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 wrote: > > > >> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 12:25 AM Bakul Shah wrote: >> On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 17:46:42 -0400 Clem Cole 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