Berkeley Flame

[Stephen Dyer]

AAuuugh!  Berkeley's fee was a DISTRIBUTION fee to cover the costs of
mailings, personnel, tapes, etc.  From every indication, they were
SWAMPED with demand, and could have done one of two things:

	ignored it, and remain an ad-hoc distribution with an
	infinite service time for requests.

	added additional personnel, and instrument an efficient
	distribution system, with a realistic fee to cover their
	costs.

They decided on the latter, a decision which they could have easily
passed on.  In fact, if you'd like to get an appreciation for what
the first option would have been like, just try to get a 2.9BSD tape
(or more truthfully, try to have gotten a 2.8* BSD tape in the past few
years.)  This is no slur against the PDP-11 people at Berkeley--it just
falls out as a consequence of the different style of distribution.

Blaming Berkeley is a little dumb--clearly the UNIX community voted by
its demand.  Meanwhile,  Bell did NOTHING to support the UNIX user community.
Now, they come out with the hodgepodge named System V, and they expect the
prodigal users to come back to its fold.  No virtual memory on the VAX,
though--clearly a problem out of the reach of the best at Bell Labs.
Give me a break!

I think, however, that we'll begin to see a re-integration of some of
the best features of both systems in the next decade, as AT&T becomes
more strongly committed to supporting the system.

/Steve Dyer
decvax!bbncca!sdyer