[TUHS] most direct Unix descendant

[Ed Bradford]

Excellent responses here. Brings back so many great memories.

My 1 cent would be to ask the question:

   Which of today's Unix variants (Linux, BSD, AIX, Cygwin, ...) is
   closest to the philosophy of the Ken-Denis-Doug versions of V6 Unix?

All the variants I see today suffer from "complexification" - a John Mashey
term.
Documentation of commands today has grown 5 to 10 fold for each
command in /usr/bin. V7 had less than 64 well documented
system calls. Today's Linux, AIX, and others have how many?
I don't know.

The concept of producing a stream of text as the output of a program
that does simple jobs well has been replaced by "power-shell" thinking
of passing binary objects rather than text between program - a decidedly
non-portable idea.

Passing "objects" requires attaching to a dynamically linked
library (that will change or even disappear
with the next release of the OS or the object library).
With Research Unix, I could pipe the output of a Unix program
running on an Intel 486 to another program running on a Motorola
68000 or a Zilog Z80000 or an IBM AIX machine.

IPhones, iPads, and my Android tablet don't have a usable text editor. All
non-Unix text editors seem to struggle to offer a fixed width font. (Ever
try to make columns line up on an iPhone or Android tablet?)
Complexification
rears its ugly head.

I still use vi on both my Mac and PC (Cygwin). (I can't find a usable gvim
for Mac and Macvim is weird but doesn't seem to know what a mouse is.)

Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix,
anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park.  Today, everything
is GUI and nothing can
be automated easily or, most of the time, not at all.

Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and
complexity.

It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most.

(Don't mind me, I'm just outgassing for no good reason.)

Ed


On Thu, Jun 6, 2024 at 3:06 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen at sdaoden.eu> wrote:

> Ralph Corderoy wrote in
>  <20240606095502.AD4EE210F4 at orac.inputplus.co.uk>:
>  |There's a chart of the connections between Unix versions at
>  |https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_systems, though I dislike the
>  |lack of direction given there are some arcs with little incline.
>  |It says it's based on https://www.levenez.com/unix/ where Éric notes his
>  |chart is not limited to just source-code transfer.
>
> I also admire that FreeBSD and NetBSD keep on maintaining the
> bsd-family-tree (and in the original form, not that dots thing, or
> how it was called).  So that starts with
>
>   First Edition (V1)
>        |
>   Second Edition (V2)
>        |
>   Third Edition (V3)
>        |
>   Fourth Edition (V4)
>        |
>   Fifth Edition (V5)
>        |
>   Sixth Edition (V6) -----*
>          \                |
>           \               |
>            \              |
>   Seventh Edition (V7)----|----------------------*
>               \           |                      |
>                \        1BSD                     |
>                32V        |                      |
>                  \      2BSD---------------*     |
>                   \    /                   |     |
>                    \  /                    |     |
>                     \/                     |     |
>                    3BSD                    |     |
>                     |                      |     |
>                  4.0BSD                2.79BSD   |
>                     |                      |     |
>                  4.1BSD --------------> 2.8BSD <-*
>                     |                      |
>                 4.1aBSD -----------\       |
>                     |                \     |
>                 4.1bBSD                \   |
>                     |                    \ |
>         *------ 4.1cBSD --------------> 2.9BSD
>        /            |                      |
>   Eighth Edition    |                   2.9BSD-Seismo
>        |            |                      |
>        +----<--- 4.2BSD               2.9.1BSD
>   ...
>
> and says
>
>   Multics                 1965
>   UNIX                    Summer 1969
>                                   DEC PDP-7
>   First   Edition         1971-11-03 [QCU]
>                                   DEC PDP-11/20, Assembler
>   Second  Edition         1972-06-12 [QCU]
>                                   10 UNIX installations
>   Third   Edition         1973-02-xx [QCU]
>                                   Pipes, 16 installations
>   Fourth  Edition         1973-11-xx [QCU]
>                                   rewriting in C effected,
>                                   above 30 installations
>   Fifth   Edition         1974-06-xx [QCU]
>                                   above 50 installations
>   Sixth   Edition         1975-05-xx [QCU]
>                                   port to DEC Vax
>   Seventh Edition         1979-01-xx [QCU] 1979-01-10 [TUHS]
>                                   first portable UNIX
>   ..
>
> with a nice Bibliography with falsely underscored headline plus
>
>   URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/share/misc/bsd-family-tree
>
> It also covers the system most of you are using (later).
>
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)
>


-- 
Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.
  Cicero
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