1 Feb
2022
1 Feb
'22
9:34 p.m.
All,
I did my research on this, but it's still a bit fuzzy (why is it that
people's memories from 40 years ago are so malleable?).
1. What are y'all's recollections regarding BSD 4.1's releases, vis a
vis the VAX. In McKusick's piece, Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix, I get
one perspective, and from Sokolov's Quasijarus project, I get quite
another. In terms of popularity and in terms of stable performance, what
say you? Was 4.1 that much better than 4BSD? Was 4.1as obsolete
immediately as McKusick says? 4.1b sounds good with FFS, was it? 4.1c's
the last pre 4.2 release, but it sounds like it was nearly a beta
version of 4.2...
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going off the rails
with the 4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno
release, and that Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
3. I've gotten BSD 4.2 and BSD 4.3 releases built from tape and working
very well. I just can't decide whether to go back to one of the 4.x
releases (hence question 1), or go get Quasijarus0c - thoughts on why
one might be more interesting than another?
4. Is Quasijarus0c end of the line for VAX 4.xBSD? Why does tuhs only
have Quasijarus0 and 0a, was there something wrong with 0b and 0c?
5. Has anyone unearthed an original 4.1 tape, or is Haertel's
reconstruction of the 1981 tape 1 release as close as it gets?
Later,
Will
1 Feb
1 Feb
9:47 p.m.
On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 03:34:53PM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going
off the rails with
the 4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release,
and that Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
I think the issue was that some of the core CSRG people went off to form
BSDi to try and sell BSD on PCs.
2 Feb
2 Feb
12:38 a.m.
On Tuesday, 1 February 2022 at 15:34:53 -0600, Will Senn wrote:
All,
I did my research on this, but it's still a bit fuzzy (why is it that
people's memories from 40 years ago are so malleable?).
1. What are y'all's recollections regarding BSD 4.1's releases, vis a
vis the VAX. In McKusick's piece, Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix, I get
one perspective, and from Sokolov's Quasijarus project, I get quite
another.
Kirk was there the whole time, from far earlier until the end of the
CSRG. Sokolov came later, and to my recollection he wasn't involved
in core BSD at all. I don't have any personal recollections of the
time, but it seems clear who is more plausible.
5. Has anyone unearthed an original 4.1 tape, or is
Haertel's
reconstruction of the 1981 tape 1 release as close as it gets?
Clearly this is beyond what is on the 4 CD set, right? That tree
contains a file TAPE with the comments (inter alia)
Extracted from two 4.1BSD distribution tapes dated 7/10/81.
First label on the tape:
4.1bsd VAX UNIX System 7/10/81
5 files on tape:
1 (boot stuff) 2 (root dump)
3 (/usr) 4 (/usr/src) 5(4.0/4.1)
last three are tar; 1600 bpi
But presumably you know that. Was this the Haertel reconstruction you
mention?
On Tuesday, 1 February 2022 at 13:47:53 -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 03:34:53PM -0600, Will Senn
wrote:
BSDI came later, and the founders weren't CSRG people, though some
CSRG people did join the company. I think the real issue was that
CSRG no longer had a purpose: the research aspect was over and done
with, and the funding dried up.
Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started
going off the rails with
the 4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release,
and that Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
I think the issue was that some of the core CSRG people went off to
form BSDi to try and sell BSD on PCs. 
1 Feb
1 Feb
10:04 p.m.
On 2/1/22 4:34 PM, Will Senn wrote:
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going
off the rails with
the 4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release,
and that Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
He seems to be saying that everything post-VAX was where the project lost
its way.
My recollection is that the switch from VAX to Tahoe was mostly driven by
funding, hardware donations, and the Berkeley departments' and computing
center's desire to move to the VAX 8000 series, which IIRC the CSRG was not
prepared to support. (I'm a little fuzzy on the timing of that last piece.)
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
10:18 p.m.
On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 4:35 PM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
All,
I did my research on this, but it's still a bit fuzzy (why is it that
people's memories from 40 years ago are so malleable?).
1. What are y'all's recollections regarding BSD 4.1's releases, vis a vis
the VAX. In McKusick's piece, Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix, I get one
perspective, and from Sokolov's Quasijarus project, I get quite another. In
terms of popularity and in terms of stable performance, what say you? Was
4.1 that much better than 4BSD? Was 4.1as obsolete immediately as McKusick
says? 4.1b sounds good with FFS, was it? 4.1c's the last pre 4.2 release,
but it sounds like it was nearly a beta version of 4.2...
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going off the rails with
the 4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release,
and that Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
Bluntly, no. Sokolov fell deeply into the nostalgia trap, and combined it
with a revolutionary zeal that was off-putting at best. As far as I know,
it was never more than one individual's project, and boasts of reclaiming
the mantle of CSRG and BSD are grossly exaggerated. The world changed, and
Unix moved in a different direction to accommodate; there's really no going
back.
3. I've gotten BSD 4.2 and BSD 4.3 releases built from tape and working
very well. I just can't decide whether to go back
to one of the 4.x
releases (hence question 1), or go get Quasijarus0c - thoughts on why one
might be more interesting than another?
Quasijarus is like 4.3 with some bug fixes and enhancements. If you want to
run something like 4.3 in an emulator, it's not bad; I'm running it for a
ham radio project (just for fun) and it's Y2K compliant and seems reliable.
4. Is Quasijarus0c end of the line for VAX 4.xBSD? Why does tuhs only have
Quasijarus0 and 0a, was there something wrong with 0b
and 0c?
Well, no. Both OpenBSD and NetBSD ported back to the VAX, but the OpenBSD
effort has ended due to lack of hardware and interest. It appears that
NetBSD is still being actively developed on the VAX, however, so it's
possible to get a "modern" 4.4BSD derived system on that architecture.
5. Has anyone unearthed an original 4.1 tape, or is Haertel's
reconstruction of the 1981 tape 1 release as close as
it gets?
For the fifth time today this reminded me that I wanted to find my images
from Kirk's CD collection and move them over to another machine. Sigh.
- Dan C.
2 Feb
2 Feb
12:22 a.m.
Dan/Will - I think we need the political way back machine ... below...
On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 5:19 PM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
were now supporting UNIX so DARPA no longer felt they needed to fund
support. You could buy a computer and system vendor made work. Second as
I said, there were people inside of the EECS Dept at UCB that felt that
CSRG was turning the department away from research and they needed to
reclaim that. And third as others have suggested, Joy went to Sun, and a
number of the others formed BSDi. Kirk was still there and there was still
some work going on, but it was nothing like it was. The net result was
the desire to keep going was lost, less than going off the rails. It just
did not have the same people, the same money and as such, the same effort.
On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 4:35 PM Will Senn
<will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
16/36
PDP-6/10s to the research community with BBN, MIT, Stanford and CMU
sort of being the prime places. The compilers mostly were the same (close
enough) although the OS's (user interfaces) were all different. Tenex vs.
ITS vs. WAITS vs. TOPS (sort of).
People forget that the real reason it happened was that UCB had a contract
to get Maxima running on a Vax for DARPA [this work would begat 3BSD].
Only after that, did DARPA switch to the 32 bit vax as the system of
choice. Stanford wanted VMS and mostly everyone else wanted UNIX. But
DEC did not support UNIX. So ... ARPA funded CSRG to support UNIX for
the ARPA contracts. But remember CSRG did not have everything - just a
support contact [which raised a lot of hackels both inside and outside of
UCB]. For instance networking for UNIX was at BBN not UCB. And all of
CMU, Stanford and MIT had ARPA $s for basic OS research and other ideas.
The Stanford crew tried to show that VMS was faster than 4BSD. Joy
famously did the 'FASTVAX' work over a period oa 6-8 weeks and got UNIX
within epsilon of VMS on almost everything and actually faster in a number
of places. This would become 4.1 - add it was the version that most people
that had vaxen started to use.
All,
I did my research on this, but it's still a bit fuzzy (why is it that
people's memories from 40 years ago are so malleable?).
1. What are y'all's recollections regarding BSD 4.1's releases, vis a vis
the VAX. In McKusick's piece, Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix, I get one
perspective, and from Sokolov's Quasijarus project, I get quite another. In
terms of popularity and in terms of stable performance, what say you? Was
4.1 that much better than 4BSD?
Yes but you need to understand the politics. ARPA had been supplying Was 4.1as obsolete immediately as McKusick says?
Well yes in that very few systems ran it.
It was Joy's first attempt at
creating sockets. I'm probably not being
fair, but it was the BBN stack
hacked to have a new interface. I ran it on UCBCAD and Sam probably had
it running on 5-10 750s in Evans. I thought it got sent to a few sites
outside of UCB, but 4.1B was pretty close behind.
4.1b sounds good with FFS, was it?
Hmm, you'd have to check the sources.
I thought Kirk had FFS running
with 4.1a --- but maybe not.
4.1c's the last pre 4.2 release, but it sounds
like it was nearly a beta
a
good term for it. 4.2 was not ready when I finished so I brought 4.1c
with me to Masscomp - which is what we started with for the networking
code. It was what we added MP support to and then added 4.2 fixes when it
came out. But 4.1c was breaking a lot of user mode code and so 4.2 really
did not go out until they had caught most of the issues.
version of 4.2...
Hmm, not so much a release candidate as a test vehicle. Beta is probably
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going off the rails with
the 4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe
Not really. A few things happened. First manufacturers (including DEC)
and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release,
and that Quasijarus
Amen -- I can add little to that.
puts the mission back on track, is that so?
Bluntly, no. Sokolov fell deeply into the nostalgia trap, and combined it
with a revolutionary zeal that was off-putting at best. As far as I know,
it was never more than one individual's project, and boasts of reclaiming
the mantle of CSRG and BSD are grossly exaggerated. The world changed, and
Unix moved in a different direction to accommodate; there's really no going
back.
3. I've gotten BSD 4.2 and BSD 4.3 releases built from tape and working
Then again, if the idea is running BSD on a Vax, Ultrix 4.5 is even better,
and has all the DEC languages and layered products.
very well. I just can't decide whether to go
back to one of the 4.x
releases (hence question 1), or go get Quasijarus0c - thoughts on why one
might be more interesting than another?
Quasijarus is like 4.3 with some bug fixes and enhancements. If you want
to run something like 4.3 in an emulator, it's not bad; I'm running it for
a ham radio project (just for fun) and it's Y2K compliant and seems
reliable.
4. Is Quasijarus0c end of the line for VAX 4.xBSD? Why does tuhs only have
Right - either current NetBSD or the Ultrix 4.5 is what I would do. If
NetBSD will run the Ultrix layered products, that would be the system with
the most; but I'm not sure if that will work. Ultrix for instance
supports DEC (VMS) FTN - which I know you (Will) have been messing with.
That is the best (most complete) FTN for Vaxen. I believe there is Ada,
PL/1 and maybe even Basic2 and Cobol/RPG [I think most of not all of the
VMS languages for the VAX were released on Ultrix but frankly, I don't
remember].
Quasijarus0 and 0a, was there something wrong
with 0b and 0c?
Well, no. Both OpenBSD and NetBSD ported back to the VAX, but the OpenBSD
effort has ended due to lack of hardware and interest. It appears that
NetBSD is still being actively developed on the VAX, however, so it's
possible to get a "modern" 4.4BSD derived system on that architecture.
5. Has anyone unearthed an original 4.1 tape, or is
Haertel's
😎
reconstruction of the 1981 tape 1 release as
close as it gets?
For the fifth time today this reminded me that I wanted to find my images
from Kirk's CD collection and move them over to another machine. Sigh.'
12:43 a.m.
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> writes:
[snip]
[snip]
NetBSD has a compat_ultrix that can be enabled for NetBSD/vax (and pmax
/ mips) that might allow some of those products to work. The man page
for it does not mention any of that specifically and does say that there
are a few limits to it.
https://man.netbsd.org/compat_ultrix.8
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
Well, no. Both
OpenBSD and NetBSD ported back to the VAX, but the OpenBSD
effort has ended due to lack of hardware and interest. It appears that
NetBSD is still being actively developed on the VAX, however, so it's
possible to get a "modern" 4.4BSD derived system on that architecture.
Right - either current NetBSD or the Ultrix 4.5 is what I would do. If
NetBSD will run the Ultrix layered products, that would be the system with
the most; but I'm not sure if that will work. Ultrix for instance
supports DEC (VMS) FTN - which I know you (Will) have been messing with.
That is the best (most complete) FTN for Vaxen. I believe there is Ada,
PL/1 and maybe even Basic2 and Cobol/RPG [I think most of not all of the
VMS languages for the VAX were released on Ultrix but frankly, I don't
remember].
1:19 a.m.
On 2/1/22 6:43 PM, Brad Spencer wrote:
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> writes:
[snip]
[snip]
NetBSD has a compat_ultrix that can be enabled for NetBSD/vax (and pmax
/ mips) that might allow some of those products to work. The man page
for it does not mention any of that specifically and does say that there
are a few limits to it.
https://man.netbsd.org/compat_ultrix.8
I tried an install of netbsd latest on simh microvax a few weeks back
and it installed without error. It was slow to boot to login, but I'm
sure that's just the network being misconfigured somehow, I haven't had
time to troubleshoot - let's just call it pilot error.
Well, no.
Both OpenBSD and NetBSD ported back to the VAX, but the OpenBSD
effort has ended due to lack of hardware and interest. It appears that
NetBSD is still being actively developed on the VAX, however, so it's
possible to get a "modern" 4.4BSD derived system on that architecture.
Right - either current NetBSD or the Ultrix 4.5 is what I would do. If
NetBSD will run the Ultrix layered products, that would be the system with
the most; but I'm not sure if that will work. Ultrix for instance
supports DEC (VMS) FTN - which I know you (Will) have been messing with.
That is the best (most complete) FTN for Vaxen. I believe there is Ada,
PL/1 and maybe even Basic2 and Cobol/RPG [I think most of not all of the
VMS languages for the VAX were released on Ultrix but frankly, I don't
remember].
1:35 a.m.
On 2/1/22 6:22 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
Dan/Will - I think we need the political way back
machine ... Â below...
That's a lot of history. Thanks. Always with the money, I thought it was
strictly altruism that drove the pioneers :).
Then again, if the idea is running BSD on a Vax,
Ultrix 4.5 is even
better, and has all the DEC languages and layered products.
Wow. I will dig into this. I like the layered stuff. I thought you had
to do RT11/RSTSE/TOPS/etc to have that. I had no idea it was available
on a *nix platform.
4. Is Quasijarus0c end of the line for VAX 4.xBSD? Why does
tuhs only have Quasijarus0 and 0a, was there something wrong
with 0b and 0c?
Well, no. Both OpenBSD and NetBSD ported back to the VAX, but the
OpenBSD effort has ended due to lack of hardware and interest. It
appears that NetBSD is still being actively developed on the VAX,
however, so it's possible to get a "modern" 4.4BSD derived system
on that architecture.
Right - either current NetBSD or the Ultrix 4.5 is what I would do.Â
If NetBSD will run the Ultrix layered products, that would be the
system with the most; but I'm not sure if that will work. Â Ultrix for
instance supports DEC (VMS) FTN - which I know you (Will) have been
messing with.  That is the best (most complete) FTN for Vaxen. I
believe there is Ada, PL/1 and maybe even Basic2 and Cobol/RPG [I
think most of not all of the VMS languages for the VAX were released
on Ultrix but frankly, I don't remember].
Sweet. Off to hunt down Ultrix 4.5
:).
Will
5 Feb
5 Feb
11:57 p.m.
On Feb 1, 2022, at 4:22 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Right - either current NetBSD or the Ultrix 4.5 is what I would do. If NetBSD will run
the Ultrix layered products, that would be the system with the most; but I'm not sure
if that will work. Ultrix for instance supports DEC (VMS) FTN - which I know you (Will)
have been messing with. That is the best (most complete) FTN for Vaxen. I believe there
is Ada, PL/1 and maybe even Basic2 and Cobol/RPG [I think most of not all of the VMS
languages for the VAX were released on Ultrix but frankly, I don't remember].
I don’t know if NetBSD has Ultrix binary compatibility on VAX, but it does on MIPS—so much
so that a few years back, someone accidentally pointed their NetBSD boot at the wrong
partition on their DECstation and Ultrix booted right up using the NetBSD kernel!
— Chris
2 Feb
2 Feb
1:30 a.m.
On 2/1/22 4:18 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
snip...
For the fifth time today this reminded me that I wanted to find my
images from Kirk's CD collection and move them over to another
machine. Sigh.
    - Dan C.
Having the CD's handy is very handy :) I usually mount the iso and build
pdfs of the docs I'm interested, in or view source code or whatever:
hdiutil mount "~/_workarea/_retro-resources/bits/csrg/The CSRG
Archives CD-ROM 1 (August 1998) (Marshall Kirk McKusick).ISO"
cd /Volumes/CDROM/4.2/usr/doc/setup
eqn *.t | tbl | groff -Tps -ms > ~/Desktop/setup.ps
ps2pdf ~/Desktop/setup.ps
open ~/Desktop/setup.pdf
I bought my copy back when from:
https://www.mckusick.com/csrg/index.html
Now they're conveniently hosted on archive.org. Here's the first cd as
downloadable iso:
https://archive.org/details/The_CSRG_Archives_CD-ROM_1_August_1998_Marshall…
Kirk's fine with them being hosted there, by the way. But, having the
actual CD's are great in case of the apocalypse :).
Will
1 Feb
1 Feb
11:40 p.m.
4.2 was sockets. This was a huge change in network stack. It was also
bust off the tape, we tried a unix domain socket binding and crashed
the Vax. At that stage, we were using UUCP and cu heavily to do
VMS-UNIX networking.
When it settled down, much though I hated them, (I wanted the
newcastle ... connection model to work, and then streams) sockets
drove a lot of things. sockets became everything in some ways. the
energy behind SunOS is NFS, and thats sockets.
To me, noting some work on multi-core CPUs which fed into things, 4.3
onward is mostly about novel networking stacks. Its the side story to
OS design, but the Van-Jacobsen work and related stuff by Sally Floyd,
Alison Mankin and others looking into network dynamics and algorithms
was huge. the IBM PC-RT became the fuzzball/BBN-Butterfly replacement
in the NSFnet, run by Elise Gerich and others, Elise went on to be
IANA after Jon Postel died. So the BSD-> IBM-PC/RT (BSD port) -> BGP
story is huge in this. And .. It drives on sockets. BSD drove sockets
drove NSFNet drove the explosive uptake of the network. Sockets sold
machines.
I don't entirely buy "off the rails" but I could believe the dynamic
of the BSD workgroup and the surge in burden for not enough visible
increment in benefit to Berkeley overall combined with the first
pre-dotcom boom of Sun, Dec into the space probably drove people to
seek salary and live outcomes better met in commerce. I didn't much
get MT-XINU or the other breakout when the 386 port went live. an ISP
I worked for used it, but frankly it was wierd. A Sun, pre Solaris was
a more natural place to be for a BSD refugee.
The dark side of this being Ingres. What happened there remains a bit
shrouded to me, but I'm told a lot of dirty tricks went on.
Kirk McKusick remained part of BSDs (V)FS story to this day. Others
have become more occasional on the BSD lists but they are there, if
they chose to remain silent, perhaps its because there's little upside
to buying into the current debates. I didn't run BSD on any Vax after
the 7 series, Maybe the effort to port to the later Vax-Cluster models
was hard, but by then (looking backwards) DEC was already in Decline
and Sun was spinning up to Solaris and the brave future of SYSV
alignment hell. I had this wierd 2 floppy OS from some kid in
northern europe, I mean FFS Andy Tannenbaum did tiny unix, who needs
another one it doesn't have sockets it doesn't have anything. This
linux thing will never work guys. We need more BSD. (worked out well,
prognosticatiion-wise)
DEC kind-of "got" networks but wierdly. They tried to sell UQueensland
an entire campus of FDDI but we had to commit to buying 1000 linecards
at a tiny discount. It was an insanely stupid idea. We stuck to
thinwire and PCs with lightweight sockets stacks. Thats when two (2,
I counted them) DECmate devices turned up and somebodys PA had to move
over to them, hated them. The IBM Golfballs were much more heavily
used.
NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD can't agree on support for tabstop=4 and
expandtabs in vi, and Python2 has just been deprecated EOL and Black
rewrites tabs to 4 spaces. So I guess we can argue about that for some
time yet.
On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 7:35 AM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
All,
I did my research on this, but it's still a bit fuzzy (why is it that people's
memories from 40 years ago are so malleable?).
1. What are y'all's recollections regarding BSD 4.1's releases, vis a vis
the VAX. In McKusick's piece, Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix, I get one perspective,
and from Sokolov's Quasijarus project, I get quite another. In terms of popularity
and in terms of stable performance, what say you? Was 4.1 that much better than 4BSD? Was
4.1as obsolete immediately as McKusick says? 4.1b sounds good with FFS, was it?
4.1c's the last pre 4.2 release, but it sounds like it was nearly a beta version of
4.2...
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going off the rails with the
4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release, and that
Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
3. I've gotten BSD 4.2 and BSD 4.3 releases built from tape and working very well. I
just can't decide whether to go back to one of the 4.x releases (hence question 1),
or go get Quasijarus0c - thoughts on why one might be more interesting than another?
4. Is Quasijarus0c end of the line for VAX 4.xBSD? Why does tuhs only have Quasijarus0
and 0a, was there something wrong with 0b and 0c?
5. Has anyone unearthed an original 4.1 tape, or is Haertel's reconstruction of the
1981 tape 1 release as close as it gets?
Later,
Will
11:54 p.m.
On Tue, 1 Feb 2022, Will Senn wrote:
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going
off the rails with the
4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release, and
that Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
Wasn't he an anti-POSIX, anti-SysV zealot who thought the pre-rewrite BSD
stuff was the Last Bastion of True Unix? At least that's the impression
I've gotten from Quasijarus.
-uso.
2 Feb
2 Feb
1:02 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 1, 2022, at 1:34 PM, Will Senn wrote:
All,
I did my research on this, but it's still a bit fuzzy (why is it that people's
memories from 40 years ago are so malleable?).
1. What are y'all's recollections regarding BSD 4.1's releases, vis a vis
the VAX. In McKusick's piece, Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix, I get one perspective,
and from Sokolov's Quasijarus project, I get quite another. In terms of popularity
and in terms of stable performance, what say you? Was 4.1 that much better than 4BSD? Was
4.1as obsolete immediately as McKusick says? 4.1b sounds good with FFS, was it?
4.1c's the last pre 4.2 release, but it sounds like it was nearly a beta version of
4.2...
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going off the rails with the
4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release, and that
Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
My recollection from 1997 or 1998 is that Sokolov appeared out of nowhere, alone, with (as
someone else in this thread best put it) a "revolutionary zeal", and decided to
create Quasijarus with the specific goal of supporting VAXen beyond the models that had
been originally supported under 4.2. Sokolov was 18 or 19 at the time, so I can certainly
understand the revolutionary zeal (I miss mine!). Beyond that, I don't think anything
else ever came out of it.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web(a)loomcom.com
10:28 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 03:34:53PM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going
off the rails with
the 4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with the 4.3-Reno release,
and that Quasijarus puts the mission back on track, is that so?
Well, thats just his opinion. You can still read all about it here:
https://ifctfvax.superglobalmegacorp.com/
3. I've gotten BSD 4.2 and BSD 4.3 releases built
from tape and working very
well. I just can't decide whether to go back to one of the 4.x releases
(hence question 1), or go get Quasijarus0c - thoughts on why one might be
more interesting than another?
IIRC 4.3-Tahoe was the first to support running on MicroVAX II, III
and later systems based on the CVAX chip and the QBus. But getting it
installed on one of these was a pain to say the least. The main reason
was that it required the use of disk labels on the directly-attached
MSCP disks commonly found on these systems, but it lacked a standalone
utility for creating them during installation.
From my recollection Michael made a few small
improvements to what he
found in 4.3-Tahoe, and a standalone disklabel utility may
or may not
have been one of them.
I do remember that when I first installed 4.3-Tahoe (Or was it
Quasijarus 0b?) on a real MicroVAX II about 20 years ago, I had to create
the disklabels with NetBSD 1.5, which apparently were still reasonably
compatible back then.
4. Is Quasijarus0c end of the line for VAX 4.xBSD? Why
does tuhs only have
Quasijarus0 and 0a, was there something wrong with 0b and 0c?
It's basically just yet another branch off the Unix family tree,
originating at 4.3BSD-Tahoe and not going very far. He had big plans to
support most later MicroVAX models, but apparently that never
materialized.
Hans
--
%SYSTEM-F-ANARCHISM, The operating system has been overthrown
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14 comments
12 participants
participants (12)
-
Brad Spencer -
Chet Ramey -
Chris Hanson -
Clem Cole -
Dan Cross -
George Michaelson -
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
Hans Rosenfeld -
Larry McVoy -
Seth Morabito -
Steve Nickolas -
Will Senn