[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Clem cole]

Im not sure how you got there. I hardly said or implied that Unix started in 78 or on the Vax.  I’m fairly aware that Ken had core in his PDP-7, as did many of us (including myself) on our many of PDP-11s in the old times.  I started with Fifth and Sixth Edition.  Dumping core had meaning to all of us in those days. 

All I said was that by the time of the VAX - which very much did spread the gospel of Unix to the world -  core memory had fallen from favor and widespread use.   The PDP11 was the last system DEC released core.  

BTW if you want to be correct about dates - the DEC released the Vax in 76 not 78 ( I personally used to program Vax serial #1 at CMU under VMS 1.0 before I was at UCB which is what Dan had asked). Also FWIW. Bill and Ozzie whom I knew from my UCB days, did not do the UCB Vax work until a few years later when the UCB EECS Dept got their first Berkeley VAX and Prof Fateman who had come from MIT wanted to run MAC Lisp on it - which very much required VM support.  V32 ( the V7 port for the Vax from AT&T) swapped.  Bill and Ozzie added paging support which was released as BSD 3.0 (Ozzie graduates and left for Cornell as I recall but where he went is fuzzy in my memory now). Primarily Bill but with the help of us others followed quickly with 4.0 and 4.1 (the later being the first wide spread Vax release) with his Fastvax support. Later still in the early 1980s Bill lead the CRSG team and released 4.1a/b/c.  Bill left for Sun and I left for Masscomp.  Kirk, Sam and Keith pushed out 4.2 et al to the final NET2 release which was after my time.  

Of those on the list from UCB which was my time there was also Mary Ann Horton in EECS and Debbie S. who was up the hill at LBL and who both also sometimes reply - I do look to them correct/affirm me for UCB history.  

But I personally go back in Unix history to the early/mid 1970s at CMU.  I often defer to Noel C for memories of networking things which he was a part at MIT from the same time frame.   I defer to Doug, Steve and obviously Ken for things at ATT and history before Fifth Edition. 

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Apr 22, 2018, at 4:58 PM, Mutiny <mutiny.mutiny at rediffmail.com> wrote:
> 
> From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
> Sent: Sun, 22 Apr 2018 23:08:32
> Thus, the UNIX term 'core dump' was really meaningless.
> UNIX didn't started in 1978 with the VAX and solid state ram. It started earlier when core was cheaper than ss ram in the dec world which was the case even in '77. Yes there was core, and yes, core dump isn't meaningless at all.
> ...
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