[TUHS] Bell Labs Holmdel site coming down

[John Cowan]

Stuart, Jon scripsit:

> Perhaps an OSF1-"lite", on par with 4.4BSD-Lite which had the
> copyrighted code removed, would be possible to get released.  

That was only possible because of the massive effort to rewrite all things
AT&T out of the BSD source.

> All of this, the closing of UNX, the loss of the VAX and now the dying
> of the Alpha chip, is very disheartening.  Although I'm lucky enough to
> have access to 5 VAXen (running 4.3 BSD UNIX and one running Ultrix4),
> it's tough for anyone to learn and play with this stuff, because they
> are becoming so scarce (you can by a VaxStation/MicroVax on eBay, but
> these will only run Ultrix and not 4.3 BSD, unfortunately).

On come the emulators.

> I guess I'm somewhat nostoglic about old UNIX, and I enjoy seeing it's
> evolution.  That's why whenever I'm able to view the source code of some
> closed-source UNIX, it's very enjoyable to me.  Old UNIX has a rustic
> appeal to me.

It's really "middle Unix" you are talking about.  Old Unix and new Unix
(and I don't agree that Linux/*BSD are not Unix) are both now open source.

> It's unfortunate that it seems we must resign ourselves to a future of
> x86-based OSs, such as Linux, or even Open/Free/NetBSD, which aren't
> really UNIX (Linux definitely isn't, and the modern BSDs have changed
> enough that they also aren't IMO).

Unix is a local minimum in the design space.  It can be reimplemented
over and over.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
If he has seen farther than others,
        it is because he is standing on a stack of dwarves.
                --Mike Champion, describing Tim Berners-Lee (adapted)