Oh, please, please, COME ON Ubuntu development people!

[Jared Greenwald]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 April 2011 16:33, Mike McGinn <mikemcginn at mcginnweb.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Thursday, April 21, 2011 11:18:58 Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 12:04 +0200, Joep L. Blom wrote:
>>> > The story is then that Olson was so pissed off that he put the PDP-11
>>> > within 9 months in the market and when you opened the 2 boxes you didn't
>>> > find much difference.
>>> > I assume other computer veterans on this list can give better details on
>>> > this.
>>> > Any way on this site > http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11
>>> > the PDP11-20 is said to be set into the market in 1970 and ran several
>>> > OS. Unix (DEC name: Ultrix) was one of them.
>>>
>>> Ultrix did not appear until after the AT&T breakup in the early 80s.
>>> Ultrix was a derivative of the BSD Unix work and ran on the VAX
>>> hardware. I think you could get a PDP-11 version, but I am not sure
>>> about that.  In the 70s Unix was put out under various research
>>> "Editions".  The last one from AT&T before the commercial System 3 was
>>> Edition 7.  I still have a paper manual for Edition 7 lying around the
>>> house somewhere.  Remarkably, the basic OS API and filesystem
>>> permissions and structure is very similar to any modern Unix or Linux
>>> system.  Any competent sysadmin or programmer familiar with Linux would
>>> feel right at home on Edition 7.
>>
>> My first exposure to Ultrix was on the Alpha hardware. The later changed the
>> name to "Digital Unix". It was not a bad system to develop on. Most of the
>> places that I knew of with VAXes ran VMS, including the big physics labs.
>
> I think your memories are a bit confused.
>
> Ultrix never ran on Alpha. Ultrix ran only on VAXes, VAXstations and
> DEC's MIPS-powered DECstations.
>
> The Unix for Alpha was originally called OSF/1. Version 3.1 was
> renamed Digital UNIX. Version 4 was renamed again, sadly, to the
> horrible, twee "Tru64 UNIX."
>
> Released versions only ever ran on Alpha. It was developed on MIPS but
> that version was never released, and after Compaw bought DEC and then
> HP bought Compaq, Tru64 was ported to Itanium, but again, never
> released; HP simply killed the product and laid off the developers.
>
> This is why proprietary Unix was a bad thing, kids. Too much infighting.

The only thing that HP wanted to port from Tru64 was the clustering
product - TruClusters.  I could go into a long story as to why that
failed, but it wasn't for technical reasons which only illustrates
your point.