One of my co-workers, Serge Vakulenko, just gave me a small gift -- a 1 x 2 inch computer chip that runs a version of BSD Unix, complete with compilers and editors. It's powered by the USB port and you connect with it at 115200 baud (10,000 x faster than a model 33 TTY!). It has a surprisingly big file system and 128K of RAM, half of which is given to the system. There are lots of BSD games, including a game of Go Fish that I wrote for my son over 50 years ago. It was interesting to me to look at that early C code. I was surprised at the nonzero number of gotos (5).
The source is on https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd/blob/master/src/games/fish.c if you are interested...
For extra credit, see if you can find the bug that Serge found in this 50-year-old code, and figure out how the program seems to work OK anyway (Hint: type mismatch). There clearly was a good reason to invent Lint and declarations and header files...
Steve
PS: if you'd like a look at the chip, google PIC32-RETROBSD. The CPU is a MIPS microcontroller.
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Larry McVoy" <lm@mcvoy.com>
To:
"Richard Salz" <rich.salz@gmail.com>
Cc:
"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Sent:
Wed, 11 Sep 2019 11:54:18 -0700
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] PWB vs Unix/TS
On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 02:18:08PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote:
> >
> > It would have been
> > much better if Sun had licensed their source base to AT&T and then
> > AT&T could have leveraged the industry standard.
>
>
> Interesting to speculate if that would have sped up the creation of OSF or
> delayed/prevented it. I think the former.
You're probably right but it wouldn't have mattered. SunOS was very popular
and had a good VM system with a working mmap. Once it became official
AT&T source everyone would have moved to it over time.
Sort of obvious in retrospect. Nobody, that I know of, considered it at
the time. I proposed open sourcing it.