GGJaguar
Reverential Member
Ah, the joy sitting in the department Chair's office using an 8088 PC with dual floppy drives to write my Masters thesis with the buzzing of a dot matrix printer filling the air.
What was the storage capacity of those floppies? Anyone remember? Something quite laughable by today's standards!
I remember the 3.5" floppies were 1.4MB, but I couldn't remember what the bigger, floppier ones held so I had to look it up. By the end of the 5 1/4 inch floppies, IBM had a version that held 1.2MB, but GGJ is right that most were 720KB. Having my memory jogged, I now remember that before the 720K were 360K double sided and 180K single sided. My first PC had a single sided drive in it, but I could use both sides of a 360K floppy by removing it and inserting it upside down.
Computer geek fun fact: Unix was created before MS-DOS and still lives a healthy life in the forms of Linux (android phones and many other embedded systems) and... wait for it.... Mac OS-X!!
In the spirit of those who have nothing better to do than argue iPhone vs. Android and Vi vs, emacs, UNIX is a trademark and only systems that adhere to the Single UNIX Specification can be called UNIX. Similiar systems, such as Linux, are UNIX-like. Than said, popular usage assumes all UNIX-like system can be called Linux. Popular usage rarely distinguishes between Unix and Linux unless a purchase order is involved. This is the process by which trademarks, such as Xerox, Kleenex and Photoshop become generic terms.
Thank you for the chart. It's enlightening. Probably about a quarter of the history that I carry around in my head was completely made up by me, but the belief that I've been carrying for literally decades is that both Linux and BSD were blatant attempts to create an operating system that was functionally the same as Unix, but without the licensing that went along with Unix. So, no they're not Unix, they're Unix-like, but they are undeniably based on Unix.
As for vi vs. emacs, I never developed a fondness for either. (I spell both without any capital letters because the Unix commands to launch them are all lower case.)
In the spirit of those who have nothing better to do than argue iPhone vs. Android and Vi vs, emacs, UNIX is a trademark and only systems that adhere to the Single UNIX Specification can be called UNIX. Similiar systems, such as Linux, are UNIX-like. Than said, popular usage assumes all UNIX-like system can be called Linux. Popular usage rarely distinguishes between Unix and Linux unless a purchase order is involved. This is the process by which trademarks, such as Xerox, Kleenex and Photoshop become generic terms.
Given GAD's networking background his Raspberry Pi Hadoop cluster may have no other purpose than to show that if he can build one he understands the tech and so his clients have warmer, fuzzier feelings about the job he is about to do for them.
It may also be just that making distributed systems work is pretty fun stuff.
Given GAD's networking background his Raspberry Pi Hadoop cluster may have no other purpose than to show that if he can build one he understands the tech and so his clients have warmer, fuzzier feelings about the job he is about to do for them.
It may also be just that making distributed systems work is pretty fun stuff.