[GRLUG] multiple login on Mac

[Bob Kline]

Clearly "working in" trumps working with.
i.e., Sun's Graphics Group.  A fellow I
knew years ago became Sun employee
number 36.  Jerry Evans?  Worked in
the same group, if there were groups yet
in a company with 36 employees. The
same field anyway.  He used to got to
SIGGRAPH every year.   I remember
visiting the plant in CA, and seeing a
hush-hush project: a machine with a
SPARC processor.

The first Sun workstation I had used a
Motorola 68020.  Seemed spunky at the
time, but wasn't by today's standards.
The display was the big new feature
for people not so long before using ASCII
terminals....  Later I got a SPARC I
workstation, and that was peppy indeed.
A SPARC 5 for home use was less
people, but still compatible with SunOS,
which was really the point.  Plus it was
built like a brick privy.

Anyway, I recollect that News was
short lived, despite that fact that it
was intended to become Sun's standard
windows system.  Didn't happen as
I remember, and there were one or
two others to choose from.

Jumping around a bit, my take is that
while Sun dabbled with the idea for a
while, Solaris never became open source.
And with Oracle now owning what's left
of Sun, probably never will.  BSD was
the result of a sabbatical Ken Thompson
At UC Berkeley.  One result of that was
BSD Unix, steered mostly by Bill Joy.
But Unix was still owned by AT&T, and
Berkeley was not free to give it away.
Just how FreeBSD came to be I only
know vaguely, but it was the result of
Bill Jolitz and his wife - nominally a
rewrite of BSD Unix, and somehow legally
open.  One can probably say the same
thing about Linux. AT&T used to supply
Unix source code to universities for their
CS students to study.  Andy Tanenbaum,
of Minix fame, and others, certainly had
access to that, and Torvalds might well
have too.  His intent was certainly to
write a "Unix like" system, and a casual
user could not tell Linux from Unix.
Certainly from the application viewpoint,
which is the most contact many have
with an OS.

Anyway, more tales of the old days.
i.e., 15 to 20 years ago.  Of course there's
nothing like a loose fact here and there
to ruin an otherwise good story.  It's the
risk one runs.  But at the grander level,
I'll simply restate that nothing much
conceptually has changed with Unix
in 40 years, and all the spinoffs that
have a "nix" in the name have a pretty
clear line back to Thomspon and Ritchie's
original creation, announced Jan, 1970.
Even there the only big change was to
re-write the system In Ritchie's "C" rather
than Thompson's assembly language,
making more portable, if conceptually the
same.  I took a course or two in Unix
internals years ago.  As the instructor
casually mentioned, "look folks, Unix
works." And I'll repeat that the big
advances over the years are in silicon,
not software.....

'nuff said.

   -- Bob


On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 5:50 AM, Robar Philip <philip.robar at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Jan 7, 2012, at 2:30 PM, Bob Kline wrote:
>
> > I believe Sun was going to run X on everything, but then
> > discovered it was too slow for the CPUs of the time.
>
> I don’t understand what you mean by “was” and "everything.” We shipped
> NeWS and X11/NeWS on i386/i486/MC680x0 class machines. CPU speed was a
> minor concern compared to the limitations of GPUs of the time. (Back then
> even most workstations shipped with a monochrome or 8 bit GPU. Oh color map
> flashing, how I don’t miss you.)
>
> > Probably wouldn't be true today, and X is open, but there’d
> > still be the bandwidth issue for many remote users.
>
> Today, bandwidth is a non-issue for the X Window System*. One of the major
> advantages of X11 is that it doesn't ship around bits. It’s a client/server
> system. You run a graphics server locally and the remote client just sends
> you drawing instructions—no bits. Back in the day I accessed remote clients
> over a modem to work from home. It was a tolerable experience.
>
> > Besides which Apple is not noted for its interest in open software.
>
> Not to be too harsh, but this is simply wrong. OS X’s core, Darwin, is
> open source. You can download and run it on your home PC if you like. The
> UNIX(™) user layer comes from FreeBSD. Apple ships and contributes to open
> source projects such as Bash, SAMBA (prior to OS X 10.7), Apache, GCC,
> Clang/LLVM, Dovecot/Cyrus, Python, PERL, Ruby and many others.
>
>
> Phil
>
> * It’s the "X Window System”, not “X Windows.” :-)
>
> BTW, if you want to see what a fast window system is like, track down a
> machine running Sun's SunView. Even on a Motorola 68K machine with a
> megabyte (or less) of memory it puts today’s window systems to shame.
>
>
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