[TUHS] Re: forgotten versions

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 09:44:02AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
> v7 exploded into the world, and made BSD and SunOS happen.
> 
> v8 and 9 and 10 had to work harder to get mindshare because something
> was already there.

I think this is spot on.  v7 was pretty easy to find in src form, I know
I've seen some of v{8,9,10} in Shannon's treasure trove of Unix source
at Sun but they were less common.

> things like rc were too "confrontational" to a mind attuned to bourne
> shell.  Sockets (which btw, totally SUCK PUS) were coded into things
> and even (YECHH) made POSIX and IETF spec status. Streams didn't stand
> a chance.

There was streams (from Dennis) and STREAMS from Sys whatever.  I don't
know how great streams was, I read the paper and it seemed fine for a tty
driver, networking I dunno.  And having seen an SGI SMP machine brought
to it's knees by racks and racks of modems, I'm not sure streams is even
a good idea for ttys; it's fine for a personal system, I've never seen
that sort of layered design perform well at scale.  I have seen what a
networking stack in STREAMS did, it was awful, absolutely awful.
Sun bought the STREAMS networking stack from Lachman, same one that
I ported to the ETA 10 and SCO Unix, it sucked hard.  Sun threw it out,
hired Mentat to give them a performant STREAMS stack, I'm not sure
that ever worked.  I know they put back the socket interface, as much
as people don't like it, it's a non-starter to have an OS without it.