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I find dead-end projects like this very interesting, in aggregate. So much original work went in, and then it died. Likewise Symbolics, Apollo Aegis, BeOS, OS/2
by ncmncm 4y ago
I find dead-end projects like this very interesting, in aggregate. So much original work went in, and then it died. Likewise Symbolics, Apollo Aegis, BeOS, OS/2, MacOS9, Lisa, Pink, Plan9.
UNIX itself has turned out to be one, almost (BSDs and MacOSX excepted). SerenityOS might not!
- skissane 4y ago> UNIX itself has turned out to be one, almost (BSDs and MacOSX excepted). Unix’s success story was about the interfaces, the APIs, not the original implementation of them - even though BSDs (and through them macOS) are direct descendants of the original implementation, I doubt much Bell Labs code actually survives. But the Unix API will likely outlive us all.
- pjmlp 4y agoBeing free beer with source code is what made that descendency possible in first place. Had it been on sale with prices similar to VAX/VMS and others, it would been an history footnote most likely.
- user3939382 4y agoI always wonder about this, I wonder how many lines of code from the 70s are running in my iPhone.
- ncmncm 4y ago'70s, likely not. But zlib code is probably copied in a hundred, maybe a thousand times, in a dozen versions.
- user3939382 4y agoI figure there must be at least some from the original BSD code.
- ncmncm 4y agoMacOSX has a great deal of BSD in it. iOS, maybe not, although it is a fair bet that its TCP/IP code originated in BSD 4. But anyway that code did not come from Bell Labs.
- skissane 4y ago> MacOSX has a great deal of BSD in it. iOS, maybe not The XNU kernel is largely the same across its different variants (macOS/iOS/tvOS/watchOS/bridgeOS). The XNU kernel contains a massive chunk of BSD code (originally 4.3BSD, later updated with enhancements from FreeBSD), and most of that code will be there in all variants. The big area in which macOS has much more BSD code than iOS would be user space, since iOS is missing Unix command line tools present in macOS. (Although, you can install them if you jailbreak it, and I assume Apple's internal builds for their own developers would include many of them.)
- retrac 4y agoThere's definitely some code in BSD that dates to around 1980 largely untouched since. But probably not much older than that. It was heavily rewritten around that time.