topic Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution in Operating System - HP-UX

BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Stephen Badgett — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 15:31:20 GMT

What does bsd - Berkeley Software Distribution have to do with files on the HP-UX machine? To me this soulnds like an odd question but I waws ask it and need your help in understanding it

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Mark Greene_1 — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 15:37:35 GMT

BSD was a variant of AT&T Unix done by Bill Joy at UC Berkeley. IBM's AIX is BSD-like, Sun even more so. HP-UX is mostly an AT&T System V -like implementation of Unix. You can see a comparison of various commands here:

http://www.unixguide.net/unixguide.pdf

mark

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 15:38:33 GMT

HP-UX is a Berkeley-based (ie BSD) UNIX as opposed to AT&T (Bell Labs) based UNIX --- what I consider to be "real" UNIX but only because that's what I started on. Probably the most direct link to files is the hfs filesystem which is a direct counterpart to the BSD ufs filesystem. There are other file distinctions and one that comes immediately to mind are the differences in the Berkeley-style and AT&T-style tape behaviors. This is one area where BSD got it right; the AT&T convention is simply insane.

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Arunvijai_4 — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 21:21:49 GMT

Hi Steve,

Using NFS, you can easily share files with HP-UX and BSD. Probably, this wikipedia article should give more information about BSD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution

-Arun

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Geoff Wild — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 21:30:48 GMT

Here's the history of Unix:

http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html

HPUX is based on the System 5.

System V has been considered one of the two major flavours of UNIX, the other being BSD.

More @ wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V

Rgds...Geoff

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

David Markus — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 09:29:43 GMT

Here's a nicely done graphical timeline of the most used Unixes : http://www.levenez.com/unix/ , just to give you an idea of who 'borrowed' from who...

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Jeff_Traigle — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 10:00:16 GMT

These days, most vendors have borrowed so much from both BSD and System V that it's difficult to say that they are one or the other. HP-UX was more BSD-like in the pre-10.X days, but has incorporated many of the System V-isms since then. The same with SunOS prior to v5.X (Solaris 2.X). I was trying to find a really cool graphic that showed the relationships between the various flavors that I remember seeing somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it online with a Google search. Maybe it's in a book I have. I'll have to search through the likely candidates in my library when I get home. If I manage to find it, I'll let you know. The timelines the others have posted probably depict the same thing, but I found them rather difficult to follow... more suited to printing out and hanging on a wall to view, I think.

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Stephen Badgett — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:43:17 GMT

This is some great stuff -- I have enjoyed going over all of them

thank you,
Steve

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Ralph Grothe — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:53:40 GMT

I also once bookmarked a link to the chart that David's link refers to.
Glad I rediscovered thanks to Dave.

Click on the chart there to see a spaghetti like entanglement of bewildering ramnifications of various Unices.

As far as I remember BSD (which is often referred to as the genuine Unix) was started at AT&T by Ritchie and Thompson
originally as a joint project why its name should have been Multics.
Soon AT&T lost interest (partly because they were struggling at the time with plans of divestiture, similar to Microsoft lately) and the venture partners quickly withdrew.
Rumor had it that this was the reason they changed the name from Multics to Unix.
Because AT&T considered Unix futile they gave it away (on tapes, the foundation of the famous Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)) to the University of California Berkeley (UCB) for educational tinkering.
So BSD students like Bill Joy (who later became one of the founders of SUN further developed the code (I think vi and other venerable Unix tools were written by Joy))
and Kirk McKusick who was a major contributor to the BSD filesystem (in a way the founding father of Unix filesystems).
Later when the industry rediscovered that Unix was more than an OS for computer games on a PDP-7 they founded the OSF.
Meanwhile AT&T also revived interest in Unix and formed a joint with SUN who at the time were fully on the BSD track since their technical founders inculcated their own BSD code.
That was when the trouble started for the UCB BSD since now there where right and license proprietors (SCO Group, the ones who recently have been claiming that the Linux folks stole their code),
although by the time the BSD code was completely rewritten, and there were no remnants of AT&T left in it.

I'm not sure when HP-UX came into play
(the mentioned chart should show),
but I think it wasn't before the 80s.
When I first got set loose on an HP-UX box there was already 11 around which is less BSD but more SysV.
I think to have read that a major change must have been taken place between the 9 and 10 releases.

Because SunOS (later to become Solaris) started as very BSD like its origins are very conspicuous, especially when you are formatting or rather labelling and vtoc-ing a disk.
Oddly there is still a /usr/ucb subdir
which holds a set of BSD binaries,
I think for compatibility reasons of scripts that use BSD style syntax (e.g. ps command)

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Arunvijai_4 — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 12:10:47 GMT

Hi Steve,

Some more links that talks about history of Unix

http://www.computerhope.com/history/unix.htm
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/hp/hpux-faq/section-5.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX

-Arun

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Stephen Badgett — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 18:06:53 GMT

Arun

thanks

Re: BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

Yogeeraj_1 — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 23:36:07 GMT

hi steve,

BSD was widely identified with the versions of Unix available for workstation-class systems. This can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed and the familiarity it found among the founders of many technology companies during the 1980s. This familarity often came from using similar systemsâ notably DEC's Ultrix and Sun's SunOSâ during their education. While BSD itself was largely superseded by the System V Release 4.x and OSF/1 systems in the 1990s, in recent years modified open source versions of the codebase have seen increasing use and development.

this one is really nice reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution

kind regards
yogeeraj