[TUHS] Leaked patches... v6 to v6.5

reed at reedmedia.net reed at reedmedia.net
Tue Oct 1 12:54:55 AEST 2019


On Mon, 30 Sep 2019, Warner Losh wrote:

> Ok. I know there was never a v6.5... officially. But there are several
> references to that in different bits of the early user group news letters.
> This refers to v6 plus all the patches that "leaked" out of bell Labs via
> udel and Lou Katz.
> My question?is,? have they survived? The story sure has, but I didn't find them
> in the archive..?

I think these are the same as what went other places too.

See 
Archive/Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz
unsw3/usr/sys/v6unix/ directory.
has annotated changes and a diff

(following from my writings...)

In preparation to his year sabbatical, Thompson put together a Unix 
system to take.  ``Since it was almost a release, I made a `diff' with 
V6. On the way to Berkeley, I stopped by Urbana-Champaign ... I left the 
`diff' tape there and ...  [said] I wouldn't mind it if it got 
around.''\cite{salus2008}

At the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, research assistant Mike 
O'Brien got a copy of the single-file diff (from Thompson directly). Its 
main purpose was to keep the Bell Labs systems from crashing.  O'Brien 
went through it, diff by diff, and annotated it so others would have 
some idea of what it was what and whether they were 
useful.\cite{mikeobrien1}

...

By the end of the summer, Haley and Joy began to explore the kernel 
internals. With Schriebman's observance, they installed the fixes 
and improvements provided on the ``fifty changes'' tape from Bell Labs.  
As they learned to maneuver through the kernel code, they suggested 
several small enhancements to streamline certain 
bottlenecks.\cite{mckusick85}



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