25 Apr
2015
25 Apr
'15
12:17 a.m.
On 2015-04-25 00:10, Clem Cole wrote:
On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
<mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:
?U?
ltrix was an odd child even when it was "current". Just check any
contemporary software for all the comments about the special things
needed for it to compile and work on Ultrix.
?Fair enough - as I said, it was a time where everyone was trying to
protect their own turf. The Sun/AT&T deal sort of cemented that, which
is why OSF/1 was so important.
I actually should temper my statement a little. Ultrix certainly wasn't
all bad. It was in many ways pretty well done. It just was pretty
different from most other things, making it much harder to port software
to. While it was (more or less) BSD 4.3, a bunch of libraries and
functions were for some reason kept at the BSD 4.2 level. Typical of
this was syslog, for instance.
Compilers and tools as such were fine. Support for the hardware was
good, and it had some features and functionality that you wish had
existed on other Unix systems.
But the fact that so many "standard" things (I know, standard and Unix
weren't exactly synonyms, or even well defined back then) in Ultrix were
different than most other systems and what most other software expected
meant that getting any software running on Ultrix was usually a pain. So
you started with replacing whole chunks of libraries and subsystems to
something a bit more "modern" and compatible with other systems, just to
make your life easier.
I've run both Ultrix 4.4 and Ultrix 4.5 for several years. In fact,
Updates VAX 8650 have Ultrix on one disk. Just need to type "boot" with
the right arguments, and the machine is up and running.
No DECnet, though. Sorry. :-(
Johnny