Alternatives lead to choices

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

I’ve shared a few historical videos on a few of the most influential forces in the development of small computer systems that everyone can use.

Without a doubt, Microsoft – along with the name and might of IBM and the chip making expertise of Intel, made a huge mark on computing.

Apple Computer, with both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, have made tremendous design choices that have had a profound influence on both small computers, portable small, smart phones, and music – which of course has led to tablets, smart phones, music players, and now it is all integrated on our “smart” phones.

Almost five decades ago, General Electric, RCA, Xerox Parc, and research universities on the East and West Coasts of the United States of America did some advanced computer operating systems research. Only the TRUE GEEKS in the audience will even know about it, but a really cool operating system that was 10-20 years ahead of hardware advancements, MULTICS, was invented. I got a chance to use it in 1982, before UNIX and Linux became popular.

UNIX was actually invented in 1969 at AT&T Bell Systems Laboratories. I’d have to go back in my computer history books on MULTICS; I’m guessing it was invented in the early sixties and available in the middle sixties. If anyone wants to know (or is familiar with the timeline) do share it; if there is sufficient interest, I can otherwise look it up; I’ve written research papers on this in the distant past.

AT&T and the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) went to “war” over software rights. AT&T argued about UCB use of UNIX code in their UCB UNIX derivative, the BSD or Berkeley Standard Distribution. UCB, likewise, fought AT&T over incorporating the Berkeley improvements in editing, the ex improvements to the standard ed text editor and the much more famous vi improvements, which are text editor standards today.

Fearing this, some people set out to rewrite the Berkeley Standard Distribution entirely. Today we have FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD as completely free rewrites.

At about the same time, our now famous friends, Richard M. Stallman and Linus Torvalds were at work. Stallman got a start significantly before Torvalds, creating many UNIX application replacements, beginning with a rewrite of an existing editor, Emacs, creating GNU Emacs, then worked with many people to create complete code replacements for each utility. The last was the kernel. Before a solid GNU kernel was created, Linus Torvalds created a simple kernel. He was going to call it Freax, but someone else thought the name was bad, so the alternative name Linux was chosen. The Free Software Foundation and Stallman did eventually create a Mach kernel, but it never really caught on, so the systems we have today are called Linux. Stallman insists that it really ought to be GNU/Linux, because most of the software is actually a GNU shell, core utilities, a Linux kernel, and applications from both GNU and other sources. Most people ignore this and refer to the software either as “Linux” or by the distribution names, such as antiX, MX Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, etc.

There is a lot more to the complete story; the videos and the comments in this message represent a fraction of what actually happened.

In the antiX historical tree, there was an older distribution called MEPIS. If I recall correctly, at one point in time, Warren Woodford worked on several important projects in the nineties and early 2000s. I *think* that Warren spent at least some time on the Next Computer project that Steve Jobs created during his absence from Apple Computer. When that project fizzled, Woodford came up with MEPIS, one of the top Linux distributions of the early 2000s.

A couple years after MEPIS was produced, one person asked if they could make a much lighter derivative of MEPIS and call it…

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antiX!

In 2011, MEPIS produced the final release. In 2012, a test version was in the works. I believe that Warren Woodford, wanting to “pay the bills”, like most of us, accepted some good paying work in software patents.

People like Adrian, Jerry, and a few others who were key MEPIS users and developers, eventually started MX Linux. At first, I believe our own anticapitalista helped with some of the work. I know that Dolphin Oracle has been a major influence, as have others.

Again, I’m not recording every person, every event, and some details may not be 100% accurate.

Those with details are welcome to note additional details; those are welcome, Attacking, unkind remarks will not be welcome, accepted, or allowed to remain in this thread, since the idea of writing this history and posting this topic are mine alone. Only the history itself is owned by others; the particular order, emphasis, and details, whether completely accurate or slightly flawed are ultimately my responsibility to assert and correct.

I hope I have most of this right and I hope at least a few of you enjoy the historical perspectives I have shared in this section today.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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What kind of operating system is Multics?

Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was a mainframe time-sharing operating system that was developed in the 1963-1969 period through the collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), General Electric (GE), and Bell Labs.

Who made Multics?

It was developed on the GE 645 computer, which was specially designed for it; the first one was delivered to MIT in January, 1967.
…
Multics.
Developer MIT, GE, Bell Labs

Sources downloaded from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics

My ending story:

I originally did my research on MULTICS while taking a 1989 graduate Operating Systems Theory class. I picked up the majority of my research from textbooks I read at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Library; the course I took was at the University of New Hampshire, Nashua Branch. I took additional graduate studies at the University of Phoenix Online while working full time as a Year 2000 Test Engineer and UNIX Software Engineering tester. (Unfortunately that effectively ended my career in software engineering development; I worked in a variety of successful testing roles, wrote testing harnesses and shell-based automated test suites; that was my final development effort. I did have success in Software Test Management before my retirement.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by Brian Masinick.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by Brian Masinick.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Here’s another story that contains stories from various people in various places who ended up trying Linux :
https://opensource.com/article/21/5/switch-to-linux?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=weekly&sc_cid=7013a000002wCXKAA2

My own Linux story is that I had read many computer magazine Develop articles about Linux, but it wasn’t until I joined the Digital UNIX Development Environment team working specifically on Localization (L10N) and Internationalization (I18N) that I heard a few people in the hallway talking about Linux.

One day, I was near a popcorn, break, and coffee station nook and ran across an old friend, a guy named Jon “maddog” Hall. Years earlier, Jon and I ate popcorn in the afternoon in Merrimack, NH, where Digital Equipment Corporation had a Government Systems Group, several marketing organizations, including a telecommunications team of marketing and systems engineering, and several small operating systems groups. Most were for some of their older 16-bit minicomputer systems that were in the maturing, late years of existence, but a few were about to emerge, including the group that Jon was in – ULTRIX 16, 32m, and 32. These would all be merged into Digital UNIX, which is where we met the SECOND time – eating popcorn – and later, for dinner and a few “cold beverages”.

Jon believed that Digital needed to spend more energy on the more established versions of UNIX (which our Telco groups were also interested in, because our customers wanted to use the AT&T versions of UNIX – either on our hardware, or elsewhere from someone who would produce it. Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, and IBM all joined in the hunt to attract UNIX customers. We got into it too with Digital UNIX, but then Jon spotted another interesting alternative – the young man from Helsinki, Finland, who came up with Linux. Some of us in the OS groups were interested too. I was interested enough to finally purchase my own computer. Prior to that, I’d sign out a terminal and a modem or a Digital Rainbow PC to connect to our company servers, but this Linux really interested me.

I got a Micron P100 – a 32-bit, 100 Mhz PC. It came in the store preinstalled with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a release with modem network software included.
I DUAL booted my first system with Windows and Slackware. The Slackware of that era presented some challenges; the one I tried I got from a book, and the graphics card support was old, and therefore I got a 640×480 resolution with only 8 colors. I had to research how to improve this.

I found the fix, downloaded the fix onto my UNIX workstation, then wrote it to those 3 1/2″ removable disks that were available in the mid nineties, and improved the graphics capability to 1024×768 and 256 colors; modest today, but a huge improvement.

Slackware took two removable disks to install it back then, so it was an exercise. It wasn’t terrible for an engineer to handle, but it took a lot more time to accomplish than the simple installations we enjoy today. What I really DID enjoy with Slackware and the simpler Web environment of the day (mostly text, with only small, occasional graphics) was a clean, responsive environment in some ways similar (but much less modern) than the antiX we enjoy today. It did have a very pleasant, quick response that I enjoyed. It seemed as fast as my UNIX workstation, though the workstation was 64-bit with more than double the processor speed, much larger disk capacity and memory capacity. This means that the simple Slackware was much more efficient than the UNIX with a full Common Desktop Environment (CDE).

Of course, if you ran CDE on today’s hardware it would be super fast! 🙂

Anyway, Jon and I shared many memories. This past year I saw a couple of feature articles that Jon wrote in Linux Magazine, called Maddog’s Doghouse. Interestingly he wrote about some of those early days – the same ones he and I discussed over popcorn or a “cold”, after work beverage. The October 2020 issue tells a few of those tales.

I really accelerated my Linux testing in 2001, put two disk drives on one of my systems and starting multi-booting Linux and vxWorks instances. I had 12-13 instances a couple of times, rarely less that 6-10 for quite a few years. It was 2001 that I started using Debian. I found Libranet that same year, MEPIS a couple of years my later, and caught antiX in testing before it was released, along with some of the early PCLinuxOS releases, Red Hat, SUSE, Mandrake, later Mandriva, KNOPPIX, and many others.

Now I’m retired so I don’t do anything other than multiboot and browse the Web.
My technical skills are getting out of date.

When it comes to history though, I have several decades of stories to tell.

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Brian Masinick

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