[ On Wednesday, June 25, 2003 at 02:54:40 (+0700), Robert Elz wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Trailing '/' to mkdir(2) revisited 
>
> What is 3.9 BSD ?

I wondered if anyone would ask!  :-)

It ran for a short while on the first VAX 11/780 I ever used.  I think
that would have been sometime in fall of 1980.  Shortly before that the
machine had temporarily run 32/V, but of course almost everyone really
wanted a VM kernel, and shortly thereafter it did run 4.0BSD, and then
eventually about a year later it was upgraded to 4.1BSD.  Perhaps 3.9
wasn't publicly distributed as a real BSD, but was probably just a
pre-release of 4BSD with a login prompt claiming to be 3.9BSD -- all I
know is that at the time it was rather critical for quite a few
different reasons to have that VAX running a UNIX in production ASAP
after delivery.  IIRC that VAX was the first full 11/780 delivered by
Digital Canada and somewhere I think I still have the press release they
issued about it at the time.  I had a copy of the invoice once upon a
time too, and IIRC it was all together over a quarter of a million
dollars worth of hardware.

> The BSD kernels (which started at 3BSD) were based upon 32V,

The ones for VAX, anyway....  :-)

> which was
> a 7th edition derivative.

There's apparently some disupte about that.  Peter Salus has written
that in 1979 an early version of 32/V was done by Charlie Robert's group
at Holmdel from V6 and/or PWB-1.0 sources, but of course the final UNIX
32/V release was based on The Seventh Edition.

>   The difference is easy to spot, 7th edition
> had stdio, earlier unix distributions did not.   (Also with Bourne shell,
> and lots more).

Note I was really only talking about the kernel, given the topic of this
thread....

> 1BSD and 2BSD (the 2BSD that preceded 3BSD) did not include kernels,
> they were userland add-ons for 6th edition (there may have been some
> drivers, or kernel mods, but they were not complete systems).

What's "1BSD"?  :-)  (I've never really heard it called that. :-)

Yes of course the first Berkeley Software Distribution had no kernel
because it was just the Pascal compiler and a hidden copy of 'ex'.

I always understood there were indeed kernel mods in 2BSD as it ran at
Berkeley, but I see they were not included in the actual "Second Berkely
Software Distribution".

> Later versions of 2BSD (2.xBSD) for the PDP-11 were v7 based, with a
> healthy dose of 4BSD thrown in.

Well yes, of course.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>