[TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Thu May 12 03:35:18 AEST 2022


On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 12:44:10PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
> Many of the Ultrix
> engineers had a religious belief in keeping Unix pure and
> platform-independent.  Things available on only one hardware platform
> were perceived as "vendor traps" and to be avoided.

Not unique to DEC, I very much had that attitude at Sun and wasn't alone.
As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant, I wrote lint libraries
for BSD, Sys III, Sys V, POSIX, and I don't remember what else.  The idea
was that you could use Sun as a dev platform but lint your code against
whatever platform you wanted to target.

It was misguided, I bet I can count on one hand the number of people that
used any of those, but I hated vendor traps as much as DEC, maybe more.


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