On Mar 22, 2024, at 6:38 PM, Diane Bruce via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 11:00:25PM +0100, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:
On Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 10:54 PM Zane Healy via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
...
Even v7 Unix didn't have halt or reboot.
sync;sync;sync
power off
I remember it well.
Yes. So Unix did have a shutdown procedure, and it was particularly critical to do it and
do it right. I remember when I first heard about Unix, when at the U of Illinois -- some
PDP11s in the Center for Advanced Computation ran it, for their Arpanet connection. The
story was that CAC was a good facility to run Unix because it had very reliable power --
it was built to house Illiac 4 before that machine was moved to a military facility in
response to campus protests. So there was little worry about having to repair the file
system manually after a power failure -- I guess fsck hadn't been created yet, or
perhaps wasn't reliable yet.
paul