[TUHS] Origin year of BSD csh?

arnold at skeeve.com arnold at skeeve.com
Tue Jun 28 17:51:44 AEST 2016


Thanks everyone for the answers, esp. to Mary Ann for the definitive dates.

My story is similar to most everyone else's. I was exposed to csh on
4.1 BSD but was so horrified by the syntax that I preferred to do without
job control and use the Bourne shell.

Later on when I was at Georgia Tech we got the BRL dist and I used Ron's
job control shell. I wrote a csh-style history mechanism for it and backported
that and the job control to the V7 sh and posted diffs to USENET so that people
without a SV license could benefit.

>From there I went to ksh for many years, and thence to Bash. I abandoned
the csh-history-for-sh stuff as soon as I got ksh with vi editing mode
and have never looked back.  Circa 1990 I banged on the bash/readline code
to make its vi mode more like ksh's.

How well I remember Bournegol and how happy I was when I saw that SVR2 had
gotten rid of it.

With respect to history in the terminal, the Bell Labs guys did that by
making the terminal smarter, with the Blit.  I had one but the load it
put on our poor vax 11/780 was awesome.

Arnold



More information about the TUHS mailing list