17 Jun
2022
17 Jun
'22
5:18 a.m.
you're not wrong, but the other take on this is that the AT&T
licensing and some other things tended to make the circle of people
who could "see" this code significantly smaller than those feeding off
Unix 32V/v7 -> BSD -> Solaris.
this isn't meant to imply you did anything "wrong" -It was probably a
huge distraction having randoms begging for a tape of v8/9/10 with low
to no willingness to "give back"
-G
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 9:06 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Excited as I was to see this history of Unix code in a single repository:
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
it continues the long-standing tradition of ignoring all the work done at Bell Labs after
v7. I consider v8 v9 v10 to be worth of attention, even influential, but to hear this list
talk about it - or discussions just about anywhere else - you'd think they never
existed. There are exceptions, but this site does reinforce the broadly known version of
the story.
It's doubly ironic for me because people often mistakenly credit me for working on
Unix, but I landed at the Labs after v7 was long dispatched. At the Labs, I first worked
on what became v8.
I suppose it's because the history flowed as this site shows, with BSD being the
driving force for a number of reasons, but it feels to me that a large piece of Unix
history has been sidelined.
I know it's a whiny lament, but those neglected systems had interesting advances.
-rob