[ale] Lions Commentary on V6

[Transam]

Joe Morris <jolomo at olagrande.net> Wrote:

> Not so long ago Transam wrote:
> > 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.

> By chance, I'm reading _Sunburst_ and on P.96 they mention Joy taking
> a class taught by Dave Patterson.  Is this the same class?

Uh, I don't have that book and the question is lacking in specifics.

If Joy took an OS class at Berkeley, it probably was the one designed
by Thompson.

> [other very interesting stuff snipped]

> > 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

> That's one of the funniest things about Unix-like things over the years....
> duplication of effort. How often has the same system-call or editor or
> window manager been re-written. Too bad we can't retain all these
> tries as institutional knowledge.

Yup.  The different Unix vendors were so busy fighting each other that M$
steamrolled over all of them.

Fortunately, most of the Linux types have learned from this lesson.  Well,
except for Mr. Richard GNU linux Stallman, in my opinion.

> [snip]

> > 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.

> I noticed that Peer-to-Peer press is printing all (6?) of Jolitz's books
> of commentary on BSD kernel code.

Cool.

> I had looked a little through Lion's commentary.... anybody know the origin
> of the name of the function "estabur()"?  And one more.....
> the origin of the name "channel", as in wchan?

The name wchan is short for "wait channel".  It actually is an address, the
queue address I think, of a kernel, uh, thread waiting on an event.  I would
guess that channel is basically an I/O device.

> Thanks
> -- 
>   Joe Morris, SysAdmin and Not Insane           jolomo at olagrande.net
>   Atlanta stories: http://www.olagrande.net/users/jolomo

Bob

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