[TUHS] MacOS X is Unix (tm)

[David]

MacOS is the best of a bad lot, in my opinion. Unix at the core and as a result pretty well able to withstand attacks from the outside world. For a desktop OS, not too bad.

Linux is to diversified at this point to make it to the desktop any time soon. As a server OS it is a wonderful thing and I am willing to work with it there any time. Though the differences between Linux A and Linux B are sometimes grating on my ability to get the code I am paid to work on running in all environments.

Windows is just broken. Yes, it is getting better (for some definition of better) with each release. The ability to hack and attack usually has this common vector. It is usually chosen by some IT guy because the initial cost is low and it is what they got trained to use sometime in history.

As to Doug Gwyn and The BRL code, I ported all of that onto an early Celerity release. Celerity was 4.2 and I did the port to get the feature set that some customers were clamoring for. And Ron, you may have been the one to send me your patches for the Bourne shell way back when. I do remember doing that integration for Celerity as well.

	David

> On Jan 1, 2017, at 5:56 AM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:
> 
> Yes, I know it's Mach: I really meant the userland and (to a smaller extent) the system calls.  Given my aim of a desktop machine on which to live that's actually all I care about: if I have to worry about the guts of the kernel then the system has failed to provide what I need from it.
> 
> On 1 Jan 2017, at 13:01, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> 
>> OS/X (Mac) is Mach-derived   I think you do it a disservice to call it BSD-derived.    While the kernel-to-application interface was compatible with 4.2 BSD, the kernel is largely of CMU’s only creation.
>> The thing came layered with Doug Gwyn’s (where is he? I invited him) BRL SV on BSD user environment to silence the critics that it wasn’t SVID compatible.    I hadn’t even realized it until I got a few Mach kerneled machines (notably our NeXT cube) and found that it had my version of the Bourne shell with job control and command line editing hacked in (to battle the tcsh guys at BRL because I detested the csh syntax and Korn’s shell hadn’t gotten out of the labs yet at that point).