71–80 of 126 posts
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What sort of things could/can VMS do that Unix couldn't? I know almost nothing about computer history.
Filesystem level versioning. TRUE async I/O. Reliability for real workloads. Plus a properly configured VMS cluster has never, ever , been hacked.
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They do, and a certified one at that. Android phone's doesn't, as Linux is not technically a UNIX (doesn't derive from the original UNIX codebase in any way.
I don't think iOS is a certified UNIX, is it?
Just sayin'.
Wow. I have to say that it is funny how you hear the legendary tales of computing history over and over again and then some little crucial minor details like "we sold the CEO's office on it" eventually slip out. Ok, that was important at AT&T, but not really why Unix currently rules the universe. Due to anti-trust settlements and cheap licensing, and copyright foibles, Unix was the cheap midrange choice for students…
I learned TeX back in 1984 because I wanted a word processor which would put footnotes at the bottom of the page.
TeX was and is available on a large number of OSes. I was very happy being to run a 'large' TeX instance on my Atari ST with 1 MB of ram, it could easily typeset my undergraduate thesis.
Man, is there any part of modern computing that doesn't have GLS's fingerprints on it?
> It didn't seem like a very good idea for us to be keeping records from > the inner sanctum of the corporation on a computer where most everybody > had super-user privileges. A call to the PR guy convinced him of the > wisdom of keeping such things on their own premises. And so the CEO's > office bought a Unix system. ... and this is exactly how it works today with SaaS subscriptions, except root-privileged people d…
Isn't that why most smart companies have a self hosted enterprise version as well?
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TeX was and is available on a large number of OSes. I was very happy being to run a 'large' TeX instance on my Atari ST with 1 MB of ram, it could easily typeset my undergraduate thesis.
Indeed. TeX later moved to Pascal, but was originally written in SAIL for use on WAITS. GLS ported it to ITS (the first ever port of TeX), and also was responsible for lobbying Knuth to make it Turing-Complete. Man, is there any part of modern computing that doesn't have GLS's fingerprints on it?
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> UNIX is found in many devices end users don't think of as being "computers" at all. No, Linux is. http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net/pdf/ch-intro.pdf Some devices run BSD derivatives, but I'd still hesitate to call those Unix vs derived from Unix.
The name UNIX is just not well defined. Saying Linux is a UNIX is perfectly valid imo, but everyone has a different idea of what UNIX means. That pdf btw has quite a few misconceptions about the history of UNIX.
The trademark UNIX® and its specification is (still) tightly controlled[1] and licensing and compliance was far too expensive for Linus to think about it for his tiny Linux-like OS. (A Linux distribution did recently get certified as UNIX® but that's a recent exception.)
There have been multiple lawsuits between different companies about what could be considered UNIX. The original Linux distribution was basically GNU (GNU is NOT UNIX) utilities wrapped around a deliberately non-UNIX kernel called Linux.
Back when people were trying to explain Linux to UNIX users, it was called "UNIX-like" or a UNIX® clone. Now that Linux has clearly eclipsed UNIX, even now no one really calls Linux, "UNIX" or vice-versa. They are very similar but they are different.
There is also another specification called POSIX. Even Windows NT had a POSIX-compliant layer for a while, and Services for UNIX had some licensed IP, but no one would claim that Windows NT was UNIX.
See also Lisivka's comments [2] further down: Linux is not UNIX.
See also the Single UNIX Specification[3].
1. http://www.opengroup.org/subjectareas/platform/unix
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What sort of things could/can VMS do that Unix couldn't? I know almost nothing about computer history.
In VMS, revision control was built into the file system. It was easy to retrieve older versions of files. Unix didn't have anything like that until rcs was invented, and even then it was a tool, not something built in like what VMS had.
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The name UNIX is just not well defined. Saying Linux is a UNIX is perfectly valid imo, but everyone has a different idea of what UNIX means. That pdf btw has quite a few misconceptions about the history of UNIX.
> The name UNIX is just not well defined. Saying Linux is a UNIX is perfectly valid imo, but everyone has a different idea of what UNIX means. The trademark UNIX® and its specification is (still) tightly controlled[1] and licensing and compliance was far too expensive for Linus to think about it for his tiny Linux-like OS. (A Linux distribution did recently get certified as UNIX® but that's a recent exception.) There…
"I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers."
K. Thompson is also using Linux. I think that's the ultimate testament to it being 'Unix', unless you want the trademark for marketing purposes, like Apple does.