[TUHS] Origin year of BSD csh?

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

Interesting... Horton's timing sounds right because  I'm pretty sure we had
some sort of Berkeley shell @ before CMU had 2BSD on the v6++ systems in
1978 - (I have to ask him, Klone must have been the one that brought it
over to Mellon Institute ). I state that because I remember trying to play
with it as well as another hacked shell V6 (I think from Harvard) around
that time.  I was fascinated by the idea of being able to change the
default command system, which no other OS I was using I could do same
(TOPS*, VMS, TSS, Exec/8).   But I remember I didn't like some of choices
of the Berkeley shell's syntax and tended to avoid it/could not figure it
out.    Within a year or so V7 showed up there after with Bourne shell and
I was happy with that.

A few years later, I did switch to typing to the csh when I got to UCB, but
that was not until after the MIT job control stuff had been spliced into
the BSD kernel (Horton & Kleckner were probably the ones that convinced me
to learn it).  With job control I became a fan, but never warmed up to the
programming syntax.   I picked up the mantra that I still consider wise --
"type to Joy and program to Bourne."   This is comfortable for the ROMS in
the muscles of my fingers, but my scripts are portable.

Clem

PS To this day (like about a month ago), if I need to hack on my .login
script when I move sites (I have some site specific stuff in .login and
.profiles), I have to grab the cshell man page so I don't screw up the
syntax.

On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 2:14 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 09:30:39AM -0700, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> > 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
>
> I used csh for a while before ksh became available.  It was an improvement
> over the Bourne shell, IMO, but once ksh came out I went back to Bourne
> shell syntax.  And now bash is pretty nice.
>
> --lm
>
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