On Sat, May 27, 2017 at 4:16 PM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???>
wrote:

>
> bash wasn't the original shell.


I really did start on Version 6 Unix. I think Version 7 was out by then,
but the NYIT Graphics Lab didn't ever switch their PDP-11s to it. We did
have the Ken Thompson shell. We did not have fsck, we used icheck, dcheck,
ncheck, and clri. Imagine having a routinely used program that would clear
an inode, because it had duplicate blocks in the free list. So, you needed
to actually understand a lot more about the filesystem to repair it. A
detached directory had to be reconnected by a systems programmer using adb.

And we ran 4BSD on the first VAX to leave Digital, the one that got
surreptitiously examined in "The Soul of a New Machine". Even on VAX BSD,
the filesystems did not write in the correct order and had no journal.

I later ported fsck from 2.8 BSD back to version 6 for that place. A lot of
lost files surfaced overnight, and the operators didn't have to understand
the filesystem any longer.

    Thanks

    Bruce