Archive for the ‘linux’ Category

How a Nonstandard OS Led to Unix Standards

October 11, 2019

From 1988 through 1992, I worked as a system administrator for the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, DC. As a nonprofit, it was too expensive for them to provide each employee with a PC, and Windows and PC networking were primitive back then, so their offices around the US used Wyse 50 terminals connected to a single computer in the copier room. When I arrived, that computer was a 68020-based Charles River Data Systems Universe 68, running their UNOS operating system.

1988-04 044-13 CRDS Universe 68-35T edfdc-Dfine-close

 

Command-Line Utilities on UNOS

UNOS was sort of like Unix System V if you squinted, but it changed many of the details, so porting software to it ran into all kinds of incompatibilities. The command line utilities were maddeningly deficient and different from the 4.2 and 4.3BSD Unix I had used at college. Apparently CRDS was trying to make Unix more user-friendly or more like some other operating systems; their version of cp was named copy, dd was called debe (a pun on girls’ names?), etc. and the command line options were multiple characters long. Completely useless for running shell scripts written for Unix.

I started looking around for a way to replace them. I found the source code for half-finished versions of some utilities in the GNU source tree at MIT, where I had access as a volunteer thanks to my friendship with Mike Haertel, a former roommate who wrote GNU grep and diff. I finished them and wrote some more missing utilities, and thus started the GNU fileutils, textutils, and shellutils, which were later all rolled up into the coreutils. I also ported GNU Emacs to UNOS, including its tricky “undump” method of restoring a RAM image from a file for faster startup. EDF paid me to spend some of my time on this work, because they wanted more usable computer systems themselves.

So a good deal of GNU/Linux code was written to make up for the deficiencies of UNOS. After a few years, EDF switched to timeshared 486 computers running SCO Xenix, then SCO Unix, and we ran the GNU utilities on them, too, because they were better than the SCO versions. EDF finally went to networked Windows PCs for everyone, but they’re still using GNU/Linux for their web presence, at least, and using descendants of the utilities they funded.

Kermit on UNOS

Long before SSH, Kermit was a popular file transfer protocol which worked over both serial connections, like modems, and network connections, like TCP/IP. It was often paired with terminal emulators. It was implemented for nearly every type of computer made in the 1980s and 1990s, in many programming languages. Yes, it was named after the muppet, with permission.

EDF needed a good way to transfer files to and from its UNOS systems (besides UUCP), so I ported C-Kermit (the version for systems that use the C programming language) to UNOS. For that, I had to deal with many quirks in UNOS system calls.

Standards Because of UNOS

Mike O’Dell, Internet pioneer, related on an email list that the incompatibilities of UNOS led to the creation of the UNIFORUM association and the POSIX standards, so the US government wouldn’t have a sole source for Unix products that were interoperable. Thus, the obscure and quirky OS from CRDS contributed to creating both the official standards for Unix and what is now the most-used implementation of them.

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Who Got Perl from Me?

August 2, 2019

Unexpectedly, I made the de-facto distribution tar files for source code releases of the Perl programming language for a year or two in the early 1990s. Up until sometime in the Perl 4 release cycle, its author Larry Wall distributed Perl by posting a set of several dozen shar (shell archive) files on the Usenet group comp.sources.unix or comp.sources.misc, so people using dialup modems could download them without having to restart if the phone disconnected. In between major releases, he posted patches which were much smaller than a full distribution.

I was volunteering for the GNU project, which distributed Perl as a courtesy since it was popular free software that used the GNU license. The GNU FTP site prep.ai.mit.edu distributed source code in compressed tar files, so each time Larry released a new Perl version, I downloaded the shars and created a single tar file which I uploaded to prep. Dozens of organizations mirrored the GNU FTP server and did their own redistribution, so it was amusing to notice that most of the Perl 3 tar files out there had my user name in them if you did a tar -tvf to list them. They seem to have fallen off the Internet by now, as the last Perl 4 release is the oldest version that’s easy to find.

I finally stopped when Larry started making tar files of Perl releases himself. Larry last posted Perl 4 patch shars to comp.sources.misc in June 1992. I don’t remember whether he started making tar files concurrently, or only after he stopped posting the shars.

Why Do Long Options Start with Two Dashes?

August 2, 2019

Around 1990, Richard Stallman (RMS) and I were writing the GNU C library getopt() and he wanted to extend it to support long (multi-character) option names for user-friendliness. He considered Unix inferior in this regard to other operating systems such as TOPS-20 which supported long options (that could be abbreviated). He wanted GNU to be better than Unix while still compatible. There were a few programs that ran on Unix systems and used long option names starting with either - or no prefix at all, such as find, but those syntaxes were not compatible with Unix getopt() and were parsed by ad-hoc code.

Long options needed a prefix that wouldn’t clash with the Unix conventions, so programs could support both types of options without ambiguity. Richard chose +, since logically if - (for a small number mathematically) is for short options then + would be for long options, and it’s no additional typing. We created an extended interface called getopt_long() to support specifying long options.

But when the IEEE POSIX shell and utilities standard was published in 1992, the + syntax was disallowed. GNU developers discussed what to do over email. We considered -+ as the long options prefix, but that was hard to type, so we settled on --, which wouldn’t violate POSIX or Unix compatibility and wasn’t hard to type.

For a few months, GNU getopt() supported both + and -- to allow time for people to transition their scripts. I’m pretty sure support for + during that transition could be disabled by setting the environment variable POSIX_ME_HARDER (RMS’s exasperation with standards showing there), later changed to the more polite POSIXLY_CORRECT, which also disables recognizing options intermixed with positional arguments.

Because GNU software was popular and the solution was logical, everyone else adopted the -- prefix and implemented variations of it in their own argument parsers. Perl was probably one of the first.