[TUHS] when did v8 or later get networking?

Douglas McIlroy douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu
Thu Aug 10 22:41:58 AEST 2023


My preface to the manual: says v8 " incorporates facilities from the
Seventh Edition, System V, andBerkeley BSD 4.1. The distinctive theme
...is distributed computing"It goes on to cite streams, Datakit, RFS,
and Blit. The internet lurks in the citation of BSD 4.1.

The preface goes on to suggest how the new facilities affected life in
the lab: "These facilities have spurred a host of programs for remote
information services, interactive graphics, debugging, and simple
fun".

On rereading this, I am struck by how blinkered I was not to overtly
mention either the internet, which brought us out of the clumsy era of
uucp and CSNET, or upas, which seamlessly integrated remote and local
mail (and would eventually save us from the Morris worm).

I recall expressions of surprise (dismay?) at the size of the BSD
internet code, but without it we'd have lost our place in the Unix
community. Even greater concern about the complexity of sendmail led
Presotto to develop the simpler upas.

Doug


On Wed, Aug 9, 2023 at 9:09 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>
> TCP/IP, not datakit.


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