30 Mar
2020
30 Mar
'20
9:43 a.m.
On 29 Mar 2020, at 23:48, Rob Pike
<robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I have a dog in the fight, having joined in June 1980, but that is not
a coincidence. The period of 1980-1982 was a big one for 127 (soon
1127) as they were finally given the chance to grow, and I was one of
the lucky early hires in that burst. New blood brought in new ideas
and things happened fast.
I had not realised that the Research group expanded in 1980, but it fits.
It was also the time of the VAX; the center's
11/780 arrived in late
1980 I think, maybe early 1981.
I did realise that bit, and it made me wonder if the ’73 burst was in part driven by the
arrival of a 11/45.
Our first experiments with graphical terminals spanned
1980 to early 1981,
Yes, as you may remember from this list I dove into that last November - schematics, tools
& firmware.
using Greg Chesson's mux,
Chesson’s MPX files remain a puzzle piece that is somewhat difficult to fit in the overall
story, having so many aspects. It sits between Rand ports and SysIII fifo’s, experiments
with non-blocking I/O, has aspects of pseudo-terminals, etc. I have not been able to
figure out what immediate need they served, unless it was used in the first generation
Datakit software (as MPX precedes the Jerq, that cannot have been the immediate need.)
but by late 1981 we were using Dennis's streams
(only STREAMS when
they went to USG) and the select system call, which was by then running
in a merged Berkeley/Research Unix that eventually became the Eighth
Edition.
To be honest, late 1981 sounds a bit too early for the merge. The 4.1 code was ready in
June 1981 and the ’select’ system call was first proposed in July 1981, so it is possible.
However, in the BSD line ’select’ was not fully implemented until March/April 1982.
It is certainly possible, even likely, that ‘streams’ date from 1981 or earlier. Networks
don’t mesh well with TTY line disciplines and clist buffering - that pain will have become
apparent already in 1979. Maybe it was among the first things to be fixed when the VAX
arrived.
My notebooks can probably lock down a lot of this as I
was a prolific
note-taker back then, when they still made paper.
If someday you have time for this, it would be much appreciated!
Paul