[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

George Michaelson ggm at algebras.org
Mon Oct 2 02:51:31 AEST 2017


My favourite remains V7 on a pdp11. Not because of any specious
reductionism, but because it was a dawning experience, and because of
the 'learn' package which I found very good, subsequently stripped
because of licence restrictions. I had the care of one in Leeds uni in
'82 and loved it. Far more than the Norsk Data mini, perhaps less
usefully than the 780s with 4.1 but still. It was a joy.

I freely admit I did next to nothing of substance (maintenance coding
an X.25 comms package for JANET was the high spot, on a compiler with
a very low #define expansion limit which hit us badly) but somehow, it
remains my favourite.

I also admired the ease with which people I knew could do things with
it. 32V was (AFAIK) a logical outcome.

On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 9:37 AM, Derrik Walker v2.0 <dwalker at doomd.net> wrote:
> On 09/28/2017 10:58 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>>
>> What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or
>> more:
>> 1) Free
>> 2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
>> macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
>> 3) Historical
>
> 1) Linux - not the greatest, by far, but it gets the job done and pays the
> bills ( in my case, anyway ). And it still has good long term viability, as
> of 2017, anyway.
>
> 2) Solaris - Sun finally got it right starting with Solaris 7, and it just
> got better from there.  I ran it for many, many years on my Home Ultra 5.
> Really sad to see what Oracle did to it! I use to have boss say that Solaris
> was the UNIX geek's UNIX, he might be right ( altho these days that's
> probably BSD ).
>
> 3) Irix - Not the best UNIX, but damn, those workstations it ran on WERE the
> best.  I miss my Indigo R4K/Elan almost as much as I do my Ultra 5 with
> Solaris 9 on it!
>
> --
> -- Derrik
>
> Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE
> dwalker at doomd.net
>
> "Those UNIX guys, they think weird!" -- John C. Dvorak
>
>



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