[TUHS] PDP-11/70 in Cory Hall, Berkeley '74 or 75

[Eric Allman via TUHS]

On 10/4/25 14:15, Jim Mellander via TUHS wrote:
> Hi all:
>
> I had the occasion to use the PDP-11/70 on the ground floor of Cory Hall. I
> was not a student, but was in the Navy stationed at Treasure Island, but
> groked Unix & visited there on my time off to tinker, among other things.

I believe that would have been the instructional PDP-11/70. There was 
also an 11/45 that was, to the best of my knowledge, shared by CS, Math, 
and Statistics. Math and Stat wanted to run the vendor OS but CS wanted 
to run UNIX, so ⅓ of the time it ran UNIX and 2/3 of the time it ran 
something else, maybe RSTS.

I worked on the INGRES project, which eventually got their own 
PDP-11/70, which was on the 4th floor of Cory. There were a few guest 
accounts, but it wasn't an instructional machine other than for the 
graduate DBMS class.

My recollection is that Berkeley was running 5th Edition when I got my 
first account, but that didn't last long. I was mostly insulated from 
the transition to 6th Edition, but I remember that it required a lot of 
changes in INGRES due to changes in both the libraries and the C 
language itself. I was not insulated from the transition to 7th Edition, 
which was a lot of work but easier to work with.

There were other transitions when the VAXen started to appear, but those 
were later.

> I always have wondered who were the long hairs who were working inside the
> glass partition on the system.

These were probably the usual suspects: Bill Joy and Chuck Haley 
(certainly), Bob Fabry (who convinced the department to run UNIX in the 
first place), Ken Thompson (when he was on sabbatical while at 
Berkeley), Jeff Shriebman, and many others that I'm forgetting at the 
moment. There were also a lot of other folks who weren't doing a lot of 
kernel work like Ken Arnold, Kirk McKusick (who shared an office with 
Bill), Tom Ferrin (UCSF, but spent time in Berkeley working with other 
UNIX folks), Eric Schmidt, Kurt Shoens, etc. For the most part they were 
not working inside the glass box.

Bonus recollection: Ken Thompson gave a free evening class that was a 
walk-through of the v6 kernel. I think about a dozen people showed up. 
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has an audio recording of 
the talk and an annotated listing with my personal notes. Yes, I held on 
to that listing for almost 50 years.

>
> Also, I played with a PDP-11/45 in Evans Hall.
>
> I'm interested in any information anyone has about those times and places.

You might also want to check out videos of Kirk McKusick's talks on the 
history of UNIX at Berkeley. A search for "Kirk McKusick Berkeley UNIX 
history" should do the trick, or check out his Youtube channel at 
https://www.youtube.com/@marshallkirkmckusick1756.

>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Jim Mellander

eric