eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (08/07/84)
[] First, I would like to thank those people who sent or post suggestions. Scott is right, you just can't write about it. Dr. Perlman made the best suggestion: make a video tape, I agree, but we have too few video tape drives that this rules this out for the time. I have to keep the Q&A format for my "marketing memos." Like others, I have followed the S1 (and the early Pick) discussion. I think than based on the past history of the development of operating systems, CP/M, MS/DOS, VMS/RSX, we see these operating systems moving closer and closer to what we regard as UNIX. Multiple processes have been added, hierarchical file systems (in VMS), HLL (in VMS) development language for the OS. I suspect these and other (4.2) features will eventually evolve their way into S1 and Pick. (Maybe some of their features will work their way into UNIX (Note Multics and TOPS-20 features). What I am wondering, from the more hard core wizards reading this light weight list: if we define UNIX as a set of system calls, then if a system comes along which uses a different HLL (Higher Level Language) than C, something other than fork()-wait(), creat()-open()-close()-read()- write()-lseek(), mkdir()-rmdir-chdir(), and so on, is this UNIX? Is it UNIX-like? In the case of the ELXSI EMBOS system: "Is it UNIX without 'grep'?" --eugene miya NASA Ames Res. Ctr.
gwyn@BRL-VLD.ARPA (08/10/84)
From: Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn@BRL-VLD.ARPA> There is obviously no single "right" answer to the question whether an operating system that provides compatible system calls but changes everything else is "really UNIX". Note, however, that UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories so the legal answer is "definitely not". The technical answer is more a matter of opinion. In my case, I consider the traditional set of user-mode utilities to be an essential part of UNIX and would not buy a UNIX system where these are all different or missing.