[ale] Lions Commentary on V6

Christopher Fowler cfowler at outpostsentinel.com
Mon Oct 22 20:18:11 EDT 2001


Okay.

Would it be possible that sig.c in the kernel of BSD look like sig.c in  V7.
I'm looking at some "BSD" code specificalyy sig.c and I'm alos looking at
the source to V7.  Would some of the variable names and logic be the same?
The sig.c code was written in 1993.  I'm trying to determine toe original
source.

Chris



-----Original Message-----
From: Transam [mailto:transam at cavu.com]
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2001 2:08 AM
To: kaboom at gatech.edu
Cc: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Lions Commentary on V6


> On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Christopher Fowler wrote:

> > Maybe someone will know this.  Did BSD have code that was based on V6
code?

> Yes.  1BSD came directly from V6.  Ken Thompson did a sabbatical at
Berkeley
> and brought V6 with him (Berkeley already had machines running V4 and V5).
> Bill Joy started grad school under Thompson, took V6, and started madly
> hacking away, eventually producing the first Berkeley Software
Distribution
> (released in 1977).

Well, Berkeley already had V6 running on PDP-11/40 and PDP-11/45 machines.
(The PDP-11/40 was traded for an elevator in Evens Hall.  By choosing not
to buy and install the fifth elevator, there was enough money freed up to
buy the PDP-11/40 for the building's tenants.)

Unix did not yet run on the PDP-11/70.  One of Ken's projects while on
Sabbatical at Berkeley was to port V6 to the PDP-11/70.  His other main
project was to create Berkeley's EXCELLENT Operating Systems class, CS155.
I took it the following year when Bill Joy arrived, after Ken went back
to Bell Labs.

Ken & Bill were not at Berkeley at the same time, though they worked
together via phone and email on improving Unix.  Other early Berkeley
Unix hackers were Jeff Schreibmann and Chuck Haley.  I did a little.

The initial Berkeley work was to improve the performance of the kernel
to put a huge number of active users on the PDP-11/70 which handled almost
all of the undergraduate Computer Science students and a lot of the
Graduate and Faculty research.  Later ex/vi was created, Ken's Pascal
interpreter was improved, and many other improvements were made.  The
Berkeley Software Distributions came about because of an exponential
demand for copies of this work by other universities.

Over time all of the original Bell Labs code was eliminated from the
Berkeley version of UNIX.  AT&T's lawyers didn't like others not paying
its obscene license fees (whose high amount prevented the normal growth
of Unix and thus hatched Winbloz).  Anyway, BSDI (created by Bill Jolitz,
a classmate of mine there) was marketing and supporting Berkeley Unix
when AT&T's lawyers aimed their big guns at BSDI and fired in Federal court
for illegal use of the source code.

Up to this time almost everyone was so afraid of being sued by AT&T that
they paid them their license fees.  In a rare demonstration of intelligence
by US courts, the courts found that AT&T had its head up its butt and that
there was no more AT&T owned code in Berkeley Unix.  Thus was born the
Open Source version of Berkeley Unix.

.. and Unix, Linux, and M$ battled each other in the marketplace ever
after.

> If your *real* question, however, is if Lions Commentary will be useful
for
> modern BSD, you'd probably be better off with McKusick's _Design and
> Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System_.

True.  Unfortunately Lions died before the courts freed the Unix source
code.
His commentary was handed around illegally by being photocopies over and
over
again.  I have a copy as well as the recently published book.

> later,
> chris

Bob Toxen
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