steveg (07/18/82)
The following note is in reply to a comment by Martin Minow (decvax!minow) about "a family of incompatable unix systems". The opinions expressed are solely my own, anything you can't handle is your own problem. ----------------- Perhaps I have been around a while, but what I associate with UNIX is a nice environment for systems hacking, exploration, and research. I do not think of UNIX as a stabile, standardized timesharing base. This is VMS's market. If you look at UNIX over the years, and compare its evolution to RSTS, it would be on version 58 in RSTS terms, instead of just 7 (they take bigger leaps). The vast ammount of this flexibility has arrived by taking "unwaranted" liberties in its design philosophy, command structure, etc. I have no lament the downfall of the BTL standard. BTL only had so much to give to the baby. To me, Unix never meant one monolithic system, but was a name for an idea and culture of programming, it had little to do with universal compatability. Sure, it would be nice to have everything transportable. But nothing ever is. Afterall, most software needs some degree of customizing to fit in the local environment (something that makes things non-standard, but is never really called that by programmers). Tailoring it further to add more system functions is just a linear addition to the ammount of work. Furthermore, I believe that UNIX has made it to version 58 by allowing people to take cavalier "fly-ing leaps" into the unkown to try out how things would look like after three hundred small steps. If you had a standard, each step would have to be made in lock-sync. Naturally, one violates major system compatabilities in the processs, so what? Unix is for research. Face it, standardization means slower evolutions rates. Unix has a increadibly fast evolution rate. That is why the latest toys are always tried out on it: PWB, INGRESS, R etc. If you want standards, VMS is it. In time VMS will have all these toys, it just does not move fast, nor get as much buy-in and synergism from its community (even in DEC, few build system toys for fun). But VMS is more in the way of a "standard" operating system. (you asked for this, you got it, TOYOTA). - Steven Gutfreund Corporate Research Group DEC