@cstross Such bugs are far older than that.

The place I studied as an undergrad had a PDP-10 for campus-wide time sharing. ca. 1979 official IT staff (not that they were called that) moved most of their effort to getting new VAXes going as replacements. As part of that, they cancelled the weekly downtime to run diagnostics on the PDP-10.

That revealed a long-standing bug in TOP-10: some internal counter (I forget what, can't have been simple uptime in clock ticks on a system with 36-bit words) overflowed after about a month of uptime, causing havoc.

I forget whether DEC supplied a fix, IT staff (or us students helping keep the -10 running) rolled our own, or we just scheduled monthly reboots.

@oddhack @cstross I was happy to leave VMS behind when I left California. I wish I could do the same with Linux and return to something that really feels like Unix, but that doesn't exist any more.

Need to find time to assemble, at long last, my PiDP-11 and run 7/e on it.

@oddhack

For context:

The -v option to cat was introduced to AT&T #Unix in 1987 with System 5 Release 3, so @oclsc is looking for something that's older than even late 1980s #Unix.

I don't know what old versions of #Xenix one could get up and running nowadays.

@cstross
#cat #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory

@JdeBP @oddhack @cstross From 1984-1990 I worked in the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Group, the folks from whom Unix originally came. At the time we still ran our own Unix; colloquially we called it Research Unix for cultural reasons.

Our cat had no options at all; it just read as much as it could in each go and wrote the same amount, so -u was no longer needed. That's the way cat should be.

That the completely different group responsible for the commercial System V product, in a completely different part of the company in a facility four miles from Murray Hill accepted that abomination was irrelevant to us.

Research Unix wound down not long after I left, though there is no direct connection between those events.

My standards are unreasonably high, yes. We were an arrogant bunch, yes. But philosophically we were right.

The even-greater iconoclasm visible in Plan 9 comes from the same place.