[TUHS] PWB vs Unix/TS

[Steve Johnson]

One of my co-workers, Serge Vakulenko,  just gave me a small gift --
a 1 x 2 inch computer chip that runs a version of BSD Unix, complete
with compilers and editors.  It's powered by the USB port and you
connect with it at 115200 baud (10,000 x faster than a model 33
TTY!).  It has a surprisingly big file system and 128K of RAM, half
of which is given to the system.  There are lots of BSD games,
including a game of Go Fish that I wrote for my son over 50 years
ago.   It was interesting to me to look at that early C code.  I
was surprised at the nonzero number of gotos (5).

The source is on
https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd/blob/master/src/games/fish.c if
you are interested...

For extra credit, see if you can find the bug that Serge found in this
50-year-old code, and figure out how the program seems to work OK
anyway  (Hint: type mismatch).  There clearly was a good reason to
invent Lint and declarations and header files...

Steve

PS: if you'd like a look at the chip, google PIC32-RETROBSD.  The CPU
is a MIPS microcontroller.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry McVoy" <lm at mcvoy.com>
To:"Richard Salz" <rich.salz at gmail.com>
Cc:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
Sent:Wed, 11 Sep 2019 11:54:18 -0700
Subject:Re: [TUHS] PWB vs Unix/TS

 On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 02:18:08PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote:
 > >
 > > It would have been
 > > much better if Sun had licensed their source base to AT&T and
then
 > > AT&T could have leveraged the industry standard.
 > 
 > 
 > Interesting to speculate if that would have sped up the creation of
OSF or
 > delayed/prevented it. I think the former.

 You're probably right but it wouldn't have mattered. SunOS was very
popular
 and had a good VM system with a working mmap. Once it became official
 AT&T source everyone would have moved to it over time.

 Sort of obvious in retrospect. Nobody, that I know of, considered it
at
 the time. I proposed open sourcing it.


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