A very incisive post Clem and to everyone generally I am fascinated to hear about PWB, Unix 3/4/5 history, System V, choice of codebases, featuresets and APIs. The thread made a good read on a long boring drive and I'm not even finished reading yet. :) Nick On 02/02/2017 6:31 AM, "Clem Cole" wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 1:33 PM, wrote: > >> ​.. >> At the time, the policy was to release externally one version >> behind what was being run internally, so System III was released to the >> world while the Bell System was using Unix 4.0. I still have the manual; >> I'm pretty sure "PWB" and "Programmer's Workbench" are not on the cover, >> ​ ​ >> it was just called "UNIX". >> > ​Could be.... the "System III" manual cover I have says PWB 3.0​ > > I never had a 4.0 doc, although I saw it at some point. > > > > >> >> As UNIX 5.0 was approaching, someone decided that to be one release >> behind on the outside was dumb, thus the jump from System III to System >> ​​ >> V. >> > > ​Making the outside and inside system in sync makes sense and I think I > remember some of that. But the name was definitely forced by the > Marketing types in NC. I somewhere have a memo that they sent to all > licenses about the term UNIX and how it could be used and what could be > called same. It was clear that was all part of the UNIX wars and they > were trying to make System xxx have some sort of halo. > > > As a side note, what is funny is when it all went down, I remember having > an argument with some of the Masscomp (and ex-DEC) marketing types. The > geeks (like me) just could not get through to them that what mattered was > how it worked and what was inside (which BSD was pretty much superior > technology by most accounts). It was not that Sys III/V was bad, it was > just unadorned and claiming it was cool and trying to give it a cool name > was not going to make it cool.​ > > Around this time we came up with the Universes hack, so you can have it > both ways; but our kernel was more BSD that AT&T. > > > As I said, funny, because a few years later with Stellar, the same group > of people would >>start<< with a System V kernel and fold in BSD interfaces > as needed. We wrote our own FS (which was UFS-externally - i.e. BSD user > api) but kernel insides completely new (extent based, more like VMS). > > We had decided that by then the AT&T code base was *cleaner to make scale > on a multiprocessor*, as we had already lived the BSD MP nightmare once > with the Masscomp kernel. But the key was that even thought we used > System V, we made darned sure the user mode API's (such as sockets, mmap, > signals, namespaces etc) were the BSD APIs and that the BSD user code from > UNIX and that VMS/FORTRAN sources would pretty much compile out of the box. > > We were at that point targeting Sun, Apollo & VMS customers so we knew it > name meant nothing, it was all about how easy it was going to be for the > code recompile and "just work". > > Back to the main point, AT&T Marketing was still chasing IBM at this > time. It was amazing to many of us watching the ship sink. They really > did not see where the future was and that they owned the SW technology that > was going to dive it, but it was going to be sold to people other than whom > IBM had traditionally sold. They also made the fatal mistake of trying to > grip it too tight and in doing so, it slipped through their fingers. > > Clem > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: