Rob Landley

Also for those interested, here is Bryan's take on criticism of Sun: https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/kissedagirl.html He wasn't fired or canceled. It is great to see Gen-Xers and Boomers having all the fun in the 1980s and 1990s and then going all prissy on younger people in the 2010s and trying to ruin their careers.

It is great that the URL for this website is: https://landley.net/history/mirror/institutional_memory.html In other words, it is in the "history/mirror/" sub-directory, being preserved for future corporate archeologists.

Also, at the OS level, there are entire projects built around just understanding the dependencies in the Operating System and applying minimalism to try and get to a state of (relatively) simple, known dependencies. One of my favorites is Rob Landley's Aboriginal Linux: http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html I highly recommend his blogs if you're interested.

> But systemd is not only an init daemon anymore and the systemd developers work actively to cut off everything that is not systemd (see the udev saga as an example) http://www.landley.net/notes-2015.html#05-07-2015 is a lovely entry from Rob Landley about trying to maintain an alternative to udev, and getting the runaround by GregKH and Kay Sievers. > or make idiotic decisions (NTP server defaults?). Love the excuse for that. "Systemd is not meant for end users, and distros should set their own servers anyways". Its like anyone thats not a developers working for/on the large name distros are users (aka consumers, aka mooo) and should shut up and accept what the distros ship.

For what it's worth, the same author (Rob Landley) has another opinionated article on the SysV/BSD split which also touches today's OS X and Linux, under the context of init systems: http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014 An interesting read, if bound to ruffle some feathers.

Rob had an excellent article about systemd http://www.landley.net/notes.html#23-04-2014 Is there a way, or any way to somehow stop systemd which is from Redhat? I'm very worried as I don't want to be _forced_ to use it on my embedded projects. Redhat does not know as much embedded system as their big gun server systems.

> Since the formulas did depend on each other the order of (re)calculation made a difference. The first idea was to follow the dependency chains but this would have involved keeping pointers and that would take up memory. We realized that normal spreadsheets were simple and could be calculated in either row or column order and errors would usually become obvious right away. Later spreadsheets touted "natural order" as a major feature but for the Apple ][ I think we made the right tradeoff. It would seem that the creators of VisiCalc regarded this is a choice that made sense in the context of the limitations of the Apple ][, but agree that a dependency graph would have been better. https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/apple2/implementingvisicalc.htm… Edit: It's also interesting that the tradeoff here is put in terms of correctness, not performance as in the posted article. And that makes sense: Consider a spreadsheet with =B2 in A1 and =B1 in B2. Now change the value of B1. If you recalc the sheet in row-column OR column-row order, B2 will update to match B1, but A1 will now be incorrect! You need to evaluate twice to fully resolve the dependency graph.

In earlier times, before Google or OS X even existed, long before "automatic updates", it used to be own experience that Microsoft's pre-installed Windows programs would run generally faster and with fewer issues (read: none) than third party software that a Windows user would install. This was also the case with software downloaded from Microsoft that a Windows user might install. Hence I thought perhaps MS Word today might run smoother on a Microsoft laptop than an Apple laptop. I'm not a Windows user anymore so I have no idea. For reading, editing, creating Word documents, the TextMaker Android app seems to work. Size of recent version I tried was 111MB, startup is quick. Paid features are non-essential IMHO. https://www.softmaker.net/down/tm2024manual_en.pdf A personal favourite program for me is spitbol, a SNOBOL interpreter written in a portable assembly language^3 called MINIMAL. I'm using a 779k static binary. SNOBOL is referenced here: 1. https://borretti.me/article/you-can-choose-tools-that-make-you-happy The Almquist shell is another favourite of mine. It's both the "UI" and the language I use everyday to get stuff done on the computer. Like Microsoft Word makes some HN commenters unhappy, it seems that the UNIX shell makes some "developers" unhappy.^2 But the shell is everywhere and it is not going away. IME, old software from an era before so-called "tech" companies funded by VC and "ad services", still works and I like it. For example, sed is…

I did try to explain the logic already, in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42338166 Letwin says what killed OS/2 was that it could run Windows apps. This is not true. That only applied to OS/2 2; OS/2 1 could not run Windows apps. It didn't matter; there weren't any. Windows apps followed Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 followed the failure of OS/2 1.x. This is his bias: he was one of the project leads and was passionate about OS/2, which blinds him to the fact that it was OS/2 1.x that flopped and there was nothing OS/2 2.x could do to usefully come back from that. His assertion is that 32-bit OS/2 flopped, because it lacked native apps, because it could run Windows apps. This is not true. It flopped because Windows 3 was out, and Windows 3 was a hit because it did what 16-bit OS/2 failed to do: it ran DOS apps _well_ and it could do that because it took advantage of the 386 chip. His bias means he fails to identify the true cause although he named it. Secondarily, I think we can point to a 2nd, non-technical, personal reason: Letwin was not involved in Windows 3, which was essentially a 1-man skunkworks project. It was done by David Weise: https://news.microsoft.com/2000/09/10/i-found-a-cool-little-problem-th… Helped by Murray Sargent: https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/davidweise.html

it seems somewhat unlikely. let's follow the trail the existence of bell characters, of course, predates gordon bell's existence itself (they're in the ita2 baudot-murray code from 01932, two years before his birth) so what we're discussing is specifically the assignment of the ascii bell character to the control character corresponding to bell's middle initial it was already ^g in 01963 according to tom jennings's excellent history https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/projects/cod… https://landley.net/history/mirror/ascii.html#ASCII-1963 and at that point bell had just started working at dec three years before. however, he was working on serial communications at dec, and had just been doing research at mit, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if he, or friends of his from mit or dec, were to sit on the ansi (then asa) committee mackenzie's 'coded character sets' from 01980 has a chapter 13 about ascii https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mackenzie_CodedCharSets.pd… but unfortunately it doesn't go into any detail on the composition of the asa committee. note that mackenzie was the ibm thug who invented ebcdic and spent the 60s and 70s trying to kill ascii, so he devotes most of the book to glorifying that catastrophic error; the book is from 01980, the year before ibm shipped its first ascii-supporting equipment, the ibm pc. it's reasonable to see jennings's account as a violent reaction against mackenzie's…

Strictly, the difference between /bin and /sbin versus their siblings in /usr has to do with what you can fit on the RK05 disk pack that the system boots from. If it comes up too broken to mount the DECtape (or if you're lucky and your institution's not cheap, the second RK05) where /usr lives, you'd better be able to fix it with whatever's in /, because until you do that's all you've got. Hence keeping some binaries there, but not too many; your root volume is only a couple megabytes large. Too, if /usr is on tape, that's a lot slower in random access than even a contemporary disk, which matters because you also don't have enough core memory to avoid paging binaries - so even things you might not need to fix a broken system still may be worth putting in /bin if you can afford the space, if they're frequently enough used to be worth the speedup. I believe the difference between /bin and /sbin per se had to do with dynamic versus static linking, with /sbin reserved for statically linked versions of binaries critical to bring up or repair a system - after all, if something in /bin is linked against libraries in /usr/lib, then you still won't be using it if you can't mount /usr. I'm not so sure about that part, though; it's been a very long time since any of this mattered at all to how Unix is operated in practice, and it is really only of interest to those curious about how the constraints of early hardware informed the evolution of historical filesystem layout…

No it didn't, but it was started in 88 when keeping planar modes and adding 1280x1024 still made some sense keeping compatibility. Adding the DSP would have made a few new niches. In 93 it was all a bit too late - and they weren't even ready to ship then. 3D was in Hombre that was the PowerPC. Wildly different and no compatibility, so heaven knows how that would have played out. Only that was when we were all starting to play Doom at work :) Edit: I searched and found this from Dave Haynie - who always seemed pretty straight talking. Weirdly some of the dates have 10 years added :D The 3D section and the following on Gould and Ali seems to sum up the train wreck pretty well. eg: "When he got to Engineering, he hired a human bus error called Bill Sydnes to take over. Sydnes, a PC guy, didn’t have the chops to run a computer, much less a computer design department. He was also an ex-IBMer, and spent much time trying to turn C= (a fairly slick, west-coast-style design operation), into the clunky mess that characterized the Dilbert Zones in most major east-coast-style companies" http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/commodore/haynie.html

Manpages as "worse is better"? Them's fighting words :) I think it's more an example of how GNU isn't Unix, for better and for worse[1][2]. Info seems to be deeply integrated with the Emacs mindset, so coming from a different editor it's got some learning curve. Except it never seemed to be setup properly by default on a new server, and when I installed something new I'd never remember what I had to do to add it to the root page. Many's the time I tried to info for something and got.. its manpage, but in a crappier setting. Scanning a large manpage with '/' seems far superior to playing whack-a-mole with Info's tree structure. I don't want to sip documentation with a straw, just give me the firehose. (This is also why I prefer 'man zshall' rather than the trying-to-be-helpful sections of the zsh manpage. Who in god's name remembers which of those sections the factoid they're looking for is going to be in?) All this would be surmountable if Info worked consistently out of the box. But the combination of encountering it only intermittently in working fashion meant that any lessons I learned quickly evaporated, and had to be repeatedly relearnt. I'm very happy now that GNU systems have given up on trying to make Info happen. Documentation quality is all about the quality of the content. Working on the tools instead of the content is classic bikeshedding. (The one great advance in Unix documentation recently is git's approach of opening the man page when you type…

The grand irony is that Larry was one of the earliest advocates of open sourcing the operating system at Sun[1] -- and believed that by the time Sun finally collectively figured it out and made it happen (in 2005), it was a decade or more too late.[2] So on the one hand, you can view the story of BitKeeper with respect to open source as almost Greek in its tragic scope: every reason that Larry outlined for "sourceware"[3] for Sun applied just as much to BK as it did to SunOS -- with even the same technologist (Torvalds) leading the open source alternative! And you can say to BK and Larry now that it's "too late", just as Larry told Sun in 2005, but I also think this represents a forced dichotomy of "winners" and "losers." To the contrary, I would like to believe that the ongoing innovation in the illumos communities (SmartOS, OmniOS, etc.) proves that it's never too late to open source software -- that open source communities (like cities) can be small yet vibrant, serving a critical role to their constituencies. In an alternate universe, might we be running BK on SunOS instead of git on Linux? Sure -- but being able to run an open source BK on an open source illumos is also pretty great; the future of two innovative systems has been assured, even if it took a little longer than everyone might like. So congratulations to Larry and crew -- and damn, were you ever right in 1993! ;) [1] Seriously, read this: http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/unix/srcos.html [2]…

Android has potential to be next Windows, because it's getting commoditized right now. Thanks to cheap devices. Apple doesn't have that, because it doesn't want it. I think there are few things remaining for Android to replace Windows (in no particular order): 1. UX - what you already said. 2. Cheap and universal docks for even cheapest devices. Alternatively cheap wireless display technology (without lags), something more than ChromeCast - again even for cheapest devices. What can be used for this? Bluetooth (sound and input) and/or USB-OTG (with charging of device). 3. Android needs to be selfhosting - you can't rely on Windows or traditional desktop linux if you want to replace them. There is toybox and Aborginal Linux project from Rob Landley on http://landley.net/ Recent commits advancing in the goal of building Linux kernel with clang will come in handy too. I think that all of these will eventually come, but ask myself is this what Google really wants now. ChromeOS seems more in line with Google business model. They are using NaCl to bring Android apps to ChromeOS, so probably it could enable Android apps for Windows. But that would undermine Android as replacement of Windows just like Wine for Desktop Linux.

It seems reminiscent of the Green Project/FirstPerson episode that led to Java https://landley.net/history/mirror/java/javaorigin.html , and I'm sure many another attempt to keep some unhappy star players in a company's orbit using a spinoff.

You are both correct, although I'd like to point out that Linux Foundation draws the line at GPLv2, whereas GNU believes their kernel ought to be GPLv3, and that opens another can of worms. See BSD0: https://spdx.org/licenses/preview/0BSD.html https://landley.net/toybox/license.html

Hey, at least it's better than your other one. https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/kissedagirl.html

Just for reference. Here is the full list of completed and in-progress commands from the toybox website: https://landley.net/toybox/status.html And here is the list of the Linux standard core commands (toybox covers more than this): https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Co…

The license page and linked blog posts mentions this: https://landley.net/toybox/license.html I like the 0BSD license (see my https://©.st), AWS also uses the semantically equivalent MIT-0 license for code samples, etc.

sbase and ubase from https://core.suckless.org maybe? In a wider context maybe Plan 9 from user-space https://9fans.github.io/plan9port In an even wider context the stuff https://chimera-linux.org does. Also https://landley.net/toybox/status.html

Would be nice to link to the source, which contains more details: https://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.html

The Access database engine used SQL, it's how I got started using the language in the mid 90's. It wasn't just used by MS Access, its was used from VB and other languages because it was just an ODBC/OLEDB driver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Database_Engine FoxPro looks like it supported SQL in V2 in 1991 https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/collate/foxpro/foxprotimeline.h…

And here I was wondering what the odd title meant, but with your hint it totally makes sense. From the page: <!-- from http://wrttn.in/04af1a --> <title>wrttn:04af1a</title> and of course if one visits https://landley.net/history/ you can see that Rob has archived some things he found interesting: I'm writing a book on computer history. You can look at my mirror of stuff I found elsewhere on the web, or the scans of stuff I found at garage sales and such. ...which links to https://landley.net/history/mirror/index.html Apologies for those who lose hours if not days to the rabbit hole therein.

I think each of these symbols represents where a command was defined (e.g., commands in square brackets came from POSIX.1). https://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html

"Toybox's main goal is to make Android self-hosting by improving Android's command line utilities so it can build an installable Android Open Source Project image entirely from source under a stock Android system. After a talk at the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference explaining this plan, Google merged toybox into AOSP and began shipping toybox in Android Marshmallow in 2015." --Rob Landley http://landley.net/toybox/

This sounds really cool, however, reading the status page ( http://landley.net/toybox/status.html#done )is near impossible. I have no clue what the difference between `#command#` or `@command@` is. Are they both usable? some are links to man pages, some are not, but are listed in the done section.

A tiny Linux image along the lines of the Docker hosted base. It isn't trying to be a Docker or Alpine, it's just a tiny runnable image. I find it interesting and useful for running an x8_64 Linux under QEMU on my Kindle Fire tablet. Tiny things, test CLI tools. The project's author, Rob Landley, was maintainer for BusyBox for about a year, but disagreed with BusyBox originator Bruce Parens over GPL 3.0 licensing. Landley's current idea of a multi-tool binary for Linux userland, ToyBox, is the basis for this tiny runnable system image. https://landley.net/toybox/

From their NEWS page: https://landley.net/aboriginal/news.html News April 30, 2017 -- End of Line -- Development of Aboriginal Linux has ended, replaced by mkroot.

Why go half ass with DOS? Go full retro and build your BBS with CP/M... https://landley.net/history/mirror/cpm/history.html If you're going to use a 1980 8-bit OS, why use M$'s crippled version? Use the real thing...