[Info-vax] misstatement of Unix origin [was Re: A portable VMS, was: Re: OS Ancestry]

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-05-24, John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 24/05/2021 13:28, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> 
>> Yes, oops. :-) Somebody already reminded me about this a few days ago
>> and as I pointed out in response this just shows how much more portable
>> things are when you are using an implemention language not tied to the
>> architecture.
>> 
>
> Yeah sure, UNIX code was so portable that back in the 1980s anything 
> much more complex than "Hello World" had little chance of being portable 
> between (e.g.) BSD and System V even on the very same hardware.
>
> When the two main camps can't even agree on the basics of opening a file 
> from C,
> as in fd = open(...),
> it's no wonder there was a customer/vendor need for a Single UNIX 
> Specification.
>
> Fortunately times have moved on since then.

You are confusing functionality of an operating system with the
portability of an operating system between architectures.

Your comments above talk about functionality within an operating
system. I am talking about the ease of porting an operating system
from one architecture to another.

The choice of implementation language does not decide the functionality
of an operating system. It is however a major factor in how easy or not
it is to port that operating system to another architecture.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.