1 May
2022
1 May
'22
5:56 p.m.
The folks at Bell Labs were asked to figure out if Mark Williams had copied
Unix directly or via too much knowledge already obtained, or whether it was
truly a clean room recreation. I don't remember all the details, but it
became clear after a while that it was indeed a reasonably clean rewrite.
This was done by looking for corner cases that were an accident of the
original implementation and would be unlikely to appear in a version
created separately. One detail that did stick with me was the discovery
during this process that ppt, the paper tape simulator, mispunched a
letter, I think "R", but the Mark Williams version did not. Was that
compelling? Not on its own, but it was funny and memorable.
-rob
On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 9:46 PM Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC
many years ago.
On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin
<andreww591(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
actually the first.