Then there are all the old OS's: VMS, Os2, many variants of DOS, CP/M, BESYS and plan 9, OS/360, MVS and as aleady noted the whole OS400 I-series.
These must surely be the old pagan deities. The only major remaining form of these old religions would be the IBM mainframe which would be like Hinduism.
And Unix-ianity is not without its eschatology whether that be the promise of a coming earthly millennium of Unix and free software on all computers to dreaded anti-Christs like Bill Gates.
]]>About 1/2 of the marketing material for the Wang Labs VS line. :)
]]>What Perl daemon?! Perl is a programming language, not a background process. You can write a daemon in Perl, and for some tasks that may be better than doing it in C, but it itself is a language.
]]>That wasn't quite a transputer statement; it was part of a language called OCCAM that was intended to support the parallel mechanisms that the transputer was designed to offer (see "Meiko" and "Computing Surface"). As I understand it, OCCAM gained most traction as a harness language describing coarse-grained parallelism; we used it as part of our second-year CS course.
The transputer was good, but unfortunately it was single-sourced. I was told that it was one of the reason our radar division chose not to use it in our shiny new MIMD processor design. Instead we used the SPARC, for which we could buy full rights.
]]>Well - it's open source now and still runs okay on Ubuntu with sufficient effort I think http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/latest-poplog/#ubuntu ;-) But you're right - realistically it's pretty much dead now.
Why? Lots of reasons I think.
The difficulty of a Windows port was certainly a factor for mass appeal at the time.
The bigger issue was probably it's odd nature as a commercial product marketed by ISL and developed in "academia" by Sussex. Once ISL focussed all it's efforts on Clementine and got bought by SPSS Poplog was basically dead as a commercial entity (they ported Clementine to C++ in the end IIRC).
While there was a fairly large group of Poplog users at various organisations - there weren't a lot of Poplog developers. Especially at the more gnarly end of PVM/PIM stuff. There was a lot of that low-level info only sitting in one or two people's heads. Open-sourcing was, in some ways, a reaction to the developer team dissipating and came too late.
Also, most of the planet still wasn't sold on things like virtual machines, garbage collection, etc. for "real world" projects. This was before, or just at the start of, the rise of Java which - if nothing else - managed to persuade the world that VMs etc. weren't a liability.
Finally (and this is more of a guess) I wouldn't be surprised if the PVM/PIM layer wouldn't have gotten much harder to do well with modern processors. To get the best out of modern processors I think there would have had to have been some clever additions around branch prediction 'n' stuff. From what I recall of that layer some significant effort would have been involved.
]]>It would be great to see someone read this and donate enough money to fund a team to address the points Adrian mentions, bringing Poplog up to the present day. Any billionaires read Charlie's blog? Roman, Bernie, Richard, Liz,...?
]]>Let the truth be known from the scrolls of the intitiates: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/Mach/Mach.html.
You'd think Jobs would be proud of keeping his creation (NextStep) alive...
So perhaps OS-X is the Islam of the OS world, since its a new religion which adopts the facade of the old.
]]>developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/Mach/Mach.html
]]>developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/ Conceptual/KernelProgramming/Mach/Mach.html
]]>You're allowed 0 to 2 valid hyperlinks before your message will be automatically submitted to the moderation stack. Does that explain your "missing" submission?
]]>Because it is. It conforms to the UNIX 03 specification. It's a bit unusual (BSD userland running on top of a Mach microkernel) but since it conforms to specification what does it matter if it has different sort of kernel?
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