4.2 progressive or dead end

[John Quarterman]

To get the attributions straight, the systems comparisons referred to
by Lyle McElhaney were done by John Chambers and John Quarterman:
``Unix System V and 4.1C BSD'' and an earlier one on System III and
4.1BSD.  What story they tell is up to the reader to decide, since we
went to a great deal of trouble to be as fair as possible to both sides
and let the systems speak for themselves.

Personally, I find all the brouhaha about signals in 4.2BSD to greatly
resemble the fuss people made when System III came out with tty ioctls
that were completely incompatible with the Version 7 ones.  Now people
think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread, and castigate the
4.2BSD tty ioctls, which are so baroque mostly because they try to
preserve compatibility with the Version 7 ones.

Perhaps sometimes there is a good reason to make an incompatible change?

Perhaps both those who think that all the 4BSD systems were done solely
by unguided graduate students while USG systems were personally
designed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, as well as those who think
that Bill Joy was divinely inspired while nobody at Bell has written a
good line of code since 1979, should both check their facts?
-- 
John Quarterman, CS Dept., University of Texas, Austin, Texas
jsq at ut-sally.ARPA, jsq at ut-sally.UUCP, {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!jsq