Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:58 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> > I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented
> > in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
> > discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
> > be absent from the man page).
>
> No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
> I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
> FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:
>
>   static char sccsid[] = "@(#)stty.c    5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";
>
> And it has the -f flag.  This was (just) before the very first version
> of Linux.  My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
> from Net/2.  Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.
>

Net/2 was the basis of 386BSD, which begat the patchkits, which begat
FreeBSD and NetBSD.

One of the problems with early Linux was that they were just a bunch of
guys (and sometimes gals) that had access to these cool unix systems. At
the time, there was quite the lag between release by research / university
and running in a commercial Unix. So in the early 1990s, there were  a
bunch of systems based on 4.2BSD, as well as many based on System V, which
lacked the -f flag. At the time, it was at the end of the isolated phase of
Unix, where people just made stuff up in relative isolation and when the
cross pollination effects of USENET and the first Unix converts having had
a decade or so under their belts. The Linux guys weren't old-time Bell Labs
guys that would know the differences in detail between the different
strains, especially the people that were writing one-off utilities, often
to an old, out of date man page, that Linux encouraged to contribute.
Nothing wrong with all that, it was a crazy time trying to recreate things
at a mile a minute. But some details were not faithfully emulated. It's not
surprising: there was always so much to do. So while it existed when they
started, it's unlikely the knowledge had diffused enough for them to know
about it when it came time to code...

Warner

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