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List:       tuhs
Subject:    Re: [TUHS] v7, adb, and fcreat
From:       jnc () mercury ! lcs ! mit ! edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date:       2020-08-06 19:25:23
Message-ID: 20200806192523.5774D18C08E () mercury ! lcs ! mit ! edu
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    > From: Will Senn

    > it finally clicked that it is just one (of many) bit buckets out there
    > with the moniker v6. ... I am coming from a world where OS version
    > floppy/cd/dvd images are copies of a single master ... These tape things
    > could be snapshots of the systems they originate from at very different
    > times and with different software/sources etc.

Well, sort of. Do remember that everyone with V6 had to have a license, which
at that point you could _only_ get from Western Electric. So every
_institution_ (which is not the same as every _machine_) had had to have had
dealings with them. However, once your institution was 'in the club', stuff
just got passed around.

E.g. the BBN V6 system with TCP/IP:

  https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6

I got that by driving over to BBN, and talking to Jack Haverty, and he gave us
a tape (or maybe a pack, I don't recall exactly). But we had a V6 license, so
we could do that.

But my particular machine, it worked just the way you described: we got our V6
from the other V6 machine in the Tech Sq building (RTS/DSSR), including not
only Bell post-V6 'leakage' like adb, but their local hacks (e.g. their TTY
driver, and the ttymod() system call to get to its extended features; the
ability to suspend selected applications; yadda, yadda). We never saw a V6
tape.

   Noel
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