4.2BSD steering committee members

4.2BSD steering committee members

[Paul Ruizendaal]

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Many thanks for on and off list replies to my query.

I happened to stumble across a paper by Krik McKusick (right here in the THUS archives) that has some more background:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Unix_Review/Berkeley_Unix_History.pdf
and in particular on page 38 of the magazine (page 6 of the PDF).

It says (with some reformatting for clarity):

"The contract called for major work to be done on the system so the
DARPA research community could better do its work. Based on the needs
of the DARPA community, goals were set and work began to define the
modifications to the system.

In particular, the new system:
- was expected to include a faster file system that would raise
  throughput to the speed of available disk technology,
- would support processes with multi-gigabyte address space requirements,
- would provide flexible interprocess communication facilities that
  would allow researchers to do work in distributed systems,
- would integrate networking support so that machines running the new
  system could easily participate in the ARPAnet.”

So, IPC facilities to support distributed systems were apparently an explicit goal, and that helps explain the composition of the committee.

It continues:

"To assist in defining the new system, Duane Adams, Berkeley's contract
monitor at DARPA, formed a group known as the "steering committee” to
help guide the design work and ensure that the research community's needs
were addressed.

This committee met twice a year between April, 1981 and June, 1983, and
included [name list as before]. Beginning in 1984, these meetings were
supplanted by workshops that were expanded to include many more people.”

This shift in membership after 4.2BSD shipped had already been noted. The committee seems to have had a productive start:

"An initial document proposing facilities to be included in the new system
was circulated to the steering committee and other people outside Berkeley
in July, 1981, sparking many lengthy debates.”

I would assume that those initial discussions included debates on what would become the socket API. I’ve asked Kirk McKusick if he still remembered that initial discussion document. The reply was:

"The document to which you refer became known as the "BSD System
Manual". The earliest version that I could find was the one
distributed with 4.2BSD in July 1983 which I have attached.”

If anyone knows of earlier versions of that document (prior to 1982), I’d be highly interested.

The paper also notes:

"During the summer, Joy concentrated on implementing a prototype version
of the interprocess communication facilities.”

I’ll scan the early (partial) SCCS logs for remnants of that (a long shot, but worth a try).

Paul

4.2BSD steering committee members

[Jeremy C. Reed]

Other names:

Duane Adams formed the committee. He was DARPA's first VLSI program 
manager and then the Deputy Director of ARPA's Information Processing 
Techniques Office (IPTO).

Colonel Robert Baker, the R&D Program Manager for DARPA's Distributed 
Computing Program later became DARPA's representative on the steering 
committee.

Are Adams and Baker excluded because they weren't technical 
participants?

Mike Karels later joined.

and I was told that Mike O'Brien represented CSNET.

Or maybe the "steering committee" terminology was still used as this 
morphed into the Dave Clark (of MIT) led meetings?

4.2BSD steering committee members

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Paul Ruizendaal

    > * Alan Nemeth - apparently the designer of the BBN C-series mini's

ISTR him from some other context at BBN; don't recall off the top of my
head, though.

    > (I think the C30 was designed to replace the 316/516 as IMP).

They _did_ replace the Honeywell's. At MIT, they eventually came and took away
the 516 (I offered it to the MIT Museum, but they didn't want it, as the work
on it hadn't been done by MIT - idiots!), and replaced it with a
C/30. (Actually, we had a couple of C/30 IMPs - the start was adding a C/30,
to which the MIT Internet IP gateway was connected - the other two IMPs were
full, and the only way to get another port for the gateway was to get another
IMP - something which caused a very long delay in getting MIT connected to the
Internet, to my intense frustration. I seem to recall DARPA/DCVA had stopped
buying Honeywell machines, and the C/30 was late, or something like that.)
	  
    > It is hard to find any info on the C-series, but I understand it to be a
    > mini with 10 bit bytes, 20 bit words and 20 bit address space, more or
    > less modeled after the PDP11 and an instruction set optimised to be an
    > easy target for the C compilers of the day.

Yes and no. It was a general microprogrammed machine, but supported a
daughter-board on the CPU to help with instruction decoding, etc; so the C/30
and C/70 had different daughter-boards, specific to their function.

There's a paper on the C/70, I don't recall if I have a copy - let me look.

    > Any other links to Unix?

I think the C/70 was intended to run Unix, as a general-purpose timesharing
resource at BBN (and did).


    > * Bert Halstead - seems to have built a shared memory multiprocessor
    > around that time

He was, as a grad student, a member of Steve Ward's group at MIT, the ones who
did the Nu machine Unix 68K port. (He wrote the Unix V6/PWB1 driver for the
Diva controller for the CalChomps they had on their -11/70, the former of
which I eventually inherited.)  After he got his PhD (I forget the topic; I
know he did a language called 'D', the origin of the name should be obvious),
he became a faculty member at MIT.


    > * Dan Lynch - ISI program manager for TCP/IP and the switch-over from
    > NCP on Arpanet.

He was actually their facilities manager (or some title to that effect; he was
in charge of all their TENEX/TWENEX machines, too). He was part of the early
Internet crowd - I vividly remember him at a bar with Phill Gross and I in the
DC suburbs, at a _very_ early IETF meeting, discussing how this Internet thing
was going to reallly take off, and the IETF had got to get itself organized to
be ready for that.


    > Next to networking, the link between these people seems to have been
    > distributed computing

That wasn't really the tie - the tie was they were all part of the
DARPA-funded circle. Now, as to why whomever at DARPA picked them - I think
they probably looked for people with recognized competence, who had a need for
a good VAX Unix for their research/organization.

	Noel

4.2BSD steering committee members

[Ron Natalie]

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* Alan Nemeth - apparently the designer of the BBN C-series mini’s (I think the C30 was designed to replace the 316/516 as IMP). It is hard to find any info on the C-series, but I understand it to be a mini with 10 bit bytes, 20 bit words and 20 bit address space, more or less modeled after the PDP11 and an instruction set optimised to be an easy target for the C compilers of the day. Any other links to Unix?

The C machine was a generic emulation box if I recall properly.   The C-30 was indeed an attempt to emulate the 316/516 for IMPS/TACS.   In BBNs long history of selling the same thing to the government over and over, they tweaked the firmware with the goal of allegedly coming up with the perfect instruction set for running C programs and dubbed that model the C- 70.    I had use of a few in the Army.     They were kind of "meh" processors and frankly, I don't recall them running a BSD-ish version of UNIX.

* Dan Lynch - ISI program manager for TCP/IP and the switch-over from NCP on Arpanet.

And eventually running the Interop TCP/IP promotion organization.

* Gerald Popek - worked on a secure version of (Arpanet enabled) Unix and on distributed systems (LOCUS) at the time.

>  Next to networking, the link between these people seems to have been distributed computing — yet I don’t think 4.2BSD had a goal of being multiprocessor ready.

But it wasn't particularly ill suited for that.    George Gobels had little problem getting the dual-vax running.    We ported 4.2 to the MIMD HEP early on as well.   All of these worked fine as long as you guaranteed that no more than one processor went into the core kernel at one time.     It didn't always need to be the same CPU, but just that you didn't have concurrency.    The HEP and a later product I worked on with four i860 processors, the kernel would bounce around among the different processors.

4.2BSD steering committee members

[Paul Ruizendaal]

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According to the Unix Tree web pages, the development of 4.2BSD was at the request of DARPA guided by a steering committee consisting of:

Bob Fabry, Bill Joy and Sam Leffler from UCB
Alan Nemeth and Rob Gurwitz from BBN
Dennis Ritchie from Bell Labs
Keith Lantz from Stanford
Rick Rashid from Carnegie-Mellon
Bert Halstead from MIT
Dan Lynch from ISI
Gerald J. Popek of UCLA

Although I can place most people on the list, for some names I’m in the dark:

* Alan Nemeth - apparently the designer of the BBN C-series mini’s (I think the C30 was designed to replace the 316/516 as IMP). It is hard to find any info on the C-series, but I understand it to be a mini with 10 bit bytes, 20 bit words and 20 bit address space, more or less modeled after the PDP11 and an instruction set optimised to be an easy target for the C compilers of the day. Any other links to Unix?

* Keith Lantz - apparently specialised in distributed computing. No clear links to Unix that I can find.

* Rick Rashid - driving force behind message passing micro-kernels and the Accent operating systems. Evolved into Mach. Link to Unix seems to be that Accent was an influential design around 81/82

* Bert Halstead - seems to have built a shared memory multiprocessor around that time, “Concert”.

* Dan Lynch - ISI program manager for TCP/IP and the switch-over from NCP on Arpanet.

* Gerald Popek - worked on a secure version of (Arpanet enabled) Unix and on distributed systems (LOCUS) at the time.

Next to networking, the link between these people seems to have been distributed computing — yet I don’t think 4.2BSD had a goal of being multiprocessor ready.

All recollections about the steering committee, its goals and its members welcome.

Paul