Wrote a few more chapters, and boom. It's 23:30. The /Forks and Wars/ chapter of my Unix History is going smoothly. However there is so much info that would make the text incomprehensable, I think I'll add "bonus" subpages, like timeline.
Which Unix forks would you consider as the most important/noteable except of BSD, Solaris and Xenix? Have you used others maybe?
I have a #unix question. I’m running #Slackware. I log into my machine from the console and use startx to start X11. By default, my terminal app (urxvt) does not start a login shell. I know I can configure it to do this. The question is: should I? And why?
A nerd nostalgia thread of possible #RetroComputing interest:
From 1993-1994, I was a “technical assistant” in the RF Engineering department of #Comcast#Cellular. Back then, Comcast was a scrappy regional cable #TV operator making its first foray into #mobile telephony, not the multinational #telecommunications and media behemoth we know today. (1/6)
I was a twenty-year-old college #dropout who had lucked into the job after the department’s director noticed that his temporary secretary (me) was way better at automating repetitive tasks in #Microsoft Office than typing up memos.
So he hired me outright (neglecting to increase my administrative-assistant-level wage 😖) and set me loose helping the engineers with their Sun #Unix workstations and #Intel#i486-based PCs running #Windows for Workgroups. (2/6)
Before moving to greener (and higher-paying 🤑) pastures, one of my two big "technical assistant" projects for #Comcast#Cellular was upgrading the engineers' Sun #Unix workstations from the #BSD-based #SunOS 4 to #SVR4-based SunOS 5 (#Solaris 2), and from #NIS / #YellowPages to NIS+.
In hindsight, it was a bad idea to make both changes at once, but I was a kid entranced by novelty and not yet very considerate of my users during the inevitable downtimes. (3/6)
Talking to someone about git's UI, and they compared it to vim and GUI IDEs.
When replying with how vi was basically a GUI of its time over more CLI editing with ed/ex ...
it struck me that it is perhaps glaring that we don't have a "vgit": A more visual/TUI tool that supplanted and erased git from memory apart from the "git compatibility mode" still available in "vgit".
I may be off here, but is this emblematic of the cultish worship of unix tooling in the "linux" era?
@aka_pugs@nluug we definitely need more real original architects from the early days of UNIX and the likes to share their views like Tom did!
If you are a crossbow developer, a webserver (or even gopher) architect or a Solaris kernel-dev, please submit a talk for the Fall conference, or let me know here, right now, so I can try to strong arm you into it using just words and incentives from your peers. 😇😇 #opensource#computerhistory#insights#unix#nluug