low-end vaxen and unix

[Michael Sokolov]

Alan F R Bain <A.F.R.Bain at dpmms.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> I think this is being grossly unfair and irrelevant; the information
> provided was that NetBSD was a viable alternative which is correct.
> All my modern machines run NetBSD and the only non supported hardware
> is a 9 track magtape drive on a sun -- I don't consider that 
> unreasonable as it's rather an unusal model.

How is this relevant to NetBSD/vax? Remember, architectures other than VAX do
not exist as far as I am concerned, so when I say "NetBSD", I always always
always mean NetBSD/vax.

> I don't think PUPS
> is the place for OS favouritism arguments, so please desist.

It is necessary, however, to protect the innocent novice users from falling
into the claws of that predator.

> To add a constructive comment, there's been a lot written about the
> history and tree of development of early unix up to the SYSV
> and BSD split occured, but I'm pretty unsure about the rest.
> It seems that BSD2 and BSD4 developed pretty much in parallel,
> the former targetting the PDP and the latter the VAX;  Warren's
> graphing data provide an interesting view of what happened,
> but I'm unsure how closely related the two developments were
> (especially in time of releases, introduction of new features
> etc.).  I'd be grateful if someone more knowledgable could fill
> in some of the details.

First of all, this is absolutely irrelevant to the question of binary
compatibility between 4.2BSD, 4.3BSD, and Ultrix.

Second, the development didn't "split" into PDP-11 and VAX. Instead, the
MAINSTREAM UNIX system _CONVERTED_ from PDP-11 to VAX, and did so at AT&T,
before the torch was turned over to UC Berkeley. 2BSD was not mainstream UNIX.
In fact, it was not UNIX at all, since it didn't contain a kernel, only a
patchkit of userland enhancements. Now if you are talking about 2.xBSD, as
opposed to the real 2BSD, it is a different story altogether, and it isn't
really Berkeley Software DIstribution, since it wasn't developed at Berkeley.
2.xBSD is an unauthorized, unapproved, and unblessed side branch, and as far as
I'm concerned, it doesn't exist.

Michael Sokolov
TUHS 4BSD Coordinator
4.3BSD-* Maintainer
Quasijarus Project Principal Architect & Developer
Phone: 440-449-0299 or 216-217-2579
ARPA Internet SMTP mail: mxs46 at k2.scl.cwru.edu
TUHS WWW page: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/TUHS/
Quasijarus WWW page: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/Quasijarus/

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