[TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Jan 5 03:17:40 AEST 2018


On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 11:45:57AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 09:03:09AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > ???You need to add >>and that he knew about and had access<<.
> > 
> > The truth is there was and it had networking and X windows already.  Bill
> > Jolitz had completed the original 386 BSD port (and actually started to
> > publish about it in DDJ).
> 
> How real was it in June 1991, when he demo'ed it in Usenix Anaheim?
> Was it at the level of a "MIT Media Lab demo", or was it actually
> something that could be used in anger?

I dunno what "used in anger" means but it worked.  I used it.  I know
Joltiz pretty well, he worked for me around this time period.  I hired
him just to give him some money, he had gotten sort of screwed by the
in crowd in the BSD/Usenix world, I didn't see that as reasonable.

> The biggest problem with Jolitz's work seems to have been more social
> than anything else.  The writeups from that era seem to indicate that
> the Jolitz's wanted to keep a much tighter control over things, and
> this discouraged collaboration and contributions, which led to the
> first of *BSD fragmentation/spin-offs, starting with FreeBSD and
> NetBSD.

Yep.  Leading to the famous (to me) quote: The BSD guys can't decide
who is going to drive the big red fire truck so they each get to drive
their very own toy fire truck.  (I think Linus said that but not sure).



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