dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (11/15/84)
It does indeed seem that the UNIX trademark has to be used as an adjective. I nearly giggled out loud when I saw an AT&T advertising blurb that described "uucp" as "UNIX operating system to UNIX operating system copy" rather than the apparently-forbidden "UNIX to UNIX copy".
aps@decvax.UUCP (Armando P. Stettner) (11/16/84)
This is a reposting as news got scrambled recently on decvax. aps. From its beginning, UNIX was in a constant state of change. I do not feel that any single version or release typifies UNIX. I feel that UNIX represents a philosophy of implementation and architecture more so than its common services. However, I feel that there is a set of characteristics which is required in order consider a thing a member of the UNIX lineage: open, read, write, seek, close, fork, exec, getuid, setuid, a real hierarchical file system, a shell, etc. What other capabilities a "UNIX System" is given is not important to the question of whether or not the system is UNIX. What maybe more important is how a capability is implemented and how it is presented to a user [process?]. Adding VMS type RMS capabilities (file access methods) to UNIX is not necessarily a bad idea. Doing so will not change whether or not it is UNIX. However, if the implementation means that all files have an RMS file type and files can not be reproduced *exactly* by simply copying their bytes because the system knows more about their structure to begin with or if the implementation means that the output of one program can not be piped into the input of another, it probably isn't UNIX anymore. While I'm on it, 4.2BSD isn't UNIX; neither is 4.1BSD, System V or System III or Version 7 (although I think it is the "real standard"). Even the /usr/group "standard" is not UNIX. These are all UNIX. They are all part of the evolution of UNIX. As I have said before, I believe that UNIX is evolution. To nail down the idea UNIX to some specific implementation is not good. UNIX is a direction or set of directions. For me, it is a way of being. (How's that for existentialism.) If I can get real-time capabilities or the ability to share resources across several machines running UNIX, more power to me, a user. Armando P. Stettner UNIX User.
dave@uwvax.UUCP (Dave Cohrs) (11/18/84)
> It does indeed seem that the UNIX trademark has to be used as an adjective. > I nearly giggled out loud when I saw an AT&T advertising blurb that described > "uucp" as "UNIX operating system to UNIX operating system copy" rather than > the apparently-forbidden "UNIX to UNIX copy". But that isn't even really correct -- we talk to a VMS site with uucp, and a site with a Harris (running vulcan or whatever they call it) is trying out a version of uucp on us also. -- (Bug? What bug? That's a feature!) Dave Cohrs ...!{allegra,heurikon,ihnp4,seismo,uwm-evax}!uwvax!dave dave@wisc-rsch.arpa
Bob Larson <BLARSON@ecld.#eclnet> (11/19/84)
What? Does this mean that UUCP doesn't stand for Unusually Ugly Communications Program? -------