instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases

[Guy Harris]

> IBM is pretty braindamaged but even they don't require you to run MVS on
> your XT.

That's a remarkably irrelevant example, considering 1) it has nothing to do
with internal vs. external releases and 2) since MVS is written in 360
assembler and PL/S, and since the former *can't* run on an 8088 without a
slow simulator and the latter probably has lots of 360-dependent goo in it,
you couldn't run MVS on a PC anyway.

> AT&T was quite happy with having an external and an internal system before
> System III.

I see no reason to assume they were happy about it.  Remember a little
something called the "Consent Decree"?  AT&T *wasn't allowed* to be in the
computer business *at all* before the breakup - there were suits from ADAPSO
trying to get UNIX off the market!

> Also most "non AT&T" UNIX systems predate System V. The ones that claim to
> be System III are almost all Microsoft or Unisoft releases

The HP ones?  The CCI one? (more on that one later)  The Plexus one?

> and are V7 with SIII patches

So what?  The TTY driver seems to be your primary source of dyspepsia; I
suspect most systems which are "V7 with S3 patches" have S3 libraries and a
kernel which started out as a V7 kernel and got changed to resemble S3,
including having the S3 tty driver dropped into it (I know that's how the
CCI system was done, since I was one of the people who did it).  As such,
well, if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a
duck, who cares if it's a goose with duck patches?

> (which is why I didn't have to know about MIN & TIME when I was working
> on Xenix 3.0. Nice of Microsoft to tell me).

This has been explained to you elsewhere, but if you're clearing the ICANON
bit, you either have to set MIN and TIME to get reliable results or they
botched the tty driver.

	Guy Harris