Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 12:51:37 -0500 From: Bob Willcox <bob@luke.pmr.com> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@mat.net> Cc: "Alton, Matthew" <Matthew.Alton@anheuser-busch.com>, DL-ADM <DLADM@anheuser-busch.com>, "'Hackers@FreeBSD.ORG'" <Hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: AIX going BSD Message-ID: <19990406125137.A41889@luke.pmr.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9903311617510.498-100000@picnic.mat.net>; from Chuck Robey on Wed, Mar 31, 1999 at 04:24:24PM -0500 References: <BED2E68B5FB4D21193C90008C7C56836564C87@STLABCEXG012> <Pine.BSF.4.10.9903311617510.498-100000@picnic.mat.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, Mar 31, 1999 at 04:24:24PM -0500, Chuck Robey wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, Alton, Matthew wrote:
>
> > This lends credence to my lond-held hypothesis that all
> > commercial UNICES are secretly floating on 4.4BSD UNIX -
> > The OS that God runs on his PDP/11 up in Heaven. No
> > wonder they won't free up their source code. It'd be too
> > embarassing.
>
> You guys are showing snobbery, just as surely as the commercial world.
> You forget that BSD was proprietary software for years (only available
> if you had AT&T licenses) and it would be very difficult to find any
> Unix version at all (outside of that bought directly from AT&T) that
> didn't have some BSD code in it. That's been the situation for 15
> years, and now you want to discover it?
>
> AIX is *not* doing anything at all outside the usual, and it would, in
> fact, be remarkable (and outside the expected norm) if you *didn't* find
> some BSD code in it. Why don't you go look at, oh, Hewlett Packard, or
> some other mainstream vendor?
There is some interesting history here. Back in 1986 (I think it was, I
may be off by a year or two, though) I was the manager of a department
at IBM working on the AIX kernel for the RT (precursor to RS/6K's, do
you remember them...not a very memorable product, I'm afraid). At that
time the version of AIX (it was 1.1 or 2.1, not sure any more) running
on the RT's had a rather poor implementation of TCP/IP from IBM Research
(SNA was still king at IBM). Anyway, my department (credit goes mostly
to the folks working for me at the time) lobbied for tossing the IBM
Research implementation of TCP/IP that we had and integrating the BSD
code.
Eventually we were successful in convincing the powers that be. This
was somewhat of a major coup for us in that our department didn't own
the networking responsibility, and we had to convince the manager of
the department that did own it (my principle role in it all) that it
would be good for the product and for his department. Of course, we (my
department) did all of the work integrating it and simply handed the
completed code over to the networking department.
I guess the jist of this is that nothing is necessarily GIVEN (at least
not in those days at IBM). Certainly, ditching the IBM Research code
and converting to the BSD TCP/IP code wasn't. It sounds like the current
folks working on AIX have continued to use good ideas from outside of
IBM as well (I retired from IBM almost 4 years ago now).
Ah, well, enough with the nastalgia, Bob.
--
Bob Willcox The man who follows the crowd will usually get no
bob@luke.pmr.com further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is
Austin, TX likely to find himself in places no one has ever
been. -- Alan Ashley-Pitt
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990406125137.A41889>