You should read Section 8 of the Unix User's Manual If, like me, you were a computer-science graduate student who cut your teeth on Berkeley Unix – complete with the first open-source implementation of TCP/IP – you know Section 8 as the cryptic System Maintenance Commands section of the Unix User's Manual. It was obvious, to me, that this concluding section warranted a closer …
"Would BSD Unix have had the same impact in the 1980s and 1990s if the university computer center had supported it rather than the computer-science department letting its grad students take ownership of the operations problem?"
There are users and then there are those others, well, "... all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
If the students had been forced to be 'users', then much less would have been accomplished, invented. Here's a fishhook and some string, figure out what you can do with them.
"... an opportunity to manage systems that deliver services to actual users is a great source of systems research problems, as well as fertile ground for platform innovations."
And maturity, and responsibility, and insights into what a product must be to be useful.
Unfortunately, too many developers are really just users. For many of the rest of us, fulfilling a need of others fulfils a need of our own. (sic itur ad astra ?)
"Unfortunately, too many developers are really just users."
This one kind of resonates with me; especially in the 3D graphics area. So many talented young guys are effectively stagnating by just consuming products like Unity3D rather than exploring new ideas, creating new technologies and learning!
(even worse with Unity's strict DRM meaning that all their hard work is guaranteed to be worthless once the company ceases to trade!)
Even worse was the JANET to Internet mail translation: JANET domain names were the other way round.
An old friend and colleague wrote the definitive Sendmail config so that (in SMTP terms) usr@dept.university.ac.uk could be munged into usr@uk.ac.university.dept. And then added in rules to correctly handle UUCP delivery (which was where the !-path and % came in)
One problem arose with Computer Science depts. Before the iron curtain came down, the country code for Czechoslovakia was CS. So (for instance) cs.bath.ac.uk got swapped to uk.ac.bath.cs. It turned out that the Sendmail rules struggled with this. Stuff got sent to Prague. The solution was a filter/reflector over there that sent if back again.
And of course, the most famous UUCP !-path hostnames: Kremvax and Kgbvax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax
I was a big user of Jim Crammond's UK-Sendmail package until I wrote my own sendmail config from scratch as I was a know-it-all postgrad.
For those who remember the days of bang paths, rapid re-routers, EAN, EARN, BITNET and the UKs NRS hell where the Computer Science email would all get redirected to Czechoslovakia, here's Jim's take on it
https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/90q3/fig1.html
Somewhere I've still got my university sweatshirt with uk.ac.stir.cs printed on it. :)
My first two real paid jobs involved nursing and configuring sendmail, with some bits of rewriting as well. Usefully, I came from a background of having written a sendmail program* for networked Beebs five years earlier. :)
*And an instant messaging system**
**And a distributed information browsing system***
***And a multi-user networked gaming system****
****Youngsters today, think they invented everything....
You could use multiple "@" signs in an address and they were read right to left. The need for "%" was so that you could mix SMTP and UUCP hops in one address.
The precedence was that @'s are processed before UUCP's ! so if you needed to have a UUCP hop followed by an SMTP one you used the lower precedence % format.
I also benefited because the IP network wasn't rolled out in the company I was working for by their IT network but rather by the companies research division who then allowed the rest of us techies to come on board and play too. You learn so much more when you need to do stuff for real.
The bang path UUCP addresses let you specify a specific path to take (the machines to pass through).
I vaguely remember the ability to do this using % symbols; the mail went to the system after the @. then the @ and everything after it was stripped off and the rightmost % became an @ - then processing continued.
I remember winning a successful challenge to get an email from the Oxford engineering department VAX to an oil rig in the Hudson Bay. As I recall it had to go from uk.ac.ox.engvax (an 11/780) to uk.ac.ox.vax (a cluster of 2 8800s and 2 8700s) to uk.ac.convex (the only Unix machine with public access) to somewhere at Sussex University (which had a uucp to IP gateway) to New York University to the oil rig, Memory may have diminished or embellished this, but it was tricky.
Having spent Christmas (with family - lucky me!) in Hawaii, I made a pilgrimage to UHawaii to see the IEEE marker commemorating ALOHAnet. ...and took a selfie. Curiously, there was no crowd...
Abramson died just after the marker was placed last year. Kuo is still with us.
Have just returned, and good God is it cold in Boston! 10 hours on a plane and you get off to 0F and 20 mph wind that goes right through the minimal cold weather clothing I had brought.
I went from VAX VMS to Unix. I could make VMS do almost anything I wanted after 10 years of it. It took a while to get anywhere near that kind of fluidity with Unix. I think you learn a subset of 'computers' that is sufficient for almost any task you need and even though unix had everything I needed it took a long while to work out where it was. It didnt help the machine I was using was managed by someone who never found out how to turn of full disk checking on bootup which was a good hour or so of the day drinking enough tea to interrupt all later procedures.
TOPS-10, VMS etc. came from a particular school of thought where commands had consistency. So once you had learnt the general format and vocabulary it was generally very easy to either locate the right command for what you were wanting to do and get the parameters right. Obviously, CP/M and PC/MS-DOS borrowed and created a much-simplified command set. Unix was very much counter-culture being intentionally designed for two-finger typists and commands made obscure so you had to read the 'manual'.
I think the two fingered typist thing works well until about 1980 when the abbreviation space starts to seriously flood. I came to it from chip design so I probably had two or three hundred well worn commands that were nothing to do with the underlying OS by which time brevity was a | dream! The commands I found useful where used for building up long command scripts from directory contents and managing errors to drive the files through various routes to make/validate the bits of chips in the directories. I look back on some of the stuff I have on fanfold and wonder how I actually got it to work - lots of sed and yacc and cshell I can not longer understand off the top of my head but the VMS script collection uses commands I cant even remember!
>That wasn't obscurity, that was brevity
Maybe, but then Unix was intended for the "priesthood", which was stronger in academic institutions (and their IT departments/schools) than commercial IT departments running proprietary systems.
Obviously, with the rise of microprocessors in the 80's and the availability of an open OS ie. portable Unix source code, many new entrants were able to build and sell boxes using Intel/Motorola/National Semiconductor CPU's, chipsets and buses and running 'Unix'; its how Sun started.
What would have been interesting is whether Unix would have become so dominate so quickly, particularly in the server space, if there had been other viable releases of open source code. Whilst I know there are reasons why it didn't happen, I suspect Unix would have lost out to VMS had DEC released their source code in the mid 80's.
>Why on Earth would you want a sysadmin to NOT read the fine manual? Do you expect them to learn the finer points of the OS by osmosis?
There is reading the manual and having to use the manual to ensure you are using the right set of parameters and even then not all parameters were documented! :)
With the early 80's releases, there were key variations between Unix distributions and commands.
The issue isn't not reading the manual, but finding you way around it - there is no comparison between the Unix Reference manual and the bookcase of documentation systems such as VMS had.
"I suspect Unix would have lost out to VMS had DEC released their source code in the mid 80's."
Having worked at DEC, and put in a boat-load of time on BSD long before that, and knowing that DEC's source was available to researchers (at Berkeley and Stanford, certainly) ... no. DEC's code wasn't built to be flexible enough for the (then) modern world of near-ubiquitously networked systems. UNIX (and by extension, BSD) was.
Note that this wasn't a war of attrition, rather it was a fine example of evolution in action. None of us had any clue what it would all lead to, we just used what worked & built upon it, sometimes throwing out a whole chunk and starting fresh, until it worked the way we wanted it to work. All in all, I think it turned out OK.
Except the monstrosity known as the systemd-cancer, of course.
I get what you are saying, however, remember outside of academia, Unix was largely unknown and a bit of a joke (early 80's). Business was familiar with VMS and liked what they saw, so a bit like how Microsoft subsequently became, so given a choice between: VMS with its catalogue of business applications and Unix, I would have expected business to have chosen VMS.
Whether (open source) VMS would have been as adaptable as Unix was, is a slightly different, but still relevant question. However, many think it would have killed Microsoft...
On the contrary, by the late 70s UNIX was well enough known, and being used in proto Silicon Valley startups, to the point that Gates & Co. (always looking to make a fast buck) licensed the source for AT&T's very own Unix Version 7 in order to re-sell it. (You didn't really think that Microsoft actually wrote Xenix, did you?)
I did minor consulting work for Onyx Systems in 1979, which lead to some moonlighting at RDS (later known as Informix, you may have heard of them) in 1980. I also did work for plenty of others in the same time frame. Lots of UNIX, making quite a bit of money. At the time, only the dinosaurs were still using VMS for new projects ... and being made fun of by us young whippersnappers.
Microsoft's NT was largely architected[0] by Dave Cutler, who pretty much wrote the core of VMS singlehandedly while at DEC. That's why NT looks so much like VMS. Sadly, Microsoft turned what could have been a truly great operating system into a joke.
[0] I really, really hate that word ...
There was a difference between what was going on in the Valley and in the world outside of the USA.
>You didn't really think that Microsoft actually wrote Xenix
...
Microsoft's NT was largely architected by Dave Cutler, who pretty much wrote the core of VMS singlehandedly while at DEC.
Funnily enough by the beginning of 1985, I was sitting on the core to an OS that ran on the x286/386, we debated whether to release it and decided being UK-based and with the massive increase in Unix (on Intel), plus the MS-DOS battles, the field was getting a little crowded. Instead, I got into Unix and with some friends delivered LivingC to market (on MS-DOS).
>Sadly, Microsoft turned what could have been a truly great operating system into a joke.
Agree an opportunity wasn't just missed it was positively ballsed up.
The best manual I have ever seems was for the Coherent 3 unix clone operating system I used during my time at Uni. The university had Solaris machines, all I could afford was a 486 SX 25 and the $99 OS to go with it. The manual got me through Uni, it covered everything Unix right down to C programming. It was about a thousand pages thick. I’ve never seen anything like it since.
After I left Uni they did release a Coherent 4 which had X11 Windows support in 1992 which I did purchase, but having left Uni I never found a use for it. Windows for Workgroups was taking over the world, and it was another decade before I even came across another Unix implementation of any kind, and that was A Red Hat Linux web server circa 2005ish.
Nowadays any manuals don’t match the product I have in front of me. They don’t seem to keep up. Screen shots and instructions are just plain wrong and you’re pretty much left to fend for yourself.
That wasn't just a manual, that was The Coherent Lexicon. Possibly the best over-all operating system book ever published. It is still a valuable tool today, with the caveat that the details of CLI commands have changed, but that's easy enough to check with modern man pages.
It is available for the download here, but I suggest finding a dead-tree copy on fleabay or the like. I've also seen it in used bookstores, mainly in University towns. Why dead-tree? Because it doubles as a reference manual, and to date computers don't come close to actual books when looking up shit in a hurry.
Couple the Lexicon with a copy of ORA Power Tools, 2nd Edition (the Drill Book) and you've got a really, really good starter's kit on REAL system administration ... but again, with the above caveat.
You can also download & play with the actual Coherent OS, should you want to. A legally downloadable copy is archived at TUHS, here.
Have an upvote for having been a Coherent user. I purchased it back in the day to run on old 286 (IIRC) when the other alternative (for x86) was considerably more expensive Interactive UNIX. Probably the only example I can think of from top of my head, where something rather cheap was very very good. Thanks MWC! It was few years later when Tanenbaum's MINIX started to emerge.
Minix was fun - I had a 286 that I hammered it on for a while. Seems to no longer function as per the instructions any more. Though I'll just update VBox and have a check to make sure.
Still think the book that came with it was one of the most useful ever.
Update - seems Minix is all ok now and with X11 functioning. The 286 was a bit slower ISTR!
Just wondering if reading certain old software induces the smell of the manual? Different computers and OSes came with manuals all of which had different smells. Just writing about old code distantly triggers memories of the manual smells and the desks and near environments where I poured over them! I think if left in a library I could probably track down Prentice-Hall manuals by year!
Ah, that's synOSthesia that you're experiencing…
Even better if the manuals are rainbow 'colour book' series, for extra stimulus!
(And then there's the animals…)
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