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Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2019 23:14:01 -0500 (EST)
From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Subject: Re: [TUHS] V6 networking & alarm syscall
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    > From: Dave Horsfall

    > As I dimly recall ... it returns the number of characters in the input
    > queue (at that time)

Well, remember, this is the MIT V6 PDP-11 system, which had a tty driver which
had been completely re-written at MIT years before, so you'd really have to
check the MIT V6 sources to see exactly what it did. I suspect they borrowed
the name, and basic semantics, from Berkeley, but everything else - who
knows.

This user telnet is from 1982 (originally), but I was looking at the final
version, which is from 1984; the use of the ioctl was apparently a later
addition. I haven't checked to see what it did originally for reading from the
user's terminal (although the earlier version also used the 'tasking'
package).

      Noel