Unix History

[John Mashey]

In article <513 at hropus.UUCP> ka at hropus.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) writes:
>.... generally accurate description of release history...
>
>PWB UNIX was not developed by USG.  One of the goals enunciated in the
>switch to the new release naming scheme was to eliminate the various special
>versions of UNIX floating around.  SCCS was included in UNIX/RT 1.0.  The
>PWB code didn't make it into USG UNIX until release 2.0.
>
>I don't know much about the version of PWB UNIX that was released externally,
>but I think that predated UNIX/TS 1.0 significantly, so there were probably
>UNIX/TS 1.0 features not in the external version of PWB UNIX, as well as vice
>versa.

Close, but not quite.
1) A bunch of us [Haight, Wehr, me] moved from PWB to USG in early 1977,
to help the merging process as noted.
2] Research was doing V7 at this time, and one of the additional goals of
ours, working with them, was to get V7 to have the facilities found needed
elsewhere, but in a more elegant fashion, given hindsight.  For example,
that's where environment variables (a drastic generalization of a PWB 
feature) and process accounting came from.)
3] Many PWB features actually did make it into UNIX/TS 1.0: the Acknowledgments
say: '...; a large part ot its contents is descended from the UNIX Programmer's
Manual-Sixth Edition...and the PWB/UNIX User's Manual...'  Specifically,
from PWB in that round were a) Numerous minor commands and command extensions,
b) A few system calls,  c) -MM and -MV macros, d) Miscellaneous functions.
4] The general goal was for UNIX/TS 1.0 to let the USG & PWB kernels merge at
the transition to a V7 base, while integrating such user-level features as
were easy to do and of general use.
5] PWB/UNIX 2.0 took the 1.0 base and added in some of the remaining features,
that took more time and were more work, like: SCCS, RJE, LEAP, etc, etc.
As noted, there never was a SYSTEM II; this was it, in some sense;
of course, it was the last PWB release.
6] PWB/UNIX 1.0 was what was released outside, way back.  This was too bad,
there was a 1.2 release that was substantially cleaned up and tuned;
this was probably the highest-performance V6 time-sharing version in
any widespread use.
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
UUCP: 	{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!mips!mash, DDD:  	408-720-1700, x253
USPS: 	MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086