[PLUG] Re: wow. learned something new!

[Tony Schlemmer]

On Sunday 26 March 2006 14:44, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
[snip]

> And the wonderful thing is that with this being open source, you can *see*
> how it works, and *how* it is used, in a large enterprise-ready system, and
> all of us become better programmers for it.
>
> One of the cool things about the original Unix Source licenses available to
> universities was being able to study the V6 and V7 (One True Unix) kernels
> line by line.  The V6 kernel was small enough that you could read it in a
> long weekend from start to end, including the commentary from Lyons
> University.
>
> Having good examples of large systems is a great way to see what works in
> practice, not just theory.

Years ago when I was an undergraduate CompSci major I managed to get a good 
chunk of the BSD source code o. I wanted Unix commands on my PC and actually 
spent some time porting some of the BSD text utility programs to DOS. It was 
pretty difficult as the DOS C compilers of the day were lacking in terms of 
common Unix system calls. It was still an intersting exercise and I learned 
quite a bit about the various system calls that BSD Unix had.

Tony

-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at comcast.net