10 Feb
2023
10 Feb
'23
4:22 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 09, 2023 at 08:07:45PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 6:30 PM segaloco via TUHS
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
It was the other way around.
"The original intent had been to call it the 5BSD release; however,
there were objections from AT&T that there would be customer confusion
between their commercial Unix release, System V, and a Berkeley release
named 5BSD. So, to resolve the issue, Berkeley agreed to change the
naming scheme for future releases to stay at 4BSD and just increment the
minor number."
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.html
The more I look at things, the more 5.0 appears
to actually be a minor
release compared to what all was going on in the 4.x era. From 4.1 to 5.0
So let's look at release dates:
4.2BSD released August 1983
4.3BSD released May 1986
System V released sometime in 1983 (so TS 5.0 was 1982 by convention?)
5.0 felt like a minor release... (even after TS 4.2) Sure sounds like it
was rebranded to 5.0 to avoid confusion with 4.2BSD which was released
around... as well as to have a '.0' zero feel to it but neatly avoiding
that by calling it V...
Anybody here know for sure? I have a vague memory of Dr McKusick mentioning
this off hand in one of his informal talks or maybe it was over dinner at a
conference...