[TUHS] Claim your early Unix contributions on GitHub

Diomidis Spinellis dds at aueb.gr
Thu Mar 31 01:49:10 AEST 2016


On 30/03/2016 17:25, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> What do you mean by "early"? All of my early work was done under my
> login "marc", and in those days to email we just typed:
>
> % mail marc
>
> Email was internal to the system. Email between machines came along later.
>
> Also, I don't think we ever used the word "commit." Actually, much of my
> early work predated the introduction of SCCS. ;-)

I should have been more clear. The Unix history Git repository contains 
synthetic commits imported from snapshots, patches, SCCS, CVS, and Git 
files. I took the liberty of attaching the email ID at research.uucp on all 
Bell Labs commits, even though many predate UUCP email.

Your SCCS work belongs to the mysterious subset of Bell Labs commands 
that made their first public appearance on BSD Unix. I didn't find SCCS 
included in the 6th or 7th Research Edition, nor in Unix 32/V, which, I 
understand, were the ancestors of BSD.

Specifically, I first find SCCS included in the BSD-4 snapshot (e.g. 
usr.bin/sccs/sccs.c) and also in the BSD SCCS repositories predating 
BSD-4, through commits such as the following.

commit 20f9634be56fa471a34bc386dcc4c04f9587791d
Author: Eric Allman <eric at ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue May 13 07:23:29 1980 -0800

changed path to SCCS/s.
added chghist & help
generalized argument chomping

SCCS-vsn: 1.2


Other commands that fall into this category include fsck (frodo), gres 
(lem), efl (sif), diction (llc), and ideal (cvw). Somebody has commented 
on this list that a secret tunnel linked Murray Hill and Berkeley. I'd 
welcome any better explanations you may have.


I'll find a way to graft you as the developer of SCCS somewhere between 
BSD3 and BSD4, so please do claim marc at research.uucp on GitHub.  Are 
there other files I should also attribute to you?


Diomidis



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