It's interesting that this comment about ptrace was written
as early as 1980.
Indeed - that seems to be really strange. I wonder of the Man page was written later.
I don't know when Tom's code first went
live, but I first heard about it by seeing it in action on my first
visit to Bell Labs in early 1984, and it was described in public in
a talk at the Summer 1984 USENIX conference in Salt Lake City.
Ditto. The 84 paper was the first I knew about it but ....
It's possible Tom was messing with it before then. Joy spent a couple of Summers in NJ but I've forgotten when. But if it was being talked about/prototyped in the summer of '79, he might have known by 1980. But I find that unlikely.
I really don't remember people going /proc crazy until after the '84 paper.
The other minor thing missing was the VFS/File System Switch layer. Peter had not put FSS into Research 8.
What I don't remember is which came first Peter's work for Tom. The RFS guys would use Peter's work for V.3. I used it something similar for EFS after reading about it and the NFS/EFS are '85 USENIX. Somebody at Sun did VFS, which was better than FSS, although later we came to conclusion both had advantages and disadvantages and a true i-node interposition layer was best so you could really want to do FS stacking. But by that time, the damage was done, and people had gone FS crazy. Since Sun gave away NFS and Peter's work was tied up in either Research 8 or V.3 (i.e. AT&T licensing), VFS won.