[TUHS] Re: Berkeley 11/70 (was Re: Strange Reference on Usenix_77 tape)

[Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 1:00 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:
> Warner Losh wrote:
> >  > For those of us not involved with Unix in 1977, what was the
> >  > HRSTS system?
> >
> >  ‘The Harvard/Radcliffe Student Time-sharing System Terminal Users Guide,
> >   1st edition, September 10, 1974, Center for Research in Computing
> >   Technology, Harvard University’.
> >
> > These are the same folks that also did the LISP that appeared in
> > various 2BSD distributions as well.  There's a special C compiler.
>
> I found a description in a Usenix paper[1], and it really seems to be a
> lot of "Harvard specials" in there.  MACRO-11, LINK-11, DDT, TECO,
> FILCOM, shell with TENEX file completion, even ECL[2].  To me it looks
> like a layer of PDP-10 on top of Unix.
>
> [1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_june_11_unix_news.pdf
> [2] https://github.com/PDP-10/harvard-ecl

Thanks, that was very interesting. Indeed, it sounds like at attempt
to bring a TENEX-style user experience to Unix.

Also interesting was the short article about, "the Berkeley 11/70 System"
with notes from Ken.  The description of the UID scheme to separate
students from "regular" users and the note that "the group concept is
about to disappear" were particularly intriguing; clearly an evolutionary
dead end, but striking in that this must have yielded a much greater
level of isolation. Also, the note about per-directory quotas (as opposed
to per-user/group quotas) was interesting.

I wonder what other early attempts at hardening the system for
educational environments were made that similarly didn't make it
in the long haul, and to what extent such efforts have survived?

        - Dan C.