<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">Excellent responses here. Brings back so many great memories.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">My 1 cent would be to ask the question:</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> Which of today's Unix variants (Linux, BSD, AIX, Cygwin, ...) is</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> closest to the philosophy of the Ken-Denis-Doug versions of V6 Unix?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">All the variants I see today suffer from "complexification" - a John Mashey term.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">Documentation of commands today has grown 5 to 10 fold for each</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">command in /usr/bin. V7 had less than 64 well documented</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">system calls. Today's Linux, AIX, and others have how many?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">I don't know.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">The concept of producing a stream of text as the output of a program</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">that does simple jobs well has been replaced by "power-shell" thinking</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">of passing binary objects rather than text between program - a decidedly</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">non-portable idea.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">Passing "objects" requires attaching to a dynamically linked</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">library (that will change or even disappear</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">with the next release of the OS or the object library).</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">With Research Unix, I could pipe the output of a Unix program</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">running on an Intel 486 to another program running on a Motorola</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">68000 or a Zilog Z80000 or an IBM AIX machine.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">IPhones, iPads, and my Android tablet don't have a usable text editor. All</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">non-Unix text editors seem to struggle to offer a fixed width font. (Ever</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">try to make columns line up on an iPhone or Android tablet?) Complexification</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">rears its ugly head.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">I still use vi on both my Mac and PC (Cygwin). (I can't find a usable gvim</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">for Mac and Macvim is weird but doesn't seem to know what a mouse is.)</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park. Today, everything</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">is GUI and nothing can<br>be automated easily or, most of the time, not at all.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and complexity.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">(Don't mind me, I'm just outgassing for no good reason.)</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace">Ed</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Jun 6, 2024 at 3:06 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <<a href="mailto:steffen@sdaoden.eu">steffen@sdaoden.eu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Ralph Corderoy wrote in<br>
<<a href="mailto:20240606095502.AD4EE210F4@orac.inputplus.co.uk" target="_blank">20240606095502.AD4EE210F4@orac.inputplus.co.uk</a>>:<br>
|There's a chart of the connections between Unix versions at<br>
|<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_systems" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_systems</a>, though I dislike the<br>
|lack of direction given there are some arcs with little incline.<br>
|It says it's based on <a href="https://www.levenez.com/unix/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.levenez.com/unix/</a> where Éric notes his<br>
|chart is not limited to just source-code transfer.<br>
<br>
I also admire that FreeBSD and NetBSD keep on maintaining the<br>
bsd-family-tree (and in the original form, not that dots thing, or<br>
how it was called). So that starts with<br>
<br>
First Edition (V1)<br>
|<br>
Second Edition (V2)<br>
|<br>
Third Edition (V3)<br>
|<br>
Fourth Edition (V4)<br>
|<br>
Fifth Edition (V5)<br>
|<br>
Sixth Edition (V6) -----*<br>
\ |<br>
\ |<br>
\ |<br>
Seventh Edition (V7)----|----------------------*<br>
\ | |<br>
\ 1BSD |<br>
32V | |<br>
\ 2BSD---------------* |<br>
\ / | |<br>
\ / | |<br>
\/ | |<br>
3BSD | |<br>
| | |<br>
4.0BSD 2.79BSD |<br>
| | |<br>
4.1BSD --------------> 2.8BSD <-*<br>
| |<br>
4.1aBSD -----------\ |<br>
| \ |<br>
4.1bBSD \ |<br>
| \ |<br>
*------ 4.1cBSD --------------> 2.9BSD<br>
/ | |<br>
Eighth Edition | 2.9BSD-Seismo<br>
| | |<br>
+----<--- 4.2BSD 2.9.1BSD<br>
...<br>
<br>
and says<br>
<br>
Multics 1965<br>
UNIX Summer 1969<br>
DEC PDP-7<br>
First Edition 1971-11-03 [QCU]<br>
DEC PDP-11/20, Assembler<br>
Second Edition 1972-06-12 [QCU]<br>
10 UNIX installations<br>
Third Edition 1973-02-xx [QCU]<br>
Pipes, 16 installations<br>
Fourth Edition 1973-11-xx [QCU]<br>
rewriting in C effected,<br>
above 30 installations<br>
Fifth Edition 1974-06-xx [QCU]<br>
above 50 installations<br>
Sixth Edition 1975-05-xx [QCU]<br>
port to DEC Vax<br>
Seventh Edition 1979-01-xx [QCU] 1979-01-10 [TUHS]<br>
first portable UNIX<br>
..<br>
<br>
with a nice Bibliography with falsely underscored headline plus<br>
<br>
URL: <a href="https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/share/misc/bsd-family-tree" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/share/misc/bsd-family-tree</a><br>
<br>
It also covers the system most of you are using (later).<br>
<br>
--steffen<br>
|<br>
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,<br>
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one<br>
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off<br>
|(By Robert Gernhardt)<br>
</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><font face="'courier new', monospace"><span style="font-weight:900"><div>Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.</div><div> Cicero</div></span></font><div><br></div></div>