att & osf

[Chris Torek]

[The following was by Scott MacQuarrie, quoted by Henry Spencer]
>> 	... show me another vendor which has worked as hard to provide
>> 	a truly hardware independent operating system to allow customers
>> 	to [freely] decide what hardware they need to solve their problems...

In article <2857 at ttrdc.UUCP> levy at ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
>And MacQuarrie makes a damned good point there too.  You gripe and bellyache
>about the UNIX operating system.  OK, you don't like it, come up with another
>operating system, NOT a UNIX system workalike, that will port to a gazillion
>other machines even half as well.  The UNIX operating system (and its structure
>and philosophy, which non-AT&T UNIX system workalikes, such as what the OSF
>wants to build, now use without one word of acknowledgment to AT&T or objection
>by AT&T--"my how greedy of us") came to exist because of AT&T.

The problem with this argument is that Unix came into existence because
of the One Bell System, the same One Bell System that no longer exists.
The AT&T that now controls (by licensing) Unix is *not* the same corporation
that produced it!  It merely has the same name.

Henry apparently believes---and I agree with him---that the new AT&T
cannot be assumed to be exactly like the old, and that any actions
taken by the old AT&T are not to be construed to the new AT&T's credit,
nor vice versa.  In particular, the old `portable' Unix (i.e., V7) was
produced by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Doug McIlroy,
John Mashey, Joe Ossanna, et alia; the new `portable?' Unix (i.e.,
SysV) is by hundreds of programmers of varying ability, and it shows
it in a noticeable *lack* of portability in some of the new programs.
Rick Adams posted a wonderful example, where someone wrote

	strcmp(ptr, "f(") == 0

instead of

	ptr == NULL

It works on the 3B....

>MacQuarrie is talking about the big picture, about what AT&T has
>created and nurtured into being.  [Henry Spencer has] narrowly focused
>on current problems with System V, and viewed his statement through
>those glasses, ironic considering that you talk later on about "taking
>the long view."

Since the AT&T that `created and nurtured' Unix is really
research!everyone, and the AT&T that produced System V Release 3 is
not, this seems like a reasonable position to me.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris