Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 06:43:43 -0800 From: Don Dugger <dugger@hotlz.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Unix vs unix-like and unix-type Message-ID: <36BC551F.A73D14AA@hotlz.com>
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Sorry, I really don't want to offend anybody, however I worked at DEC West right after Cutter left for M$ with NT. Cutter was the one who headed up the NT developement, and he was most definitely a VMS guy. In fact he rather disliked UNIX and saw it as the down fall of DEC. At DEC he was noted for this attitude. He was also the developer of the Mini-Vax. At the time DEC was moving from Ultrix, which BTW was based on BSD 4.2, to OSF/1, within DEC anything but UNIX was politically correct. There had been a battle between OSF/1 and NT at least in Cutter's mind, and NT lost. So Cutter took NT and went to M$, So the story goes. Right after that a project was started at DEC, for M$, to port NT to the new Alpha chip. This BTW was not a very popular project at DEC in fact the engineers on the project disliked NT immensely and they were VMS guys. This all took place in ~1990 and ~1991. In the end Ultrix (UNIX) survived and DEC didn't. As to the question, what is UNIX, NT is not UNIX it's NT developed in the tradition of VMS and M$. And for those of you that have worked with VMS you know that it is very different then UNIX. As one who has worked on UNIX sense 1981 and computer sense 1972 and saw BSD 4.2 replace 4.1 (what a wonderful event) I have listed to all the old religious wars between System V and BSD. I don't care who owns the name UNIX. FreeBSD is UNIX in the tradition of BSD, that BTW includes NetBSD, BSDI and OpenBSD, everything else is UNIX-like. I say this because the System V tradition has been lost. It was lost when Bell Labs give up UNIX. Ok I'm a BSD bigot, so shot me. But I am also a UNIX bigot. BTW I live in Redmond, WA in the same neighberhood as the NT developers. Maybe I should inview some of them and put it on my Web site. Please take no offence I say all this with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. Don 8) Frank Warren wrote: > > Dan O'Connor wrote: > > You're both right and wrong, from someone who has been around DOS since > before there was a Microsoft involved with it. > > > > > > Microsoft's "NT" environment is UNIX. > > > > A friend of mine was also told this at an IBM point-of-sale system AIX > > seminar. Do you know of any documentation on this? I can't find anywhere > > where Microsoft admits to NT be derived from Unix. > > NT was cloned from UNIX the same way that LINUX was -- only commercially > instead of under the GNU Public Virus. What Microsoft did was hire > DEC's top UNIX OS developer (sorry, forgot his name) who swore that he > was going to write "The world's best UNIX." NT was the result. It was > pure UNIX underneathe and highly abstracted. There were to be no hacks > at all, a pure microkernel OS that abstrated everything. And it is > abysmally slow. As for NT not being stable, it was done blindly. As for > NT being slow, when you indirect the living daylights out of everything, > what you get is a VERY long pathlength. Basically, all of UNIX was > replicated by Microsoft programmers under one brilliant architect in two > years time, including X and all drivers. The problem is that there > aren't enough brilliant people at Microsoft and it has always had > problems writing things from scratch. > > > When hard drive support was added to PC-DOS, Microsoft incorporated more > > Unix-like commands (albeit with a renegade \ directory delimiter and a / > > switch character), but I've never seen anything suggesting NT (ne-OS/2) > > *was* Unix. > > Ah, they have eyes, but they do not see. What amazes me, coming here > from the PC world, is how ignorant UNIX types are outside of their own > world. Gates advertised to the world in the 1983 timeframe that UNIX > was the future, and DOS would migrate into UNIX. Xenix was Gates name > for his "brand" of unix and it was, much later, sold to SCO. As for > using \ instead of /, that was a hack left over from 1980, when command > line switches were done with / instead of -. The point of 86-DOS, which > was and always has been the core of MS-DOS, was to get an OS out the > door for Seattle Computer Products. Gary Kildal and CP/M-86 weren't > happening, so Seattle Computer Products just went ahead and wrote their > own OS. And CP/M used == the forward slash for options instead of the > dash. And so it goes. DOS from version 2 onward was always supposed to > "become" unix some day. Gates took a detour with OS/2 and then went > right back to it about 1991 when the limitations of Windows 3 were > obvious and IBM was clearly going to score with their rewrite of OS/2. > > >If it is, it begs the question: Why is NT less stable and less > > robust than Unix? > > Less stable? Since when has ANYTHING coming from Microsoft been stable? > It took them 18 tries to get DOS 2.0 stable. You should look at an NT > 4.0 boot screen. Not only were there 1381 builds to get to NT 4.0, > there are fixpacks on fixpacks on top of that. > > You have to have been at Microsoft to know how it works. And I have > been, albeit consulting for one of their client firms. > > The folks at Microsoft, the line programmers, are nice and reasonable > people. The evil at Microsoft comes from the top down. > > Their problem is that in their drive to take over the world, they need a > LOT of programmers and a lot of the rocket scientists won't do what > Microsoft wants, which is take the entire world down the path of > mediocrity and enforced corporate uniformity in every area of everyone's > life in the name of private profit. So Microsoft mostly makes its > living based on the work of guys who, while they are nice fellows, are > not A players, but mostly B and C players. And due to size, these guys > are largely unsupervised, non-UNIX types writing some pretty > unmaintainable stuff. > > Microsoft panders mediocrity at all levels. They are after profit and > control, not excellence and liberty. Their reputation for slow, > bloated, faulty and ugly code is their reward. > > Best, > > Frank > > > --Dan > -- > Disclaimer: Any resemblance between the above views and those of my > employer are purely coincidental. I'm not sure what my employer's views > are, exactly, except that they improve on a day when the stock is doing > well. > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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