instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases

[Guy Harris]

> Judging by how much stuff Bell broke when they came out with SV, and
> judging by the fact that BSD is still sufficiently compatible that you
> can run a V6 binary on it (2BSD, but 2 is source compatible with 4),

"V6 binary"?  What have you been smoking?  For one thing, 2BSD is V7, not V6
(I think 1BSD was the V6 Berkeley distribution), but, more importantly, you
*can't* run V6 binaries on V7.  You don't even have a good chance of
compiling *source* written for V6 on a V7 system and having it run.

And there are programs written for V7 that will break when you try to
compile them and run them under 4.2BSD...

> even if it uses stty, I'd say it's Bell that's in the unstable computing
> environment business.

If you're referring to the S3 terminal driver, from Bell's standpoint they
didn't break anything.  It's compatible with UNIX 2.0 (or PWB/UNIX 2.0 or
whatever the hell the release before UNIX 3.0 was).  The trouble is that the
release that went out the door before System III was V7, not UNIX 2.0, which
means the S3 driver's backward compatibility with UNIX 2.0 is totally
useless to anybody outside the former Bell System.

	Guy Harris