Truth is I think IBM beat Sun on getting loadable modules for the kernel out first. But I was counting the versions that people really looked at which is why I give Linux credit. It makes sense they modeled on SunOS btw but the fact is the Linux version is what folks like *BSD and macOS modeled after later. Btw you are 100% right - As for launchd I agree/no doubt - but I’d already given up on MacOS being able to be admin’ed like a Unix box. I can pretty much use it via iterm2 as a user like one and if mostly works as I expect (which I do appreciate). Linux is seductive enough to make think I should be able to admin it like I have for the last 40 years and it then bites me when I least expect it. Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.

AIX takes a lot of shit but there were (and still are) some areas it was quite a bit ahead of its time. I haven't used the ROMP 2.0 version that would have been on the IBM RT.. on my search and todo list. This is interesting because it ran under a hypervisor. The 1.x version for x86 PS/2s is basically Locus. I don't like it. I think it was also used as a common port base for AIX/370 You can run 1.x in VirtualBox with some careful instructions. I'm the canonical source for all this at http://ps-2.kev009.com/aixps2/ But the 3.x version released with POWER/RS6000 in 1990 had a fully pagable kernel, loadable kernel modules[1], logical volume management and disk mirroring, an object oriented thing called the ODM which is probably extremely controversial but a pretty nice for providing KPI/KBI/API compatibility for drivers and subsystems and configuration thereof. It's a good mix of BSD and interesting to see how that was accomplished https://technologists.com/sauer/Convergence_of_AIX_and_4.3BSD.pdf [1] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/rs6000/aix_3.0/SC23-2207-0_Kernel_Extensions_a… See for instance page 6-10 Regards, Kevin On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 6:14 PM, Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Kevin Bowling wrote: The standing joke with AIX was that it was pronounced "aches" (as in pains), but I was glad that it ran "smit" for admin stuff, as there was no way that I could remember the appropriate Shell commands. -- Dave

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 08:41:26PM -0400, Dan Cross wrote: So back in the BitKeeper days, we supported everything, including AIX. I've got a fairly beefy AIX box in my shop in case we need it, 1ghz, lots of ram, we're never gonna turn that on. I went into smit and I was just like can you just frigging let me edit /etc/inetd.conf or whatever, but no. SMIT happens. And I did not like it. I think that's one of the reasons that SunOS was cool, it was just a better, bugfixed BSD. So we all knew how to deal with it. SMIT not so much.

Dave Horsfall's comment about AIX made me think. The joker in me has always been impressed by how marketing people 'missed' the obvious pronunciations that would lead to serious jokes. Some of the more memorable ones from the UNIX world that I knew: AIX -> "aches", CRDS -> "cruds", HP-UX -> HP "yucks" and "hockey pucks" and my favorite: RHEL -> "our hell" I bet there are more and others I did know/consider ;-) That said, I did hear a pro-VMS person in ZKO (*i.e.* a DECie) once tried refered to "DEC Ultrix" as Dirty Tricks, but I never heard that one take off/be repeated outside of ZKO. For history we probably should try to collect them, although I fear the context of the joke in the future may be lost. Clem ᐧ

UNIX is a trademark of AT&T AT&T is a modem test command. -----Original Message----- From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> To: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> Sent: Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:42 Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX System names - since UNIX was a Trademark Dave Horsfall's comment about AIX made me think. The joker in me has always been impressed by how marketing people 'missed' the obvious pronunciations that would lead to serious jokes. Some of the more memorable ones from the UNIX world that I knew: AIX -> "aches", CRDS -> "cruds", HP-UX -> HP "yucks" and "hockey pucks" and my favorite: RHEL -> "our hell" I bet there are more and others I did know/consider ;-) That said, I did hear a pro-VMS person in ZKO (*i.e.* a DECie) once tried refered to "DEC Ultrix" as Dirty Tricks, but I never heard that one take off/be repeated outside of ZKO. For history we probably should try to collect them, although I fear the context of the joke in the future may be lost. Clem ᐧ

We always referred to HP-UX as "H-Pukes". On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 11:17 AM, William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 31/08/2018, ron(a)ronnatalie.com <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: H-Pox in my neck of the woods. (I think everyone said Slowlaris. Even the guys from Sun who first demo'd dtrace and how it was used to speed up their system calls.) N.

On 01/09/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote (in part): As did I -- I am right-handed -- but mainly because reaching over the keypad was such a bother. N.

On Sat, 1 Sep 2018, Paul Winalski wrote: At the risk of making a 'me too' post (especially these days) I am also left handed and trained myself to use a mouse right handed for both of the reasons you mention. Left handedness is very well studied so I wondered if there were any studies on this. While looking I found one that argues that numeric keypads and using the mouse on the right don't mix. Maybe time to run with a keyboard with no numeric keypad again.[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14985137 [1] As a leftie it's on the wrong side anyway. Rob

On 9/30/18, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon(a)orthanc.ca> wrote: Back at DEC Engineering we had the saying, "you can't teach a new dog ULTRIX." -Paul W.

Andrew Warkentin wrote: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhatIsNotInPlanNine This is sure better. On top of that I don't get how Acme adheres to the philosophy. It's basically a reverse engineered, unavailable on the console, GNU Emacs with a mouse-driven interface. -- caóc

Kurt H Maier wrote: Oberon 2.0 Yeah, I guess I should've started with that :) I love Unix for the console. -- caóc

On Mon, Sep 3, 2018 at 11:11 PM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote: well, you can believe that, and I can't stop you, but it's wrong.

On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 5:35 AM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote: I don't mean to speak for Ron, but I think I know where he's coming from. There has been a slow shift in the way we use computer interfaces and the Don't mistake "windows" (as in "stacking window manager") for "bitmapped graphical displays." At the time people thought that GUI is the best and most useful interface This is conflating two things: textual interfaces and the graphical presentation of those interfaces. Plan 9 is about both. Unix was born in an era where the TTY (that is, tele-typewriter, as in "prints to paper") was still very much a force in mediating the interaction between user and computer. That evolved rather quickly to the "green screen" terminals of the 70s and early 80s, but the paradigm was basically the same: the serial terminal was a window showing the tail of an infinite scroll of data. The "terminal", as in the TTY, was and is a central abstraction in Unix. By the late 80s, when plan9 got started, the paradigm had shifted: machines now had relatively high resolution bitmapped graphical interfaces, and by and large you weren't sitting in front of a serial terminal anymore. Being tied to a single "terminal" was a hindrance and led to a lot of complexity (job control, terminal interactions with process groups, POSIX sessions, signals and ioctls for window-size changes for programs that wanted to continue believing that they're using a serial terminal, even though they haven't been for years...). Plan9 wanted to take advantage of the new graphics functionality but didn't want to be chained to the complexity associated with obsolete hardware (e.g., the TTY abstraction, which _still persists_ and has its fingers in weird parts of the kernel). They still wanted a text-oriented interface though, and that's what plan9 provides. You sweep out a rio window and it's running a shell. Text in acme is usually editable and there aren't a lot of strange glyphs to click on; commands are strings. And you're no longer chained to a "terminal": I can have many shells running in many windows and they're all more or less the same. And it allowed them to move beyond the limitations of cursor-addressed user interfaces. They could, for example, write (or more precisely adapt) text editors like `sam`, which is fundamentally a textual program but uses the GUI to very nice effect. It may seem dated by today's standards, but it still works very nicely (indeed, I had to run a coworker through a sam session last Thursday; he was a continent away from me connecting to a plan9 system but we were able to do what needed to be done relatively quickly because it's all text and so simple...). I remember when I was in high school driving over to New Jersey and going to Bell Labs and meeting Dennis Ritchie for the first time (a college student I knew was doing an internship there and let me come visit). Dennis showed me plan9 on his gnot (this was back in the 8.5 days), and specifically talked about this: the focus was text, which was editable, could be manipulated, combined, split apart, was self-explanatory etc, instead of little icons like MS Windows and the Mac which were simultaneously static and cryptic. It *is* a textual interface, though it's *presented* and *multiplexed* via a bitmapped graphics display. I distinctly remember feeling blown away by the powerful marriage of text with bitmapped displays; it was a GUI for a Unix-like experience done right. They didn't sacrifice anything, but they gained so much more. Unix was born in the different era. Same with the original IBM PC. That Unix and the PC date from radically different eras. The original IBM PC had a graphics adapter, and that was the expected mode of interaction, not the serial port. Granted that adapter was pretty weak, but it was there. Using a PC, you were using a graphical representation of your text interface. Unlike a serial terminal, where you simply emit the text to the terminal and the terminal deals with displaying it, writing an interface for CGA or MGA -- even in text mode -- involves scrolling the buffer, handling line feeds, tab and backspace expansion, and all the rest of it in software (granted, lots of serial drivers for Unix handle tab and BS expansion, too). But you, the programmer, have to manually keep track of your position in that little 4k buffer. You have to deal with moving the cursor around, etc. - Dan C.

ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote: I understand that we are drifting a bit off-topic here, but for the sake of all reading it, it probably would be relevant to at least offer some more explanation of your point. Saying 'you are wrong' is not very informative. I still think that you just misinterpret my words though. One still cannot ignore the fact that Unix and Plan 9 offer two completely different approaches to displaying text. I think it also would not be very productive nor it was intended to use Plan 9 without mouse and rio(1). --Andy

ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote: Just from personal experience running Plan 9. Well, you can't tell me this system was designed with the idea of running it using text terminal and no mouse. There is also no cursor addressing, no curses. Like I written before it was born in the different era -- they tried to not build it on the idea of character based TTY, but rather incorporate graphical element into it. If it is possible to be fully productive in Plan 9 using just VGA text mode (720x400) and not any of the bitmap modes, with Unix like cursor addressing and with no rio(1) and no mouse then it's something I never really explored. --Andy

Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think I was clear enough and meant 'text terminal' as a physical glass TTY e.g. vt220 from DEC, but understand now why someone might have interpreted it differently. There is also a big difference between a text mode (character mode) where what we see on the screen is addressed in terms of characters rather than individual pixels and a bitmap mode (graphics mode) also known as APA (all points addressable) mode where every pixel is addressable[1]. Inherent in the text mode is also the concept of monospace fonts which some people prefer to this day. Why there are still people running C64, Atari XL/XE or Amiga? Even more, some of them think those computers are still better than the machines of today... In the Unix community there are some that still prefer to use old CRT terminals or MS-DOS era PC monitors using only text mode. Why I can't speak for all of them, I can speak for myself and explain my motivation behind it. I instantly fell in love with a text mode when I first started computing on Commodore and Atari machines in the 80s and then naturally advanced to a text mode on MS-DOS era PC's. I never really ran Linux or *BSDs with X Window System -- always preferred pure text mode. It is aesthetically pleasing and most elegant to converse with a machine using only text, and a text mode as displayed on cathode ray tube (CRT) is the most beautiful representation of such an idea. Although these days I'm using sometimes MacBook (who doesn't?) which is using of course the bitmap mode, I still prefer to experience the full text mode on a real CRT and actually collect them as they are becoming more and more rare. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mode --Andy

On Sep 3, 2018, at 11:11 AM, Kurt H Maier <khm(a)sciops.net> wrote: What text editor do you like? One measure of success of a program is additional tools people build to work with it. By that measure emacs has succeeded very well. Acme is used by far fewer people but it too has had additional tools built. And even standard tools such as grep work well with it. You can also view it as an experiment and not an end product. That is, nothing to prevent anyone from extending it or changing it. The same is true of plan9 too. An experiment in seeing how far “representing resources as filesystems” model can be pushed. But for some reason this never happened.

On Sep 3, 2018, at 1:41 PM, Kurt H Maier <khm(a)sciops.net> wrote: I’m still not clear on why you think acme is a bad citizen. If anything it makes its windows more accessible to other tools. Unlike emacs or vim or any IDE. What could acme have differently or what other editor is not a “bad citizen”. Composability is implicitly the key point in “the Unix way” but typically editors are not very composable. Or composable in a different domain. Similarly GUI. Once you add a human in your composition, further composability falls apart! A human being the ultimate “do everything” kitchen sink:-) The question is what can be done to improve composability beyond the “Unix way” or plan9 way.