3 Jan
2004
3 Jan
'04
5:53 a.m.
norman(a)nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson) wrote:
You mean you've restored the original version of
cat that had only one option,
[...]
Notice my use of the words "nearly" and "almost" in the part you
responded to.
Seriously though, you gotta agree that until 4.3BSD inclusive, Berkeley was
basically adding to and extending V7. Sure they added a *lot* and extended
many of the existing facilities, but with very few exceptions, it was all
additive, virtually no V7 facility (except the mpx you mentioned) was removed.
Yes, they added fsck, but icheck is still there! (No one uses it of course,
but knowing that nobody removed it gives a warm fuzzy feeling.) The same goes
for almost everything else.
Here is the acid test: time-teleport a V7 user from 1979 to a VAX running
4.3BSD, set PATH=/bin:/usr/bin (no /usr/ucb), do stty old (old tty driver) and
stty ek (erase # kill @) and see if he feels at home or not.
Of course I never use my systems in this way, I make extensive use of Berkeley
UNIX facilities, but I like it much better to use a system that is additive
rather than substitutive with respect to Original UNIX.
MS