Phoronix reports on a presentation about trying FreeBSD on modern Framework laptop from last week's Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation: With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops... With the Framework Laptop, the touchscreen "just worked" as did other basic functionality from the KDE desktop on FreeBSD, including peripherals like a wireless mouse. Among the challenges were Zoom failing for video calls but eventually working, the web camera took steps to enable, and Microsoft Teams only partially worked. With the help of online resources, ultimately she was able to succeed in her journey of running FreeBSD daily on a laptop.

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"I love these machines," writes long-time Slashdot reader Shayde: I was super-active in the Unix-PC Usenet groups back in the 90s... We hacked the hell out of them. They were small, sexy, and... they ran Unix! Unfortunately, they were a commercial failure. There were so many things wrong with them — not just stuff that broke, but the baseline configuration was nigh on worthless. I recently was able to get another machine and got it up and running (with a few hiccups). I whipped up a video showing all the cool things it can do, but also running through what went wrong and why it ultimately failed. The video shows the ancient green-on-black screen of 1984's AT&T Unix PC (with the OS running on a silicon drive emulation). The original machine had 512K of memory and a 10-megabyte hard drive described as slow, failure-prone, and noisy. There's also a drive for inserting floppy disks, and a separate MS-DOS board (with its own CPU) that could be plugged into the expansion slot — but the device was "remarkably heavy," weighing in aqt 40 pounds See the strange 1984 mouse, and its keyboard with both a Return key and a separate Enter key. There's even plug-in ports for phone landlines. "It looked great," Shayde says in the video, showing off its Spirograph demo and '80s-era games like Pong, Conway's Game of Life, GNU Chess, "Trk", and NetHack. But besides slow startup times, it was expensive — in today's dollars, it would've cost roughly $15,000 — and suffered from Unix's lack of spreadsheets, word processing software and other office productivity tools at the time. At that price the Unix PCs couldn't compete with IBM's home computers and their desktop applications. "It just didn't have the resources, the software, the capabilities and the price point that made it attractive."

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Bell Labs "created many of the foundational innovations of the modern age," writes Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation — from transistors and telecommunications satellites to Unix and the C programming language. But what was the secret to its success? he asks in a new article for the Wall Street Journal. Start with its lucky arrival in a "problem-rich" environment, suggests Arno Penzias, winner of one of Bell Labs' 11 Nobel Prizes: It was Bell Labs' responsibility, in other words, to create technologies for designing, expanding and improving an unruly communications network of cables and microwave links and glass fibers. The Labs also had to figure out ways to create underwater conduits, as well as switching centers that could manage the growing number of customers and escalating amounts of data.... Money mattered, too. Being connected to AT&T, the largest company in the world, was an advantage. The Labs' budget was enormous, and accounting conventions allowed its parent company to make huge and continuing investments in R & D. The generous funding, moreover, allowed scientists and engineers to buy and build expensive equipment — for instance, anechoic chambers to create the world's quietest rooms... The most fortunate part of Bell Labs' situation, however, was that in being attached to a monopoly it could partake in long-term thinking... Without competition nipping at its heels, Bell Labs engineers had the luxury of working out difficult ideas over decades. The first conceptualization of a cellular phone network, for instance, came out of the Labs in the late 1940s; it wasn't until the late 1970s that technicians began testing one in Chicago to gauge its potential. The challenge of deploying these technologies was immense. (The regulatory hurdles were formidable, too....) The article also credits the visionary management of Mervin Kelly — who fortunately also "had access to funding in a decade when most executives and universities didn't" to hire the brightest people. (By the early 1980s Bell Labs employed about 25,000 researchers, technicians and support staff, with an annual budget of $2 billion — roughly $7 billion in today's dollars.) "The Labs' involvement in World War II suggested to Kelly that an exciting postwar era of electronics was approaching, but that the technical problems would be so complex that they required a mix of expertise — not just physicists, but material scientists, chemists, electrical engineers, circuitry experts and the like." At Bell Labs, Kelly would sometimes handpick teams and create such a mix, as was the case for the transistor invention in the late 1940s. He came to see innovation arising not from like-minded or similarly trained people conversing with each other, but from a friction of ideas and approaches. It meant hiring researchers who had different personalities and favored a range of experimental angles. It also meant personally designing a campus in Murray Hill where departments were spread apart, so that scientists and engineers would be forced to walk, mingle and engage in serendipitous conversations and debate ideas. Meanwhile, under Kelly, the Labs focused on hiring people who were deeply curious, not just smart. Kelly saw it as his professional duty to do far more than what was expected, with his laboratory and vast resources, to create new technologies... The breakup of AT&T's monopoly, which led to a steady shrinking of Bell Labs' staff, budget and remit, shows us that no matter how forward looking your employees and managers may be, they will not necessarily see the future coming. It likewise suggests that technological progress is too unpredictable for one organization, no matter how powerful or smart, to control. Famously, Bell Labs managers didn't see value in the Arpanet, which eventually led to today's internet. And yet, for at least five decades, Bell Labs created a blueprint for the global development of communications and electronics. In understanding why it did so, I tend to think its ultimate secret may be hiding in plain sight. The secret has to do with Bell Labs' structure — not only being connected to a fabulously profitable monopoly, but being connected to a company that could move theoretical and applied research into a huge manufacturing division that made telecom equipment (at Western Electric) and ultimately into a dynamic operating system (the AT&T network)... Scientists and engineers at the Labs understood their ideas would be implemented, if they passed muster, into the huge system its parent company was running. Bell Labs racked up about 30,000 patents, according to the article, and celebrated its 100th anniversary last April. It is now part of Finland-based Nokia.

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Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwritten label. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the closet where it was found also contained "old cords from unknown sources and mountains of papers that had been dumped from a former professor's file cabinet, including old drawings from his kids and saved plane ticket stubs." (Their report also includes a photo of the University of Utah team that found the tape — the University's Flux Research Group). Professor Robert Ricci believes only 20 copies were ever produced of the version of Unix on that tape: At the time, in the 1970s, Ricci estimates there would have been maybe two or three of those computers — called a PDP-11, or programmed data processor — in Utah that could have run UNIX V4, including the one at the U. Having that technology is part of why he believes the U. got a copy of the rare software. The other part was the distinguished computing faculty at the school. The new UNIX operating system would've been announced at conferences in the early 1970s, and a U. professor at the time named Martin Newell frequently attended those because of his own recognized work in the field, Ricci said. In another box, stuffed in under manila envelopes, [researcher Aleks] Maricq found a 1974 letter written to Newell from Ken Thompson at Bell Labs that said as soon as "a new batch comes from the printers, I will send you the system." Ricci and Maricq are unsure if the software was ever used. They reached out to Newell, who is now 72 and retired, as well as some of his former students. None of them recalled actually running it through the PDP-11... The late Jay Lepreau also worked at the U.'s computing department and created the Flux Research Group that Ricci, Maricq and [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig are now part of. Lepreau overlapped just barely with Newell's tenure. In 1978, Lepreau and a team at the U. worked with a group at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they built their own clone of the UNIX operating system. They called it BSD, or Berkeley Standard Distribution. Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, worked with BSD, too, and it influenced his work. Ultimately, it was Lepreau who saved the 9-track tape with the UNIX system on it in his U. office. And he's why the university still has it today. "He seems to have found it and decided it was worth keeping," Ricci said... The U. will also get the tape back from the museum. Maricq said it will likely be displayed in the university's new engineering building that's set to open in January 2027. That's why, the research associate said, he was cleaning out the storage room to begin with — to try to prepare for the move. He was mostly just excited to see the floor again. "I thought we'd find some old stuff, but I didn't think it'd be anything like this," he said. And Maricq still has boxes to go through, including more believed to be from Lepreau's office. Local news station KMYU captured the thoughts of some of the University researchers who found the tape: "When you see the very first beginnings of something, and you go from seed to sapling, that's what we saw here," [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig said. "We see this thing in the moment of flux. We see the signs of all the things changing — of all the things developing that we now see today." Duerig also gave this comment to local news station KSL. "The coolest thing is that anybody, anywhere in the world can now access this, right? People can go on the internet archive and download the raw tape file and simulate running it," Duerig said. "People have posted browsable directory trees of the whole thing." One of the museum's directors said the tape's recovery marked a big day for the museum "One of the things that was pretty exciting to us is that just that there is this huge community of people around the world who were excited to jump on the opportunity to look at this piece of history," Ricci said. "And it was really cool that we were able to share that." Duerig said while there weren't many comments or footnotes from the programmers of that time, they did discovery more unexpected content having to do with Bell Labs on the tape. "There were survey results of them actually asking survey questions of their employees at these operator centers," he said. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

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Archive.org now has a page with "the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum's Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek's readtape tool." A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with the contents of the tape ready for bootstrapping, "including a tar file of the filesystem," and instructions on dumping an RK05 disk image from tape to disk (and what to do next). Research professor Rob Ricci at the University of Utah's school of computing posted pictures and video of the tape-reading process, along with several updates. ("So far some of our folks think they have found Hunt The Wumpus and the C code for a Snobol interpreter.") University researcher Mike Hibler noted the code predates the famous comment "You are not expected to understand this" — and found part of the C compiler with a copyright of 1972. The version of Unix recovered seems to have some (but not all) of the commands that later appeared in Unix v5, according to discussion on social media. "UNIX wasn't versioned as we know it today," explains University of Utah PhD student Thalia Archibald, who researched early Unix history (including the tape) and also worked on its upload. "In the early days, when you wanted to cut a tape, you'd ask Ken if it was a good day — whether the system was relatively bug-free — and copy off the research machine... I've been saying It's probably V5 minus a tiny bit, which turned out to be quite true."

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FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE arrived this week, notes this report from The Register, which calls it the latest release "of the Unix world's leading alternative to Linux." As well as numerous bug fixes and upgrades to many of its components, the major changes in this version are reductions in the number of platforms the OS supports, and in how it's built and how its component software is packaged. FreeBSD 15 has significantly reduced support for 32-bit platforms. Compared to FreeBSD 14 in 2023, there are no longer builds for x86-32, POWER, or ARM-v6. As the release notes put it: "The venerable 32-bit hardware platforms i386, armv6, and 32-bit powerpc have been retired. 32-bit application support lives on via the 32-bit compatibility mode in their respective 64-bit platforms. The armv7 platform remains as the last supported 32-bit platform. We thank them for their service." Now FreeBSD supports five CPU architectures — two Tier-1 platforms, x86-64 and AArch64, and three Tier-2 platforms, armv7 and up, powerpc64le, and riscv64. Arguably, it's time. AMD's first 64-bit chips started shipping 22 years ago. Intel launched the original x86 chip, the 8086 in 1978. These days, 64-bit is nearly as old as the entire Intel 80x86 platform was when the 64-bit versions first appeared. In comparison, a few months ago, Debian 13 also dropped its x86-32 edition — six years after Canonical launched its first x86-64-only distro, Ubuntu 19.10. Another significant change is that this is the first version built under the new pkgbase system, although it's still experimental and optional for now. If you opt for a pkgbase installation, then the core OS itself is installed from multiple separate software packages, meaning that the whole system can be updated using the package manager. Over in the Linux world, this is the norm, but Linux is a very different beast... The plan is that by FreeBSD 16, scheduled for December 2027, the restructure will be complete, the old distribution sets will be removed, and the current freebsd-update command and its associated infrastructure can be turned off. Another significant change is reproducible builds, a milestone the project reached in late October. This change is part of a multi-project initiative toward ensuring deterministic compilation: to be able to demonstrate that a certain set of source files and compilation directives is guaranteed to produce identical binaries, as a countermeasure against compromised code. A handy side-effect is that building the whole OS, including installation media images, no longer needs root access. There are of course other new features. Lots of drivers and subsystems have been updated, and this release has better power management, including suspend and resume. There's improved wireless networking, with support for more Wi-Fi chipsets and faster wireless standards, plus updated graphics drivers... The release announcement calls out the inclusion of OpenZFS 2.4.0-rc4, OpenSSL 3.5.4, and OpenSSH 10.0 p2, and notes the inclusion of some new quantum-resistant encryption systems... In general, we found FreeBSD 15 easier and less complicated to work with than either of the previous major releases. It should be easier on servers too. The new OCI container support in FreeBSD 14.2, which we wrote about a year ago, is more mature now. FreeBSD has its own version of Podman, and you can run Linux containers on FreeBSD. This means you can use Docker commands and tools, which are familiar to many more developers than FreeBSD's native Jail system. "FreeBSD has its own place in servers and the public cloud, but it's getting easier to run it as a desktop OS as well," the article concludes. "It can run all the main Linux desktops, including GNOME on Wayland." "There's no systemd here, and never will be — and no Flatpak or Snap either, for that matter.

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"A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years," reports The Register. And the software librarian at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, Al Kossow of Bitsavers, believes the tape "has a pretty good chance of being recoverable." Long-time Slashdot reader bobdevine says the tape will be analyzed at the Computer History Museum. More from The Register: The news was posted to Mastodon by Professor Robert Ricci of the University of Utah's Kahlert School of Computing [along with a picture. "While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973..." Ricci posted on Mastodon. "We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum."] The nine-track tape reel bears a handwritten label reading: UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format)... If it's what it says on the label, this is a notable discovery because little of UNIX V4 remains. That's unfortunate as this specific version is especially interesting: it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language. Until now, the only surviving parts known were the source code to a slightly older version of the kernel and a few man pages — plus the Programmer's Manual [PDF], from November 1973. The Unix Heritage Society hosts those surviving parts — and apparently some other items of interest, according to a comment posted on Mastodon. "While going through the tapes from Dennis Ritchie earlier this year, I found some UNIX V4 distribution documents," posted Mastodon user "Broken Pipe," linking to tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes/Gao_Analysis/v4_dist/. There's a file called license ("The program and information transmitted herewith is and shall remain the property of Bell Lab%oratories...") and coldboot ("Mount good tape on drive 0..."), plus a six-page "Setup" document that ends with these words... We expect to have a UNIX seminar early in 1974. Good luck. Ken Thompson Dennis Ritchie Bell Telephone Labs Murray Hill, NJ 07974

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31 years ago FreeBSD was first released. But here in 2025, searches for the Unix-like FreeBSD OS keep increasing on Google, notes the official FreeBSD blog — and it's at least a two-year trend. Yet after talking to some businesses using (or interested in using) FreeBSD, they sometimes found that because FreeBSD isn't talked about as much, "people think it's dying. This is a clear example of the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is a fascinating mental shortcut. It's how product names become verbs and household names. To 'Google' [search], to 'Hoover' [vacuum], to 'Zoom' [video meeting]. They reached a certain tipping point that there was no need to do any more thinking. One just googles , or zooms . These days, building internet services doesn't require much thought about the underlying systems. With containers and cloud platforms, development has moved far from the hardware. Operating systems aren't top of mind — so people default to what's familiar. And when they do think about the OS, it's usually Linux. But sitting there, quietly powering masses of the internet, without saying boo to a goose, is FreeBSD. And the companies using it? They're not talking about it. Why? Because they don't have to. The simple fact that dawned on me is FreeBSD's gift to us all, yet Achilles heel to itself, is its license. Unlike the GPL, which requires you to share derivative works, the BSD license doesn't. You can take FreeBSD code, build on it, and never give anything back. This makes it a great foundation for products — but it also means there's little reason for companies to return their contributions... [W]e'd like to appeal to companies using FreeBSD. Talk to us about your use case... We, the FreeBSD Foundation, can be the glue between industry and software and hardware vendors alike. In the meantime, stay tuned to this blog and the YouTube channel. We have some fantastic content coming up, featuring solutions built on top of FreeBSD and showcasing modern laptops for daily use.

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This week the "Old Vintage Computing Research" blog published a 21,000-word exploration of the DEC PDP-11, the 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corporation. Slashdot reader AndrewZX calls the blog post "an excellent deep dive" into the machine's history and capabilities "and the classic Venix UNIX that it ran." The blogger still owns a working 1984 DEC Professional 380, "a tank of a machine, a reasonably powerful workstation, and the most practical PDP-adjacent thing you can actually slap on a (large) desk." But more importantly, "It runs PRO/VENIX, the only official DEC Unix option for the Pros." In that specific market it was almost certainly the earliest such licensed Unix (in 1983) and primarily competed against XENIX, Microsoft's dominant "small Unix," which first emerged for XT-class systems as SCO XENIX in 1984. You'd wonder how rogue processes could be prevented from stomping on each other in such systems when neither the Intel 8086/8088 nor the IBM PC nor the PC/XT had a memory management unit, and the answer was not to try and just hope for the best. It was for this reason that IBM's own Unix variant PC/IX, developed by Interactive Systems Corporation under contract as their intended AT&T killer, was multitasking but single-user since in such an architecture there could be no meaningful security guarantees... One of Venix's interesting little idiosyncrasies, seen in all three Pro versions, was the SUPER> prompt when you've logged on as root (there is also a MAINT> prompt when you're single-user... Although Bill Gates had been their biggest nemesis early on, most of the little Unices that flourished in the 1980s and early 90s met their collective demise at the hands of another man: Linus Torvalds. The proliferation of free Unix alternatives like Linux on commodity PC hardware caused the bottom to fall out of the commercial Unix market. The blogger even found a 1989 log for the computer's one and only guest login session — which seems to consist entirely of someone named tom trying to exit vi. But the most touching part of the article comes when the author discovers a file named /thankyou that they're certain didn't come with the original Venix. It's an ASCII drawing of a smiling face, under the words "THANK YOU FOR RESCUING ME". "It's among the last files created on the system before it came into my possession..." It's all a fun look back to a time when advances in semiconductor density meant microcomputers could do nearly as much as the more expensive minicomputers (while taking up less space) — leaving corporations pondering the new world that was coming: As far back as 1974, an internal skunkworks unit had presented management with two small systems prototypes described as a PDP-8 in a VT50 terminal and a portable PDP-11 chassis. Engineers were intrigued but sales staff felt these smaller versions would cut into their traditional product lines, and [DEC president Ken] Olsen duly cancelled the project, famously observing no one would want a computer in their home.

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Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: On June 19, 1984, Robert Scheifler announced on MIT's Project Athena mailing list a new graphical windowing system he'd put together. Having cribbed a fair bit of code from the existing windowing toolkit called W, Scheifler named his new system X, thus giving birth to the X Window System. Scheifler prophetically wrote at the time, "The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up." The 1980's and 1990's saw tremendous activity in the development of graphical displays and user interfaces, and X was right in the middle of it all, alongside Apple, Sun, Xerox, Apollo, Silicon Graphics, NeXT, and many others. Despite the fierce, well-funded competition, and heated arguments about how many buttons a mouse should have, X managed to survive, due in large part to its Open Source licensing and its flexible design, allowing it to continue to work well even as graphical hardware rapidly advanced. As such, it was ported to dozens of platforms over the years (including a port to the Amiga computer by Dale Luck in the late 1980's). 40 years later, despite its warts, inconsistencies, age, and Wayland promising for the last ten years to be coming Real Soon Now, X remains the windowing system for UNIX-like platforms.

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Liam Proven reports via The Register: The latest version of the systemd init system is out, with the openly confrontational tag line: "Available soon in your nearest distro, now with 42 percent less Unix philosophy." As Lennart Poettering's announcement points out, this is the first version of systemd whose version number is a nine-bit value. Version 256, as usual, brings in a broad assortment of new features, but also turns off some older features that are now considered deprecated. For instance, it won't run under cgroups version 1 unless forced. Around since 2008, cgroups is a Linux kernel containerization mechanism originally donated by Google, as The Reg noted a decade ago. Cgroups v2 was merged in 2016 so this isn't a radical change. System V service scripts are now deprecated too, as is the SystemdOptions EFI variable. Additionally, there are some new commands and options. Some are relatively minor, such as the new systemd-vpick binary, which can automatically select the latest member of versioned directories. Before any OpenVMS admirers get excited, no, Linux does not now support versions on files or directories. Instead, this is a fresh option that uses a formalized versioning system involving: "... paths whose trailing components have the .v/ suffix, pointing to a directory. These components will then automatically look for suitable files inside the directory, do a version comparison and open the newest file found (by version)." The latest function, which The Reg FOSS desk suspects will ruffle some feathers, is a whole new command, run0, which effectively replaces the sudo command as used in Apple's macOS and in Ubuntu ever since the first release. Agent P introduced the new command in a Mastodon thread. He says that the key benefit is that run0 doesn't need setuid, a basic POSIX function, which, to quote its Linux manual page, "sets the effective user ID of the calling process." [...] Another new command is importctl, which handles importing and exporting both block-level and file-system-level disk images. And there's a new type of system service called a capsule, and "a small new service manager" called systemd-ssh-generator, which lets VMs and containers accept SSH connections so long as systemd can find the sshd binary -- even if no networking is available. The release notes are available here.

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Michael 'Mike' Karels, one of the authors of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System" and a part of the Computer Systems Research Group at Berkeley, who received the USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award, has died. Longtime Slashdot reader bplipschitz shared the news. The FreeBSD Foundation issued a statement in memory of Karels: "We are deeply saddened about the passing of Mike Karels, a pivotal figure in the history of BSD UNIX, a respected member of the FreeBSD community, and the Deputy Release Engineer for the FreeBSD Project. Mike's contributions to the development and advancement of BSD systems were profound and have left an indelible mark on the Project. Mike's vision and dedication were instrumental in shaping the FreeBSD we know and use today. His legacy will continue to inspire and guide us in our future endeavors."

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Slashdot reader Mononymous writes: The latest release of OpenBSD, the FOSS Unix-like operating system focused on correctness and security over features and performance, has been released. This version includes newer driver support, performance improvements, stability fixes, and lots of package updates. One highlight is a complete port of KDE Plasma 5. You can view the announcement and get the bits at OpenBSD.org. Phoronix reports that with OpenBSD 7.5 "there is a number of improvements for ARM (AArch64) hardware, never-ending kernel optimizations and other tuning work, countless package updates, and other adjustments to this popular BSD platform."

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"After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise," reports Phoronix: NetBSD 10 provides WireGuard support, support for many newer Arm platforms including for Apple Silicon and newer Raspberry Pi boards, a new Intel Ethernet drive, support for Realtek 2.5GbE network adapters, SMP performance improvements, automatic swap encryption, and an enormous amount of other hardware support improvements that accumulated over the past 4+ years. Plus there is no shortage of bug fixes and performance optimizations with NetBSD 10. Some tests of NetBSD 10.0 in development back during 2020 showed at that point it was already 12% faster than NetBSD 9. "A lot of development went into this new release," NetBSD wrote on their blog, saying "This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did." Among the new userspace programs is warp(6), which they describe as a "classic BSD space war game (copyright donated to the NetBSD Foundation by Larry Wall)."

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jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The Register has been running a series of articles about the evolution of Unix, from humble beginnings to the transition to Plan9. There is a short discussion of why Plan9 and its successors never really took off (despite being vastly superior to microkernels), along with the ongoing development of 9Front. From the article: Plan 9 was in some way a second implementation of the core concepts of Unix and C, but reconsidered for a world of networked graphical workstations. It took many of the trendy ideas of late-1980s computing, both of academic theories and of the computer industry of the time, and it reinterpreted them through the jaded eyes of two great gurus, Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and their students) — arguably, design geniuses who saw their previous good ideas misunderstood and misinterpreted. In Plan 9, networking is front and center. There are good reasons why this wasn't the case with Unix — it was being designed and built at the same time as local area networking was being invented. UNIX Fourth Edition, the first version written in C, was released in 1973 — the same year as the first version of Ethernet. Plan 9 puts networking right into the heart of the design. While Unix was later used as the most common OS for standalone workstations, Plan 9 was designed for clusters of computers, some being graphical desktops and some shared servers... Because everything really is a file, displaying a window on another machine can be as simple as making a directory and populating it with some files. You can start programs on other computers, but display the results on yours — all without any need for X11 or any visible networking at all. This means all the Unixy stuff about telnet and rsh and ssh and X forwarding and so on just goes away. It makes X11 look very overcomplicated, and it makes Wayland look like it was invented by Microsoft.

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"As important as its historically underhanded business dealings were for its success, Microsoft didn't have to cheat to win," argues a new article in the Register. "The Unix companies were doing a great job of killing themselves off." You see, while there were many attempts to create software development standards for Unix, they were too general to do much good — for example Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) — or they became mired in the business consortium fights between the Open Systems Foundation and Unix International, which became known as the Unix wars. While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. The core problem was that the Unix companies couldn't settle on software standards. Independent Software Vendors (ISV) had to write applications for each Unix platform. Each of these had only a minute desktop market share. It simply made no business sense for programmers to write one version of an application for SCO OpenDesktop (also known as OpenDeathtrap), another for NeXTStep, and still another one for SunOS. Does that sound familiar? That kind of thing is still a problem for the Linux desktop, and it's why I'm a big fan of Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat's Flatpak and Canonical's Snap. By the time the two sides finally made peace by joining forces in The Open Group in 1996, it was too late. Unix was crowded out on the conventional desktop, and the workstation became pretty much a Sun Microsystems-only play. Linux's GPL license created an "enforced" consortia that allowed it to take over, according to the article — and with Linus Torvalds as Linux's single leader, "it avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting... I've been to many Linux Plumbers meetings. There, I've seen him and the top Linux kernel developers work with each other without any drama. Today's Linux is a group effort... The Linux distributors and developers have learned their Unix history lessons. They've realized that it takes more than open source; it takes open standards and consensus to make a successful desktop operating system. And the article also points out that one of those early Unix desktops "is still alive, well, and running in about one in four desktops." That operating system, of course, is macOS X, the direct descendent of NeXT's NeXTSTEP. You could argue that macOS, based on the multi-threaded, multi-processing microkernel operating system Mach, BSD Unix, and the open source Darwin, is the most successful of all Unix operating systems.

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"Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our digital age, is closing in Murray Hill," writes journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (in an op-ed for New Jersey's Star-Ledger newspaper). "The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more." I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet. The internet would not be possible without the technologies forged at Bell Labs: the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix, communications satellites, fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression, microphones, talkies, the first digital art, and artificial intelligence — not to mention, of course, many advances in networks and the telephone, including the precursor to the device we all carry and communicate with today: the Picturephone, displayed as a futuristic fantasy at the 1964 World's Fair. There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet and you'll find amusing digital artifacts, but nowhere to immerse oneself in and study this immensely impactful institution in society. Where better to house a museum devoted to the internet than New Jersey, home not only of Bell Labs but also at one time the headquarters of the communications empire, AT&T, our Ma Bell...? The old Bell Labs could be more than a museum, preserving and explaining the advances that led to the internet. It could be a school... Imagine if Bell Labs were a place where scholars and students in many disciplines — technologies, yes, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, ethics, economics, community studies, design — could gather to teach and learn, discuss and research. The text of Jarvis's piece is behind subscription walls, but has apparently been re-published on X by innovation theorist John Nosta. In one of the most interesting passages, Jarvis remembers visiting Bell Labs in 1995. "The halls were haunted with genius: lab after lab with benches and blackboards and history within. We must not lose that history."

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Anyone remember the high-end commercial UNIX workstations from a few decades ago — like from companies like IBM, DEC, SGI, and Sun Microsystems? Today OSnews looked back — but also explored what happens when you try to buy one today> : As x86 became ever more powerful and versatile, and with the rise of Linux as a capable UNIX replacement and the adoption of the NT-based versions of Windows, the days of the UNIX workstations were numbered. A few years into the new millennium, virtually all traditional UNIX vendors had ended production of their workstations and in some cases even their associated architectures, with a lacklustre collective effort to move over to Intel's Itanium — which didn't exactly go anywhere and is now nothing more than a sour footnote in computing history. Approaching roughly 2010, all the UNIX workstations had disappeared.... and by now, they're all pretty much dead (save for Solaris). Users and industries moved on to x86 on the hardware side, and Linux, Windows, and in some cases, Mac OS X on the software side.... Over the past few years, I have come to learn that If you want to get into buying, using, and learning from UNIX workstations today, you'll run into various problems which can roughly be filed into three main categories: hardware availability, operating system availability, and third party software availability. Their article details their own attempts to buy one over the years, ultimately concluding the experience "left me bitter and frustrated that so much knowledge — in the form of documentation, software, tutorials, drivers, and so on — is disappearing before our very eyes." Shortsightedness and disinterest in their own heritage by corporations, big and small, is destroying entire swaths of software, and as more years pass by, it will get ever harder to get any of these things back up and running.... As for all the third-party software — well, I'm afraid it's too late for that already. Chasing down the rightsholders is already an incredibly difficult task, and even if you do find them, they are probably not interested in helping you, and even if by some miracle they are, they most likely no longer even have the ability to generate the required licenses or release versions with the licensing ripped out. Stuff like Pro/ENGINEER and SoftWindows for UNIX are most likely gone forever.... Software is dying off at an alarming rate, and I fear there's no turning the tide of this mass extinction. The article also wonders why companies like HPE don't just "dump some ISO files" onto an FTP server, along with patch depots and documentation. "This stuff has no commercial value, they're not losing any sales, and it will barely affect their bottom line.

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Co-creator of core Unix utility, now 80, just needs to run a few more tests. From a report: A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their US visit was going, and dropped off hundreds of lines of code that could add Unicode support for AWK, the text-parsing tool he helped create for Unix at Bell Labs in 1977. "I have tested this a fair amount but clearly more tests are needed," Kernighan wrote in the email, posted as a kind of pseduo-commit on the onetrueawk repo by longtime maintainer Arnold Robbins. "Once I figure out how ... I will try to submit a pull request. I wish I understood git better, but in spite of your help, I still don't have a proper understanding, so this may take a while." Kernighan is the "K" in AWK, a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix's pipeline features and interoperability between systems. A working awk function (AWK is the language, awk the command to invoke it) is critical to both Standard UNIX Specification and IEEE POSIX certification for interoperability. There are countless variants of awk, but "One True AWK," sometimes known as nawk, is the version based on Kernighan's 1985 book The AWK Programming Language and his subsequent input. Kernighan is also the "K" in "K&R C," the foundational 1978 book The C Programming Language he cowrote with Dennis Ritchie that sticks with programmers, mentally and in dog-eared paper form. C's roots go much deeper. Kernighan had been teaching C to workers at Bell Labs and convinced its creator, Dennis Ritchie, to collaborate on a book to spread the knowledge. That book gave birth to "the one true brace style," the endless debate that goes with it, and the structure underpinning every modern programming language. Kernighan also named Unix and first demonstrated the "Hello, world" code example.

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"Everyone's favorite security focused operating system, OpenBSD 7.1 has been released for a number of architectures," writes long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker, "including Apple M1 chips." Phoronix calls it "the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system." With OpenBSD 7.1, the Apple Silicon support is now considered "ready for general use" with keypad/touchpad support for M1 laptops, a power management controller driver added, I2C and SPI controller drivers, and a variety of other driver additions for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware. OpenBSD 7.1 also has a number of other improvements benefiting the 64-bit ARM (ARM64) and RISC-V architectures. OpenBSD 7.1 also brings SMP kernel improvements, support for futexes with shared anonymous memory, and more. On the graphics front there is updating the Linux DRM code against the state found in Linux 5.15.26 as well as now enabling Intel Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake / Rocket Lake support. The Register notes OpenBSD now "supports a surprisingly wide range of hardware: x86-32, x86-64, ARM7, Arm64, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Hitachi SH4, Motorola 88000, MIPS64, SPARC64, RISC-V 64, and both Apple PowerPC and IBM POWER." The Register's FOSS desk ran up a copy in VirtualBox, and we were honestly surprised how quick and easy it was. By saying "yes" to everything, it automatically partitioned the VM's disk into a rather complex array of nine slices, installed the OS, a boot loader, an X server and display manager, plus the FVWM window manager. After a reboot, we got a graphical login screen and then a rather late-1980s Motif-style desktop with an xterm. It was easy to install XFCE, which let us set the screen resolution and other modern niceties, and there are also KDE, GNOME, and other pretty front-ends, plus plenty of familiar tools such as Mozilla apps, LibreOffice and so on.... We were expecting to have to do a lot more work. Yes, OpenBSD is a niche OS, but the project gave the world OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall as used in macOS, much of Android's Bionic C library, and more besides.... In a world of multi-gigabyte OSes, it's quite refreshing. It felt like stepping back into the early 1990s, the era of Real Unix, when you had to put in some real effort and learn stuff in order to bend the OS to your will — but in return, you got something relatively bulletproof.

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