[Info-vax] The (now lost) future of Alpha.

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 08/06/2018 02:23 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2018-08-06 17:21, Bob Koehler wrote:
>> In article <pk7pe6$c30$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, Chris 
>> <xxx.syseng.yyy at gfsys.co.uk> writes:
>>>
>>> One of the reasons why unix and C became so popular in the early days
>>> is because the C library provides platform independent access to i/o,
>>> storage and a shed load of other functions. If I write a c program for
>>> any flavour of unix, or linux and don't try to be too clever, it will
>>> almost always compile and run on anything else.
>>
>>     You obvioulsy haven't done enough with ioctl().  Or am I being "too
>>     clever"?
>>
>>     Years ago, I found I had to get into ioctl() just to identify the 
>> contents
>>     of a magtape.
> 
> You needs ioctl() for two specific things when dealing with magtapes.
> 1) When moving over the tape, either rewinding, skipping files or 
> records forward or backward.
> 2) When you want to write tape marks.
> 
> There are no other situation when you use ioctl() for the tape. If you 
> want to figure out what is on the tape, you read() from it.
> 
> But I agree that just using the C library when dealing with tapes will 
> make you so utterly miserable that you want to shoot yourself in the head.
> 
> The C library is good when you want to do basic, simple things. Tapes 
> are not among the basic, simple things under Unix.
> 

Not just tapes.  Terminals, networks, screen handling.  There hasn't
been a time when Unix was just Unix since Version 7 went away.

bill