(As a reminder to list readers ... I am authoring a
very detailed book
covering the history of Berkeley Unix. I have done interviews either by
email, phone, and some in person with over 80 of the very
early contributors.)
Very interesting. Does your research extend into Sun? Because wnj went
there and SunOS (not that Solaris stuff) was a "better BSD than BSD".
mmap, vnodes, lots of very cool OS stuff happened at Sun that did not
happen at Berkeley. No disrespect to Berkeley, they got the ball rolling,
in some ways they were the Linux of the day, moving stuff forward while
the rest of the world stalled.
What was that Ken quote? Something about cat went to Berkeley and came
back waving tails? Something like that? Whatever, I've been part of Unix
dev for a long time and I'm painfully aware of the pushback that happens
when people want to make things better. Berkeley made Unix better.
Sun made it hugely better in my opinion. I was there at the tail end,
you don't want to talk to me, you want to talk to wnj, rusty, moran, srk.
They did some cool stuff.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at
mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm