[TUHS] Chaosnet in v8

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Wednesday, April 10th, 2024 at 9:46 AM, arnold at skeeve.com <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> John Floren via TUHS tuhs at tuhs.org wrote:
> 
> > I've been doing some research on Lisp machines and came across an
> > interesting tidbit: there was Chaosnet support in Unix v8, e.g.
> > https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/sys/chunix/chaos.c
> > 
> > Does anyone remember why that went in? My first guess would be for
> > interoperability with the Symbolics users at Bell Labs (see Bromley's
> > "Lisp Lore", 1986), but that's just speculation.
> > 
> > john
> 
> 
> Didn't BSD have Chaosnet support? It wouldn't suprise me to learn that
> it was just left over from when Research imported 4.1 BSD.
> 
> Arnold

Dan Cross's note on the providence of these files:

> The following files were found on Mountain Avenue.  I understood
> that they all came from the final Bell Labs Plan 9 file server

So allegedly straight from Murray Hill.

If it helps trace this, many of the Chaos-related files contain copyrights regarding Nirvonics, Inc. and with authorship attributed to Kurt Gollhardt.

These copyright notices are in extant V8 and V10 sources on the archive (and some backed up headers in some of the V9 artifacts.)

I can't find a whole lot on Nirvonics otherwise, but looks like Kurt was also involved in another UNIX-based experiment regarding "Headturn" studying language capabilities in infants: https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/831/1.0051436/1 

- Matt G.