[TUHS] Did System V Really Prevent 5BSD?

[Jon Forrest via TUHS]

Some very minor notes:

On 12/28/25 5:12 PM, Clem Cole via TUHS wrote:

> And getting back to BSD the key differences between 4.0 and 4.1 are pretty
> small and the time between them was short (Oct 1980 and June 1981).  The
> primary differences are the #ifdef FASTVAX stuff that Joy did over the
> winter after the dust up that the Stanford folks started  in the fall 1980

All the talk about Stanford should make it clear that it was actually
the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), not Stanford University.
SRI was also one of the first 4 nodes on the Arpanet.

> - Joy had to demonstrate that Unix was just as fast as VMS (which had been
> written in assembler). He instrumented a bunch of the kernel and if a
> couple places dropped into assembly and got Unix to perform within a very
> small epsilon on everything that DARPA cared about.  So the issue became
> that ATT nor DEC was supporting Unix. CSRG does not yet exist.

In the early 1980s David Kashtan at SRI wrote Eunics, which was a way to
run Unix (I don't recall which version) on top of VMS. It was an
emulation layer, not a virtual machine. (I'm not aware of any VMs that
ran on top of VMS). I used an VMS executable version of 'vi' that worked
just fine for most of my VMS career.

Kashtan and Joy went back and forth for a while. I think both
communities (VMS and Unix) benefited from their work.

> [For a
> historical prospective, Stanford had counter proposed using DEC/VMS and
> Australian Wollongong’s Unix for VMS and the Tek/CMU IP/TCP stack for VMS -
> two commercial products and the later FOSS. 

I don't recall how Kashtan's Eunice, done at SRI, became part of the
Wollongong Group. I do know that Kashtan and Ken Adelman wrote a
IP/TCP for VMS called Multinet that was quite popular for a while.
I'm not aware of it ever becoming FOSS.

(For a fascinating non-Unix anecdote, check out
https://www.californiacoastline.org/streisand/lawsuit.html about how
Adelman presumably used some of the money he made when he and Kashtan
sold Multinet to Cisco to fund his successful lawsuit defense against
Barbra Streisand.)

Sorry to mention VMS so much. However, early Unix history was often
buffeted by what was happening in VMS and DEC.

Jon