day@fortune.UUCP (Dave Yost) (12/29/83)
I heard a delicious rumor recently: Apparently there was an operating system named 'genie' developed at Berkeley in the early 60's in assembly language. The claim is that there is a striking similarity between unix and this system. Anyone know about this? --dave yost
chris@basservax.SUN (01/04/84)
I guess that the similarities of 'genie' to 'unix' are only that they are both operating systems. Or maybe the similarity was to 4.2bsd... Sorry about the bitterness, but I have seen enough Berkeley software to know.
day@fortune.UUCP (Dave Yost) (01/05/84)
Oh, dopey me. Shooting off at the mouth. The venerable 'Unix Time-sharing System' 1974 ACM article mentions the GENIE time- sharing system as an influence, had I looked. Isn't technological archaeology fun? Imagine, many of the good ideas that found their way into unix were around 10 years before Version 6 came out, and yet so many of us were stuck using the other garbage of the time. I wonder what wonderful stuff is hiding out there somewhere today that we haven't even heard of, too avant-garde to make it into the unix arena? --dave
ed@unisoft.UUCP (01/12/84)
Genie was indeed an operating system developed at Berkeley in the 60s. It ran on the SDS (later XDS) 940. It wasn't particularly Unix-like, but I'm sure that there were good ideas taken. In particular, Genie is the genesis of qed, the predecessor of our favorite editor, ed. Among the things that Genie had were command completion in its command interpreter, and a good interactive Snobol4 system. It was a fun system. It finally met its demise when a construction crew building a new floor above the machine room got too much sawdust into the drum. -- Ed Gould ucbvax!mtxinu!ed