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

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

On Dec 29, 2025, at 9:22 AM, Clem Cole via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

From The Maxima Book[1], pages 8-9:

Around 1980, the idea of porting Macsyma began to be more
interesting, and the Unix based vaxima distribution, which
ran on a Lisp system built at the University of California at
Berkeley for VAX UNIX demonstrated that it was both possible
and practical to run the software on less expensive systems.
(This system, Franz Lisp, was implemented primarily in Lisp
with some parts written in C.)
...
1982 was a watershed year in many respects for Macsyma - it
marks clearly the branching of Macsyma into two distinct
products, and ultimately gave rise to the events which have
made Maxima both possible and desirable.
...
The new version was distributed via the National Energy
Software Center, and called DOE Macsyma. It had been re-coded
in a dialect of lisp written for the VAX at MIT called NIL.
There was never a complete implementation.  At about the same
time a VAX/UNIX version "VAXIMA" was put into the same
library by Berkeley.  This ran on any of hundreds of machines
running the Berkeley version of VAX Unix, and through a UNIX
simulator on VMS, on any VAX system.

[1]
https://maxima.sourceforge.io/docs/maximabook/maximabook-19-Sept-2004.pdf
Authors: de Souza, Fateman, Moses & Yapp

[I was interested in Macsyma long before I touched Unix &
still have a fanfold printed Macsyma manual from 1977 or so!]