'dbm' hash table software
Guy Harris
guy at sun.uucp
Wed Jul 23 04:17:28 AEST 1986
> AT&T (USG) never got a copy (of "dbm") from Bell, since System III -> V
> -> Vr2 -> \(if doesn't come from V7, but from V6. (I think we've been
> over this before; apologies to those who've heard it before :=) )
If UNIX/TS 1.0 -> PWB/UNIX 2.0 -> UNIX 3.0 -> UNIX 3.0.1 (S3) -> ... came
from V6, how come it has:
1) The V7 file system
2) The V7 "stat" structure
3) The V7 "lseek" system call
4) Environment variables
5) The Bourne shell
etc., when V6 had *none* of those? The USG/USDL UNIX series came from a
UNIX somewhere between what was sent out the door as V6 and what was sent
out the door as V7; it was closer to V7 than to V6, though. (The fact that
it lacked "dbm" and a few other things is hardly as important as the fact
that it had the V7 features listed above.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "AT&T" and "Bell" here. It's not relevant,
though; the Research group that did V6, V7, etc. and the USG/USDL that did
S3, S5, etc. were both part of Bell Laboratories, so they *could* have
gotten a copy of "dbm" if they'd wanted to. The pipeline between Research
and USG/USDL was less than smooth (consider that a bug in "fgrep", fixed in
an addendum to V7, is *still* not fixed in S5!), but it could conceivably
have been made to flow better.
--
Guy Harris
{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)
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