Right (and I agree) -- widespread usage/really being noticed.
And that was because it came in the Summit releases not the Research/UCB
stream, which did not help either.
ᐧ

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 1:54 AM, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> > BY the time dmr adds stdio, it was
> > still early enough in the life to displace the randomness for something
> as
> > important as I/O, whereas lack of use of something.like getopt would not
> > become clearly deficient until after widespread success.
>
> I think "widespread access" is more like it for getopt.  Getopt dates
> to 1980; it was in System III (I just checked). That's only about two years
> after V7 which was circa 1978.
>
> Here are the dates:
>
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 1073 Apr 11  1980 usr/src/lib/libc/pdp11/gen/
> getopt.c
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 2273 May 16  1980 usr/src/man/man3/getopt.3c
>
> But the world outside the Bell System didn't have System III. Getopt
> didn't become "popular" until System V or so, and became much easier to
> adopt once Henry Spencer published his public domain rewrite of the code
> and man page.
>
> Just a nit, (:-)
>
> Arnold
>