and to think that not long ago around 90% of the world's sms traffic was processed by VMS ...
A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
31–40 of 286 posts
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#32à propos means apt/appropriate as a noun in french and in English, but the phrase « à propos de … » means “about …” ; which is much more (wait for it) à propos. It is kind of weird that it was used in Unix wherein only the noun form made sense ; and even with french in mind the “apropos ” syntax (without « de ») makes it sound weird. In practice I don't think I've ever used it, and when I was a noob I often lamented…
> In practice I don't think I've ever used it, and when I was a noob I often lamented the lack of a high-level documentation of Linux which would introduce the appropriate man/info pages. It was introduced in 3.0BSD, it's pretty old :). As for usage, while I'm not a native French speaker, I don't think I've heard it used as a noun that often. I can't speak (heh :P) for Canadian speakers of French -- perhaps there are…
Not saying it didn't exist, just saying it's not an introductory high-level Linux user-space documentation.
Also not saying apropos is incomprehensible, just that 1 it sounds weird as a Frenchman, 2 there could have been a simpler alternative: “about”.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#33Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#34We had to use VAX/VMS when I was a freshman, decades ago. The “Computer Center” had dozens of VT220s hooked up to it via serial “hubs” in the main building basement (the very stereotype of a nerd dungeon). It wasn’t half bad. As multi-user systems went, it was actually quite good and we ran a number of projects on it before moving off to PCs, Sun Workstations and Linux in general. I remember all the staples of the er…
> but largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine when accessing it via teletype (glass or otherwise). I disagree. I first sat down at a VMS terminal in a library in North Carolina when the OPAC broke and dropped me back to a prompt. I knew Linux passably well at that point but had never used VMS before. I typed ls, tried dir, that worked, and finally tried help. In half an hour I was investigating t…
I just tried 'help' on a linux system.
It is absolute garbage.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#35"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are
PowerShell takes the UNIX philosophy, cranks it up to 11, and makes commands trivially discoverable.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#36[deleted]
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
And afterwards try Inferno, which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like. http://inferno-os.org/inferno/limbo.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/
> which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like No, not really can you proof that in any way?
Yes, really.
It was developed by the same core team that created Plan 9, and Limbo is the evolution of Alef, that Rob Pike wasn't happy to have to drop for Plan 9 3rd edition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)
> Alef appeared in the first and second editions of Plan 9, but was abandoned during development of the third edition.[1][2] Rob Pike later explained Alef's demise by pointing to its lack of automatic memory management, despite Pike's and other people's urging Winterbottom to add garbage collection to the language;[3]...
> The Limbo programming language can be considered a direct successor of Alef and is the most commonly used language in the Inferno operating system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
> Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly compilers, graphics, security, networking and portability.
For some strange reason many stop at the middle station, instead of going all the way to the end.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#38We had to use VAX/VMS when I was a freshman, decades ago. The “Computer Center” had dozens of VT220s hooked up to it via serial “hubs” in the main building basement (the very stereotype of a nerd dungeon). It wasn’t half bad. As multi-user systems went, it was actually quite good and we ran a number of projects on it before moving off to PCs, Sun Workstations and Linux in general. I remember all the staples of the er…
Similar story here - as a physics student, I used VMS in the first year of uni, mainly for its Fortran compiler (WATFOR) and the NAG libraries, and Unix thereafter. Both had advantages and disadvantages, VMS was touted as more secure (as in, security was a fundamental consideration in its design, whereas it wasn't the case for Unix). I particularly liked the automatic versioning of files, making reversion to earlier known-good files simple.
VMS knowledge came in handy years later when I had to work in VMS Fortran on the company VAX - I even coded the VMS Fortran random number generator in g77 (thanks to the excellent documentation) for consistency when we ported our code to DOS after the VAX was shut down.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#39> [the name] Grep suggests to me that the author of this one had been reading too much Robert Heinlein (you grok?), or possibly --- and this is in fact quite likely --- was under the influence of psychotropic substances at the time.
As funny as this is, the actual origin for "grep" is even more interesting – and, at least to me, quite mnemonic. "grep" comes from ed, and stands for the command "g/re/p", that is
global/regular expression/print
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#40Came for a discussion of OS/2, stayed for the comparison of Ken Thompson to E. E. Cummings.