BSD 9.2 [History of BSD Unix]

[News Account]

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From: mcg at mipon2.intel.com (Steven McGeady)
Path: mipon2!mcg

In article <274 at umbio.MIAMI.EDU> jherr at umbio.MIAMI.EDU (Jack Herrington) writes:
>BTW, BSD 2.9 was the fore-runner of 4.1. Which in turn spawned 4.2,
>who in turn was kind enough to spawn 4.3, and soon 4.4.

No, this isn't true.  BSD 1.0 (although it was probably just called the
"Berkeley Distribution") came out in the summer of 1979 (78?).  I remember
because Mike Sleator, Rico Tudor, Alan Watt, and I drove from Reed College in
Portland to Berkeley in a pink 1956 Buick Roadmaster to pick it up from Bill
Joy.  We were interested in the Berkeley Pascal compiler, which was first
released on that tape, although it had other goodies on it, including a
hacked-up version of 'ed' called 'ex' (no 'vi' then).  Everyone at that time
(Yale, Harvard, Purdue, us) had hacked 'ed' to put in prompts or whatever, but
Bill went way overboard :-) with this thing called 'open' mode, which
ultimately grew into 'vi'.  The code on this tape was (only) for the PDP-11,
because that's all anyone had at the time.

At some later time, BSD 2.0 came out, still oriented toward the PDP-11.
BSD 2.0 may have come along at the same time as V7, I don't recall.

In 1981 or 1982, BSD 3.0 came out, which was Berkeley's answer to AT&T's
V32, the first (non-paging) VAX version of UNIX.  At this stage, the
BSD 2.0 distribution for the PDP-11 started growing fractional digits,
and had tried to track the VAX BSD releases, which went to 4.0, followed
shortly by 4.1, then a long (breathless) gap in which some parties got
interim versions such as 4.1b and 4.1c, then 4.2, and another long gap, and
then 4.3.  The are probably other fractional releases to which I was not privy,
but these are the major ones.  BSD 2.? has hit major releases 2.3, 2.4, 2.9,
and beyond, methinks, though I haven't run on a PDP-11 for years.

BSD 4.2 first implemented the major changes in the filesystem and added
all the networking code.  BSD 4.3 made it all work.

The ancestry of UNIX is reasonably convoluted, including as it does the
above-mentioned Berkeley releases, the Bell Labs Research UNIX releases
(V5, V6, V7, V8), the AT&T PWB Releases (PWB1.0, PWB3.0), and the
related AT&T Product Releases (System III, System V, Sys VR1, R2, R3, R4).
The early lineage was also molded by university contributions from
places other than Berkeley.  Did anyone besides me ever run the 'Yale Shell'?
Yale, Harvard, Purdue, University of Toronto, City University of New York
(CUNY), and a number of other places made many contributions to the
community back then.  Armando Stettner once put together a UNIX family
tree, but I don't know what became of it.

But I digress ...

S. McGeady