Re: [TUHS] System IV

[arnold@skeeve.com]

Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com> wrote:

> i will simply observe that when i joined bell labs in 1981, i was on
> the System III team. we certainly did internal releases under that name..

I assume you mean under the name "PWB". I stand corrected.  At Southern
Bell I'm pretty sure the doc did not use that name though.  However, it's
been close to 40 years and I don't feel like digging out the manuals
to check. :-)

Thanks,

Arnold

>

> > On Jun 10, 2021, at 9:05 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 3:59 AM <arnold@skeeve.com <mailto:arnold@skeeve.com>> wrote:
> > System III had been released to the world.  When I asked why AT&T
> > hadn't released Unix 4.0, I was told that the policy was to release
> > one version behind what was being run internally.
> > I was under that impression - I had referred to it in my message as the 'pre-Judge Green release rules.' 
> > 
> > After the Bell System break up (1/1/1984), AT&T decided to just
> > release what was current, thus the jump to System V, with "System IV"
> > never having gotten outside the Bell System.
> > Right.
> >  
> > There was also a screen editor, named 'se' (NOT related to the Georgia
> > Tech 'se' editor) which they'd managed to shoehorn onto the '11.
> > It was kinda cool. I used both it and 'ed'. vi was also available but
> > I found the modal stuff weird and didn't end up learning it until a year
> > or two later. :-)
> > I remember seeing se -- Brian Redman showed it to me IIRC.  I never tried using it myself.  I remember that he was not happy that it was not vi.   If I recall the argument in USG was many of the BSD tools were not better or even as good as what USG had already created.  But the USG folks did eventually add some of them to their stream because so many internal sites were already using them.  In particular, v, csh and col -- but there were others too and the argument was we have those tools covered already i.e. pg vs. more or se vs. vi
> > 
> >   
> > 
> > Hope this is of interest.
> > Definitely -- thank you.
> > 
> > Clem 
> > ᐧ
> > ᐧ
>