Re: [TUHS] BSD 4.1, 4.1x, Quasijarus, and 4.3x

4.2 was sockets. This was a huge change in network stack. It was also bust off the tape, we tried a unix domain socket binding and crashed the Vax. At that stage, we were using UUCP and cu heavily to do VMS-UNIX networking. When it settled down, much though I hated them, (I wanted the newcastle ... connection model to work, and then streams) sockets drove a lot of things. sockets became everything in some ways. the energy behind SunOS is NFS, and thats sockets. To me, noting some work on multi-core CPUs which fed into things, 4.3 onward is mostly about novel networking stacks. Its the side story to OS design, but the Van-Jacobsen work and related stuff by Sally Floyd, Alison Mankin and others looking into network dynamics and algorithms was huge. the IBM PC-RT became the fuzzball/BBN-Butterfly replacement in the NSFnet, run by Elise Gerich and others, Elise went on to be IANA after Jon Postel died. So the BSD-> IBM-PC/RT (BSD port) -> BGP story is huge in this. And .. It drives on sockets. BSD drove sockets drove NSFNet drove the explosive uptake of the network. Sockets sold machines. I don't entirely buy "off the rails" but I could believe the dynamic of the BSD workgroup and the surge in burden for not enough visible increment in benefit to Berkeley overall combined with the first pre-dotcom boom of Sun, Dec into the space probably drove people to seek salary and live outcomes better met in commerce. I didn't much get MT-XINU or the other breakout when the 386 port went live. an ISP I worked for used it, but frankly it was wierd. A Sun, pre Solaris was a more natural place to be for a BSD refugee. The dark side of this being Ingres. What happened there remains a bit shrouded to me, but I'm told a lot of dirty tricks went on. Kirk McKusick remained part of BSDs (V)FS story to this day. Others have become more occasional on the BSD lists but they are there, if they chose to remain silent, perhaps its because there's little upside to buying into the current debates. I didn't run BSD on any Vax after the 7 series, Maybe the effort to port to the later Vax-Cluster models was hard, but by then (looking backwards) DEC was already in Decline and Sun was spinning up to Solaris and the brave future of SYSV alignment hell. I had this wierd 2 floppy OS from some kid in northern europe, I mean FFS Andy Tannenbaum did tiny unix, who needs another one it doesn't have sockets it doesn't have anything. This linux thing will never work guys. We need more BSD. (worked out well, prognosticatiion-wise) DEC kind-of "got" networks but wierdly. They tried to sell UQueensland an entire campus of FDDI but we had to commit to buying 1000 linecards at a tiny discount. It was an insanely stupid idea. We stuck to thinwire and PCs with lightweight sockets stacks. Thats when two (2, I counted them) DECmate devices turned up and somebodys PA had to move over to them, hated them. The IBM Golfballs were much more heavily used. NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD can't agree on support for tabstop=4 and expandtabs in vi, and Python2 has just been deprecated EOL and Black rewrites tabs to 4 spaces. So I guess we can argue about that for some time yet. On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 7:35 AM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: