Berkeley Flames and ihuxx!ignatz

[Armando P. Stettner]

 To: ihuxx!ignatz (Dave Ihnat, Chicago, IL)
 Regarding: Your Article-I.D.: ihuxx.585
	
	Ah, ahem.  I'm afraid I have an opinion on this...please note that it's
	my opinion, and not that of AT&T Bell Laboratories or Analysts
	International Corporation.
Noted.  These are my opinions and not necessarily those of DEC.
	
	No, I strongly suspect that Berkeley didn't expect to go into the
	software business.  I doubt strongly whether that was in their mind
	when they first started hacking the heck out of Unix(Tm); nor, when
	they graciously agreed to sell the first copy of BSD...oh, legally, of
	course, and only to legally licensed sourceholders.  (I can well
	imagine the academic pride in showing how nifty this mod was, or that
	enhancement...we all feel it from time to time.)  And I certainly don't
	believe that they consciously set about to split the Unix world.
	
	But they did.  In case you haven't noticed it, there are two large,
	armed camps out there in the real world.  There are the USG Unix
	people, clinging to the hope that some sort of standard will be imposed
	on the world.  And there are the BSD people, with a flavor of Unix
	based on a USG release that is ancient history, which does some
	interesting things, some nice things, and some not-so-nice things.
	(There is a third camp--the Unix look-alike vendors--but, in general,
	they attempt to emulate one of these two major products.)
(Please note that Berkeley started with UNIX/32v which did not come
from USG; it came from Research (HO) and it did nothing nice other than
to get UNIX onto VAX in the simplest, most straight forward means,
emulating PDP-11 style of memory management.  32v did give UNIX partial
swaps, though.)
No, Berkeley did not get into the software business; the VAX community
forced them into manufacturing tapes and documentation.
	
	Now, no one is a villain.  AT&T didn't really market Unix, actually;
	it's been more described as "Here are some source tapes, some manuals,
	and our best wishes.  Have fun!"  However, as much as was possible, the
	AT&T version was the standard.  If something was fed back to AT&T, it
	would eventually, probably, make it into the next release of Unix in
	some form or another; but the informality of the process, the time
	delays, and the ease of hacking Unix make the evolution of the Berkeley
	system understandable.  But we now have systems with fairly different
	sets of utilities, kernels that behave--and look--decidedly different
	in several ways, and the problem of portable code being not-really
	totally portable, but hey, it's better than assembler, right?
What you have to realize is that at the time Berkeley people started
"hacking" UNIX, the only UNIX on VAX was 32v.  Not capable, not
flexible, and not fast.  I seem to recall that 32v jobs were only about
1.25 times those of V7 or UNIX/TS (UNIX 1.0).  Also note, that BSD has
been around for a long time.  3BSD, the first Berkeley UNIX was around
since January of 1980.  System III (UNIX 3.0) was available in side the
Bell System after June of the same year and did not hit the streets out
side until January 1982, 1.5 years later.  In January of 1983, System V
(UNIX 5.0) was announced.  The only things from Berkeley in System V
was some table hashing and active entry linked lists, and Vi.  (A
reliable source has told me that Vi was an after thought; someone
forced USG to put it in or System V would not be "competitive".)  All
this makes me wonder about your statement saying that ATT would
"probably" put something into the next release.  (Actually I understand
that UNIX 4.0 had the kernel table enhancements.)
	
	And it now appears that the institution that fostered one of these
	major branches of the family is leaving.  Where does that leave the BSD
	system people?  Darn if I know.  Fortunately, AT&T (Actually, now it's
	Western) Unix is picking up many of the features that people found
	attractive in BSD, so perhaps there will be a "standard" Unix in the
	future; but the legacy of the split will be with us for a long time.
Now, I know that everybody does not use VAXen (don't know why...) but
would you, as an owner of a VAX, want to run System III or System V on
it when it does not support half of the peripherals available from the
vendor (not to mention third parties) or a system that will not support
certain devices on one cpu but will on another??  Now, I am not
pushing the autoconfiguration stuff in 4.1 (or 4.2) but it is nice
in an emergency when you have to bring up a crippled hardware.  System V
(and System III) do have nice things (KMC tools, messages, SCCS to name
most of them; some people also like the tty ioctl's).
	
	What's the point of this article?  Simply that I can't defend
	Berkeley's action.  Not intending to do something doesn't relieve you
	of responsibility for it; and while there was no *legal* responsibility
	to support BSD, continued distribution out-of-house certainly seems to
	impart some sort of ethical responsibility.  More importantly, I guess
	I'm just trying to put out a cautionary tale to other universities,
	companies, groups of demented hackers in dimly-lighted basements, or
	what have you:  If you want to meddle in the code, then think about
	what you're loosing on the world.  If you really want package XYZ to
	change, but don't intend/want to support it, then fer cripes' sake, do
	the change in-house; tell the world about it, if you wish, and make the
	vendor track your change.  But remember--it's a small world, really;
	and that code you modify today on an insignificant mini operating
	system may be floating around in the bowels of a Cray-I next year!
Have I missed something?  Has Berkeley said that they are no longer
going to distribute BSD?  "Make the vendorr track your change"??  What
are you saying here?  Are you implying that Bell is a "vendor" of
UNIX/32v (or any UNIX, for that matter)??  Do they support it?  Yes;
they support System V but only to those people who are willing to invest
in a source license.  How does this kind of support help the non-kernel-
hacker people who wish to use UNIX?  Not much, I should think.  My point
is this: Berkeley does not need any defense;  they were (as I understand
it) fulfilling a contract to DARPA to provide a UNIX system that other
ARPA contractors could use as a base for (common) development; a
flexible (pick a defination) base.  The rest of the VAX BSD users simply
benefited from their work by getting a reasonable and evolving UNIX
for VAX.
	
				Tired of changing BSD ioctl calls,
	
				Dave Ihnat ihuxx!ignatz
	
Tired of this,
Armando Stettner	decvax!aps