[TUHS] Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Ron Natalie via TUHS]

I always detested the CSH.    The problem was the Sys5 Bourne shell 
didn’t support the BSD job control.   So, I spent the time to figure out 
how it worked in csh (the kernel calls are not exactly well documented), 
and hacked it into /bin/sh.   Even that wasn’t enough to convince my 
coworkers to switch as they were now using the tcsh.   So, ,I put 
command line editing (to a better implementation having been working on 
gosmacs at the time) into /bin/sh.   I used it for as long as I was at 
BRL.   By the time I left, the Korn shell was beginning to make its way 
out of the labs.    I do remember sitting at a USENIX having a nice 
discussion of shell internals with Dave.     I also explained carefully 
to the guys working on one of the open source shells how it all worked 
so they could implement it.   For a long time googling my name got shell 
manual pages all over the place as the programmers gave me credit.

Years after the fact I was working for my intelligence imagery company 
and we did a lot of work with loaner equipment (our software being 
ultraportable we worked on MIPS, Dec Alpha, Itanium, Suns and SGIs of 
various configurations  Apollo, HP Oki, Masspar, Cray, DG, Stellar, 
Ardent, NeXT, IBM (from PCs to RS/6000 to mainframes) etc…).

Usually the first thing I did is port emacs (having never really learned 
vi I always impressed my office mates with how fast I could do stuff 
with ed) and   one of the shells (pdksh usually).

Anyhow, I’m sitting at a machine and type “fg” at the coknsole 
absentmindedly.   It comes back with “Job Control Not Enabled”.   Hmm… 
that sounds familiar.   I type “set -J” which was the command to turn on 
Job Control in my version fo the SysV shell and it replies with “Job 
Control Enabled.”
Holy crap, this is a “ron shell.”    After a bit of tracing I found that 
Doug Gwyn had put my shell on the SystemV on BSD distribution tapes.   
Then Mach fully included that distribution in theirs, so every one with 
mach derived source had a “ron shell” for /bin/sh.