From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 16:38:17 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: It depends a lot on when. For pure research V7 / 2BSD / 4BSD that was true. You can give the install.ms from these releases as a reference. It was a lot more daunting than today, and often times only bug fixes warranted a recompile. You can find references in the 2.11BSD patch series to the 'annual recompilation of the sources' which Steve did and where he'd always find something. However, after that, everything was binaries. The kernel you got was a bunch of .o files (even for the V7 ports), though often you had all the source to the drivers (but not the core of the kernel). I have said files for Venix, though there it was an extra cost option it seems (I say seems, since I've not found a price sheet for it from the era, though I have the disks). DEC's ultrix was binary. Sun's SunOS. All the Unisoft ports to 68k machines. Sony's NEWS workstations likewise. HP's unix offerings too. Sure, you could get a source license, sometimes, but they kept those expensive. IBM and VMS were always binary only (though again, you could buy source if you had the right amount of $$$ and leverage). So I'm not sure what old days you were talking about, or which machines.... The BSD build.sh and/or make world were a bit of an anomaly imho. Once Linux got distributions the whole notion of building it yourself faded somewhat. Warner On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 4:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the > comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for > a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, > and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > Greg > -- > Sent from my desktop computer. > Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. > See complete headers for address and phone numbers. > This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program > reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: