[TUHS] BSD/v8 TCP/IP (was Shell control through external commands)

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 10:44 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, 11 September 2016 at 21:31:10 -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
>>
>> -- Adopt 4.1c BSD kernel
>> ...
>>
>> I don't think the BSD kernel when adopted had much, if any,
>> of sockets, Berkeley's TCP/IP, McKusick's FFS; if it did,
>> they were excised.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> TCP/IP support didn't show up until later, I think summer 1985,
>> though it might have been a year later.
>
> I'm confused.  4.1c has gone down in history as the first version with
> Internet code, and looking at the sources (from mckusick's CD set), I
> see the network files in /sys/netinet with names very reminiscent of
> current FreeBSD file names.  The files have timestamps between
> November 1982 and May 1983.  Why should they have been removed?  I
> would have thought that exactly this functionality would have been the
> reason why you adopted 4.1c.
>
> Similarly, it also included FFS and (not surprisingly sockets.
>
> I checked further back, but unfortunately the previous version on the
> CDs is 4.1a, and it has no kernel code.

I don't think they are talking about BSD4.1a having these things, but
rather Research Unix Edition 8 having these things. Bell labs didn't
integrate them until later. I recall reading articles at the time (1983
or 1984) that they had their own notion of what networking to use
that wasn't TCP/IP due to some perceived failings of TCP/IP that
they fixed with their stuff. I recall that I read it in the library in
high school.  Wish I'd forgotten that and recalled what the network
protocol was they implemented instead...

Warner