10 ms·

Unix Wars (2000)

145 points by bluu00 6y ago

DonHopkins 6y ago
There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix: "4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt.Xinu%20BSD%20Poster.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt... https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
- cat199 6y ago
  interestingly also blows out the theory that bsd/unix was just a AT&T slave by licensing as the GNU project foundational docs would have you believe
  - microtherion 6y ago
    Back when the GNU project was founded, there were still lots of AT&T copyright notices in BSD headers, and it took some nasty litigation in the early 1990 to sort things out. Incidentally, in my opinion it was this lawsuit which gave Linux a head start vs the *BSDs at a critical point in its life.
- cptnapalm 6y ago
  I have read about that poster for more than 20 years. This is the first time I've ever been able to actually look at it. Thank you!
- pinewurst 6y ago
  I used their distribution/product on Vaxes back in the day.
- RangerScience 6y ago
  > X-Wing That's totally a BSG Viper, and I wonder if the autocannons (?) are another reference...
- Taniwha 6y ago
  Interestingly MtXinu was a collective, everyone earned the same and decisions were made collectively (decisions required N-1 votes if I remember correctly)
- talkingtab 6y ago
  They also did a command of the month calendar. Anyone have a copy?
DonHopkins 6y ago
Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann >Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers." https://user.eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html https://user.eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html >I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
jasoneckert 6y ago
The divisiveness of the Unix Wars was incredibly prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s. One of my favourite examples of this is a quote from Cliff Stoll's book "The Cuckoo’s Egg" from 1989. When Cliff’s colleague Dave notices that the hacker used the –f option to the ps command on a Berkeley UNIX system (Berkeley UNIX doesn’t use the –f option, only AT&T UNIX does), he said “We’re watching someone who’s never used Berkeley Unix.” He sucked in his breath and whispered, “A heathen.”
- codetrotter 6y ago
  Reminds me of a few years ago when I was admining some Solaris 10 servers at a company. Prior to that I had only ever used Linux and FreeBSD. It was interesting to me, even though I was already used to there being differences between Linux and FreeBSD, to interact with something that felt like an even more remote evolutionary branch of a species of creatures. (Though at the same time, things like ZFS and DTrace come from Solaris, so it's not like it is actually all that remote to FreeBSD. Likewise, Solaris Zones are kinda like Jails in FreeBSD.) I came to think of this because of what you wrote. Prior to using Solaris 10 I had always used to write "ps wwwaux" always, both on Linux and FreeBSD. But on Solaris 10, in order to get roughly the same info, I had to instead type "ps -ef".
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Hence why when most talk about how POSIX and C are so portable across UNIX platforms, they really don't have any idea what they are talking about. I have coded for Xenix, DG/UX, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux (starting with kernel 1.0.9 in Slackware 2.0), using the platform compilers of each respective OS. To put it to modern audience, it is like doing a beautiful web app and then fixing it for every browser in existence.
    - mncharity 6y ago
      I still sometimes get a thrill of joy, when I pip or npm install something and it just works. Instead of long ago ftp'ing a tar file and spending an hour or day or punt, porting it from their * nix to mine. And sometimes laugh when HN'ers complain of (admittedly poorly infrastructured) excessive dependencies. Reusable code... living the dream.
talkingtab 6y ago
Any mention of "unix" and "war" needs to include a reference to www.groklaw.net, a website set up as a focal point for a community defense of unix and linux. A must read. It is in reverse order, with newest articles at the front so I recommend starting with this link: http://www.groklaw.net/index.php?page=482 http://www.groklaw.net/index.php?page=482 It is also a remarkable example of a website that provides value to the community, a service and a piece of history. If you are interested in the idea of what different social platforms provide/afford (Zeynep Tufecki's Twitter and Tear Gas) this is great example of what could be done. [edit for typo]
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  Wow, I read Groklaw daily back then, and had forgotten about it and her completely. What a resource that was!
- DannyB2 6y ago
  The Unix Wars article mentions Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). It is very important to realize that this is NOT the same SCO that sued IBM in 2003, which is what starts the very first Groklaw article. A company named Caldera renamed itself to SCO in order to create confusion. A few years later, during the (in)famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit, and covered by Groklaw, SCO considered naming itself USL. I would suggest that idea was simply to create more confusion and give an appearance of legitimacy to the company. Technically the SCO vs IBM suit is still alive. SCOXQ.PK has been in bankruptcy since 2007! (13 years!) Nothing has moved for several years except a few notices of appearance by different lawyers.
  - _jal 6y ago
    Man, I didn't notice as daily life started becoming history. It is really time for a book. I wonder if PJ from Groklaw is considering it.
  - justin66 6y ago
    > A company named Caldera renamed itself to SCO in order to create confusion. A few years later, during the (in)famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit, and covered by Groklaw, SCO considered naming itself USL. I would suggest that idea was simply to create more confusion and give an appearance of legitimacy to the company. Caldera paid SCO for the "rights" to the Unix IP, it's not like they just bought the name. Arguing about what the "rights" for Unix actually meant (and how much could be charged to license that IP to people who thought they had already paid for it) was the point of the braindead lawsuits that followed.
pjmlp 6y ago
Nowadays replaced by Linux distribution wars.
- bluu00 6y ago
  no those are cold ones. mostly newbees. few flavors of distros. Gimme a recent released distro which got decent userbase.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Try to package something on OpenSuse to run on Android.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Gimme a recent released distro which got decent userbase. Solus is 5 years old and ranks 8th on distrowatch.
    - bluu00 6y ago
      hmm i'll take that one
- extremeMath 6y ago
  I feel it was more replaced by- Linux/Windows developer friendly vs Apple ruthless dictatorship.
  - sreekotay 6y ago
    Hah - I think that's clever: Apple as the "China" of the new world tech order... All their users and developers are happy with their benevolence. Except the ones that aren't.
- ThinkBeat 6y ago
  That is a totally different beast. That is more like differnet flavour of Windows. Windows 10 Pro, Windows 10 Standard, Windows Server, Windows server core etc. The UNIX war had truly different implementation that all converge to a partially common standard.
neilv 6y ago
Apollo Domain/OS could emulate both BSD and System V, as well as support its own very different shell command set. One of the ways it did this was that filesystem symlinks could reference the environment variable that specified what OS emulation you wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/ https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Pyramid Technology Corporation 90x RISC-based minicomputer ran OSx, which supported BSD and System V at the same time in parallel universes, and had patented "conditional symbolic links" to support dynamically switching between the two by changing an environment variable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symbolic_links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symboli... >Pyramid Technology's OSx Operating System implemented conditional symbolic links which pointed to different locations depending on which universe a program was running in. The universes supported were AT&T's SysV.3 and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD 4.3). For example: if the ps command was run in the att universe, then the symbolic link for the directory /bin would point to /.attbin and the program /.attbin/ps would be executed. Whereas if the ps command was run in the ucb universe, then /bin would point to /.ucbbin and /.ucbbin/ps would be executed. Similar Conditional Symbolic Links were also created for other directories such as /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/include. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology ...And the hardware wasn't all that reliable either! http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/gymble-roulette.html http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/gymble-roulette.html At least you could run Space Invaders on the system console while it was down waiting for repairs.
rbanffy 6y ago
It's interesting that GNU only gets a mention in the very last paragraph when a lot of the software described in the article was built with GNU tools (if not for other reason, because developer tools were horrendously expensive back then). Also, it's interesting people don't think of user groups DECUS and SHARE as relevant precursors (that predate both Unix and the internet)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- floren 6y ago
  Even late versions of Solaris (such as I was using at school circa 2005) didn't ship a GNU userspace, you'd have to install it separately. By the time GCC 1.0 came out in 1987, 4.3BSD was already out, SunOS was several versions deep, AT&T had released System V four years earlier... how precisely were these built on GNU tools, when they all got their start before GNU existed?
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Early versions of Solaris, as most Unix systems, didn't come with any compilers - a C compiler was an expensive add-on option. Other development tools - other languages, debuggers, linters, code-generators, etc, were not provided in the standard distribution. The college I graduated from, when I visited a couple years after graduating, had compilers installed in their Unix machines (mostly AIX, some HP/UX and, IIRC, one DG/UX). Usage was limited (they were licensed by seat). The availability of GNU tools was a big thing - for the first time we could have a C compiler and other developer tools on our Unix machines without worrying about per seat licensing.
    - icedchai 6y ago
      I admin'd some SunOS 4.x boxes in the mid 90's. It came with a C compiler, but from what I remember it was K&R, pre-ANSI only. About the only thing we used it for was building gcc. The Solaris (meaning, SunOS 5.x) situation was different. I remember needing a licensed compiler, or installing a packaged gcc.
x87678r 6y ago
One of my favorate quotes ever comes from an old article about BSD development, and contributor's code in general: > Still, 90 percent of the contributions were thrown away; the rest, as McKusick likes to say, "were peed upon to make them smell like Berkeley. https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/ https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Berkeley pees right back! https://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/12/07/berkeley-business-tries-novel-way-to-stop-public-urination https://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/12/07/berkeley-business-tr...
mcv 6y ago
> "a full screen wysiwyg text editor called vi" I guess the meaning of wysiwyg has changed a bit over the years.
- dhosek 6y ago
  You've never had the "pleasure" of using ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor) apparently. In an era of daisy wheel printers, vi (and emacs) were very much WYSIWYG and far more usable than their predecessors.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    ? the experienced user... https://comp.databases.ingres.narkive.com/XDxQf3h8/info-ingres-context-free-grammer-nazi-just-cost-me-an-hour#post15 https://comp.databases.ingres.narkive.com/XDxQf3h8/info-ingr...
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I had the pleasure of using its MS-DOS counterpart, edlin. Yep vi was definitely an improvement.
- JdeBP 6y ago
  Well, no. What you saw was what you got. But you didn't either get or see boldface, italics, underline, proportional spacing, and other such stuff. (-:
andikleen2 6y ago
Small mistake in the article. System V code was never released publicly by SCO, just some earlier variants not too far removed from V7. They make great code reading if anyone is interested. The early Unix variants were quite simple and concise, nothing like the complexity of a modern variant. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/Research-V7 https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/Researc... For example early process swapping was really simple: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/text.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... or scheduling was quite simple too: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/slp.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... or that's most of a file system: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/iget.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... scanner and lexer of the earlier (pre pcc) c compiler: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/c/c00.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... and that is ls: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/ls.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... ed, the standard editor: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/ed.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...
spazx 6y ago
"In the late 1990's, interest began to coalesce around Linux, the first really open Unix system released under the free software GNU license, and which might finally unify the Unix family after three decades of development." I wonder if they ever imagined the editor wars and distro wars of today.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Vi vs Emacs vs XEmacs was already a thing back then.
  - ido 6y ago
    I like to tell how Emacs standing for "eight megabyte and constantly swapping" was a joke about Emacs requiring a lot of memory, as 8mb of RAM was considered a lot (i.e. the joke wasn't even claiming that Emacs took 8mb in memory, but that the entire system had a generous 8mb of RAM).
- JdeBP 6y ago
  People had been arguing about editors for roughly two decades at that point; the 1980s had already seen the archiver wars (ZIP versus ARC versus ARJ versus LHA versus ZOO versus ...); and the early 1990s had already seen DOS+Windows 95 versus OS/2.
remram 6y ago
This has to be a new all-time low in website layout. `max-width:460px` means that it uses less that 24% of my screen space, on my laptop. I have to scroll through 3 pages of 12-point, 10-word wide text. I heard the arguments for 80-column code but 80-column websites? If this is their idea of a "web book" feel, it would be a book held 4 feet from your face.
- sreekotay 6y ago
  Srsly. Open JS console and type this: document.querySelectorAll('table')[4].style.maxWidth ='1000px'
- samdixon 6y ago
  In any web browser window 'Ctrl +' zooms the page in. Can be helpful with situations like this where it is a classic site.
- McGlockenshire 6y ago
  Hi and welcome back to the year 2000, where a non-trivial number of users operate at sub-800x600 resolutions and the only reliable cross-platform tool for page layout is HTML tables. You can't even reliably switch stylesheets based on viewport size, and even if you could, CSS support is laughable. Netscape can't reflow, it has to redraw the entire page. While it's clear that the max-width was added later, it seems to be done so in order to maintain the layout that was clearly created back in those days. Thankfully simple layouts like this are trivial to zoom, as other commenters have pointed out.
microtherion 6y ago
I remember ca. 1990 when the big debate in Unix shops was whether SVR4 or OSF/1 would ultimately prevail. Few people probably would have predicted that both of these would be seen as essentially dead ends 20 years later.
jfb 6y ago
On the one hand, having basically one default Unix these days makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people; but at the same time, I don't like software monocultures. So, it's a mixed bag. But I'll tell you what: I do not miss HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ...
- asveikau 6y ago
  I was thinking something very similar to this just reading the headline. We don't really have monoculture of Unix-like OSs in the strictest sense. It's true that a lot of people here will assume any server is Linux. But a lot of people reading are also using a Mac as a client OS. I myself use both FreeBSD and OpenBSD a lot [typing this on FreeBSD]. Just want to mention here that those are totally viable OSs. I believe many people, including here, do a disservice when they dismiss them.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > But I'll tell you what: I do not miss HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ... I'm curious whether this includes Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris. It appears to me (as a latecomer) that Sun finally got their act together and shipped something technically superior to GNU+Linux, and that if they'd managed to stay in business that (Open)Solaris would be an extremely competitive offering. Or put differently, how much of this is that yes, the old unixen sucked, but just because they were old? I mean, if I compare Fedora 32 to Red Hat Linux 7 (RH, not RHEL), there's a world of difference there.
  - derekp7 6y ago
    The big thing for me is that (Open) Solaris felt like a single solid product, the same feeling I always got from FreeBSD. Whereas the various Linux distributions always felt like a grab bag of various pieces, some of which worked well and others were still rough around the edges. Little things, like the days of LILO for a boot loader. It had to maintain a map of disk blocks that contained the kernel and initial ram disk, so if the kernel or initrd was re-written to /boot you had to re-run the lilo command to refresh its map (otherwise your system wouldn't boot). Took forever to get something that understood the filesystem. But what replaced it (Grub) I always felt was over-engineered. To me, the perfect successor to lilo would have been the tooling from isolinux (there were boot loaders that natively understood fat32, ext4, and other filesystems without having to have a mini OS built into the boot loader) -- just seemed to be more elegant to me. Then there were promising technologies that just up and disappeared (at least for a while) such as userfs. We now have fuse, but there were multiple years of distribution versions that didn't have either. Also, there were patches for older kernel versions that supported containers, but they were never mainstream until we got the current mix of process isolation features which enables things like Docker. Speaking of which, why is it that Solaris has an easy way to back out of an OS update (using Zones), but that same process (using Linux containers and snapshots) doesn't exist in any of the modern Linux distributions?
dangischiops 6y ago
I hope dang won't flex his russian or chinese alliances in this thread; uck russia and china; may they be bombed to the ground. China is hiroshima to russias nagasaki, burn those ckers to the ground. Let the bodies hit the floooooor. ocksuckers
Koshkin 6y ago
I warmly remember Coherent [1], it was a nice UNIX clone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)
kpommerenke 6y ago
This page shows a nice chart of the GNU/Linux evolution: http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/11.10/gldt1110.svg http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/11.10/gldt1110.sv...
ochrist 6y ago
It's probably just me, but from the headline I expected this: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unixwars.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unixwars.html
gonzo 6y ago
> The original version was developed at AT&T Bell Labs, a non-profit research institution, so the source code was permitted to be published and shared with others. This is not true. Consider what occurred with “Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code“.

Unix Wars (2000)

145 points by bluu00 6y ago

There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix: "4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt.Xinu%20BSD%20Poster.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt... https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!

cat199 6y ago
interestingly also blows out the theory that bsd/unix was just a AT&T slave by licensing as the GNU project foundational docs would have you believe
- microtherion 6y ago
  Back when the GNU project was founded, there were still lots of AT&T copyright notices in BSD headers, and it took some nasty litigation in the early 1990 to sort things out. Incidentally, in my opinion it was this lawsuit which gave Linux a head start vs the *BSDs at a critical point in its life.
cptnapalm 6y ago
I have read about that poster for more than 20 years. This is the first time I've ever been able to actually look at it. Thank you!
pinewurst 6y ago
I used their distribution/product on Vaxes back in the day.
RangerScience 6y ago
> X-Wing That's totally a BSG Viper, and I wonder if the autocannons (?) are another reference...
Taniwha 6y ago
Interestingly MtXinu was a collective, everyone earned the same and decisions were made collectively (decisions required N-1 votes if I remember correctly)
talkingtab 6y ago
They also did a command of the month calendar. Anyone have a copy?

DonHopkins 6y ago

Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann >Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers." https://user.eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html https://user.eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html >I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

jasoneckert 6y ago

The divisiveness of the Unix Wars was incredibly prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s. One of my favourite examples of this is a quote from Cliff Stoll's book "The Cuckoo’s Egg" from 1989. When Cliff’s colleague Dave notices that the hacker used the –f option to the ps command on a Berkeley UNIX system (Berkeley UNIX doesn’t use the –f option, only AT&T UNIX does), he said “We’re watching someone who’s never used Berkeley Unix.” He sucked in his breath and whispered, “A heathen.”

codetrotter 6y ago
Reminds me of a few years ago when I was admining some Solaris 10 servers at a company. Prior to that I had only ever used Linux and FreeBSD. It was interesting to me, even though I was already used to there being differences between Linux and FreeBSD, to interact with something that felt like an even more remote evolutionary branch of a species of creatures. (Though at the same time, things like ZFS and DTrace come from Solaris, so it's not like it is actually all that remote to FreeBSD. Likewise, Solaris Zones are kinda like Jails in FreeBSD.) I came to think of this because of what you wrote. Prior to using Solaris 10 I had always used to write "ps wwwaux" always, both on Linux and FreeBSD. But on Solaris 10, in order to get roughly the same info, I had to instead type "ps -ef".
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Hence why when most talk about how POSIX and C are so portable across UNIX platforms, they really don't have any idea what they are talking about. I have coded for Xenix, DG/UX, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux (starting with kernel 1.0.9 in Slackware 2.0), using the platform compilers of each respective OS. To put it to modern audience, it is like doing a beautiful web app and then fixing it for every browser in existence.
  - mncharity 6y ago
    I still sometimes get a thrill of joy, when I pip or npm install something and it just works. Instead of long ago ftp'ing a tar file and spending an hour or day or punt, porting it from their * nix to mine. And sometimes laugh when HN'ers complain of (admittedly poorly infrastructured) excessive dependencies. Reusable code... living the dream.

talkingtab 6y ago

Any mention of "unix" and "war" needs to include a reference to www.groklaw.net, a website set up as a focal point for a community defense of unix and linux. A must read. It is in reverse order, with newest articles at the front so I recommend starting with this link: http://www.groklaw.net/index.php?page=482 http://www.groklaw.net/index.php?page=482 It is also a remarkable example of a website that provides value to the community, a service and a piece of history. If you are interested in the idea of what different social platforms provide/afford (Zeynep Tufecki's Twitter and Tear Gas) this is great example of what could be done. [edit for typo]

ubermonkey 6y ago
Wow, I read Groklaw daily back then, and had forgotten about it and her completely. What a resource that was!
DannyB2 6y ago
The Unix Wars article mentions Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). It is very important to realize that this is NOT the same SCO that sued IBM in 2003, which is what starts the very first Groklaw article. A company named Caldera renamed itself to SCO in order to create confusion. A few years later, during the (in)famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit, and covered by Groklaw, SCO considered naming itself USL. I would suggest that idea was simply to create more confusion and give an appearance of legitimacy to the company. Technically the SCO vs IBM suit is still alive. SCOXQ.PK has been in bankruptcy since 2007! (13 years!) Nothing has moved for several years except a few notices of appearance by different lawyers.
- _jal 6y ago
  Man, I didn't notice as daily life started becoming history. It is really time for a book. I wonder if PJ from Groklaw is considering it.
- justin66 6y ago
  > A company named Caldera renamed itself to SCO in order to create confusion. A few years later, during the (in)famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit, and covered by Groklaw, SCO considered naming itself USL. I would suggest that idea was simply to create more confusion and give an appearance of legitimacy to the company. Caldera paid SCO for the "rights" to the Unix IP, it's not like they just bought the name. Arguing about what the "rights" for Unix actually meant (and how much could be charged to license that IP to people who thought they had already paid for it) was the point of the braindead lawsuits that followed.

pjmlp 6y ago

Nowadays replaced by Linux distribution wars.

bluu00 6y ago
no those are cold ones. mostly newbees. few flavors of distros. Gimme a recent released distro which got decent userbase.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Try to package something on OpenSuse to run on Android.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Gimme a recent released distro which got decent userbase. Solus is 5 years old and ranks 8th on distrowatch.
  - bluu00 6y ago
    hmm i'll take that one
extremeMath 6y ago
I feel it was more replaced by- Linux/Windows developer friendly vs Apple ruthless dictatorship.
- sreekotay 6y ago
  Hah - I think that's clever: Apple as the "China" of the new world tech order... All their users and developers are happy with their benevolence. Except the ones that aren't.
ThinkBeat 6y ago
That is a totally different beast. That is more like differnet flavour of Windows. Windows 10 Pro, Windows 10 Standard, Windows Server, Windows server core etc. The UNIX war had truly different implementation that all converge to a partially common standard.

neilv 6y ago

Apollo Domain/OS could emulate both BSD and System V, as well as support its own very different shell command set. One of the ways it did this was that filesystem symlinks could reference the environment variable that specified what OS emulation you wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/ https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/

DonHopkins 6y ago
Pyramid Technology Corporation 90x RISC-based minicomputer ran OSx, which supported BSD and System V at the same time in parallel universes, and had patented "conditional symbolic links" to support dynamically switching between the two by changing an environment variable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symbolic_links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symboli... >Pyramid Technology's OSx Operating System implemented conditional symbolic links which pointed to different locations depending on which universe a program was running in. The universes supported were AT&T's SysV.3 and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD 4.3). For example: if the ps command was run in the att universe, then the symbolic link for the directory /bin would point to /.attbin and the program /.attbin/ps would be executed. Whereas if the ps command was run in the ucb universe, then /bin would point to /.ucbbin and /.ucbbin/ps would be executed. Similar Conditional Symbolic Links were also created for other directories such as /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/include. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology ...And the hardware wasn't all that reliable either! http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/gymble-roulette.html http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/gymble-roulette.html At least you could run Space Invaders on the system console while it was down waiting for repairs.

rbanffy 6y ago

It's interesting that GNU only gets a mention in the very last paragraph when a lot of the software described in the article was built with GNU tools (if not for other reason, because developer tools were horrendously expensive back then). Also, it's interesting people don't think of user groups DECUS and SHARE as relevant precursors (that predate both Unix and the internet)

deleted 6y ago
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floren 6y ago
Even late versions of Solaris (such as I was using at school circa 2005) didn't ship a GNU userspace, you'd have to install it separately. By the time GCC 1.0 came out in 1987, 4.3BSD was already out, SunOS was several versions deep, AT&T had released System V four years earlier... how precisely were these built on GNU tools, when they all got their start before GNU existed?
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Early versions of Solaris, as most Unix systems, didn't come with any compilers - a C compiler was an expensive add-on option. Other development tools - other languages, debuggers, linters, code-generators, etc, were not provided in the standard distribution. The college I graduated from, when I visited a couple years after graduating, had compilers installed in their Unix machines (mostly AIX, some HP/UX and, IIRC, one DG/UX). Usage was limited (they were licensed by seat). The availability of GNU tools was a big thing - for the first time we could have a C compiler and other developer tools on our Unix machines without worrying about per seat licensing.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    I admin'd some SunOS 4.x boxes in the mid 90's. It came with a C compiler, but from what I remember it was K&R, pre-ANSI only. About the only thing we used it for was building gcc. The Solaris (meaning, SunOS 5.x) situation was different. I remember needing a licensed compiler, or installing a packaged gcc.

x87678r 6y ago

One of my favorate quotes ever comes from an old article about BSD development, and contributor's code in general: > Still, 90 percent of the contributions were thrown away; the rest, as McKusick likes to say, "were peed upon to make them smell like Berkeley. https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/ https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/

DonHopkins 6y ago
Berkeley pees right back! https://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/12/07/berkeley-business-tries-novel-way-to-stop-public-urination https://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/12/07/berkeley-business-tr...

mcv 6y ago

> "a full screen wysiwyg text editor called vi" I guess the meaning of wysiwyg has changed a bit over the years.

dhosek 6y ago
You've never had the "pleasure" of using ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor) apparently. In an era of daisy wheel printers, vi (and emacs) were very much WYSIWYG and far more usable than their predecessors.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  ? the experienced user... https://comp.databases.ingres.narkive.com/XDxQf3h8/info-ingres-context-free-grammer-nazi-just-cost-me-an-hour#post15 https://comp.databases.ingres.narkive.com/XDxQf3h8/info-ingr...
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I had the pleasure of using its MS-DOS counterpart, edlin. Yep vi was definitely an improvement.
JdeBP 6y ago
Well, no. What you saw was what you got. But you didn't either get or see boldface, italics, underline, proportional spacing, and other such stuff. (-:

andikleen2 6y ago

Small mistake in the article. System V code was never released publicly by SCO, just some earlier variants not too far removed from V7. They make great code reading if anyone is interested. The early Unix variants were quite simple and concise, nothing like the complexity of a modern variant. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/Research-V7 https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/Researc... For example early process swapping was really simple: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/text.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... or scheduling was quite simple too: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/slp.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... or that's most of a file system: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/iget.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... scanner and lexer of the earlier (pre pcc) c compiler: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/c/c00.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... and that is ls: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/ls.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... ed, the standard editor: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/ed.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...

spazx 6y ago

"In the late 1990's, interest began to coalesce around Linux, the first really open Unix system released under the free software GNU license, and which might finally unify the Unix family after three decades of development." I wonder if they ever imagined the editor wars and distro wars of today.

pjmlp 6y ago
Vi vs Emacs vs XEmacs was already a thing back then.
- ido 6y ago
  I like to tell how Emacs standing for "eight megabyte and constantly swapping" was a joke about Emacs requiring a lot of memory, as 8mb of RAM was considered a lot (i.e. the joke wasn't even claiming that Emacs took 8mb in memory, but that the entire system had a generous 8mb of RAM).
JdeBP 6y ago
People had been arguing about editors for roughly two decades at that point; the 1980s had already seen the archiver wars (ZIP versus ARC versus ARJ versus LHA versus ZOO versus ...); and the early 1990s had already seen DOS+Windows 95 versus OS/2.

remram 6y ago

This has to be a new all-time low in website layout. `max-width:460px` means that it uses less that 24% of my screen space, on my laptop. I have to scroll through 3 pages of 12-point, 10-word wide text. I heard the arguments for 80-column code but 80-column websites? If this is their idea of a "web book" feel, it would be a book held 4 feet from your face.

sreekotay 6y ago
Srsly. Open JS console and type this: document.querySelectorAll('table')[4].style.maxWidth ='1000px'
samdixon 6y ago
In any web browser window 'Ctrl +' zooms the page in. Can be helpful with situations like this where it is a classic site.
McGlockenshire 6y ago
Hi and welcome back to the year 2000, where a non-trivial number of users operate at sub-800x600 resolutions and the only reliable cross-platform tool for page layout is HTML tables. You can't even reliably switch stylesheets based on viewport size, and even if you could, CSS support is laughable. Netscape can't reflow, it has to redraw the entire page. While it's clear that the max-width was added later, it seems to be done so in order to maintain the layout that was clearly created back in those days. Thankfully simple layouts like this are trivial to zoom, as other commenters have pointed out.

microtherion 6y ago

I remember ca. 1990 when the big debate in Unix shops was whether SVR4 or OSF/1 would ultimately prevail. Few people probably would have predicted that both of these would be seen as essentially dead ends 20 years later.

jfb 6y ago

On the one hand, having basically one default Unix these days makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people; but at the same time, I don't like software monocultures. So, it's a mixed bag. But I'll tell you what: I do not miss HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ...

asveikau 6y ago
I was thinking something very similar to this just reading the headline. We don't really have monoculture of Unix-like OSs in the strictest sense. It's true that a lot of people here will assume any server is Linux. But a lot of people reading are also using a Mac as a client OS. I myself use both FreeBSD and OpenBSD a lot [typing this on FreeBSD]. Just want to mention here that those are totally viable OSs. I believe many people, including here, do a disservice when they dismiss them.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> But I'll tell you what: I do not miss HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ... I'm curious whether this includes Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris. It appears to me (as a latecomer) that Sun finally got their act together and shipped something technically superior to GNU+Linux, and that if they'd managed to stay in business that (Open)Solaris would be an extremely competitive offering. Or put differently, how much of this is that yes, the old unixen sucked, but just because they were old? I mean, if I compare Fedora 32 to Red Hat Linux 7 (RH, not RHEL), there's a world of difference there.
- derekp7 6y ago
  The big thing for me is that (Open) Solaris felt like a single solid product, the same feeling I always got from FreeBSD. Whereas the various Linux distributions always felt like a grab bag of various pieces, some of which worked well and others were still rough around the edges. Little things, like the days of LILO for a boot loader. It had to maintain a map of disk blocks that contained the kernel and initial ram disk, so if the kernel or initrd was re-written to /boot you had to re-run the lilo command to refresh its map (otherwise your system wouldn't boot). Took forever to get something that understood the filesystem. But what replaced it (Grub) I always felt was over-engineered. To me, the perfect successor to lilo would have been the tooling from isolinux (there were boot loaders that natively understood fat32, ext4, and other filesystems without having to have a mini OS built into the boot loader) -- just seemed to be more elegant to me. Then there were promising technologies that just up and disappeared (at least for a while) such as userfs. We now have fuse, but there were multiple years of distribution versions that didn't have either. Also, there were patches for older kernel versions that supported containers, but they were never mainstream until we got the current mix of process isolation features which enables things like Docker. Speaking of which, why is it that Solaris has an easy way to back out of an OS update (using Zones), but that same process (using Linux containers and snapshots) doesn't exist in any of the modern Linux distributions?

dangischiops 6y ago

I hope dang won't flex his russian or chinese alliances in this thread; uck russia and china; may they be bombed to the ground. China is hiroshima to russias nagasaki, burn those ckers to the ground. Let the bodies hit the floooooor. ocksuckers

Koshkin 6y ago

I warmly remember Coherent [1], it was a nice UNIX clone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

kpommerenke 6y ago

This page shows a nice chart of the GNU/Linux evolution: http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/11.10/gldt1110.svg http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/11.10/gldt1110.sv...

ochrist 6y ago

It's probably just me, but from the headline I expected this: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unixwars.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unixwars.html

gonzo 6y ago

> The original version was developed at AT&T Bell Labs, a non-profit research institution, so the source code was permitted to be published and shared with others. This is not true. Consider what occurred with “Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code“.