[TUHS] 4.2BSD Steering committee

[Paul Ruizendaal]

According to “20 years of BSD”, there was a steering committee to inform the development of what would eventually be 4.2BSD Unix. The committee had the following members:

Duane Adams and Bob Baker: DARPA

Bob Fabry, Bill Joy, Sam Leffler: CSRG

Dennis Ritchie:  Bell Labs

Alan Nemeth, Rob Gurwitz: BBN
Dan Lynch: ISI

Keith Lantz:   Stanford
Rick Rashid:   CMU
Bert Halstead: MIT
Jerry Popek:   UCLA


I’m intrigued by the composition and the rationale for each member. Some of it is obvious, some of it is not. According to “20 years of BSD” what DARPA wanted was:

"In particular, the new system was expected to include a faster file system that would raise throughput to the speed of available disk technology, support processes with multi-gigabyte address space requirements, provide flexible interprocess communication facilities that allow researchers to do work in distributed systems, and would integrate networking support so that machines running the new system could easily participate in the ARPAnet."

As I understand Duane Adams was the contract manager and Bob Baker a DARPA vice-president. The CSRG crowd are also clear, they were going to do the work.

Then it becomes less clear.

I can certainly see the logic of asking dmr to provide his guidance, also in view of Bell Labs expertise in working with large scale communication systems. I can also see the logic of having the BBN and ISI folk there, representing the Arpanet community and doing the work on the new TCP/IP protocol stack.

I’m not sure about the four others. They seem to be one each for 4 main computer science schools in the US at the time. Rashid and Popek had moreover recently completed distributed systems (Aleph and LOCUS). Halstead seems to have been working on messaging systems at the time. I’m not sure what Lantz’ spike was at the time.

All in all, a strong focus on distributed systems and messaging. No people with apparent links to virtual memory research or disk access research. Other than dmr, no research people from industry. For example, nobody from Xerox Parc. Nobody from IBM, HP, DEC, DG, etc.

Any and all recollections about the committee and its composition welcome.