[TUHS] Origin year of BSD csh?

[mah@mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton)]

1BSD did not contain csh, and was officially released March 9 1978. It 
contained something called "a shell" which appears to be a predecessor 
to csh, but was still compiled as sh.  The README on 1BSD from Bill Joy 
states:

    Wed Oct 19, 1977

    This directory contains the source for a shell.
    It requires floating point to do the time command which is built-in
    so you will have to cc it -f on machines without floating point.
    It also requires a version 7 C compiler.

    Accurate documentation is in the file "sh.6" to be nroffed with
    /usr/man/man0/naa and a new "version 7" nroff.

    This shell requires the "htmp" data base also used by the editor "ex".
    If you do not set it up so that the "sethome" command is done by "login"
    then you should use the old "osethome" routine in ../s6 rather than
    "sethome"
    and reenable the execl of this sethome in the file "sh.c" (with the
    correct
    pathname).

2BSD did include csh and was first officially released May 1979. I'm 
sure there were informal advance copies of csh sent out sooner. I recall 
csh already being on the UCB systems when I arrived in September of 1978.

I brought csh with me to Bell Labs in the summer of 1979.  The folks at 
Bell Labs recoiled in horror: they had just gone through a painful 
conversion from the Mashey shell to the Bourne shell, and would never 
consider another conversion.  csh was (mostly) upward compatible with 
the Mashey shell, unlike the Bourne shell.  (This was in the Bell Labs 
Computer Center, where I was a summer employee, not Research or the PWB 
group, which I'm sure felt the same way.)

     Mary Ann

On 06/26/2016 03:14 AM, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> Hi.
>
> Can anyone give a definitive date for when Bill Joy's csh first got out
> of Berkeley?  I suspect it's in the 1976 - 1977 time frame, but I don't
> know for sure.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Arnold

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