• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

14:03 / 16:50 The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall.

In 2023 you can say that Unix is dead and that Unix is the most important contemporary computing standard.

Depends on whether you refer to the Unix philosophy or UNIX(TM) operating systems or POSIX compliance practices or Unix-like system distributions.

Unix-like OSes are everywhere. Everyone has them in their house in multiple devices. Windows runs a POSIX compatbility layer solely there so Unix-trade programmers can develop seamlessly on Windows desktop. Phones run it, smart TVs, whatnot. The adherence to Unix philosophy is hard to measure. Certainly it peaked in the distant past, and modern Linux is straying away from it, while OSX and aforementioned Windows and appliances include Unix/Posix only as an interface and not an overall design philosophy. Yet, the number of Unix-trade users these systems enabled in today's world is by the tens of millions.

POSIX compliance slowly died off with the UNIX(TM) and the workstations market. Nobody is going to invest a ton into complying unless it's a very specific case where compliance is required, like some government contracts or something.

Caluser2000 said:
You do know MacOS aka Mac OS X is UNIX(tm) don't you?
Click to expand...

I believe it used to be.
Current Darwin is listed only partially compatible, in same range as BSDs and Linux.
POSIX certification is not important for commodity hardware OS in 2023.
 
Zare said:
In 2023 you can say that Unix is dead and that Unix is the most important contemporary computing standard.

Depends on whether you refer to the Unix philosophy or UNIX(TM) operating systems or POSIX compliance practices or Unix-like system distributions.

Unix-like OSes are everywhere. Everyone has them in their house in multiple devices. Windows runs a POSIX compatbility layer solely there so Unix-trade programmers can develop seamlessly on Windows desktop. Phones run it, smart TVs, whatnot. The adherence to Unix philosophy is hard to measure. Certainly it peaked in the distant past, and modern Linux is straying away from it, while OSX and aforementioned Windows and appliances include Unix/Posix only as an interface and not an overall design philosophy. Yet, the number of Unix-trade users these systems enabled in today's world is by the tens of millions.

POSIX compliance slowly died off with the UNIX(TM) and the workstations market. Nobody is going to invest a ton into complying unless it's a very specific case where compliance is required, like some government contracts or something.



I believe it used to be.
Current Darwin is listed only partially compatible, in same range as BSDs and Linux.
POSIX certification is not important for commodity hardware OS in 2023.
Click to expand...
It still i behind that pretty GUI....Go and have a look. Alll BSD userland under there. running on top of a Mach/BSD hybrid kernel.


Apple own the UNIX actually trademark
 
Last edited:
Caluser2000 said:
It still i behind that pretty GUI....Go and have a look. Alll BSD userland under there. running on top of a Mach/BSD hybrid kernel.


Apple own the UNIX actually trademark
Click to expand...
Not sure if you were being facetious, but The Open Group says otherwise
 
Caluser2000 said:
Apple own the UNIX actually trademark
Click to expand...

No, they don't. They have paid to have The Open Group certify that OS X/MacOS complies with requirements of the Single Unix Specification, or SUS. (I'm sure any Zoomers reading this will get a kick out of the acronym.) The first version they registered with this was OS X Leopard in 2007, seemingly to try to boost the prospects of their rack-mountable Xserve line. (Which they discontinued in 2011 because, according to Steve Jobs himself, "hardly anyone was buying them".) They've continued paying for the UNIX03 certification since, probably out of habit.

In the real world UNIX "certification" doesn't mean a whole lot. Linux and the various free BSDs are all probably subjectively more like "real UNIX" than MacOS is by various measures, but nobody's paid to get them certified and they mostly omit a few of the more obscure features, like support for the "pax" archive format, seemingly out of spite. On the flip side, OSes that don't share much heritage with UNIX at all, like IBM's z/OS and OS/390, have UNIX certifications because they have sufficiently featureful POSIX layers slapped on top. (Microsoft's old "UNIX subsystem for Windows" and the current Linux incarnation of it could probably earn a UNIX certification with very little work if MS cared to do it. They don't because, yeah, no one cares.)
 
resman said:
Not sure if you were being facetious, but The Open Group says otherwise
Click to expand...
Gilty your Honour! Is'nt it great to have a decrnt discution in AOs normal anti topics and it goes without saying the Three Stooges that follow him about. any thing unix/*nix threads. Apple do own CUPs and gladly share it with the rest of the community .;)
 
Last edited:
Eudimorphodon said:
rack-mountable Xserve line. (Which they discontinued in 2011 because, according to Steve Jobs himself, "hardly anyone was buying them".)
Click to expand...
I worked in a data center with a good 20,000 physical servers, a solid portion of which were colocated. In over a decade there, I saw one single rack mounted Xserve in use.
 
My recollection is that the BSD was known in the early days as "Berkeley UNIX", as it's based on the UNIX V6 originally, mostly by way of added programs, not replacements. When we ran 4.1BSD, the man pages were definitely those of AT&T UNIX. An organization back then could get a 9 track tape(s) from AT&T for a very modest fee. This was before the 1982 AT&T breakup.
 
skate323k137 said:
I worked in a data center with a good 20,000 physical servers, a solid portion of which were colocated. In over a decade there, I saw one single rack mounted Xserve in use.
Click to expand...

At my company we had a few anti-Linux/Pro-Mac/BSD-Zealot guys that tried to get IT to buy some (the G5 model) for, I dunno, some reason they’d try to justify later, but they thankfully failed. (These were the same folks that eventually did succeed in getting us to waste $15,000 on a pair of absolute boat-anchor UltraSparc III servers to run the same two-factor auth software that we could have just run on RedHat using the same Xeon servers we had literally hundreds of available.)

Some people just *really* get the idea stuck in their heads that the same bits smell sweeter if they plop out the back of whatever their favorite less mainstream platform is. These days I generally just sigh and imagine these people also *insist* that records sound better than CDs because they can “hear the music breaking up” at 44.1khz and think something similar happens if your CPU has too ugly an instruction set or whatever.
 
Al Kossow said:

Virginia Tech Migrates Mac Supercomputer to Apples Xserve

The third-fastest supercomputer cluster located at Virginia Tech is moving from Power Macintosh G5 desktop machines to a similar number of Apple Computer's Xserve G5 rack-mount servers.
www.eweek.com www.eweek.com
Click to expand...

Hey, I can speak from direct hands-on experience with one a G5 Xserve absolutely kicked butt running SETI@Home, perfectly valid choice for a floating point *compute* cluster...

Downside: for general UNIX tasks mid-2000-aughts OS X was stupid inefficient compared to Linux for any highly threaded application. See Here. Considering the ideas these guys had for what we could use it for (MySQL server? HA!) this was relevant enough to nip the idea in the bud.
 
Caluser2000 said:
It still i behind that pretty GUI....Go and have a look. Alll BSD userland under there. running on top of a Mach/BSD hybrid kernel.
Click to expand...

The underlying operating system is called Darwin, it has 4.4BSD heritage inherited via NeXTSTEP and it had a BSD userland based on FreeBSD 4.
The former is the Mach part and the latter is the BSD part.

4.4BSD is a late version of one of two original UNIX flavours - SysV vs Berkeley. It includes original UNIX source code. FreeBSD was born out of the cleanup project that aimed to replace all AT&T proprietary code from Berkeley flavour namely 386BSD.

In OSX, kernel part used to be POSIX/UNIX because they had aligned syscalls and other stuff already. For the userspace POSIX APIs FreeBSD imports were slightly changed and that's it.
This all happened about 15-20 years ago.

As far as I know, Apple has not send further versions for certification and it doesn't have POSIX.1-2017 compliance.
There is a test suite so you can run it if you have a modern mac, I don't. I strongly suspect it will fail.

Caluser2000 said:
Apple own the UNIX actually trademark
Click to expand...

No they don't, Open Group owns it. Unix wars of early 90s are a good topic to read into to grasp all the historicity behind a very complicated story with a lot of stakeholders. Apple was not among them, they're or were just a licensee like QNX used to be.

Chuck(G) said:
My recollection is that the BSD was known in the early days as "Berkeley UNIX", as it's based on the UNIX V6 originally, mostly by way of added programs, not replacements. When we ran 4.1BSD, the man pages were definitely those of AT&T UNIX. An organization back then could get a 9 track tape(s) from AT&T for a very modest fee. This was before the 1982 AT&T breakup.
Click to expand...

UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. v. Berkeley Software Design, Inc. - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

BSD and Berkeley UNIX share a common lineage, but due to code rewrite above, it's not a direct descendant like in Darwin->BSD case.
Linux is a rewrite of (mostly SysV) UNIX as far as external API is concerned, 386BSD is a rewrite of Berkeley UNIX as far as internal APIs are concerned.

The aforementioned OSX contains code from both.

Eudimorphodon said:
At my company we had a few anti-Linux/Pro-Mac/BSD-Zealot guys that tried to get IT to buy some (the G5 model) for, I dunno, some reason they’d try to justify later, but they thankfully failed. (These were the same folks that eventually did succeed in getting us to waste $15,000 on a pair of absolute boat-anchor UltraSparc III servers to run the same two-factor auth software that we could have just run on RedHat using the same Xeon servers we had literally hundreds of available.)

Some people just *really* get the idea stuck in their heads that the same bits smell sweeter if they plop out the back of whatever their favorite less mainstream platform is. These days I generally just sigh and imagine these people also *insist* that records sound better than CDs because they can “hear the music breaking up” at 44.1khz and think something similar happens if your CPU has too ugly an instruction set or whatever.
Click to expand...

There is a ton of pros and cons in practical scenario most of them business related.
FreeBSD is a far more stable OS than Linux in every aspect for server performance. However if hardware support is not there and you don't have enough people with skills to implement it the project will fail.

One of the red flags immediately raised about your team is that they've approached software choice as #1 requirement without looking at a TCA/TCO of the complete system.

The other red flag is conflating Mac experience with FreeBSD. It's same and totally opposite. Same is clear venue how to do something, ton of quality documentation, everyting important is already on the base system, etc. The opposite part is that Mac is a few-click experience and FreeBSD tends to be manual configs all the way.

Today even Linux people underestimate the level of automation in their "non-noob" distribution such as Debian. "That's it, I hate systemd, moving to FreeBSD", then tries to get his desktop up and running for weeks because you need to learn a metric ton of new stuff. I have graduated on FreeBSD kernel programming and been inside the FreeBSD community for 20 years, for me it's easy to get a flashy modern desktop running, because I'm aware of 20-30 commands that haven't changed for ages. Someone that thinks it's going to go smoothly without real experience is terribly wrong.
 
If a hobbyist can use Debian any one can....It is NOT hard. Nor is Slackware OR .....It's all basically the same shit with a different smell for Petes sake!. Who ever Pete is. Anybody know him?

Debian based, Red Hat based or sourced based -Slackware, TinCore etc. Use whatever init system you prefer as well. You have choices.... Devuin Linux gives you thre at last count. Don't make it seem harder than it actually is....Takes a minute to boot up on my AMD K2-6 400 test rig with 256megs of ram to the XFCE desktop with ram to spare on spinning rust.

Pick your smell and enjoy the fragrance and don't knock any one else's preference. That is what grown ups do. I think?
 
Last edited:
Yeah, exactly. But in business environment its not about someone's preferences, that preference needs to be drawn from a business plan. That's mostly what I was referring to above.

And the point is that FreeBSD is "harder" than Linux, while in my personal opinion Windows is harder than both. More obscure, more abstract, more undocumented, etc. But when we talk about what's hard and easy I think hard is something that current generations wish to be automated and easy is something which they wish to interact with.

OpenBSD installer is a line based installer that just asks you regular questions including the partition management. This thing killed so many "I want to try OpenBSD" attempts by people who wanted a firewall - they underestimated the knowledge needed to install and overestimated automation, probably based on past experiences.

Everything is hard before you get enough XP at it, then it becomes easy.
Anyways, FreeBSD is way less automated than Debian. I can go into myriad of detail, but Debian installer can land you a modern automated desktop OS, FreeBSD does not. Intentionally.
 
Certainly, OpenBSD is not that intuitive for FreeBSD user, tho "technology transfers" between projects happen all the time.
Notably there is no "BSD" to take as a reference for intuition, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly are different OSes that have similarities and differences. From my perspective I would like OpenBSD to be intuitive for me a FreeBSD user, but then an OpenBSD user could say the opposite too ;)

Chuck(G) said:
Ah, but BSD and Linux don't have Copilot keys. :)
Can I get a Model M keyboard with that key?
Click to expand...

Imagine someone making a virus that makes Clippy appear (and never disappear) after you hit this key. If you dare to try ctrl+alt+del your Windows shell gets replaced by Microsoft Bob. Permanently.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top