Re: [TUHS] 4.1c bsd ptrace man entry ("ptrace is unique and arcane")

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 7:34 PM Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> wrote:

> It's interesting that this comment about ptrace was written
> as early as 1980.
>
Indeed - that seems to be really strange.  I wonder of the Man page was
written later.

>
> I don't know when Tom's code first went
> live, but I first heard about it by seeing it in action on my first
> visit to Bell Labs in early 1984, and it was described in public in
> a talk at the Summer 1984 USENIX conference in Salt Lake City.
>
Ditto.   The 84 paper was the first I knew about it but ....

It's possible Tom was messing with it before then.   Joy spent a couple of
Summers in NJ but I've forgotten when.   But if it was being talked
about/prototyped in the summer of '79, he might have known by 1980.   But I
find that unlikely.

I really don't remember people going /proc crazy until after the '84 paper.
The other minor thing missing was the VFS/File System Switch layer.   Peter
had not put FSS into Research 8.
What I don't remember is which came first Peter's work for Tom.   The RFS
guys would use Peter's work for V.3.   I used it something similar for EFS
after reading about it and the NFS/EFS are '85 USENIX.    Somebody at Sun
did VFS, which was better than FSS, although later we came to conclusion
both had advantages and disadvantages and a true i-node interposition layer
was best so you could really want to do FS stacking.   But by that time,
the damage was done, and people had gone FS crazy.   Since Sun gave away
NFS and Peter's work was tied up in either Research 8 or V.3 (i.e. AT&T
licensing), VFS won.

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