> On Mar 22, 2024, at 6:38 PM, Diane Bruce via cctalk <[email protected]>
> 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 <[email protected]>
> ...
>> 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
