Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!dvlmarv!alanm From: alanm@dvlmarv.UUCP (Alan Matsuoka) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: PWB/UNIX Keywords: PWB Message-ID: <1194@dvlmarv.UUCP> Date: 6 Jul 88 19:52:00 GMT References: <16382@brl-adm.ARPA> Reply-To: alanm@dvlmarv.UUCP (Alan Matsuoka) Organization: Develcon Electronics, Toronto Lines: 51 In article <16382@brl-adm.ARPA> rdavenport@gtewis.arpa writes: > > Can anyone tell me where PWB/UNIX > fits in to the UNIX history? I've never heard of it before. > [ somebody please correct me if I am wrong anywhere... This goes back inmy memory a ways]. I worked on a PWB system about 9 years ago. As I can recall, it was a sort of Version 6.5 ( At least the C compiler was ). Version 6.5 was released to a number of universities ( I think... I came from a Version 6 site [ or 6th Edition as it was called ]). PWB was a sort of beefed up version that came with SCCS. It had the 6th Edition I node format ( with some modifications [I forget] ). We didn't have such nice things like fsck to fix things up when things crashed, just fsdb , a 'file system debugger' that was considered a great help considering that all we had with V6 was rm, clri, dcheck, icheck and ncheck to fix up the file system. A crash took a while to recover from. There were the old restrictions on file sizes like in V6. There were restrictions in the C language at the time, things like no enums, voids, arrays of unions. unions, typedefs, and unsigned math were new back then. (How many of you can remember that unsigned arithmetic was done using char * in V6?). Last but not least, I believe that it ran only on PDP11/70's with Floating Point. There was some bizarre reason why you needed the floating point unit but you could live without it if you had a source license (everybody did back then). Oh, yes.. Then there was the Mashey shell. This was a shell that appeared only with PWB. Now most people, (mainly institutions) waited until Version 7 came out since it was a lot better. After V7, Western Electric changed the naming scheme and came out with System III. A sort of PWD, V7 and other stuff put together.... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alan Matsuoka, Develcon Electronics, 515 Consumers Road, Suite 500 Willowdale, ON Canada M2J 4Z2 uucp: {decvax,ihnp4,utai,uunet}!watmath!dvlmarv!alanm phone: (416) 495-8666 {utai,mnetor}!lsuc!dvlmarv!alanm sask!zaphod!dvlmarv!alanm