16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
7:52 a.m.
Fair enough. But the original v6 Whitesmiths Idris was important and should be part of
your v6 slide. It establishes that some people were beginning to take a commercial
version of Unix seriously even if AT&T was not allowed too.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On Sep 15, 2019, at 9:42 PM, Warner Losh
<imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 12:25 AM Bakul Shah
<bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote:
On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 17:46:42 -0400 Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Cataloguing all the clones was out of scope for my talk... there are a huge number that
are known, and many more that aren't...
I likely could do a whole talk on just that...
Warner
> Thoth could not have been a clone of v6. It used message
> passing. More RPC than pipes. And it had "teams", where a
> "team" is roughly the same as a Unix process (separate address
> space) and a Thoth "process" was a thread in that address
> space. root was "*" (instead of "/") and current dir was
"@"
> (instead "."). A bigger difference was that it had *nodes* or
> files and any file can have sub nodes. There was no
> separation between files and directories.
>
> It was an interesting system and a lot of different things
> were tried in it. In 1980-81 timeframe AMD forked off a
> separate company called AMC to build microcomputers. They
> chose Thoth. I almost worked there but in the end decided I'd
> rather do unix and joined Fortune and soon after AMD came to
> its senses and shut AMC down.
>
> [1] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/1979/CS-79-19.pdf
>
> > As I mentioned before the first commercial user of UNIX was Rand
> > Corporation in LA. Al Arms of AT&T legal wrote the original $15K/CPU
> > license for them. I don't know how many of those licenses were made
> > available, but I've always been under the impression it was under 10.
Like
> > a lot of people at the time, this was when the 'glass tty' was just
showing
> > up in force and Rand updated/wrote a version of ed(1) called the rand(1)
> > editor [IIRC, its still available as the 'grand editor' from Dave
Yost].
>
> The Rand editor e had nothing in common with ed(1). e
> descended from NED, a 2D editor, invented by Ned Irons in 1967
> and described in "A CRT editing system" CACM Jan 1972.
>
> The "Grand editor", derived from e19 is long gone. Even Dave
> gave up on it long ago. Though you can find a separate
> version on the 'Net, also derived from e19. e with its
> multiple windows was a joy to use on a 60 line Ann Arbor
> Ambassador terminal. I use acme because it too is a tiling
> editor like e. It has some goodies not in e but overall e
> was a better experience.
>
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/rand/R-2176-ARPA_The_CRT_Text_Editor_NED_Dec77…
The first UNIX clone that I know about was a V6 version by Whitesmiths,
called Idris, I want to say in 1977/78. I believe that Michel's Gien's
Pascal clone that he talked about a year later started out as V6, but
morphed to V7 before he was done (and then later morphed again to become
Chorus in a C++ rewrote). Mike Malcolm's Thoth (which "Thucks" by the
way,
my wife threw out my tee-shirt years ago;-) was a pseudo V6 clone. I
Acc. to a paper[1] by Cheriton, Malcom and Melen did the
original small run time executive called Thoth. Cheriton
rewrote it to form the kernel of the system described in the
Feb 1979 CACM article. It used memory mapping, swapping. etc.
They also added a filesystem.