[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 10:36 AM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>

Also interesting to note is that X10 had clu bindings in the
CLUlib directory...


> 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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