[Mailman-Users] Removing archived spam

[Jordan Brown]

On 11/11/2017 11:04 AM, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> On 2017-11-11 12:22, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>> Heh, I just looked at that myself.  How did such a useless tool ever
>> become standard?
> My guess is IIRC SunOS was on Solaris 8 by 2001, and it was *the*
> grown-up 64-bit unix: every other unix vendor's keeled over or was
> about to and x86_64 didn't exist. So it was a standard utility on the
> standard unix by the time when posix decided in 2001 The Standard
> Shall Be That Other Thing. Good thing about standards, as we all know,
> is there's plenty to choose from. 

arch(1) dates back to at least SunOS 4.0, ca 1987.  I haven't been able
to find manual pages before that.

The competitor, "uname -m", dates back at least that far, in the System
V branch of UNIX - it's in the SVID in 1986.

Much before that you find the "machid" system-type commands, e.g. the
"vax" command that succeeds on a vax and fails on all other systems. 
(and: sun, iAPX286, i386, m68k, pdp11, sparc, u3b, u3b2, u3b5, u3b15.) 
Those are still present at SunOS 4.0, but not in SVID.  (Strangely, I
don't see them in BSD 4.x.  I dimly remember them existing in a BSD
derivative ca 1985.)

UNIX v7 (my manual © 1979, 1983) does not have any of those.  I suspect
that at that time there was only Zool.  Er, PDP-11.

So I think the simple answer is that both the Sun/Berkeley fork and the
AT&T/SysV fork realized the need for a better answer than the "machid"
commands, and independently invented different answers.