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

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 4:20 PM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:

> Quite a bit of this feels not exactly wrong, but not quite right. (And his
> name is John Reiser, not Reisner.)
>
Thank you.  Never assume I will get spelling right ;-)



> 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.
>
Yes, I know.  I did not mean to imply this -- only that we have discussed
much of this and Steve has offered comments as a manager.



>
> 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 was not either, although very close friends with a few that were.  My old
lab partner in hacking, the late Ted Kowalski and Armando Stettner were
officemates in Summit in USG in the late 1970s - who are the primary
sources of data I have from that time.   Mashey is the other (and I think
we have an old email from John in the archives).

The problem you are getting too is exactly what I was referring BTW.  It
was not a straight line.

Some facts ... PWB 1.0 was created and release before USG would be
created.   Again look at the old messages here.   What I don't know is who
packaged PWB 2.0 -- I was under the impression that was still Mashey et al
(as you said Whippany a few other NJ labs - although the USG folks must
have just been created).

IIRC the kernel in PWB 2.0 and V7 are close, but not the same and
definitely the userspaces are different.

TS starts to could thing, and the best I personally can tell (again from
old message from Ted Armando et al), at some point TS was being created -
maybe around 1978ish.    How much of V7 went into TS and vice versa - is
not clear.  So far, I do not believe we have found a definitive TS
'distribution' - but a number of things seem to be a part.  Werner I think
can add the most color here, as he researched it., a bit more than I did.
Again, the best, I can tell is that something approximating TS 1.0 was
created (in Summit >>I believe<<) and it had a common kernel with V7.  Who
got it and how it was distributed it not completely understood -- again
AT&T politics, the consent decree et al, all mix this up.

Tick, tick, tick ...  Judge Green does his thing ...

PWB 3.0 was released to the OCs at some point.     During a
discussions AT&T NC (Al Arms et al) had with customers (like me), we had
memos created by USG that are marked PWB 3.0 that discussed what was going
to be in the release.  AT&T North Carolina (the lawyers and marketing
folks) gave them to us.    I personally was part of the
negotiation associated with that license had a few of those memos at one
point.   They were clearly marked PWB 3.0 and were originally created
the OCs distribution.

 AT&T was now in the computer market and the marketing/sales types and did
not like the name Programmmer Workbench - when going against IBM [who was
clearly the target].  It was also made clear to us (commercial UNIX
licensees) that whatever was produced, would not be the named PWBct when
the AT&T Marketing folks released it publically -- it seems to me that they
were working trademarking in parallel with the pricing/licensing
negotiation that I was a part.

I >>believe<< that is why the manuals were printed saying 3.0 - but Summit
did not yet know what the name would be - although they did release PWB 3.0
inside of the Bell System.   Eventually, the name 'System III' was picked
by AT&T NC and the marketing blitz started -- "Consider it standard," etc..

FWIW: John Mashey is the source of the comment about PWB bloodline begets
Summits work.





> 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.
>
Not at all.  I was not trying to imply that in any way.




> Columbus's major contribution, as we saw it from Research, was the world's
> second most complex init.
>
systemd was yet to be created ;-)




> 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.
>
That is the impression I had.



>
> 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.
>
Again - that syncs with my comments and my memory of the time.



> 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.
>
I never ran it, but that does seem to be the report.

Question for you Rob ... SVR3 was a rewrite the memory system from earlier
things called 'System V'.   Do you know if any of Reiser's stuff make it
into that or was SVR3 a new stream altogether and who did it?   Tom Bishop
lead me to believe that some of Reiser's stuff was imported into the SSI
system they did in IH. But again what went where and who did what has never
been clearly understood.

And that was my point -- there was never a linear progression.



> 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.
>
Indeed and not the first time we have heard that said here.
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