On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 1:33 PM, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

​.. 

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".

​Could be.... the "System III" manual cover I have says PWB 3.0​

I never had a 4.0 doc, although I saw it at some point.   

 

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.

​Making the outside and inside system in sync makes sense and I think I remember some of that.   But the name was definitely forced by the Marketing types in NC.  I somewhere have a memo that they sent to all licenses about the term UNIX and how it could be used and what could be called same.    It was clear that was all part of the UNIX wars and they were trying to make System xxx have some sort of halo. 

As a side note, what is funny is when it all went down, I remember having an argument with some of the Masscomp (and ex-DEC) marketing types.   The geeks (like me) just could not get through to them that what mattered was how it worked and what was inside (which BSD was pretty much superior technology by most accounts).   It was not that Sys III/V was bad, it was just unadorned and claiming it was cool and trying to give it a cool name was not going to make it cool.​

Around this time we came up with the Universes hack, so you can have it both ways; but our kernel was more BSD that AT&T.  

As I said, funny, because a few years later with Stellar, the same group of people would >>start<< with a System V kernel and fold in BSD interfaces as needed.  We wrote our own FS (which was UFS-externally - i.e. BSD user api) but kernel insides completely new (extent based, more like VMS).

We had decided that by then the AT&T code base was cleaner to make scale on a multiprocessor, as we had already lived the BSD MP nightmare once with the Masscomp kernel.     But the key was that even thought we used System V, we made darned sure the user mode API's (such as sockets, mmap, signals, namespaces etc) were the BSD APIs and that the BSD user code from UNIX and that VMS/FORTRAN sources would pretty much compile out of the box.

We were at that point targeting Sun, Apollo & VMS customers so we knew it name meant nothing, it was all about how easy it was going to be for the code recompile and "just work".

Back to the main point, AT&T Marketing was still chasing IBM at this time.  It was amazing to many of us watching the ship sink.   They really did not see where the future was and that they owned the SW technology that was going to dive it, but it was going to be sold to people other than whom IBM had traditionally sold.  They also made the fatal mistake of trying to grip it too tight and in doing so, it slipped through their fingers.

Clem