Yes, there is this strange idea in new generations that GNU/Linux is UNIX, without having tried DG/UX, Tru64, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, Irix and many others.
Just drop a GNU/Linux user into a default HP-UX installation and watch them getting around the system. Hint, those nice GNU flags and utilities aren't there.
As for what UNIX turned out to be, I think Rob Pike as one of its creators is a good quote:
<quote>
I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!
I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
> Yes, there is this strange idea in new generations that GNU/Linux is UNIX, without having tried DG/UX, Tru64, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, Irix and many others.
I think that it's not so strange, seeing that you have to fork over lots of $$$ to get your hands on hardware that would run Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/etc, plus licensing fees. You can't easily rent a cloud server for an hour to play with it (with some exceptions, like SmartOS on Joyent). The high barrier to tinkering reduced proprietary Unices to expensive niche environments that are willing to pay lots of cash.
> Yes, there is this strange idea in new generations that GNU/Linux is UNIX, without having tried DG/UX, Tru64, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, Irix and many others.
Actually, one can say that nowadays Linux is unix. It isn't Linux that has strayed outside the unix philosophy, it's the commercial unixes you've mentioned that have become stuck in the past. Even those that still get under-the-hood work and new features, are not even trying to become nicer to end-users (sysadmins).
On second thought, they are, since you can easily install GNU utilities from vendor-provided repositories (on AIX you even use RPM to do it).
Except AFAIK there are zero features in POSIX that came from GNU/Linux.
Now, if anything I do agree that UNIX is stuck on the past by not having any standard workstation environment or adoption of modern kernel architectures.
Also CDE is not what one would expect from a 2015 workstation.
> Except AFAIK there are zero features in POSIX that came from GNU/Linux.
My point is that commercial unixes are old, dying, relics that don't define what unix is anymore, Linux does (and to a lesser extent, so do the BSDs). There is no such thing as a "real unix" anymore.
> Also CDE is not what one would expect from a 2015 workstation.
The unix workstation/desktop market was lost long ago. Unfortunately, Linux hasn't successfully recovered it and, IMHO, never will. The commercial vendors stopped caring when big hardware margins dissappeared and the opensource community lacks the unifying vision to build something sensible.
Just drop a GNU/Linux user into a default HP-UX installation and watch them getting around the system. Hint, those nice GNU flags and utilities aren't there.
As for what UNIX turned out to be, I think Rob Pike as one of its creators is a good quote:
<quote>
I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!
I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
</quote>
Taken from http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pi...