On 28/08/19, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
There is some contemporary material that gives a bit of context. The quotes are a bit
contradictory and perhaps reflect evolving views.
[1]
The original dmr paper (1984) on streams (
http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/st.html) seems
to support the no networking view, focussing on terminal handling in its discussion. Also,
near the end it says: "Streams are linear connections; by themselves, they support no
notion of multiplexing, fan-in or fan-out. [...] It seems likely that a general
multiplexing mechanism could help in both cases, but again, I do not yet know how to
design it.” This seems to exclude usage for networking, which is typically multiplexed.
[2]
However, now that the V8 sources are available it is clear that the streams mechanism was
used (by dmr?) to implement TCP/IP networking. He explains how that tallies with the above
quote on multiplexing in a 1985 usenet post:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/net.unix-wizards/subject$3A…
The config files in the surviving TUHS V8 source tree actually match with the setup that
dmr described in the penultimate paragraph.
Something else I found interesting is in v8's blit/Road.map:
"Next, operating systems. We run under Berkeley 4.1bsd or Dennis Ritchie's
stacked line-discipline system."
That sounds to me like an early v8. If not, what was it? I'm really
interested in the timeline here. How long was research running on a
PDP-11 and when did they move to a VAX?
aap