strangest systems I've sent email from

[Liam Proven]

On 27 April 2016 at 19:44, Brian L. Stuart <blstuart at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 4/27/16, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ... with a few weirdos saying that 6809 was better than
>> ... and a few weirdos maintained that Forth was better.
>> ... while the weirdoes use FreeBSD.
>
> I've never been more proud to be classified as a weirdo :)

Oh, well, good! I am glad to hear that, because it suggests that my
deliberate theme -- of people choosing obscure systems, not even the
2nd or 3rd choice but the ones out past that -- got benefits from
their choices and they were happy with them. The idea of the 'weirdo'
label is that that's what the mainstream types see them as, because
the mainstream types don't understand the benefits or can't believe
that they're even there.

>> The efforts to fix and improve Unix -- Plan 9, Inferno -- forgotten.
>
> Plan 9 and Inferno are still around.  There are quite a few of
> us who still use them on a regular basis.  In fact, the Plan 9
> updates for the new Pi 3 should be out very soon, and I have
> a student currently working on a port of Plan 9 to the Allwinner
> A20 found in the Banana Pi and several of the low-end tablets.

Oh, yes, indeed! I have a Plan 9 VM, and I intend to try it on my Pi.
But it's had relatively little impact on mainstream Unix.

The peak development period of actual UNIX™ seems to have ended in the
late 1980s, i.e. decades ago -- up to System V, then SVR 3, SVR 4,
then it seemed to sort of peter out. SVR4.2 was the last
widely-adopted version, AFAIK. SVR5 didn't go anywhere much; I don't
think it even made it into AIX. Wikipedia suggests that SVR6 was never
even released.

I blame SCO for that.

>> That makes me despair.
>
> I feel much the same way, but it leads me to a little different place.
> While I'll probably never be there entirely, I am now at a point where
> I am giving serious thought to only running software I write myself.
> For example, the file system I run on my home file server (a Plan 9
> box) is something I wrote myself.  The version of Scheme I use on
> Inferno is one I wrote, etc.  The truth is if you're willing to be one
> of the weirdos, there are still some pretty interesting places to be
> in the computing world.  There are still interesting languages both
> old and new to learn.  (I had a blast last summer working with MCPL,
> an experimental offshoot of BCPL, and the ENIAC simulator I'm
> developing is written in Go.)  I find life to be much more enjoyable
> and my blood pressure to be much lower as long as I steer away
> from anything that's mainstream or popular.

That's great to hear. Sadly, I fear I'm not hardcore enough. I can
barely code and haven't really done so since the late 1980s.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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