2 Feb
2017
2 Feb
'17
12:33 a.m.
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Note that AT&T Marketing renames PWB 3.0 -- System
III thinking that
"Programmer's Workbench" would be a bad name to sell against IBM, and
this
it the first non-research system for License outside of the the labs. If
you look at the documentation set, et al - it all says PWB 3.0 on the cover
and throughout Also, the BSD vs AT&T wars basically start around this
time....
Roll the clock forward and here is an new problem the PWB 4.0 moniker was
used internally, but AT&T marketing want to get rid of the PWB term - so
the decree comes down the next release is to be called System V.
Sort of. I did some contract work for Southern Bell circa 1983. They
were still part of the Bell System then. I worked on a PDP-11 running
Unix 4.0. At the time, the policy was to release externally one version
behind what was being run internally, so System III was released to the
world while the Bell System was using Unix 4.0. I still have the manual;
I'm pretty sure "PWB" and "Programmer's Workbench" are not
on the cover,
it was just called "UNIX".
As UNIX 5.0 was approaching, someone decided that to be one release
behind on the outside was dumb, thus the jump from System III to System V.
The doc I have describes UNIX as an operating system for the PDP-11,
the VAX 11/780 *and* the IBM S/370 series of systems and the source
code directory had the machine dependent bits for the IBM. Too bad
that stuff never made it out.
It's too bad that all I have is just the paper, but that's all I
could get.
That was a fun job, I learned a lot. Over lunch every day I read a few
more pages of the manual, basically reading it from cover to cover
by the time I was done. What a great way to learn the system!
Arnold