I asked:
> I wonder where the inspiration for the Unix job control came from? In
> particular, I can't help but notice that Control-Z does something very
> similar in the PDP-10 Incompatible Timesharing System.
Jim Kulp answered:
> The ITS capabilities were certainly part of the inspiration. It was a
> combination of frustrations and gaps in UNIX with some of those
> features found in ITS that resulted in the final package of features.
Casual interest,
Anyone ever used RJE from SYS-III - IBM mainframe remote job entry
System? I started on Edition 7 on an interdata so I am (pretty much) too young
for that era, unless I am fooling myself.
-Steve
Doug McIlroy:
There was some pushback which resulted in the strange compromise
of if-fi, case-esac, do-done. Alas, the details have slipped from
memory. Help, scj?
====
do-od would have required renaming the long-tenured od(1).
I remember a tale--possibly chat in the UNIX Room at one point in
the latter 1980s--that Steve tried and tried and tried to convince
Ken to rename od, in the name of symmetry and elegance. Ken simply
said no, as many times as it took. I don't remember who I heard this
from; anyone still in touch with Ken who can ask him?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Reputed origins of SVR4:
> From SunOS:
> ...
> NFS
And, sadly, NFS is still with us, having somehow upstaged Peter
Weinberger's RFS (R for remote) that appeared at the same time.
NFS allows one to add computers to a file system, but not to
combine the file systems of multiple computers, as RFS did
by mapping uids: NFS:RFS::LAN:WAN.
Doug
> From: Chet Ramey
> /proc was done by Roger at AT&T (maybe USL). I recall him telling me
> that he was not the original author though and that it came from PWB.
> The original implementation was done by Tom Killian for 8th Edition.
I wonder if >pdd (which dates to somewhere in the mid-60's, I'm too lazy to
look the exact date up) was in any way any inspiration for /proc?
Noel
Wasn't ksh SVR4... It was in the Xelos sources @Concurrent Computer which was an SVR2 port. Xelos didn't do paging but the source in 87 or 88 or so had ksh in it.
I. built it for SVR4 on my Xelos 3230 back in the day.
Bill
Sent from my android device.
> On 10 Jan 2017, at 16:16, pechter(a)gmail.com wrote:
>
> Wasn't msg SVR4... It was in the Xelos sources @Concurrent Computer which was an SVR2 port. Xelos didn't do paging but the source in 87 or 88 or so had ksh in it.
>
> I. built it for SVR4 on my Xelos 3230 back in the day.
msgs goes back as far as SVR2.
>
> Bill
>
> Sent from my android device.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Berny Goodheart <berny(a)berwynlodge.com>
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Sent: Tue, 10 Jan 2017 10:12
> Subject: [TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines
>
> I have been trolling these many threads lately of interest. So thought I should chip in.
>
> "SVr4 was not based on SunOS, although it incorporated
> many of the best features of SunOS 4.x”.
>
> IMHO this statement is almost true (there were many great features from BSD too!).
> SunOS 5.0 was ported from SVR4 in early 1991 and released as Solaris 2.0 in 1992 for desktop only.
> Back in the late 80s, Sun and AT&T partnered development efforts so it’s no surprise that SunOS morphed into SVR4. Indeed it was Sun and AT&T who were the founding members of Unix International…with an aim to provide direction and unification of SVR4.
> I remember when I went to work for Sun (much later in 2003), and found that the code base was remarkably similar to the SVR4 code (if not exact in many areas).
>
> Here’s the breakdown of SVR4 kernel lineage as I recall it. I am pretty sure this is correct. But I am sure many of you will put me right if I am wrong ;)
>
> From BSD:
> TCP/IP
> C Shell
> Sockets
> Process groups and job Control
> Some signals
> FFS in UFS guise
> Multi groups/file ownership
> Some system calls
> COFF
>
> From SunOS:
> vnodes
> VFS
> VM
> mmap
> LWP and kernel threads
> /proc
> Dynamic linking extensions
> NFS
> RPC
> XDR
>
> From SVR3:
> .so libs
> revamped signals and trampoline code
> VFSSW
> RFS
> STREAMS and TLI
> IPC (Shared memory, Message queues, semaphores)
>
> Additional features in SVR4 from USL:
> new boot process.
> ksh
> real time extensions
> Service access facility
> Enhancements to STREAMS
> ELF
>
>
>
>
>
> From: Berny Goodheart
> From BSD:
> Process groups and job Control
The intermediate between V6 and V7 which ran on several MIT machines (I think
it was an early PWB - I should retrieve it and make it available to the Unix
archive, it's an interesting system) had 'process groups', but I don't know if
the concept was the same as BSD process groups.
Noel
> From: Tony Finch
> The other classic of Algol 68 literature
No roundup of classic Algol 68 literature would be complete without Hoare's
"The Emperor's Old Clothes".
I assume everyone here has read it, but on the off-chance there is someone
who hasn't, a copy is here:
http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/2014/bib/hoare81emperor.pdf
and I cannot recommend it more highly.
Noel
On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com
<https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=rminnich@gmail.com>>
wrote:
> Larry, had Sun open sourced SunOS, as you fought so hard to make happen,
> Linux might not have happened as it did. SunOS was really good. Chalk up
> another win for ATT!
>
FWIW: I disagree. For details look at my discussion of rewriting Linux
in RUST
<https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linu…>
on quora. But a quick point is this .... Linux original took off (and was
successful) not because of GPL, but in spite of it and later the GPL would
help it. But it was not the GPL per say that made Linux vs BSD vs SunOS et
al.
What made Linux happen was the BSDi/UCB vs AT&T case. At the time, a
lot of hackers (myself included) thought the case was about *copyright*.
It was not, it was about *trade secret* and the ideas around UNIX. * i.e.*
folks like, we "mentally contaminated" with the AT&T Intellectual Property.
When the case came, folks like me that were running 386BSD which would
later begat FreeBSD et al, got scared. At that time, *BSD (and SunOS)
were much farther along in the development and stability. But .... may of
us hought Linux would insulate us from losing UNIX on cheap HW because
their was not AT&T copyrighted code in it. Sadly, the truth is that if
AT&T had won the case, *all UNIX-like systems* would have had to be removed
from the market in the USA and EU [NATO-allies for sure].
That said, the fact the *BSD and Linux were in the wild, would have made it
hard to enforce and at a "Free" (as in beer) price it may have been hard to
make it stick. But that it was a misunderstanding of legal thing that
made Linux "valuable" to us, not the implementation.
If SunOS has been available, it would not have been any different. It
would have been thought of based on the AT&T IP, but trade secret and
original copyright.
Clem
