[TUHS] UNIX on (not quite bare) System/370

[Rob Pike]

Quite a bit of this feels not exactly wrong, but not quite right. (And his
name is John Reiser, not Reisner.) Steve Johnson didn't go to work in
development until the mid 1980s, for example, long after these bloodlines
as you call them were laid down.

Do we know that PWB became USG? That doesn't feel right to me, although it
might well be true, I wasn't there. I think of it as mostly staying in
Whippany, not going to Summit. Also your prose would imply USG never got to
V7 level, which is certainly not true. Columbus's major contribution, as we
saw it from Research, was the world's second most complex init. All these
variants lobbied to have Research adopt things, as such approval was seen
as a badge of honor. Honestly, though, it was all pretty toxic.

Reiser and London's Unix, which I greatly admired, died on the vine for a
variety of political reasons, as well as because it had slightly different
semantics in some important cases, and because of a broad antipathy to
virtual memory across the company due to various people having used VM on
inadequate hardware, and of course then there was Multics. Sandy Fraser was
very nervous about Research adopting the BSD kernel because of his
experience with Atlas. But let it be said: Reiser's VM system was seriously
impressive, cleanly integrated, structurally central, and wonderfully fast.
And Sandy relented but the general warmth of 1127 towards Berkeley led to
Research adopting Berkeley Unix as its VAX VM platform, despite some,
including myself, feeling that was the inferior choice.

-rob


On Tue, Dec 20, 2022 at 8:03 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 1:54 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> All I can comment is there are a number of #ifdef u370 sections added to
>> System V.  Happened somewhere between 3.0 and 5.0, likely UNIX/TS.  This is
>> my understanding of Bell-adjacent platform work:
>>
>> PDP-7          - Research, 1969
>> PDP-11         - Research, 1970
>> Interdata 8/32 - Research, 1977
>> VAX            - Research, 1979 (or did USG do 32V, it's sitting in my
>> USG folder...)
>> 3B20           - UNIX/TS 4.x, 1981
>> System/370     - UNIX/TS?, 198x
>> 3B5            - Release 5.0, 1982
>> M68000         - System V, 1983
>> Z8000          - System V, 1983
>>
>>
> Sadly, do I wish it was this linear as you present ;-)    Simply - it was
> not.
>
> Just like the folks outside of the Bell System, inside, there were several
> forks, many of which have been discussed here.
>
> Research was its own bloodline.  Ken/Dennis et al..   This, of course, was
> what seeded much of the external work at the Universities with the BSD
> bloodline as a direct result. There was a good bit of porting work done
> there, such as the work on the Interdata,  IBM S/360,  and Honeywell, but
> most of that work tended to leave the labs in an indirect form.
>
> PWB 1.0/2.0 started a different thread - Glaser, Mashey, et al...  as a
> fork of Research Sixth Edition.  After many twists and turns, that
> bloodline would become the Unix Support Group (a.k.a. USG) in Summit (Steve
> Johnson - a.k.a. yaccman - was a manager in Summit and has offered some
> enlightenment on this list over the years).  As we have often discussed
> here, the TS line is hugely impure.  There is a great question of what was
> TS and what was not.  What was the name and what was actual technology?
> It's clear it started based on AT&T politics of the mid-late 70s, but as
> things changed at AT&T and their own internal Unix wars - names and
> technologies shave been blurred and some of the details were lost to time.
>  We know that the PWB thread  (and >>name<< ) would >>eventually<< become
> the many flavors of Sys V and it was the 'official' line that AT&T started
> to market -- at first to the Operating Companies and later more widespread
> commercially.  What was PWB and what was TS is not completely clear? (I
> think Werner may have done so of the best sleuthing here and has reported
> his learnings in the past).
>
> Part of the issues we have as historians was because threads and those
> twists and turns started before the breakup and were controlled by rules of
> the 1956 consent decree (TS and PWB itself are examples) and other things
> happened afterward as Charlie Brown (AT&T CEO) wanted to make a run at
> being in the computer business.  Pre breakup, the AT&T >>commercial<< work
> was targeted for the Operating Companys. Each group often did different
> things to deal with specific projects that were being targeted to solve
> problems that the OCs had.
>
> As was pointed out before, the switching folks in Indian Hill not only
> needed to build things like SW for the ESS#5 (the 370/TSS-based stuff
> mentioned yesterday helped to support that project) but they were also
> working on a very slick single system image Unix system [Tom Bishop at
> friends] that ran on the 3B duplex and some other HW - the /400 IIRC]
> (FWIW: Tom used to be findable - I've tried to get him on this list a few
> times).  But you will see some #ifdefs in various codes that ended back up
> in Summit that really are from that work.   That said, if I understand
> things that have been suggested here, officially the Duplex system used an
> OS that Indian Hill created but was >>seeded<< from Summit, but not the
> Summit released directly [i.e., IH acted the same way as DEC, Sun, IBM, etc
> might have].
>
> Holmdel ( Reisner et al.) had several projects.  The best we3 can tell,
> is that bloodline seems to have died off due to some internal AT&T politics
> and reorgs, although a  number of things from it seem to have shown up in
> other bloodlines and different people brought some of the ideas.  For
> instance, while it's not directly there, SVR3's memory system >>seems<< to
> have had some Reisner's influence.   Again we don't have direct evidence
> other than different people's recollections and some comments people here
> and elsewhere have found in different sources.
>
> Columbus ( Dale's team ) did a great deal of work in several areas.  Some
> of it has been recovered, but not all.  Mary Ann, is a one-time member of
> that team and often comments and fills in some of the history here.  FWIW:
> The PWB 3.0, a.k.a. System III release, got a bunch of the technology from
> CBUNIX (again discussed at length here over the years) - shared mem,
> semaphore, ipc, etc.
>
> These are just a few and I apologize to anyone that was not mentioned.  I
> offered some highlights to make my point.
>
> If you are newer to the list, I respectfully suggest that instead of
> restarting some of this discussion, please go back into the old Mail
> archives and you will see a great deal of detail.
>
> The most important point I will leave you with is that the different UNIX
> flavors influenced each other - inside and outside the Bell System.  As
> Larry points out, politics often had a more substantial influence on what
> 'won' than the 'goodness' of the technology itself in many cases.  But the
> path from the root to any of the leaves includes a great deal of
> cross-fertilization. It seems to me to be a bit disingenuous to offer a
> linear statement from one of the bloodlines and infer that was how it all
> worked, just because some #ifdefs have been found in a few places in some
> of the different pieces of code, be kernel portions or user space.
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
>
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