Re: [9fans] ports from GPL

[dmr@plan9.bell-labs.com]

Coile remarked

 > ...  I can see at least three different cultures.
 > Murry Hill (Bell Labs), 545 Technology Sq (MIT), and Berkeley.  These
 > cultures have belief systems that are mutually exclusive.  And there
 > must be subcultures as well.  The socket interface, for example, is
 > really MIT culture thru BBN to BSD.

There were two markedly different groups on different
floors of 545 Tech Sq:
the ITS crowd (emacs, eventually GNU), vs. CTSS then
Multics. Unix itself was influenced much more by the
second group.

I'm reasonably sure that the socket interface was Berkeley's.
BBN was tasked by ARPA to develop the TCP/IP stack for BSD,
but UCB's CSRG was quite resistant to incorporating the BBN
work in favor of their own.  This was the major subject of
several somewhat messy meetings of ARPA's BSD advisory board.
I no longer remember what the BBN ideas were for the
programming interface to networks; they may have contained
the germ of the socket scheme.

On the other hand, the --longoption convention (mod the -- vs -)
espoused by all recent GNU stuff is a reversion to Multics
conventions that were taken out of early Unix with its mostly 1-char
options, and which were generally followed by BSD.

	Dennis