Unix Is Dead. Long Live Unix!

The Register ^ | Tue 17 Jan 2023

[Myrddin]

Xenix was a port of System 7 as sold to Microsoft by Bell Labs. I still have a TRS80 Model 16A running the 68000 version of Xenix. I worked directly with David Korn to port his Korn shell to 30 different UNIX/Xenix environments. It was always fun when I found a bug and reported it to David. He would confirm the bug in his master source code base. I often sent a suggested fix and it was often accepted.

[dadfly]

wow. takes me back to the 70’s, learning to write OS’s, compilers, etc. just me and unix and long long hours in the math lab.

[BlueLancer]

wow. takes me back to the 70’s, learning to write OS’s, compilers, etc. just me and unix and long long hours in the math lab.

My apologies, but, reading in haste, I thought your phrase was "long long hours in the meth lab."

[ifinnegan]

To me it’s all Unix.

The best.

[dadfly]

lol. well, no. my all nighter fuel in those days was in-n-out and and a liter (or two) of caffeinated soda. but there might have been some others in the lab inclined or driven to something harder. there was no coddling whatsoever back in those days.

[Paal Gulli]

"...the last Unix left is… Linux...."

That's like saying "The last Presley left is ... Elvis."

[old-ager]

Pretty sure it was System V.

[old-ager]

Very nice details about your work with Korn. I’m impressed!

I don’t have anything to match, but I did have lunch with Michael Tiemann, and corresponded with Jon Postel when he was personally administering the .US Domain (and a lot of other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel and I got Bjarne Stroustrup to sign a copy of the C++ language book.

[old-ager]

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2468

[Myrddin]

I went to Software Development 88. Great conference. As I was leaving from a talk and entered the elevator, Bjarne Stroustrup stepped in as well. I thanked him personally for creating C++. At UseNIX, I had a chance to hang out with Dennis Richie. Keith Muller at UCSD extended an invite to a talk at UCSD where Ken Thompson was speaking. In person he could pass for a biker. My days of rubbing shoulders with the UNIX community ran from 1983 to 1992. After that point, I was too busy with customer contracts to dash off to UseNIX. Postel's name is very familiar from all of the TCP/IP documentation in the early days of the internet. I relied upon those foundation documents as I wrote my early networking applications and kernel device drivers.

[Myrddin]

Nice write up by Cerf. I've heard him speak at a few conferences. We were privileged to be part of the generation that built the internet. I still have my early work with Phil Karn, KA9Q on his NET/NOS code to do TCP/IP over AX.25 on ham radio. I used the same code to drive a SLIP link to UCSD from the Xenix box. When PPP was finally ready for use, I upgraded to Xenix drivers to use PPP. I only had a 2400 bps modem at the time, so internet connectivity was slow. Tolerable for my budget in 1985.

[Myrddin]

AT&T Research UNIX

The 7th edition released in 1979 was the basis for the distribution to Microsoft and Tandy. It was the precursor to System III. The 68000 Xenix I had in August 1983 was System III flavor. It was difficult to backport the System V uucp to that version of the OS. Tandy had a later release that I installed along with the 68010 CPU to support demand paged virtual memory. That was a big improvement to the responsiveness of the OS. I'm pretty certain that the current OS on my 68010 Xenix box is a System V environment. It hasn't been booted since 2000 when I moved to Idaho, so the power supply may be in tough shape.