30 Mar
2020
30 Mar
'20
3:06 p.m.
I've looked through my notes and unfortunately there's very little
about this as the notes are mostly about graphics and physics.
You're right I was a little early above, but the "merge" was not an
event. It was a process that went on for months, years even.
Dennis wrote the select we used, I'm almost certain of that. We (he
and I) talked about its design at the time, after a trip he made to
Berkeley about the DARPA Stuff. He had had many discussions with the
BSD work going on and wanted to couple it to the streams work to make
my graphical multiplexer work. Mpx was killing me (and killing the
kernel), but I'm nearly certain that I was using select (with our form
of pseudo-ttys) before or by very early 1982. I'm all but certain; we
gave up on mpx(2) very early.
Streams came later; Dennis's Show and Tell about them was early in 1982.
I'm not sure, but we may have booted London & Reiser's VAX port first,
but we moved to Berkeley code pretty early. We (Dennis mostly, but
others) were talking to Berkeley often. We didn't just wait for a
release; we were a part (not sure I could say now how important, but a
part) of it from early on.
-rob
On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 6:44 PM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
On 29 Mar 2020, at 23:48, Rob Pike
<robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I have a dog in the fight, having joined in June 1980, but that is not
a coincidence. The period of 1980-1982 was a big one for 127 (soon
1127) as they were finally given the chance to grow, and I was one of
the lucky early hires in that burst. New blood brought in new ideas
and things happened fast.
I had not realised that the Research group expanded in 1980, but it fits.
It was also the time of the VAX; the
center's 11/780 arrived in late
1980 I think, maybe early 1981.
I did realise that bit, and it made me wonder if the ’73 burst was in part driven by the
arrival of a 11/45.
Our first experiments with graphical terminals
spanned 1980 to early 1981,
Yes, as you may remember from this list I dove into that last November - schematics,
tools & firmware.
using Greg Chesson's mux,
Chesson’s MPX files remain a puzzle piece that is somewhat difficult to fit in the
overall story, having so many aspects. It sits between Rand ports and SysIII fifo’s,
experiments with non-blocking I/O, has aspects of pseudo-terminals, etc. I have not been
able to figure out what immediate need they served, unless it was used in the first
generation Datakit software (as MPX precedes the Jerq, that cannot have been the immediate
need.)
but by late 1981 we were using Dennis's
streams (only STREAMS when
they went to USG) and the select system call, which was by then running
in a merged Berkeley/Research Unix that eventually became the Eighth
Edition.
To be honest, late 1981 sounds a bit too early for the merge. The 4.1 code was ready in
June 1981 and the ’select’ system call was first proposed in July 1981, so it is possible.
However, in the BSD line ’select’ was not fully implemented until March/April 1982.
It is certainly possible, even likely, that ‘streams’ date from 1981 or earlier. Networks
don’t mesh well with TTY line disciplines and clist buffering - that pain will have become
apparent already in 1979. Maybe it was among the first things to be fixed when the VAX
arrived.
My notebooks can probably lock down a lot of this
as I was a prolific
note-taker back then, when they still made paper.
If someday you have time for this, it would be much appreciated!
Paul