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by mananaysiempre
1062 days ago
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How would one go about exploring “other” real-world systems? I’ve read some old OS textbooks, poked at Symbian and OS/2 books some, and have texts on Oberon and Symbolics in my queue, but the docs for RSX-11 and VMS seem to bury me in operational minutiae without really explaining the design choices, and the Multics docs look like a huge pile of research notes, which is going a bit too far in the other direction. The current bytecode on IBM i is apparentily outright NDA’d, and the RPG docs are eager to presume I know how to operate the original punch-card tabulators. Any pointers? |
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I think a lot of value can be gained from not only using software, but by reading papers and manuals, especially when the software is unavailable or unattainable. There’s a site called Bitsavers that is a treasure trove of old documents.
Come to think of it, a significant reason for Unix’s dominance in research and education is its availability, going all the way back to the 1970s when Bell Labs sold licenses to universities at very low prices. Even when licensing became more restrictive in the 1980s, this spurred the development of MINIX, GNU, later BSDs, and finally the Linux kernel, in order to recreate the environment students enjoyed with 1970s Unix. This openness is a far cry from the work of Xerox and Lisp machine vendors, where one needed to have been privileged enough to work for one of these vendors or their customers to use these environments, which were far more expensive than Unix workstations and especially personal computers. Thankfully there’s a wealth of documentation about these non-Unix systems, as well as testimony from their users. In addition, some systems were open sourced. But we must remember the times that these systems emerged, and we must remember why Unix became so dominant in the first place; its openness and availability set it apart from its competitors.