17 Jun
2022
17 Jun
'22
5:44 a.m.
Another take on this is Mike Lesk's saying "its easy to occupy a
vacuum its harder to push something aside" said of UUCP.
v7 exploded into the world, and made BSD and SunOS happen.
v8 and 9 and 10 had to work harder to get mindshare because something
was already there.
things like rc were too "confrontational" to a mind attuned to bourne
shell. Sockets (which btw, totally SUCK PUS) were coded into things
and even (YECHH) made POSIX and IETF spec status. Streams didn't stand
a chance.
basically, v7 succeeded too well, for v8/9/10 to get mindshare. I
agree it sucks they aren't documented, its just wrong: Serious OS
history needs to look beyond the narrow path in view. I'd say anyone
who doesn't write about them at length hasn't done their homework.
-G
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 9:18 AM George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
you're not wrong, but the other take on this is that the AT&T
licensing and some other things tended to make the circle of people
who could "see" this code significantly smaller than those feeding off
Unix 32V/v7 -> BSD -> Solaris.
this isn't meant to imply you did anything "wrong" -It was probably a
huge distraction having randoms begging for a tape of v8/9/10 with low
to no willingness to "give back"
-G
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 9:06 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Excited as I was to see this history of Unix code in a single repository:
>
> https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
>
> it continues the long-standing tradition of ignoring all the work done at Bell Labs
after v7. I consider v8 v9 v10 to be worth of attention, even influential, but to hear
this list talk about it - or discussions just about anywhere else - you'd think they
never existed. There are exceptions, but this site does reinforce the broadly known
version of the story.
>
> It's doubly ironic for me because people often mistakenly credit me for working
on Unix, but I landed at the Labs after v7 was long dispatched. At the Labs, I first
worked on what became v8.
>
> I suppose it's because the history flowed as this site shows, with BSD being
the driving force for a number of reasons, but it feels to me that a large piece of Unix
history has been sidelined.
>
> I know it's a whiny lament, but those neglected systems had interesting
advances.
>
> -rob
>