PWB/UNIX

[Alan Matsuoka]

In article <16382 at brl-adm.ARPA> rdavenport at gtewis.arpa writes:
>
> Can anyone tell me where PWB/UNIX 
>  fits in to the UNIX history? I've never heard of it before.
>

[ somebody please correct me if I am wrong anywhere... This goes
   back inmy memory a ways].

I worked on a PWB system about 9 years ago. As I can recall, it was a
sort of Version 6.5 ( At least the C compiler was ). Version 6.5 was
released to a number of universities ( I think... I came from a Version 6
 site [ or 6th Edition as it was called ]). PWB was a sort of beefed
up version that came with SCCS.

It had the 6th Edition I node format ( with some modifications [I forget] ).

We didn't have such nice things like fsck to fix things up when things
crashed, just fsdb , a 'file system debugger' that was considered a
great help considering that all we had with V6 was rm, clri, dcheck, icheck
and ncheck to fix up the file system. A crash took a while to recover from.

There were the old restrictions on file sizes like in V6.

There were restrictions in the C language at the time, 
things like no enums, voids, arrays of unions.

	unions, typedefs, and unsigned math were new back then.

(How many of you can remember that unsigned arithmetic was done
using char * in V6?).

Last but not least, I believe that it ran only on PDP11/70's with Floating
Point. There was some bizarre reason why you needed the floating point unit
but you could live without it if you had a source license (everybody did 
back then).

Oh, yes.. Then there was the Mashey shell.  This was a shell that appeared 
only with PWB.

Now most people, (mainly institutions) waited until Version 7 came
out since it was a lot better. After V7, Western Electric changed the
naming scheme and came out with System III. A sort of PWD, V7 and other
stuff put together.... 

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Alan Matsuoka, Develcon Electronics, 515 Consumers Road, 
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