peachey (11/25/82)
I thought that we should share with the UNIX community some information just received from AT&T. As if UNIX System III were not problem enough, AT&T is apparently planning to release UNIX System V in early 1983. The precise date of release will be announced in January. Educational licensing has not been mentioned so far. The most novel aspect is that AT&T will be offering support to source licensees who request it. Support will include updates to fix bugs, telephone consultation, newsletters, and so forth. So for anyone who can cough up the price of a source license (which was $43,000 US for System III, and has been monotonically increasing), support from The Phone Company may finally have arrived. Whether this is boon or bane will undoubtedly become clear in the fullness of time. I have my doubts about the overall impact of System V. The commercial community has gone to System III at considerable expense and effort, in order to reap the benefits of lower binary licensing royalties. The academic community is largely using 4BSD from Berkeley and is not enthusiastically embracing System III. It seems unlikely that either group will be eager to accept System V. Darwyn Peachey (...!harpo!utah-cs!sask!hssg40!peachey)
gwyn@Brl@sri-unix (11/29/82)
From: Doug Gwyn <gwyn@Brl> Date: 28 Nov 82 3:49:10-EST (Sun) Yes, the commercial community has moved to System III while the academic community has remained pretty much with 4.?bsd. However, System V doesn't make the situation any worse and may make it somewhat better, since it will include (according to reliable sources) several of the more useful Berkeley enhancements as well as the latest good stuff from Bell. Extrapolating purely from the known path of USG UNIX before System V, I expect that it will be HIGHLY upward-compatible with System III. Remember, AT&T has a sizeable user base USG has to consider...
johnl (12/02/82)
Unix System V will have a large effect, but more commercially than
technically. Technically, it is very like System III, and they made a
big effort to make sure that anything that works under System III will
work unmodified under System V. The main changes are bug fixes, extra
hardware support (new disks, more models of Vax, mostly) and the shared
memory and semaphore stuff. The switch for users from Sys III to Sys V
should be very easy, unlike moving from V7 to Sys III.
The biggest effect will likely be that AT&T support will give Unix
much more credibility in the commercial world. AT&T only supports their
source licensees, so their support will be most appealing to very large
customers (the government signed up a while ago) and Unix re-sellers.
This means that various Unix vendors can truthfully say that they have
the might of the phone company behind their support. Furthermore, Sys V
is the current Bell version so this gives re-sellers parity with internal
Bell users. The goal is clearly to push a universal Unix standard.
Berklix certainly has technical advantages and is cheaper for
educational users who have Vaxes (and presumably SUNs), but the
support of Sys III/Sys V and their increasing availability on all sorts
of diferent hardware makes them the most likely de-facto standard in the
commercial Unix world.
John Levine, decvax!yale-co!jrl, ucbvax!cbosgd!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.
PS: Before you post a followup saying that "4.2BSD is ten thousand times
better than System V and anybody who disagrees is nuts," please consider
that there are other criteria for picking a computer than profusions of
nifty features and zippy performance on a Vax. I like Berklix, too. I
just don't think that it's a serious candidate for a widely used
commercial system, where "widely used" means thousands of installations,
like RSTS or an IBM System 34.smb (12/08/82)
I'm intrigued by Bell promising electronic mail for bug reports. Will 6.0 promise USENET access....? --Steve Bellovin unc!smb smb.unc@udel-relay