On 06/04/2006, at 11:17 PM, Jerry W. Walker wrote:
Hi, Chuck & Ian,
On Apr 5, 2006, at 8:33 PM, Chuck Hill wrote:
No, Jerry. Windows is not UNIX. It's really, really not UNIX.
Trust me on this.
Now that sounds like a great feature of Windows, except not
implies < or > (get your boolean parsers on that one) and alas
Windows is ....
Crap. I think that is the technical word for it.
I'm still trying to parse those last three sentences, but it feels
like Ian rode in to my defense and Chuck admitted to the reasons
for my parochialism. So, thanks, guys!
At least it's a friendly beat up - ouch watch it!
* setting up a link in /bin to its current location.
What? No C:?
Physical device mapping... how 1960s. No wait the B5000 was out
in 1964, how 1950s! (The B5000 had a virtual memory P- (or
presence) bit in segment descriptors, like WO faults! And its OS
was not written in C.)
The history... The history... (thinking of Apocalypse Now).
Oooh. Ian, you're bringing back fond memories. I only wish I'd
spent more time with the B5000 series and less time with the
Burroughs' sales staff. :-)
Arrrrrrgh, now that's twisting the knife. The Burroughs' Sales
Prevention Force was what it was known as. The story was that they
would actually vet customers to see if they could provide a suitable
environment to put the machine in. Another story about Edsger
Dijkstra was that when he was in the plant at Pasadena saw how fast
the B5000 could compile ALGOL (in seconds) that he wanted three for
his university in Eindhoven. Then CEO Ray McDonald put a stop to that
because he did not want to set up a support centre in Europe.
There's a nice article ;-) on the B5000 on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B5000
and for a great first-hand paper on the development of the B5000:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
mostly about Bob Barton, who was one of Alan Kay's influential
professors, and a nice aside about Don Knuth.
Back then, I was trying as hard to avoid the S360 as I am trying to
avoid Windows today.
Well, the 360 did to the B5000 what Windows did to the Mac – a really
inferior product, but marketing people seem to have to prove their
worth on inferior products. The 360 made Dijkstra depressed it was so
bad. No virtual memory, you had to configure fixed partitions for
applications and do a Sysgen, where the B5000 MCP automatically
configured itself to the environment (plug and play, so no sysgens).
The 360s OS was still done in assembler, vs B5000 where there was no
assembler (and no buffer overruns like you get in assember- and C-
based OSs, so no modern viruses due to that problem). The stories
about how virtual memory was in the B5000 ten years before IBM
invented it is insightful into the differences of the two companies,
as it is in the difference between the Barton -> Kay -> Jobs -> Apple
and IBM -> Gates -> Windows lines. Fortunately, because of Jobs,
Apple seems not to make the same mistakes as the Burroughs sales people.
The upside was that it got me Unix religion very early on (1977).
The down side was constantly being aware of how really hard it is
spending one's professional life in an industry dominated by
clueless monopolists.
It's a bit of a white-knuckle ride ;-)
ROFL
Heh, now he laughs! Now that we've weaned him from that Windows
blankey he used to clutch! :-)
Regards,
Jerry
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