Untitled attachment

Notices where this attachment appears

1. Embed this notice
   That Would Be Telling (thatwouldbetelling@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:06:33 JST That Would Be Telling

   in reply to

   "> Unfortunately for the Internet I accept the principle 'You will own nothing and you will be happy.'

   "You're here, not Twitter."

   Where Sun is my first level landlord....

   "> [Stuff you're addressing with Revolver, except of course for DDoS.]

   "> So it's "landlords all the way down,"

   "Well, I could argue the point with you or I could hack on the thing that eliminates these problems so that I can release it and then not have these problems."

   Good to hear. Even more that some of Revolver is in production.

   If you decide to translate it from Go (a good enough first choice) to C, contact me. Not going to learn Go when I have much more preferred managed languages, but I know C cold after many decades of using it.

   That said, as you might partly guess from my last missive, I'm not exactly a programmer and sysadmin by choice, I much prefer history and SCIENCE! But I will program for a good cause in a sane team.

   "[...]"

   "> MIT had no serious UNIX systems at all when started there"

   "Ha, yeah, I expect they didn't exist. TOPS/20 and ITS and CTSS and VMS and Project MAC and whatnot; I hear it was a zoo back in the day, and Unix was not taken seriously until they had no choice."

   UNIX™ would only fit the "had no choice" by the time Project Athena started (which paled in comparison to CMU's equivalent, and used its distributed file system).

   It was so badly managed by a non-computer type who managed setting up the first prominent VMS computer system for four small engineering departments, plus the technical lead Corboto had lost some marbles, so no one good and established enough to be wise wanted to work on it, we had lots of choices (but of course undergrads worked on it and did good stuff).

   So UNIX™ and patching together stuff made a lot of sense and basically worked once DEC fixed their bad glue inside disk drives problem (seriously, one RA81 almost half a GB drive failure a week in the initial fleet of time sharing systems before the move to workstations).

   Before then thanks to AT&T's generous, essentially free for new installations UNIX™ licencing, it crept into many places as people bought or repurposed split I and D PDP-11s, /44, /45, /70 (although I have no idea who bought one of the latter and for what), then VAX-11/750s (much cost reduced from the original /780 with gate arrays, DEC having first used them for the PDP-11/44's FPU).

   Kinda like PCs did in that period, something that bypassed a lot of issues and the IT department's expensive pay by the drink offerings, although then MIT started charging overhead for buying your own computers....

   "> Multics was killed by Honeywell, UNIX™ became big, such is life.

   "Well, to hear Ken or dmr or McIlroy tell the story, it was basically dead when AT&T pulled out...."

   Well, it did for them, they had no access to one, plus it took a long time to mature. See the gecos field in /etc/passwd, Bell Labs/AT&T kept with the original formula mainframes. But, no, Multics became a technical and commercial success, but again Honeywell's management was terminal.

   For example, the first and last pure Multics CPU project was beset by problems, the last straw being algae in the water cooling.

   But the Official blame was laid on deciding to microcode it (!!! :cirnoForReals: !!!). You know, one of the biggest reasons the System/360 was fantastically successful (MIT did have a 370/168 running from across the street VM/CMS, people only used that for the usual reasons of established software packages and sometimes raw number crunching).

   So the max performance of a Multics CPU was severely capped at around 1/1.5 VAX-11/780, async design is hard, and a normal config had a maximum of six, plus two redundant units that connected them to memory and disks. So the only reason to continue running Multics was the software, and often the B2 level of security, see again the Pentagon's love for their system to keep the different branches and other fiefdoms from cheating when the budget was prepared.

   Only one really good thing came out of this AT&T withdrawal from the project besides of course Worse Is Better survival characteristics, piping when the small address space required splitting up big tasks like making technical documentation (first formal funding for the UNIX project) into discrete parts.

   Like doing eqn for equations and troff formatting for a phototypesetter, roff for a daisy wheel . And thus the small tools that do one thing well method and philosophy was born, although now "What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, PoetteringOS/Linux."

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing