[TUHS] Release Dates, Systems History - (was Did System V Really Prevent 5BSD?)

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

First, thanks to everyone for filling in many of the gaps I left
out/glossed over. Luther is correct: SVR1 was sometime in mid to late 83
(pre-Judge Green), and SVR2 is a year or so later (post-Judge Green).

It is essential when considering >>anything<< WRT to AT&T and UNIX before
and after the 1984 decree. Until that time, the 1956 consent decree drove
everything in their behavior with regard to the UNIX marketplace, since
they could not officially participate.

Sorry that I left the impression that Kashtan beef was from Stanford
University, not SRI - in my defense, many of us at Berkeley just looked at
anything across the bay as the same 😉

IIRC, the reason Kasktan built his system call emulator (which, as others
have said, was named Eunice but sold and supported by Wollongong) was to
run Franz Lisp and to move Fateman's "Vaxima" [moving maxima from the
PDP-10 and Maclisp had been the driver for developing a VM system on the
Vax at UCB].  But the primary issue was the "unsupported" status of UNIX at
the time, either by AT&T or DEC.  What was funny about that complaint was
that, at the time, the ARPA community was switching from PDP-10s to Vaxen
as the research platform that ARPA supplied to many of the folks it
funded.  The "pro-VMS" argument was that not only was the OS fully
supported, but DEC had superior language tools.  However, DEC's behavior
had changed from the late 80s to the early 80s regarding where/how you
could run them on non-DEC OS for the PDP-10 (or 11s for that matter).   And
Kashtan needed a non-DEC-supported Lisp (DEC's VAX LISP was a Common Lisp
bootstrapped from CMU's) - in this case, Franz.  So part of his argument
for using VMS was just not reasonable.

And for the record, a number of us had a few of his tools independently
of the entire subsystem (in my own case, I had his vi and a couple of
others on a 9-track tape - which I think I still have somewhere). In my
case, DEC was funding the UCB CAD group and had given us a fully
tricked-out 785 configuration (*a.k.a.* "ucbcad").  Which we originally ran
4.1 BSD UNIX (and was also one of the test machines for 4.1A/B/C and 4.2 -
particularly for many DEC-specific peripherals [TU78 -
https://gunkies.org/wiki/TU78_Magnetic_Tape_Transport and DEUNA -
https://gunkies.org/wiki/Digital_Ethernet_UNIBUS_Network_Adapter], as it
was the only site that had them).  But while we ran UNIX on it, some of us
also had login privileges on a 785 in MRO where Hanover's team (our
sponsor) lives, as the CAD group had agreed to ensure all our tools ran on
VMS.

I never knew the story of how Kashtan's work ended up in Wollongong (others
may know).

On Sun, Dec 28, 2025 at 8:32 PM Luther Johnson via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org
<https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=tuhs@tuhs.org>> wrote:

> If you look at the dates on the files in the TUHS Unix tree, pdp11v
> (System V r1 for PDP-11) files are dated 10/11/1983, so I've always
> thought that System V release 1 must have been then. For example:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=pdp11v/usr/src/cmd
>
> On 12/28/2025 06:12 PM, Clem Cole via TUHS wrote:
> > Interesting.  I need to talk to them as that can’t be right. I’ll believe
> > they might have been a discussion WRT to calling it 5BSD [which would
> have
> > made sense from a stand point of being the 5th Berkeley (UNIX) Software
> > Distribution tape from the Berkeley Industrial Liaisons Office since the
> > ILO tried to keep track of the different tapes that folks sent out
> > [originally CAD tools like SPICE, SPLICE, MOTIS long before and of the
> UNIX
> > distributions].
> >
> > ATT would not have had anything to do with it. System III was released
> Nov
> > 1981 and System V late 1984 - plus Jan 1, 1984 is when Judge Green breaks
> > allows ATT to be in the computer business so ATT could not have had
> > anything to say before then.
> >
> > Calling it 4.1 made sense because it really was a small incremental
> > difference from 4.0.  Where numbering got weird was years later with the
> > 4.2 release from CSRG.
> >
> > The point is that ATTs Summit’s next release at that time frame (pre
> Judge
> > Green) was Unix 3.0 (which would be renamed System III) while Berkeley
> was
> > already at the 4.x level.
> >
> > 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
> > - 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.
> >
> > Bob Fabry goes to ARPA with a proposal (and the results from Bill’s work
> > they winter) that UCB create a team to fill that void (CSRG) - DARPA
> would
> > create an advisory team for them and Berkeley would add the features that
> > DARPA required.   CSRG was not created until the Fall/Winter 81/82.
> [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.  As we know Fabry’s proposal
> > was accepted].
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 28, 2025 at 6:48 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com
> <https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=imp@bsdimp.com>>
> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> On Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 4:34 PM Clem Cole via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org
> <https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=tuhs@tuhs.org>> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Right idea, wrong release.  4.1BSD was the “fastvax” update from 4.0BSD
> >>> and
> >>> really was an increment from the previous release. 4.1 was triggered by
> >>> the
> >>> Stanford push to use VMS for performance reasons as the official ARPA
> >>> supported OS for the VAX. It was CSRG’s naming of 4.2BSD were things
> got
> >>> strange.  When you look at functionality the changes from 4.1 to 4.2
> were
> >>> huge [Henry Spencer’s famous line:  “4.2 is just like Unix, only
> >>> different.”].
> >>>
> >>> As for why CSRG chose to call it 4.2 over 5.0BSD is a bit lost to
> time. I
> >>> don’t think ATT was in any position to “demand” anything.
> >>
> >> I'm pretty sure that 4.1 was going to be 5BSD. I've heard this story
> from
> >> Kirk several times. He has a listing he labeled 4.5BSD. It was between
> 4BSD
> >> and 5BSD when he wrote 4.5 on the spine. Whatcwe know today as 4.1BSD
> was
> >> going to be 5BSD. But when it came time to try to do the paperwork, AT&T
> >> Balked and insisted no 5BSD since it would be confused with the forth
> >> coming System V. I don't know the nuts and bolts of the back and forth
> to
> >> know if this was a really firm request, or if threats were involved.
> >>
> >> I've heard this tale from both Kirk and Eric...
> >>
> >> Warner
> >>
> >> Being at UCB and
> >>> my memory of the time was that the folks at CSRG chose to stay away
> from
> >>> the number 5 because they wanted to be sure their work was clearly
> >>> distinguished from ATTs — and while the short lived 3.0BSD release was
> for
> >>> the Vax, most people by then associated the numbering 2xBSD to be
> PDP-11
> >>> and 4xBSD to be Vax.  Only later did CSRG start to add a suffix
> >>> (Reno/Tahoe) to distinguish other processors as they branched out.  But
> >>> when 4.2BSD was released, CRSG had a DARPA contract to support UNIX on
> the
> >>> VAX [BTW, they did not have the contract for IP/TCP, BBN had that
> contract
> >>> and the stories of the issues this caused had been documented/discussed
> >>> here in the past].
> >>>
> >>> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Dec 28, 2025 at 6:08 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org
> <https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=tuhs@tuhs.org>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> So the prevailing narrative I've heard is that 4.1BSD was so-named at
> >>>> AT&T's demand to avoid confusion with System V.  However, the timeline
> >>>> leads me to question this.  4.1BSD is given as having been issued
> first
> >>>> June 1981.  Of the Bell lineage, my 4.1 manual also gives June 1981
> as a
> >>>> publication date.  5.0 wouldn't release inside AT&T for another year,
> >>> and
> >>>> System V manuals give 1983 (i.e. post-divestiture) publication dates
> >>>> (although they went to print before, many have Bell logos on the cover
> >>>> still.)
> >>>>
> >>>> In any case, if System V as a product didn't exist until sometime
> 1983,
> >>>> how did the fear of confusion with this name prevent the naming of
> 5BSD
> >>> in
> >>>> 1981, two years prior?  Was System V as a future trademark already
> well
> >>>> accepted as a given in 1981?
> >>>>
> >>>> - Matt G.
> >>>>
>
>