20 Dec
2022
20 Dec
'22
7:20 a.m.
I forget if I've mentioned this here before, so apologies in advance.
I never met Reiser, but I ran across his PhD thesis (for Knuth!). It was 35 pages (!) on
random number generators. I implemented one for my own work. It was pretty clear he was
one of those people who is smarter than the rest of us.
-Larry
On Dec 19, 2022, at 6:03 PM, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 4:20 PM Rob Pike
<robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Quite a bit of this feels not exactly wrong, but not quite right. (And his name is John
Reiser, not Reisner.)
Thank you. Never assume I will get spelling right ;-)
Steve Johnson didn't go to work in
development until the mid 1980s, for example, long after these bloodlines as you call them
were laid down.
Yes, I know. I did not mean to imply this -- only that we have
discussed much of this and Steve has offered comments as a manager.
Do we know that PWB became USG? That doesn't feel right to me, although it might
well be true, I wasn't there.
I was not either, although very close friends
with a few that were. My old lab partner in hacking, the late Ted Kowalski and Armando
Stettner were officemates in Summit in USG in the late 1970s - who are the primary sources
of data I have from that time. Mashey is the other (and I think we have an old email
from John in the archives).
The problem you are getting too is exactly what I was referring BTW. It was not a
straight line.
Some facts ... PWB 1.0 was created and release before USG would be created. Again look
at the old messages here. What I don't know is who packaged PWB 2.0 -- I was under
the impression that was still Mashey et al (as you said Whippany a few other NJ labs -
although the USG folks must have just been created).
IIRC the kernel in PWB 2.0 and V7 are close, but not the same and definitely the
userspaces are different.
TS starts to could thing, and the best I personally can tell (again from old message from
Ted Armando et al), at some point TS was being created - maybe around 1978ish. How much
of V7 went into TS and vice versa - is not clear. So far, I do not believe we have found
a definitive TS 'distribution' - but a number of things seem to be a part.
Werner I think can add the most color here, as he researched it., a bit more than I did.
Again, the best, I can tell is that something approximating TS 1.0 was created (in Summit
>>I believe<<) and it had a common kernel with V7. Who got it and how it was
distributed it not completely understood -- again AT&T politics, the consent decree et
al, all mix this up.
Tick, tick, tick ... Judge Green does his thing ...
PWB 3.0 was released to the OCs at some point. During a discussions AT&T NC (Al
Arms et al) had with customers (like me), we had memos created by USG that are marked PWB
3.0 that discussed what was going to be in the release. AT&T North Carolina (the
lawyers and marketing folks) gave them to us. I personally was part of the negotiation
associated with that license had a few of those memos at one point. They were clearly
marked PWB 3.0 and were originally created the OCs distribution.
AT&T was now in the computer market and the marketing/sales types and did not like
the name Programmmer Workbench - when going against IBM [who was clearly the target]. It
was also made clear to us (commercial UNIX licensees) that whatever was produced, would
not be the named PWBct when the AT&T Marketing folks released it publically -- it
seems to me that they were working trademarking in parallel with the pricing/licensing
negotiation that I was a part.
I >>believe<< that is why the manuals were printed saying 3.0 - but Summit
did not yet know what the name would be - although they did release PWB 3.0 inside of the
Bell System. Eventually, the name 'System III' was picked by AT&T NC and
the marketing blitz started -- "Consider it standard," etc..
FWIW: John Mashey is the source of the comment about PWB bloodline begets Summits work.
I think of it as mostly staying in Whippany, not
going to Summit. Also your prose would imply USG never got to V7 level, which is certainly
not true.
Not at all. I was not trying to imply that in any way.
Columbus's major contribution, as we saw it
from Research, was the world's second most complex init.
systemd was yet to be
created ;-)
All these variants lobbied to have Research adopt
things, as such approval was seen as a badge of honor. Honestly, though, it was all pretty
toxic.
That is the impression I had.
Reiser and London's Unix, which I greatly admired, died on the vine for a variety of
political reasons, as well as because it had slightly different semantics in some
important cases, and because of a broad antipathy to virtual memory across the company due
to various people having used VM on inadequate hardware, and of course then there was
Multics.
Again - that syncs with my comments and my memory of the time.
Sandy Fraser was very nervous about Research
adopting the BSD kernel because of his experience with Atlas. But let it be said:
Reiser's VM system was seriously impressive, cleanly integrated, structurally
central, and wonderfully fast.
I never ran it, but that does seem to be the
report.
Question for you Rob ... SVR3 was a rewrite the memory system from earlier things called
'System V'. Do you know if any of Reiser's stuff make it into that or was
SVR3 a new stream altogether and who did it? Tom Bishop lead me to believe that some of
Reiser's stuff was imported into the SSI system they did in IH. But again what went
where and who did what has never been clearly understood.
And that was my point -- there was never a linear progression.
And Sandy relented but the general warmth of 1127
towards Berkeley led to Research adopting Berkeley Unix as its VAX VM platform, despite
some, including myself, feeling that was the inferior choice.
Indeed and not the
first time we have heard that said here.
ᐧ