Talk:PWB/UNIX

Some personal recollections

From Guy Harris from here (Jan 11, 1984):

UNIX/TS was USG UNIX and PWD UNIX combined.

And was derived from a version of UNIX that was mostly Research V7, although it was, I believe, slightly earlier than the released V7 (it had a V6-ish) terminal driver, for instance) - the original USG UNIX and PWB/UNIX were derived from V6 or from V6es later than the released V6 - a set of "50 changes" that would turn V6 into what was running at Research at the time when the changes were sent out was done by Ken Thompson, and there was a Phototypesetter, Version 7" distribution that contained the "modern" nroff/troff/eqn/tbl, the "modern" C compiler with "long", "typedef", etc., the "modern" linker and archiver, and the Standard I/O library. Most of the "50 changes" and "Phototypesetter, Version 7" stuff was in PWB/UNIX 1.0.

Jnc (talk) 17:28, 7 March 2023 (CET)

'Huge' file support removed

In PWB1, support for 'huge' files appears to have been removed. If one compares bmap() in PWB1'S subr.c with V6's, the "'huge' fetch of double indirect block" code is gone. I guess PWB didn't need very large (> 8*256*512 = 1,048,576 bytes) files? I'm not sure what the benefits of removing it were, though - unless PWB was generating lots of files of between 7*256*512 and 8*256*512 bytes in length, and they wanted to avoid the overhead of the double-indirect block? Jnc (talk) 11:57, 8 March 2023 (CET)