[TUHS] My EuroBSDcon talk (preview for commentary)

[Clem cole]

I’m very aware it was message passing.  I’ve run it.  I’ve spoken to mike about it.  They definitely had seen v6.  But as I said I’m not so sure it was a clone.  Again they used B which was popular at Waterloo at the time.


Thanks for the update on the relationship between Ned and rand’s e.  I had thought they used Ed as part of it.   I saw Dave earlier this summer btw and he said he still gets asked about it.  Although he’s working a new hw architecture to fill his days. 

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

> On Sep 15, 2019, at 7:25 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 17:46:42 -0400 Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>> 
>> The first UNIX clone that I know about was a V6 version by Whitesmiths,
>> called Idris, I want to say in 1977/78.   I believe that Michel's Gien's
>> Pascal clone that he talked about a year later started out as V6, but
>> morphed to V7 before he was done (and then later morphed again to become
>> Chorus in a C++ rewrote).  Mike Malcolm's Thoth (which "Thucks" by the way,
>> my wife threw out my tee-shirt years ago;-) was a pseudo V6 clone.   I
> 
> Acc. to a paper[1] by Cheriton, Malcom and Melen did the
> original small run time executive called Thoth. Cheriton
> rewrote it to form the kernel of the system described in the
> Feb 1979 CACM article. It used memory mapping, swapping. etc.
> They also added a filesystem.
> 
> Thoth could not have been a clone of v6.  It used message
> passing. More RPC than pipes. And it had "teams", where a
> "team" is roughly the same as a Unix process (separate address
> space) and a Thoth "process" was a thread in that address
> space.  root was "*" (instead of "/") and current dir was "@"
> (instead ".").  A bigger difference was that it had *nodes* or
> files and any file can have sub nodes.  There was no
> separation between files and directories.
> 
> It was an interesting system and a lot of different things
> were tried in it. In 1980-81 timeframe AMD forked off a
> separate company called AMC to build microcomputers. They
> chose Thoth.  I almost worked there but in the end decided I'd
> rather do unix and joined Fortune and soon after AMD came to
> its senses and shut AMC down.
> 
> [1] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/1979/CS-79-19.pdf
> 
>> As I mentioned before the first commercial user of UNIX was Rand
>> Corporation in LA.  Al Arms of AT&T legal wrote the original $15K/CPU
>> license for them.   I don't know how many of those licenses were made
>> available, but I've always been under the impression it was under 10.  Like
>> a lot of people at the time, this was when the 'glass tty' was just showing
>> up in force and Rand updated/wrote a version of ed(1) called the rand(1)
>> editor [IIRC, its still available as the 'grand editor' from Dave Yost].
> 
> The Rand editor e had nothing in common with ed(1).  e
> descended from NED, a 2D editor, invented by Ned Irons in 1967
> and described in "A CRT editing system" CACM Jan 1972.
> 
> The "Grand editor", derived from e19 is long gone. Even Dave
> gave up on it long ago.  Though you can find a separate
> version on the 'Net, also derived from e19.  e with its
> multiple windows was a joy to use on a 60 line Ann Arbor
> Ambassador terminal. I use acme because it too is a tiling
> editor like e. It has some goodies not in e but overall e
> was a better experience.
> 
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/rand/R-2176-ARPA_The_CRT_Text_Editor_NED_Dec77.pdf