Regarding select, I recall that Dennis implemented it
and passed it to
Berkeley*, but maybe not. He certainly had a hand in its design; I
distinctly remember talking to him about it after one of his trips out
west.
That is an interesting comment. DMR was on the steering committee for what would become
4.2BSD.
I once spoke with Kirk McKusick about the origins of the sockets API and I think he told
me that there was a lot of debate in the committee whether descriptor readiness API should
be stateful (like Haverty’s await()
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6/ken/awaitr.c ) or stateless (like
select). According to Sam Leffler (who I think added select() to 4.1c BSD) the select
system call was somewhat modelled after the ADA select statement.
I am speculating now, but I would not be surprised if dmr favoured the stateless design
and contributed to its design.
Paul