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From: ajai@ffast.ffast.att.com (Ajai Khattri)
Subject: Re: Retro-Computing!
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References: <D5yxwn.5BG@sdf.saomai.org> <vsocciD629vw.HH1@netcom.com> <D69MLr.E9y@ranger.daytonoh.attgis.com> <3ljv03$bt9@umbc8.umbc.edu>
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 1995 21:40:51 GMT
Lines: 48

In article <3ljv03$bt9@umbc8.umbc.edu>, R. D. Davis <rdavis4@umbc.edu> wrote:
>In article <D69MLr.E9y@ranger.daytonoh.attgis.com>,
>Mike Czaplinski  <mcc@nsscmail.att.com> wrote:
>
>annoyed at what is produced and sold as UNIX these days, such as the
>jumble of UNIX software sold with newer UNIX boxes like Suns.  Things
>keep getting more and more bloated, more and more useless features

Agreed. And just for the record SysV r4 sucks and I curse Sun Microsystems
for ever going down that path. Long live BSD!

>keep being added, thigns don't work like they used to, what works on
>one UNIX box doesn't work on another one, etc.  Things get even worse
>when the beasts get networked together... different uucps do things
>differently, yellow pages is changed by some to NIS, etc.

Sun were sued and forced to change the name.
(Remember, in actual fact, lawyers are the scum of the earth ;-)

>Arrggghhhh!!!  I like UNIX, but why do so many people have to fiddle
>with it and wreck it?  Even getty is no longer sacred.  What's
>happening isn't a good thing.
>
>>But, which would you rather rely on for your everyday use?  A
>>relatively robust truck or a tempramental Italian sports car?
>
>A robust 20+ year old large car. :-)

At home I have an aging MG-1 workstation that runs a variant of 4.2BSD.
I have a complete 4.2BSD Unix system on a 22Mb drive! (You don't even get PCs
with drives that small anymore). The kernel and buffers take up a few hundred 
Kb - in fact the whole machine has 1.5Mb of real memory to play with. It is 
based on the old NS32000 processor. The point is, its a completely functional 
Unix system with none of the bloat you find on newer machines these days. When 
I think of the OS Im currently using at work (Solaris) I cringe inside 
thinking about how much space its taking up on the hard-drive and in memory.
And you don't even get development tools anymore. What's happened? Have the
suits finally taken over?

What's really ironic is that Im currently working at AT&T ;-)


Aj.
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