[SPG_Active_Members] Fw: Here it is! - APL for the Burroughs B5500

[Jay & Sharon McCauley]

I've only disagreed with my good friend Mash once, so this is in support of his note.
V7 was where lots of startups etc started, was part of a couple of 'em. Very important BTL/ATT product that helped lots of companies begin and some of them prosper. Flaws? For sure! Every one of my employers devised their own IPC mechanisms, for example. Pipes are cool, but not adequate for real IPC, require process family membership.  Heck, even I did one scheme (for the record, not my best work...). Many other issues, not as serious, let us add value with feature content, while preserving basic source level compatibility. The fact that V7 based systems were marketed on both big-endian and little-endian computers, speaks a lot about portability. As things evolved from 16 bit words, ultimately to 64 bit words, the basic code in the OS didn't change very much (yes SVR4 tweaked lots of stuff).
So IMHO V7 was a big step forward.
jay


________________________________
 From: John R. Mashey <mash at heymash.com>
To: Van.Snyder at jpl.nasa.gov 
Cc: scc_active at computerhistory.org; 'Paul Kimpel' <paul.kimpel at digm.com>; 'Stan Sieler' <sieler at allegro.com>; 'John C. Hollar' <jchollar at computerhistory.org> 
Sent: Monday, September 9, 2013 2:04 PM
Subject: RE: [SPG_Active_Members] Fw: Here it is! - APL for the Burroughs B5500
 

Well, I wouldn't say that, but it was a big leap, in the sense of trying to have a serious OS that was much more portable, a fairly
alien concept at the time.
Of course it was the last one where Ken and Dennis were still the clear arbiters.
On the other hand, many features added later had pretty good reasons for existence, if not necessarily done as well as they might
have.
Inside BTL, we really did need a lot of other things to enable UNIXizing the numerous operations support systems.
I will admit, about that time is when I started using the phrase "Creeping featurism".

-----Original Message-----
From: Van Snyder [mailto:Van.Snyder at jpl.nasa.gov] 
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 12:05 PM
To: John R. Mashey
Cc: 'Len Shustek'; 'Nigel Williams'; scc_active at computerhistory.org; 'Paul Kimpel'; 'Stan Sieler'; 'John C. Hollar'
Subject: RE: [SPG_Active_Members] Fw: Here it is! - APL for the Burroughs B5500

On Sun, 2013-09-08 at 22:26 -0700, John R. Mashey wrote:
> I offer some related UNIX history:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lions John got a copy of UNIX V6, 
> which was thoroughly obsolete by the (much more portable and
> general) V7,

Who said "Version 7 was an improvement on all of its successors?"




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