[TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

Wed Feb 10 13:10:49 AEST 2021

Sounds good, I've been out on my boat and with my feet I'm a mess, love 
that boat but I need go rest.  I'll give this the reply it deserves in 
the morning.

On Tue, Feb 09, 2021 at 09:44:49PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2021 at 9:25 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > I'm going to rant a little here, George, this is not to you, it's to
> > the topic.
> >
> 
> All in all, that was a pretty tame Rant, Larry. :-)
> 
> Who among us is running v7, or some other kernel that we all love
> > because we understand it?  I'd venture a guess that it is noone.
> > We like our X11, we like that we can do "make -j" and you can build
> > a kernel in a minute or two, we like our web browsers, we like a lot
> > of stuff that if you look at it from the lens "but it should be simple",
> > but that lens doesn't give us what we want.
> >
> 
> I had a stint in life where my "primary" environment was a VT320 hooked up
> to a VAXstation running VMS, from which I'd telnet to a Unix machine.
> Subjectively, it was among the more productive times in my life
> professionally: I felt that I wrote good code and could concentrate on what
> I was working on.
> 
> Fast forward 15 years (so a little 10 years ago), I'm sitting in front of a
> Mac Pro desktop with two large displays and an infinite number of browser
> tabs open and I feel almost hopelessly productive. I just can't
> concentrate; I can't find anything; things are beeping at me all the time
> and I have no idea where the music is coming from. Ads are telling me I
> should buy all kinds of things I didn't even know I needed; the temptation
> to read the news, or email, or the plot of some movie I saw an ad for 20
> years ago (but never saw) on wikipedia is too great and another 45 minutes
> are gone.
> 
> So I go on ebay and find a VT420 in good condition and buy it; it arrives
> an unproductive week later, and I hook it up to the serial port on my Linux
> machine at work and configure getty and login and ... wow, this is
> terrible! It's just too dang and limiting. And that hum from the flyback
> transformer is annoyingly distracting.
> 
> The lesson is that we look back at our old environments through the rosy
> glasses of nostalgia, but we forget the pain points. Yeah, we might moan
> about the X protocol or the complexity of SMP or filesystems or mmap() or
> whatever, but hey, programs that I care about to get my work done are
> already written for those environments, and do I _really_ want to write
> another shell or terminal program or editor or email client? Actually...no.
> No, I do not.
> 
> So I'm sympathetic to this.
> 
> I get it.  I love the clean simple lines that were the original Unix
> > but we live in a more complex world.
> 
> 
> But this I take some exception to. Yes, the world is more complex, but part
> of the complexity of our systems is, as Jon asserts, poor abstractions.
> It's like the recent discussion of ZFS vs merged VM/Buffer caches: most
> people don't care. But as a system designer, I do. One _can_ build systems
> that support graphics and networking without X11 and sockets and with a
> small number of system calls. One _can_ provide some support for "legacy"
> systems by papering over the difference with a library (back in the day,
> someone even ported X11 to Plan 9), but it does get messy and you hit
> limitations at some point.
> 
> Ted is straddling those lines
> > and he's doing the best he can and his best is pretty darn good.
> >
> 
> I'd just like to stress I'm not trying to criticize Ted, or anyone else,
> really. We've got the systems we've got. But a lot of the complexity we've
> got in those systems comes from trying to retrofit a design that was
> fundamentally oriented towards a uniprocessor machine onto a multiprocessor
> system that looks approximately nothing like a PDP-11. I do agree with Jon
> that much of Linux's complexity is unjustified (functions called `foo` that
> call `__foo` that calls `__do_foo_for_bar`...I understand this is to limit
> nesting. But...dang), but much of it is forced by trying to accommodate a
> particular system model on systems that are no longer really amenable to
> that model.
> 
>         - Dan C.
> 
> I'd argue listen to Ted.  He's got the balance.
> >
> > --lm
> >
> > [1] Truth in advertising, Ted and I are friends, we used to hike together
> > in Pacifica, we like each other.
> >
> > On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 11:52:21AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
> > > I won't dispute your age, or how many layers of pearl are on the seed
> > > Larry, but MP unix was a thing long long ago.
> > >
> > > I am pretty sure it was written up in BSTJ, and there was Pyramid by
> > > 1984/5 and an MP unix system otherwise running at Melbourne University
> > > (Rob Elz) around 1988.
> > >
> > > You might be ancient, but you weren't THAT ancient in the 1980s.
> > >
> > > anyway, pearls before swine, and age before beauty.
> > >
> > > -G
> >
> > --
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> > http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
> >

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 