aps@decvax.UUCP (Armando P. Stettner) (11/09/83)
To: ihuxx!ignatz (Dave Ihnat, Chicago, IL) Regarding: Your Article-I.D.: ihuxx.585 Ah, ahem. I'm afraid I have an opinion on this...please note that it's my opinion, and not that of AT&T Bell Laboratories or Analysts International Corporation. Noted. These are my opinions and not necessarily those of DEC. No, I strongly suspect that Berkeley didn't expect to go into the software business. I doubt strongly whether that was in their mind when they first started hacking the heck out of Unix(Tm); nor, when they graciously agreed to sell the first copy of BSD...oh, legally, of course, and only to legally licensed sourceholders. (I can well imagine the academic pride in showing how nifty this mod was, or that enhancement...we all feel it from time to time.) And I certainly don't believe that they consciously set about to split the Unix world. But they did. In case you haven't noticed it, there are two large, armed camps out there in the real world. There are the USG Unix people, clinging to the hope that some sort of standard will be imposed on the world. And there are the BSD people, with a flavor of Unix based on a USG release that is ancient history, which does some interesting things, some nice things, and some not-so-nice things. (There is a third camp--the Unix look-alike vendors--but, in general, they attempt to emulate one of these two major products.) (Please note that Berkeley started with UNIX/32v which did not come from USG; it came from Research (HO) and it did nothing nice other than to get UNIX onto VAX in the simplest, most straight forward means, emulating PDP-11 style of memory management. 32v did give UNIX partial swaps, though.) No, Berkeley did not get into the software business; the VAX community forced them into manufacturing tapes and documentation. Now, no one is a villain. AT&T didn't really market Unix, actually; it's been more described as "Here are some source tapes, some manuals, and our best wishes. Have fun!" However, as much as was possible, the AT&T version was the standard. If something was fed back to AT&T, it would eventually, probably, make it into the next release of Unix in some form or another; but the informality of the process, the time delays, and the ease of hacking Unix make the evolution of the Berkeley system understandable. But we now have systems with fairly different sets of utilities, kernels that behave--and look--decidedly different in several ways, and the problem of portable code being not-really totally portable, but hey, it's better than assembler, right? What you have to realize is that at the time Berkeley people started "hacking" UNIX, the only UNIX on VAX was 32v. Not capable, not flexible, and not fast. I seem to recall that 32v jobs were only about 1.25 times those of V7 or UNIX/TS (UNIX 1.0). Also note, that BSD has been around for a long time. 3BSD, the first Berkeley UNIX was around since January of 1980. System III (UNIX 3.0) was available in side the Bell System after June of the same year and did not hit the streets out side until January 1982, 1.5 years later. In January of 1983, System V (UNIX 5.0) was announced. The only things from Berkeley in System V was some table hashing and active entry linked lists, and Vi. (A reliable source has told me that Vi was an after thought; someone forced USG to put it in or System V would not be "competitive".) All this makes me wonder about your statement saying that ATT would "probably" put something into the next release. (Actually I understand that UNIX 4.0 had the kernel table enhancements.) And it now appears that the institution that fostered one of these major branches of the family is leaving. Where does that leave the BSD system people? Darn if I know. Fortunately, AT&T (Actually, now it's Western) Unix is picking up many of the features that people found attractive in BSD, so perhaps there will be a "standard" Unix in the future; but the legacy of the split will be with us for a long time. Now, I know that everybody does not use VAXen (don't know why...) but would you, as an owner of a VAX, want to run System III or System V on it when it does not support half of the peripherals available from the vendor (not to mention third parties) or a system that will not support certain devices on one cpu but will on another?? Now, I am not pushing the autoconfiguration stuff in 4.1 (or 4.2) but it is nice in an emergency when you have to bring up a crippled hardware. System V (and System III) do have nice things (KMC tools, messages, SCCS to name most of them; some people also like the tty ioctl's). What's the point of this article? Simply that I can't defend Berkeley's action. Not intending to do something doesn't relieve you of responsibility for it; and while there was no *legal* responsibility to support BSD, continued distribution out-of-house certainly seems to impart some sort of ethical responsibility. More importantly, I guess I'm just trying to put out a cautionary tale to other universities, companies, groups of demented hackers in dimly-lighted basements, or what have you: If you want to meddle in the code, then think about what you're loosing on the world. If you really want package XYZ to change, but don't intend/want to support it, then fer cripes' sake, do the change in-house; tell the world about it, if you wish, and make the vendor track your change. But remember--it's a small world, really; and that code you modify today on an insignificant mini operating system may be floating around in the bowels of a Cray-I next year! Have I missed something? Has Berkeley said that they are no longer going to distribute BSD? "Make the vendorr track your change"?? What are you saying here? Are you implying that Bell is a "vendor" of UNIX/32v (or any UNIX, for that matter)?? Do they support it? Yes; they support System V but only to those people who are willing to invest in a source license. How does this kind of support help the non-kernel- hacker people who wish to use UNIX? Not much, I should think. My point is this: Berkeley does not need any defense; they were (as I understand it) fulfilling a contract to DARPA to provide a UNIX system that other ARPA contractors could use as a base for (common) development; a flexible (pick a defination) base. The rest of the VAX BSD users simply benefited from their work by getting a reasonable and evolving UNIX for VAX. Tired of changing BSD ioctl calls, Dave Ihnat ihuxx!ignatz Tired of this, Armando Stettner decvax!aps
guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (11/10/83)
There are rumors that 4.3BSD will require a System V license, and as such it
may have a lot of the USG UNIX tools (SCCS and the like). The USG tty ioctls
are a clean-up of the V7 ones; they permit you to do things you just can't
do with the V7/4.xBSD ones. Since Berkeley has been trying to clean up other
old kludges in 4.2BSD perhaps they should either do the USG ioctls or a new
set which are a superset of both (they are very similar in general concept
so this wouldn't be too big a set) and implement both the V7/4.xBSD ones
and the USG ones as subsets. They've already picked up the USG "open" call
(superior to the old V7 one) and the USG "fcntl" call (which is USG cleaning
up a lot of old kludges), so perhaps something like this with the TTY driver
would be nice.
In effect, 4.xBSD is "V7 (32/V, actually) muchly cleaned up, with virtual
memory". 4.2 is quite a bit more of a radical departure from V7/32V than
4.1 was, but I suspect a lot of programs go over without major change.
If 4.3BSD were "System V (System VI) muchly cleaned up, with
virtual memory", with no more incompatibility between it and USG than there
currently is between 4.2BSD and V7/32V, and with some backward compatibility
stuff for V7/32V/4.1BSD (USG UNIX doesn't have any stuff for backward
compatibility with the stuff that changed from V7, which is sometimes a
nuisance), that would probably make both camps as happy as is possible. It
wouldn't be perfect but I suspect perfection isn't possible here.
Guy Harris
{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guyaps@decvax.UUCP (Armando P. Stettner) (11/13/83)
Dave, give me a break. I must not be understanding you correctly or you don't know what is going on: Berkeley "sells" BSD for (at times in the past $300.00) $750.00 which is to cover media, documentation, and person-power. So get off this "selling a product" crap. On another point, there has been a lot of care and effort taken in 4.1 (do not know, 100% as to 4.2) to be source code compatible with V7 (the **Real** standard UNIX). Not only can you compile a V7 C program on BSD (assuming no programming hacks like knowing that an int on PDP-11's was two bytes or stuff like that) with no changes, but you can also run (most) images from PDP-11's V6 or V7 with the compat (too bad it is in /usr/games ...). I have even moved (just tar/tp'ed) images from USG Generic 2 UNIX to 4.1 for an OTC. I am pretty sure that you can not move a V7 program to System III or System V as easy as you can to 4.1/4.2 and you certainly can not run PDP-11 images on VAX. So don't hand me this stuff either. aps.
fair@dual.UUCP (11/16/83)
I might add to Armando's comments that one of the reasons that Berkeley
might be slacking off, so to speak, is that the industry keeps hiring away
its best talent. Bill Joy is at SMI, Sam Leffler now works for LucasFilm,
I have no idea where Mike O'dell ended up, but I think you get the picture.
Late of UCB, and soon to return,
Erik E. Fair {ucbvax,amd70,zehntel,unisoft}!dual!fair
Dual Systems Corporation, Berkeley, California