[TUHS] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth!
Dave Horsfall
dave at horsfall.org
Mon Feb 19 10:28:22 AEST 2018
On Sun, 18 Feb 2018, Norman Wilson wrote:
> I also wrote a paper about the work, which was published in (of all
> places) AUUGN. I haven't read it in years but it was probably a bit
> snotty. It nevertheless ended up causing a local UNIX-systems-software
> company to head-hunt me (but at the time I had no interest in leaving
> Caltech), so it must not have been too rude.
Norman is obviously too modest to toot his own trumpet, so me being me
I'll do it for him:
AUUGN-V04.2.pdf A bastardized paging UNIX
ABSTRACT
One of the VAXes in the Caltech High Energy Physics Group runs a
peculiar hybrid of several versions of UNIX. Its principle claim to
fame is that it is recognizably a variant of UNIX/TS, but has virtual
memory code grafted in from Berkeley’s 4BSD. It is also compatible
with the UNIX/TS system run on our PDP-II/45. This paper is meant to
give some idea of what our system is, why it exists, and how much
effort went into its creation.
My favourite quote:
Philosophy - We feel that many of Berkeley’s changes to the
system and the supporting programs are unnecessary, un-UNIX-like,
and just plain silly. To take a favourite example: anyone who
will add a flag to _cat_ to make it number lines, remove blank
lines, and make control characters visible, rather than writing
separate filters, simply doesn’t understand what UNIX is all
about.
Well said, bro!
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
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