Our cat had no options at all; it just read as much as it could in each go and wrote the same amount, so -u was no longer needed. That's the way cat should be.

That the completely different group responsible for the commercial System V product, in a completely different part of the company in a facility four miles from Murray Hill accepted that abomination was irrelevant to us.

Research Unix wound down not long after I left, though there is no direct connection between those events.

My standards are unreasonably high, yes. We were an arrogant bunch, yes. But philosophically we were right.

The even-greater iconoclasm visible in Plan 9 comes from the same place.

I attended a mid-80s Unix conference (Toronto) where Rob Pike complained that “cat went off to Berkeley and came back waving flags”. I think his talk was an early exploration of what would become known as “the Unix philosophy”

*no one was going to ask.

My primary laptop is currently running at over 4 months of uptime, I have over a dozen client (I’m in IT) machines with 5-9 months of uptime.

My work laptop doesn’t sleep/hibernate as it’s tethered to a screen so that’s a continuous 127 days.

I have an iMac Pro sitting next to me on the floor that’s been running for 245 days straight.

*Windows 95 peels off mask* "And I would have got away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling security researchers!"

Need to find time to assemble, at long last, my PiDP-11 and run 7/e on it.

Yeah, that’s more like my experience — sample size of one here, but it’s an M1 Mac Mini that stays up for months without anything like this happening. It only goes down when I turn it off to physically move it, which is uncommon.

Edit: Seeing reports it may be Tahoe only.

The place I studied as an undergrad had a PDP-10 for campus-wide time sharing. ca. 1979 official IT staff (not that they were called that) moved most of their effort to getting new VAXes going as replacements. As part of that, they cancelled the weekly downtime to run diagnostics on the PDP-10.

That revealed a long-standing bug in TOP-10: some internal counter (I forget what, can't have been simple uptime in clock ticks on a system with 36-bit words) overflowed after about a month of uptime, causing havoc.

I forget whether DEC supplied a fix, IT staff (or us students helping keep the -10 running) rolled our own, or we just scheduled monthly reboots.