16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
5:35 a.m.
I’m very aware it was message passing. I’ve run it. I’ve spoken to mike about it. They
definitely had seen v6. But as I said I’m not so sure it was a clone. Again they used B
which was popular at Waterloo at the time.
Thanks for the update on the relationship between Ned and rand’s e. I had thought they
used Ed as part of it. I saw Dave earlier this summer btw and he said he still gets
asked about it. Although he’s working a new hw architecture to fill his days.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On Sep 15, 2019, at 7:25 PM, Bakul Shah
<bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote:
On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 17:46:42 -0400 Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
The first UNIX clone that I know about was a V6 version by Whitesmiths,
called Idris, I want to say in 1977/78. I believe that Michel's Gien's
Pascal clone that he talked about a year later started out as V6, but
morphed to V7 before he was done (and then later morphed again to become
Chorus in a C++ rewrote). Mike Malcolm's Thoth (which "Thucks" by the
way,
my wife threw out my tee-shirt years ago;-) was a pseudo V6 clone. I
Acc. to a paper[1] by Cheriton, Malcom and Melen did the
original small run time executive called Thoth. Cheriton
rewrote it to form the kernel of the system described in the
Feb 1979 CACM article. It used memory mapping, swapping. etc.
They also added a filesystem.
Thoth could not have been a clone of v6. It used message
passing. More RPC than pipes. And it had "teams", where a
"team" is roughly the same as a Unix process (separate address
space) and a Thoth "process" was a thread in that address
space. root was "*" (instead of "/") and current dir was
"@"
(instead "."). A bigger difference was that it had *nodes* or
files and any file can have sub nodes. There was no
separation between files and directories.
It was an interesting system and a lot of different things
were tried in it. In 1980-81 timeframe AMD forked off a
separate company called AMC to build microcomputers. They
chose Thoth. I almost worked there but in the end decided I'd
rather do unix and joined Fortune and soon after AMD came to
its senses and shut AMC down.
[1] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/1979/CS-79-19.pdf
As I mentioned before the first commercial user
of UNIX was Rand
Corporation in LA. Al Arms of AT&T legal wrote the original $15K/CPU
license for them. I don't know how many of those licenses were made
available, but I've always been under the impression it was under 10. Like
a lot of people at the time, this was when the 'glass tty' was just showing
up in force and Rand updated/wrote a version of ed(1) called the rand(1)
editor [IIRC, its still available as the 'grand editor' from Dave Yost].
The Rand editor e had nothing in common with ed(1). e
descended from NED, a 2D editor, invented by Ned Irons in 1967
and described in "A CRT editing system" CACM Jan 1972.
The "Grand editor", derived from e19 is long gone. Even Dave
gave up on it long ago. Though you can find a separate
version on the 'Net, also derived from e19. e with its
multiple windows was a joy to use on a 60 line Ann Arbor
Ambassador terminal. I use acme because it too is a tiling
editor like e. It has some goodies not in e but overall e
was a better experience.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/rand/R-2176-ARPA_The_CRT_Text_Editor_NED_Dec77…