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I was about to name some innovations from Linux and BSD worlds, but that is not technically Unix. (BSD is Unix derived but cannot use the trademark). So I thi

I was about to name some innovations from Linux and *BSD worlds, but that is not technically Unix. (*BSD is Unix derived but cannot use the trademark). So I think your example is not technically Unix technical history. But if we could include these things, I'd say also: * Epoll and kqueue. The recognition that select(2) and later poll(2) do not scale. * Interactivity. One thing I remember about 90s Unix is how terrible the usability was on those old terminal emulators or termcaps. You'd type a backspace and see ^H. Arrow keys that didn't do the right thing. You'd log into a Linux box and by contrast you'd get good tab completion, colors, etc. * Secure defaults. First noticed this in OpenBSD. But the internet forced everybody to reconsider the set of daemons you get on a default install. * Deprecation of unsafe libc functions

sanxiyn 4y ago
"Linux is not Unix" is useless pedantry, but sure, Solaris SMF did it earlier than systemd, both dependency based boot and parallel boot.
syncsynchalt 4y ago
epoll / kqueue is a good thought. That also makes me think of scatter/gather i/o (readv/writev), though I can't remember if we ever really saw big gains from it like we do from epoll. One other improvement worth calling out is that /dev/random (or substitute your RNG method of choice) is a thousandfold better now than it was in the 90s, though Linux has a big wart with entropy pool exhaustion. BSD leading the way there from what I understand, having an RNG that Just Works. This isn't just an invisible implementation detail, it means application developers can request and use random data without a bunch of "just-in-case" bit shuffling like discarding lower bits.
xenadu02 4y ago
I think shell interactivity improved because everyone just decided xterm was the way to go, which itself was based on VT-102 with some later VT 200/300/400 bits and new inventions added on. Today it's so common (the default on Linux and macOS terminal emulators) you'd be a bit bananas to use anything else. Sometimes something is so painful everyone unconsciously decides choice is bad and we're all going to use $X.

I was about to name some innovations from Linux and *BSD worlds, but that is not technically Unix. (*BSD is Unix derived but cannot use the trademark). So I thi

sanxiyn 4y ago

"Linux is not Unix" is useless pedantry, but sure, Solaris SMF did it earlier than systemd, both dependency based boot and parallel boot.

syncsynchalt 4y ago

epoll / kqueue is a good thought. That also makes me think of scatter/gather i/o (readv/writev), though I can't remember if we ever really saw big gains from it like we do from epoll. One other improvement worth calling out is that /dev/random (or substitute your RNG method of choice) is a thousandfold better now than it was in the 90s, though Linux has a big wart with entropy pool exhaustion. BSD leading the way there from what I understand, having an RNG that Just Works. This isn't just an invisible implementation detail, it means application developers can request and use random data without a bunch of "just-in-case" bit shuffling like discarding lower bits.

xenadu02 4y ago

I think shell interactivity improved because everyone just decided xterm was the way to go, which itself was based on VT-102 with some later VT 200/300/400 bits and new inventions added on. Today it's so common (the default on Linux and macOS terminal emulators) you'd be a bit bananas to use anything else. Sometimes something is so painful everyone unconsciously decides choice is bad and we're all going to use $X.