Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org> wrote:
Joerg Schilling:
Interesting that they created a name clash:
"p" was the name of a pager on UNOS, the first realtime
UNIX lookalike from former AT&T employees.
=====
p was something Rob Pike brought when he arrived in
1980. I believe he wrote its first version several
years earlier, when he was at the University of Toronto.
The timestamp for p.c in V8 is:
May 30 06:56 1983
Do you have a link to verify that it has been created earlier?
Since UNOS dates from 1981 (says Wikipedia), I think
Rob's p gets precedence.
p from UNOS was written by Jeff Goldberg in 1981 or 1982.
Not that it matters. There never was, nor should
there
ever have been, some global register of UNIX command
names during its formative years. UNIX was a research
platform and a living work-in-progress until it became
productized in the latter part of the 1980s.
Well, in practice people managed this problem nicely.
The annoying name clashes I am aware of are less than 20 years old.
And, of course, UNOS was a lookalike written from
scratch.
It wasn't UNIX. If it wanted to be, it should have
adopted Rob's p!
Well, if Rob's p existed before and was available as OSS.....
The background for UNOS in it's first glance was that Jeff Goldberg wanted to
rewrite UNIX from scratch in less than a year. I believe, he did a pretty good
job.
BTW: UNOS has been sold to real customers from it's beginning. Was UNIX V8
available outside AT&T?
Jörg
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