> To call this joint is complete nonsense. Â Sun was in a cash bind, AT&T
> wanted to make SVR4 the main Unix platform and SunOS was winning. Â The
> story I heard, not widely known, is that AT&T bought a big pile of Sun
> stock at 35% over market - in return for which Sun had to dump their BSD
> based SunOS and go to SVR4.
>
> Biggest mistake Sun ever made in my opinion.
"Sun has helped spark a major controversy within the UNIX community
that may have split it into different directions.
The controversy began to heat up in October 1987, when AT&T announced
that it would license Sun's SPARC architecture as the basis for AT&T
computer systems. Furthermore, said AT&T, it was going to collaborate
with Sun to develop a UNIX "standard" that would eliminate
deficiencies in the operating system--such as lack of features for
commercial applications--and be compatible at the binary level across
the entire SPARC architecture.
Not surprisingly, other companies in the UNIX Community smelled
incipient monopolistic practices that would give AT&T and Sun an
unqualified advantage in the UNIX market. These moves would
effectively make the Sun/AT&T-developed System V and SPARC proprietary
standards controlled by the two companies. This perception was
bolstered in January 1988, when AT&T announced that it had agreed to
purchase 20 percent of Sun by buying shares, in amounts and at times
determined by Sun, at 25 percent above current market value."
[Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems, p. 112-113]
> Contrary to a lot of the distant opinions here,
> SVr4 was actually a joint project between USL
> (the AT&T commercial-UNIX organization) and Sun.
> The intent was to bring together the two different
> commercial-UNIX cults (what Stu Feldman once referred
> to as Sunni and Shiite UNIX).
>
> I was at Bell Labs while this was going on, but
> well off to the side of the effort, in a research
> group where we tended (foolishly) to look down
> our noses a bit at the whole thing. I do know that
> there were a lot of ruffled feathers within USL
> about the allegedly overbearing Sun guys, and it
> wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that there
> were similar feelings going the other way. On
> the other hand there were some pretty smart
> people involved at a technical level on all
> sides.
>
> Certainly it wasn't a one-way street, with BSD-isms
> being injected into a USG system or vice versa.
>
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
Thanks, Norman. This clarify a lot my confusion about SysV.
I'm reading the J. Lions Commentary to V6 UNIX, the ancestor of all
UNIXes, including SysV (if I understood correctly). The last Research
Unix release was Tenth Edition Unix. Is the source code of
releases 8, 9 and 10 available? Are there other commentaries of ancient
Research Unixes, like Lions book?
Thanks,
--Michele
P.S. to Cyrille: Again, my apologies for the confusion. I realized my
mistake just after I sent the mail. I'm really sorry!
Mahlzeit,
some years after losing my MO drive and unable to access my
PUPS copy I would like to redownload it before it perhaps
vanishes. I have forgotten my access data. I believe it was
with rsync. And with all the borken links on the website and
the time going by I am not sure what the current status is.
Is Warren still here? His last posting was from April last year.
Mahlzeit,
Matthias
--
kitty mea felis duodeviginti annos nata requiescat in pace.
laeta gaudiumque meum erat. desiderio eius angor.
Contrary to a lot of the distant opinions here,
SVr4 was actually a joint project between USL
(the AT&T commercial-UNIX organization) and Sun.
The intent was to bring together the two different
commercial-UNIX cults (what Stu Feldman once referred
to as Sunni and Shiite UNIX).
I was at Bell Labs while this was going on, but
well off to the side of the effort, in a research
group where we tended (foolishly) to look down
our noses a bit at the whole thing. I do know that
there were a lot of ruffled feathers within USL
about the allegedly overbearing Sun guys, and it
wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that there
were similar feelings going the other way. On
the other hand there were some pretty smart
people involved at a technical level on all
sides.
Certainly it wasn't a one-way street, with BSD-isms
being injected into a USG system or vice versa.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
There is a somewhat modern port of V6 to the 286, which is in the archive (http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/Other/V6on286/) There is also a modern x86 port of V7 available at http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/ This one is more interesting as it aims to run in modern machines and includes a bootable CD image.
Best regards,
Sergio Aguayo
----- Mensaje original -----
De: "Michele Ghisolfo" <ghisolfo.m(a)gmail.com>
Para: "Sergio Aguayo" <sergioag(a)qmailhosting.net>
Enviados: Lunes, 11 de Julio 2011 7:02:37
Asunto: Re: [TUHS] SVR4 x86 -- Sources
On Mon, 2011-07-11 at 08:50 -0400, Sergio Aguayo wrote:
> If you're reading the Lion's book, better get Unix V6 from the archive. SVR4 is quite different in many aspects.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Sergio Aguayo
I got them, but they work on PDP-11. I'd like to see an version of Unix
working on Intel x86. As far as I know, SVR4 was the first Unix working
on this architecture.
If I recall correctly Unix V6 was only ported on Interdata 7/32
computers. I'd like to get the sources of a small Unix kernel working
on x86.
Has anyone ported Unix V6 on x86?
Thanks for your replies,
-- Michele
All, several years back Mike Mahoney interviewed several of the original
Unix players for a Unix oral history. The transcripts are at:
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/
At the time AT&T were going to release these in audio format, but it seems
to have fizzled out. Does anybody know if the audio interviews ever got out?
The transcripts are fine, but in places they show "(unclear)" when a word
or name is used, and of course it's exactly that name you want to find out.
Many thanks for any leads.
Warren
> All, IEEE Spectrum have asked me to write a paper on Unix to celebrate the
> 40th anniversary of the release of 1st Edition in November 1971. I'm after
> ideas & suggestions!
of course this quote is always good for a chuckle:
Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were
redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Thompson]
and I always liked this quote from Linus Torvalds:
On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Rik van Riel wrote:
> The real issue here is paradigms. The classical "everything's
> a file" broke down with the advent of networking, sockets and
> non-blocking reads. At the moment the file paradigm is so much
> out of touch with computational reality that web servers need
> to fork for each client and people are crying out for asynchronous
> sendfile and other weird interfaces.
Sure. But I think it's still a valid paradigm to consider "everything is a
stream of bytes". And that's _really_ what the UNIX paradigm has been from
the first: the whole notion of pipes etc is not all that different from
networking.
[http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/7bcbbfeaea2b93c9?hl=en&d…]
> I'm also trying to chase down some quotes; my memory seems to be failing me
> but I'm sure I've seen these somewhere:
ugh..my memory is failing too at the moment. I'm sure I once read a
nice rant of sorts about how Unix has proven to be of sound design
that has adapted well to changes in the computing landscape...
Anyone remember picasso, a vector graphics GUI app
that generated pic(1) source?
I know nothing of it, anyone got a screenshot even?
is the source available?
was its frontend X11 or blit terminal?
Was it related to the blit cip and xcip tools
or are they a different genus?
Thanks for any info.
-Steve
