The truth about Unix

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mark]

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and 4.1BSD, which superceded 3BSD the same way V7 has superceeded V6.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.)