[TUHS] Ninth Edition incomplete?

[schily@schily.net (Joerg Schilling)]

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Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:

> Joerg Schilling:
>
>   Interesting that they created a name clash:
>
> 	"p" was the name of a pager on UNOS, the first realtime
> 	UNIX lookalike from former AT&T employees.
>
> =====
>
> p was something Rob Pike brought when he arrived in
> 1980.  I believe he wrote its first version several
> years earlier, when he was at the University of Toronto.

The timestamp for p.c in V8 is:

	May 30 06:56 1983

Do you have a link to verify that it has been created earlier?

> Since UNOS dates from 1981 (says Wikipedia), I think
> Rob's p gets precedence.

p from UNOS was written by Jeff Goldberg in 1981 or 1982.

> Not that it matters.  There never was, nor should there
> ever have been, some global register of UNIX command
> names during its formative years.  UNIX was a research
> platform and a living work-in-progress until it became
> productized in the latter part of the 1980s.

Well, in practice people managed this problem nicely.
The annoying name clashes I am aware of are less than 20 years old.

> And, of course, UNOS was a lookalike written from scratch.
> It wasn't UNIX.  If it wanted to be, it should have
> adopted Rob's p!

Well, if Rob's p existed before and was available as OSS.....

The background for UNOS in it's first glance was that Jeff Goldberg wanted to 
rewrite UNIX from scratch in less than a year. I believe, he did a pretty good
job.

BTW: UNOS has been sold to real customers from it's beginning. Was UNIX V8 
available outside AT&T?

Jörg

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