Posted on 01/26/2006 9:06:27 AM PST by SirLinksalot
I vaguely remember something called OS-2 and Microchannel Architecture?.......
"Everyone knows the future, no one remembers the past."
Wanna buy and old Eagle?.........(obscure CP/M machine).......
"At least I'm consistent! :)"
Don't ever give me stock advice! :P
I learned to program on a VAX 11-785 cluster running Berkeley Unix. Ahh the good ole days of monochrome screens and dot matrix.
Right after my punch card days gladly only two semesterson cards on an IBM 370. I hated JCL and Assembly Language.
I work for the Air Force and we still use UNIX extensively.
Although we are starting to integrate some Linux based systems into what we do, but they aren't "production" yet.
Of course we have our Winblows machines as well.
Little Endian rules. Big Endian Drools.
I have actually always preferred little...from an embedded perspective it makes more sense.
"Big Endian Drools. "
Big Endian is just backwards.
First time I ran into little endian vs. big endian I thought it was a joke. Well it is, but not an intentional joke.
In the '90s, Unix was set to become the dominant operating system for heavy-duty computing, with Windows the only threat. But the rise of Linux and steady maturation of Win-
Firstly UNIX is lucky to have survived its own fragmentation in the 80's and early 90's a fact the author later referred to "Ten years ago, the computer industry attempted to unite Unix by agreeing to a set of common APIs that made it possible to develop a business application once and run it across any Unix brand.".
UNIX survived because there was little middleware competition. NT3.1 and 4 were not ready for huge middleware applications, and Mainframes were too expensive to justify for middleware. This is where SUN got going as a *HARDWARE* company. Sun basically made great hardware that the loaded BSD onto, that is until they decided to become a software company as well..
Is Linux taking share from UNIX? there is little doubt but its not because its 'free' is because it cant split the same way that UNIX did...
"Someone here can correct me, but wasn't all the old Unix stuff mainly run on motorola processors, and more recently PowerPc's? "
The type of cpu depended on the Unix vendor. Sun/Solaris on Sparc, IBM/AIX on Power, Digital/Ultrix on Alpha, HP/HP-UX on PA-RISC.....basically, the vendors made Unix versions to run on their own hardware and no one elses. Only SCO was made to run on low end Intel stuff. Everyone else had been RISC and 64 bit since the early 90s. PPC was almost totally dominated by Mac OS Classic, in no way a Unix at all, in fact, kind of an anti-Unix. Only when Apple went to OS X did PPC have a significant Unix presence, and now that Mr. Realiy Distortion Field has gone to Intel, they've lost that too.
"If there was an easy, intuitive way to implement a command, the UNIX developer would look at it, and then go 180 degrees away from it."
It's function over form. Unix commands are notoriously cryptic and also famously powerful. The good news for casual users of the command line is that aliases and scripts can take care of a lot of that.
It's diffcult to write a function that's powerful, flexible and concise. Pick two, can't have all three.
Well to be fair the problem with SUNS, IBM's, Apple's and HP's is that you get locked into hardware. FreeBSD/NetBSD has not such problem..
I loved assembly. Never understood JCL. Interestingly, after some years on Solaris and AIX, I'm back on the mainframe again this time running a dozen suse sles8 instances as z/vm guests on the ifl of a z/890. No more boxes.
Screw it. I'm getting my Commodore 64 out from the back of the closet. I never did finish Zork or Wishbringer or Hitchhiker's Guide, anyway.
TS
(giving a cryptic example that a Unix user could enjoy)
I can remember standing there in our A/C controlled room with the VAX looking across the lab at the "goobers" playing on the IBM PC's and their 5 1/4 inch floppies and laughing while saying those will never take off, mainframes rule.
Boy, thinking back now about my choice of first wife and my picking the Vikings to win a Superbowl I was not in tune with my kharma or something and could not predict sh_t.
I have the entire Infocom library on my linux laptop.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.