>>1024863
That's what AT&T did. Academics used to build their own operating systems and machines and didn't care about being "compatible" with someone else's shitty code. You might not know that Berkeley already had an OS, the Berkeley Timesharing System, which AT&T shills replaced with UNIX because they needed more free labor because UNIX is so unproductive. AT&T pioneered the same thing Apple and Google are doing today. All around the world, real research operating systems were being replaced by UNIX bullshit. Later on, this also took over the computer industry. C and POSIX were the Java (and now JavaScript) of the 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)
>NLS development moved to a Scientific Data Systems SDS 940 computer running the Berkeley Timesharing System in 1968.[1] It had an approximately 96 MB storage disk. It could support up to 16 workstations, which were composed of a raster-scan monitor, a three-button mouse, and a device known as a chord keyset. The input of typed text was sent from the keyboard to a specific subsystem that relayed the information along a bus to one of two display controllers and display generators. The inputted text then was sent to a 5-inch (127 mm) cathode ray tube (CRT), which was enclosed by a special cover, and a superimposed video image was then received by a professional-quality black-and-white TV camera. The TV camera information was then sent to the closed-circuit camera control and patch panel, and, finally, displayed on each workstation's video monitor.
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/plan9.html
>This is not Plan 9 hacking per se, but it would be interesting to fix dot-dot in Unix. There might even be enough issues involved to make it a good senior or master's thesis. I don't use Unixes enough to do it myself, but if someone were interested I'd be glad to talk through problems and lend help.
That's the difference between academic computer science then and "academic" computer science now. Now, when someone "fixes dot-dot" that "fix" won't be used anywhere because it wouldn't be compatible, so someone else will get to "fix" it, just like that "safe C" bullshit which tries to give C a few of the error handling features of 60s BASIC. All these theses get wasted on bullshit that has no academic value or purpose besides fixing a corporation's mistakes from the 70s. Any paper involving C or UNIX fits into that category. C and UNIX waste billions of dollars and thousands of papers. It's not surprising people think computer science is worthless and a waste of time.
>>1024996
>This is actually exactly how original Unix worked.
>It was the time when software was well designed and professional programmers were well-paid rock stars.
If you wouldn't have mentioned UNIX, that would have been true, but UNIX was even worse back then than it is now. It took decades and thousands of programmers just to make it worse than a 60s OS and it still found its main use in single-user workstations because it sucked at timesharing and access control and everything else. Threads and memory-mapped files were bolted onto UNIX decades later and they are still worse than the original implementations in the 60s. Panic was only acceptable because PC users were used to DOS where any poorly written program could crash the system. The UNIX kernel was just a poorly written program.
After describing how much we know about making
computer hardware which is fault-tolerant...
So, what other problems do we have?
<strategic pause>
UNIX.
<mumbles of agreement from the audience>
Unix is a standard brought to us by academia....
<goes on to point out the obvious contradictions
to implementing fault-tolerant systems on top of
Open Systems -- continually equating the concepts
of "Open Systems" with "UNIX" as the propoganda
would have us believe... finishes up with pleas
to academia for Open Standards which are
compatible with Fault Tolerance...>
Why do "we" get all the blame? AT&T spawned this virus.
Perhaps we are at fault for not rising to the occassion and
writting an anti-toxin which vaccinated machines to cure
them of the virus. Hmm, perhaps that was what RTM's worm
was really after (after all, it did only affect UNIX
machines...).