[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 10:16 AM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

>
> On Jan 27, 2023, at 1:19 AM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:
>
> The version of X discussed in the paper was apparently part of the 4.3BSD
> distribution tapes:
>
> "The use of X has grown far beyond anything we had imagined. Digital has
> incorporated X into a commercial product, and other manufacturers are
> following suit. With the appearance of such products and the release of
> complete X sources on the Berkeley 4.3 UNIX distribution tapes, it is no
> longer feasible to track all X use and development.”
>
>
> This X is not on the TUHS Unix tree website, nor on the CSRG disks. It
> turns out that there is a directory “src/new” that is not included there.
> It is here:
>
> http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/43bsd/usr/src/new/
>
> The version of X included with 4.3BSD was X10. I assume this is the oldest
> surviving X Window source code.
>

There's X10R3 and X10R4 at https://www.x.org/archive/X10R3/ and
https://www.x.org/archive/X10R4/. On the FTP site, there's sym links for
R1, R2, R3, R4, R5, R6, R6.1, R6.3, R6.4, R6.5.1, R6.6 and R6.8 in the pub
directory as well, but they are dead links and correspond to the X11
releases that are also there, not X1, etc.

The X10R3 is from Feb 2, 1986. X10R4 is from December 2, 1986. The
retro11.de files are from June 1986, so
are no later than X10R4, and most likely either X10R3 or an internal
snapshot (I've not downloaded them both
to run a diff to see which).

Google searches for X9, X8, etc aren't at all helpful.

Of course the source code for the Blit has survived, as has the source code
> of MGR. The source code for Sunwindows and NeWS is presumably lost?
>

When I was a Solbroune, we started the OI toolkit with pdb, swm, uib, etc
because Sun refused to license the source code to SunView. Although I had
easy access to SunOS (which I wish I'd saved a copy of now), the SunView
code was never in the building. It was relatively easy to get SunOS sources
for a fee, but much harder for SunView. So I'm less than completely hopeful
here. And NeWS was a fringe thing with a significantly shorter product
life, so I'm even less hopeful there.

Warner
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