2 Feb
2017
2 Feb
'17
5:57 p.m.
Side story on Unix related to Xview.
I go to a conference in San Jose for Sun users in the mid 80’s
and am discussing Xview with a few folks (names lost to memory).
A very nice person named Nancy Blackman walks up and joins
the discussion. We get to talking and she has a weird memory
bug and I’m willing to help her look at it. So we go to ‘her place’
which is her lab at Moffet field. We discuss her bug, find a fix
and I go back home to San Diego.
I mention that I met this very nice lady named Nancy Blackman
at the conference to my wife. Turns out my wife went to school
with Nancy before she moved to San Diego.
So, who else has weird stories of how Unix development or
Unix conferences had the side effect of making the world a
smaller place.
If this is too off topic, drop the conversation here.
David
On Feb 1, 2017, at 1:52 PM,
tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2017 13:40:11 -0800
From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
To: Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] shared memory on Unix
Message-ID: <20170201214011.GG880(a)mcvoy.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
On Wed, Feb 01, 2017 at 02:44:34PM -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote:
Sun had reorgtool (orgtool) that had all the high up people down to
directors I think and you pushed a button and it reshuffled them.
It was a Xview app, anyone remember that toolkit (I sorta miss it).
--lm
From:
"Steve Johnson"
The meetings went on for over a year, but _I
NEVER MET WITH THE SAME
PERSON TWICE!_ It seemed that the only thing the marketing group knew
how to do was reorganize the marketing group...
Shades of SI:Electric-Marketing (I _think_ that was its name) on the Symbolics
LISP Machine...
(For those who never had the joy of seeing this, it randomly drew a bunch of
boxes with people in them on the screen in a hierarchy, connected them, and
then started randomly moving the boxes around... I wonder if the source
still exists - or, better yet, a video of it running? Probably not, alas.) 
5 Feb
5 Feb
10:10 p.m.
On Thu, 2 Feb 2017, David wrote:
[ Great story!]
So, who else has weird stories of how Unix development
or Unix
conferences had the side effect of making the world a smaller place.
Unix itself pretty much changed the world; without those two bods we'd all
be running M$ Windoze, and believing that it's wonderful ('cuz Billy told
us so).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
6 Feb
6 Feb
4:07 p.m.
I doubt Microsoft would have made it without Xenix on their backoffice, and it was not
only UNIX that inspired the changes in MS-DOS 3 and OS/2 to make it more UNIX like, but
had inspired Cutler to make the next VMS written in C to be portable. Maybe we'd be
in a far more Vax dominated world with more Digital inspired mid range kit, or something
else would have filled the void to deliver us from a single vendor.
On February 6, 2017 6:10:44 AM GMT+08:00, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Thu, 2 Feb 2017, David wrote:
[ Great story!]
--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
So, who else has weird stories of how Unix
development or Unix
conferences had the side effect of making the world a smaller place.
Unix itself pretty much changed the world; without those two bods we'd
all
be running M$ Windoze, and believing that it's wonderful ('cuz Billy
told
us so).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer." 
4:42 p.m.
On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 2:11 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Unix itself pretty much changed the world; without those two bods we'd all
be running M$ Windoze, and believing that it's wonderful ('cuz Billy told
us so).
--
yes and no. Yes, because the ideas made it out. No, because, well ...
In 1976 or so bwk came to udel as we had just set up a Unix V6 at that
point.
He gave a great talk. One example was looking up all the words in the
dictionary that could be created with the upside down characters form a
calculator (left as an exercise for the reader).
He ran a standard dictionary tool, and pointed out that
o it could not run in a pipe
o it had a prompt, meaning even if run in a pipe there'd be output we did
not wan
o it was wordy, telling us "when it was compiled (like we care) ..."
I always loved that 'like we care" part.
he pointed out the core concept: small simple tools that do one thing well,
and that you compose with | operators.
What a long strange trip it's been. Lots of commands are now little shells:
git --help
go help
bash --help
and many interns I now work with are astonished when I point out that bash
can be part of a processing pipeline.
Further, back then, processes were cheap. You used them and tossed them. I
saw a talk a few years back about why you should use i3 instead of wmii;
one reason was that starting processes was so expensive that i3 did things
much faster (this is actually true now; people tell me all the time how
expensive it is to start a process).
Why are process slow to start?
LD_DEBUG=all date
strace date and count the system calls
"modern" software techniques have completely forgotten all the lessons of
Unix. It's been sad to watch. Linux today is much more like the systems
Unix displaced than it is like Unix. So, yes, the world changed, but not as
much as we might think. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
ron
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ron minnich