[TUHS] Did System V Really Prevent 5BSD?

[Larry McVoy via TUHS]

On Sun, Dec 28, 2025 at 06:53:41PM -0800, Jon Forrest via TUHS wrote:
> 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. 

I ran on that.  It was a very lonely place.  When you ran it, you were
the only person visible, you didn't see any of the VMS people logged in.
I don't know if you saw other Eunice people, I never did.

Contrast that with 4.2BSD on the Vax, You saw everyone, there were tools
to see them and talk to them, finger, talk, etc.  BSD was just so much
more friendly and inclusive.  I know that TUHS is all about v7 et al, and
I get how amazing it was that Ken & crew made that work multi user on
PDP-11s in a tiny amount of memory.  Mad respect for that, it's a lost
art (he says as his web browser has a 32GB foot print and don't get me
started about slack).

But as much as I respect the early Unix work, it's BSD that made me feel
like Unix was home.  Rob can complain about cat coming back wagging tails,
I think that misses the point.  And I almost never disagree with Rob,
I'd like to be Rob, I'm just not.  But the point it misses is BSD made
Unix really friendly.  Welcoming in a way the V6, V7, even Sys III and
Sys V were not.  Lots of fun stuff that felt like it was connecting you
to the other people on the machine.

I ported Lachman's networking stack to SCO and it was a huge step
backwards in time, I don't remember what release they had but it was
early.  It was not a friendly environment in my opinion.

Sorry for the rant, the Eunice thing just made me remember that it was
nice but lonely.

--lm