Right. That’s the V6 diff tape.
Yea. This copy looks like it has been applied and has the commentary on it. A rather nice find. There are a plethora of copies of v6 with changes here and there for bug fixes and new drivers.
The other nugget is that "many of the changes ... are in our own sources" suggesting they are in AUSAM since unsw was part of that effort...
I'll have to audit the diffs between v6.5 and v7...
I’m not sure where the story of it coming from Lou comes from (I’ve never heard that before to be honest).
Wikipedia :). It comes from our friend Warren:
Maybe he can say...
Warner
But the source for many of us was Kens trip to CA and the stop to see Chesson at U of I.
I don’t remember who gave it to us at CMU at the time but like copies of the Lions book there was an active underground in those days.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
> On Sep 30, 2019, at 10:54 PM, reed@reedmedia.net wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 30 Sep 2019, Warner Losh wrote:
>>
>> Ok. I know there was never a v6.5... officially. But there are several
>> references to that in different bits of the early user group news letters.
>> This refers to v6 plus all the patches that "leaked" out of bell Labs via
>> udel and Lou Katz.
>> My question?is,? have they survived? The story sure has, but I didn't find them
>> in the archive..?
>
> I think these are the same as what went other places too.
>
> See
> Archive/Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz
> unsw3/usr/sys/v6unix/ directory.
> has annotated changes and a diff
>
> (following from my writings...)
>
> In preparation to his year sabbatical, Thompson put together a Unix
> system to take. ``Since it was almost a release, I made a `diff' with
> V6. On the way to Berkeley, I stopped by Urbana-Champaign ... I left the
> `diff' tape there and ... [said] I wouldn't mind it if it got
> around.''\cite{salus2008}
>
> At the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, research assistant Mike
> O'Brien got a copy of the single-file diff (from Thompson directly). Its
> main purpose was to keep the Bell Labs systems from crashing. O'Brien
> went through it, diff by diff, and annotated it so others would have
> some idea of what it was what and whether they were
> useful.\cite{mikeobrien1}
>
> ...
>
> By the end of the summer, Haley and Joy began to explore the kernel
> internals. With Schriebman's observance, they installed the fixes
> and improvements provided on the ``fifty changes'' tape from Bell Labs.
> As they learned to maneuver through the kernel code, they suggested
> several small enhancements to streamline certain
> bottlenecks.\cite{mckusick85}
>