Accusing Bell of NIH (formerly Re: useless digest reference)

[Peter DaSilva]

> especially now that experience has had a chance to prove Berkeley's decision
> wrong?

It has? News to me. The current usage seems to be:

	BSD		USG

	mail		mailx
	binmail		mail

And what's so terrible about "nmail", whuch has the advantage of being
reasonable mnemonic for New MAIL?

> (2) Count on Berkeley to provide two ways of doing things when one would do.
> '~.' is a standard exit for a lot of programs (e.g., cu, tip), as is '.'.
> Providing options confuses people without adding significant functionality.

But '.' is the standard exit for old mail. I'm using connect (variant of cu)
to call this system. I've hung up a couple of times by forgetting to type
"~~.". Why not keep the compatibility eith your own software?

> (3) The USG TTY driver is a clean, orthogonal design that is easy to get to
> do what you want.  You've never seen a posting of "how do I get an 8-bit
> data path with ^S/^Q flow control" (needed for many laser printers) for USG
> because it's so easy.  Sometimes you have to bite the bullet for the future.

Now that I've found the well-hidden documentation on the USG driver I have to
agree it's orthogonal. Overloading EOF and QUIT as MIN and TIME was a bad
mistake, since it makes the intuitive transform between V7 and relatives and
SIII and relatives a total loss... and adds extra stuff you have to save
and restore when changing modes.

> > Like it or no, at the time Bell came
> >out with System III, THE standard system in the real world was V7.
> 
> THE standard system in the educational world was V7.  The standard system
> in the rest of the world was RSX, or TOPS-20, or OS/370.

The standard UNIX system. Ever hear of Microsoft? Or Venturcom? Or Unisoft?
That's a straw man & a very bad argument.

> >There
> >is no good excuse for making SIII incompatible with V7.
> 
> Untrue.  There are frequently excellent COMMERCIAL reasons to drop
> compatibility or at least reduce it in the interests of making use of what
> one has learned.  (PDP-8?  What's that?)

But is this the case here? You say yes. I say no.
Microsoft's Xenix 3.0 is compatible with V7 and looks like SIII. It's the
most common UNIX system on small machines.

> >Or for
> >making SV incompatible with SIII.
> 
> They didn't.

You're right. I was using a Unisoft SIII and Xenix 3.0 when I said this. Both
were V7 with some cosmetic changes. I apologise for this misconception, however
understandable.
> -- 
> 	Geoff Kuenning