Hello everyone, Sorry for being away from the list lately, the machine I was doing my E-mail on (harrier.Uznet.NET) has been down for several days, and I have to assume that it's down forever. I have moved my mail back to my old address <mxs46(a)k2.scl.cwru.edu>. If any of you have sent any mail to msokolov(a)harrier.Uznet.NET in the past several days, please resend it to mxs46(a)k2.scl.cwru.edu, since harrier.Uznet.NET is probably down forever and everything in my mailbox is lost. (I have recovered the missed pups mail via the archive.) Sorry for this screw-up, but it's not my fault, I'm not that machine's admin. (The admin is Stacy Minkin, whom I can't contact because his address is also obviously on that machine.) Sincerely, Michael Sokolov Cellular phone: 216-217-2579 ARPA Internet SMTP mail: mxs46(a)k2.scl.cwru.edu Received: (from major@localhost) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.1/8.9.1) id OAA16866 for pups-liszt; Thu, 7 Jan 1999 14:39:00 +1100 (EST) Received: from henry.cs.adfa.edu.au (henry.cs.adfa.oz.au [131.236.21.158]) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id OAA16861 for <pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au>; Thu, 7 Jan 1999 14:38:52 +1100 (EST) Received: (from wkt@localhost) by henry.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.1/8.9.1) id OAA27637 for pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au; Thu, 7 Jan 1999 14:39:39 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from wkt) From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)henry.cs.adfa.edu.au> Message-Id: <199901070339.OAA27637(a)henry.cs.adfa.edu.au> Subject: Re: V8's roots? (fwd) To: pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au (Unix Heritage Society) Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1999 14:39:39 +1100 (EST) Reply-To: wkt(a)cs.adfa.oz.au X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL43 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au Precedence: bulk ----- Forwarded message from dmr ----- I also got mail from Norman Wilson today about the discussion. This is mainly to confirm and fill out details of Wilson's account. The Eighth Edition system started with (I believe) BSD 4.1c and the work was done on VAX 11/750s -- our group did not get a 780 until a while later. Most of the operating system superstructure of BSD was retained (in particular no one (even the indefatigable Norman) wanted to get much into the paging code. Norman is also right that the competitor was John Reiser's (and Tom London's) 32V descendant from another group at the Labs. In structure this system had a lot to offer (in particular the buffer cache and the page pool were unified, but it was clear that their work was not being supported by their own management. It was used for a while on our first 750 and also our first 11/780 ("alice", a name that lives in netnews fame preceding the reach of Dejanews). The big change leading to V8 was the scooping-out and replacement of the character-device and networking part by the streams mechanism. Later, Peter Weinberger added the file-system switch that enabled remote file systems and prescient things ideas like /proc). Weinberger, as Norman said, also did a simple-minded FFS. The TCP/IP stack wasn't very important to us then and it has a mixed and murky history. Much of it came from early CSRG work, but it was converted to a streams approach by Robert Morris and subsequently fiddled over a lot. Likewise, as Norman said, the applications (/bin and whatnot) were somewhat of a mixture. Many were the locally-done versions, some were taken from BSD in some incarnation, some from System V. Dennis ----- End of forwarded message from dmr -----