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From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Subject: Re: BSD demon? :-)
In-Reply-To: eric@CS.Berkeley.EDU's message of 31 Aug 1993 14:29:27 GMT
Message-ID: <BZS.93Sep1024433@world.std.com>
Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Organization: The World
References: <1993Aug25.193813.4198@deathsquare> <CCC0Jp.CAG@nebulus.ampr.ab.ca>
<31241@ksr.com> <9308302323.50@rmkhome.UUCP>
<25vn87$2qt@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1993 07:44:33 GMT
Lines: 37
From: eric@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Allman)
>Hmmm..... my recollection is that when V7 came out, the chic thing
>to do was to bemoan how it was all downhill after V6. Now the zenith
>has moved to V7. With Solaris/SVR4 hitting the streets, I expect to
>see claims that 4.1BSD was the pinnacle of the practice. And so
>forth.....
I'd vote for 4.2 (full source) on a Vax, at least it had networking
(yes I know about 4.1a/b/c) and address space. I used to code my way
out of the PDP-11 address space in a weekend butt-buster, it was a
real nuisance for fast typists, as much as I hold some nostalgia for
the PDP-11 Unix's time doth march on.
Actually, you'll find a lot of sentiment that SunOS 4.1.3 is a
relatively late pinnacle, particularly among those confronted with the
prospect of Solaris 2.x. Basically, after you get it properly stripped
down (throw out all that NIS and vendor window cruft) it's 4.3 with
NFS and X11 and a few other goodies that you can take or leave. And
lotsa MIPS and address space and cheap, plentiful disk and memory.
Then again, my motto is: Never use a computer you can lift.
Actually, I use BSDI on a 486 I can lift, quite extensively. So much
for New Year's resolutions...
The nice thing about Unix on PDP-11's, particularly the smaller ones,
was that if you had to hunt down a kernel bug you could actually halt
the thing and step through all of memory, using firmware, looking for
the problem (perhaps knowing some areas to skip.) An experience that I
suspect is completely lost to history.
--
-Barry Shein
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