Re: [TUHS] My EuroBSDcon talk (preview for commentary)

[Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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Fair enough.  But the original v6 Whitesmiths Idris was important and should be part of your v6 slide.    It establishes that some people were beginning to take a commercial version of Unix seriously even if AT&T was not allowed too.  

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Sep 15, 2019, at 9:42 PM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 12:25 AM Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 17:46:42 -0400 Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > The first UNIX clone that I know about was a V6 version by Whitesmiths,
>> > called Idris, I want to say in 1977/78.   I believe that Michel's Gien's
>> > Pascal clone that he talked about a year later started out as V6, but
>> > morphed to V7 before he was done (and then later morphed again to become
>> > Chorus in a C++ rewrote).  Mike Malcolm's Thoth (which "Thucks" by the way,
>> > my wife threw out my tee-shirt years ago;-) was a pseudo V6 clone.   I
>> 
>> Acc. to a paper[1] by Cheriton, Malcom and Melen did the
>> original small run time executive called Thoth. Cheriton
>> rewrote it to form the kernel of the system described in the
>> Feb 1979 CACM article. It used memory mapping, swapping. etc.
>> They also added a filesystem.
> 
> 
> 
> Cataloguing all the clones was out of scope for my talk... there are a huge number that are known, and many more that aren't...
> 
> I likely could do a whole talk on just that...
> 
> Warner 
> 
> 
>> Thoth could not have been a clone of v6.  It used message
>> passing. More RPC than pipes. And it had "teams", where a
>> "team" is roughly the same as a Unix process (separate address
>> space) and a Thoth "process" was a thread in that address
>> space.  root was "*" (instead of "/") and current dir was "@"
>> (instead ".").  A bigger difference was that it had *nodes* or
>> files and any file can have sub nodes.  There was no
>> separation between files and directories.
>> 
>> It was an interesting system and a lot of different things
>> were tried in it. In 1980-81 timeframe AMD forked off a
>> separate company called AMC to build microcomputers. They
>> chose Thoth.  I almost worked there but in the end decided I'd
>> rather do unix and joined Fortune and soon after AMD came to
>> its senses and shut AMC down.
>> 
>> [1] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/1979/CS-79-19.pdf
>> 
>> > As I mentioned before the first commercial user of UNIX was Rand
>> > Corporation in LA.  Al Arms of AT&T legal wrote the original $15K/CPU
>> > license for them.   I don't know how many of those licenses were made
>> > available, but I've always been under the impression it was under 10.  Like
>> > a lot of people at the time, this was when the 'glass tty' was just showing
>> > up in force and Rand updated/wrote a version of ed(1) called the rand(1)
>> > editor [IIRC, its still available as the 'grand editor' from Dave Yost].
>> 
>> The Rand editor e had nothing in common with ed(1).  e
>> descended from NED, a 2D editor, invented by Ned Irons in 1967
>> and described in "A CRT editing system" CACM Jan 1972.
>> 
>> The "Grand editor", derived from e19 is long gone. Even Dave
>> gave up on it long ago.  Though you can find a separate
>> version on the 'Net, also derived from e19.  e with its
>> multiple windows was a joy to use on a 60 line Ann Arbor
>> Ambassador terminal. I use acme because it too is a tiling
>> editor like e. It has some goodies not in e but overall e
>> was a better experience.
>> 
>> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/rand/R-2176-ARPA_The_CRT_Text_Editor_NED_Dec77.pdf

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