On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 5:35 PM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > I can think of at least 4 things, some big, some small, where post-V7
> > Research Unix was influential
>
> Besides streams, file system switch, /proc, and /dev/fd. v8 had the
> Blit. Though Rob's relevant patent evoked disgruntled rumblings from
> MIT that window systems were old hat, the Blit pioneered multiple
> windows as we know them today. On the contemporary Lisp Machine, for
> example, active computation happened in only one window at a time.
>
> V8 also had Peter Weinberger's Remote File System. Unlike NFS, RFS
> mapped UIDS, thus allowing files to be shared among computers in
> different jurisdictions with different UID lists. Unfortunately, RFS
> went the way of Reiser paging.
>

I believe RFS shipped in SVR3, at least as a package for the 3b2.


> And then there was Norman Wilson, who polished the kernel and
> administrative tools. All kinds of things became smaller and
> cleaner--an inimitable accomplishment
>
> > No clue what was new in V10
>
> This suggests I should put on my to-do list an update of the Research
> Unix Reader's combined table of man-page contents, which covers only
> v1-v9. I think it's fair to say, though, that nothing introduced in
> v10 was as influential as the features mentioned above.
>
> Doug
>