[TUHS] Isaacson v Unix [really RMS bashing]

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 7:59 PM A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 9:39 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 7:06 PM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 6 Jan 2019, A. P. Garcia wrote:
>>>
>>> If not for GNU, Unix would still have been cloned.  Net/2 happened in
>>> parallel, did it not?
>>>
>>
>> Berkeley actively rewrote most of unix yes. Net/1 was released about the
>> same time GNU was getting started. Net/2 and later 4.4 BSD continued this
>> trend, where 4.4 was finally a complete system. BSD386 only lagged Linux by
>> about a year and had much stronger networking support, but supported fewer
>> obscure devices than linux...
>>
>> Warner
>>
>> Ps I know this glosses over a lot, and isn't intended to be pedantic as
>> to who got where first. Only they were about the same time... and I'm
>> especially glossing over the AT&T suits, etc.
>>
>
> It's really hard to say. How would you compile it? Clang didn't come along
> until 2007. The Amsterdam Compiler Kit, perhaps?
>

The portable c compiler PCC was used to bootstrap a lot of this. It kinda
sucked, but was decent enough. Early unix vendors used it on a variety of
platforms. Here different universities produced different back ends. But
there was no central clearing house. Gcc was a bit innovative in that it
provided that, which allowed people to cooperate enough to make it better
than PCC, at first. Then better or comparable to vendor compilers.
Competition with gcc in large measure drove Sun to unbundle its compilers
so there was a revenue stream that could be pointed at technology
improvements. Somewhere between 4.3 and 4.4 BSD started using gcc over pcc
since it was easier to distribute. The gnu project was important, but not
because it rewrote the kernel. It provided the enabling compilers for
that...

Warner

>
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