On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 8:51 PM, William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com> wrote:
I can’t believe this is a latent defect.
Oh I can... SVR1 was not run on 16 bit machines that much I suspect. By the time SVR1 came on the scene, the VAX and
68K were the primary UNIX systems. AT&T was pushing the 3B but except for the Telco's not getting much luck.
I'd look at the C runtime library. I bet there is a overflow. IIRC: The BSD compiler (and Research) compilers used a different buffering scheme
that the Summit folks did - Steve may remember the argument (I only remember because I ran into that squirmish a few years early when the my thesis work was causing an strange error in the BSD runtime - I found and fixed it and mentioned it to Dennis who had the same problem in the V8 compiler at that time).
The point is that 'standard' system in Summit by this time was likely to been a 3B and Vaxen (i.e. 32 bit) and if there was something that was assuming a 32 bit int in the runtime and it ran on PDP-11, it could easily have not been tested.