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From: Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Early history of Bash
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2025 15:43:44 -0800
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Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> writes:
> On 2025-01-26, Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is obviously deliberate, and I see similar code (without the
>> posixly_correct condition) in bash 1.05 from 1990.
>>
>> According to Wikipedia, POSIX began in 1988, and the initial
>> release of bash was in 1989, just a year later.  Obviously the
>> authors thought that expanding literal '~'s in $PATH was a good
>> idea at the time, and it's not suprising that they didn't pay much
>> attention to POSIX.  It would have been nice if they'd documented it.
>
> In recent years, I've been wondering about the early history of
> Bash, but cursory searches came up empty.  Versions before 1.14
> have even been expunged from ftp.gnu.org.
>
> My vague impression is that Bash started as an attempt to combine
> csh and sh, but it's not clear to me how soon people noticed the
> infeasibility and pivoted to a sh-based model.  Or maybe that's not
> at all how it happened.
>
> If anybody has pointers to the early history or old source code,
> I'd love to know.

The oldest version I've found is 1.05.

bash is maintained in a git repo at

    git://git.savannah.gnu.org/bash.git
    
but the earliest commit is :

    commit 726f63884db0132f01745f1fb4465e6621088ccf
    Author: Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net>
    Date:   1996-08-26 18:22:31 +0000

        Imported from ../bash-1.14.7.tar.gz.

so it doesn't have the full history.

I downloaded a tarball for bash 1.05 from oldlinux.org.
It's been reorganized since then and moved to GitHub.

https://github.com/oldlinux-web/oldlinux-files/tree/master/gnu/bash
has 1.05, 1.13.5, and 1.14, from 1990, 1993, and 1994, respectively.
The direct download URLs are:

https://github.com/oldlinux-web/oldlinux-files/raw/refs/heads/master/gnu/bash/bash-1.05-linux.tar.gz
https://github.com/oldlinux-web/oldlinux-files/raw/refs/heads/master/gnu/bash/bash-1.13.5.tar.gz
https://github.com/oldlinux-web/oldlinux-files/raw/refs/heads/master/gnu/bash/bash-1.14.tar.gz

bash-1.05-linux.tar.gz isn't just the original bash 1.05 sources.  The
tarball includes object and executable files from a build apparently
done in 2004 for a Linux i386 system.  There are also some changes to
some of the source files to let it build on Linux.

I've just created a GitHub repo that includes the original
bash-1.05.tar.gz, which doesn't appear to be available elsewhere :

https://github.com/Keith-S-Thompson/old-bash

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */