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30 years of GNU30 years of GNUPosted Sep 27, 2013 12:45 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)Parent article: 30 years of GNU
* Longer filenames - I think the filenames we have 30 years later are adequately long, certainly I cannot remember any occasion on which I have wished they were longer
* File version numbers - nope, but OTOH the arrival of DVCS has reduced the need for this among the most technical users for whom it might have been appealing.
* Crashproof file system - a rather vague claim, nothing is "crashproof" but I suppose that filesystem fuzzing has brought this perceptibly closer
* Filename completion - not only are my filenames completed, but my URLs, postal address, Google searches, ...
* Terminal-independent display support - the distance of time has made this difficult to understand but it seems like a check
* Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen - I do not think anybody is working on such a system today, I'm aware of LISP-based WMs, and of course the endless Emacs-as-OS jokes, but nothing else.
* Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages - Sure, why not.
* Network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol - Long forgotten in favour of the Internet Protocol
* Something compatible with UUCP - Again forgotten in fvour of the Internet Protocol.
So I make that five fulfilled, one definite miss (AFAICT), one arguable either way and two obsoleted by external factors. Pretty good for thirty years, even in computing.
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30 years of GNU Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:02 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
> Terminal-independent display support
Maybe the fact that the system would work on displays of any resolution?
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:11 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] No, this was 1983. People did work on terminals, and those terminals came in an unbelievable number of varieties. There was a period of time where you could determine people's relative status by seeing who had a vt100 in their office, and who was pounding on an ADM3. Making software work transparently on all those terminals was a real challenge, to the point that the original curses library was actually a significant contribution; rms was certainly thinking about the continuation of that work.There must certainly be some old /etc/termcap files out on the net. Reading the comments found therein used to be a way to get a, shall we say, graphic description of just how annoying some terminals were... Kids these days have no culture...:)
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 29, 2013 13:05 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
We had an old Unix machine (I forget what variety) in our department where I was a student in the mid 1990s which came with five terminals with green plain-text screens (VT100 compatible). It was kept in the common student area but we had at least one professor who would only ever use those terminals for sending email (he used computers for little else), because he didn't know how to use these newfangled window-based thingies. Alas, the machine was eventually retired...
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 29, 2013 17:42 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Even as late as the early 90s (when I joined the UNIX scene), we still had quite a mix of terminals and terminal emulations that made curses and proper TERMCAP settings very important. At the university I attended, I encountered, among other things:
I guess the main difference by the time I got there was that everything was shifting to terminal emulators on PCs and Macs as opposed to dedicated terminals. We still had many dedicated terminals, but by the time I left, most everything was on a PC or Mac in some form.
30 years of GNU Posted Oct 3, 2013 22:04 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link]
Amazing, just noticed no /etc/termcap on my ubuntu system, stty is still there :)
By chance at this very moment I am looking at a 2 page "Data Processing Master Plan" from 1984 for our college which surfaced during office reorganization today. The document brags about the DEC 11/70, the number of student terminals, a possible upgrade to a VAX 11/750, going from Fortran IV to Fortran 77, adding another operating system "such as UNIX", and replacing the terminals with microcomputers.
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:14 UTC (Fri) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link]
I think he was actually talking about serially-attached terminals (vt100/vt220/etc.) and something like terminfo to support text output on all types of terminals, where software doesn't need to be written with a specific terminal (later: terminal emulator) in mind.
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:25 UTC (Fri) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link]
> * Crashproof file system - a rather vague claim, nothing is "crashproof"
> but I suppose that filesystem fuzzing has brought this perceptibly closer
I am guessing that this was meant to be understood as "a filesystem
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 27, 2013 15:33 UTC (Fri) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]
Your Google search terms are completed using free software? Are you sure?
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 28, 2013 10:30 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
If you consider Kana->Kanji conversion in IMEs a form of completion, then yes :)
30 years of GNU Posted Sep 28, 2013 13:46 UTC (Sat) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
> * File version numbers - nope, but OTOH the arrival of DVCS has reduced
> the need for this among the most technical users for whom it might have > been appealing.
That's about as stupid as encoding metadata for files on the filesystem. it sounds like a good idea first, but is actually terrible. (What? you still do that with you e-book collection and your MP4 movies? how sad...)
> * Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and
This sounds rather like NEXTSTEP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript and NeWS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
Anyway, it sounds rather fun (if you like Lisp) , but also like a security nightmare.
> * Network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol - Long forgotten in
It's still present in the DNS, the reason you write "IN", because there could be a "CH" as well ;) of course there's a linux implementation of it..
> * Something compatible with UUCP - Again forgotten in fvour of the
Umm, actually, most of the time UUCP run on top of TCP/IP. I used it instead of POP3 for some time to have a (tadaa!) push-mail service and the other way round, to receive mail on a server, without having to expose that server to the internet, because you could also have it pulled. However, that was when sendmail reigned supreme (and was notoriously insecure). I actually think the death of UUCP was mostly due to the arrival of decent SMTP MTAs ;).
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