21 May
2008
21 May
'08
5:20 p.m.
On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 07:08:51AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
It's important to remember that 1st, 2nd, 3rd,
... represent editions of
the *manual*, and that there is no guarantee that any particular
snapshot of the system corresponds exactly to what was in any particular
manual edition. Research Unix (as it was later called retrospectively)
was right up to the end a continuously evolving system, and the whole
concept of releases simply did not exist for it.
So when the CACM article was written, it probably specified what the
kernel was doing that particular day, without reference to any edition.
Yes, exactly right. That's always in the back of my mind, so sometimes I
forget to make it explicit. What I should have said that the CACM paper
possibly indicates that UNIX went through the stages:
"rwrw" + "x" ==> "rwxrwx" ==> "rwxrwxrwx"
sometime between the points in time known as 3rd and 4th Editions.
Thanks John,
Warren