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

[Liam Proven]

On 21 April 2011 17:57, Jared Greenwald <greenwaldjared at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

AIUI, HP also wanted AdvFS and the Tru64 Logical Storage Manager.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/02/hp_ends_tru64/

AdvFS got open-sourced, but it's not attracted much interest AFAIK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdvFS
http://advfs.sourceforge.net/

LSM was the homegrown DEC equivalent of the licenced-in Veritas
storage manager, as also used in Windows 2000 Server and later:
http://h30097.www3.hp.com/tiplsm.html
The Linux equivalent is LVM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Volume_Manager_(Linux)

It's a real shame. OSF/1 was the last survivor of the OSF's project to
create a new, advanced Unix with some of the old cruft removed. It was
based on the same Mach kernel as NEXTstep, OPENstep, Mac OS X, Apple
iOS and MkLinux.

HP/UX is an old-time Unix which has been doing its own thing since the
days of Unix System III.

Still, Linux will probably eventually supplant all of them. :¬)



-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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