Olde cheap(ish) *nix [was Linux vs. BSD?]

Tom Buskey tbuskey at gmail.com
Sat Jun 18 22:59:01 EDT 2005


On 6/18/05, Ken D'Ambrosio <kend at xanoptix.com> wrote:
> Fred wrote:

> >manufacturing decisions made with wild abandon. Hell, we had even ported
> >Unix to the Amiga, and many universities became interested, because

I remember the article in Byte magazine....


> IIRC, Commodore's 2500UX and 3000UX were the first SVR4's out the door
> of anyone.  I wanted that machine *SO BADLY*... but as a mere MIS guy

Yep, they were.  I wanted one too.

> for UPS, I couldn't swing even its fairly reasonable price.  (And my
> lowly A1000, without an MMU, wouldn't deign to run the software.)  Thus,
> when Coherent came out (anyone remember Coherent by Mark Williams Co.?),
> I pounced.  And it was good.

Coherent came out for the PC when Minix was in its heyday.  It had
different (fewer?) limitations then Minix.  Thank goodness for those
limitations, else linux might not have come around and we'd still be
waiting for Hurd.
 
> Then I heard about Linux, fired up my spiffy new 14.4 modem, and started
> d/l'ing Slackware.  And it was better.  Hell: I could even get X
> running!  (Coherent had X, but it was $100 extra.)
> 
> Would I have tried BSD?  Almost certainly.  And y'know what?  There's

I *did* try BSD 1st.  I had a spiffy new 486/33 from gateway and a
slew of unix apps ported to DOS.  I also had OS/2 w/ another slew of
ported apps that worked much more like on real unix.  One of my main
applications was LaTeX at the time and that didn't run on Minix.  Nor
would most of the GNU suite.  Or X.

Dr. Dobbs had the 386BSD series at the time (you could buy BSD386 from
BSDi for $1000 and SCO was a bit more).

I thought, why not run real unix?  I donwloaded the 30 or so 360k
floppies, installed it, and... nothing.  I downloaded SLS with Linux
0.93pl5 and it ran!  It had LaTeX and all the GNU utilies.

I also ran Slackware when it came out.  It was basically SLS modified
with proper permissions & other fixes that the author of SLS wouldn't
roll in.


If FreeBSD had been out, I probably would have gone for that.  From
what I gather, that did for 386BSD what Slackware did to SLS.  Timing
is sometimes everything.

> nothing wrong with BSD -- but I agree with Linus: attempting to attain
> perfection can really hamper development.  Lots of development means

The Unix Philosophy: Sometimes an 80% solution now is better then a
100% solution later.  And another program can provide that other 20%. 
Ex: ls and ls | sort.

-- 
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but
have only one course of action.
- Frank Herbert



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