[TUHS] Usenix: no official Unix 50th celebration, apparently

[George Michaelson]

sockets broke that. ioctl() always felt like special magic to me, but
sockets+ioctl is not just special magic, its arcane.

I think part of the problem is that a network binding actually isn't
"just like a file" because it incudes things like out of order
delivery, and control (side) channel.

TBF, sparse files and network file systems is another place things
broke down. For some reason, device-special and sparse files wound up
being in the too hard basket for network mounts.

I know Lindsay Marshall of old, so have a soft spot for the newcastle
connections (.../mounthost/path/to/file) syntax. I always liked this.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 9:30 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> I know that I'll probably get into trouble for writing this (I'm a born
> stirrer, coming from a military family), but...
>
> On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>
> > This is all so asinine it sounds like it’s run by a random haughty
> > social club of people far detached from systems and UNIX and especially
> > far from publishing systems papers that actually advance the art.
> > Sometimes it is necessary to let an org know it’s become a joke.  I’d
> > prefer to attend and assist with something not affiliated with Usenix
> > after reading this thread.
>
> I'm having trouble thinking of an OS (still in current use) that has
> remained *mostly* unchanged over 50 years.  Yes, Unix has certainly
> evolved, but is still recognisable as "do one thing, and do it well".
>
> It's just a shame that they seem to have broken the other philosophy of
> "everything looks like a file".
>
> -- Dave