[TUHS] Fwd: V7 RE

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

Yes, uucp, usenet, net news et al demonstrated MetCalf’s Law. But it came
at a heavy user admin price too. I suspect much of that was due to traffic
volume of news systems on top of the uucp routing scheme.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Sun, Jan 4, 2026 at 10:17 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> To the extent that uucp enabled usenet, yeah, huge impact.  He says with
> full knowledge that uucp always seemed to need baby sitting.  Honey
> Danber was better but I seem to recall it needed baby sitting as well.
>
> I'm most definitely not complaining, uucp/usenet gave us a sense of
> community that was awesome.
>
> On Sat, Jan 03, 2026 at 10:21:42PM -0500, Clem Cole via TUHS wrote:
> > Thank you.  Funny your story about uucp. In the end, it was probably the
> > most significant new tool out side of  the Bell system that came from
> > Seventh Edition.
> >
> > Clem
> >
> > Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 10:09???PM Douglas McIlroy via TUHS <
> tuhs at tuhs.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I don't remember how it was decided that the time had come for another
> > > edition. I volunteered to edit volume 1 of the manual. Andrew Hume
> > > took on volume 2, which ultimately split into 2A and 2B. We exercised
> > > some judgment about what should be in userland, wheedled contributions
> > > to the manual out of folks, and prodded fixes that would minimize the
> > > man-page BUGS sections. Maybe we rated the title of release
> > > provocateurs.
> > >
> > > As always in Unix, no one had ultimate authority. The most vivid
> > > example in v7 is that I didn't want uucp with its known security
> > > holes, but Mike Lesk could not be persuaded to work on closing them.
> > > It finally was included on the premise that it posed no new danger
> > > since it was already in widespread use.
> > >
> > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> > > From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
> > > Date: Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 11:08???AM
> > > Subject: Re: V7 RE
> > > To: srb gmail <srbourne at gmail.com>
> > > Cc: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu>
> > >
> > >
> > > Thank you.  Fair enough. I was sure you had been heavily involved.
> > > Doug, your memory?
> > >
> > > On Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 9:53???AM srb gmail <srbourne at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >   "As I understand it, Dennis did not want to be the "release
> > > > engineer" for V7 (I believe srb put it together), but since V7 was
> going
> > > to
> > > > go outside of Bell to the "general population" in the CS research
> > > > community, it seemed like that was a good time to take back some it
> (by
> > > V8
> > > > they stopped trying and Research and Summit diverged)."
> > > >
> > > > Hi Clem, I did some of the release engineering for V7.  Wrote
> scripts to
> > > make sure the release tree had
> > > > src, bin and man pages and some other cleanup and checks.  Doug I
> think
> > > was the official RE but he would
> > > > probably remember better than me.
> > > >
> > > > Steve
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>