== Discovering things while researching Unix history

One of the nice things about researching things like [[the history of
_dump_ DumpHistory]] is that it teaches me things about Unix's history
that I didn't know. For example, until I decided to write up _dump_'s
history, I had no idea that it had actually originated as far back as
V6; for some reason I had it in my mind as a UCB invention.

(Perhaps because the idea of _dump_ always struck me as the kind of
baroque thing that UCB would come up with, instead of the sort of nice
clean solution that I like to think of Bell Labs creating. Although,
if we are being honest, V7 had its share of hacks too.)

Unix history is a bit arcane and I didn't start using Unix early enough
to be fully familiar with all of it, so I can be fuzzy (or outright
mistaken) about the exact details.  Fortunately there are places like
[[tuhs.org http://www.tuhs.org/]] where I can actually check the primary
sources. (Why I care about this stuff is another question entirely, one
that I don't have a satisfactory answer to.)

On a side note, I put an unjustified slam on _cpio_ into my [[original
entry DumpHistory]].  According to Wikipedia, _cpio_ seems to have
been invented more or less at the same time as _tar_, just by a
different group inside of AT&T (see the history of [[PWB/UNIX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX]]).