[Sluglug] 10 reasons I hate U(nix)

[Thomas Leavitt]

This is a good reminder that we were not always stuck on Intel's 4, 8,
16, 32, 64, 128 bit squirrel wheel. :)

Thomas

On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 22:47 -0800, Peter Belew wrote:
> The first Unix versions were run on the PDP-7, which has a quite
> different architecture from the later PDP-11 - 18-bit words,
> no byte addressing (in fact, Digital hadn't started to use the word
> 'byte' yet - an IBM coinage somewhat disparaged by the
> anti-IBM users of DEC machines of the day - note that
> networking folks dating back to that time tend to say 'octet'
> rather than 'byte'). The first Unix was in assembly code; 'B'
> was eventually written for the PDP-7 version (it was inspired
> by the very spartan word-only BCPL language, in turn inspired
> by the British language CPL, which was never fully implemented
> by anyone). But with the PDP-11 came C, based on 'B',
> which had byte addressing added on.
> 
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7
>    http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html
> 
> (As an aside, the version of BCPL used by Xerox PARC in the
> mid-1970s did have a really kludgy syntax for byte addressing
> on the Data General Nova and Xerox PARC Alto - I believe
> this version was created in Switzerland, possibly at CERN??.
> BTW BCPL had a feature most recently seen in Perl - in
> addition to the 'if' statement, it had 'unless'. This was dropped
> in C, sadly IMHO).
> 
> Process control went under a lot of changes in early Unix, as
> the Ritchie article describes. The advent of multithreading
> has a bearing on some of the criticisms. Also named pipes
> are a useful mechanism in Unix for dealing with processes
> with multiple output streams and/or needing 2-way
> communication:
> 
>   http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/named_pipes.html
> 
> (Another aside: most early PDP's, like a number of early IBM
> machines, in fact, used a 6-bit character set, and word sizes
> were typically a multiple of that - 36 bits for the PDP-6 and
> PDP-10 and DEC 20 and IBM 704/7090 machines, 18
> bits for the PDP-1 and PDP-4 and PDP-7, 12 bits for the
> PDP-5 and PDP-8, for example; the PDP6/10/DEC20 series
> software switched to using 7-bit ASCII, with a bit left over on
> each 36-bit word to flag words used for line number marks
> in text files; that series of computers were the first PDPs to
> have byte addressing, with special instructions for addressing
> variable-length bytes. The PDP-11 marks the transition
> to little-ending byte and bit addressing and power-of-2
> word sizes in the DEC world).
> 
> (I'm running out of steam, so off to bed! Maybe it's
> "out of streams")
> 
> (Another aside, further afield - speaking of the 36-bit big-endian
> IBM machines like the 704 - their instruction set and registers
> inspired the CAR and CDR keywords of LISP, first implemented
> by John McCarthy on a 704 - 'Contents of Address Register'
> and 'Contents of Decrement Register'.)
> 
> Now I'm really sleepy.
> 
>  - Peter
> 
> 
> On 11/11/05, Thomas Leavitt <thomas at thomasleavitt.org> wrote:
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 14:04:51 -0800
> > From: Ignacio Solis <isolis at igso.net>
> > Subject: [Sluglug] 10 reasons I hate U(nix)
> > To: SlugLUG <sluglug at sluglug.ucsc.edu>
> > Message-ID: <20051107220451.GB16415 at inrg.cse.ucsc.edu>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> >
> > I read this article today and was wondering what were people's
> > impressions.
> > Link originally from osnews.
> >
> > http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=424451&rl=1
> >
> > Nacho
> >
> > ***
> >
> > Interesting, although I've heard most of this before in one rant or
> > another. ... but, it would seem that a lot of these things can be fixed
> > (or have already been fixed, such as he points out with Mach and GNU
> > Hurd).
> >
> > There's nothing stopping someone from designing and releasing a version
> > of Linux that has fixes for most of these problems layered in.
> >
> > Thomas
> >
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