On 30/03/2016 17:25, Marc Rochkind wrote:

What do you mean by "early"? All of my early work was done under my
login "marc", and in those days to email we just typed:

% mail marc

Email was internal to the system. Email between machines came along later.

Also, I don't think we ever used the word "commit." Actually, much of my
early work predated the introduction of SCCS. ;-)

I should have been more clear. The Unix history Git repository contains synthetic commits imported from snapshots, patches, SCCS, CVS, and Git files. I took the liberty of attaching the email ID@research.uucp on all Bell Labs commits, even though many predate UUCP email.

Your SCCS work belongs to the mysterious subset of Bell Labs commands that made their first public appearance on BSD Unix. I didn't find SCCS included in the 6th or 7th Research Edition, nor in Unix 32/V, which, I understand, were the ancestors of BSD.

Specifically, I first find SCCS included in the BSD-4 snapshot (e.g. usr.bin/sccs/sccs.c) and also in the BSD SCCS repositories predating BSD-4, through commits such as the following.

commit 20f9634be56fa471a34bc386dcc4c04f9587791d
Author: Eric Allman <eric@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue May 13 07:23:29 1980 -0800

changed path to SCCS/s.
added chghist & help
generalized argument chomping

SCCS-vsn: 1.2


Other commands that fall into this category include fsck (frodo), gres (lem), efl (sif), diction (llc), and ideal (cvw). Somebody has commented on this list that a secret tunnel linked Murray Hill and Berkeley. I'd welcome any better explanations you may have.


I'll find a way to graft you as the developer of SCCS somewhere between BSD3 and BSD4, so please do claim marc@research.uucp on GitHub.  Are there other files I should also attribute to you?


Diomidis