[TUHS] Provenance of the documents used to restore 1st Ed Unix

All, here's a special Christmas present, especially for those who helped out with the restoration of the 1st Ed Unix system, see http://code.google.com/p/unix-jun72/ To do the restoration we needed a copy of the 1st Ed Unix kernel source code, and Al Kossow had found these two documents and scanned them in: http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v1/Kern… http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v1/Prel… At the time nobody could work out who had studied the kernel source code, why they had done it etc. Nor could we work out who Ted Bashkow was and why he was involved. After my IEEE Spectrum article I was contacted by Jim DeFelice to say thanks for the article. I recognised him as one of the people named in the above documents, and asked him about the kernel study. He has contacted some of the people involved and sent me the e-mail below, which gives a full description of the work! Before I get to it, just an aside. According to Berkley Tague, Ted Bashkow "was a visiting Professor for the summer some time around 1970 or 1971 and worked with me and others in research on various topics. I don't believe he contributed much to UNIX at that time, but was an early user of the early systems." Cheers, Warren [ Jim's story] Here is as coherent a story as I can piece together Let me know if you have any more questions. Jim. The documents that describe the UNIX system as it was implemented on the PDP-11/20 circa 1971 originated as a consequence of a project undertaken within the comptrollers department of the AT&T General Departments. The project was titled the Investment and Cost Information System (ICIS). It was a major new accounting system intended to track detailed cost information for the operating telephone companies of the Bell System. ICIS was a major IBM mainframe based system which was being developed in COBOL. I transferred from Bell Labs in late 1970 to join Chuck Everhart who preceded me from the Labs. In 1971 we were joined by Ron Silacci, Cathy Judge, and later (early '72?) Jerry Conser all from Bell Labs. We formed the core of what would become a much larger Development staff by 1973. In preparation for a major development effort, we wanted to develop a system to maintain the spate of expected ICIS specification and design documents including graphics such as flowcharts. We decided on the PDP-11/20 with a Tecktronix T4002 graphics terminal as the hardware platform for the development of our document maintenance system. For obscure reasons, in order to purchase the PDP-11/20, the ICIS team needed to get approval from the Bell Labs computer aquisition review department headed by Berkley Tague. Berk made the approval for the purchase contingent us agreeing to use UNIX as the operating system.First hearing of this "UNIX" verbally, my mind was filled with scenes from the Arabian Nights. "Eunuchs" seemed a strange name for an operating system. At the time, the only instances of UNIX were to be found in the hands of the developers (Ken Thompson & Co.) at Murray Hill, NJ. We naturally asked for all the documentation. We were told there was none. What we got was a source listing of the PDP-11 assembly language UNIX Kernel. It was virtually without any commentary or external description. In order to proceed we undertook to reverse engineer the listing in order to understand how to modify UNIX to support the T4002. To that end, in late 1971, we set up shop at a Labs facility in Piscataway, NJ. The team got occasional hints and pointers from the UNIX developers at Murray Hill, but they tended to be focussed on their own work (the C programmimg language, troff, etc.). Initial progress was slow, but as the overall design structure emerged and the team became fluent with PDP assembly language and the coding style of the UNIX developers things moved along. Early work was done with paper and pencil resulting in the document named by you as "Kernel Subroutine Description...". Once we took delivery of our PDP-11/20, we were able to make use of the UNIX tools "ed" and "roff" to create a more easily edited digital document "Preliminary UNIX Implementation Document" The detailed timing of all this is uncertain. The hand work was done from late 1971 through March 1972 resulting in the Kernel Subroutine documentation. Chuck Everhart left AT&T in late 1971 and I became the group supervisor. A draft of the machine based Preliminary Implementation document was completed by June 1972 per the date on my cover letter for its first distribution. By June 1972 there was evidently a lot of interest in UNIX inside Bell Labs. The computer commitee was pushing UNIX for all PDP based projects inside Bell Labs. The ICIS owned PDP-11/20 was probably received after March 1972. The hand written cover letter to Ted Bashkow is dated 4/3/72. Once we had use of the PDP-11 we would have entered our work directly. The modifications for the T4002 are not dated in your PDF version and do not appear in the original printout that I still have. I don't know why the date on all the printed pages is 3/17/72. Also, missing in the PDF version of the Preliminary Implementation document that is in the paper version is a subroutine cross reference listing that lists which subroutines are called by which. Regarding the authorship of the documents. Looking at the handwriting it seems at least four people contributed to the Kernel Subroutine document. Myself and Ron have actually reviewed the document and can claim authorship to specific sections. By sections: J. DeFelice H0_01, H0_02, H0_03,H0_04,H0_05, H2-11_sysexec call chain, H2.4,H2_1.7,H2-8, H2-9 H4-3, H5-1, H5-2, H5-3, H5-4, H5-7, H7-1, H7-2, H7-4, H7-5,H7-6, H8-01.2, H8-02, H8-03, H8-05, H8-06, H8-07, H8-08, h8-09-00, h5-6 Ron Silacci sysclose, syscreate, sysent, sysexit, sysfork, sysmdate, sysgetty, sysmdir, error, badsys, sysopen, sysret, sysrele, sysstty, syswait, read, write, ani, sysstat, sysgetuid, sysintr, syslink, sysseek, syssetuid, sysstat, sysstime, systime, sysquit, sysunlink, wdir, fclose, isdir, isown, maknod, mkdir, getf, seektell, sysbreak, syschdir, syschmod, syschown, clear, idle, putlu, swap, tswap, unpack, rswap, wswap, clock, isintr, retisp, sleepo, setisp, tty0, wakall, ttyi, wakeup, itrunc, imap, dskr, cpass, readi, canon, cesc, ctty, ttych, getspl, iclose, iopen, sysmount, sysumount, bread, bwrite, dioreg, drum, preread, rtap, tape, tstdeve, trapt, rw1, intract, otty. Unknown 1 (all caps) H4_00, H4_01, H4_02, H4_2.1, H6_2.2, H6_3.0, H6_6, H7_0.0.4, H7_3.0, H7_3.2 H7_3.3, H9_00.1, H9_01, H9_02, H9_03 Unknown 2 H0_06, H0_07, H2_0.2, H2_3,H2_4, H3_2, H3_4, H5_2.0, H5_2.1,H6_0.9, H6_1.0, H6_1, H6_2.0, H6_2.2, H6_3, H6_4, H8_09, H8_11 The two unknowns would be Jerry Conser and Cathy Judge. I have not been able to track them down. The comments in the listing were made by the people who authored the corresponding man pages. We would comment the listing and as understanding dawned write up the man page. I had a major hand in Section F but can't claim sole responsibility. The people listed in the recipients list in Ted Bashkow's cover letter are the members of the computer aquisition department. According to Joe Maranzano: "Ted Bashkow was a professor from Columbia who was on a 6-month sabbatical in Berkley Tague's department. The other names on the memo are: Dan Clayton David Copp Gwen Hansen Jossie Hintz Ruth Klein Jim Ludwig Georgette Petit Joe Ritacco Berk Tague Dan Vogel Linda Wright This was the composition of the Department in 1972 and most of us were working on Computer Acquisition Reviews for the Computer Centers. The Unix Support Group was formed in 1973." By the time the Tecktronix application was developed, the ICIS development project was ramping up. The developers were using punch cards for their Cobol programs. It occurred to me that we could utilize our UNIX system to eliminate punch cards which were difficult to manage and instead enter and edit the Cobol code using "ed". My management (rotated in from Bell Operating Companies) was not keen on diverting resources towards more tool building but I had enough autonomy to push through the ordering of a PDP-11/45 and a DEC developed Bisync communications interface card. This configuration allowed the UNIX system to emulate an IBM card reader/printer. The PDP11/45 had memory protection, which made committing all the source code for a major project to UNIX thinkable. I did all the development work on a bisync driver myself while my group attacked the main IBM development. The resulting system worked well and over the course of a few months all the die hard card rearder afficianados had converted to the new system. This despite the occasional file system crash. At the time you could go in and edit i-nodes by hand to recover lost files and directories. So with frequent tape backups for insurance we never lost more that a few hours worth of work. The Bell Labs UNIX support department (formed in 1973) eventually took over the maintenance of the system and dubbed it the Programmers Work Bench. Other types of workbench were to follow. I lost track of developments in the UNIX world till I transferred back to Bell Labs in 1982. By then the UNIX support organization was an entire Laboratory. The hardware platform was the DEC VAX system, UNIX was rewritten in C, and Berkely UNIX was a major competitor to the AT&T version. I still have the design and code for the Bisync driver if you are interested.