3 May
2020
3 May
'20
4:21 a.m.
Doug's list is slightly off:
adb v7-v10
sdb v8-v10
sdb may actually have been in V7; I'm quite sure
it was present in 32/V. But it's not in the V7
manual.
adb and sdb were certainly working fine when I
arrived in 1127, but they still used ptrace
because nobody wanted to touch the code. I used
adb quite often (still would were it available
in modern worlds!), so I cared enough to take
it over, restructuring it quite a bit to make it
easier to retarget for different instruction
sets and byte orders, and of course to use /proc.
I also made some trivial, compatible changes to
how numbers were read and printed to conform to
Rob's Rule (of which I am also a fan) that what
a program presents as output it should also
accept as input.
sdb I wasn't as fond of, but I did want to get
rid of ptrace, so I tinkered it just enough to
accomplish that.
I do remember clearly celebrating the death of
ptrace by removing ptrace(2) from the copy of the
V8 manual in the UNIX Room. It took up two
pages, and they happened to be facing pages,
so I glued them together.
I wish it was as easy for others to have such
satisfaction these days.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON