On Sat, Dec 31, 2022 at 07:55:28PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 31, 2022 at 5:55 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:
>
> > The "assembly code in the Bourne shell" comment is in the same
> > London/Reiser paper. The full quote is:
> >
> > "The (Bourne) shell is the standard user command interpreter. It required
> > by far the largest conversion effort of any supposedly portable program,
> > for the simple reason that it is not portable. Critical portions are coded
> > in assembly language and had to be painstakingly rewritten. The shell uses
> > its own sbrk which is functionally different from the standard routine in
> > libc. The shell wants the routine which fields a signal to be passed a
> > parameter giving the number of the signal being caught; signal was also a
> > private rou- tine. This was handled by having the operating system provide
> > the parameter in the first place, doing away with the private code for
> > signal. The code in fixargs (for constructing the argument list to an exec
> > system call) had to be diddled."
> >
> > The files in the V7 tree on the Tuhs website are dated January 1979, so it
> > would seem that the fixes for 32V were immediately taken back to Research.
> > As you point out, this means that the comments above do not refer to the
> > well known source code, but to a predecessor of that (which I don’t think
> > survived).
> >
>
> We have ample evidence that V7 was really something more akin to a rolling
> release. Let me explain: We know from the leaked '50 changes' tape that
> many of the features were set earlier rather than later. This leaked in
> 1978 (if my notes are right), but I found references to it from as early as
> November 1976 in
> http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/197611-unix-news-n11.pdf. This
> was 18 months after V6 was released, but over 2 years before V7 was
> released. In addition, we know from the AUUS newsletters in the archive
> document that the V7 release process process took a while to get through
> AT&T's legal department (IIRC a year, but I've not gone back to the AUUS
> newsletters to refresh my recollection). A big push of V7 was to make it
> portable as well (with AT&T doing an Interdata 8/32 port themselves, as
> well as at least looking at the Wollongong Interdata 7/32 port and the
> Harvard VM/370 port). In talking to Kirk and others that have been around
> from approximately that time, 32V was widely viewed as V7 for Vaxen. We can
> see evidence in the surviving 32V files of evolution from the 'PDP-11-like
> swapping to a more sophisticated paging algorithm' since we have the
> slowsys directory. It's my contention, as someone that coded in the era
> before good source code control, that it's evidence that somebody got it
> working, then renamed/copied it to slowsys while they got paging working so
> they could build either kernel for A/B testing. Kirk has also told me that
> the 32V port was started well in advance of V7's release to be both a
> useful product inside of Bell Labs (since Vaxen were starting to appear) as
> well as to prove that V7 was portable enough. I'll be the first to admit
> this is at best conjecture that matches available facts, artifacts and old
> timers recollections (sorry Kirk), but that we have no direct evidence for.
> It also allowed the 3BSD efforts to get going before the official V7
> release due to the close ties between Bell Labs and Berkeley and the DARPA
> project around Unix.

"So DEC came to us at Holmdel.  We were clearly the second string.
Tom London and John Reiser were interested and so was Ken Swanson, and
we got the VAX in early '78.  I didn't do any of the technical work.  In
fact, I devoted a lot of energy and time to getting the management to
let us do it.  It wasn't research, you see.  However, they let us take
the time.  And in about three months my small group ported Version 7 to
the VAX.  We got the machine in January, they had it running in April,
and by August it really worked.
...
So, with the blessings of BTL Area 11 management, we sent 32V to
Berkeley.  It was in October or November, 1978"

Charlie Roberts in Salus QCU

"The operating system is Research version 7 as of April 15, 1978.
..
Work on the C compiler began in mid-December 1977.  The hardware arrived
on March 3.  We held a party on May 19 to celebrate successful multiuser
operation of the system."

London and Reiser
A UNIX Operating System for the DEC VAX-11/780 Computer
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/otherports/32v.html

>
> I believe that we can conclude that the original 'hard to port' Bourne
> shell was produced around the time of the 50 changes tape, give or take.
> And that all the unix porting efforts that pre-dated the V7 release rolled
> what appeared in 32V into V7 to reduce the amount of pdp-11 assembler. And
> those efforts are what we read about in the paper.

"The Bourne shell work started either in early 1976, or maybe
late 1975. The first version was VERY different"

John Mashey in net.unix-wizards, 18 Mar 86
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/xW3ZgEnFoFs
tuhs/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V06.6.pdf pg 39

"In 1976, Steve Bourne, who had recently joined 1127, wrote a new shell"
Kernighan, UNIX A History and a Memoir, 5.1 pg 88

Bourne's AsiaBSDCon 2016 talk also lists 1976
and goes on to discuss sbrk() use causing problems with ports
https://youtu.be/7tQ2ftt3LO8?t=715