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Aucbvax.2534 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mark Wed Aug 5 08:47:18 1981 The truth about Unix I read your Unix flame with interest, but you seem to be ill informed about lots of things. Obviously you are comparing V6 Unix with 3BSD, but you claim to be comparing "Unix" with "Berkeley Unix". You credit Berkeley with things that are part of V7 (getting rid of dsw, adding egrep and fgrep). I might compare your note with a message saying "don't go out and buy a 1975 VW Rabbit - those are crummy cars because the 1979 Rabbit is better". (No, I'm not complaining about the recent Rabbit note, this just happened to be a handy example). You also claim that "Berkeley Unix is too big to fit ... on an 11/45". Hogwash! 3BSD is a Vax distribution - it has a C compiler that generates Vax object code, a kernel that knows the Vax memory management and I/O conventions, and some other VAX specific things. So are 4BSD and 4.1BSD, which superceded 3BSD the same way V7 has superceeded V6. We have lots of PDP-11's here at Berkeley, including 70's, a 45, and several 40's. Most of them run some version of Berkeley Unix. Bigness is not important - we run vi 3.6 on a 40 in the virus lab. Of course, it is a different system than the one on the vax. "Berkeley Unix" is about as specific as "Chevrolet".

You also have to bear in mind that the various flavors of Unix have evolved from one system years ago in Bell Labs. In upgrading from version x to version x+1, issues of upward compatibility have to be taken into account. If you changed /usr to /user, not only would you infuriate most of the users "What a pointless change! Now I have to retype half my commands!" but you would break a large number of programs that look for such places as /usr/spool/mail, /usr/dict/words, and so on. Things that are not obviously wrong and horrible tend to get left alone. (There are, unfortunately, exceptions. index and rindex are called strchr and strrchr in some versions of Unix.)

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