Split Thread Linux and UNIX reminiscences

[AmyStrange]

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Most people who use Linux are usually IT people or some tinkerers. Linux has worse hardware and software support and the vast majority of users don't care if a software/hardware vendor doesn't support Linux. Even on nerdy sites like w3schools Linux percentage is around 4.3%. Telling that Linux worked on your God chosen hardware is unfair at best, considering Windows runs normally on almost all PCs and Laptops.

And yes, Linux is more unpolished compared to Windows, you often struggle to get things work. I've seen countless of bugs in Linux distributions. It isn't just difference. Just look at the reviews on dedoimedo.com and his opinion about desktop Linux.

You can cherry pick instances when old Linux programs worked and old Windows programs didn't but this won't change the reality that Windows has much better backward compatibility compared to Linux. Backward compatibility in this context means that it can run old applications, not running on very old hardware. Win7 will probably fail to run on XP era hardware but most XP era software will run on Win7. Here is an example of Win 3.1 GUI program working on Win10.

Even Linus Torvalds confirms that the compatibility is a big problem in Linux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=287s .

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Isn't Linux a different flavor of Unix?

And isn't Unix used on all internet servers?

The reason I ask this is because Unix uses the forward slash (/) to show file paths, while windows uses the backward slash (\) instead?

I'm probably wrong, but what the hey, asking questions of smart people is better than looking like a dumb**** all my life, which if you've followed my post, you'd know that I'm really good at it.

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ETA: does anyone else who switched to Win11 notice that their computer has slowed down?

I was able to download Win11 to my second computer (it has 8 GBs of Ram), while I couldn't on my first one, but even though it only has 4 GBs, the browser (Edge) is still faster than my second one with Win11.

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[RecoveringYuppy]

Linux is a more recent adaptation of the earlier Unix operating system and it's Linux that runs a lot of the internet. And, yes, Unix and Linux use the forward slash. The web also uses the forward slash but off the top of my head I'm not entirely sure if that was driven by being compatible with Linux or not. Even though Linux hosts a lot of web sites it's also not uncommon to have websites hosted by Windows servers. Web sites hosted by windows will still use the forward slash for web sites.

And an awful lot of unpredictable things will try to just correct it if you use the wrong one so it can be hard to tell what the "real" convention is.

 

[AmyStrange]

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Linux is a more recent adaptation of the earlier Unix operating system and it's Linux that runs a lot of the internet. And, yes, Unix and Linux use the forward slash. The web also uses the forward slash but off the top of my head I'm not entirely sure if that was driven by being compatible with Linux or not. Even though Linux hosts a lot of web sites it's also not uncommon to have websites hosted by Windows servers. Web sites hosted by windows will still use the forward slash for web sites.

And an awful lot of unpredictable things will try to just correct it if you use the wrong one so it can be hard to tell what the "real" convention is.

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Thank you for your answer, and by the way, can you still use Unix/Linux to write C++ code and compile it? It's how I learned basic code writing back in the 1990s.

And just to keep this on topic, I've sometimes been able to solve my browser problem with Win11 by turning it on and off a couple times, but that's a pain in the *** solution.

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ETA: Since ARPANET (the forerunner of today's internet) was initiated at the same time as UNIX (1969), I think it's safe to say that UNIX was the OS used at the time.

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[RecoveringYuppy]

Thank you for your answer, and by the way, can you still use Unix/Linux to write C++ code and compile it? It's how I learned basic code writing back in the 1990s.

Yeah, definitely. It's pretty safe to say that the vast majority of developer activity can be done on Linux.

 

[AmyStrange]

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Yeah, definitely. It's pretty safe to say that the vast majority of developer activity can be done on Linux.

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Once again thank you, but what I meant was that the C++ development program was actually built into the original Unix OS, so you didn't have to buy anything separate.

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[Gord_in_Toronto]

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Once again thank you, but what I meant was that the C++ development program was actually built into the original Unix OS, so you didn't have to buy anything separate.

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You may be right for C. But UNIX was around long before C++.

 

[marting]

Linux is a more recent adaptation of the earlier Unix operating system and it's Linux that runs a lot of the internet. And, yes, Unix and Linux use the forward slash. The web also uses the forward slash but off the top of my head I'm not entirely sure if that was driven by being compatible with Linux or not. Even though Linux hosts a lot of web sites it's also not uncommon to have websites hosted by Windows servers. Web sites hosted by windows will still use the forward slash for web sites.

And an awful lot of unpredictable things will try to just correct it if you use the wrong one so it can be hard to tell what the "real" convention is.

I've found std::filesystem, added in C++17, makes interoperability between Linux/Windows a lot easier. Takes care of the forward/backward slash PITA.

 

[AmyStrange]

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You may be right for C. But UNIX was around long before C++.

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Crap, you're probably right, because I'm talking about when I used it in 1995.

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[RecoveringYuppy]

Once again thank you, but what I meant was that the C++ development program was actually built into the original Unix OS, so you didn't have to buy anything separate.
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You seem to be referring to 1995 and a lot of things were going on then. Hard to say what you experienced. You can get Linux in various forms with a ton of different things built in.

 

[thaiboxerken]

That's funny, but 64K was the total RAM of the PDP-11/34 I learned to code C on in the 70s. (That computer was worth $70K and required an air-conditioned room.)

In 2007, while I was doing field service for wood mills, I had to repair a PDP-11 that was being used to automate a high speed lathe for plywood. This was a mill at a reservation. It was the floppy drive that failed, they happened to have older, failed floppy drives in a closet. I removed a motor from a closet drive and placed it in the recently failed drive and it worked. We were just lucky, there was no "troubleshooting" to see if it was a motor failure. I told them that updating to a modern PC was necessary because we were only lucky and finding parts for such an old computer is nigh-impossible. I wonder if they ever did.

 

[eerok]

In 2007, while I was doing field service for wood mills, I had to repair a PDP-11 that was being used to automate a high speed lathe for plywood. This was a mill at a reservation. It was the floppy drive that failed, they happened to have older, failed floppy drives in a closet. I removed a motor from a closet drive and placed it in the recently failed drive and it worked. We were just lucky, there was no "troubleshooting" to see if it was a motor failure. I told them that updating to a modern PC was necessary because we were only lucky and finding parts for such an old computer is nigh-impossible. I wonder if they ever did.

It looks like DEC continued to sell the PDP-11^WP into the 90s. I didn't know that. The machine I learned on ran UNIX Version 7 -- I might still have photocopies from the manuals. I used a line editor, and I had to print out my code to actually look at it.

Geez, memory lane.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

It looks like DEC continued to sell the PDP-11^WP into the 90s. I didn't know that. The machine I learned on ran UNIX Version 7 -- I might still have photocopies from the manuals. I used a line editor, and I had to print out my code to actually look at it.

Geez, memory lane.

Wow. You're about the only person I've ever heard even mention UNIX 7. I managed a UNIX 7 shop in TO at a time when just we and Bell had the only two commercial UNIX licenses (from AT&T) in the city.

As you say, "Memory Lane".

 

[DallasDad]

My first 'nix machine was a university PDP-11, which I accessed using a 300-baud modem (the kind where you put the phone handset into a large box with cushioned cups to hold the handset). I don't recall the 'nix version, but this was in the early 80's.

 

[bruto]

I just recently was trying to install Linux on an old laptop, mostly for viewing PBS streamed movies on Passport. Ubuntu works beautifully, but it needed a bunch of codecs that are available but not loaded by default, because they're not open source. Various on line resources tell me how to do this, and sure enough, I manage to start the process, which loads a huge number of little things into the system. Until, halfway through, we get to a Microsoft fonts page which requires an "OK" which stops the entire process. The OK doesn't work. Try again, try loading a different way, try a different version of the same package. No go. Back on line I go, looking for answers. Sure enough, many people have had this problem, and helpful gurus provide long and complicated methods for bypassing the problematic page, until, halfway down the answers, someone says "undocumented, you simply have to hit the "tab" key to light up the OK." Sure enough, off it goes. Hours spent trying different ways to load the codecs, and the solution takes a second.

Usually if you want upside down inside out thinking, you'll find it in Android, but perhaps an Android programmer was moonlighting at Microsoft.

 

[theprestige]

Isn't Linux a different flavor of Unix?

Not exactly.

POSIX is a standard that specifies how a computer operating system should interact with other software. It's based on the Unix OS, which is the ur-example of this interaction behavior.

Linux is an independent project to produce a POSIX-compliant OS. The different flavors of Unix all start with a basic Unix kernel, and extend from there. Linux was written from scratch to achieve the same POSIX result.

And isn't Unix used on all internet servers?

No. Not only are a lot of servers actually running Linux, but there's also a growing amount of Windows, and probably some other esoteric stuff that's not any of those three.

It also depends on what you mean by "internet server". Strictly speaking, the Internet is the underlying information transmission infrastructure. On top of that, there's the computers using that infrastructure to serve content or provide other services to humans and other computers. This upper layer of content and services is, broadly speaking, the World Wide Web, or "web". A lot of "internet" servers are actually "web" servers. The server that runs this forum, for example, is a webserver.

On the other hand, the industrial-strength routers that move information around along one data path or another are also computers. Imagine an army of tiny switchboard operators, sitting at the junction of every major and minor information pathway, flipping bits this way and that to keep the messages flowing. These can be thought of as "internet servers". They can run Unix or Linux, but a lot of them run custom-built, task-optimized operating systems like Cisco's IOS.

The reason I ask this is because Unix uses the forward slash (/) to show file paths, while windows uses the backward slash (\) instead?

The forward slash / is a Unix convention widely copied, as in Linux. IIRC, Microsoft uses the backslash \ because they'd already decided to use the forward slash as a special character in their DOS command line utility.

But nowadays things can get pretty weird. URLs use the forward slash as a path delimiter, as in http://internationalskeptics.com/forums. As a result, Microsoft's webserver app, IIS, is perfectly comfortable using the forward slash to resolve URLs (even if it has to translate them to backslashes when looking up the local resource behind the scenes; I'm not sure if that's even true).

 

[theprestige]

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Once again thank you, but what I meant was that the C++ development program was actually built into the original Unix OS, so you didn't have to buy anything separate.

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Heh. Just as the "internet" is actually the Internet and the Web on top of it, so too is "unix" actually two separate things: The Unix kernel itself, and the vast library of utilities large and small that were developed to run on Unix and make a total package. This is the GNU software suite. Most of all of it has been ported to Linux. You can typically expect a Linux box to come bundled with all the same familiar GNU utilities you were using on your Unix box. (Of course some flavors come more stripped down than others, while others include a bunch of stuff above and beyond the classic GNU bundle.)

But a C++ compiler should be pretty standard. If your OS doesn't include it out of the box, it should be trivial to install one via the OS's package manager.

 

[DallasDad]

The Windows API is happy to accept forward slashes to separate path nodes. So, for example, in CreateFile(), you can use "C:\MyFile.txt" or "C:/MyFile.txt" (In C or C++, as with many programming languages, the backslash is an escape character, so you'd put "C:\\MyFile.txt" in your code statement; only one backslash gets emitted by the compiler -- an escaped backslash is a single backslash.)

 

[AmyStrange]

Not exactly.

POSIX is a standard that specifies how a computer operating system should interact with other software. It's based on the Unix OS, which is the ur-example of this interaction behavior.

Linux is an independent project to produce a POSIX-compliant OS. The different flavors of Unix all start with a basic Unix kernel, and extend from there. Linux was written from scratch to achieve the same POSIX result.


No. Not only are a lot of servers actually running Linux, but there's also a growing amount of Windows, and probably some other esoteric stuff that's not any of those three.

It also depends on what you mean by "internet server". Strictly speaking, the Internet is the underlying information transmission infrastructure. On top of that, there's the computers using that infrastructure to serve content or provide other services to humans and other computers. This upper layer of content and services is, broadly speaking, the World Wide Web, or "web". A lot of "internet" servers are actually "web" servers. The server that runs this forum, for example, is a webserver.

On the other hand, the industrial-strength routers that move information around along one data path or another are also computers. Imagine an army of tiny switchboard operators, sitting at the junction of every major and minor information pathway, flipping bits this way and that to keep the messages flowing. These can be thought of as "internet servers". They can run Unix or Linux, but a lot of them run custom-built, task-optimized operating systems like Cisco's IOS.


The forward slash / is a Unix convention widely copied, as in Linux. IIRC, Microsoft uses the backslash \ because they'd already decided to use the forward slash as a special character in their DOS command line utility.

But nowadays things can get pretty weird. URLs use the forward slash as a path delimiter, as in http://internationalskeptics.com/forums. As a result, Microsoft's webserver app, IIS, is perfectly comfortable using the forward slash to resolve URLs (even if it has to translate them to backslashes when looking up the local resource behind the scenes; I'm not sure if that's even true).

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Interesting and thank you.

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[BowlOfRed]

Deleted (I mean "slashed")

 

[a_unique_person]

Not exactly.



POSIX is a standard that specifies how a computer operating system should interact with other software. It's based on the Unix OS, which is the ur-example of this interaction behavior.



Linux is an independent project to produce a POSIX-compliant OS. The different flavors of Unix all start with a basic Unix kernel, and extend from there. Linux was written from scratch to achieve the same POSIX result.





No. Not only are a lot of servers actually running Linux, but there's also a growing amount of Windows, and probably some other esoteric stuff that's not any of those three.



It also depends on what you mean by "internet server". Strictly speaking, the Internet is the underlying information transmission infrastructure. On top of that, there's the computers using that infrastructure to serve content or provide other services to humans and other computers. This upper layer of content and services is, broadly speaking, the World Wide Web, or "web". A lot of "internet" servers are actually "web" servers. The server that runs this forum, for example, is a webserver.



On the other hand, the industrial-strength routers that move information around along one data path or another are also computers. Imagine an army of tiny switchboard operators, sitting at the junction of every major and minor information pathway, flipping bits this way and that to keep the messages flowing. These can be thought of as "internet servers". They can run Unix or Linux, but a lot of them run custom-built, task-optimized operating systems like Cisco's IOS.





The forward slash / is a Unix convention widely copied, as in Linux. IIRC, Microsoft uses the backslash \ because they'd already decided to use the forward slash as a special character in their DOS command line utility.



But nowadays things can get pretty weird. URLs use the forward slash as a path delimiter, as in http://internationalskeptics.com/forums. As a result, Microsoft's webserver app, IIS, is perfectly comfortable using the forward slash to resolve URLs (even if it has to translate them to backslashes when looking up the local resource behind the scenes; I'm not sure if that's even true).

Why didn't they just check when they wrote MS-DOS which way UNIX did it. They guessed and they guessed wrong. It caused all kinds of hassles for me over the years.