On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> > Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
> >
> > stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
>
> Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
> (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD. It was in the original
> sources imported into FreeBSD. 4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
> I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994. (Lite2 was released in 1995.)

Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
1992 at the latest.

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).

Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were unwillingly frog-marched
from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.

I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS. "Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to Solaris.

- Dan C.