From dave at plonka.us Tue Oct 1 05:29:55 2019 From: dave at plonka.us (Dave Plonka) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 14:29:55 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] capturing history of bs(1) command / programming language In-Reply-To: <20190909001945.GA2815@akamai.com> References: <75D36093-D9D0-48EF-ACAC-DF739E0236B6@mac.com> <20081210180826.GE1746@mercury.ccil.org> <20190909001945.GA2815@akamai.com> Message-ID: Hi TUHS folks, Earlier this month I did a fair bit of research on a little known Unix programming language - bs - and updated the wikipedia pages accordingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bs_(programming_language) Thanks for solving some bs mysteries goes to its author, Dick Haight, as well as those that got us in touch: Doug McIlroy, Brian Kernighan, and John Mashey. Apart from what is in the aforementioned wikipedia page, in exchanging email with me, Dick shared: q( I wrote bs at the time Unix (V 3?) and all of the commands were being converted from assembler to C. So Thompson’s bas became my bs — sort of. I included snobol’s succeed/fail feature (? Operator/fail return). [...] No one asked me to write bs. [...] I tried to get Dennis Ritche to add something like “? / fail” to C but he didn’t. This is probably part of why I wrote bs. I wasn’t part of the Unix inner circle (BTL Computing Research, e.g., Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy, etc). Neither were Mashey & Dolotta. We were “support”. ) The Release 3.0 manual (1980) mentions bs prominently on page 9: Writing a program. To enter the text of a source program into a UNIX file, use ed(1). The four principal languages available under UNIX are C (see cc(1)), Fortran (see f77(1)), bs (a compiler/interpreter in the spirit of Basic, see bs(1)), and assembly language (see as(1)). Personally, some reasons I find bs noteworthy is (a) it is not much like BASIC (from today's perspective) and (b) as mentioned in the wikipedia page, "The bs language is a hybrid interpreter and compiler and [an early] divergence in Unix programming" (from Research Unix mentioning only the other three languages): q( The bs language was meant for convenient development and debugging of small, modular programs. It has a collection of syntax and features from prior, popular languages but it is internally compiled, unlike a Shell script. As such, in purpose, design, and function, bs is a largely unknown, modest predecessor of hybrid interpreted/compiled languages such as Perl and Python. ) It survives today in some System III-derived or System V-derived commercial operating systems, including HP-UX and AIX. If you have additional information that might be useful for the wikipedia page, please do share it. Peace, Dave P.S. Here is a 2008 TUHS list discussion, "Re: /usr/bin/bs on HPUX?": On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 01:08:26PM -0500, John Cowan wrote: > Lord Doomicus scripsit: > > > I was poking around an HP UX system at work today, and noticed a > > command I've never noticed before ... /usr/bin/bs. > > > > I'm sure it's been there for a long time, even though I've been an > > HPUX admin for more than a decade, sometimes I'm just blind ... but > > anyway .... > > > > I tried to search on google ... it looks like only HPUX, AIX, and > > Maybe AU/X has it. Seems to be some kind of pseudo BASIC like > > interpreter. > > That's just what it is. Here are the things I now know about it. > > 0. The string "bs" gets an awful lot of false Google hits, no matter > how hard you try. > > 1. "bs" was written at AT&T, probably at the Labs, at some time between > the release of 32V and System III. It was part of both System III and > at least some System V releases. > > 2. It was probably meant as a replacement for "bas", which was a more > conventional GW-Basic-style interpreter written in PDP-11 assembly > language. (32V still had the PDP-11 source, which of course didn't work.) > > 3. At one time System III source code was available on the net, > including bs.c and bs.1, but apparently it no longer is. I downloaded > it then but don't have it any more. > > 4. I was able to compile it under several Unixes, but it wouldn't run: > I think there must have been some kind of dependency on memory layout, > but never found out exactly what. > > 5. I remember from the man page that it had regular expressions, and > two commands "compile" and "execute" that switched modes to storing > expressions and executing them on the spot, respectively. That eliminated > the need for line numbers. > > 6. It was apparently never part of Solaris. > > 7. It was never part of any BSD release, on which "bs" was the battleships > game. > > 8. I can't find the man page on line anywhere either. > > 9. The man page said it had some Snobol features. I think that meant > the ability to return failure -- I vaguely remember an "freturn" command. > > 10. 99 Bottles of Beer has a sample bs program at > http://www2.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-bs-103.html . > > 11. If someone sends me a man page, I'll consider reimplementing it as > Open Source. > > -- > We are lost, lost. No name, no business, no Precious, nothing. Only empty. > Only hungry: yes, we are hungry. A few little fishes, nassty bony little > fishes, for a poor creature, and they say death. So wise they are; so just, > so very just. --Gollum cowan at ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan -- dave at plonka.us http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/ From reed at reedmedia.net Tue Oct 1 07:17:37 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 16:17:37 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] Peter Collinson interviews? Message-ID: Does anyone know where I can find the Unix-related interviews with Dr. Peter Collinson? These are acknowledged in front-matter of Peter Salus's Quarter Century book which says previously appeared in ".EXE". Bottom of https://www.hillside.co.uk/articles/index.html mentions the magazines aren't found. I didn't try contacting him yet. I have read the Mahoney collection (archived at TUHS). Any other interview collections from long ago? Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy" From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Oct 1 07:41:10 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 17:41:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] Poll: good location for Unix documentation? Message-ID: <20190930214110.32CA718C08E@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Warner Losh > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/1972_stuff/tmg.pdf > has an earlier version. That's the exact same as the one I have. > From: "Brian L. Stuart" > The M6 manual is another one that I didn't find. Got that too (it's by Andrew Hall). Noel From reed at reedmedia.net Tue Oct 1 07:59:49 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 16:59:49 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] understand earliest hardware? Message-ID: I read in the PDP-7 reference manual that Precision CRT Display Type 30 and Precision Incremental Display Type 340 are the typical displays used with the PDP-7, but aren't standard equipment. I read about the Graphics-II scope. Was it the only display? I read it was used as a second terminal and that it would pause per display full with a button to continue. I assume this second terminal's keyboard was TTY model 33 or similar since it was the standard equipment. Does anyone know? Do you know if the PDP-7 or early edition Unixes have pen support for that Graphics-II or similar displays? Clem has written that the PDP-7 had a disk from a PDP-9. Where is this cited? The ~1971 draft "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" says first version runs on PDP-9 also. https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/ But I cannot find any other reference of running on PDP-9 at all. Was this academic? That draft calls the PDP-7 version the "first edition" but later the PDP-11/20 is called the "first edition". When did the naming of first edition get defined to not include the PDP-7 version? Or is it because the early "0th" version was never released/shared outside? Thompson interview https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/OralHistory/transcripts/thompson.htm mentions an "interim machine" and a "PDP-11 that had PDP-10 memory management, KS-1." What is this interim machine? Is this a PDP-11 without a disk (for a few months?) What is this PDP-11 and KS-1? Maybe this is the PDP-11/20 with KS-11? Do we know what hardware was supported for the early editions? We don't have all the kernel code and from a quick look from what is available I didn't see specific hardware references. The later ~1974 "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" paper does mention some hardware at that time on the PDP-11/45 like a 201 dataset interface and a Tektronix 611 storage-tube display on a satellite PDP-11/20. When did a CRT with keyboard terminal like DEC vt01 (with Tektronix 611 CRT display), LS ADM-3, Hazeltine 2000, VT01A display with keyboard (what keyboard?) get supported? Any code to help find this? (The https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/picture.html does mention the VT01A plys keyboard). Thanks, Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy" From imp at bsdimp.com Tue Oct 1 11:05:11 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 19:05:11 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] understand earliest hardware? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 4:00 PM wrote: > I read in the PDP-7 reference manual that Precision CRT Display Type 30 > and Precision Incremental Display Type 340 are the typical displays used > with the PDP-7, but aren't standard equipment. I read about the > Graphics-II scope. Was it the only display? I read it was used as a > second terminal and that it would pause per display full with a button > to continue. > According to the reconstructed kernel sources, it had both. I'm unsure about the button detail. > I assume this second terminal's keyboard was TTY model 33 or similar > since it was the standard equipment. Does anyone know? > I've no looked at this detail, but I think it had its own keyboard independent of a tty 33. We have the sources so we can look. They will be the final answer on this anyway. > Do you know if the PDP-7 or early edition Unixes have pen support for > that Graphics-II or similar displays? > Yes. > Clem has written that the PDP-7 had a disk from a PDP-9. Where is this > cited? > You can look at the simh simulator to find where this is described. We know there's one pdp-7 with the PDP-9 disk drive from the 18-bit service log that was printed in 1972 available from bitsavers.org. It is excerpted here: https://www.soemtron.org/downloads/decinfo/18bitservicelist1972.pdf for details. Serial number 34 was Ken's PDP-7. I have a blog entry on that here: https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-pdp-7-where-unix-began.html that describes things in some detail. > The ~1971 draft "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" says first version runs > on PDP-9 also. > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/ > But I cannot find any other reference of running on PDP-9 at all. Was > this academic? > Private email from Ken earlier this year said that there were 2 PDP-9s and 3 PDP-15s at Bell Labs that ran pdp7 Unix at one time or another. There are other instances sprinkled through the early newsletters I've been reading lately, but they aren't greppable and I don't have the time to look at them all again (including a couple of cases where it was said that Ken brought things up on a PDP-9, which we know to be in error). > That draft calls the PDP-7 version the "first edition" but later the > PDP-11/20 is called the "first edition". When did the naming of first > edition get defined to not include the PDP-7 version? Or is it because > the early "0th" version was never released/shared outside? > It's the first version, but the 1st edition manual definitely describes the PDP-11/20 port. > Thompson interview > > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/OralHistory/transcripts/thompson.htm > mentions an "interim machine" and a "PDP-11 that had PDP-10 memory > management, KS-1." What is this interim machine? Is this a PDP-11 > without a disk (for a few months?) What is this PDP-11 > and KS-1? Maybe this is the PDP-11/20 with KS-11? > > Do we know what hardware was supported for the early editions? We don't > have all the kernel code and from a quick look from what is available I > didn't see specific hardware references. > We know that it was a 11/20, initially without an MMU, and later with a custom hacked MMU, which I think is the KS-11. Clem would know :) > The later ~1974 "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" paper does mention some > hardware at that time on the PDP-11/45 like a 201 dataset interface and > a Tektronix 611 storage-tube display on a satellite PDP-11/20. > PDP 11/45 support was added as part of the efforts for the 4th edition. bitsavers has a couple of interesting sets of notes from lectures at the time: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bellLabs/unix/ has the interesting bits (including the sources used to reconstruct the 1st edition kernel we have in TUHS in the kernel routine documentation). > When did a CRT with keyboard terminal like DEC vt01 (with Tektronix 611 > CRT display), LS ADM-3, Hazeltine 2000, VT01A display with keyboard > (what keyboard?) get supported? Any code to help find this? (The > https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/picture.html does mention the > VT01A plys keyboard). > I'm unsure. I didn't research those details. Warner > Thanks, > > Jeremy C. Reed > > echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ > tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy" > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Oct 1 12:29:38 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 22:29:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] understand earliest hardware? Message-ID: <20191001022938.5E6F318C08E@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Jeremy C. Reed > "PDP-11 that had PDP-10 memory management, KS-1." ... What is this > PDP-11 and KS-1? Maybe this is the PDP-11/20 with KS-11? Yes. The reference to "PDP-10 memory management" is because apparently the KS11 did what the PDP-10 MMU did, i.e. divide the address space into two sections. (On the -10, one was for code, and one for data.) Alas, next to nothing is known of the KS11, although I've looked. There's a mention of it in "Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix": https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/odd.html but it doesn't say much. Noel From imp at bsdimp.com Tue Oct 1 12:38:47 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 20:38:47 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Leaked patches... v6 to v6.5 Message-ID: Ok. I know there was never a v6.5... officially. But there are several references to that in different bits of the early user group news letters. This refers to v6 plus all the patches that "leaked" out of bell Labs via udel and Lou Katz. My question is, have they survived? The story sure has, but I didn't find them in the archive.. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reed at reedmedia.net Tue Oct 1 12:54:55 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 21:54:55 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] Leaked patches... v6 to v6.5 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2019, Warner Losh wrote: > Ok. I know there was never a v6.5... officially. But there are several > references to that in different bits of the early user group news letters. > This refers to v6 plus all the patches that "leaked" out of bell Labs via > udel and Lou Katz. > My question?is,? have they survived? The story sure has, but I didn't find them > in the archive..? I think these are the same as what went other places too. See Archive/Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz unsw3/usr/sys/v6unix/ directory. has annotated changes and a diff (following from my writings...) In preparation to his year sabbatical, Thompson put together a Unix system to take. ``Since it was almost a release, I made a `diff' with V6. On the way to Berkeley, I stopped by Urbana-Champaign ... I left the `diff' tape there and ... [said] I wouldn't mind it if it got around.''\cite{salus2008} At the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, research assistant Mike O'Brien got a copy of the single-file diff (from Thompson directly). Its main purpose was to keep the Bell Labs systems from crashing. O'Brien went through it, diff by diff, and annotated it so others would have some idea of what it was what and whether they were useful.\cite{mikeobrien1} ... By the end of the summer, Haley and Joy began to explore the kernel internals. With Schriebman's observance, they installed the fixes and improvements provided on the ``fifty changes'' tape from Bell Labs. As they learned to maneuver through the kernel code, they suggested several small enhancements to streamline certain bottlenecks.\cite{mckusick85} From clemc at ccc.com Tue Oct 1 13:25:14 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem cole) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 23:25:14 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Leaked patches... v6 to v6.5 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7D53B9FD-7368-420F-979D-06F841A1D5D6@ccc.com> Right. That’s the V6 diff tape. I’m not sure where the story of it coming from Lou comes from (I’ve never heard that before to be honest). But the source for many of us was Kens trip to CA and the stop to see Chesson at U of I. I don’t remember who gave it to us at CMU at the time but like copies of the Lions book there was an active underground in those days. Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. > On Sep 30, 2019, at 10:54 PM, reed at reedmedia.net wrote: > >> On Mon, 30 Sep 2019, Warner Losh wrote: >> >> Ok. I know there was never a v6.5... officially. But there are several >> references to that in different bits of the early user group news letters. >> This refers to v6 plus all the patches that "leaked" out of bell Labs via >> udel and Lou Katz. >> My question?is,? have they survived? The story sure has, but I didn't find them >> in the archive..? > > I think these are the same as what went other places too. > > See > Archive/Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz > unsw3/usr/sys/v6unix/ directory. > has annotated changes and a diff > > (following from my writings...) > > In preparation to his year sabbatical, Thompson put together a Unix > system to take. ``Since it was almost a release, I made a `diff' with > V6. On the way to Berkeley, I stopped by Urbana-Champaign ... I left the > `diff' tape there and ... [said] I wouldn't mind it if it got > around.''\cite{salus2008} > > At the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, research assistant Mike > O'Brien got a copy of the single-file diff (from Thompson directly). Its > main purpose was to keep the Bell Labs systems from crashing. O'Brien > went through it, diff by diff, and annotated it so others would have > some idea of what it was what and whether they were > useful.\cite{mikeobrien1} > > ... > > By the end of the summer, Haley and Joy began to explore the kernel > internals. With Schriebman's observance, they installed the fixes > and improvements provided on the ``fifty changes'' tape from Bell Labs. > As they learned to maneuver through the kernel code, they suggested > several small enhancements to streamline certain > bottlenecks.\cite{mckusick85} > From imp at bsdimp.com Tue Oct 1 15:00:44 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 23:00:44 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Leaked patches... v6 to v6.5 In-Reply-To: <7D53B9FD-7368-420F-979D-06F841A1D5D6@ccc.com> References: <7D53B9FD-7368-420F-979D-06F841A1D5D6@ccc.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 9:25 PM Clem cole wrote: > Right. That’s the V6 diff tape. Yea. This copy looks like it has been applied and has the commentary on it. A rather nice find. There are a plethora of copies of v6 with changes here and there for bug fixes and new drivers. The other nugget is that "many of the changes ... are in our own sources" suggesting they are in AUSAM since unsw was part of that effort... I'll have to audit the diffs between v6.5 and v7... I’m not sure where the story of it coming from Lou comes from (I’ve never > heard that before to be honest). Wikipedia :). It comes from our friend Warren: Toomey, Warren (December 2011). "The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix" . *IEEE Spectrum *. IEEE . Retrieved December 15, 2012. Maybe he can say... Warner But the source for many of us was Kens trip to CA and the stop to see > Chesson at U of I. > > I don’t remember who gave it to us at CMU at the time but like copies of > the Lions book there was an active underground in those days. > > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not > quite. > > > On Sep 30, 2019, at 10:54 PM, reed at reedmedia.net wrote: > > > >> On Mon, 30 Sep 2019, Warner Losh wrote: > >> > >> Ok. I know there was never a v6.5... officially. But there are several > >> references to that in different bits of the early user group news > letters. > >> This refers to v6 plus all the patches that "leaked" out of bell Labs > via > >> udel and Lou Katz. > >> My question?is,? have they survived? The story sure has, but I didn't > find them > >> in the archive..? > > > > I think these are the same as what went other places too. > > > > See > > Archive/Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz > > unsw3/usr/sys/v6unix/ directory. > > has annotated changes and a diff > > > > (following from my writings...) > > > > In preparation to his year sabbatical, Thompson put together a Unix > > system to take. ``Since it was almost a release, I made a `diff' with > > V6. On the way to Berkeley, I stopped by Urbana-Champaign ... I left the > > `diff' tape there and ... [said] I wouldn't mind it if it got > > around.''\cite{salus2008} > > > > At the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, research assistant Mike > > O'Brien got a copy of the single-file diff (from Thompson directly). Its > > main purpose was to keep the Bell Labs systems from crashing. O'Brien > > went through it, diff by diff, and annotated it so others would have > > some idea of what it was what and whether they were > > useful.\cite{mikeobrien1} > > > > ... > > > > By the end of the summer, Haley and Joy began to explore the kernel > > internals. With Schriebman's observance, they installed the fixes > > and improvements provided on the ``fifty changes'' tape from Bell Labs. > > As they learned to maneuver through the kernel code, they suggested > > several small enhancements to streamline certain > > bottlenecks.\cite{mckusick85} > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wkt at tuhs.org Tue Oct 1 15:56:03 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2019 15:56:03 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Leaked patches... v6 to v6.5 In-Reply-To: References: <7D53B9FD-7368-420F-979D-06F841A1D5D6@ccc.com> Message-ID: <20191001055603.GA28677@minnie.tuhs.org> On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 11:00:44PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote: > Wikipedia :). It comes from our friend Warren: > Toomey, Warren (December 2011). [2]"The Strange Birth and Long Life of > Unix". [3]IEEE Spectrum. [4]IEEE. Retrieved December 15, 2012. > Maybe he can say... Actually it comes from Salus' "A Quarter Century of Unix", pg. 139: Lou Katz’s version is a bit different: A large number of bug fixes was collected, and rather than issue them one at a time, a collection tape (”The 50 fixes”) was put together by Ken. Some of the fixes were quite important, though I don't remember any in particular. I suspect that a significant fraction of the fixes were actually done by non-Bell people. Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept stalling and stalling and stalling. Finally, in complete disgust, someone "found a tape on Mountain Avenue” which had the fixes. [The address of Bell Labs is 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ.] When the lawyers found out about it, they called every licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them how they came by the tape (I didn’t). It was the first of many attempts by the lawyers to justify their existence and to kill Unix. Cheers, Warren P.S In 2002 I wrote on the list: The mythical `50 bugs' tape, described in Peter Salus' book `A Quarter Century of UNIX' has been found lurking in the Unix Archive. You can find it in Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz as the file usr/sys/v6unix/unix_changes. From dave at horsfall.org Tue Oct 1 16:05:26 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2019 16:05:26 +1000 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Leaked patches... v6 to v6.5 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2019, Warner Losh wrote: > Ok. I know there was never a v6.5... officially. But there are several > references to that in different bits of the early user group news > letters. This refers to v6 plus all the patches that "leaked" out of > bell Labs via udel and Lou Katz. I was once referred to as "Mr Unix V6.5" when I shoehorned as much of V7 into V6 (with AUSAM mods) as I could, such as XON/XOFF etc. Those lucky buggers at Elec Eng and AGSM had 11/70s, whereas I had to support a number of 11/40s etc. > My question is,  have they survived? The story sure has, but I didn't find > them in the archive..  Sadly, not my version (UNSW/CSU). -- Dave From alec at sensi.org Tue Oct 1 20:03:58 2019 From: alec at sensi.org (Alexander Voropay) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2019 13:03:58 +0300 Subject: [TUHS] SystemV R3.2 manpages in e-form ? Message-ID: Hi! Is there a SystemV R3.2 manpages in the "-man" macropackage form or similar ? AFAIK there are scanned documentations at bitsavers: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/att/unix/System_V_386_Release_3.2/ http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/att/unix/System_V_Release_3/ P.S. The disks in the old days were small and vendors distributed manpages in print form... -- -=AV=- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Wed Oct 2 08:40:52 2019 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2019 15:40:52 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] DG/UX details? Message-ID: I’ve seen it said a couple of places that the DG/UX kernel was an almost complete rewrite and rather well-done. Have any details been preserved? There’s not a whole lot out there that I’ve been able to find about DG/UX or the AViiON workstation series (whether 88K or Intel x86). -- Chris PS - I’ve found that my asking around has prompted some people to put things online, so may as well keep asking in various places. :) From clemc at ccc.com Wed Oct 2 23:50:12 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 09:50:12 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] DG/UX details? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 7:00 PM Chris Hanson wrote: > I’ve seen it said a couple of places that the DG/UX kernel was an almost > complete rewrite and rather well-done. > Indeed - we worked with it at Locus and was one of the simplest kernels to add things too. The locks were easy to understand and it was well documented/thought out. > > Have any details been preserved? There’s not a whole lot out there that > I’ve been able to find about DG/UX or the AViiON workstation series > (whether 88K or Intel x86). > Never seen it in the wild, sadly. Hope it does appear at some point. > > -- Chris > > PS - I’ve found that my asking around has prompted some people to put > things online, so may as well keep asking in various places. :) > +1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From david at kdbarto.org Thu Oct 3 00:02:48 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 07:02:48 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] DG/UX details? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1C43D25F-8A26-4922-B74C-B14B6D2C1725@kdbarto.org> I have to agree with Clem here. I ported multiple device drivers for custom boards to DG/UX and it was nicely done at the lower levels. The documentation was excellent and the field service reps were more than helpful when I walked into strange corners that didn’t perfectly mesh between SunOS 4.X and DG/UX. David > On Oct 2, 2019, at 6:50 AM, Clem Cole wrote: > > > > On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 7:00 PM Chris Hanson > wrote: > I’ve seen it said a couple of places that the DG/UX kernel was an almost complete rewrite and rather well-done. > Indeed - we worked with it at Locus and was one of the simplest kernels to add things too. The locks were easy to understand and it was well documented/thought out. > > Have any details been preserved? There’s not a whole lot out there that I’ve been able to find about DG/UX or the AViiON workstation series (whether 88K or Intel x86). > Never seen it in the wild, sadly. Hope it does appear at some point. > > > -- Chris > > PS - I’ve found that my asking around has prompted some people to put things online, so may as well keep asking in various places. :) > +1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reed at reedmedia.net Thu Oct 3 08:34:36 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 17:34:36 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 Message-ID: The Dallas Ft. Worth UNIX Users Group will be highlighting the 50th anniversary on October 10, November 14, and maybe in December. http://www.dfwuug.org/wiki/Main/Welcome I will be presenting about the early history next week and then about BSD-specific history in November. Any of you in the DFW area? Any suggestions on anyone local to invite? I am also looking for anyone local who can display old hardware or materials at the event. I only have some old books and training materials from 1980's. Does anyone have scanned copies of early Lions commentary? (Not the 2000 printing, unless it looks identical, please let me know.) I will try to share my slides to this list by end of this week. (I did look at an early draft of Warner's slides, but didn't look at his final slides nor watch his presentation yet. My presentation is from scratch for now.) Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy" From finnoleary at inventati.org Fri Oct 4 04:51:19 2019 From: finnoleary at inventati.org (Finn O'Leary) Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 18:51:19 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files Message-ID: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> Hi, I remember that someone had recovered some ancient /etc/passwd files and had decrypted(?) them, and I remember reading that either ken or dmr's password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely punctuation characters, was around three different characters in total, and was pretty damn short). I've tried to find this since, as a friend was interested in it, and I cannot for the life of me find it! Do any of you remember or have a link? :) Thanks! -- "Too enough is always not much!" From leah at vuxu.org Fri Oct 4 05:30:31 2019 From: leah at vuxu.org (Leah Neukirchen) Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 21:30:31 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> (Finn O'Leary's message of "Thu, 03 Oct 2019 18:51:19 +0000") References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> Message-ID: <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> Finn O'Leary writes: > Hi, I remember that someone had recovered some ancient /etc/passwd files > and had decrypted(?) them, and I remember reading that either ken or > dmr's > password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely > punctuation characters, was around three different characters in > total, and > was pretty damn short). I've tried to find this since, as a friend was > interested in it, and I cannot for the life of me find it! I did this once, but I never managed to crack all of them. It was bwk who used /.,/., My findings (from https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-Snapshot-Development/etc/passwd): gfVwhuAMF0Trw:dmac Pb1AmSpsVPG0Y:uio ymVglQZjbWYDE:/.,/., c8UdIntIZCUIA:bourne AAZk9Aj5/Ue0E:foobar E9i8fWghn1p/I:apr1744 IIVxQSvq1V9R2:axolotl 9EZLtSYjeEABE:network P0CHBwE/mB51k:whatnot Nc3IkFJyW2u7E:...hello olqH1vDqH38aw:sacristy 9ULn5cWTc0b9E:sherril. N33.MCNcTh5Qw:uucpuucp FH83PFo4z55cU:wendy!!! OVCPatZ8RFmFY:cowperso X.ZNnZrciWauE:5%ghj IL2bmGECQJgbk:pdq;dq 4BkcEieEtjWXI:jilland1 8PYh/dUBQT9Ss:theik!!! lj1vXnxTAPnDc:sn74193n But I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash ZghOT0eRm4U9s, and I think I enumerated the whole 8 letter lowercase + special symbols key space. The uncracked ones are: ozalp:m5syt3.lB5LAE:40:10:& Babaoglu,4156423806:/usr/ozalp:/bin/csh hpk:9ycwM8mmmcp4Q:9:10:Howard Katseff,2019495337:/usr/staff/hpk:/bin/csh tbl:cBWEbG59spEmM:10:10:Tom London,2019492006:/usr/staff/tbl ken:ZghOT0eRm4U9s:52:10:& Thompson:/usr/staff/ken fabry:d9B17PTU2RTlM:305:10:Bob &,4156422714:/usr/staff/fabry:/bin/csh Any help is welcome. -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From scj at yaccman.com Fri Oct 4 06:03:57 2019 From: scj at yaccman.com (Steve Johnson) Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 13:03:57 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] OT: compiler back-end bug In-Reply-To: <20190929105016.92665200AB@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Message-ID: <6696fb88a31a97eeae2c0f9970476ff6aa55e9d4@webmail.yaccman.com> I have all to much experience with back end bugs, usually when someone porting PCC asked for help. The advice I always gave first was:  "what would the correct output look like?" 90% of the time, they didn't know.  And it's hard to hit the target if you don't know where it is... Once you know what you want, then you figure out the first instruction that isn't right and hit it with everything you have... Hope this helps... Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralph Corderoy" To: Cc: Sent:Sun, 29 Sep 2019 11:50:16 +0100 Subject:Re: [TUHS] OT: compiler back-end bug Hi Warren, > Good point Ralph: > https://minnie.tuhs.org/wktcloud/index.php/s/HQjsggHb4i6wdWM?path=%2FSfiles I've always tried to avoid x86 and friends for ARM, so I may be wrong, but the run up to the first of the two memcpy() calls looks the same to me. Here's the assembler, values given an RBP of 100, and the stack contents. Good version first, bad second. rbp = 100 L29: movq -8(%rbp),%rax rax = *92 pushq %rax *92 movq 16(%rbp),%rax rax = *116 pushq %rax *92 *116 movq $64,%rax rax = 64 pushq %rax *92 *116 64 movq 32(%rbp),%rax rax = *132 popq %rcx rcx = 64 *92 *116 addq %rcx,%rax rcx = 64+*132 movq (%rax),%rax rax = *(64+*132) pushq %rax *92 *116 *(64+*132) movq $40,%rax rax = 40 pushq %rax *92 *116 *(64+*132) 40 movq 32(%rbp),%rax rax = *132 popq %rcx rcx = 40 *92 *116 *(64+*132) addq %rcx,%rax rax = 40+*132 movq (%rax),%rax rax = *(40+*132) popq %rcx rcx = *(64+*132) *92 *116 addq %rcx,%rax rax = *(64+*132)+*(40+*132) pushq %rax *92 *116 *(64+*132)+*(40+*132) call Cmemcpy rbp = 100 L29: movq -8(%rbp),%r8 r8 = *92 pushq %r8 *92 movq 16(%rbp),%r8 r8 = *116 pushq %r8 *92 *116 movq $64,%r8 r8 = 64 movq 32(%rbp),%r9 r9 = *132 addq %r9,%r8 r8 = *132+64 movq (%r8),%r8 r8 = *(*132+64) movq $40,%r9 r9 = 40 movq 32(%rbp),%r10 r10 = *132 addq %r10,%r9 r9 = *132+40 movq (%r9),%r9 r9 = *(*132+40) addq %r9,%r8 r8 = *(*132+64)+*(*132+40) pushq %r8 *92 *116 *(*132+64)+*(*132+40) call Cmemcpy A glance at the second memcpy() call look equivalent too. So perhaps it's not calculating the parameters to memcpy() that's wrong, but the inputs into those calculations being faulty? I'd use gdb(1) to break at particular instructions, examine memory, etc., to work backwards through the bad version until spotting where good data becomes bad. -- Cheers, Ralph. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cym224 at gmail.com Fri Oct 4 06:03:47 2019 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 16:03:47 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] OT: compiler back-end bug In-Reply-To: <6696fb88a31a97eeae2c0f9970476ff6aa55e9d4@webmail.yaccman.com> References: <6696fb88a31a97eeae2c0f9970476ff6aa55e9d4@webmail.yaccman.com> Message-ID: <31d29b9b-9810-7731-cfd7-326acb9e2844@gmail.com> On 10/03/19 16:03, Steve Johnson wrote (in part): > Once you know what you want, then you figure out the first instruction > that isn't right and hit it with everything you have... +42 N. (And sorry, Warren, I haven't written iapx assembler in over a decade.) From finnoleary at inventati.org Fri Oct 4 06:41:51 2019 From: finnoleary at inventati.org (Finn O'Leary) Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 20:41:51 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: On 2019-10-03 19:30, Leah Neukirchen wrote: > I did this once, but I never managed to crack all of them. > It was bwk who used /.,/., > > My findings (from > https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-Snapshot-Development/etc/passwd): > > [ ... ] Interesting~! Thank you for the quick response :) > But I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash > ZghOT0eRm4U9s, and I think I enumerated the whole > 8 letter lowercase + special symbols key space. > [ ... ] > Any help is welcome. I'm not even sure how I would go about starting to crack them, as I have very little experience with that! That said, I'd be willing to lend some CPU power to recover the rest :) -- - Finn finnoleary.net From steffen at sdaoden.eu Fri Oct 4 08:04:38 2019 From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:04:38 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: <20191003220438.qBDYS%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Finn O'Leary wrote in : |On 2019-10-03 19:30, Leah Neukirchen wrote: |> I did this once, but I never managed to crack all of them. |> It was bwk who used /.,/., |> |> My findings (from |> https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-Snapshot-Deve\ |> lopment/etc/passwd): |> |> [ ... ] | |Interesting~! Thank you for the quick response :) |> But I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash |> ZghOT0eRm4U9s, and I think I enumerated the whole |> 8 letter lowercase + special symbols key space. |> [ ... ] |> Any help is welcome. | |I'm not even sure how I would go about starting to crack them, as I have |very little experience with that! That said, I'd be willing to lend some |CPU power to recover the rest :) The dark powers of criminal energy touched also me, i wanted to write hazy spheres thereof, but that reminded me of hazy shade of criminal from Public Enemy ("Once the riot started, it went like a forest fire") thirty years ago. (The one rap/hip hop i have ever heard, with text that really mattered, sometimes.) Oh, we like that wendy!!! was nothing fast-food alike. And Kurt Shoens used sacristy! How could that ever be decrypted. Thanks, Leah. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) From dave at horsfall.org Fri Oct 4 09:24:18 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 09:24:18 +1000 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Oct 2019, Finn O'Leary wrote: >> But I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash >> ZghOT0eRm4U9s, and I think I enumerated the whole 8 letter lowercase + >> special symbols key space. I can't find the original post, but, was upper case not tried? -- Dave From ches at cheswick.com Fri Oct 4 10:59:32 2019 From: ches at cheswick.com (WIlliam Cheswick) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 20:59:32 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: <65C10476-6AB0-483C-9843-8E3FFF0A3941@cheswick.com> I did extensive password checking in 112 at one point. I saved almost none Of the original passed files, but I do have /etc/passwd from: arachne caspian cl44 fiji mhmips ore ruble tempo-hadrian banc cd cl45 irisa mht40-3 peso sidewise vector bill cdrom coorong irisb mht40-3-mhbb quark subtillion yankee bloom celerity deneb jazz mhuxw rgbvax sun1c zeno bruce chaos dixie lucian none rial sunshine This list includes 1033 different user names. Most do not have the pw field: bruce:jpl:2v/xj5FQ.kqVY:4129:4129:John P. Linderman,MH 3D-435,6427 (gc,exp.6/1990):/tmp:/bin/ksh tempo-hadrian:jpl:BQl9MmYhh.8oE:358:358:John P. Linderman:/usr/jpl:/bin/ksh tempo-hadrian:jpl:sorry:358:358:John P. Linderman,3D-435,6427,4641129,11384:/usr/jpl:/bin/true vector:jpl:2v/xj5FQ.kqVY:4129:4129:John P. Linderman,(gc)3D-435,6427,4641129:/tmp:/bin/ksh Here’s one hash from a famous person. I believe GPUs can now test over 8 billion tries in a second. s6BGoOQ8LfLYo -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Fri Oct 4 14:20:34 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 21:20:34 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] eqn Message-ID: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him what troff can do. For the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program chair for Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant was I had the job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big deal but I pushed people towards troff and the few people that took the push came back and said "holy crap is this easy". My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output that they can share? Thanks, --lm From dave at horsfall.org Fri Oct 4 14:35:13 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 14:35:13 +1000 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Oct 2019, Larry McVoy wrote: > So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him what troff can do. For > the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program chair for > Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant was I had the > job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big deal but I pushed > people towards troff and the few people that took the push came back and > said "holy crap is this easy". :-) I've always liked software where the user is in charge, not whoever wrote the tool. A boss of mine was into LaTeX, and I hated it. > My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output that > they can share? I've only ever used "neqn" and that was yonks ago, so I'd be interested in seeing some examples. -- Dave From ggm at algebras.org Fri Oct 4 15:12:43 2019 From: ggm at algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 15:12:43 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: I'm going to give a contrarian response. You may be wrong, and he maybe should do LaTex. Why? because it's what his peer group, and professors, and other people like markers and tutorial assisters will expect, and he can use things like OverLeaf very probably on the Uni tab, which has shared edit, all kinds of useful templates, and help communities. You don't want to tie him to your apron strings, for help: He needs to learn how to go out into the world and hassle other people for help too! My son, who is in the same kind-of cohort but perhaps 6years ahead, wrote his thesis in OverLeaf and did very well in it. The markup is XArchiV and journal friendly: His chances of getting through peer review barriers which obsess with form, and not function (sad) is better. Sometimes, being the stand-out is not good. I was the only visible Athiest in school and when I found a copy of the scots prayer book, it was different page numbers and I couldn't find the hymn before they'd finished singing it. I guess the example I am giving doesn't help my own story because I am an essentially HAPPY athiest, but still: you don't always want to be running against the stream. If the maths is good, he's born to fly solo, and is heading into place of excellence, none of this will matter. If he is looking to relate to his community, it may. On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 2:21 PM Larry McVoy wrote: > > So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him what troff can do. > For the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program > chair for Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant > was I had the job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big > deal but I pushed people towards troff and the few people that took > the push came back and said "holy crap is this easy". > > My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output > that they can share? > > Thanks, > > --lm From leah at vuxu.org Fri Oct 4 20:29:40 2019 From: leah at vuxu.org (Leah Neukirchen) Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 12:29:40 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: (Dave Horsfall's message of "Fri, 4 Oct 2019 09:24:18 +1000 (EST)") References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: <877e5kpzvv.fsf@vuxu.org> Dave Horsfall writes: > On Thu, 3 Oct 2019, Finn O'Leary wrote: > >>> But I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash >>> ZghOT0eRm4U9s, and I think I enumerated the whole 8 letter >>> lowercase + special symbols key space. > > I can't find the original post, but, was upper case not tried? That explodes my computational resources (I don't have good GPU). But since all the other (simple) passwords use lowercase letters only, I assumed it was a fair assumption. -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From cym224 at gmail.com Fri Oct 4 23:43:54 2019 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 09:43:54 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On 04/10/2019, George Michaelson wrote (in part): > I'm going to give a contrarian response. You may be wrong, and he > maybe should do LaTex. > > Why? > > because it's what his peer group, and professors, and other people > like markers and tutorial assisters will expect, [...] Pace Larry but I tend to agree with George here. N. From reed at reedmedia.net Sat Oct 5 00:53:29 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 09:53:29 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] v0 manpages of November 3, 1970? and earliest writing about Unix? Message-ID: Several v0 manpages say 11/3/70 See https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/commit/14a2a9b10bd4f9c56217234afb321cd5e8509d72#diff-77750bb85687a23c2469f0679ad2c24b The commit message says "I've borrowed the V1 manuals from http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man1 and changed them to reflect the PDP-7 utilities." Where did that 1970 date come from? Was it just made up? (Notice it is one year earlier, same day.) Maybe v0 didn't have any manuals? This was just an exercise in learning PDP7-Unix better? I understand they weren't in roff anyways. Also ... what is the earliest known date where we have some scanned/printed document? https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/ says "runs on the PDP-7 and -9 computers; a more modern version, a few months old, uses the PDP-11." but no specific date. The earliest date I see is from the 1stEdman / Dennis_v1 docs of November 3, 1971. That is a full set of docs. There must be something prior to that date. Anyone know of some early printed memo or other correspondence that mentions the work? Thanks, Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{' From aksr at t-com.me Sat Oct 5 00:57:50 2019 From: aksr at t-com.me (aksr) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 16:57:50 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> On Thu, Oct 03, 2019 at 09:20:34PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output > that they can share? Have you tried (heard of) neatroff[1] and neateqn? Neateqn uses TeX's algorithm for typesetting mathematical formulas.[2] Here is an example: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqndemo.pdf [1] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf [2] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqn.pdf From ken at google.com Sat Oct 5 01:05:48 2019 From: ken at google.com (Ken Thompson) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 08:05:48 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <877e5kpzvv.fsf@vuxu.org> References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> <877e5kpzvv.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: no, it was tty model 33. On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 3:30 AM Leah Neukirchen wrote: > > Dave Horsfall writes: > > > On Thu, 3 Oct 2019, Finn O'Leary wrote: > > > >>> But I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash > >>> ZghOT0eRm4U9s, and I think I enumerated the whole 8 letter > >>> lowercase + special symbols key space. > > > > I can't find the original post, but, was upper case not tried? > > That explodes my computational resources (I don't have good GPU). But > since all the other (simple) passwords use lowercase letters only, I > assumed it was a fair assumption. > > -- > Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From ullbeking at andrewnesbit.org Sat Oct 5 01:52:29 2019 From: ullbeking at andrewnesbit.org (U'll Be King of the Stars) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 16:52:29 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> Message-ID: <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote: > Have you tried (heard of) neatroff[1] and neateqn? > Neateqn uses TeX's algorithm for typesetting mathematical formulas.[2] > Here is an example: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqndemo.pdf > > [1] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf > [2] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqn.pdf I have tried these and I have been in touch with the author. He was very helpful. One thing that surprised me during our discussions was the revelation that Groff is (apparently) optimized for authoring man pages. I am personally interested in *roff as a typesetting system for technical documentatio in general. I do agree with the other folk/s in this thread who have said that learning La/TeX is _much_ more advantageous as a _practical_ tool for writing maths and CS manuscripts. I spent about 20 years buried in LaTeX during the academic phase of my life. I don't miss it now but there was no way to collaborate and publish using a typesetting setting other than LaTeX because nothing else has that kind of commonality. My field was signal processing, especially as applied to multimedia: music and audio specifically. I would not have been able to write my PhD dissertation or write _any_ journal/conference articles without knowning LaTeX. One thing that helped significantly is that I am an Emacs user. This comes with AUCTeX mode, which, when set up properly, makes LaTeX tolerable for me.[1] I now have the freedom to choose *roff for presentational markup for personal technical documentation. I have also joined a project that uses DocBook for semantic markup. But when one needs to collaborate in academia, and if one wants to minimize friction when communicating, then LaTeX (or sometimes even MS Word) is the standard that one's colleagues in maths, CS, and software engineering will use. Don't be "that person" who causes friction unnecessarily; there are plenty more important hills to die on. One tool I *highly* recommend learning well is Pandoc. This is wonderful for translating between markup formats and even rendering output well. When I would send end-of-week updates to managers, I would often convert new documentation that was contained within a restricted repository to PDF format and attach that to my email updates as well. (Just in case there were permissions issues. For example, corporate enterprise firewalls are notoriously difficult to make connections through. They can make the documents even more difficult to access from their upstream repositories, and nobody want to be messing around with these kinds of permissions issues on a Friday afternoon.) Andrew [1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown. You can build a career on top of it but not on top of Markdown. I don't even consider MD a proper markup format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing introductory README.md files. The only thing that La/TeX and MD have in common for me is that they are both intolerable without Emacs modes (AUCTeX and markdown-down.el). -- OpenPGP key: EB28 0338 28B7 19DA DAB0 B193 D21D 996E 883B E5B9 From krewat at kilonet.net Sat Oct 5 02:08:38 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 12:08:38 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <65C10476-6AB0-483C-9843-8E3FFF0A3941@cheswick.com> References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> <65C10476-6AB0-483C-9843-8E3FFF0A3941@cheswick.com> Message-ID: <992ab358-2d91-71cd-3c8f-5b47e853d783@kilonet.net> 9ycwM8mmmcp4Q:graduat; On 10/3/2019 8:59 PM, WIlliam Cheswick wrote: > I did extensive password checking in 112 at one point.  I saved almost > none > Of the original passed files, but I do have /etc/passwd from: > > arachnecaspiancl44fijimhmipsorerubletempo-hadrian > banccdcl45irisamht40-3pesosidewisevector > billcdromcoorongirisbmht40-3-mhbbquarksubtillionyankee > bloomceleritydenebjazzmhuxwrgbvaxsun1czeno > brucechaosdixieluciannonerialsunshine > > This list includes 1033 different user names. > > Most do not have the pw field: > > bruce:jpl:2v/xj5FQ.kqVY:4129:4129:John P. Linderman,MH 3D-435,6427 > (gc,exp.6/1990):/tmp:/bin/ksh > tempo-hadrian:jpl:BQl9MmYhh.8oE:358:358:John P. > Linderman:/usr/jpl:/bin/ksh > tempo-hadrian:jpl:sorry:358:358:John P. > Linderman,3D-435,6427,4641129,11384:/usr/jpl:/bin/true > vector:jpl:2v/xj5FQ.kqVY:4129:4129:John P. > Linderman,(gc)3D-435,6427,4641129:/tmp:/bin/ksh > > Here’s one hash from a famous person.  I believe GPUs can now test > over 8 billion tries in a second. > > s6BGoOQ8LfLYo > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nobozo at gmail.com Sat Oct 5 02:12:53 2019 From: nobozo at gmail.com (Jon Forrest) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 09:12:53 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> Message-ID: <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6@gmail.com> One slightly OT fact about TeX. On my 16GB, Core i7, SATA SSD Lenovo T430s laptop running Fedora 30, it takes ~3 seconds to run TeX on the ~900 page TeXBook. That's pretty fast. TeX contains all kinds of code to make it fit in the constraints of a 1980s computer. I wonder whether a redesign for a 2020 computer would be faster or slower. I suspect, but can't prove, that classic [nt]roff might also benefit in the same way. groff was written latter, so it might suffer less. Jon From athornton at gmail.com Sat Oct 5 03:24:11 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 10:24:11 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6@gmail.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6@gmail.com> Message-ID: A modern TeX would probably look a lot like SILE: http://sile-typesetter.org/ Simon's a smart guy. It's a pretty neat project. On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 9:13 AM Jon Forrest wrote: > > One slightly OT fact about TeX. On my 16GB, Core i7, SATA SSD > Lenovo T430s laptop running Fedora 30, it takes ~3 seconds to run TeX on > the ~900 page TeXBook. That's pretty fast. TeX contains all kinds of > code to make it fit in the constraints of a 1980s computer. I wonder > whether a redesign for a 2020 computer would be faster or slower. > > I suspect, but can't prove, that classic [nt]roff might also > benefit in the same way. groff was written latter, so it might > suffer less. > > Jon > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steffen at sdaoden.eu Sat Oct 5 03:43:00 2019 From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 19:43:00 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6@gmail.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20191004174300.Ok_Nq%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Jon Forrest wrote in <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6 at gmail.com>: |One slightly OT fact about TeX. On my 16GB, Core i7, SATA SSD |Lenovo T430s laptop running Fedora 30, it takes ~3 seconds to run TeX on |the ~900 page TeXBook. That's pretty fast. TeX contains all kinds of |code to make it fit in the constraints of a 1980s computer. I wonder |whether a redesign for a 2020 computer would be faster or slower. It made a really huge difference whether you base upon the plain TeX macros, maybe with epsf.tex for embedding .eps files, and colordvi.tex for colors in slides, index and bibliography reviews etc., or whether you use the huge LaTeX macros. Also lazy loading fonts added upon that, i finally added that and it saved a 1-2 second hang upon program startup (plain tex plus ~250kb single file macro, plus the mentioned included) for each and every letter that was sent out. % 00-05-31: new scheme to avoid waste. now a font is init only if it's used. % 2Compare (Cyrix 166+, 49MB, Linux 2.2.13-12, X 3.3.5): % | OLD | NEW | % |-----------------------------------|---------------------------------------| % | 1178 strings out of 13013 | 1413 strings out of 13013 | % | 13106 string characters of 122154 | 17026 string characters of 122154 | % | 35574 words of memory of 263001 | 54220 words of memory of 263001 | % | 2086 multiletter of 10000+0 | 2321 multiletter of 10000+0 | % | 80647 font info for 276 fonts | 20674 words of font info for 70 fonts | % (out of 400000 for 1000) |I suspect, but can't prove, that classic [nt]roff might also |benefit in the same way. groff was written latter, so it might |suffer less. | |Jon --End of <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6 at gmail.com> --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) From khm at sciops.net Sat Oct 5 04:55:04 2019 From: khm at sciops.net (Kurt H Maier) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 11:55:04 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20191004185504.GA9810@wopr> On Fri, Oct 04, 2019 at 10:24:11AM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > A modern TeX would probably look a lot like SILE: > > http://sile-typesetter.org/ > > Simon's a smart guy. It's a pretty neat project. I always bristled at SILE being described as a typesetting program. It's a desktop publishing suite. The whole advantage of roff and TeX is that you're freed from micromanaging everything. SILE takes that base from TeX, and then puts back in all the knobs that a certain kind of person likes to fiddle with. This means if you're collaborating with any sized group on a document, and you're using SILE, someone will turn it into a figure-positioning bikeshedding competition. khm From lm at mcvoy.com Sat Oct 5 05:02:07 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 12:02:07 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> Message-ID: <20191004190207.GA6882@mcvoy.com> My complaint with LaTex et al is that it is escape based. Roff wants stuff to start at the beginning of the line. Which mean Roff input will version control *dramatically* better which leads to better collaboration. My kid already knows Latex, I'd like him to try roff. On Fri, Oct 04, 2019 at 04:52:29PM +0100, U'll Be King of the Stars wrote: > On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote: > >Have you tried (heard of) neatroff[1] and neateqn? > >Neateqn uses TeX's algorithm for typesetting mathematical formulas.[2] > >Here is an example: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqndemo.pdf > > > >[1] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf > >[2] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqn.pdf > > I have tried these and I have been in touch with the author. He was very > helpful. > > One thing that surprised me during our discussions was the revelation that > Groff is (apparently) optimized for authoring man pages. I am personally > interested in *roff as a typesetting system for technical documentatio in > general. > > I do agree with the other folk/s in this thread who have said that learning > La/TeX is _much_ more advantageous as a _practical_ tool for writing maths > and CS manuscripts. > > I spent about 20 years buried in LaTeX during the academic phase of my life. > I don't miss it now but there was no way to collaborate and publish using a > typesetting setting other than LaTeX because nothing else has that kind of > commonality. > > My field was signal processing, especially as applied to multimedia: music > and audio specifically. I would not have been able to write my PhD > dissertation or write _any_ journal/conference articles without knowning > LaTeX. > > One thing that helped significantly is that I am an Emacs user. This comes > with AUCTeX mode, which, when set up properly, makes LaTeX tolerable for > me.[1] > > I now have the freedom to choose *roff for presentational markup for > personal technical documentation. I have also joined a project that uses > DocBook for semantic markup. > > But when one needs to collaborate in academia, and if one wants to minimize > friction when communicating, then LaTeX (or sometimes even MS Word) is the > standard that one's colleagues in maths, CS, and software engineering will > use. Don't be "that person" who causes friction unnecessarily; there are > plenty more important hills to die on. > > One tool I *highly* recommend learning well is Pandoc. This is wonderful > for translating between markup formats and even rendering output well. > > When I would send end-of-week updates to managers, I would often convert new > documentation that was contained within a restricted repository to PDF > format and attach that to my email updates as well. > > (Just in case there were permissions issues. For example, corporate > enterprise firewalls are notoriously difficult to make connections through. > They can make the documents even more difficult to access from their > upstream repositories, and nobody want to be messing around with these kinds > of permissions issues on a Friday afternoon.) > > Andrew > > [1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown. You can build a career on top > of it but not on top of Markdown. I don't even consider MD a proper markup > format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing introductory README.md > files. The only thing that La/TeX and MD have in common for me is that they > are both intolerable without Emacs modes (AUCTeX and markdown-down.el). > -- > OpenPGP key: EB28 0338 28B7 19DA DAB0 B193 D21D 996E 883B E5B9 -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm From fabio at esse.ch Sat Oct 5 05:25:13 2019 From: fabio at esse.ch (Fabio Scotoni) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 21:25:13 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <47c43a48-b980-5e6e-1e0d-6876e3f9a308@esse.ch> On 10/4/19 6:20 AM, Larry McVoy wrote: > So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him what troff can do. > For the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program > chair for Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant > was I had the job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big > deal but I pushed people towards troff and the few people that took > the push came back and said "holy crap is this easy". > > My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output > that they can share? I've got no such thing that I still have available to myself, but perhaps "A System for Typesetting Mathematics" in the 7th Edition manual volume 2A would be something of relevance? It's both an introduction to eqn(1) and shows off what it can do. https://tex.loria.fr/divers/unix-eqn1.ps.gz http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/v7man/eqn/eqn2e.ps ^ seemingly updated version, found dvia Schaffter's mom macro documentation From reed at reedmedia.net Sat Oct 5 07:58:53 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 16:58:53 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] lowercase vs. uppercase PDP-7? (was Re: Recovered /etc/passwd files) Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Oct 2019, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > no, it was tty model 33. Changing the topic slightly ... The scans for v0 code are in lowercase. I assume printed on TTY 37. But why is the early PDP-7 code in lowercase? I do see the B language code for "lcase" which converts to lowercase. Maybe something like that was used? (I think I saw a scan mistake showing a "B" which is probably an "8" due to that. See pdp7-unix/src/cmd/bc.s "dab B i".) I didn't see anything in historical login code or manuals about upper versus lowercase. Any experiences about upper versus lower case to share? When did stuff get rewritten to have both cases in code? Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy" From rminnich at gmail.com Sat Oct 5 08:41:30 2019 From: rminnich at gmail.com (ron minnich) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 15:41:30 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] RFC formatting Message-ID: "why is the formatting so weird" someone asked me. I am guessing, looking at RFC 1, that it was formatted with an ancestor of runoff but ... anyone? ron From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Sat Oct 5 11:59:01 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 21:59:01 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] eqn Message-ID: <201910050159.x951x1nh023003@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > does anyone have some eqn input and output that they can share? I have a quite elaborate document that uses eqn, pic, and tbl. In fact one table contains both pic and eqn entries (but not subtables; Latex beats roff in being recursive). Take a look at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/wallpaper.pdf. If you think you'd like to see the source, just holler. > he maybe should do Latex Sadly, math journals often demand Latex, but I've also run into journals that require Word. I wanted to submit the document above to a cartography journal until I found out they were in the Word camp. I was, however, able to convert it to Latex. At one point the American Instutute of Physics took only roff (and retypeset other manuscripts--in roff). I don't know what their practice is q now. > Maybe v0 didn't have any manuals? > I understand they weren't in roff anyways. No manuals, true. But if there had been they would have been in some version of roff, just as all Research Unix manuals were. Doug From michael at kjorling.se Sun Oct 6 03:29:44 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2019 17:29:44 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> Message-ID: <20191005172944.GI20298@localhost> On 3 Oct 2019 18:51 +0000, from finnoleary at inventati.org (Finn O'Leary): > password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely > punctuation characters, was around three different characters in total, and > was pretty damn short). I'm a bit late to the party here (it's been a crazy week for me and I'm only just now starting to catch up), but don't forget that hashed Unix passwords back then were limited to eight bytes (actually I believe the hard limit was 64 bits' worth of password, so if your system used less than 8 bits per character, you could theoretically cram more _characters_ into the password, but not more _entropy_, which topped out at 2^64 no matter what you did, and in practice a fair bit less because you wanted to be able to type it in). Of course, this wasn't a problem in practice when even just hashing a single candidate password took noticable fractions of a second. At 100 ms per hash, while you could exhaustively search the lower alphanumerics four characters space within about two days (my calculator says 1.944 * 86400 seconds for that) if you could hog the computer for everyone, by the time you got to six characters the same search would take almost 7 years, and eight characters the better part of 9000 years (assuming you kept running it on the same hardware for the duration). Adding uppercase A-Z alongside lowercase a-z and 0-9 increases the exhaustive search time even for the four characters password space to about 17 days at 100 ms per hash. So with no additional information for an attacker, even a [a-zA-Z0-9]{4} password was tolerably secure, and a [a-zA-Z0-9]{5} one was more than good enough if you changed it once a year (would take about three years to crack at 100 ms/hash). William Cheswick mentioned 8e9 hashes per second. While that sounds low for good ol' Unix crypt() to me, at that rate, an exhaustive search of [a-z0-9]{8} would take about 353 days, again according to my calculator. [a-z0-9]{4} would finish in about 18 seconds. My _guess_, without having looked up current numbers, is that these figures are at least some two orders of magnitude too high given modern hardware. Just look at EFF's good ol' Deep Crack. I wasn't really around much at the time, but if _The Cuckoo's Egg_ is to be believed, the bigger problem was that people in general weren't any better at choosing good passwords (or keeping them secret) back then than they are today. That honestly wouldn't particularly surprise me. Technology advances, but people remain largely the same? -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From krewat at kilonet.net Sun Oct 6 03:49:27 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2019 13:49:27 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <20191005172944.GI20298@localhost> References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <20191005172944.GI20298@localhost> Message-ID: I cracked a root password for a certain system, back in the ARPANET days. If memory serves, it was 5 characters. I was able to get my hands on the crypt() source, and figure out that the first part of it was intentionally "lengthy" and it just pre-computed a bunch of stuff on purpose. At least, that's my memory of it at the time. I was able to separate that precompute part, and then loop through all combinations further down the crypt() function. Made it a lot faster. Was able to crack a 5-character password in less than a week (or maybe it was a few days) on a VAX-11/750. Of course, it was a simple password consisting of lower-case alpha and no numerics. I think the first letter of the password was "b" which helped a lot ;) Nowadays, run hashcat on an HPC cluster and you can break a lot of stuff... art k. On 10/5/2019 1:29 PM, Michael Kjörling wrote: > On 3 Oct 2019 18:51 +0000, from finnoleary at inventati.org (Finn O'Leary): >> password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely >> punctuation characters, was around three different characters in total, and >> was pretty damn short). > I'm a bit late to the party here (it's been a crazy week for me and > I'm only just now starting to catch up), but don't forget that hashed > Unix passwords back then were limited to eight bytes (actually I > believe the hard limit was 64 bits' worth of password, so if your > system used less than 8 bits per character, you could theoretically > cram more _characters_ into the password, but not more _entropy_, > which topped out at 2^64 no matter what you did, and in practice a > fair bit less because you wanted to be able to type it in). > > Of course, this wasn't a problem in practice when even just hashing a > single candidate password took noticable fractions of a second. At 100 > ms per hash, while you could exhaustively search the lower > alphanumerics four characters space within about two days (my > calculator says 1.944 * 86400 seconds for that) if you could hog the > computer for everyone, by the time you got to six characters the same > search would take almost 7 years, and eight characters the better part > of 9000 years (assuming you kept running it on the same hardware for > the duration). > > Adding uppercase A-Z alongside lowercase a-z and 0-9 increases the > exhaustive search time even for the four characters password space to > about 17 days at 100 ms per hash. So with no additional information > for an attacker, even a [a-zA-Z0-9]{4} password was tolerably secure, > and a [a-zA-Z0-9]{5} one was more than good enough if you changed it > once a year (would take about three years to crack at 100 ms/hash). > > William Cheswick mentioned 8e9 hashes per second. While that sounds > low for good ol' Unix crypt() to me, at that rate, an exhaustive > search of [a-z0-9]{8} would take about 353 days, again according to my > calculator. [a-z0-9]{4} would finish in about 18 seconds. My _guess_, > without having looked up current numbers, is that these figures are at > least some two orders of magnitude too high given modern hardware. > Just look at EFF's good ol' Deep Crack. > > I wasn't really around much at the time, but if _The Cuckoo's Egg_ is > to be believed, the bigger problem was that people in general weren't > any better at choosing good passwords (or keeping them secret) back > then than they are today. That honestly wouldn't particularly surprise > me. Technology advances, but people remain largely the same? > From tj at enoti.me Sun Oct 6 04:05:04 2019 From: tj at enoti.me (Tom Jones) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2019 19:05:04 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: <20191005180503.GA31679@tom-desk.erg.abdn.ac.uk> On Thu, Oct 03, 2019 at 09:30:31PM +0200, Leah Neukirchen wrote: > Finn O'Leary writes: > > > Hi, I remember that someone had recovered some ancient /etc/passwd files > > and had decrypted(?) them, and I remember reading that either ken or > > dmr's > > password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely > > punctuation characters, was around three different characters in > > total, and > > was pretty damn short). I've tried to find this since, as a friend was > > interested in it, and I cannot for the life of me find it! > > I did this once, but I never managed to crack all of them. > It was bwk who used /.,/., > > My findings (from https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-Snapshot-Development/etc/passwd): > > gfVwhuAMF0Trw:dmac > Pb1AmSpsVPG0Y:uio > ymVglQZjbWYDE:/.,/., > c8UdIntIZCUIA:bourne > AAZk9Aj5/Ue0E:foobar > E9i8fWghn1p/I:apr1744 > IIVxQSvq1V9R2:axolotl > 9EZLtSYjeEABE:network > P0CHBwE/mB51k:whatnot > Nc3IkFJyW2u7E:...hello > olqH1vDqH38aw:sacristy > 9ULn5cWTc0b9E:sherril. > N33.MCNcTh5Qw:uucpuucp > FH83PFo4z55cU:wendy!!! > OVCPatZ8RFmFY:cowperso > X.ZNnZrciWauE:5%ghj > IL2bmGECQJgbk:pdq;dq > 4BkcEieEtjWXI:jilland1 > 8PYh/dUBQT9Ss:theik!!! > lj1vXnxTAPnDc:sn74193n > > But I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash > ZghOT0eRm4U9s, and I think I enumerated the whole > 8 letter lowercase + special symbols key space. > > The uncracked ones are: > > ozalp:m5syt3.lB5LAE:40:10:& Babaoglu,4156423806:/usr/ozalp:/bin/csh m5syt3.lB5LAE:12ucdort > hpk:9ycwM8mmmcp4Q:9:10:Howard Katseff,2019495337:/usr/staff/hpk:/bin/csh > tbl:cBWEbG59spEmM:10:10:Tom London,2019492006:/usr/staff/tbl > ken:ZghOT0eRm4U9s:52:10:& Thompson:/usr/staff/ken > fabry:d9B17PTU2RTlM:305:10:Bob &,4156422714:/usr/staff/fabry:/bin/csh I pointed my FreeBSD build machine at the password file, but it didn't manage many guesses a second (55000 per core with 48 cores, using john). I asked a friend to point their GPU rig at the password file. It is a MSI Graphics Card R9 290X and is doing about 255MHashes/Second using hashcat. He is going to do the alphanumeric space and then call it a day. "for hashcat, 80s DES crypt is -m 1500" - [tj] From mparson at bl.org Sun Oct 6 05:44:38 2019 From: mparson at bl.org (Michael Parson) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2019 14:44:38 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff In-Reply-To: References: <201909132024.x8DKObEP013266@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <463d5cc4-9bef-9ac3-a680-a5161d664dc1@aueb.gr> <20190913221345.GA16129@minnie.tuhs.org> <20190914020240.GO2046@mcvoy.com> <20190914024433.GA19193@minnie.tuhs.org> <2e84c4d0-5239-b223-856d-00aacf8d3028@andrewnesbit.org> <201909150654.x8F6sChG021185@freefriends.org> <201909160552.x8G5qBYK025195@freefriends.org> Message-ID: (pardon the reply on an oldish thread, I've not read this group in a while) On Mon, 16 Sep 2019, Clem Cole wrote: > On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 1:52 AM wrote: > >> I use the standalone Info reader (named info) if I want to look at the >> Info output. >> > Fair enough, but be careful, while I admit I have not looked in a while, > info(gnu) relies on emacs keybindings and a number of very emacs'ish things. > Every time I have tried to deal with it, I have unprogram my fingers and > reset them to emacs. > > If it would have used more(1) [or even less(1)] then I would not be as > annoyed. > Unix had fine tools [man(1), more(1), et al] and rms and friends felt the > need to replace them with ITS-like programs. A few years ago, I was introduced to pinfo[0] for reading info pages, it's more like using the lynx browser to read info docs rather than the emacs keybindings. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ [0] http://pinfo.sourceforge.net From arnold at skeeve.com Sun Oct 6 18:03:26 2019 From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com) Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2019 02:03:26 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6@gmail.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6@gmail.com> Message-ID: <201910060803.x9683QTm020295@freefriends.org> Jon Forrest wrote: > One slightly OT fact about TeX. On my 16GB, Core i7, SATA SSD > Lenovo T430s laptop running Fedora 30, it takes ~3 seconds to run TeX on > the ~900 page TeXBook. That's pretty fast. You can thank Moore's Law for this. I remember trying to run TeX on BSD 4.[12] vax with 4 Meg of memory and it taking many minutes to format a single page. The first time it became easy to run TeX, for me, was on sparcstation class systems in the early 1990s. > TeX contains all kinds of > code to make it fit in the constraints of a 1980s computer. I wonder > whether a redesign for a 2020 computer would be faster or slower. I think it's just compute-intensive code. Moern versions of TeX use WebToC to translate Knuth's web/pascal code to C, and that has been the case for a long time. (As an aside, everyone here who's read "TeX: The Program", raise you hand. [I have, but only once.]) > I suspect, but can't prove, that classic [nt]roff might also > benefit in the same way. groff was written latter, so it might > suffer less. I don't think classic [nt]roff suffers at all. I remember (boy do I sound like an old f*art) circa 1991, having both nroff and groff on a '486 class system. nroff was noticeably faster at formatting man pages than groff was. (Groff, of course, was ditroff and gave me PostScript output, but comparing the two versions of nroff for text output, there was a noticeable difference.) Again, today, it doesn't really matter. Arnold From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Mon Oct 7 03:47:47 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2019 13:47:47 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] lowercase vs. uppercase PDP-7? Message-ID: <201910061747.x96Hllxs034213@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > The scans for v0 code are in lowercase. I assume printed on TTY 37. > But why is the early PDP-7 code in lowercase? Once you've used a device with lower case, upper case looks as offensive as a ransom note. I went through this in moving "up" from Whirlwind to IBM's 704. By 1969, we'd all had lower-case terminals in our homes for several years. So Unix was ASCII from the start. Upper-case from a TTY 33 was converted to lower. On the PDP-11, at least, there was an escape convention for upper case. I believe the lower-case convention was explained in the introduction. In particular if you logged in with an upper-case user name, the terminal driver was set to convert everything to lower. Remember, too, that 33's used yellow paper. For printing on white we had use other machines that had full ASCII support. Doug From david at kdbarto.org Mon Oct 7 22:56:02 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 05:56:02 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books Message-ID: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> I’ve got a few books I’ve just pulled off the shelf and no longer want/need. I’m hoping someone will give them a good home. UNIX System Labs Inc UNIX(r) System V Release 4 Programmers Guide: System Services and Application Packaging Tools Device Driver Interface/Driver-Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI) Reference Manual (2 copies) AT&T 3B2/3B5/3B15 Computers Assembly Programming Manual Sun Microsystems Inc (Sun Technical Reports) The UNIX System - 1985 Sun 3 Architecture - 1986 I’m willing to split postage on mailing them wherever. If you are local (San Diego) I’m willing to meet you wherever for an exchange and a coffee. David (Also posted on the cctalk mailing list) From jcapp at anteil.com Mon Oct 7 23:05:19 2019 From: jcapp at anteil.com (Jim Capp) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 09:05:19 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> David, I’m interested and will give them a good home. I’m in Pennsylvania, so coffee would not work. I’m also willing to cover your shipping costs. Cheers, Jim > On Oct 7, 2019, at 8:56 AM, David wrote: > > I’ve got a few books I’ve just pulled off the shelf and no longer want/need. > I’m hoping someone will give them a good home. > > UNIX System Labs Inc UNIX(r) System V Release 4 > Programmers Guide: System Services and Application Packaging Tools > Device Driver Interface/Driver-Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI) Reference Manual (2 copies) > > AT&T 3B2/3B5/3B15 Computers Assembly Programming Manual > > Sun Microsystems Inc (Sun Technical Reports) > The UNIX System - 1985 > Sun 3 Architecture - 1986 > > I’m willing to split postage on mailing them wherever. If you are local (San Diego) > I’m willing to meet you wherever for an exchange and a coffee. > > David > (Also posted on the cctalk mailing list) > From david at kdbarto.org Mon Oct 7 23:15:00 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 06:15:00 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> Message-ID: <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> These went exceptionally fast. Timing of the first response was Jim Capp by about 1 minute. So if Jim will send me his physical address off list, I’ll coordinate with him in shipping them. David > On Oct 7, 2019, at 6:05 AM, Jim Capp wrote: > > David, > > I’m interested and will give them a good home. I’m in Pennsylvania, so coffee would not work. I’m also willing to cover your shipping costs. > > Cheers, > > Jim > > >> On Oct 7, 2019, at 8:56 AM, David wrote: >> >> I’ve got a few books I’ve just pulled off the shelf and no longer want/need. >> I’m hoping someone will give them a good home. >> >> UNIX System Labs Inc UNIX(r) System V Release 4 >> Programmers Guide: System Services and Application Packaging Tools >> Device Driver Interface/Driver-Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI) Reference Manual (2 copies) >> >> AT&T 3B2/3B5/3B15 Computers Assembly Programming Manual >> >> Sun Microsystems Inc (Sun Technical Reports) >> The UNIX System - 1985 >> Sun 3 Architecture - 1986 >> >> I’m willing to split postage on mailing them wherever. If you are local (San Diego) >> I’m willing to meet you wherever for an exchange and a coffee. >> >> David >> (Also posted on the cctalk mailing list) >> > From web at loomcom.com Tue Oct 8 03:17:35 2019 From: web at loomcom.com (Seth J. Morabito) Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2019 10:17:35 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> David writes: > These went exceptionally fast. > > Timing of the first response was Jim Capp by about 1 minute. So if Jim > will send me his physical address off list, I’ll coordinate with him > in shipping them. All (and especially Jim and David!) I'm 100% fine with Jim getting these manuals (lord knows I don't have any more room on my shelves!), but may I ask that the 3B2 manual be scanned? There is an existing copy of this manual floating around online, but the copy that was scanned was a proof print, has extensive markup, and a very poor scan quality. I would love to see a better version available! All the best, -Seth -- Seth Morabito Poulsbo, WA, USA web at loomcom.com From web at loomcom.com Tue Oct 8 03:26:49 2019 From: web at loomcom.com (Seth J. Morabito) Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2019 10:26:49 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> Message-ID: <87v9t0tqjq.fsf@loomcom.com> U'll Be King of the Stars writes: > On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote: > > [1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown. You can build a career > on top of it but not on top of Markdown. I don't even consider MD a > proper markup format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing > introductory README.md files. The only thing that La/TeX and MD have > in common for me is that they are both intolerable without Emacs modes > (AUCTeX and markdown-down.el). [With sincere apologies for taking this slightly more off-topic, but still within the realm of the vaguely UNIX-y...] This is one of the reasons I live in Emacs, too. I make extensive use of org-mode, not only for organizing my life, but also for generating documentation. Org-mode has extensive native support for LaTeX markup, and exporting marked-up documents to PDF via LaTeX. Additionally, of course, it can export to HTML and even Markdown if you like. But the LaTeX support makes it killer. In fact, veering back on-topic, there is even a mode to export Org-mode files to Groff Memorandum Macros documents[1]! It's a pretty powerful system. -Seth [1] https://orgmode.org/worg/exporters/ox-groff.html -- Seth Morabito Poulsbo, WA, USA web at loomcom.com From krewat at kilonet.net Tue Oct 8 04:34:55 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 14:34:55 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> Message-ID: I'd also like to ask that the Sun stuff be scanned ... thanks! On 10/7/2019 1:17 PM, Seth J. Morabito wrote: > David writes: > >> These went exceptionally fast. >> >> Timing of the first response was Jim Capp by about 1 minute. So if Jim >> will send me his physical address off list, I’ll coordinate with him >> in shipping them. > > All (and especially Jim and David!) > > I'm 100% fine with Jim getting these manuals (lord knows I don't have > any more room on my shelves!), but may I ask that the 3B2 manual be > scanned? There is an existing copy of this manual floating around > online, but the copy that was scanned was a proof print, has extensive > markup, and a very poor scan quality. I would love to see a better > version available! > > All the best, > > -Seth > -- > Seth Morabito > Poulsbo, WA, USA > web at loomcom.com > > From aek at bitsavers.org Tue Oct 8 04:38:07 2019 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 11:38:07 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Poll: good location for Unix documentation? In-Reply-To: <20190929213446.GA30379@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20190929185320.5902C18C088@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20190929213446.GA30379@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On 9/29/19 2:34 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > Can someone point me at the > docs that outline the procedure to get documents to Al There is no documentation, just an email adr on the bottom of the main page I can email you ftp upload info From alan at alanlee.org Tue Oct 8 04:36:13 2019 From: alan at alanlee.org (alan at alanlee.org) Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2019 14:36:13 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> Message-ID: <8d0f5706d29fd08d2a8e5d3c47a301ef@alanlee.org> Yes. I was about to ask the same question on scanning. Would be very handy to others. Thanks, -Alan On 2019-10-07 13:17, Seth J. Morabito wrote: > David writes: > >> These went exceptionally fast. >> >> Timing of the first response was Jim Capp by about 1 minute. So if Jim >> will send me his physical address off list, I’ll coordinate with him >> in shipping them. > > > All (and especially Jim and David!) > > I'm 100% fine with Jim getting these manuals (lord knows I don't have > any more room on my shelves!), but may I ask that the 3B2 manual be > scanned? There is an existing copy of this manual floating around > online, but the copy that was scanned was a proof print, has extensive > markup, and a very poor scan quality. I would love to see a better > version available! > > All the best, > > -Seth > -- > Seth Morabito > Poulsbo, WA, USA > web at loomcom.com From chet.ramey at case.edu Tue Oct 8 05:01:04 2019 From: chet.ramey at case.edu (Chet Ramey) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 15:01:04 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> Message-ID: <16def659-e7f6-357e-f55c-dc10eb2b0c4a@case.edu> On 10/7/19 2:34 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote: > I'd also like to ask that the Sun stuff be scanned ... thanks! https://www.rcsri.org/library/80s/UNIX-A-Sun-Tech-Report.pdf -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet at case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/ From athornton at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 05:14:10 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 12:14:10 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: <87v9t0tqjq.fsf@loomcom.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> <87v9t0tqjq.fsf@loomcom.com> Message-ID: And just in case you didn't know about it.... https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal This converts org-mode docs to reveal.js presentations. https://athornton.github.io/Jupyter-PCW-2019/ is an example On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 10:36 AM Seth J. Morabito wrote: > > U'll Be King of the Stars writes: > > > On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote: > > > > [1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown. You can build a career > > on top of it but not on top of Markdown. I don't even consider MD a > > proper markup format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing > > introductory README.md files. The only thing that La/TeX and MD have > > in common for me is that they are both intolerable without Emacs modes > > (AUCTeX and markdown-down.el). > > [With sincere apologies for taking this slightly more off-topic, but > still within the realm of the vaguely UNIX-y...] > > This is one of the reasons I live in Emacs, too. I make extensive use of > org-mode, not only for organizing my life, but also for generating > documentation. Org-mode has extensive native support for LaTeX markup, > and exporting marked-up documents to PDF via LaTeX. Additionally, of > course, it can export to HTML and even Markdown if you like. But the > LaTeX support makes it killer. > > In fact, veering back on-topic, there is even a mode to export Org-mode > files to Groff Memorandum Macros documents[1]! It's a pretty powerful > system. > > -Seth > > > [1] https://orgmode.org/worg/exporters/ox-groff.html > -- > Seth Morabito > Poulsbo, WA, USA > web at loomcom.com > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From david at kdbarto.org Tue Oct 8 07:19:58 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 14:19:58 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> Message-ID: <48ED5487-B872-4E98-945D-50C3D8E6F3D0@kdbarto.org> I’ll leave it to Jim to see about scanning it (?bitsavers?). I don’t have the equipment or the bandwidth to do it. David > On Oct 7, 2019, at 10:17 AM, Seth J. Morabito wrote: > > > David writes: > >> These went exceptionally fast. >> >> Timing of the first response was Jim Capp by about 1 minute. So if Jim >> will send me his physical address off list, I’ll coordinate with him >> in shipping them. > > > All (and especially Jim and David!) > > I'm 100% fine with Jim getting these manuals (lord knows I don't have > any more room on my shelves!), but may I ask that the 3B2 manual be > scanned? There is an existing copy of this manual floating around > online, but the copy that was scanned was a proof print, has extensive > markup, and a very poor scan quality. I would love to see a better > version available! > > All the best, > > -Seth > -- > Seth Morabito > Poulsbo, WA, USA > web at loomcom.com From david at kdbarto.org Tue Oct 8 07:31:14 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 14:31:14 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <16def659-e7f6-357e-f55c-dc10eb2b0c4a@case.edu> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> <16def659-e7f6-357e-f55c-dc10eb2b0c4a@case.edu> Message-ID: > On Oct 7, 2019, at 12:01 PM, Chet Ramey wrote: > > On 10/7/19 2:34 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote: >> I'd also like to ask that the Sun stuff be scanned ... thanks! > > https://www.rcsri.org/library/80s/UNIX-A-Sun-Tech-Report.pdf > > > -- > ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer > ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates > Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet at case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/ Different from the 2 that I’ve got. So If we can get the 2 scanned, all for the better. David From krewat at kilonet.net Tue Oct 8 08:31:24 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 18:31:24 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <16def659-e7f6-357e-f55c-dc10eb2b0c4a@case.edu> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> <16def659-e7f6-357e-f55c-dc10eb2b0c4a@case.edu> Message-ID: Thank you! Any chance the Sun-3 tech stuff is online anywhere? I still have a 3/280 that I might have to resurrect at some point if it dies (it was running solid last time I turned it on), and any little bit helps. On 10/7/2019 3:01 PM, Chet Ramey wrote: > On 10/7/19 2:34 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote: >> I'd also like to ask that the Sun stuff be scanned ... thanks! > https://www.rcsri.org/library/80s/UNIX-A-Sun-Tech-Report.pdf > > From chet.ramey at case.edu Tue Oct 8 10:21:41 2019 From: chet.ramey at case.edu (Chet Ramey) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 20:21:41 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> <16def659-e7f6-357e-f55c-dc10eb2b0c4a@case.edu> Message-ID: On 10/7/19 6:31 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote: > Thank you! Any chance the Sun-3 tech stuff is online anywhere? I looked briefly but unsuccessfully. -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet at case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/ From earl.baugh at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 10:24:15 2019 From: earl.baugh at gmail.com (Earl Baugh) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 20:24:15 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: What do you need? I have a bunch of Sun 3 docs. ( I have a Sun 1/100, Sun 2/120, Sun 3/110 and Sun 4/110 — on of each of the first 4 generations, all working 😀) Earl Sent from my iPhone > On Oct 7, 2019, at 8:22 PM, Chet Ramey wrote: > > On 10/7/19 6:31 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote: >> Thank you! Any chance the Sun-3 tech stuff is online anywhere? > > I looked briefly but unsuccessfully. > > > -- > ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer > ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates > Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet at case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/ From chet.ramey at case.edu Tue Oct 8 10:40:42 2019 From: chet.ramey at case.edu (Chet Ramey) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 20:40:42 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0a67d788-3c59-5705-0886-1d1087d1489b@case.edu> On 10/7/19 8:24 PM, Earl Baugh wrote: > What do you need? I have a bunch of Sun 3 docs. ( I have a Sun 1/100, Sun 2/120, Sun 3/110 and Sun 4/110 — on of each of the first 4 generations, all working 😀) I have the sun-3 architecture report; I just looked for the benefit of the list. -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet at case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/ From akosela at andykosela.com Tue Oct 8 17:27:56 2019 From: akosela at andykosela.com (Andy Kosela) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 09:27:56 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <16def659-e7f6-357e-f55c-dc10eb2b0c4a@case.edu> References: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> <1614BEF9-8622-4625-891C-A784592D9B49@anteil.com> <4DD83A6C-6825-4B22-A796-1A313F5F8478@kdbarto.org> <87wodgtqz4.fsf@loomcom.com> <16def659-e7f6-357e-f55c-dc10eb2b0c4a@case.edu> Message-ID: On Monday, October 7, 2019, Chet Ramey wrote: > On 10/7/19 2:34 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote: > > I'd also like to ask that the Sun stuff be scanned ... thanks! > > https://www.rcsri.org/library/80s/UNIX-A-Sun-Tech-Report.pdf > > This is pure gold. Thank you. --Andy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dot at dotat.at Tue Oct 8 23:21:16 2019 From: dot at dotat.at (Tony Finch) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 14:21:16 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] RFC formatting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: ron minnich wrote: > "why is the formatting so weird" someone asked me. > > I am guessing, looking at RFC 1, that it was formatted with an > ancestor of runoff but ... anyone? This is really a question for the Internet History list, I think http://www.postel.org/internet-history/ I don't know how things were done in the 1970s, except that the NIC used Englebart's NLS. I get the impression that the earliest RFCs were formatted using the facilities at the author's home institution; I don't know about the mechanics of duplication and distribution, but it relied on paper mail for some years until the NIC spun up an FTP server, e.g. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc95 For a very long time, RFCs and drafts were produced using nroff. You can see some of the remnants of that here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/tools/ For about 20 years there has been an XML source format for RFCs https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2629 But in the final stages the RFC Editor would convert to nroff to produce the final published form. They have just this week switched to a toolchain based on v3 of the xml2rfc source format. I believe they aren't using nroff for the text format any more, the publishing tool produces it directly. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/rfc-interest/jemoHh4imSYkX_Oo2FvMyt_7ZYg Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch http://dotat.at/ defend the right to speak, write, worship, associate, and vote freely From krewat at kilonet.net Wed Oct 9 03:38:42 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 13:38:42 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <20191005180503.GA31679@tom-desk.erg.abdn.ac.uk> References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191005180503.GA31679@tom-desk.erg.abdn.ac.uk> Message-ID: I have some more out of this list, but not sure if I should send them or not. Ken's has not been cracked - yet. ozalp:m5syt3.lB5LAE:40:10:& Babaoglu,4156423806:/usr/ozalp:/bin/csh hpk:9ycwM8mmmcp4Q:9:10:Howard Katseff,2019495337:/usr/staff/hpk:/bin/csh tbl:cBWEbG59spEmM:10:10:Tom London,2019492006:/usr/staff/tbl ken:ZghOT0eRm4U9s:52:10:& Thompson:/usr/staff/ken fabry:d9B17PTU2RTlM:305:10:Bob &,4156422714:/usr/staff/fabry:/bin/csh On 10/5/2019 2:05 PM, Tom Jones wrote: > On Thu, Oct 03, 2019 at 09:30:31PM +0200, Leah Neukirchen wrote: >> Finn O'Leary writes: >> >>> Hi, I remember that someone had recovered some ancient /etc/passwd files >>> and had decrypted(?) them, and I remember reading that either ken or >>> dmr's >>> password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely >>> punctuation characters, was around three different characters in >>> total, and >>> was pretty damn short). I've tried to find this since, as a friend was >>> interested in it, and I cannot for the life of me find it! >> I did this once, but I never managed to crack all of them. >> It was bwk who used /.,/., >> >> My findings (from https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-Snapshot-Development/etc/passwd): >> >> gfVwhuAMF0Trw:dmac >> Pb1AmSpsVPG0Y:uio >> ymVglQZjbWYDE:/.,/., >> c8UdIntIZCUIA:bourne >> AAZk9Aj5/Ue0E:foobar >> E9i8fWghn1p/I:apr1744 >> IIVxQSvq1V9R2:axolotl >> 9EZLtSYjeEABE:network >> P0CHBwE/mB51k:whatnot >> Nc3IkFJyW2u7E:...hello >> olqH1vDqH38aw:sacristy >> 9ULn5cWTc0b9E:sherril. >> N33.MCNcTh5Qw:uucpuucp >> FH83PFo4z55cU:wendy!!! >> OVCPatZ8RFmFY:cowperso >> X.ZNnZrciWauE:5%ghj >> IL2bmGECQJgbk:pdq;dq >> 4BkcEieEtjWXI:jilland1 >> 8PYh/dUBQT9Ss:theik!!! >> lj1vXnxTAPnDc:sn74193n >> >> But I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash >> ZghOT0eRm4U9s, and I think I enumerated the whole >> 8 letter lowercase + special symbols key space. >> >> The uncracked ones are: >> >> ozalp:m5syt3.lB5LAE:40:10:& Babaoglu,4156423806:/usr/ozalp:/bin/csh > m5syt3.lB5LAE:12ucdort > >> hpk:9ycwM8mmmcp4Q:9:10:Howard Katseff,2019495337:/usr/staff/hpk:/bin/csh >> tbl:cBWEbG59spEmM:10:10:Tom London,2019492006:/usr/staff/tbl >> ken:ZghOT0eRm4U9s:52:10:& Thompson:/usr/staff/ken >> fabry:d9B17PTU2RTlM:305:10:Bob &,4156422714:/usr/staff/fabry:/bin/csh > I pointed my FreeBSD build machine at the password file, but it didn't > manage many guesses a second (55000 per core with 48 cores, using john). > > I asked a friend to point their GPU rig at the password file. It is a > MSI Graphics Card R9 290X and is doing about 255MHashes/Second using > hashcat. He is going to do the alphanumeric space and then call it a > day. > > "for hashcat, 80s DES crypt is -m 1500" > > - [tj] > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From norman at oclsc.org Wed Oct 9 04:38:43 2019 From: norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2019 14:38:43 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files Message-ID: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Back in the heyday of uucp, some sites were lazy and allowed uucico access to any file in the file system (that was accessible to the uucp user). A common ploy for white hats and black hats was to try uucp remotesys!/etc/passwd ~/remotesys or the like, and see what came in and whether it had any easy hashes (shadow password files didn't quite exist yet). The system known to the uucp world as research! was more careful: / was mapped to /usr/spool/uucp. We left a phony etc/passwd file there, containing plausible-looking entries with hashes that, if cracked, spelled out why are you wasting your time I don't remember whether anyone ever stole it by uucp, though I think Bill Cheswick used it to set up the phony system environment for Berferd to play in (Google for `cheswick berferd' if you don't know the story). Norman Wilson Toronto ON From krewat at kilonet.net Wed Oct 9 04:51:28 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 14:51:28 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> Slightly off-topic, but still UUCP related. If a SunOS box NFS exported /, and I could mount /, even without root NFS access, using the uucp user, I could overwrite uucico because it was owned by uucp. The entry in inetd.conf would automatically run uucico as root. Telnet to the box on that port, and it would happily run whatever I put in the uucico file. Bad joo-joo. On 10/8/2019 2:38 PM, Norman Wilson wrote: > Back in the heyday of uucp, some sites were lazy and allowed > uucico access to any file in the file system (that was accessible > to the uucp user). A common ploy for white hats and black hats > was to try > uucp remotesys!/etc/passwd ~/remotesys > or the like, and see what came in and whether it had any easy > hashes (shadow password files didn't quite exist yet). > > The system known to the uucp world as research! was more > careful: / was mapped to /usr/spool/uucp. We left a phony > etc/passwd file there, containing plausible-looking entries > with hashes that, if cracked, spelled out > > why > are > you > wasting > your > time > > I don't remember whether anyone ever stole it by uucp, though > I think Bill Cheswick used it to set up the phony system > environment for Berferd to play in (Google for `cheswick berferd' > if you don't know the story). > > Norman Wilson > Toronto ON > From dave at horsfall.org Wed Oct 9 06:40:35 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 07:40:35 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191005180503.GA31679@tom-desk.erg.abdn.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Tue, 8 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote: > I have some more out of this list, but not sure if I should send them or > not. Ken's has not been cracked - yet. Has anyone tried "John the Ripper"? And there was another tool (name forgotten) that was specifically designed to attack crypt(). -- Dave From dave at horsfall.org Wed Oct 9 06:52:24 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 07:52:24 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: On Tue, 8 Oct 2019, Norman Wilson wrote: > I don't remember whether anyone ever stole it by uucp, though I think > Bill Cheswick used it to set up the phony system environment for Berferd > to play in (Google for `cheswick berferd' if you don't know the story). And an excellent story: if you haven't read it then read it; if you have read it then read it again. I'm sure that I have the book somewhere. Semi-spoiler: the protagonist used to sleep next to his terminal (leaving his girlfriend alone) until the perp tried to log in, upon which alarms went off and he was finally able to trace the call. Or am I confusing it with "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll? -- Dave From krewat at kilonet.net Wed Oct 9 06:57:06 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 16:57:06 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191005180503.GA31679@tom-desk.erg.abdn.ac.uk> Message-ID: Using hashcat on an nvidia GPU cluster. crypt() is slow on it, I guess because the GPUs are not able to do it efficiently. On 10/8/2019 4:40 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Tue, 8 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote: > >> I have some more out of this list, but not sure if I should send them or >> not. Ken's has not been cracked - yet. > > Has anyone tried "John the Ripper"?  And there was another tool (name > forgotten) that was specifically designed to attack crypt(). > > -- Dave > From dave at horsfall.org Wed Oct 9 07:02:42 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 08:02:42 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 8 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote: > Slightly off-topic, but still UUCP related. If a SunOS box NFS exported > /, and I could mount /, even without root NFS access, using the uucp > user, I could overwrite uucico because it was owned by uucp. The entry > in inetd.conf would automatically run uucico as root. Telnet to the box > on that port, and it would happily run whatever I put in the uucico > file. > > Bad joo-joo. *Cough cough* I remember that *cough cough*... Unix systems in those days were broken in subtle ways; we once broke into a Gould (marketed as the most secure box on the planet[*]) by social-engineering a marketoid (we tricked him into running a custom "ls" or something). "Thank you Sir, and we've just broken into your Gould; there's the root prompt". [*] They never did pay us our bounty, because we "cheated" :-) -- Dave From michael at kjorling.se Wed Oct 9 07:15:22 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 21:15:22 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: On 9 Oct 2019 07:52 +1100, from dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall): > Semi-spoiler: the protagonist used to sleep next to his terminal (leaving > his girlfriend alone) until the perp tried to log in, upon which alarms went > off and he was finally able to trace the call. > > Or am I confusing it with "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll? You might be. At least, what you describe definitely bears a close resemblance to events recounted in Stoll's book. Of course, that by itself doesn't mean something similar can't have been done by or happened to others. When all you've got is a hammer... -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From web at loomcom.com Wed Oct 9 07:11:14 2019 From: web at loomcom.com (Seth Morabito) Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2019 14:11:14 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] eqn In-Reply-To: References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> <87v9t0tqjq.fsf@loomcom.com> Message-ID: <50bb3193-4c1c-4185-b7a3-8c93ef2b44c7@www.fastmail.com> On Mon, Oct 7, 2019, at 12:14 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: > And just in case you didn't know about it.... > > https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal > > This converts org-mode docs to reveal.js presentations. > > https://athornton.github.io/Jupyter-PCW-2019/ is an example I was not familiar with this, thanks for pointing it out! In the past, for presentations I have used org-beamer to produce LaTeX Beamer presentations, which works very well, but of course there are no fancy transitions or anything. I'll definitely check out reveal.js, I didn't know that was a thing. -Seth -- Seth Morabito Poulsbo, WA web at loomcom.com From krewat at kilonet.net Wed Oct 9 07:22:03 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 17:22:03 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> On 10/8/2019 5:02 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Tue, 8 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote: > >> Slightly off-topic, but still UUCP related. If a SunOS box NFS >> exported /, and I could mount /, even without root NFS access, using >> the uucp user, I could overwrite uucico because it was owned by uucp. >> The entry in inetd.conf would automatically run uucico as root. >> Telnet to the box on that port, and it would happily run whatever I >> put in the uucico file. >> >> Bad joo-joo. > > *Cough cough* I remember that *cough cough*... cough cough back at you, sir ;) > > Unix systems in those days were broken in subtle ways; we once broke > into a Gould (marketed as the most secure box on the planet[*]) by > social-engineering a marketoid (we tricked him into running a custom > "ls" or something).  "Thank you Sir, and we've just broken into your > Gould; there's the root prompt". I was able to social-engineer an operator a few times on TOPS-10 systems back in the day to reset passwords, or mount disks. "Can you give me a list of disks you have ready to mount?" - "blah blah blah" - "OK, mount pack BLARG". But then, one time, I was talking to an "operator" for a while before I realized it was an ELIZA-like program that kept going back around in a loop. Trying to be suave, I started it by asking how they were doing, and got all sorts of weird responses. At some point, realizing I was talking to a bot, I said: "I feel bad" - and it replied something to the effect of "Can you explain why you feel bad?". Typical ELIZA response ;) Someone at that university had a sense of humor, that's for sure. Broke into it anyway guessing passwords. ak From jcapp at anteil.com Wed Oct 9 08:59:24 2019 From: jcapp at anteil.com (Jim Capp) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 18:59:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <07F6CE19-6D98-4089-8142-517AB142C70E@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <20774963.3022.1570575564420.JavaMail.root@zimbraanteil> David, Did you get my "off list" email about the books? Cheers, Jim From: "David" To: "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" Sent: Monday, October 7, 2019 8:56:02 AM Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books I’ve got a few books I’ve just pulled off the shelf and no longer want/need. I’m hoping someone will give them a good home. UNIX System Labs Inc UNIX(r) System V Release 4 Programmers Guide: System Services and Application Packaging Tools Device Driver Interface/Driver-Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI) Reference Manual (2 copies) AT&T 3B2/3B5/3B15 Computers Assembly Programming Manual Sun Microsystems Inc (Sun Technical Reports) The UNIX System - 1985 Sun 3 Architecture - 1986 I’m willing to split postage on mailing them wherever. If you are local (San Diego) I’m willing to meet you wherever for an exchange and a coffee. David (Also posted on the cctalk mailing list) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lyndon at orthanc.ca Wed Oct 9 10:38:11 2019 From: lyndon at orthanc.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2019 17:38:11 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] INed/Rand Editor/Ned [was Re: My EuroBSDcon talk (preview for commentary) In-Reply-To: References: <20190915232524.9A5491570CE9@mail.bitblocks.com> <7F62BF6B-8FEA-4C43-9E35-05BDE9BF04EA@ccc.com> <20190916023738.F34E81570CE9@mail.bitblocks.com> Message-ID: Warner Losh writes: > Venix had vi. At least 2.0 pulled that in from Berkeley... But they built it with '#define SMALL' or whatever the #ifdef was for the 16-bit version. I was working at a court reporting company at the time, and we had just introduced the court reporters to UNIX for editing, proofing, and typesetting the transcripts. Within a few weeks they were blowing through the limits of the 16-bit-restricted Venix vi. I ended up bootlegging the vi source from a friend so we could compile an un- restricted address space binary for them to use. This same bunch of reporters, within a couple of months, were writing their own awk scripts to look for transcription errors, and their own troff macros to typeset the final product in client-specific formats. When I first arrived there they were using Convergent NGEN workstations to transcribe the tapes. In well under a year we had replaced those with a Convergent MiniFrame and moved the entire workflow over to vi/awk/troff spitting out Postscript, most of the tools for which the reporters wrote themselves. Today, when I listen to all our "technical support" people at work whine about how they can't log in to XXX (because they didn't run ssh-add), it sets my hair on fire. I would so love to put them in the Waybac Machine and let the old gang school them in "learn to do your fscking job!" Sorry, what were we talking about ... ? --lyndon From lyndon at orthanc.ca Wed Oct 9 11:10:15 2019 From: lyndon at orthanc.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2019 18:10:15 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] INed/Rand Editor/Ned [was Re: My EuroBSDcon talk (preview for commentary) In-Reply-To: References: <20190915232524.9A5491570CE9@mail.bitblocks.com> <7F62BF6B-8FEA-4C43-9E35-05BDE9BF04EA@ccc.com> <20190916023738.F34E81570CE9@mail.bitblocks.com> <20190916202153.wbpzx3jn3a7rs6kb@localhost.localdomain> <201909162047.x8GKlSbX001635@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: [Sorry, coming to this thread very late ...] George Michaelson writes: > Terminfo just didn't feel very *relevant* In the sense that we no longer stare down collections of Ann Arbor Ambassador's with their endless combinations of screen configurations, or just dealing with adm3a vs. xl83 vs. vtXX0, sure. But terminfo (or cap) is still relevant to me every day in a couple of ways, even though my $TERM is almost always 'xterm'. Lots of terminals have internal memory buffers that curses can take advantage of. The most common case is to have a cursor-oriented application (vi, less, systat) grab on to one of those buffers and use it while they run, and then restore the original terminal screen when they exit. This preserves the shell session context around the editor/whatever session. Sometimes this is useful. Sometimes it is not. I happen to dislike that behaviour. When I'm churning through a sequence of commands and get to the point where I need to look up something obscure in the manpage, there's nothing more frustrating than running 'man foo', finding the section of the manpage that describes exactly what I need to do, pressing 'q' to exit the pager, and watching said pager erase the very information I was looking for just to redraw the screen back to the point where I originally became lost :-P terminfo saves me[1] from that behaviour. The decision about how, when, or if to use those memory buffers is part of the terminfo definition for the $TERM I'm using. So I can customize the inter- action between xterm and less by writing my own 'xterm' terminfo definition that doesn't do the memory buffer dance. POSIX even defines interfaces such as $TERMINFO and tic(1) that ensure I can portably push my own 'xterm' definitions around to all the systems I work on. But of course, *everybody* knows the entire universe lives in an ANSI terminal now, so why bother with curses? This is the same logic that *knows* that nobody in the universe customizes the colours they use in their terminal sessions, so they can feel free to make up whatever colour mappings they want. Don't like it? Then set our app-specific configuration settings, or environment variables, or both. Because, why should we pay attention to the terminal attribute mappings that have been in terminfo/curses for how many decades? --lyndon [1] OpenBSD is very annoying about this. On every (every!) other UNIX variant I use, I can upload and compile my custom terminfo 'xterm' definition and It Just Works. Not OpenBSD ... From nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com Wed Oct 9 15:49:48 2019 From: nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com (Nigel Williams) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 16:49:48 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: ken is done: ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! took 4+ days on an AMD Radeon Vega64 running hashcat at about 930MH/s during that time (those familiar know the hash-rate fluctuates and slows down towards the end). From nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com Wed Oct 9 15:52:00 2019 From: nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com (Nigel Williams) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 16:52:00 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:49 PM Nigel Williams wrote: > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! BTW, is that a chess move? From imp at bsdimp.com Wed Oct 9 16:00:46 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 00:00:46 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2019, 11:52 PM Nigel Williams wrote: > On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:49 PM Nigel Williams > wrote: > > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > > BTW, is that a chess move? > Most common opening. Warner > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From akosela at andykosela.com Wed Oct 9 18:16:02 2019 From: akosela at andykosela.com (Andy Kosela) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 10:16:02 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On 10/9/19, Warner Losh wrote: > On Tue, Oct 8, 2019, 11:52 PM Nigel Williams > > wrote: > >> On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:49 PM Nigel Williams >> wrote: >> > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! >> >> BTW, is that a chess move? >> > > Most common opening. > Descriptive chess notation is not as popular today as it was back in the 70s, but it actually makes perfect sense as Ken is a long time chess enthusiast. --Andy From ken at google.com Wed Oct 9 18:53:25 2019 From: ken at google.com (Ken Thompson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 01:53:25 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: congrats. On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 1:16 AM Andy Kosela wrote: > > On 10/9/19, Warner Losh wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 8, 2019, 11:52 PM Nigel Williams > > > > wrote: > > > >> On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:49 PM Nigel Williams > >> wrote: > >> > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > >> > >> BTW, is that a chess move? > >> > > > > Most common opening. > > > > Descriptive chess notation is not as popular today as it was back in > the 70s, but it actually makes perfect sense as Ken is a long time > chess enthusiast. > > --Andy From leah at vuxu.org Wed Oct 9 19:16:17 2019 From: leah at vuxu.org (Leah Neukirchen) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2019 11:16:17 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: (Ken Thompson via TUHS's message of "Wed, 9 Oct 2019 01:53:25 -0700") References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <87lftul1ni.fsf@vuxu.org> Ken Thompson via TUHS writes: > congrats. chapeau :) -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From leah at vuxu.org Wed Oct 9 22:55:16 2019 From: leah at vuxu.org (Leah Neukirchen) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2019 14:55:16 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: (Arthur Krewat's message of "Tue, 8 Oct 2019 13:38:42 -0400") References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191005180503.GA31679@tom-desk.erg.abdn.ac.uk> Message-ID: <87h84ikrij.fsf@vuxu.org> Arthur Krewat writes: > I have some more out of this list, but not sure if I should send them > or not. Ken's has not been cracked - yet. I'd be curious to have the complete list. Thanks, -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From reed at reedmedia.net Wed Oct 9 23:30:22 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 08:30:22 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, reed at reedmedia.net wrote: > Does anyone have scanned copies of early Lions commentary? (Not the 2000 > printing, unless it looks identical, please let me know.) I got copied of the cover and front page off-list. Thank you! > I will try to share my slides to this list by end of this week. (I did > look at an early draft of Warner's slides, but didn't look at his final > slides nor watch his presentation yet. My presentation is from scratch > for now.) I have a rough draft of around 63 slides. I have a maybe around 10 more to add. It is too much content for an hour. Temporarily they are at http://reedmedia.net/~reed/pres/.tmp-ibu4txv873cv/ pdf is 63 slides at ~5MB (please don't distribute as I didn't yet cite sources in it nor have re-use statements for some images I borrowed.) J.tex is the source for the pdf. The real source is the notes in the .data file there. (It is a mess.) I plan to add a few photos of the earliest participants (as named in the research edition manuals.) I will add a few pages about Berkeley Unix up to 3BSD. (Later will do one hour talk just on BSD.) Few questions: If using a 4.5 inch diameter roll of paper for the TTY, how did you cut the paper into 11 inch pages? Or did you just let it roll up? Anyone have a pointer to the photo of a Graphic Systems (GSI) phototypesetter (1973)? (for troff v3 slide) Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971) same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later? (~1973) Anyone have a pointer to a picture of GE 635 or 645 system? (for multics slide) From krewat at kilonet.net Thu Oct 10 02:17:21 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 12:17:21 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <87h84ikrij.fsf@vuxu.org> References: <6dceffe228804a76de1e12f18d1fc0dc@inventati.org> <87bluxpqy0.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191005180503.GA31679@tom-desk.erg.abdn.ac.uk> <87h84ikrij.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: <7a53adad-bafa-b7b6-b23b-e9da89ce9894@kilonet.net> By crypt() hash: 9ycwM8mmmcp4Q:graduat; m5syt3.lB5LAE:12ucdort d9B17PTU2RTlM:561cml.. cBWEbG59spEmM:..pnn521 On 10/9/2019 8:55 AM, Leah Neukirchen wrote: > Arthur Krewat writes: > >> I have some more out of this list, but not sure if I should send them >> or not. Ken's has not been cracked - yet. > I'd be curious to have the complete list. > > Thanks, -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From imp at bsdimp.com Thu Oct 10 02:31:15 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 10:31:15 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 7:30 AM wrote: > On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, reed at reedmedia.net wrote: > > > Does anyone have scanned copies of early Lions commentary? (Not the 2000 > > printing, unless it looks identical, please let me know.) > > I got copied of the cover and front page off-list. Thank you! > > > I will try to share my slides to this list by end of this week. (I did > > look at an early draft of Warner's slides, but didn't look at his final > > slides nor watch his presentation yet. My presentation is from scratch > > for now.) > > I have a rough draft of around 63 slides. I have a maybe around 10 more > to add. It is too much content for an hour. Temporarily they are at > http://reedmedia.net/~reed/pres/.tmp-ibu4txv873cv/ > pdf is 63 slides at ~5MB > (please don't distribute as I didn't yet cite sources in it nor have > re-use statements for some images I borrowed.) > J.tex is the source for the pdf. > The real source is the notes in the .data file there. (It is a mess.) > I plan to add a few photos of the earliest participants (as named in > the research edition manuals.) > I will add a few pages about Berkeley Unix up to 3BSD. (Later will do > one hour talk just on BSD.) > > Few questions: > > If using a 4.5 inch diameter roll of paper for the TTY, how did you cut > the paper into 11 inch pages? Or did you just let it roll up? > > Anyone have a pointer to the photo of a Graphic Systems (GSI) > phototypesetter (1973)? (for troff v3 slide) > > Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971) > same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later? > (~1973) > > Anyone have a pointer to a picture of GE 635 or 645 system? (for multics > slide) > You can find images at: https://multicians.org/drv-bull.html (says its a GE-645 installed in Paris) https://multicians.org/mulimg/radc-bldg3-a.jpg (ROME building 3 GECOS/Honeywell systems) https://multicians.org/645artist.html (weird artist's conception) In general, there's several images on the multicians page. In my talk I found one of a later Honeywell system that I mistakenly thought was a 645. Great slides. Good detail on the bell-labs stream of innovation (better than my talk by far, I think). Great use of early manual artifacts to drive the story telling. It's clearly only slightly related to my talk and that it was done from scratch with at most an element or two from my talk that could easily have come from this list instead. So some feedback: The slide that has LSI-Unix is missing mini-unix. If you look at the AUUGN news letters, that's mentioned much more than LSI-Unix, so it was out in the wild. CB-UNIX had its origins in SCCS Unix, which was derived from a ~1st edition Unix for a switch (SCCS here is Switch Control Center System) done by New Jersey Bell in 1972. It took in snapshots from research unix from time to time. After V6, CB-Unix 1.0 was done based on it, with its additions in the areas of IPC and enhancements for production systems. After V7, there was a 2.x series. This was later merged with System III / Unix/TS 3.0 to produce what would become System V (I found conflicting accounts of whether this was done in Unix/TS 4.0 (never released outside of bell labs) or in Unix TS 5.0). The merges were what we'd call "cherry picks" today: the IPC features and some minor other things were re-done for the Unix/TS environment and would become what we call today System V IPC. CB-Unix had infrastructure to port to multiple CPUs, but really only ran on the 11/70. The IPC system was called maus (pronounced mouse, evidently). We gave man pages and source for it in PDF form in the TUHS archive. I'm slowly plowing through OCRing the sources... All this work was done in Columbus OH. Unix/TS targeted time sharing systems that developers, secretaries, etc used. CB-UNIX targeted call record collection systems and similar "production" systems. MERT is interesting... It ported V4 Unix to run under a PDP-11 hypervisor... It was later called UNIX/RT and merged code from V5 and/or V6 (the recollections differ), but not V7 as the system call ABI changed for that. It was cancelled in favor of Unix/TS, but hung on to life, was ported to the 3B2 and later systems to become DMERT... There's hints of this scattered in the different bell labs technical journals and in the TUHS archive of recollections of early unix from the 80s on usenet. I'll have to go through the PWB stuff in more detail than I have time right now. I'm unsure the thing you labeled as DISPLAY-2 is the DISPLAY-2 or the standard Option 340 display. I know people on this list said it was a display-2 (maybe my early slides did as well). Based on pictures in the PDP-7 manuals, I think it was the 340... Where are you giving it? Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lars at nocrew.org Thu Oct 10 02:47:14 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2019 16:47:14 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: (reed@reedmedia.net's message of "Wed, 9 Oct 2019 08:30:22 -0500 (CDT)") References: Message-ID: <7wv9sx3lyl.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Reed wrote: > Anyone have a pointer to a picture of GE 635 or 645 system? I linke this one, because it's from MIT. Unfortunately it's very small. https://multicians.org/phase-one.html From krewat at kilonet.net Thu Oct 10 02:54:19 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 12:54:19 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: <7wv9sx3lyl.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <7wv9sx3lyl.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: <079f7351-5f26-55b3-4a59-90bec4254b82@kilonet.net> On 10/9/2019 12:47 PM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > Reed wrote: >> Anyone have a pointer to a picture of GE 635 or 645 system? > I linke this one, because it's from MIT. Unfortunately it's very small. > > https://multicians.org/phase-one.html > Lars, you need to be more of a link hacker ;) https://multicians.org/mulimg/martin-widrig-645.jpg From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Oct 10 03:19:29 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 13:19:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 Message-ID: <20191009171929.123D518C087@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Lars Brinkhoff > Unfortunately it's very small. There's a larger version hiding 'behind' it. There are very few 645 images. There's the large painting of a 645, which for many years hung in the hallway on the 5th floor of Tech Sq: https://multicians.org/645artist.html Noel From robpike at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 05:59:43 2019 From: robpike at gmail.com (Rob Pike) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 09:59:43 -1000 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: I coulda told you that. One tends to learn passwords (inadvertently) when they're short and typed nearby often enough. (Sorry, ken.) If I remember right, the first half of this password was on a t-shirt commemorating Belle's first half-move, although its notation may have been different. Interesting though it is, though, I find this hacking distasteful. It was distasteful back when, and it still is. The attitudes around hackery have changed; the position nowadays seems to be that the bad guys are doing it so the good guys should be rewarded for doing it first. That's disingenuous at best, and dangerous at worst. -rob On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 7:50 PM Nigel Williams wrote: > ken is done: > > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > > took 4+ days on an AMD Radeon Vega64 running hashcat at about 930MH/s > during that time (those familiar know the hash-rate fluctuates and > slows down towards the end). > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wkt at tuhs.org Thu Oct 10 06:13:21 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 06:13:21 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers Message-ID: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> All, we just had about a dozen new subscribers to the TUHS list. Rather than e-mail you all individually, I thought I'd use the list itself to say "Welcome!". The TUHS list generally has a high signal/noise ratio on the history of Unix, the systems and software, and anecdotes from those who used the various flavours. Occasionally, we drift a bit off-topic and I'll gently nudge the conversation back to Unix history. The list archives are at: https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/ and you should browse the last couple of months to get a feel for what we talk about. Cheers, Warren From krewat at kilonet.net Thu Oct 10 06:14:07 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 16:14:07 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On 10/9/2019 3:59 PM, Rob Pike wrote: > > Interesting though it is, though, I find this hacking distasteful. It > was distasteful back when, and it still is. The attitudes around > hackery have changed; the position nowadays seems to be that the bad > guys are doing it so the good guys should be rewarded for doing it > first. That's disingenuous at best, and dangerous at worst. Which is why, after a point, I asked if the results were OK to post. TBH, I ranged far and wide in my hacking back in the early 80's. I am proud of it on the one hand, because it exposed me to systems that I would never have had access to. And when I found huge gaping security holes, I usually let them know. But on the other hand, well, you've expressed the exact sentiment. My only experience with TOPS-20 and UNIX early on was because of that. I never went to college. In fact, I never graduated high school. But I was hired as a consultant to do systems programming for TOPS-10 systems by the consulting firm that ran BOCES/LIRICS in Dix Hills, NY. I was mentored by a great guy, Bruce Maier, and using my hacking experience, I continue to this day to try to help both my consulting customers, and the general public whenever I can. I'm a white-hat kinda guy ;) art k. From khm at sciops.net Thu Oct 10 06:09:42 2019 From: khm at sciops.net (Kurt H Maier) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 13:09:42 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> On Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 09:59:43AM -1000, Rob Pike wrote: > > Interesting though it is, though, I find this hacking distasteful. It was > distasteful back when, and it still is. The attitudes around hackery have > changed; the position nowadays seems to be that the bad guys are doing it > so the good guys should be rewarded for doing it first. That's disingenuous > at best, and dangerous at worst. > And not really relevant to this topic, in fact. It's not like we're sitting around rainbow-tabling someone's Macbook. This stuff is, at this point, of historical interest. "How many decades old must a hash be before it's acceptable to decode it" is a valid question worth answering, but comparing this kind of archaeology to active attack is slightly absurd. khm From rtomek at ceti.pl Thu Oct 10 06:50:05 2019 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 22:50:05 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191009205004.GA18701@tau1.ceti.pl> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 06:13:21AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we just had about a dozen new subscribers to the TUHS list. Rather than > e-mail you all individually, I thought I'd use the list itself to say > "Welcome!". Aloha! SunOS/Solaris 1992-1995 (user) AIX - a very short period inside Solaris period (user) Linux 1994-... (finally, a small time admin) OpenBSD ... (if I migrate there) - ... -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From bakul at bitblocks.com Thu Oct 10 07:05:06 2019 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2019 14:05:06 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 09 Oct 2019 13:09:42 -0700." <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> Message-ID: <20191009210513.B3660156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> On Wed, 09 Oct 2019 13:09:42 -0700 Kurt H Maier wrote: > On Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 09:59:43AM -1000, Rob Pike wrote: > > > > Interesting though it is, though, I find this hacking distasteful. It was > > distasteful back when, and it still is. The attitudes around hackery have > > changed; the position nowadays seems to be that the bad guys are doing it > > so the good guys should be rewarded for doing it first. That's disingenuous > > at best, and dangerous at worst. > > > > And not really relevant to this topic, in fact. It's not like we're > sitting around rainbow-tabling someone's Macbook. This stuff is, at > this point, of historical interest. "How many decades old must a hash > be before it's acceptable to decode it" is a valid question worth > answering, but comparing this kind of archaeology to active attack is > slightly absurd. I feel more than slightly absurd asking this but is the password ken used in 1980 is of "historical interest"? From imp at bsdimp.com Thu Oct 10 07:09:50 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 15:09:50 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <20191009210513.B3660156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> <20191009210513.B3660156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 3:05 PM Bakul Shah wrote: > I feel more than slightly absurd asking this but is the > password ken used in 1980 is of "historical interest"? > Only if he still uses it for online banking... :) Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From krewat at kilonet.net Thu Oct 10 07:16:15 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 17:16:15 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> <20191009210513.B3660156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> Message-ID: <3a088340-49bd-b828-cd38-99b35e39ae42@kilonet.net> On 10/9/2019 5:09 PM, Warner Losh wrote: > Only if he still uses it for online banking... :) LMFAO. From athornton at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 08:05:29 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 15:05:29 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <3a088340-49bd-b828-cd38-99b35e39ae42@kilonet.net> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> <20191009210513.B3660156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> <3a088340-49bd-b828-cd38-99b35e39ae42@kilonet.net> Message-ID: It is, if nothing else, a nice example of Moore's Law. Here's a thing on the distribution tape (at least, I assume it was; happy to be wrong here) but which was assumed to be fundamentally safe, because it was computationally infeasible to rainbow-table the hash...so why not leave your real password hash on the images you gave to the world? 40 years later, it's obviously within the reach of hobbyists spending, I presume, essentially zero dollars to do the computational work (at least, I hope no one sunk more than a few bucks on doing it). ...which is why we went to salted passwords, and shadow pw files that hid the hashes while leaving the other fields available to all users, and more secure and longer hashes than original crypt(1), quite some time ago. In fact there's an interesting little essay about the history of that arms race up until about 33 years ago in the 1986 Unix System Manager's Manual, Section 18. It's by two guys named Morris and Thompson. On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 2:16 PM Arthur Krewat wrote: > On 10/9/2019 5:09 PM, Warner Losh wrote: > > Only if he still uses it for online banking... :) > > LMFAO. > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Thu Oct 10 09:04:12 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 10:04:12 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Oct 2019, Nigel Williams wrote: > wrote: >> ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > > BTW, is that a chess move? Looks like Queen's Gambit (remember the Chess machine?). I never did figure out how to counter it, being a King's Gambit bod (although I'm coming to grips with the Spanish Defence). -- Dave From dave at horsfall.org Thu Oct 10 09:26:42 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 10:26:42 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we just had about a dozen new subscribers to the TUHS list. Rather > than e-mail you all individually, I thought I'd use the list itself to > say "Welcome!". May this list live forever! -- Dave From steffen at sdaoden.eu Thu Oct 10 09:28:10 2019 From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 01:28:10 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> <20191009210513.B3660156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> <3a088340-49bd-b828-cd38-99b35e39ae42@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <20191009232810.82G40%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Adam Thornton wrote in : |It is, if nothing else, a nice example of Moore's Law. | |Here's a thing on the distribution tape (at least, I assume it was; \ |happy to be wrong here) but which was assumed to be fundamentally safe, \ |because it was computationally infeasible to rainbow-table the |hash...so why not leave your real password hash on the images you gave \ |to the world? | |40 years later, it's obviously within the reach of hobbyists spending, \ |I presume, essentially zero dollars to do the computational work (at \ |least, I hope no one sunk more than a few bucks on doing it). Solar cells are costly. No, please do not say zero xy when you are using electronics. They are anything else but zero cost, not when their resources are captured, not when they or their assembly lines are built, not when they are shipped, not when they are used. Sorry if i bug you, but this day noble prices where given to people who improved batteries. Batteries are ok, but we just started the next race for rare earth and resources, instead of looking to a really sustainable future. |...which is why we went to salted passwords, and shadow pw files that \ |hid the hashes while leaving the other fields available to all users, \ |and more secure and longer hashes than original crypt(1), quite |some time ago. | |In fact there's an interesting little essay about the history of that \ |arms race up until about 33 years ago in the 1986 Unix System Manager's \ |Manual, Section 18.  It's by two guys named Morris and |Thompson. After i have given up on being smart and started to use very long passwords, entire sentences when i have to type them, dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=512 | LC_ALL=C tr -cd 'a-zA-Z0-9_.,=@%^+-' otherwise, i am now in the position to nag web and other interfaces here and there which restrict password lengths to 8 or so, and/or which restrict the allowed content. Now in public. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) From wkt at tuhs.org Thu Oct 10 09:51:33 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:51:33 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191009235133.GA30416@minnie.tuhs.org> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 06:13:21AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > The TUHS list generally has a high signal/noise ratio on the history of > Unix, the systems and software, and anecdotes from those who used the > various flavours. Occasionally, we drift a bit off-topic and I'll gently > nudge the conversation back to Unix history. Heh, I just realised that I'm the UNIX of mail list administrators. I say nothing when you do the usual things, but give you a cryptic warning when you do something not quite right :) Ciao, Warren From grog at lemis.com Thu Oct 10 09:58:29 2019 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 10:58:29 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191009235829.GA88463@eureka.lemis.com> On Thursday, 10 October 2019 at 6:13:21 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we just had about a dozen new subscribers to the TUHS > list. Rather than e-mail you all individually, I thought I'd use the > list itself to say "Welcome!". "Welcome!". > The TUHS list generally has a high signal/noise ratio on the history of > Unix, the systems and software, and anecdotes from those who used the > various flavours. Occasionally, we drift a bit off-topic and I'll gently > nudge the conversation back to Unix history. You might like to point at the COFF list (coff at tuhs.org) for (slightly) off-topic posts. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dave at horsfall.org Thu Oct 10 10:03:26 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 11:03:26 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: <20191009235133.GA30416@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> <20191009235133.GA30416@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote: > Heh, I just realised that I'm the UNIX of mail list administrators. I > say nothing when you do the usual things, but give you a cryptic warning > when you do something not quite right :) Was it "ed" that only gave two error messages? Something like "tmp" for /tmp being full, and "?" for "error - you get to figure it out"? And there was the car (ObUS: auto) that only had a single warning light: "The user is supposed to know what it means." -- Dave From greg.m.travis at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 10:22:46 2019 From: greg.m.travis at gmail.com (greg travis) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 20:22:46 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> <20191009235133.GA30416@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 8:03 PM Dave Horsfall wrote: > And there was the car (ObUS: auto) that only had a single warning light: > "The user is supposed to know what it means." > > -- Dave > "Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver,” says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong.”" (https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/new90/366.html) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Thu Oct 10 13:31:29 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2019 23:31:29 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 Message-ID: <201910100331.x9A3VTUH073703@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971) > same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later? > (~1973) No. The former was the BTL legal and patent department. The latter was at AT&T (or perhaps Western Electric). Doug From imp at bsdimp.com Thu Oct 10 13:49:31 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 21:49:31 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: <201910100331.x9A3VTUH073703@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910100331.x9A3VTUH073703@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019, 9:32 PM Doug McIlroy wrote: > > Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971) > > same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later? > > (~1973) > > No. The former was the BTL legal and patent department. The latter was > at AT&T (or perhaps Western Electric) > I know all the later contracts were with western electric... we have them due to the bsd/at&t lawsuit, right? Warner > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From imp at bsdimp.com Thu Oct 10 14:21:08 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 22:21:08 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: References: <201910100331.x9A3VTUH073703@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019, 9:49 PM Warner Losh wrote: > > > On Wed, Oct 9, 2019, 9:32 PM Doug McIlroy wrote: > >> > Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971) >> > same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later? >> > (~1973) >> >> No. The former was the BTL legal and patent department. The latter was >> at AT&T (or perhaps Western Electric) >> > > I know all the later contracts were with western electric... we have them > due to the bsd/at&t lawsuit, right? > Ah, Berkeley's contract for Oct 73 is with Western Electric. Warner > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lars at nocrew.org Thu Oct 10 15:37:31 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 05:37:31 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: (Warner Losh's message of "Wed, 9 Oct 2019 10:31:15 -0600") References: Message-ID: <7w36g12mas.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Warner Losh wrote: > I'm unsure the thing you labeled as DISPLAY-2 is the DISPLAY-2 or the > standard Option 340 display. I know people on this list said it was a > display-2 (maybe my early slides did as well). Based on pictures in > the PDP-7 manuals, I think it was the 340... The photo does look much like a 340 CRT. Is there anything known about how the GRAPHICS-2 (not DISPLAY-2, right?) hardware was built? Is it possible a 340 CRT was repurposed for GRAPHICS-2? From katolaz at freaknet.org Thu Oct 10 16:31:18 2019 From: katolaz at freaknet.org (Vincenzo Nicosia) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 08:31:18 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <20191010063118.xwq5ivjxrtu4syxp@unixfarts.net> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 10:04:12AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Wed, 9 Oct 2019, Nigel Williams wrote: > > > wrote: > > > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > > > > BTW, is that a chess move? > > Looks like Queen's Gambit (remember the Chess machine?). I never did figure > out how to counter it, being a King's Gambit bod (although I'm coming to > grips with the Spanish Defence). > Sorry for being pedantic, but that's just the first move in the Queen's pawn game. Whether it might become a Queen's gambit or one of the other hundreds of possible openings starting like that, well, depends only on where the two players decide to go afterwards ;) The "!" at the end indicates that the move is considered "strong", or giving an immediate slight advantage, and is normally read aloud with a slight grin in your face... Being a Semi-Slav player as black, I would have probably used "!?" instead of "!", thus providing a fairer assessment of "p/q2-q4" and automatically keeping Ken's password safe for much longer ;P HND From crossd at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 18:21:20 2019 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 04:21:20 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019, 1:50 AM Nigel Williams wrote: > ken is done: > > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > > took 4+ days on an AMD Radeon Vega64 running hashcat at about 930MH/s > during that time (those familiar know the hash-rate fluctuates and > slows down towards the end). > This feat made it The Register: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/09/ken_thompsons_old_unix_password_cracked/ - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lars at nocrew.org Thu Oct 10 19:11:36 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:11:36 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: <079f7351-5f26-55b3-4a59-90bec4254b82@kilonet.net> (Arthur Krewat's message of "Wed, 9 Oct 2019 12:54:19 -0400") References: <7wv9sx3lyl.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> <079f7351-5f26-55b3-4a59-90bec4254b82@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <7wtv8h0xtj.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Arthur Krewat wrote: > Lars, you need to be more of a link hacker ;) > https://multicians.org/mulimg/martin-widrig-645.jpg Well, it's not my preferred type of hacking. Here's another one... or is it? File name says 635, but the caption says "Mary Thompson, Jerry Clancy, Don Widrig; Project MAC, 1967" There was no 635 at Project MAC, was there? https://multicians.org/mulimg/mrt-gfc-drw-635.jpg "Mary Thompson and Noel Morris at MIT Project MAC GE-645 Multics machine, 1967" https://multicians.org/thvv/vvimg/mrt-nim-645.jpg From tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk Thu Oct 10 19:21:10 2019 From: tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk (Tony Travis) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 10:21:10 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <739d7179-e68a-d00d-c018-775d32ebea12@minke-informatics.co.uk> On 09/10/2019 21:13, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we just had about a dozen new subscribers to the TUHS list. Rather than > e-mail you all individually, I thought I'd use the list itself to say > "Welcome!". > [...] Hi, Warren. I'm one of your recent TUHS list subscribers - I first encountered AT&T Version 7 Unix on a PDP11/34 and I've used all sorts of *nix since then. One thing I noticed on this list is people's interest in the use of UPPER/lower case in Unix. It's always puzzled me when everyone talks about [the] PDP11 when, in fact, is says "pdp11" on the system itself: > https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Pdp-11-40.jpg/250px-Pdp-11-40.jpg DEC seemed to have a schizophrenic attitude to this in their documentation, sometimes using "PDP11" and sometimes "pdp11". Not sure if anyone else had a similar experience to me when visiting the "Computer History Museum" in Palo Alto and being totally shocked to see machines I used 'quite recently' there as museum exhibits! I also made a complaint to the Museum, because the original Donald Becker Beowulf was hidden away in a corner behind a Cray machine :-( Nevertheless, a fantastic museum and I highly recommend a visit! Bye, Tony. -- Minke Informatics Limited, Registered in Scotland - Company No. SC419028 Registered Office: 3 Donview, Bridge of Alford, AB33 8QJ, Scotland (UK) tel. +44(0)19755 63548 http://minke-informatics.co.uk mob. +44(0)7985 078324 mailto:tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk From krewat at kilonet.net Thu Oct 10 21:58:56 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 07:58:56 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <3054d652-7320-a99b-df24-67001f974d39@kilonet.net> Oh well. Late to the party as usual ;) (time is EST, New York) -rw------- 1 ******** ***      23 Oct  9 06:09 cracked.node006.txt  $ cat cracked.node006.txt ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! On 10/10/2019 4:21 AM, Dan Cross wrote: > On Wed, Oct 9, 2019, 1:50 AM Nigel Williams > > > wrote: > > ken is done: > > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > > took 4+ days on an AMD Radeon Vega64 running hashcat at about 930MH/s > during that time (those familiar know the hash-rate fluctuates and > slows down towards the end). > > > This feat made it The Register: > https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/09/ken_thompsons_old_unix_password_cracked/ > >         - Dan C. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leah at vuxu.org Thu Oct 10 22:07:03 2019 From: leah at vuxu.org (Leah Neukirchen) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 14:07:03 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <3054d652-7320-a99b-df24-67001f974d39@kilonet.net> (Arthur Krewat's message of "Thu, 10 Oct 2019 07:58:56 -0400") References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <3054d652-7320-a99b-df24-67001f974d39@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <8736g06byw.fsf@vuxu.org> Arthur Krewat writes: > Oh well. Late to the party as usual ;) (time is EST, New York) > > -rw------- 1 ******** ***      23 Oct  9 06:09 cracked.node006.txt > >  $ cat cracked.node006.txt > > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! I was notified Bill Joy's password does not yet appear in any list: bill:.2xvLVqGHJm8M:8:10:& Joy,4156424948:/usr/bill:/bin/csh -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Oct 10 23:18:48 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:18:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers Message-ID: <20191010131848.C13DC18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Tony Travis > It's always puzzled me when everyone talks about [the] PDP11 when, in > fact, is says "pdp11" on the system itself: DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; e.g. the "pdp11 peripherals handbook" (to transcribe the cover exactly) uses "PDP-11" several times on pg 1-1. Noel From henry.r.bent at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 23:57:10 2019 From: henry.r.bent at gmail.com (Henry Bent) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:57:10 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: I have no opinion on the password hacking (especially since Ken seemed fine with it), but this is to me distasteful. The media was alerted, and that media was of all things The Register? It's not exactly a site known for its thoughtful or balanced journalism. -Henry On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 04:22, Dan Cross wrote: > On Wed, Oct 9, 2019, 1:50 AM Nigel Williams > wrote: > >> ken is done: >> >> ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! >> >> took 4+ days on an AMD Radeon Vega64 running hashcat at about 930MH/s >> during that time (those familiar know the hash-rate fluctuates and >> slows down towards the end). >> > > This feat made it The Register: > https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/09/ken_thompsons_old_unix_password_cracked/ > > - Dan C. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From krewat at kilonet.net Fri Oct 11 00:05:26 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 10:05:26 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: It's here, too: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/forum-cracks-the-vintage-passwords-of-ken-thompson-and-other-unix-pioneers/ On 10/10/2019 9:57 AM, Henry Bent wrote: > I have no opinion on the password hacking (especially since Ken seemed > fine with it), but this is to me distasteful.  The media was alerted, > and that media was of all things The Register?  It's not exactly a > site known for its thoughtful or balanced journalism. > > -Henry > > > On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 04:22, Dan Cross > wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 9, 2019, 1:50 AM Nigel Williams > > wrote: > > ken is done: > > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > > took 4+ days on an AMD Radeon Vega64 running hashcat at about > 930MH/s > during that time (those familiar know the hash-rate fluctuates and > slows down towards the end). > > > This feat made it The Register: > https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/09/ken_thompsons_old_unix_password_cracked/ > >         - Dan C. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leah at vuxu.org Fri Oct 11 00:10:32 2019 From: leah at vuxu.org (Leah Neukirchen) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:10:32 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: (Henry Bent's message of "Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:57:10 -0400") References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <87tv8g4ron.fsf@vuxu.org> Henry Bent writes: > I have no opinion on the password hacking (especially since Ken seemed fine > with it), but this is to me distasteful. The media was alerted, and that > media was of all things The Register? It's not exactly a site known for > its thoughtful or balanced journalism. To be fair, I wrote this up on my blog because I really enjoyed this little piece of history, and put it on lobste.rs, expecting the usual 20 regulars to like it. I did not expect the story to take off like this! (I also declined interview questions from The Register and Ars Technica, because I don't have anything to add there and did not even find the end result.) -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From reed at reedmedia.net Fri Oct 11 00:21:32 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:21:32 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 In-Reply-To: <7w36g12mas.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <7w36g12mas.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > Warner Losh wrote: > > I'm unsure the thing you labeled as DISPLAY-2 is the DISPLAY-2 or the > > standard Option 340 display. I know people on this list said it was a > > display-2 (maybe my early slides did as well). Based on pictures in > > the PDP-7 manuals, I think it was the 340... > > The photo does look much like a 340 CRT. Is there anything known about > how the GRAPHICS-2 (not DISPLAY-2, right?) hardware was built? Is it > possible a 340 CRT was repurposed for GRAPHICS-2? https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/03-scope.pdf Jump down to page 20 and more. Also see some of the PDP-7 assembler code in same directory about "G-2" and "graphic-2" (keyboard and display) etc. From reed at reedmedia.net Fri Oct 11 01:18:45 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 10:18:45 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] where are v7 manual scans? license details? Message-ID: I am surprised to not find any scans of early (pre-1980) Seventh Edition Unix Programmer's Manual. Does anyone have any? (We do have the source files and I see volume 2 manual scanned from later years.) Also where is a copy the new license introduced with v7? I have copy of 1973 and 1974. Anyone have a scanned later version? from etc/rc: echo "Restricted rights: Use, duplication, or disclosure is subject to restrictions stated in your contract with Western Electric Company, Inc." >/dev/console Thanks, Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy" From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Fri Oct 11 01:20:31 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 11:20:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 Message-ID: <20191010152031.546AE18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Lars Brinkhoff > There was no 635 at Project MAC, was there? I seem to recall reading about one. And in: https://multicians.org/chrono.html there's this entry: "08/65 GE 635 delivered to Project MAC". Clicking on the 'GE 635' link leads to "MIT's GE-635 system was installed on the ninth floor of 545 Tech Square in 1965, and used to support a simulated 645 until the real hardware was delivered." Noel From larry0 at me.com Fri Oct 11 01:27:31 2019 From: larry0 at me.com (Larry W. Cashdollar) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 11:27:31 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <12C03898-A590-4E33-8888-50BE4466D85C@me.com> On 10/9/19, 4:13 PM, "TUHS on behalf of Warren Toomey" wrote: > All, we just had about a dozen new subscribers to the TUHS list. Rather than >e-mail you all individually, I thought I'd use the list itself to say >"Welcome!". Hello, Everyone! My first interaction with a UNIX system was with a Dec Alpha in my C programming class ~ 1993. In 1994 I installed Slackware on my 486. I've worked with HP-UX, SCO, BSD, *inux*, Solaris, IRIX, AIX since then. I have a Sun Ultra 1500, Sun Ultra 5 and an SGI Indy R5000 all running at home In my office. Thank you!, Larry Cashdollar. Yes, that's my real name. __ From imp at bsdimp.com Fri Oct 11 03:20:40 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 11:20:40 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] My case for video footage of the machine Ken would later use to create Unix Message-ID: https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/10/video-footage-of-first-pdp-7-to-run-unix.html is a blog entry where I step through the evidence that the PDP-7 in The Incredible Machine video that was posted here a while ago is quite likely the PDP-7 Ken used to create Unix after its days of starting in Bell Labs films were over... Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From imp at bsdimp.com Fri Oct 11 03:28:20 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 11:28:20 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] where are v7 manual scans? license details? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 9:19 AM wrote: > I am surprised to not find any scans of early (pre-1980) Seventh Edition > Unix Programmer's Manual. Does anyone have any? (We do have the source > files and I see volume 2 manual scanned from later years.) > Bell Labs published the V7 manuals with HRW publishing. Copies are available on eBay. I recently got Volume 1 and 2 copies of Volume 2. The publication date is 1983... Cool to have, but not as cool as an artifact of the original manual :) Some sellers have them for $75, but I got my copies for like $10 each... Warner > Also where is a copy the new license introduced with v7? I have copy of > 1973 and 1974. Anyone have a scanned later version? > > from etc/rc: > > echo "Restricted rights: Use, duplication, or disclosure > is subject to restrictions stated in your contract with > Western Electric Company, Inc." >/dev/console > > Thanks, > > Jeremy C. Reed > > echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ > tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy" > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From david at kdbarto.org Fri Oct 11 03:51:07 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 10:51:07 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books In-Reply-To: <20774963.3022.1570575564420.JavaMail.root@zimbraanteil> References: <20774963.3022.1570575564420.JavaMail.root@zimbraanteil> Message-ID: <85EF801C-4A20-4B3A-BC98-5B42C89ABC70@kdbarto.org> I’ve replied 2 times off list and seen nothing. So (sorry about spamming the list) just to let you know I’m shipping them out on Saturday which is when I can get to the UPS office. David > On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:59 PM, Jim Capp wrote: > > David, > > Did you get my "off list" email about the books? > > Cheers, > > Jim > > > From: "David" > > To: "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" > > Sent: Monday, October 7, 2019 8:56:02 AM > Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix books > > I’ve got a few books I’ve just pulled off the shelf and no longer want/need. > I’m hoping someone will give them a good home. > > UNIX System Labs Inc UNIX(r) System V Release 4 > Programmers Guide: System Services and Application Packaging Tools > Device Driver Interface/Driver-Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI) Reference Manual (2 copies) > > AT&T 3B2/3B5/3B15 Computers Assembly Programming Manual > > Sun Microsystems Inc (Sun Technical Reports) > The UNIX System - 1985 > Sun 3 Architecture - 1986 > > I’m willing to split postage on mailing them wherever. If you are local (San Diego) > I’m willing to meet you wherever for an exchange and a coffee. > > David > (Also posted on the cctalk mailing list) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rsk at gsp.org Fri Oct 11 03:36:46 2019 From: rsk at gsp.org (Rich Kulawiec) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 13:36:46 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix and DWB manuals seeking scanning and a permanent home Message-ID: <20191010173646.GA14544@gsp.org> I've lugged these around for 35-ish years. I'd like to seem them scanned and stored someplace as permanent as can be found, so if someone/anyone could tell me how to facilitate that, I'll package them for shipping. My apologies if this has already been done and I'm simply not aware of it. I have other stuff that probably needs the same treatment, but excavating the alluvial layers that have accumulated will take time. Single small-format red binder: Unix System User Reference Manual - AT&T Bell Labs Unix System Release 2.0 including Division 452 standard and local commands October 1985 Set of four small format gray binders: Documenter's Workbench 1.0, April 1984 1. Introduction and Reference Manual, 307-150, issue 2 2. Text Formatter Reference, 307-151, issue 2 3. Macro Package Reference, 307-152 issue 2 4. Preprocessor Reference, 307-153, issue 2 Set of two slip-cased small format maroon/gray binders: Unix System V Documenters Workbench Release 2.0 1. Technical Discusion and Reference 310-005, issue 1 2. Product Overview 999-805-007IS, User Guide 999-805-006IS, Reference Card 999-805-008IS, issue 1 ---rsk From web at loomcom.com Fri Oct 11 04:56:50 2019 From: web at loomcom.com (Seth Morabito) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 11:56:50 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] =?utf-8?q?Old_Unix_and_DWB_manuals_seeking_scanning_and_a?= =?utf-8?q?_permanent_home?= In-Reply-To: <20191010173646.GA14544@gsp.org> References: <20191010173646.GA14544@gsp.org> Message-ID: <07ab9a63-0ca0-489c-aaa5-140985d7544c@www.fastmail.com> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019, at 10:36 AM, Rich Kulawiec wrote: > I've lugged these around for 35-ish years. I'd like to seem them > scanned and stored someplace as permanent as can be found, so if > someone/anyone could tell me how to facilitate that, I'll package > them for shipping. If nobody else has claimed them, I'd like to offer to give them a home and scan them. I have already scanned document 310-004, the Documenter's Workbench 2.0 User's Guide (see: https://archives.loomcom.com/3b2/documents/Applications/), but I don't have any of the other documents you mention here. All the best, -Seth -- Seth Morabito Poulsbo, WA web at loomcom.com From berny at berwynlodge.com Fri Oct 11 05:41:42 2019 From: berny at berwynlodge.com (Berny Goodheart) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 20:41:42 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10 Message-ID: <1DC93797-18BC-4BC1-8968-6A986C4AD2E1@berwynlodge.com> I have “The” original first versions from John signed by him and Ken. Among a lot of other stuff…. From clemc at ccc.com Fri Oct 11 06:24:08 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:24:08 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:00 PM Rob Pike wrote: > Interesting though it is, though, I find this hacking distasteful. It was > distasteful back when, and it still is. The attitudes around hackery have > changed; the position nowadays seems to be that the bad guys are doing it > so the good guys should be rewarded for doing it first. That's disingenuous > at best, and dangerous at worst. > Amen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cym224 at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 06:38:24 2019 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:38:24 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On 10/10/2019, Clem Cole wrote: > On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:00 PM Rob Pike wrote: >> Interesting though it is, though, I find this hacking distasteful. [...] > Amen Some (large) companies regularly run password crackers on their employees' passwords and inform them if their passwords are found "insufficiently strong to protect company assets". Good, bad, distasteful, prudent, off-topic? N. From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 06:52:19 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:52:19 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: Randal Schwartz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz) got slammed with 3 felony charges (since revoked) for doing that favor for Intel. An Intel VP with a ridiculously weak password was unamused. It's one thing to badger your employees, quite another to post old passwords in the clear in a public forum. Those old passwords may turn up in unexpected places, or reveal information that the user would prefer not to be made public now. (Shame on Ken for liking chess :-). Bad idea, and off-topic. On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:38 PM Nemo wrote: > On 10/10/2019, Clem Cole wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:00 PM Rob Pike wrote: > >> Interesting though it is, though, I find this hacking distasteful. > [...] > > Amen > > Some (large) companies regularly run password crackers on their > employees' passwords and inform them if their passwords are found > "insufficiently strong to protect company assets". > > Good, bad, distasteful, prudent, off-topic? > > N. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wkt at tuhs.org Fri Oct 11 06:55:46 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 06:55:46 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd previously used? Mine was: Oh, I can: + write a simple script + to edit a file on the fly + with no temporary files (a la pipes) + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. Cheers, Warren From spedraja at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 07:11:31 2019 From: spedraja at gmail.com (SPC) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 23:11:31 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey escribió: > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > Me too. But in adittion and specially: + the availability of the C compiler + syslog Regards Sergio Pedraja -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mparson at bl.org Fri Oct 11 07:13:03 2019 From: mparson at bl.org (Michael Parson) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:13:03 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On 2019-10-10 15:55, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. > Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems > you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! I'm a bit younger, first started playing with Unix systems in 1992, a Sun something running SunOS 4.1.something while in collage. I just kinda assumed that this remote system I was accessing over a dial-up connection some some big-iron box, I mean, it had dozens of people logged into it at a time! Of course it was something bigger than the PC I had at home. When I first saw a Sun pizza-box, and realized it was the same class system I'd been logging into remotely, I was impressed, but was still sure it was some magic that made it way more special than the PC stuff I was used to. I later learned about Linux and installed it on a 486DX-50 that had been slated to be a backup Novell box at my job. This was a system that did a decent job at being a Novel server, its clone had ~45 systems attached to it in the student lab, was a file/print server, etc. I knew that it was a beefy box for Windows (3.1, at the time), but with Linux... With Linux, I had X11 on the console, could be playing Doom, browse thew eb with Mosaic, etc, while a dozen+ CS students were logged in from the Wyse terminals in the next building, and it kept chugging along. > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. I started out on home-PCs of the era: Commodore 64, Apple II, various CP/M systems, TI 99/4A, and of course MS/PC-DOS systems. Unix showed me what a computer could really do. I don't really remember being impressed with pipes, for some reason, they just made sense to me. For me, the first time someone showed me xargs, that was cool. It was my introduction to command-line scripting. > Cheers, Warren -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ From mrudge at ubuntu.com Fri Oct 11 07:15:50 2019 From: mrudge at ubuntu.com (Matt Rudge) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 22:15:50 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: Thanks for the warm welcome! For me, it was uucp of all things. I needed to set up a way of copying mailboxes from one place to another over a modem-to-modem connection. Unix allowed me to do it with a simple script and minimal overhead. When I realised that I also had a C compiler built in then.... On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 21:56, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > -- www.mattrudge.net - for wibble and guff blog.mattrudge.net - for Linuxy goodness -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jcapp at anteil.com Fri Oct 11 07:25:10 2019 From: jcapp at anteil.com (Jim Capp) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 17:25:10 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: My “aha” moment was the discovery of man pages and the realization that the design of the entire system, from inodes to tty drivers were freely available at my fingertips for perusal. It was like having an operating system design course “on-line”, and what a beautiful design!!! Cheers, Jim > On Oct 10, 2019, at 5:11 PM, SPC wrote: > > > El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey escribió: >> >> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd >> previously used? >> >> Mine was: Oh, I can: >> + write a simple script > > > Me too. But in adittion and specially: > > + the availability of the C compiler > + syslog > > Regards > Sergio Pedraja > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steffen at sdaoden.eu Fri Oct 11 07:31:59 2019 From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 23:31:59 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191010213159.AzhR_%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Warren Toomey wrote in <20191010205546.GA29154 at minnie.tuhs.org>: |All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. |A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you |if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. | |So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you |first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd |previously used? | |Mine was: Oh, I can: I get the feeling somebody's watching me! (However: #?0|kent:$ prt-get info xeyes Package 'xeyes' not found #?255|kent:$ prt-get dsearch xeye No matching packages found #?255|kent:$ prt-get fsearch xeye #?255|kent:$) | + write a simple script Perl with full set of manual pages available! (Only as single page HTML before.) | + to edit a file on the fly That was really hard, coming from Notepad plus or what its name was. Luckily there was MidnightCommander as a NortonCommander clone, otherwise i would likely have been bogged down. xedit no, xemacs no. There was a graphical editor thing, i think it used Motif, but i have forgotten. Had syntax highlighting, but had no tabs if i recall correctly. It was a long way to get myself going with emacs, but finally, after a year or two, came to vim. The window managers were really hard to get right, i grabbed a super-cheap SuSE debug CD on 1999-01-11, it used fvwm2. Focus follows mouse and much more i could not deal with. I booted Windows for working purposes until first of May 1999, when i finally switched over to fulltime Linux. (I ended up using icewm after Enlightenment (cool but to slow) and WindowMaker did not make it. Until i discovered ahwm, which then was it. Only recently i switched to cwm.) | + with no temporary files (a la pipes) That did bother you. I am superficial. And i came in via 4DOS. And as a Basic, .BAT and perl "programmer". | + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! Discovery of shebang was a tremendous moment. And anything around that. Discovery of manuals, for example the GNU C library manual! Ah, it soon was discovery of the entire basic UNIX tool set, that dispersed set of tools acting together for a greater whole! That was really, really great. |I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. C64/GEOS, Win 3.1/DOS, Windows95/4DOS. |Cheers, Warren --End of <20191010205546.GA29154 at minnie.tuhs.org> --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) From greg.m.travis at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 07:33:26 2019 From: greg.m.travis at gmail.com (greg travis) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 17:33:26 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: Before unix, I had only used a TRS80-III and an Atari 800. So it was my first real operating system. I think I was pretty amazed when I logged in to my account from a second location and it was the same account, somehow. Magic! I was also pretty blown away when my professor used ^T in Unipress Emacs. On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 5:25 PM Jim Capp wrote: > My “aha” moment was the discovery of man pages and the realization that > the design of the entire system, from inodes to tty drivers were freely > available at my fingertips for perusal. > > It was like having an operating system design course “on-line”, and what a > beautiful design!!! > > Cheers, > > Jim > > > On Oct 10, 2019, at 5:11 PM, SPC wrote: > > > El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey escribió: > >> >> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd >> previously used? >> >> Mine was: Oh, I can: >> + write a simple script >> > > Me too. But in adittion and specially: > > + the availability of the C compiler > + syslog > > Regards > Sergio Pedraja > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Fri Oct 11 07:34:27 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 14:34:27 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191010213427.GE5593@mcvoy.com> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? Unix was pretty much the first thing I used. I did regress to CPM Z80 based machine because 40-60 users on a 1Mhz (I think) VAX was crazy slow, even though it had disk and I think 4MB of ram, the 128K 4mhz z80 with floppies was faster. I wrote assembly versions of ls, cp, mv, rm, etc - assembly so that I could cram the program into a 512 byte sector (both for speed of loading as well as for small size). The aha moment for me was one of the many times I was logged into slovax (an 11/750 that had the BSD source on it) reading popen.c and got to the point where it forked a process. It blew my mind, here I am in libc and it's creating processes for me. I just didn't expect that but was struck by the thought "huh, these Unix guys don't fool around, they use the abstractions they advertise". I expected something like Windows spawn or some VMS complex thing, I sure as heck didn't expect fork and exec, shows how naive I was at the time. Fun times. From web at loomcom.com Fri Oct 11 09:10:02 2019 From: web at loomcom.com (Seth J. Morabito) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:10:02 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <875zkw5h9x.fsf@loomcom.com> Warren Toomey writes: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? A fun topic! I'm a bit on the young side, so Unix was my first exposure to any kind of timesharing or multi-user system. Prior to getting access to MIPS Ultrix 4.2 on a DECstation, my experience consisted ENTIRELY of: * 8-bit systems, mainly Commodore 64 and Tandy TRS-80 * The Commodore Amiga 1000 and 500 * DOS and Windows 3.0 in the form of an IBM PC XT and a PS/2 Then, when I arrived at Cornell University in 1992, I discovered that there was a network of three clustered DECstations, sharing about 2GB (!) of system and user disk space. Enormous! As an avid reader of BYTE Magazine, I had _heard_ of Unix in the trade press, but I didn't honestly know what it was. I was plunged head first into it as a user, and quickly found myself addicted. I did get some guidance from a few experienced users, so I wasn't completely on my own. I owe them quite a bit for their patience and guidance. For me, the "Aha!" moment was entirely related to being attached to Usenet and the Internet. The fact that I could suddently read email (with the RAND MH system) and Usenet (with nn) and communicate with all of these very clever people all over the world was positively intoxicating. My love only grew when I discovered that there was a C compiler installed, and that I could build my own programs from source downloaded by FTP. Later, Perl 4 was installed, and I learned how to write my own programs. It was an exciting time in my young life. -Seth -- Seth Morabito Poulsbo, WA, USA web at loomcom.com From blstuart at bellsouth.net Fri Oct 11 09:23:32 2019 From: blstuart at bellsouth.net (Brian L. Stuart) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 23:23:32 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <1586929316.4330765.1570749812945@mail.yahoo.com> On Thursday, October 10, 2019, 4:55:58 PM EDT, Warren Toomey wrote: > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? For me, it was reading the source code on 6th Ed. Seeing the elegance, simplicity, and beauty was like seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time or hearing Beethoven's 9th for the first time. To this day, I still remember looking through some of the userland code and saw that who figured out if you use it in "who am i" just by looking at argc. Using as "who are you" or "who really cares" was fun, but the real effect was realizing how much more I'd understand by reading code than by reading documentation. BLS -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ggm at algebras.org Fri Oct 11 09:28:09 2019 From: ggm at algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 09:28:09 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <1586929316.4330765.1570749812945@mail.yahoo.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <1586929316.4330765.1570749812945@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Wanting to print something and reaching for Tops-10 PIP.. to realize I didn't need to do that. Irrational concepts did not carry across Logging in by name but having my uid:gid map naturally to the Tops-10 [xxxx,yyy] form. -Rational concepts carried across Learn. "omg. Is that all there is? really? is it that simple? you mean the file permissions flags ARE BITS IN A WORD" RUNOF -> nroff. The pascal and fortran experience was a bit of a backwards step. But makefiles were logical, and once I stopped writing in fortran, things got remarkably better. csh in many ways. I know that's heresy for a lot of people, but some things were just subtly easier in csh. I didn't write csh scripts. -G From bakul at bitblocks.com Fri Oct 11 09:35:12 2019 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:35:12 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <91EB49CE-EF4F-4F0D-9734-2710ABC84E2F@bitblocks.com> On Oct 10, 2019, at 1:55 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren Being an OS student I had read "The Unix Timesharing System" paper by Ritchie and Thompson and had wanted to use Unix years before I actually had the chance. I don't remember an "Aha!" moment but I took to it like a duck to water. Most everything felt just so comfortable and right. It was very much as I had imagined it to be. Prior to it I had used TSO, TOPS-10, VM/CMS and VMS. And CP/M @home. From david at kdbarto.org Fri Oct 11 09:49:23 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:49:23 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <91EB49CE-EF4F-4F0D-9734-2710ABC84E2F@bitblocks.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <91EB49CE-EF4F-4F0D-9734-2710ABC84E2F@bitblocks.com> Message-ID: <3A5CAD53-ABFD-468F-869D-59FACA81BD5D@kdbarto.org> > On Oct 10, 2019, at 4:35 PM, Bakul Shah wrote: > > On Oct 10, 2019, at 1:55 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: >> >> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. >> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you >> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. >> >> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd >> previously used? >> >> Mine was: Oh, I can: >> + write a simple script >> + to edit a file on the fly >> + with no temporary files (a la pipes) >> + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! >> >> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. >> >> Cheers, Warren > I was at UCSD on the Pascal project, so I was used to using a machine with a nice editor and had access to the OS source code to play with and learn from. When UCSD spun the Pascal project out to SofTech MicroSystems I moved as well. SofTech had a pdp 11/45 running V6 with the famous patch tape. We called it V6.9. When I first logged in, it was just a feeling of simplicity and elegance. I could edit files, move them around on the disk, and when I was curious about what was happening under the covers, I could go look at the sources. Aha - I could use the shell to script the formatting of text files making the task of generating new printed documentation for the Pascal Project something as easy as saying ./printdocs.sh. After that it was all nroff, vi, and C compiler experiences, learning what really made this system tick. Back at UCSD I got access to the VAX (sdcsvax) and did all of my homework there never again returning to the Pascal system on the Terak boxes. Never looked back, I’ve been using Unix as my OS ever since. David From gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 11:44:30 2019 From: gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com (Gregg Levine) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 21:44:30 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: Hello! Me? I got started bitbanging my way through things on Apple 2 designs, and then DOS on a grouch PC/XT clone from AT&T, and then a PC/AT clone also from AT&T, there I also included Windows. Around the time the P100 came out from Intel I also stuffed Slackware onto it in the form their Zipslack, and about the time I'd gotten connected to the 'net, I found your site, and off I went. I'd run UNIX on SIMH/pdp-11. (Amazing stuff that!) And for your Larry I also had a Sun system here who also ran first my website, then just the background stuff. Meeting Ken sometime earlier at the VCF East, and recognizing Brian from his style, made me realize that Armstrong the musician was right about it being a "wonderful world". especially watching the big gaggle of machines celebrating the wonders of UNiX. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren From gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 11:45:58 2019 From: gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com (Gregg Levine) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 21:45:58 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: Hello again. (Silly keyboard.) That line regarding the Sun box, should read "for you Larry". ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 9:44 PM Gregg Levine wrote: > > Hello! > Me? I got started bitbanging my way through things on Apple 2 designs, > and then DOS on a grouch PC/XT clone from AT&T, and then a PC/AT clone > also from AT&T, there I also included Windows. Around the time the > P100 came out from Intel I also stuffed Slackware onto it in the form > their Zipslack, and about the time I'd gotten connected to the 'net, I > found your site, and off I went. I'd run UNIX on SIMH/pdp-11. (Amazing > stuff that!) And for your Larry I also had a Sun system here who also > ran first my website, then just the background stuff. > > Meeting Ken sometime earlier at the VCF East, and recognizing Brian > from his style, made me realize that Armstrong the musician was right > about it being a "wonderful world". especially watching the big gaggle > of machines celebrating the wonders of UNiX. > ----- > Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com > "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." > > On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > > > > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > > previously used? > > > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > > + write a simple script > > + to edit a file on the fly > > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > > > Cheers, Warren From dave at horsfall.org Fri Oct 11 12:46:02 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 13:46:02 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: <20191010131848.C13DC18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20191010131848.C13DC18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Noel Chiappa wrote: > DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; e.g. the "pdp11 > peripherals handbook" (to transcribe the cover exactly) uses "PDP-11" > several times on pg 1-1. And being an acronym it is of course upper-case... -- Dave From dave at horsfall.org Fri Oct 11 12:49:11 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 13:49:11 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Henry Bent wrote: > I have no opinion on the password hacking (especially since Ken seemed > fine with it), but this is to me distasteful.  The media was alerted, > and that media was of all things The Register?  It's not exactly a site > known for its thoughtful or balanced journalism. I've found The Register to be pretty OK, but what would you recommend in its place? -- Dave From lm at mcvoy.com Fri Oct 11 12:56:54 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 19:56:54 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] bwk Message-ID: <20191011025654.GK5593@mcvoy.com> I miss Brian on this list. I've interacted with him over the years, the one I remember the most was I was trying to do an awk like interface to a key/value "database". I talked to him about it and he sent me ~bwk/awk which had all the original awk source and the troff source to the awk book in english and french. Ken, Doug, Rob, Steve, anyone, could you coax him onto this list? If you want me to try first I will, I don't know if he remembers me or not. But I can try and then maybe one of you follow up? From lars at nocrew.org Fri Oct 11 15:49:13 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 05:49:13 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] My case for video footage of the machine Ken would later use to create Unix In-Reply-To: (Warner Losh's message of "Thu, 10 Oct 2019 11:20:40 -0600") References: Message-ID: <7weezjzvae.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Warner Losh wrote: > https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/10/video-footage-of-first-pdp-7-to-run-unix.html Thank you. I think your attention to detail is commendable. From dave at horsfall.org Fri Oct 11 16:24:05 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 17:24:05 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Nemo wrote: > Some (large) companies regularly run password crackers on their > employees' passwords and inform them if their passwords are found > "insufficiently strong to protect company assets". An ex-employer of mine (not the reason I left) used to do just that. > Good, bad, distasteful, prudent, off-topic? Depends :-) -- Dave From ralph at inputplus.co.uk Fri Oct 11 19:03:46 2019 From: ralph at inputplus.co.uk (Ralph Corderoy) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 10:03:46 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] bwk In-Reply-To: <20191011025654.GK5593@mcvoy.com> References: <20191011025654.GK5593@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20191011090346.30CB01FDC8@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Hi Larry, > I miss Brian on this list. I too think it would be great if he was, but I suspect if he wanted to be here, he would already be. He gets forwarded the odd list email by some ex-colleagues that want his input on a bit of history and they feed back his recollection. By not being here he probably gets a lot more done with his time. :-) Especially with the recent influx of new subscribers and the possible growth in number of emails and change in signal:noise. -- Cheers, Ralph. From leah at vuxu.org Fri Oct 11 20:55:57 2019 From: leah at vuxu.org (Leah Neukirchen) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 12:55:57 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> (Warren Toomey's message of "Fri, 11 Oct 2019 06:55:46 +1000") References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> Warren Toomey writes: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? I'm not sure if this was *my* "Aha, Unix!" moment, but my Dad complained once that he had some CSV file containing bills and needed to do some computation, and it would be a hassle to do in Delphi (which he is most proficient in). So I told him I could have a look at it on my Linux system, and while he explained what computations he needed, I would type in some awk oneliner and a bit of other pipe stuff and he had his answer within minutes. -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From pechter at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 21:09:35 2019 From: pechter at gmail.com (William Pechter) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 07:09:35 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <2e0412a9-ba41-6c70-9a42-3a1da710823d@gmail.com> On 10/11/2019 2:24 AM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Nemo wrote: > >> Some (large) companies regularly run password crackers on their >> employees' passwords and inform them if their passwords are found >> "insufficiently strong to protect company assets". > > An ex-employer of mine (not the reason I left) used to do just that. > >> Good, bad, distasteful, prudent, off-topic? > > Depends :-) > > -- Dave And when I was an instructor and sysadmin at Pyramid, I caught a co-worker with a SUID ksh binary named  "..."  "hidden under his home directory in a directory named "..." because su took too long.  Yeah and su had logging.  Thank you COPS.  Not that I distrusted him -- but when you share sysadmin duties there are things thatshouldn't be done. Bill From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 21:46:12 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 07:46:12 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] bwk In-Reply-To: <20191011090346.30CB01FDC8@orac.inputplus.co.uk> References: <20191011025654.GK5593@mcvoy.com> <20191011090346.30CB01FDC8@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Message-ID: I happen to know that Brian is very busy writing a book/memoir about early UNIX, coming out very soon. I suspect it is sucking up all his free time. On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 5:04 AM Ralph Corderoy wrote: > Hi Larry, > > > I miss Brian on this list. > > I too think it would be great if he was, but I suspect if he wanted to > be here, he would already be. He gets forwarded the odd list email by > some ex-colleagues that want his input on a bit of history and they feed > back his recollection. By not being here he probably gets a lot more done > with his time. :-) Especially with the recent influx of new subscribers > and the possible growth in number of emails and change in signal:noise. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From coppero1237 at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 22:04:15 2019 From: coppero1237 at gmail.com (Tyler Adams) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 15:04:15 +0300 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: One of the things that makes unix so special to me is how many different ways I had the "Aha" moment. Viscerally, I got drawn in after I tried writing some Batch script for a windows machine and found bash so much easier. Intellectually, ESR's Art of Unix Programming really shown a light onto what made unix feel so fun. Seeing the unix principles laid out shortly and clearly was world changing. Then when Apple and Google pumped out 3 BILLION unix like devices and made unix mainstream, it just nailed it in that unix is a really special piece of software*.* Tyler On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 1:56 PM Leah Neukirchen wrote: > Warren Toomey writes: > > > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > > previously used? > > I'm not sure if this was *my* "Aha, Unix!" moment, but my Dad > complained once that he had some CSV file containing bills and needed > to do some computation, and it would be a hassle to do in Delphi > (which he is most proficient in). So I told him I could have a look > at it on my Linux system, and while he explained what computations he > needed, I would type in some awk oneliner and a bit of other pipe > stuff and he had his answer within minutes. > > -- > Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ality at pbrane.org Fri Oct 11 22:28:31 2019 From: ality at pbrane.org (Anthony Martin) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 05:28:31 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <20191009200942.GA73878@wopr> Message-ID: <20191011122831.GA10582@alice> Kurt H Maier once said: > On Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 09:59:43AM -1000, Rob Pike wrote: > > I find this hacking distasteful. It was distasteful back when, and it > > still is. > > And not really relevant to this topic, in fact. It is relevant, in fact. And if you're going to peck someone's password out of a hash, at least keep your beak shut. Don't write a cock-a-hoop article that will surely be parroted all over the net. It's foul. Anthony From katolaz at freaknet.org Fri Oct 11 22:53:52 2019 From: katolaz at freaknet.org (KatolaZ) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 14:53:52 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191011125352.tim4tv556w5mq4my@unixfarts.net> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > [cut] Disclaimer: I am on the young-ish side as well. I learned the basic Unix commands and the use of vi(1) from a book, some four or five years before I sat in front of a unix login prompt (around '91 or '92). I just found the whole thing amazing, so I re-read that book several times, waiting for the day when I would have been there for real. Then finally that day came, and that was my "aahhh, Unix!" moment. Instantly, everything made so much sense. As somebody else suggested, I really felt like a duck plunging in a pond for the first time. Since then, it has been just a sequence of "aha! Unix!" moments, like when I conjured a longish pipe which solved in 30 seconds a reporting problem on which two people had spent about two weeks, or when I left a colleague jaw-dropped after seeing how I fitted several million data points to a reference distribution with an awk+bc oneliner :P HND From tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk Fri Oct 11 22:55:13 2019 From: tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk (Tony Travis) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 13:55:13 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: References: <20191010131848.C13DC18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On 11/10/2019 03:46, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Noel Chiappa wrote: > >> DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; e.g. the "pdp11 >> peripherals handbook" (to transcribe the cover exactly) uses "PDP-11" >> several times on pg 1-1. > > And being an acronym it is of course upper-case... Hi, Dave. On the _machine_ itself, DEC wrote "pdp11"... An acronym doesn't have to be upper-case! Many Unix commands are lower case acronyms: cd = (c)ange (d)irectory pwd (p)rint (w)orking (directory) ls = (l)ist file(s) I guess that my introduction to Seventh Edition Unix running on a "pdp11/34" made me think it was obviously designed to run Unix ;-) Bye, Tony. -- Minke Informatics Limited, Registered in Scotland - Company No. SC419028 Registered Office: 3 Donview, Bridge of Alford, AB33 8QJ, Scotland (UK) tel. +44(0)19755 63548 http://minke-informatics.co.uk mob. +44(0)7985 078324 mailto:tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk From spedraja at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 23:19:08 2019 From: spedraja at gmail.com (SPC) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 15:19:08 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] BSD Password cracked (fun) In-Reply-To: <739d7179-e68a-d00d-c018-775d32ebea12@minke-informatics.co.uk> References: <20191009201321.GA24336@minnie.tuhs.org> <739d7179-e68a-d00d-c018-775d32ebea12@minke-informatics.co.uk> Message-ID: A bit of fun. In appeareance, 39 years later, Ken Thompson's password on BSD Unix has been cracked... Congratulations for the password, by the way. https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/unix-bsd-password-cracked.html Cordiales saludos / Kind Regards. Gracias | Regards - Saludos | Greetings | Freundliche Grüße | Salutations -- *Sergio Pedraja* -- http://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiopedraja ----- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mparson at bl.org Fri Oct 11 23:11:08 2019 From: mparson at bl.org (Michael Parson) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 08:11:08 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: References: <20191010131848.C13DC18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <4c1973ab965afdcc938cbb7dca913427@bl.org> On 2019-10-11 07:55, Tony Travis wrote: > On 11/10/2019 03:46, Dave Horsfall wrote: >> On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Noel Chiappa wrote: >> >>> DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; e.g. the "pdp11 >>> peripherals handbook" (to transcribe the cover exactly) uses "PDP-11" >>> several times on pg 1-1. >> >> And being an acronym it is of course upper-case... > > Hi, Dave. > > On the _machine_ itself, DEC wrote "pdp11"... Well, that's also in-line with their using all lower-case on their logo. > An acronym doesn't have to be upper-case! > > Many Unix commands are lower case acronyms: > > cd = (c)ange (d)irectory > pwd (p)rint (w)orking (directory) > ls = (l)ist file(s) I always thought of it as (l)i(s)t files. > I guess that my introduction to Seventh Edition Unix running on a > "pdp11/34" made me think it was obviously designed to run Unix ;-) > > Bye, > > Tony. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ From pete at nomadlogic.org Sat Oct 12 02:44:32 2019 From: pete at nomadlogic.org (Pete Wright) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 09:44:32 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <1e8b746e-da68-6e1a-d1f4-f9a9a13a7686@nomadlogic.org> On 10/10/19 1:55 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? For me it happened in highschool - 1992/1993.  I had been playing around with my i386 at home which had a modem and i used to dial into my local library and eventually bbs's and stuff.  then my school offered a class on Earth Systems Science which was partly funded and sponsored by NASA which was awesome by itself, but for me the real turning point was our computer lab had an SGI indigo workstation.  everything about it blew my mind, i have very clear memories of learning how to download satalite data via ftp, use tar to expand the data then visualize it.  i also remember bugging one of the smarter guys in the class how he changed his prompt to look so cool :^) this workstation also had mosaic and we were all given email addresses (domain gaia.circles.org, even had a webpage hosted there!). so for me - this Unix aha! moment was very closely mixed with an Internet aha! moment when i discovered how much more info was available to me compared to my local suburban library :) -pete -- Pete Wright pete at nomadlogic.org @nomadlogicLA From velocityboy at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 03:13:37 2019 From: velocityboy at gmail.com (Jim Geist) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 13:13:37 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > As an undergrad in the 80's. Before college most of my experience had been on various flavors of BASIC, with the one exception being a summer spent at a science camp where I did Pascal on an Apple ][ and other programming assignments on VMS. My college had a big schism between the computer services department that serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account and started seeing how much more elegant things were. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Sat Oct 12 03:20:58 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 10:20:58 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191011172058.GC3783@mcvoy.com> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 01:13:37PM -0400, Jim Geist wrote: > My college had a big schism between the computer services department that > serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the > actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad > classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I > learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account > and started seeing how much more elegant things were. Our CS department had a mainframe as well, also a handful of 11/750s and 11/780s. The compiler class was taught on the mainframe, the prof had a lex/yacc clone he had written and wanted us to use that. My buddy Rob Netzer and I had 3B1 (Unix PC) or maybe 2, I think I had one as well, and we asked the prof if we could do the class on those. Rob had to write the lex/yacc clone to be compat with the profs, he did and we happily avoided using the mainframe. We were very sold on Unix by then. From rodrigosloop at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 03:37:31 2019 From: rodrigosloop at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Rodrigo_G=2E_L=C3=B3pez?=) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 19:37:31 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] bwk In-Reply-To: References: <20191011025654.GK5593@mcvoy.com> <20191011090346.30CB01FDC8@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Message-ID: that is great news. i've got all of his books, except the one about Go he wrote with Donovan. i'll definitely be purchasing that one about UNIX. On Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 1:47 PM John P. Linderman wrote: > I happen to know that Brian is very busy writing a book/memoir about early > UNIX, coming out very soon. I suspect it is sucking up all his free time. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jcapp at anteil.com Sat Oct 12 03:40:43 2019 From: jcapp at anteil.com (Jim Capp) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 13:40:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <8137868.3267.1570815643313.JavaMail.root@zimbraanteil> Thanks Jim. Your story about BASIC and C reminded me of another "aha" moment. My first programming job involving UNIX in the early 1980's was to send data to an IBM mainframe via 2780/3780 binary synchronous communications (BSC). I started writing a HEX dump utility using BASIC. I wasn't happy with the execution speed and started reading man pages. I discovered C. Having done some work with assembly, I immediately recognized the similarity and function as a "portable assembler". By that time, UNIX had been ported to at least a dozen different architectures. I was sold on the design, utility, and "openness" of the documentation, and have been working with nearly every flavor of *NIX ever since. Cheers, Jim From: "Jim Geist" To: "Warren Toomey" Cc: "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" Sent: Friday, October 11, 2019 1:13:37 PM Subject: Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey < wkt at tuhs.org > wrote: All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd previously used? Mine was: Oh, I can: + write a simple script + to edit a file on the fly + with no temporary files (a la pipes) + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. Cheers, Warren As an undergrad in the 80's. Before college most of my experience had been on various flavors of BASIC, with the one exception being a summer spent at a science camp where I did Pascal on an Apple ][ and other programming assignments on VMS. My college had a big schism between the computer services department that serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account and started seeing how much more elegant things were. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From larry0 at me.com Sat Oct 12 03:48:59 2019 From: larry0 at me.com (Larry W. Cashdollar) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 13:48:59 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <675D27CE-AA1B-4CF5-B8F1-6E71E096CC13@me.com> >On 10/10/19, 4:56 PM, "TUHS on behalf of Warren Toomey" wrote: > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? When I first typed ps -x and saw all the running processes on the system. That was on a Dec Alpha at the university of southern Maine in the computer science lab. I thought to myself I need this on my PC. A few weeks later my friend pointed me at Slackware. -- Larry C$ From arnold at skeeve.com Sat Oct 12 07:10:32 2019 From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 15:10:32 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] bwk In-Reply-To: <20191011090346.30CB01FDC8@orac.inputplus.co.uk> References: <20191011025654.GK5593@mcvoy.com> <20191011090346.30CB01FDC8@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Message-ID: <201910112110.x9BLAW6P024713@freefriends.org> Ralph Corderoy wrote: > Hi Larry, > > > I miss Brian on this list. > > I too think it would be great if he was, but I suspect if he wanted to > be here, he would already be. He gets forwarded the odd list email by > some ex-colleagues that want his input on a bit of history and they feed > back his recollection. By not being here he probably gets a lot more done > with his time. :-) Especially with the recent influx of new subscribers > and the possible growth in number of emails and change in signal:noise. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. This probably sums it up. I also send him bits and pieces as I think would interest him. Besides the book someone mentioned (it's good! I'm one of the reviewers), he also teaches classes and advises students. So, the "he'd be here if he wanted to be" is correct. More's the pity for us. Arnold From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Oct 12 07:56:20 2019 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 23:56:20 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191011215620.GB12901@tau1.ceti.pl> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. I am from this previous dozen. The current one, I guess, might have come here with help of outlets like Lobsters and HN. > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? Oh, that is a good question. I think I had a few aha's which are now faded, but the one I remember well was when I wrote a program which was to be described in a document, and it generated lots of data (20mb, which for me, in mid-1990-ies, was a lot - today, one of my org files is bigger and I keep adding to it every day). There was no way I would want to process this data by hand, and reading it into Excel was a no-no either, because typical Windows machine had 4-8 megs of ram and I did not think they would be able to handle this task. The files compressed well (like, 20:1). So I wrote some shell scripts and (n)awk scripts, find-ed compressed files, feeded uncompressed data via pipe and awk made nice tables for LaTeX and data for gnuplot. On a machine that had 4mb of ram itself. So, that was a moment - I could use Unix and the tools to make things requiring much bigger machines (if they were not running Unix). Later on, knowing some nuances of Unix helped me a lot, even if those were really small tricks. Like, using 'cp -l' to copy huge source tree to user with inadequate quota and then compile it. Later on, I bought me a crappy modem without hardware error control, and it was unusable when connection was made from Windows/DOS (time counted in seconds, then hangup because of line errors). Again, Unix (Linux, actually) to the rescue - after I learned to use ppp, hangups became extremely rare, even if many times connection was despetately slow. Still, slow was better than none. > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. Before I started to use university SunOS, I was using university's VAX for a year and Amiga at home. On Amiga, I sometimes played and sometimes played with a system. So I already had some expectations about what a computer should be like (at least, the "my computer"). Before that, I spent few years playing on and off with other people's 8-bit computers (with their knowledge, of course) - Atari (800?), Polish-made Meritum-1 (docs said it was CP/M capable, but at that time, I had hard time getting more info on this and programing simple stuff in Basic was low hanging fruit). While Amiga gave me many early pleasures of multitasking (playing Centurion and doing low-priority fractal in the background, just for the kicks), and I kept her up to 1994, SunOS quickly dwarfed her. Around 1994 I got introduced to the Linux concept by a bud. Anyway, I installed Slackware on 486 and was able to configure olvwm on it, thus having almost same look as uni-SunOS. Which helped with adoption. After that, fvwm. After some time with KDE and Gnome, back to fvwm, because it just works. There is still plenty to learn. I feel like I barely licked the surface. My recent memorable aha was when I wrote a script in Elisp rather than in bash, as usually. Elisp is hardly a scripting language, it just copes in some cases, but for some reason complicated flow control looked much better than I expected. Another aha was after reading that running stuff in pipes may outperform some well know parallel computing frameworks. Yes indeed, each part of multipipe runs on different cpu and OS takes care of making the flows as fluent as it can. And the concept of pipe is, what, more than fourty years old? Almost fifty? This quite an aha, I think. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From finnoleary at inventati.org Sat Oct 12 09:46:48 2019 From: finnoleary at inventati.org (Finn O'Leary) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 23:46:48 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <525d0f880ade38b959207fdeef1d8f26@inventati.org> (my apologies, I sent this the other day assuming it would be sent to the list, but instead it got sent directly to rob pike! oops!) I agree, but I do believe that the time itself is a mitigating factor. To me this is much more akin to replicating a key for a lock that is no longer used, than anything else. It really doesn't serve much more purpose than pure curiosity and is of historical interest at best. On a (slightly?) related note, it's very, very surprising to me that this has hit news outlets. I never considered that this would get much more than a handful of replies, let alone this much interest. -- - Finn "Enough too is much not!" On 2019-10-09 19:59, Rob Pike wrote: > I coulda told you that. One tends to learn passwords (inadvertently) > when they're short and typed nearby often enough. (Sorry, ken.) > > If I remember right, the first half of this password was on a t-shirt > commemorating Belle's first half-move, although its notation may have > been different. > > Interesting though it is, though, I find this hacking distasteful. It > was distasteful back when, and it still is. The attitudes around > hackery have changed; the position nowadays seems to be that the bad > guys are doing it so the good guys should be rewarded for doing it > first. That's disingenuous at best, and dangerous at worst. > > -rob From clemc at ccc.com Sat Oct 12 10:04:06 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem cole) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 20:04:06 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Fwd: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC References: <012a01d5808f$0e56dcf0$2b0496d0$@net> Message-ID: <97E7C5AB-B2C6-4C7F-B6D6-E98066E01038@ccc.com> FYI. I sent this to one of the lead DOC people from the old days to see if she knew. Here is her answer. Begin forwarded message: > From: "Janet Egan" > Date: October 11, 2019 at 7:53:16 PM EDT > To: "'Clem Cole'" > Subject: RE: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC > > Hi Clem, > > Hmm, I don’t remember whether the style guide addressed that. In the docs for RSX-11M and such I always wrote it “PDP-11”, that is upper case with the dash. I do remember the logo on the machine as always lower case with no dash. The PDP-8 had the same style logo. And you’re right about seeing the lower case on the cover of the handbooks. I have never seen the lower case with the dash or the upper case without it. I don’t think I still have my copy of the style guide. Maybe I’ll take a look around my archives for it. > > What a fun question to be thinking about . > Janet > > > From: Clem Cole > Sent: Friday, October 11, 2019 9:47 AM > To: Janet Egan > Subject: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC > > Janet, > I'm part of The Unix Historical Society (TUHS) mailing list and a topic came up that I thought you might be able to shed some light on. The observation was that 'DEC seemed to have a schizophrenic attitude to wrt to use of upper and lower case WRT to the PDP-11 brand,' i.e. sometimes using "PDP-11" and sometimes "pdp11" (but I note rarely if ever PDP11 or pdp-11) . For instance, the logo on the system itself was all lower: PDP-11/40 but DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; but when used on the places like the cover could be either e.g. the "pdp11 peripherals handbook" to transcribe the cover exactly but it uses upper case "PDP-11" several times on pg 1-1 and the same on the binding. But I could not find examples of pdp-11 or PDP11, i.e. if all lower it was with the dash or all upper without. > > Do you remember if there were rules or guidelines and if so what they might have been? > > Thanks, > Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From krewat at kilonet.net Sat Oct 12 10:21:53 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 20:21:53 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <525d0f880ade38b959207fdeef1d8f26@inventati.org> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <525d0f880ade38b959207fdeef1d8f26@inventati.org> Message-ID: <1810f402-58c3-5526-61ee-669ba0e92cdc@kilonet.net> On 10/11/2019 7:46 PM, Finn O'Leary wrote: > On a (slightly?) related note, it's very, very surprising to me > that this has hit news outlets. I never considered that this > would get much more than a handful of replies, let alone this > much interest. Nor me. Now my name, along with Leah Neukirchen is out there in connection with this. I don't care about myself, but Leah may not have wanted her name out there in relation to this. I was out there for various other things including of all things, Ford trucks. And I even have an IMDB entry for something I did way back in the mid 80's. While the white-hat hacker in me revels in the publicity, I, like you, am somewhat taken aback by the exposure. I can't blame anyone here or elsewhere for that. I'm just a little shell-shocked that the TUHS mailing list has this much exposure. WHICH IS NOT A BAD THING! Ah well... the Internet is what it is. ;) art k. From krewat at kilonet.net Sat Oct 12 10:23:04 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 20:23:04 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Fwd: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC In-Reply-To: <97E7C5AB-B2C6-4C7F-B6D6-E98066E01038@ccc.com> References: <012a01d5808f$0e56dcf0$2b0496d0$@net> <97E7C5AB-B2C6-4C7F-B6D6-E98066E01038@ccc.com> Message-ID: <378222e3-9adc-50a2-49f0-ea5fbceaa196@kilonet.net> While BAH was more involved in PDP-10 stuff, I wonder what her take is on this. On 10/11/2019 8:04 PM, Clem cole wrote: > FYI.  I sent this to one of the lead DOC people from the old days to > see if she knew.  Here is her answer. > > Begin forwarded message: > >> *From:* "Janet Egan" >> *Date:* October 11, 2019 at 7:53:16 PM EDT >> *To:* "'Clem Cole'" >> *Subject:* *RE: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper >> and Lower case at DEC* >> >> Hi Clem, >> >> Hmm, I don’t remember whether the style guide addressed that. In the >> docs for  RSX-11M and such I always wrote it “PDP-11”, that is upper >> case with the dash.  I do remember the logo on the machine as always >> lower case with no dash. The PDP-8 had the same style logo. And >> you’re right about seeing the lower case on the cover of the >> handbooks.  I have never seen the lower case with the dash or the >> upper case without it. I don’t think I still have my copy of the >> style guide. Maybe I’ll take a look around my archives for it. >> >> What a fun question to be thinking about . >> >> Janet >> >> *From:*Clem Cole >> *Sent:* Friday, October 11, 2019 9:47 AM >> *To:* Janet Egan >> *Subject:* Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and >> Lower case at DEC >> >> Janet, >> >>  I'm part of The Unix Historical Society (TUHS) mailing list and a >> topic came up that I thought you might be able to shed some >> light on.  The observation was that 'DEC seemed to have a >> schizophrenic attitude to wrt to use of upper and lower case WRT to >> the PDP-11 brand,' i.e. sometimes using "PDP-11" and sometimes >> "pdp11"  (but I note rarely if ever PDP11 or pdp-11) . For instance, >> the logo on the system itself was all lower: PDP-11/40 >>  but >> DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; but when used on >> the places like the cover could be either /e.g. /the >> "pdp11 peripherals handbook" to transcribe the cover exactly but it >> uses upper case "PDP-11" several times on pg 1-1 and the same on the >> binding.  But I could not find examples of pdp-11 or PDP11, /i.e./ if >> all lower it was with the dash or all upper without. >> >> Do you remember if there were rules or guidelines and if so what they >> might have been? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Clem >> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ricercar at lycos.com Sat Oct 12 12:41:07 2019 From: ricercar at lycos.com (ricercar at lycos.com) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 21:41:07 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> Perhaps impertinent since it's not part of the UNIX standard, but probably when I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I learned that quite a bit later. On 10/10/19 3:55 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Sat Oct 12 13:01:55 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 20:01:55 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> Message-ID: <20191012030155.GG3558@mcvoy.com> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 09:41:07PM -0500, ricercar at lycos.com wrote: > I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I > learned that quite a bit later. If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense. You had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see all of it in real time, that was wasteful. ed let you see as much as you needed and as little as was productive. And it worked without termcap. ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what it needs to do and no more. ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the days when getting a print out took a day or so. pic(1) is a great example of that. I *love* pic because I can look at the input to pic and I can see what it will look like. xfig and friends are not so much. From rich.salz at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 13:23:21 2019 From: rich.salz at gmail.com (Richard Salz) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 23:23:21 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> Message-ID: My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code in the BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes that I wrote communicate. Without a pipe! (I'd already used Unix for a few years and didn't think twice, it was just a natural fit. But sockets, woah.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Sat Oct 12 13:34:48 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 20:34:48 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> Message-ID: <20191012033448.GH3558@mcvoy.com> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 11:23:21PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote: > My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code in the > BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes that I > wrote communicate. Without a pipe! (I'd already used Unix for a few years > and didn't think twice, it was just a natural fit. But sockets, woah.) Sockets woah indeed. Shout out to Clem and the Masscomp doc people because they, not UW Madison that was doing all sorts of good work, the Masscomp docs got me to understand sockets. Richard, I get it, it is a light bulb moment when you realize that you can get two unrelated processes talk to each other. It bumps your understanding of what is possible. Which today seems lame, there is so much, but I get it, back then that was huge. From lars at nocrew.org Sat Oct 12 14:24:01 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 04:24:01 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Fwd: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC In-Reply-To: <378222e3-9adc-50a2-49f0-ea5fbceaa196@kilonet.net> (Arthur Krewat's message of "Fri, 11 Oct 2019 20:23:04 -0400") References: <012a01d5808f$0e56dcf0$2b0496d0$@net> <97E7C5AB-B2C6-4C7F-B6D6-E98066E01038@ccc.com> <378222e3-9adc-50a2-49f0-ea5fbceaa196@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <7wpnj2wpzy.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Arthur Krewat wrote: > While BAH was more involved in PDP-10 stuff, I wonder what her take is > on this. I don't think there ever was a lower case "pdp10" on the machines. >From what I see, it was "PDP-10", "decsystem10", "DECSYSTEM 20", or "DECSYSTEM 2020". From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Sat Oct 12 14:42:42 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 00:42:42 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <201910120442.x9C4ggMF021949@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> For a contrast in aha moments, consider this introduction to an early Apple (Apple II, I think). When my wife got one, my natural curiosity led me to try to make "Hello world". I asked her what to use as an editor and learned it all depends on what you're editing. So I looked in the manual. First thing you do to make a C program is to set up a "project", as if it was a corporate undertaking. I found it easier to write a program in some other editor than the one for C. Bad idea. Every file had a type and that editor produced files of some type other than C program. After succumbing to the Apple straitjacket, I succeeded. Then I found "Hello world" given as an example in the manual. The code took up almost a page; real men make programs that set up their own windows. Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers. And that didn't change until OS X. Doug From aap at papnet.eu Sat Oct 12 15:35:03 2019 From: aap at papnet.eu (Angelo Papenhoff) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 07:35:03 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Fwd: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC In-Reply-To: <7wpnj2wpzy.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <012a01d5808f$0e56dcf0$2b0496d0$@net> <97E7C5AB-B2C6-4C7F-B6D6-E98066E01038@ccc.com> <378222e3-9adc-50a2-49f0-ea5fbceaa196@kilonet.net> <7wpnj2wpzy.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: <20191012053503.GA58481@indra.papnet.eu> On 12/10/19, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > I don't think there ever was a lower case "pdp10" on the machines. > From what I see, it was "PDP-10", "decsystem10", "DECSYSTEM 20", > or "DECSYSTEM 2020". Nope, the KI10 panel says "pdp10" in the lower left next to the digital logo. aap From athornton at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 16:12:47 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 23:12:47 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <201910120442.x9C4ggMF021949@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910120442.x9C4ggMF021949@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <06AE2396-8976-4F15-9F03-469BC4C3A178@gmail.com> On Oct 11, 2019, at 9:42 PM, Doug McIlroy wrote: > Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers. > And that didn't change until OS X. Well, the II kinda was. Not by the time of the //gs, which, if you were writing C, was probably the one you were using. By then it had a windowing system and complications. And then the Mac, prior to OS X, yeah, not intended for the end user to be a software developer. But the II/II+/IIe were all straightforward machines. As long as you wanted to write BASIC or 6502 assembly they were reasonably programmer-friendly (I say, as someone who couldn’t afford Merlin, the real assembler of the day, at that point, and did his assembly by hand, so, yeah, maybe not THAT friendly). Once you learned what the zero page addresses were for in the particular OS/ROM BASIC you were running, it was a pretty intelligible system. ….and now having done a little googling, there was indeed an Aztec C for Apple II DOS 3.3 in 1982. If that was what you were using, well, yep, looks like you had to use its editor, but the sample program (slightly more complex than “Hello world") looks pretty much like it would have in any other C (interestingly, no #include needed): main(argc, argv) int argc; char *argv[]; { register int i = 1; printf("Program <%s> has %d arguments\n", argv[0], argc-l); while (--argc) { printf("Arg %d = <%s>\n", i, argv[i]); i++; } } So I’m guessing you were using something for the //gs plus GS/OS. Adam From wobblygong at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 18:55:42 2019 From: wobblygong at gmail.com (Wesley Parish) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 21:55:42 +1300 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: I don't really think I had an "Aha" moment as such. More a set of them, after discovering computers again after failing to understand them at high school - I blame Apple BASIC for that. I think it was discovering two articles on Minix (also discussing the Minix book) and Coherent in a local computer magazine, and of course that Unix came with source was mentioned. So I bought the Minix book, then when I could, I did a Unix course at the local polytech (SCO of some description c. early 90s) and got the SLS Linux that now resides in the Bochs area at Sourceforge. It wasn't instantaneous, but more of a build-up - this stuff is powerful and just works. Even better, you can read the source files and get to understand everything about it - so you're not in a "cargo cult" attitude to operating systems and applications: everything is in your hands and you can go in as deeply as you wish. You just have to be willing to work at learning it. My 0.02c worth - don't spend it all at once!!! :) Wesley Parish On 10/11/19, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > From usotsuki at buric.co Sat Oct 12 20:05:20 2019 From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 06:05:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <201910120442.x9C4ggMF021949@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910120442.x9C4ggMF021949@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On Sat, 12 Oct 2019, Doug McIlroy wrote: > For a contrast in aha moments, consider this introduction to > an early Apple (Apple II, I think). > > When my wife got one, my natural curiosity led me to try to > make "Hello world". > > I asked her what to use as an editor and learned it all depends > on what you're editing. > > So I looked in the manual. First thing you do to make a C program > is to set up a "project", as if it was a corporate undertaking. > > I found it easier to write a program in some other editor than > the one for C. Bad idea. Every file had a type and that editor > produced files of some type other than C program. > > After succumbing to the Apple straitjacket, I succeeded. > > Then I found "Hello world" given as an example in the manual. > The code took up almost a page; real men make programs that > set up their own windows. > > Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers. > And that didn't change until OS X. > > Doug > That sounds like Macintosh rather than Apple ][. -uso. From tuhs at t.lastninja.net Sat Oct 12 20:17:41 2019 From: tuhs at t.lastninja.net (Naveen Nathan) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 21:17:41 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <862ee186-0e99-408d-94e5-2bcc80d05689@www.fastmail.com> My aha moment was implementing a bourne-like shell for a Unix & C course I took in uni. We were given about 3 weeks to implement the shell from scratch with a lot of bonus points up for grabs such as using lex/yacc for parsing, supporting more than one pipe in a pipeline, backgrounding jobs, advanced i/o redirection, etc. It was quite fun, and we got to sort of "prove" how the Unix shell works and how the fundamental interfaces behave. - Naveen From meillo at marmaro.de Sat Oct 12 21:54:35 2019 From: meillo at marmaro.de (markus schnalke) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 13:54:35 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <1iJFyl-7yr-00@marmaro.de> Hoi, my Aha moments were (in no particular order): - Users can change their login shell! -- This surely was the most impressing discovery for me. - Users are regarded as programmers and are provided with structurally all possiblities, i.e. you can recreate the whole system to your preferences within your home directory and use that as the default. - The shell as a fluid way from dumb programm calling to full programming, where any user can float up and down the level, based on personal skills and the problem at hand. - Chroot (Linux from Scratch) - To me it's actually more a philosophy behind it all, and UNIX itself ist more a demonstration and the scientific experiment that helped to uncover and shape this philosophy. The Aha moment was that there is so much behind it. - Those guys implemented about anything there is about an operating system and application tools, and -- what is even more impressive -- in each of those fields (typesetting, fonts, chess, languages, and so on for a long time), they went deep and invented there as well. Such a small group and so hugely much and deep output! meillo From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Sat Oct 12 22:49:14 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 08:49:14 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <201910120442.x9C4ggMF021949@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <201910121249.x9CCnEEP092354@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > That sounds like Macintosh rather than Apple ][. You are right. My error. I might add that OS X was afforded a different kind of "Aha, Unix!" moment. Doug From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sat Oct 12 23:55:13 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 09:55:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <20191012135513.57C4818C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Warren Toomey > What was your "ahah" moment when you first saw that Unix was special, > especially compared to the systems you'd previously used? Sometime in my undergrad sophmore year, IIRC. A friend had a undergrad research thing with DSSR, who I think at that point had the first UNIX at MIT. He showed me the system, and wrote a tiny command in C, compiled it, and executed the binary from the shell. No big deal, right? Well, at that point ('75 or so), the only OS's I had used were RSTS-11, a batch system running on an Interdata (programs were submitted on card decks), the DELPHI system (done by the people in DSSR), and a few similar things. I had never used a system where an ordinary user could 'add' a command to the command interpreter, and was blown away. (At that point in time, not many OS's could do that.) Unix was in a whole different world compared to contemporaneous PDP-11 OS's. It felt like a 'mainframe' OS (background jobs, etc), but on a mini. Noel From usotsuki at buric.co Sun Oct 13 00:26:00 2019 From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 10:26:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <201910121249.x9CCnEEP092354@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910120442.x9C4ggMF021949@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <201910121249.x9CCnEEP092354@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On Sat, 12 Oct 2019, Doug McIlroy wrote: >> That sounds like Macintosh rather than Apple ][. > > You are right. My error. I might add that OS X was > afforded a different kind of "Aha, Unix!" moment. > > Doug > For me Unix felt like something that took the best parts of MS-DOS (which I was very familiar with) and improved on them - plus I knew / as a path separator from ProDOS on the Apple ][ (you can probably see where I'm going) ;p. I later learned that this was because MS-DOS, while it was growing out of its "CP/M clone" phase, had pinched a lot of things from Unix and so this similarity was not a coincidence. But what MS-DOS has to fumble around with and pretend to do, Unix actually *did*. Not to mention, it had, like the Apple ][ and unlike MS-DOS, a single environment that combined a command shell and a programming language. Plus the network transparency. It was the best of both worlds. -uso. Random: One of my laptops' Windows 10 install ate itself due to a bum update a couple days ago. I had left Windows on it when I got it because I'd heard that the company's laptops that were not in a specific product line would not run Linux properly. Actually, it was no problem at all, so it's running Debian now. I also have a broken laptop that runs Debian headless. I know it's not the real thing, but it'll suffice me. ;p From tytso at mit.edu Sun Oct 13 00:37:33 2019 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 10:37:33 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191012030155.GG3558@mcvoy.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> <20191012030155.GG3558@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20191012143733.GE16225@mit.edu> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 08:01:55PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense. You > had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see > all of it in real time, that was wasteful. ed let you see as much as > you needed and as little as was productive. And it worked without > termcap. ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what > it needs to do and no more. > > ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the > days when getting a print out took a day or so.... ed isn't all that different from most of the text based editors from that era. My first text based editor was "edit" from the PDP-8's 4k disk monitor system. The "monitor" was located in the high 128 (12-bit) word page of the PDP-8's 4k core memory, and the editor and its text buffer had to fit in the bottom 3968 words, which meant you had to read and edit your program file in small chunks[1]. [1] https://www.pdp8.net/asr33/dms_session.shtml The 4k disk monitor pre-dated Unix by two years, and similar text editors were part of the PDP-15 and PDP-11 operating systems from Digital. Many of the edito commands that I remember from using ASR-35 connected to my Dad's PDP-8/i are the same as what /bin/ed. Fortunately people weren't trying to copyright user interfaces back in the 1960's..... - Ted From ron at ronnatalie.com Sun Oct 13 00:51:25 2019 From: ron at ronnatalie.com (Ronald Natalie) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 09:51:25 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191012135513.57C4818C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20191012135513.57C4818C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: I graduated high school in 1977. I hadn’t heard anything about UNIX but I had hung around the University of Maryland and the like enough to know about Digital Equipment Corporation. One of my friend’s mother worked in the doc room a the local DEC office in Lanham and being the budding computer geeks we had, we’d often stop by the office and pick up whatever manuals she could spare to give us. I had processor handbooks, software handbook, peripheral handbook, etc… all in my personal library when I enrolled at Johns Hopkins that year. I got a letter from Professor Bill Huggins who was teaching my first year course “Models and Simulation” stating that the course would be taught on the departments PDP-11/45 computer (this I found in my documents) using BASIC/PLUS (again a fine DEC product taken from the RSTS operating system) on the UNIX operating system. The last one stumped me. There was not a mention (obviously) of UNIX anywhere in my docs. Of course, you couldn’t google it back then, and I probably could have asked around at the UofM (I had friends in various computer installations there) but probably would have not yielded an answer. All was answered a few weeks later when I started classes. The EE department had the PDP-11 and it was run by an organization called the UCS (Undergraduate Computer Society) on behalf of the department. This was a group of indeed undergraduates headed at the time by Michael Muuss and Pete Koziar. It was split into groups including the system programming headed by those two, documentation (led by George Toth), hardware (run by Bill Lindeman), and Operations (Joe Pistritto). It was at an early meeting of this where the whole UNIX things was explained to me. Also, having pretty much BASIC’d myself out in high school (We used HP 2000 systems that only ran basic) and was desperate for a higher level language (I’d done some Fortran and Cobol as well as APL and PLUM (and odd PL/I-ish variant at UofM), I set to learn C. At the time there were mimeographed copies of K&R’s document which was the first chapter of “The C Programming Language.” Mike Muuss, always the one to mentor someone, helped review my early stabs at C. I remember typing many of these on a Model 33 using \( \) for curly braces, etc… I quickly moved through becoming an operator (where you had to demonstrate knowledge of the file system structure as well as use of icheck/dcheck/clri and the like to recover from crashes). Mike then mentored me through basic system programming. He printed out a copy of the kernel sources for me. I volunteered to debug some device drivers George Toth had written and Mike spent a night half sleeping on a bean bag chair in the computer room supervising my stabs at Kernel work. At that point UNIX did crash a bit and this wasn’t helped by the fact that there were many students who thought that crashing or otherwise hacking on the machine was sport. I rapidly became adept at working both sides of the scheme, but trying to break the machine from user mode and then going back and fixing things (either ones I had found or figuring out what others had done). It was probably the only machine other than ones I owned myself that I was deeply involved in all aspects of. The University had a graphics display system donated to them and I set about using a DR-11 to interface it. After college I was hired to do database work on an RSX-11M system. However, the QA department had just gotten in to PWB and source code control so I got deputized into helping set up an IS PWB system to maintain the source and project documentation. It was here that I hacked on the -ms macro package and the lineprinter spooler to handle security classifications. About six months into it, I ran into Mike and former classmates Bob Miles and Doug Kingston at a Unix conference and they told me they were porting UNIX to a supercomputer, the Delelcor HEP. I actually had a HEP manual (my friends at the UofM had given it to me after they passed at doing the software). Soon I was back at BRL working with Mike doing not only the HEP (I did the ld and F77 ports and all the IO system, as well as conspiring with Denelcor’s Burton Smith on redesigning the IO system so it had reasonable performance), but also on early TCP/IP work. I was going to use the MIT C gateway (written by fellow list member Noel Chiappa) but support from MIT was problematic as Noel had been deported to Bermuda (or some such thing) at the critical time, so I wrote my own based on my own pidjin operating system, though it booted using a UNIX boot block and filesystem. Among other things I did, having detested the C shell syntax, was add many features (notably job control and the TCSH-style command line editing) to /bin/sh. (KSH hadn’t escaped the labs yet). Amusingly, since I sat down at a UNIX conference and explained to some guys working on some of the open source shells how job control actually worked, my name showed up in many of the Linux manual set as a contributor. Those were really the glory days. Mike’s standard answer to any computer problem at the labs was “Let’s put UNIX on it” and we usually did. I then went off to spend several years as a University administrator (Rutgers) and then got sucked into a startup Image Processing company where I remained for 21 years only randomly dabbling in UNIX. Though several years in I was using a MIPS workstation. Of course, I was using /bin/sh and absent mindedly typed “fg.” It came back and said “Job control not enabled.” That was odd, I thought. It sounds like something I wrote. I typed “set -J” and it said “Job control enabled.” Holy crap, this is one of my shells. I later found that Doug Gwyn had put my shell on his SYSV-on-BSD emulation package tape. The mach guys included the shell from that in all their distributions, so any mach-derived system had a “ron shell” on it. From david at kdbarto.org Sun Oct 13 02:12:19 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 09:12:19 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191012030155.GG3558@mcvoy.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> <20191012030155.GG3558@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <7F3CB32A-3D7F-4D49-80CC-C9EEE61DCC68@kdbarto.org> > On Oct 11, 2019, at 8:01 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 09:41:07PM -0500, ricercar at lycos.com wrote: >> I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I >> learned that quite a bit later. > > If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense. You > had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see > all of it in real time, that was wasteful. ed let you see as much as > you needed and as little as was productive. And it worked without > termcap. ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what > it needs to do and no more. > > ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the > days when getting a print out took a day or so. pic(1) is a great > example of that. I *love* pic because I can look at the input to > pic and I can see what it will look like. xfig and friends are > not so much. After using ed and other Unix programs I convinced a member of the UCSD Pascal project that having a line oriented editor would make sense. YALOE (Yet Another Line Oriented Editor) was the result. It took almost all of the commands that ed did and so familiarity with one would allow you to work with the other. The simplicity of ed was so nice. One other thing using ed forced me to do was to keep my files small. Large files would quickly become something you had to hunt around in. Small files were easier to edit. David From athornton at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 03:59:24 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 10:59:24 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <7F3CB32A-3D7F-4D49-80CC-C9EEE61DCC68@kdbarto.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> <20191012030155.GG3558@mcvoy.com> <7F3CB32A-3D7F-4D49-80CC-C9EEE61DCC68@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: Now I'm trying to remember if I ever had a single epiphanic a-ha moment. I don't think I did. I remember being introduced to Unix the summer before my senior year of high school, when I was a research intern at a physics lab at UT Austin. I learned very little about Unix, but learned how to drive Emacs inexpertly (I remain pretty mediocre at it thirty years later) and how to read and post to Usenet. At Rice, although by my sophomore year I was making beer money as a student systems programmer on our VM/CMS system, I'd gravitated to the Sun3/60 workstations we had around the place. And it would have been, I guess, in the fall of my sophomore year that I started playing around with Linux. By the spring, IIRC, I had gotten 4 more MB of discrete DIP RAM (for my Gateway 2000 386DX/25) and repartitioned my hard disk (65MB RLL, IIRC). The rest of undergrad life and graduate school I multibooted between DOS-Windows, OS/2, and Linux, but my primary environment became Linux/X by, oh, 1997 or so. It became OS X in the early 2000s (too bad BeOS didn't make it) but that is (from my perspective as not-a-kernel-developer) just a BSD with a nice GUI; that's where I've stayed in terms of my favorite interactive environment. As far back as 1998 I remember someone saying to me "I've never seen someone use a GUI as just a collection of terminal windows before." My graduate advisor was Mike Mahoney, so I strongly suspect I absorbed a lot of the Way Things Ought To Be from him. Which is why I guess I feel like the following principles are basically axioms of how you should design an operating system: 1) everything's a file, and a file is just an unstructured stream of bytes. Device drivers look like files and give you byte streams 2) input on stdin, output on stdout, errors to stderr 3) pipe things that do #2 together to compose complex functionality. Record semantics are the responsibility of the communicating applications to know, not the pipeline layer, which just transmits bytes 4) fork() and exec() I am willing to grudgingly recognize that #4 in particular is not a great way to create UI-intensive user-facing apps, and that you do need some sort of threading/lightweight process model to deal with a bunch of asynchronous interrupt-triggered user interactions. But for something operating as a classic transforming filter, which really *is* most computing problems, those four things do nicely. Adam -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nobozo at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 05:10:12 2019 From: nobozo at gmail.com (Jon Forrest) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 12:10:12 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> <20191012030155.GG3558@mcvoy.com> <7F3CB32A-3D7F-4D49-80CC-C9EEE61DCC68@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <3171e2de-fa39-2112-f2fc-bd901885962e@gmail.com> I was a new grad student at UC Santa Barbara (where I did my undergrad) in ~1977. Somebody who I had found for my committee had just returned from a stay at Bell Labs, and he told me about this thing called Unix. It sounded very interesting, so I asked around. It turned out that the Computer Center, where all computing was done back then, had a PDP11/45 on which they ran RSTS during the day, and Unix at night. In fact, somebody had created a sign in one of the terminal rooms that said "Oh say can you C by the dawn's early light". which very accurately described my life back then, because I was spending many a night learning C, and was getting used to seeing the dawn's early light while doing so. Not exactly an "Aha" moment, but what I learned from spending these sleepless nights is what got me started on a career that lasted ~40 years. Jon Forrest From michael at kjorling.se Sun Oct 13 05:33:53 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 19:33:53 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <7b7gk3rkhnthgh4gqstmg3gb@localhost> On 11 Oct 2019 06:55 +1000, from wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey): > What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? My Unix moment wasn't anywhere near as distinct as some other peoples'. It was rather very much a gradual process. I got Internet access of my own as I recall some time in 1996. (I'd got a modem only a year or so earlier.) I definitely had Internet access and my own e-mail address in mid-1996. At that time, having had problems installing Windows 95 on top of 3.1x, I believe I was still running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on MS-DOS. Before I figured out how to get Trumpet Winsock to talk to my ISP (it probably would have gone more easily if not for the fact that due to still young age at the time and English not being my native language I was rather Englishtically challenged), that meant dial-up and log in to my ISP's Unix systems, which I mainly used to send and receive e-mail using Pine (which I _was_ able to figure out how to use). Looking back today at some of the e-mails from around that time, I'm guessing that system ran Solaris; the message-IDs from the oldest e-mails I still have clearly indicate "Pine.SOL.3.92" but a quick web search for what SOL meant to Pine turned out to be rather unhelpful. Also somewhere around that same time, someone first introduced me to Linux, but the two of us just weren't ready for each other at the time. I dipped my toes twice before taking the plunge to using Linux (then Red Hat 6.2) as my main desktop OS some time in mid-2000. Even then it took a while to get used to, but on the whole, here I am almost two decades later, not looking back... (though I do have to use Windows at work.) -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From cym224 at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 05:39:54 2019 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 15:39:54 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: References: <20191010131848.C13DC18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On 10/10/19 22:46, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Noel Chiappa wrote: > >> DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; e.g. the "pdp11 >> peripherals handbook" (to transcribe the cover exactly) uses "PDP-11" >> several times on pg 1-1. > > And being an acronym it is of course upper-case... At the risk of being labelled a pedant. from the OED: acronym orig. U.S. (ˈækrənɪm) [f. acr(o- + -onym after homonym.] A word formed from the initial letters of other words. Hence as v. trans., to convert into an acronym (chiefly pass. and as pa. pple.). Also acroˈnymic a.; acroˈnymically adv.; ˈacronyming vbl. n.; ˈacronymize v. trans. vs. initialism (ɪnˈɪʃəlɪzm) [f. initial n. + -ism.] The use of initials; a significative group of initial letters. Now spec. a group of initial letters used as an abbreviation for a name or expression, each letter or part being pronounced separately (contrasted with acronym). N. > -- Dave From tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk Sun Oct 13 06:42:24 2019 From: tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk (Tony Travis) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 21:42:24 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers In-Reply-To: References: <20191010131848.C13DC18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On 12/10/2019 20:39, Nemo Nusquam wrote: > On 10/10/19 22:46, Dave Horsfall wrote: >> On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Noel Chiappa wrote: >> >>> DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; e.g. the "pdp11 >>> peripherals handbook" (to transcribe the cover exactly) uses "PDP-11" >>> several times on pg 1-1. >> >> And being an acronym it is of course upper-case... > > At the risk of being labelled a pedant. from the OED: Hi, Nemo. It takes one to know one! > https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/acronym What is interesting about this definition is that an 'acronym' is pronounced as a word (i.e. not spelled out as letters). So, from that point of view PDP-11 is an 'initialism' and not an acronym :-) > https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/initialism Which opens up a whole area of controversy about how to pronounce: vi In my experience, research users and hackers spell it out as "vee eye" as originally described by Bill Joy, but business/enterprise users tend to pronounce it as "vye" instead. Well, I'm a research *nix user so I spell "vi" out, but my dark secret is that I do pronounce "vim" as a full word and don't spell it out... I suppose this is just about recognition of a suitable peer group that agree, but it really sets my teeth on edge when people pronounce "vi"! Anyone else got pet hates about how people pronounce *nix commands? There are many pointless discussions about this already on the Internet, so please only post comments here of historical interest like mine :-) Bye, Tony. -- Minke Informatics Limited, Registered in Scotland - Company No. SC419028 Registered Office: 3 Donview, Bridge of Alford, AB33 8QJ, Scotland (UK) tel. +44(0)19755 63548 http://minke-informatics.co.uk mob. +44(0)7985 078324 mailto:tony.travis at minke-informatics.co.uk From steffen at sdaoden.eu Sun Oct 13 07:32:53 2019 From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 23:32:53 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <3d9ff257-8505-8792-abcf-fd44846b58f1@lycos.com> Message-ID: <20191012213253.72mf5%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Richard Salz wrote in : |My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code \ |in the BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes \ |that I wrote communicate.  Without a pipe!  (I'd already used |Unix for a few years and didn't think twice, it was just a natural \ |fit.  But sockets, woah.) Oh yes, and having a single-threaded HTTP server which could serve small static files to hundreds (128) of (test) clients concurrently on a Cyrix 166, simply by using non-blocking I/O and select(2) (through event driven C++ objects). (And by that time i think / seem to recall from computer magazine article JAVA implemented such I/O / xy monitors by creating a thread of execution, and the select(2) Cygwin code that i have seen was _so_ complicated and expensive, it was a real Aha!, just like in Kate Bush's "Wow".) --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) From gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 08:38:23 2019 From: gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com (Gregg Levine) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 18:38:23 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <7b7gk3rkhnthgh4gqstmg3gb@localhost> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <7b7gk3rkhnthgh4gqstmg3gb@localhost> Message-ID: Hello! Actually Michael you're not alone in the problems regarding Trumpet Windsock. I spent an exhaustive summer several years ago trying to get it to work. And that was on my backup machine. I did get Win95 to install onto Win3.11 without a problem. It only seems hard. By time the string of events that I described above happened within the Linux world, well that's where I am now. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Sat, Oct 12, 2019 at 3:34 PM Michael Kjörling wrote: > > On 11 Oct 2019 06:55 +1000, from wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey): > > What was your "ahah" moment when you > > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > > previously used? > > My Unix moment wasn't anywhere near as distinct as some other > peoples'. It was rather very much a gradual process. > > I got Internet access of my own as I recall some time in 1996. (I'd > got a modem only a year or so earlier.) I definitely had Internet > access and my own e-mail address in mid-1996. > > At that time, having had problems installing Windows 95 on top of > 3.1x, I believe I was still running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on > MS-DOS. > > Before I figured out how to get Trumpet Winsock to talk to my ISP (it > probably would have gone more easily if not for the fact that due to > still young age at the time and English not being my native language I > was rather Englishtically challenged), that meant dial-up and log in > to my ISP's Unix systems, which I mainly used to send and receive > e-mail using Pine (which I _was_ able to figure out how to use). > > Looking back today at some of the e-mails from around that time, I'm > guessing that system ran Solaris; the message-IDs from the oldest > e-mails I still have clearly indicate "Pine.SOL.3.92" but a quick web > search for what SOL meant to Pine turned out to be rather unhelpful. > > Also somewhere around that same time, someone first introduced me to > Linux, but the two of us just weren't ready for each other at the > time. I dipped my toes twice before taking the plunge to using Linux > (then Red Hat 6.2) as my main desktop OS some time in mid-2000. Even > then it took a while to get used to, but on the whole, here I am > almost two decades later, not looking back... (though I do have to use > Windows at work.) > > -- > Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se > “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person > is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) > From crossd at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 11:37:49 2019 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 21:37:49 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > I'm afraid I have a rather pedestrian story. Like many folks in the 80s, we had a home computer, and in early high school I got kind of hooked on this idea of using a modem to call other computers. I remember one of the kids at school telling me, "don't use DOS unless you're afraid of speed." At the time, I had no real conception of what that meant, nor how fundamentally wrong it was, but hey, ok. Our home machine was actually a Mac, but I managed to convince the family that a PC clone running DOS would be a better machine. Dad relented, a suitable machine was acquired and while it is likely the thing would have become another object gather dust, an unfortunate encounter with a solid object at a high rate of speed basically ended my changes of becoming a professional skateboarder and the (new) computer filled the void. As I was recuperating from that broken collar bone, I got into the idea of learning C. My dad, an engineer, mentioned to me that the folks at his company were using Sun machines and the word "Unix" hung in the air. It was mysterious and cool. Eventually, I saved up enough money to order a copy of Coherent, which while interesting, was abstruse and opaque: let's face it, DOS was written to drive what amounted to souped up microcontrollers; things were pretty understandable in that world once you achieved a basic level of competence. But this Unix thing sounded intriguing and I wanted to learn more. Getting access was a challenge. Coherent didn't really seem like the thing. About a year of DOS and some Coherent later, I fell in with a crowd of undergrads at the local university who were mostly CS/EE/Math majors and that cemented things: it pains me somewhat to admit it, but I got into Unix because that's what the cool kids were doing. I ditched DOS and Coherent and installed NetBSD. Interestingly, I found a Linux distribution somewhere, and we had that running in a lab for a while, but it didn't stick; I still thought BSD was better and at the time, that was probably (technically) true. Besides, we were mostly running RISC machines running various commercial Unix variants; the BSD/Linux stuff was just for messing around and/or for home use. The one unique quirk in this anecdote is that, at some point, I did two weird things: 1) I saw an ad locally for a guy selling a DECstation running Ultrix and I bought it. I could never get X to work on my 486, but it sure worked on the DECstation, so I had a graphical environment at home. 2) I bought a VAX off USENET. Not a "real" VAX in the 10th edition sense, but a desktop VAXstation. I ran VMS on that. Both of those machines are probably still down in my basement somewhere.... Anyway, while the kids were running Linux at home, most people I knew really wanted a RISC workstation and I had one as well as a personal VAX. That definitely gave me some street cred for a while. At some point I had learned enough technically to realize that Unix really was better than the alternatives I had access to; I liked VMS, but it was specific to a limited set of hardware and seemed more complex than Unix for little benefit. Some people claimed it was simpler, though; I'm not sure in what sense they meant, even today. Some of the college folks I was spending time with used the local mainframe (VM/ESA) a fair bit and RSCS was a big deal locally. I played around with it, but never found it all that interesting; it seemed to me that Unix did everything the mainframe could do, but, well, better. So yeah, that's it: it's kind of sad, but I ran Unix because people told me Unix was better. And while on the one hand it was obviously better than DOS, I had limited exposure to other systems from which to form a real opinion about its relative merits with respect to similarly ambitious designs. I see now the superiority of the design relative to other common systems of the day, but that's a perspective developed after the fact, as opposed to something that I saw or felt at the time. One more aside here: Doug lambasted the Macintosh earlier, but in retrospect I'm really glad that our first computer was a Mac. It was never a machine that was designed for command-line use; hence why something was simple as "Hello, World!" would be so complex. But it did have a regularity of interface and was simple enough that for years I never realized a computer could be any different. I didn't appreciate the value of those early lessons and how they shaped how I thought about how a system should work until much, much later. - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jon at fourwinds.com Sun Oct 13 11:57:47 2019 From: jon at fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 18:57:47 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <201910130157.x9D1vl7x028976@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Well, I guess mine is kinda weird. I had messed with a number of computer systems a litle bit and then became proficient with 516-TSS as a result of being part of the explorer scout post at BTL Murray Hill in high school. Interesting note is that one of my advisors who wrote a lot of 516-TSS interviewed Ken for his job at BTL. Ended up with a paid job at BTL starting near the end of my senior year of high school. Needed to document my work. Don't remember why, but my group acquired a PDP-11/40 that was across the hall from the 516 lab in building 2 that was running UNIX version 3. I started using roff on it to do my documentation which meant learning ed and a bunch of other tools. Of course, I took the manual home and read it cover to cover and started messing around with the various cool tools that it had and was hooked. Jon From rudi.j.blom at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 13:45:41 2019 From: rudi.j.blom at gmail.com (Rudi Blom) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 10:45:41 +0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: Not sure I had an "aha erlebnis" with UNIX. I'd done some testing on a Philips PTS6000 with T.O.S. All assembler code with debugging syslod the most fun (breakpointing code which moves itself in memory). Then I was a user on VAX 11/730, 11/750 with Ultrix which was a bit of a step down. The VAXes run VMS during the week and only in weekends we could place our disk pack and boot Ultrix. Funny feeling to go home when colleagues arrive in the morning. Later "Propriety UNIX" versions based on System III, 7, V. No source. Still had shells, command line, scripts, a bit of programming in C if all else fails (or is too slow). Never liked Windows. In that sense maybe more an 'aha windows' moment to quickly forget :-) Cheers, uncle rubl From richard at inf.ed.ac.uk Sun Oct 13 23:53:44 2019 From: richard at inf.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 14:53:44 +0100 (BST) Subject: [TUHS] Awk for CSV files In-Reply-To: Larry McVoy's message of Thu, 10 Oct 2019 19:56:54 -0700 Message-ID: <20191013135344.E0F4C292AD4E@macaroni.inf.ed.ac.uk> I was reminded of this by Larry's comment: > I miss Brian on this list. I've interacted with him over the years, the > one I remember the most was I was trying to do an awk like interface to a > key/value "database". Recently I've had to deal with a lot of data in CSV (comma-separated-value) format. Awk is *almost* prefect for this, but of course doesn't handle the quoting of fields that contain commas. One can usually work around it by finding a character that doesn't occur in the data and converting the CSV file to use that as the separator, but it's not ideal. Awk's input could easily be modified to handle CSV files, but output would be a bit more difficult, because you don't specify field boundaries explicitly on output. One possibility would be a printf() format specifier that takes a field and quotes it appropriately. -- Richard -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. From arnold at skeeve.com Mon Oct 14 00:57:31 2019 From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 08:57:31 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Awk for CSV files In-Reply-To: <20191013135344.E0F4C292AD4E@macaroni.inf.ed.ac.uk> References: <20191013135344.E0F4C292AD4E@macaroni.inf.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: <201910131457.x9DEvVGa026545@freefriends.org> Awk and csv isn't new. Googling 'awk csv' gets you a bunch of results. There is also the 'csv' dynamically loadable extension for gawk to be found in the gawkextlib project. Contact me off-list if you want more details. Thanks, Arnold Richard Tobin wrote: > I was reminded of this by Larry's comment: > > > I miss Brian on this list. I've interacted with him over the years, the > > one I remember the most was I was trying to do an awk like interface to a > > key/value "database". > > Recently I've had to deal with a lot of data in CSV > (comma-separated-value) format. Awk is *almost* prefect for this, but > of course doesn't handle the quoting of fields that contain commas. > One can usually work around it by finding a character that doesn't > occur in the data and converting the CSV file to use that as the > separator, but it's not ideal. > > Awk's input could easily be modified to handle CSV files, but output > would be a bit more difficult, because you don't specify field > boundaries explicitly on output. One possibility would be a printf() > format specifier that takes a field and quotes it appropriately. > > -- Richard > > -- > The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in > Scotland, with registration number SC005336. From robert at timetraveller.org Mon Oct 14 01:00:43 2019 From: robert at timetraveller.org (Robert Brockway) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 01:00:43 +1000 (AEST) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. Well I've been on this list for 13 years (just checked) but I'll jump in. I've mostly lurked with probably less than 13 comments total. > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? I had run Microware OS-9 as a teenager which is somewhat Unix like so some commands were familiar to me from the outset, but my Unix ahah moment is almost embarrassingly simple. I was trying to arrange to meet with a fellow student during 2nd year at University to work on a project. It was 1992 so neither of us had a calendar readily available. I turned to the dumbterm in front of me and said "If Unix had a calendar command I think it would be 'cal'". I typed cal and when it worked I realised I found Unix so much more intuitive than other OSes I had used in the past. I used Unix at university for the next couple of years, installed Linux at home in 1994 and a year later I founded a Unix user group[1]. At the first meeting I hoped we wouldn't run out of things to talk about. I had a lot to learn. [1] Which is still going to this day. http://www.humbug.org.au. Rob From arnold at skeeve.com Mon Oct 14 01:33:09 2019 From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 09:33:09 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <201910131533.x9DFX9Ev028135@freefriends.org> Warren Toomey wrote: > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? I first met Unix in the fall of 1980, after a two-year hiatus from college. Up to then, I'd only used Sperry Univac mainframes and a weird Xerox computer (only a little) and punch cards on an IBM 1130. In the interim, the college gave the undergrads access to a PDP-11/70 at the med school running IS/1 - Interactive Systems' commercial version of V6. No access for us to source code, though. :-( I/O redirection and space separated arguments were really cool, as well as pipelines. Light years ahead of anything else. More or less simultaneously, someone lent me their copies of "Software Tools" and "The C Programming Language" (which I immediately got my own copies of). Software Tools opened my eyes to the whole Unix philosophy. K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read. I then read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked. I decided pretty quickly during the course of that first year with Unix that I only wanted to work with C and Unix. Both were so far ahead of everything else... Arnold From lm at mcvoy.com Mon Oct 14 01:41:45 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 08:41:45 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <201910131533.x9DFX9Ev028135@freefriends.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <201910131533.x9DFX9Ev028135@freefriends.org> Message-ID: <20191013154145.GA7864@mcvoy.com> On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 09:33:09AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote: > K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read. I then > read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked. Agreed, it's an awesome book. All the stuff you need is there and there is no fluff. I suspect people will still be reading that book 50 years from now. From davidpotesta at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 01:47:33 2019 From: davidpotesta at gmail.com (David Potesta) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 10:47:33 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191013154145.GA7864@mcvoy.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <201910131533.x9DFX9Ev028135@freefriends.org> <20191013154145.GA7864@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: I just bought my first copy about 3 months ago. On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 10:42 AM Larry McVoy wrote: > On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 09:33:09AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote: > > K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read. I then > > read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked. > > Agreed, it's an awesome book. All the stuff you need is there and there > is no fluff. I suspect people will still be reading that book 50 years > from now. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon Oct 14 02:07:58 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 12:07:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <20191013160758.4F81118C07A@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Arnold Skeeve > K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read. I learned C from "Programming in C - A Tutorial", by Brian Kernighan, which for some reason seemed to have fallen into desuetude from V7 on (at least, that was the impression I got). Which was a pity, it was one of the best documents I ever read - a breeze to read through, and clear as crystal. Noel From rich.salz at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 02:25:07 2019 From: rich.salz at gmail.com (Richard Salz) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 12:25:07 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191013160758.4F81118C07A@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20191013160758.4F81118C07A@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: Man, those Bell Labs folks could really write. They were short, clear, unambiguous. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wlc at jctaylor.com Mon Oct 14 04:46:01 2019 From: wlc at jctaylor.com (William Corcoran) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 18:46:01 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Awk for CSV files In-Reply-To: <20191013135344.E0F4C292AD4E@macaroni.inf.ed.ac.uk> References: Larry McVoy's message of Thu, 10 Oct 2019 19:56:54 -0700,<20191013135344.E0F4C292AD4E@macaroni.inf.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: Today, working with v7m, SVR1, and bsd2.11 all PDP11 ports, for example, will stay booted and operational for long periods under simulation. With these older UNIX variants, working with awk and even the classic shell tools is often problematic. Moreover resource constraints seem to be a persistent annoyance under simulation. When dealing with even moderately sized text files, one is often left with writing a C program to ameliorate the limitations of any attempt to exclusively use awk, and the other classic shell tools. It’s not a leap to suggest that users running UNIX on actual metal instead of simulation faced the same resource challenges. Holy cow have things changed. Today, awk, and the other classic shell tools are amazing. Resource limitations are rare or even non-existent, especially so in the Cloud. Google seems to have led the way into taming unstructured data. Even email today is virtually one huge text stream where it’s binary element is masked by even more text. Text, text, text! All of this text data (CSV or whatever) has paved the way and extended the meaningful life of the classic shell tools and even newer tools that are now classics—-especially when an RDB is involved. Just don’t hit that null or you might need to ameliorate with C again. Truly, Bill Corcoran > On Oct 13, 2019, at 10:35 AM, Richard Tobin wrote: > > I was reminded of this by Larry's comment: > >> I miss Brian on this list. I've interacted with him over the years, the >> one I remember the most was I was trying to do an awk like interface to a >> key/value "database". > > Recently I've had to deal with a lot of data in CSV > (comma-separated-value) format. Awk is *almost* prefect for this, but > of course doesn't handle the quoting of fields that contain commas. > One can usually work around it by finding a character that doesn't > occur in the data and converting the CSV file to use that as the > separator, but it's not ideal. > > Awk's input could easily be modified to handle CSV files, but output > would be a bit more difficult, because you don't specify field > boundaries explicitly on output. One possibility would be a printf() > format specifier that takes a field and quotes it appropriately. > > -- Richard > > -- > The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in > Scotland, with registration number SC005336. > From henry.r.bent at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 05:36:30 2019 From: henry.r.bent at gmail.com (Henry Bent) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 15:36:30 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Awk for CSV files In-Reply-To: References: <20191013135344.E0F4C292AD4E@macaroni.inf.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Oct 2019 at 14:54, William Corcoran wrote: > Today, working with v7m, SVR1, and bsd2.11 all PDP11 ports, for example, > will stay booted and operational for long periods under simulation. > This has certainly been my experience as well with mature, for the era, BSD ports. Most of the problems I have encountered have been with TCP/IP issues in 2.11BSD and Ultrix 3.1 related to traffic they were never expecting. > With these older UNIX variants, working with awk and even the classic > shell tools is often problematic. Moreover resource constraints seem to be > a persistent annoyance under simulation. > I think our expectations of a 16 bit Unix are going to be well out of proportion now. When 16 and 32 bit Unix systems existed side by side it was easy to consider the resource limitations of both when programming. Now that 16 bit systems have moved completely out of general end user space we only consider the constraints of the 32 and 64 bit systems that exist side by side. Some of my interests lie in preserving early '90s hardware with original operating systems, and working within their constraints. Porting modern tools to SunOS 4 or Ultrix 4 or IRIX 4 (huh, everyone really was stuck on the same version) is a challenge but it can be done, as long as those tools do not necessarily rely on shared libraries. Backporting C99 to C89 is often not as difficult as it would seem, though it can sometimes be laborious. On the other hand, porting modern tools to my PDP 11/23 running 2.9BSD is a total non-starter for reasons that I am sure I do not have to elaborate upon here. -Henry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From peter at rulingia.com Mon Oct 14 05:46:03 2019 From: peter at rulingia.com (Peter Jeremy) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 06:46:03 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> I don't recall a specific aha moment either. Possibly it was make - I had previously expressed a wish for some sort of dependency tracking mechanism to speed up the build system I was using in my job, and had been told it couldn't be done. I was impressed that Unix provided one out of the box. On 2019-Oct-11 15:04:15 +0300, Tyler Adams wrote: >Then when Apple and Google pumped out 3 BILLION unix like devices and made >unix mainstream, it just nailed it in that unix is a really special piece >of software*.* Well, whilst Apple and Google products are built around a Unix-like core, none of them expose the Unix UI to normal users. And, if you come from a Unix background, even once you access the underlying core, the differences are more likely to trip you up than make you feel at home. Instead, they each have their own, proprietary UI, together with a relatively proprietary development environment. None of them are going to introduce a new generation to Unix or generate Unix evangelists. -- Peter Jeremy -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 963 bytes Desc: not available URL: From scj at yaccman.com Mon Oct 14 07:45:37 2019 From: scj at yaccman.com (Steve Johnson) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 14:45:37 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <3171e2de-fa39-2112-f2fc-bd901885962e@gmail.com> Message-ID: My Aha, Unix! moment was the Unix man pages, especially that they had a section for BUGS.  The very reality of it attracted me.  As Gloria Steinem said, "Something doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful!"  I notice that on Linux the older man pages still have BUG sections, but the newer ones don't.  Telling.   Even more telling is that 'man python' gives you a lot of information, but at the end where the Bugs section used to be is a section labled "LICENSING"... I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System.  The sequence that initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was: %  echo hello joe > hijoe % cat hijoe hello joe At the time, permanent file storage was a relatively new concept for mainframes, and the implementations were very influenced by space constraints and punched card images.  The IBM was worst, because for them a disc file was made to look like a tape drive -- "records" that had multiple card images on them."  In order to create a file, you had to submit a job (punched cards again) using a Job Control Language whose authors are hopefully all burning in hell at this very moment.  And the job failed if the file was already there, ...   The time sharing system was not much better -- still had the notion of card images in mind, but also an initial size, a maximum size, and a lot of settings for who could do what with the file.  In the time sharing system, a special subsystem took control and asked you roughly a dozen questions, one at a time.   It was quite common to botch one or more of the answers, in which case you got to answer all the questions again.  No wonder when the file was finally created, the system replied "Successful!". Typing the above created shock and awe followed by questions like "what's the blocking factor" and "what device is it allocated on".  Followed, mostly, by a dazed joy as they finally got it... Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Forrest" To: Cc: Sent:Sat, 12 Oct 2019 12:10:12 -0700 Subject:Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? I was a new grad student at UC Santa Barbara (where I did my undergrad) in ~1977. Somebody who I had found for my committee had just returned from a stay at Bell Labs, and he told me about this thing called Unix. It sounded very interesting, so I asked around. It turned out that the Computer Center, where all computing was done back then, had a PDP11/45 on which they ran RSTS during the day, and Unix at night. In fact, somebody had created a sign in one of the terminal rooms that said "Oh say can you C by the dawn's early light". which very accurately described my life back then, because I was spending many a night learning C, and was getting used to seeing the dawn's early light while doing so. Not exactly an "Aha" moment, but what I learned from spending these sleepless nights is what got me started on a career that lasted ~40 years. Jon Forrest -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scj at yaccman.com Mon Oct 14 08:17:46 2019 From: scj at yaccman.com (Steve Johnson) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 15:17:46 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] God vs god (was Upper/Lower at DEC) In-Reply-To: <7wpnj2wpzy.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: <3c4014d4052d6fe3afb97bdb89a4d22c7854059b@webmail.yaccman.com> There is a story (or perhaps an urban legend) that mainframe computers used all upper case, in spite of research showing lower case was easier to read, because some executive said "But with all lower case, we can't spell God's name right".  Anybody able to put some reality behind that? Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lars Brinkhoff" To:"Arthur Krewat" Cc: Sent:Sat, 12 Oct 2019 04:24:01 +0000 Subject:Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC Arthur Krewat wrote: > While BAH was more involved in PDP-10 stuff, I wonder what her take is > on this. I don't think there ever was a lower case "pdp10" on the machines. From what I see, it was "PDP-10", "decsystem10", "DECSYSTEM 20", or "DECSYSTEM 2020". -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wlc at jctaylor.com Mon Oct 14 08:30:21 2019 From: wlc at jctaylor.com (William Corcoran) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 22:30:21 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Awk for CSV files In-Reply-To: References: <20191013135344.E0F4C292AD4E@macaroni.inf.ed.ac.uk> , Message-ID: <580AE12E-384E-4C13-9EA3-F9E53A2CC4C3@jctaylor.com> Agreed. Although it seems like a lot of these processor “bits” beyond 32 are now put to use into senseless saccharin AI endeavors like autocorrect. I type “its” and it comes out as “it’s” when clearly it should have been “its” and it’s depressing, even more so when I miss it. Truly, Bill Corcoran On Oct 13, 2019, at 3:36 PM, Henry Bent > wrote: On Sun, 13 Oct 2019 at 14:54, William Corcoran > wrote: Today, working with v7m, SVR1, and bsd2.11 all PDP11 ports, for example, will stay booted and operational for long periods under simulation. This has certainly been my experience as well with mature, for the era, BSD ports. Most of the problems I have encountered have been with TCP/IP issues in 2.11BSD and Ultrix 3.1 related to traffic they were never expecting. With these older UNIX variants, working with awk and even the classic shell tools is often problematic. Moreover resource constraints seem to be a persistent annoyance under simulation. I think our expectations of a 16 bit Unix are going to be well out of proportion now. When 16 and 32 bit Unix systems existed side by side it was easy to consider the resource limitations of both when programming. Now that 16 bit systems have moved completely out of general end user space we only consider the constraints of the 32 and 64 bit systems that exist side by side. Some of my interests lie in preserving early '90s hardware with original operating systems, and working within their constraints. Porting modern tools to SunOS 4 or Ultrix 4 or IRIX 4 (huh, everyone really was stuck on the same version) is a challenge but it can be done, as long as those tools do not necessarily rely on shared libraries. Backporting C99 to C89 is often not as difficult as it would seem, though it can sometimes be laborious. On the other hand, porting modern tools to my PDP 11/23 running 2.9BSD is a total non-starter for reasons that I am sure I do not have to elaborate upon here. -Henry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nobozo at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 10:36:18 2019 From: nobozo at gmail.com (Jon Forrest) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 17:36:18 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 10/13/2019 2:45 PM, Steve Johnson wrote: > > I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to > several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers and > the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System.  The sequence that initiated > gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was: > %  echo hello joe > hijoe > % cat hijoe > hello joe A technically equivalent but more dramatic version of this that I used to use back then was a shell script that would prompt for the name of a file to display, and then display the file whose name the user entered. This would make steam come out of the ears of the IBM mainframe people because it wasn't possible to do that on the IBM mainframe in use at the time. Jon From stewart at serissa.com Mon Oct 14 12:08:03 2019 From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 22:08:03 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2C91B1E4-ACAA-4388-83B9-8A018BD9D27B@serissa.com> With JCL it is as easy to read one tape as it is to read 1000 tapes. > On 2019, Oct 13, at 8:36 PM, Jon Forrest wrote: > > > > On 10/13/2019 2:45 PM, Steve Johnson wrote: > >> I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System. The sequence that initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was: >> % echo hello joe > hijoe >> % cat hijoe >> hello joe > > A technically equivalent but more dramatic version of this > that I used to use back then was a shell script that would > prompt for the name of a file to display, and then display the > file whose name the user entered. > > This would make steam come out of the ears of the IBM mainframe > people because it wasn't possible to do that on the IBM mainframe > in use at the time. > > Jon > > > From stewart at serissa.com Mon Oct 14 12:13:34 2019 From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 22:13:34 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: I first encountered Unix as v6 on an 11/34 at Stanford Information Systems Lab. I read all the man pages and then the Lions book turned up and then we had need of some new device drivers, and then we needed to get hooked up to the Arpanet,… and it took off from there. -Larry From rp at servium.ch Mon Oct 14 12:32:36 2019 From: rp at servium.ch (Rico Pajarola) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 19:32:36 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: My first "Aha moment" was when I (accidentally) discovered job control. Being able to hit ctrl-Z while editing something, do some things, type "fg" and be back where I left off was just amazing. None of the "unix emulation" products on top of dos/windows could do that (at least at the time, the ones available to me. IIRC cygwin these days has job control). Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to anyone. Great book). The next epiphany was the discovery of `` (backticks) and xargs. Command line arguments and pipes could be transformed into each other. Just wow. Then I discovered vi and permanently lost the ability to be happy with other operating systems. On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 7:21 PM Lawrence Stewart wrote: > I first encountered Unix as v6 on an 11/34 at Stanford Information Systems > Lab. I read all the man pages and then the Lions book turned up and then > we had need of some new device drivers, and then we needed to get hooked up > to the Arpanet,… and it took off from there. > > -Larry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From toby at telegraphics.com.au Mon Oct 14 19:37:16 2019 From: toby at telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 10:37:16 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] God vs god (was Upper/Lower at DEC) In-Reply-To: <3c4014d4052d6fe3afb97bdb89a4d22c7854059b@webmail.yaccman.com> References: <3c4014d4052d6fe3afb97bdb89a4d22c7854059b@webmail.yaccman.com> Message-ID: <906baa19-11b4-fef3-d853-0b17eb200c3f@telegraphics.com.au> On 2019-10-13 11:17 p.m., Steve Johnson wrote: > There is a story (or perhaps an urban legend) that mainframe computers > used all upper case, in spite of research showing lower case was easier > to read, because some executive said "But with all lower case, we can't > spell God's name right".  Anybody able to put some reality behind that? > Did nobody explain to the executive that, like printed typography for FIVE HUNDRED years prior, that a character set with lower case would include BOTH CASES? (Typographic research doesn't claim that lower case _only_ is easier to read, and there are reasons to believe it is not.) > Steve > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > "Lars Brinkhoff" > > To: > "Arthur Krewat" > Cc: > > Sent: > Sat, 12 Oct 2019 04:24:01 +0000 > Subject: > Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper > and Lower case at DEC > > > Arthur Krewat wrote: > > While BAH was more involved in PDP-10 stuff, I wonder what her take is > > on this. > > I don't think there ever was a lower case "pdp10" on the machines. > From what I see, it was "PDP-10", "decsystem10", "DECSYSTEM 20", > or "DECSYSTEM 2020". > From michael at kjorling.se Mon Oct 14 19:49:26 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 09:49:26 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp at servium.ch (Rico Pajarola): > Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to > anyone. Great book). Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books USD 1 for that book and a few others. I made a longer post about that bundle to the COFF list. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From crossd at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 21:57:14 2019 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 07:57:14 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix 50 event at BTL Murray Hill? Message-ID: This just came over another list, and I'm surprised not to have seen anything about it here. Anyone heard about it? https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/12/1625237/bell-labs-plans-big-50th-anniversary-event-for-unix - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thomas.paulsen at firemail.de Mon Oct 14 22:22:47 2019 From: thomas.paulsen at firemail.de (Thomas Paulsen) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 14:22:47 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix 50 event at BTL Murray Hill? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: isn't late October somewhat too late as Ken did his work in summer '69. --- Ursprüngliche Nachricht --- Von: Dan Cross Datum: 14.10.2019 13:57:14 An: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Betreff: [TUHS] Unix 50 event at BTL Murray Hill? > This just came over another list, and I'm surprised not to have seen > anything about it here. Anyone heard about it? > > https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/12/1625237/bell-labs-plans-big-50th-anniversary-event-for-unix > > > - Dan C. > From jose.a.guerra at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 22:34:47 2019 From: jose.a.guerra at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?Sm9zw6kgR3VlcnJh?=) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 08:34:47 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix @ 50 Message-ID: https://www.bell-labs.com/unix50/event/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From terry at jon.es Mon Oct 14 23:29:27 2019 From: terry at jon.es (Terry Jones) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 15:29:27 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] A UNIX shell based on Python Message-ID: I wrote a UNIX shell based on Python the other night in case anyone's interested: https://github.com/terrycojones/daudin Apologies for a modern instead of an historic subject... Terry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Tue Oct 15 01:32:53 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 11:32:53 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <201910141532.x9EFWrjC001713@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Apropos of Steve Johnson's evocative description of JCL and other pre-Unix OS interfaces, doing legwork for Multics I ran the following experiment on a lot of then-current time-sharing systems. As a model of creating and installing a new compiler, I used a very short Fortran program that simply copied its input to its output, stopping after finding END in column 7 of the input. The drill was compile the program run it, using its own source as input compile the freshly made output file This failed on every system I tried it on, though local experts could intervene with magic to overcome the gratuitous file-type distinctions that typically got in the way. Dartmouth's DTSS came closest, but inexplicably, even to the gurus, it had a special prohibition against a program reading the source from which it was compiled. Incidentally, my favorite manifestation of JCL-like mumbo jumbo was the ironically named FUTIL control card in GECOS. Doug From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Oct 15 02:45:58 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 12:45:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <20191014164558.A029318C079@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Doug McIlroy > doing legwork for Multics I ran the following experiment on a lot of > then-current time-sharing systems. Fascinating; you don't happen to remember the ones you tried, do you? Also, when you say "legwork for Multics", was this something done during the planning stages (so, say '64-'65), or later on? Noel From cym224 at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 04:28:20 2019 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 14:28:20 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix @ 50 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 10/14/19 08:34, José Guerra wrote: > https://www.bell-labs.com/unix50/event/ > Interesting that they did not use the iconic picture of Ken Thomson seated at the console and Dennis Ritchie standing beside him. From cym224 at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 04:36:11 2019 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 14:36:11 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: On 10/14/19 05:49, Michael Kjörling wrote: > On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp at servium.ch (Rico Pajarola): >> Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to >> anyone. Great book). > Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble > Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle. > > https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books > > USD 1 for that book and a few others. Mininum is USD1 but I humbly suggest paying more. N. (And I still have the first print edition.) From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 06:39:53 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 16:39:53 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX at 50 Message-ID: Here's the schedule -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velocityboy at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 07:10:31 2019 From: velocityboy at gmail.com (Jim Geist) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 17:10:31 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for that logo. On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 2:44 PM Nemo Nusquam wrote: > > On 10/14/19 05:49, Michael Kjörling wrote: > > On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp at servium.ch (Rico Pajarola): > >> Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to > >> anyone. Great book). > > Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble > > Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle. > > > > https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books > > > > USD 1 for that book and a few others. > Mininum is USD1 but I humbly suggest paying more. > > N. > > (And I still have the first print edition.) > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wkt at tuhs.org Tue Oct 15 08:22:43 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 08:22:43 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: <20191014222243.GA13074@minnie.tuhs.org> On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 05:10:31PM -0400, Jim Geist wrote: > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted me > an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete with a > B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for that > logo. I donated this image to Kirk from my set a while back: https://www.mckusick.com/beastie/gif/4.2daemon.gif Cheers, Warren From krewat at kilonet.net Tue Oct 15 08:56:07 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 18:56:07 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I currently work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff. Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS archives ;) Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my hands on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years because of environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a complete set of boards. I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an RM05 drive to try. art k. On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted > me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete > with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. > > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for > that logo. From velocityboy at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 09:44:41 2019 From: velocityboy at gmail.com (Jim Geist) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:44:41 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> Message-ID: I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require 3-phase? On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 6:56 PM Arthur Krewat wrote: > There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I currently > work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they > closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff. > > Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS > archives ;) > > Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my hands > on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years because of > environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a > complete set of boards. > > I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the > ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an > RM05 drive to try. > > art k. > > > On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was > > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted > > me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete > > with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. > > > > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for > > that logo. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From athornton at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 09:47:31 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 16:47:31 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> > On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require 3-phase? 730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet). I would expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know. Adam From krewat at kilonet.net Tue Oct 15 09:52:03 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:52:03 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> Message-ID: From what I remember, the 750 will run off single-phase 110 volt. So will an RM05, but it has to be 220 (which, in the US, requires two phases to make 220). I think only the RP06/7's really needed 3-phase, but even then, I could be wrong. Most of this DEC equipment really only needed single-phase, but balancing the load was always a good idea in places that were already 3-phase capable. On 10/14/2019 7:44 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it > require 3-phase? > > On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 6:56 PM Arthur Krewat > wrote: > > There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I > currently > work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they > closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff. > > Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS > archives ;) > > Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my > hands > on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years > because of > environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a > complete set of boards. > > I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the > ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an > RM05 drive to try. > > art k. > > > On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to > Unix was > > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school > gifted > > me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete > > with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. > > > > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for > > that logo. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From krewat at kilonet.net Tue Oct 15 09:54:04 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:54:04 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 10/14/2019 7:47 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: >> On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist wrote: >> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require 3-phase? > > 730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet). I would expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know. > True, the 750 might need 220. I really can't remember. But when I set up a few, with a TU78, and a few RM05's at the warehouse I was storing them, I really only needed a single phase. And again, in the US, 220 requires "two phases" but the actual equipment only needed a single source of 220. So it was "single phase". Clear as mud? :) ak From ron at ronnatalie.com Tue Oct 15 09:54:51 2019 From: ron at ronnatalie.com (Ronald Natalie) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 18:54:51 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> Message-ID: <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> There is no DEC process cabinets that is really three phase. Some of the power controllers (notably the VAX 780 and the larger PDP-11’s), that had three phase cords on them but all they do is split out the three phases as three 120V circuits. I believe Armando Stetner made use of this when he ran a VAX in his hotel room at one of the conferences, he just ran 120V extension cords all over the place to get it up. There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase). I’m not sure if the RP06’s fell into this category but some of the Storage Tek drives did. From Caipenghui_c at 163.com Tue Oct 15 09:46:05 2019 From: Caipenghui_c at 163.com (Caipenghui) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 07:46:05 +0800 Subject: [TUHS] Celebrating 50 years of Unix Message-ID: <8053C456-12E7-478D-A391-BAA0D0D1A7F1@163.com> Unix has a history of 50 years. Unix has a tremendous impact on the Internet. Is Unix ready for the next computing era? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From henry.r.bent at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 10:03:10 2019 From: henry.r.bent at gmail.com (Henry Bent) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 20:03:10 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Oct 2019 at 19:54, Arthur Krewat wrote: > On 10/14/2019 7:47 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: > >> On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > >> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it > require 3-phase? > > > > 730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet). I would > expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know. > > > > True, the 750 might need 220. I really can't remember. But when I set up > a few, with a TU78, and a few RM05's at the warehouse I was storing > them, I really only needed a single phase. > > And again, in the US, 220 requires "two phases" but the actual equipment > only needed a single source of 220. So it was "single phase". Clear as > mud? :) > > > ak > A quick trawl through the Bitsavers 11/750 field maintenance docs did not definitively answer the question. Looks like it could have been 240V 12A or 120V 24A. -Henry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From krewat at kilonet.net Tue Oct 15 10:04:00 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 20:04:00 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: <1f867fcc-0e6e-f382-7351-6a8591a860da@kilonet.net> On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote: > There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase). Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US. ak From ggm at algebras.org Tue Oct 15 10:07:34 2019 From: ggm at algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 10:07:34 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: Tracy Kidder evokes different emotions around "the soul of a new machine" -To me, the book is great because its a humanist reading of technology choices. People matter. Careers are built on seemingly trivial decisions like the size of the average door frame in a lift in Tokyo. (a brief moment in the book, from memory) I always wished it had been written about Digital Equipment and not Data General, because the only DG box I worked on (a Nova) was a dog. I know one person who came from Australia (UQ) to Maynard, to track the building of the Dec-10 destined for the campus. He had entertaining anecdotes about parking and weather. (australians are not naturally prepared for 2m of snow and the effect of parking in the wrong side of the snow shadow, which explains why the parking spots were empty for the visitor to claim) -I think the birth of the pdp-8 and pdp-11 would be fascinating. I was told the queue to sign up for pdp-8 at the IFIP floor show in the 60s in Edinburgh was a mile long: people were dog tired of walking card decks over to central computing facilities and the offer of a deskside or even desktop (if your desk was strong enough) compute engine for stats and maths and process control... Sub-floor radius limits made it hard to retrofit a Cray into the UQ machine room because the piping radii had been done for the IBM mainframe. We had to lift the raised floor for the flourinert piping. 400Hz voltage demanded a spinning metal regenerator to do frequency conversion from the Australian wallplate voltage/frequency. Our groundplane was inadequate. The Tops-10 box, the cluster of Vaxen, were completely oblivious to most of this: they did air cooling through floor venting, thats really all that mattered in their machine-room. It was the one we chose to fit the comms racks because it was the least pain to work in, and the nearest to the hosts which could actually use Internet protocols trivially on UTP or thinwire. (the IBM required us to buy a $10,000 PC to fit the line card which translated TCP/IP into IBM networking and was possibly the last piece of "thickwire" ethernet we owned) -G From lm at mcvoy.com Tue Oct 15 10:10:54 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 17:10:54 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: <20191015001054.GG905@mcvoy.com> On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 10:07:34AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote: > I always wished it had been written about Digital Equipment and not > Data General ... > -I think the birth of the pdp-8 and pdp-11 would be fascinating. +1. I'd read that book in a heartbeat. From ron at ronnatalie.com Tue Oct 15 10:06:47 2019 From: ron at ronnatalie.com (Ronald Natalie) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:06:47 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <1f867fcc-0e6e-f382-7351-6a8591a860da@kilonet.net> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> <1f867fcc-0e6e-f382-7351-6a8591a860da@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <44E546CD-352D-40C6-B4FA-B27999AE6B9F@ronnatalie.com> Absolutely INCORRECT. The drives see (and the power cord only provides) ONE phase. 208 is essentially a single phase voltage you get by connecting two of your three phase legs. 240 V on 120/240 is only single phase. > On Oct 14, 2019, at 7:04 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote: > > On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote: >> There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase). > Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US. > > ak From krewat at kilonet.net Tue Oct 15 10:27:31 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 20:27:31 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <44E546CD-352D-40C6-B4FA-B27999AE6B9F@ronnatalie.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> <1f867fcc-0e6e-f382-7351-6a8591a860da@kilonet.net> <44E546CD-352D-40C6-B4FA-B27999AE6B9F@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: <6d743a91-ef54-f107-07bd-2755ea1f4a12@kilonet.net> That's exactly my point. For example, in my house, I have two phases. Each one, to neutral, gets me 120 volts. If I use both phases, I get 220. The equipment might be "single phase 220", but I need two phases out of the electric panel to get it. Sorry, I may not have explained myself well enough ;) On 10/14/2019 8:06 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote: > Absolutely INCORRECT. The drives see (and the power cord only provides) ONE phase. > > 208 is essentially a single phase voltage you get by connecting two of your three phase legs. > 240 V on 120/240 is only single phase. > >> On Oct 14, 2019, at 7:04 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote: >> >> On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote: >>> There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase). >> Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US. >> >> ak > > From ron at ronnatalie.com Tue Oct 15 10:27:44 2019 From: ron at ronnatalie.com (Ronald Natalie) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:27:44 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Supercomputer UNIX (was Aga moments). In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: <5BEB9BF4-9357-4F59-8F0C-8D417130549E@ronnatalie.com> I’ll omit comments on Data Generals, DEC-10/20, and other non-UNIX stuff. We had a series of three supercomputers at the BRL. The first was the Denelcor HEP which was pretty much purpose built for us. Originally slated to be an Analog, then Hybrid, it ended up as a MIMD ECL-logic digital machine. Denelcor was stalled on what OS to use and was writing their own proprietary one when we stepped in and told them we would put UNIX on the thing. The thing was slated to share the main computer center room with the last Cyber 7600 ever build. We had taped out the location of all the cabinets on the floor around this building pillar. Shortly after I started at the labs, I flew out to Denelcor and noted that the machine was sitting on their floor in our configuration except they had tape where our building pillar was. It was kind of a fun research exercise. The thing had 4 PEMs which each could run 8 independent (what we would call in UNIX) processes. The hardware could also schedule for each of these up to 256 (what we would call in UNIX) threads. All the memory had two semaphores on each word (full/empty bits) and the various load/store operations could be told to “wait for full” or “wait for empty.” The I/O on the thing was a box that had 32 individual UNIBUSs on it. It’s memory showed up on the common memory bus (really a big network) without the semaphore bits. I wrote all the UNIX IO code to drive this stuff and found out that it was taking forever to start I/Os. This was because they had put the control logic on this secondary bus called (aptly) “The Low Speed Bus.” The LSB’s primary function was to get the machine booted up (which involved programming the network swtich for the regular memory channel). Confronted with the problem at the local Golden Corral one night, Burton Smith the original designer and I designed a new control system to use a spare PDP-11/34 I had that would connect things up direct to the highspeed memory. It ran the same pidjin OS that our internet routers ran (LOS…no time for sharing, uniprocessor system). Tthe thing excelled at highly parallelizable stuff like Mike’s raytrace code and really all it ever got used for is to make a movie “A Shell’s-eye view of a tank.” It got shutdown and promplty replaced with the Army’s first “real” supercomputer, a Cray X/MP. This particular machine was slated for delivery to Apple, but the Army used “emergency” authority to get Cray to give it to us. We pretty much insisted on runing UNICOS (Cray’s UNIX) rather than Cray’s prorpietary OS. As I recall, the X/MP didn’t really require anything special as far as facility goes. There’s a picture in my files somewhere of me standing in the middle of the thing peering out. One of my last jobs at BRL was to be on the selection board for the Cray 2 there. That as the previous poster states, required a lot of specialized facility work. It wasn’t installed before I left, but it was my signature that was on the $25 Million dollar procurement paperwork for that thing. Amusingly, Mike wanted to call the two machines Patton and Rommel (hey, it’s the army). We named the XMP Patton, but then one of our interns whose last name was Patton managed to wreck his car and kill himself so the powers that be decided that the Patton name would officially dedicated to him and nixed the idea of Rommel. The Cray 2 was named after long term director of the laboratory, Robert J. Eichelberger (father of modern shaped charges). The problem is that Eichelberger wasn’t a workable name on the network, and RJE had bad connotations with regard to old mainframe submittals. The machine was officially known as “Bob.” From ron at ronnatalie.com Tue Oct 15 10:33:46 2019 From: ron at ronnatalie.com (Ronald Natalie) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:33:46 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Supercomputer UNIX (was Aha moments). In-Reply-To: <5BEB9BF4-9357-4F59-8F0C-8D417130549E@ronnatalie.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <87h84f4kle.fsf@vuxu.org> <20191013194603.GB68749@server.rulingia.com> <0b49b06e-7fd7-8b0d-c568-ea11c36347df@kilonet.net> <4AA7BE7E-30B6-4F47-B745-657DDE2260E1@gmail.com> <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com> <5BEB9BF4-9357-4F59-8F0C-8D417130549E@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: One project I did get to try was to see if I could vectorize the UNIX crypt routine. There was a common joke at the time that if a hacker had a Cray, he might be able to derive a lot of passwords. Since my job a the time had officially computer security in it, I got to try. It wasn’t as much fun as converting the SGI flight simulator to use TCP/IP so that when 6PM rolled around every day all the SGI’s at the lab went into a massive dog fight. I remember being collared at an IETC meeting at NASA Ames and being forced to give them the mods. I figured I killed productivity at NASA for quite a bit with that move. From patbarron at acm.org Tue Oct 15 10:28:14 2019 From: patbarron at acm.org (Pat Barron) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 20:28:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: I don't know that I had a single "Aha!" moment, but there were a few things that just got hold of me and led me down the Unix path... The first Unix I used was V7m on a PDP-11/40, in college. By this point, I was "aware" of Unix, in theory I even knew C - but never had an actual system to try it out on until this point. I'd used other operating systems (or things that called themselves operating systems...), primarily TRSDOS, CP/M, OS1100, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, and VMS. Unix was certainly the first multiuser operating system that I ever had administrator access on. 1) The idea of taking the output of one program, and using it directly as input to another program - and the simplicity by which it was done - was revolutionary to me. It was not unusual for me at that time to do things like this by having the first program create a temporary file, and then having another program open this temporary file and use it as input, but the whole paradigm of stdin/stdout/pipes made it so you didn't even have to "know" in your program that you might need to use the output of some other program (via a temporary file) as input. That was amazing to me. 2) Unix was really the first operating system that I had full, buildable sources for. (I theoretically had access to VMS source code, but it was on microfiche and not in machine-readable form, so it was just a read-only reference.) If I wanted to see how the OS was doing something, I could look. If I wanted to change something the OS did, or add something to the OS (either in the kernel, or as a user space utility), I could do that (and I did on a couple of occasions). If something was broken, I could try to figure it out and fix it. There was this bug in V7m, where if you were on a non-separate I&D system that didn't have the floating point option (and our 11/40 did not), and you tried to run an "a.out" file that was zero length, you'd get a kernel panic. We were using the system for a computer architecture course, students were programming in assembly language, and if there was a problem with the source file the assembler would leave a zero length executable behind. Of course, students would try to run it anyway, even though "as" produced errors. We'd sometimes get 3 or 4 system crashes in the course of an evening. The students and the instructors were all up in arms because any time this would happen, everyone would lose whatever they were working on (and maybe more, if the filesystem got messed up during the panic), and if there was no one around who had a key to the computer room when it happened, it would stay down until they could find someone who had physical access and the knowledge to know how to deal with "fsck"... (The construction in the lab was pretty minimal, and the walls to most of the rooms didn't go all the way to the ceiling - sometimes when it crashed and no one was around, they'd take to climbing over the wall to reboot the system themselves - which could produce disasterous results of there were filesystem issues...) I found the problem, and I fixed it. That was my first adventure in kernel debugging... (Later, we migrated to a PDP-11/24 and we ordered the KEF11-A floating point option for it, so that problem became moot.) 3) The idea of processes being able to talk to each other (without some kind of pre-arrangement, like setting up a pipe between them, or using temporary files) was just amazing, and this was the first time I'd really seen it. I knew VMS had this thing called a "mailbox", but I never used it for anything and didn't even know what it was for. On V7m, I stumbled across the mpx(5) man page. I think the first time I came across it, I stared at it for hours, looking at the description and trying to figure out what you'd even use that functionality for. At some point it was like a lightning bolt hit me - "Oh, wait! You can use this to send messages between unrelated processes!" Except V7m came with one little proviso - the mpx code was there, but it didn't work... So I dug into it, and made it work - at least, well enough for what I wanted to use it for. I wrote a multiuser chat program with it (isn't that the first thing any undergrad does when they discover interprocess communications? :-) ). I had a similar epiphany with sockets on 4.2BSD a year or two later, under similar circumstances. The one thing I found in command with both mpx and sockets was that the documentation described the low-level functionality - but there was nothing that clearly stated, "This functionaliy is used to allow processes to talk to each other"... I'm sure there are plenty more experiences with early Unix that ensured that I'd continue down this path, but I think these are my favorites. --Pat. From andreww591 at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 11:19:24 2019 From: andreww591 at gmail.com (Andrew Warkentin) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:19:24 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I didn't really have a single "Aha" moment, but I remember borrowing some books on Unix from the library and realizing it was more powerful than anything else I'd used (up until then, I'd only really used DOS/Windows, classic Mac OS, and Apple II systems; as you can probably tell, I'm quite a bit younger than many other people on this list). Shortly afterwards, I installed Linux (initially Mandrake 8.2, but I replaced it with Debian 3.0 shortly thereafter; I still have my original Debian 3.0 install around as a VM that I use from time to time) and never really looked back. I did keep a Windows dual boot around for a while but that eventually went away (although I still do have Windows VMs around). Soon after that, I decided I was going to put together my own Unix-like OS; initially I was going to put together a NeXTStep/OS X-like Linux distribution, but then later decided I was going to write a QNX-like microkernel-based OS instead. I still don't have anything that is actually useful at the moment, although now I am making a bit better progress than in the past (I changed my mind on several parts of the design and was quite busy with other projects for a while). From andreww591 at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 11:56:38 2019 From: andreww591 at gmail.com (Andrew Warkentin) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:56:38 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Celebrating 50 years of Unix In-Reply-To: <8053C456-12E7-478D-A391-BAA0D0D1A7F1@163.com> References: <8053C456-12E7-478D-A391-BAA0D0D1A7F1@163.com> Message-ID: On 10/14/19, Caipenghui wrote: > Unix has a history of 50 years. Unix has a tremendous impact on the > Internet. Is Unix ready for the next computing era? I don't think conventional Unix (SysV/BSD/Linux) has aged very well at all. As far as I'm concerned, all "modern" conventional Unices are basically cargo cult Unix at this point (especially Linux, but I'd also say it's true of current BSD and SysV). They're just carrying forward the architecture of late-70s research Unix without really understanding the design philosophy. The conventional Unix architecture was fine on a PDP-11, but it doesn't scale well to larger, more complex systems. A modern OS should be designed with security and extensibility in mind. That being said, I believe it is still possible to write a truly modern OS that is Unix-like and compatible with programs written for conventional Unix while still being secure and extensible. That's what I'm doing with the OS I'm writing . It will be a thoroughly modern OS that will take the Unix philosophy further than it's ever been taken before (even further than Plan 9 does) and will be binary compatible with Linux. From imp at bsdimp.com Tue Oct 15 14:06:11 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 22:06:11 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I had two aha moments. First was that I really didn't want the filesystem to do logical name translation. It was simple enough to do in the program. So no way to have the kernel expand /usr/share/fubar/$USER/fu. While VMS' logical names were a cool wart on its filename stuff, the whole ball of wax had too many special cases for different device types, permission areas of logical names, logical name table nesting rules, etc. Simpler was better. The second was the simplicity of the install... boot one file to prep the disk, one to copy a fs to the future swap system and a final one to get the ball rolling... for booting off of tape, on systems with no real memory, this kept what wound up in memory small enough to live in the sub Megabyte systems ot needed to work on... though once there was a lot more, this was left behind when you could just load one kernel with a ran disk to do all the setup... the different pieces of the install acted as a Koan for how Unix worked... Warner On Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 7:19 PM Andrew Warkentin wrote: > I didn't really have a single "Aha" moment, but I remember borrowing > some books on Unix from the library and realizing it was more powerful > than anything else I'd used (up until then, I'd only really used > DOS/Windows, classic Mac OS, and Apple II systems; as you can probably > tell, I'm quite a bit younger than many other people on this list). > Shortly afterwards, I installed Linux (initially Mandrake 8.2, but I > replaced it with Debian 3.0 shortly thereafter; I still have my > original Debian 3.0 install around as a VM that I use from time to > time) and never really looked back. I did keep a Windows dual boot > around for a while but that eventually went away (although I still do > have Windows VMs around). Soon after that, I decided I was going to > put together my own Unix-like OS; initially I was going to put > together a NeXTStep/OS X-like Linux distribution, but then later > decided I was going to write a QNX-like microkernel-based OS instead. > I still don't have anything that is actually useful at the moment, > although now I am making a bit better progress than in the past (I > changed my mind on several parts of the design and was quite busy with > other projects for a while). > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From grog at lemis.com Tue Oct 15 14:27:08 2019 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 15:27:08 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Simple Unix install? (was: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20191015042708.GD7292@eureka.lemis.com> On Monday, 14 October 2019 at 22:06:11 -0600, Warner Losh wrote: > The second was the simplicity of the install... Clearly you weren't installing Interactive UNIX/386 from floppy, like my first experience. It was like pulling teeth. I wasn't alone. A year or two later (about 1994) I was contacted by the editorial team of iX, a German Unix magazine, asking if I had managed to install Consensys UNIX System V.4 (maybe from tape by this time). They were having such difficulties that they ended up with an article saying effectively "Consensys looks good, and we've heard good things from other people, but we totally failed to install it". That was one of the things that I found so refreshing with BSD/386, also round that time. Part of the issue with the System V variants was the incessant entry of activation keys for every tiny component, as well as the lack of overall documentation. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From thomas.paulsen at firemail.de Tue Oct 15 18:42:24 2019 From: thomas.paulsen at firemail.de (Thomas Paulsen) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 10:42:24 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <201910141532.x9EFWrjC001713@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910141532.x9EFWrjC001713@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: I started using cards with a sperry univac scientific mainframe, the ibm mainframes with block terminals and later ibm "midrange" computers, when I finally got a network programming job on a SNI Unix system. Finally I felt free, I had the 'I can do what ever I want' feelingup to today. From arrigo at alchemistowl.org Tue Oct 15 19:03:09 2019 From: arrigo at alchemistowl.org (Arrigo Triulzi) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 11:03:09 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Simple Unix install? (was: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?) In-Reply-To: <20191015042708.GD7292@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20191015042708.GD7292@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <56623FD9-B886-46C2-A32D-6B4B2AC20F3E@alchemistowl.org> On 15 Oct 2019, at 06:27, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > Clearly you weren't installing Interactive UNIX/386 from floppy, like > my first experience. It was like pulling teeth. Not to mention Xenix/286… the never ending 5”1/4 “HD” floppies… the ones which somehow were almost readable but not quite… then you started the install again and a different floppy failed. Was it tar on the raw floppy? I don’t remember to be honest. Arrigo From dds at aueb.gr Tue Oct 15 22:55:25 2019 From: dds at aueb.gr (Diomidis Spinellis) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 15:55:25 +0300 Subject: [TUHS] The Unix Game Message-ID: <655e3240-0795-bdf1-4997-b35041cd1863@aueb.gr> The game at https://www.unixgame.io/unix50 has you solve challenges by arranging Scratch-like blocks into shell pipelines. Neat! Diomidis From michael at kjorling.se Wed Oct 16 02:32:22 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 16:32:22 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On 10 Oct 2019 10:05 -0400, from krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat): > It's here, too: > > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/forum-cracks-the-vintage-passwords-of-ken-thompson-and-other-unix-pioneers/ The circle is now all; it's back in the blogosphere. Though Schneier refers to these as passwords of "early Internet pioneers". https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/10/cracking_the_pa.html -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From imp at bsdimp.com Wed Oct 16 13:20:47 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 21:20:47 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Simple Unix install? (was: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?) In-Reply-To: <56623FD9-B886-46C2-A32D-6B4B2AC20F3E@alchemistowl.org> References: <20191015042708.GD7292@eureka.lemis.com> <56623FD9-B886-46C2-A32D-6B4B2AC20F3E@alchemistowl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 3:03 AM Arrigo Triulzi wrote: > On 15 Oct 2019, at 06:27, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > Clearly you weren't installing Interactive UNIX/386 from floppy, like > > my first experience. It was like pulling teeth. > > Not to mention Xenix/286… the never ending 5”1/4 “HD” floppies… the ones > which somehow were almost readable but not quite… then you started the > install again and a different floppy failed. > > Was it tar on the raw floppy? I don’t remember to be honest. > Venix had a boot disk, and the rest of the disks were tar without compression... Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From patbarron at acm.org Wed Oct 16 13:50:39 2019 From: patbarron at acm.org (Pat Barron) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 23:50:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] Simple Unix install? (was: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?) Message-ID: Possibly the most time consuming install I did was installing Xenix on a bunch of Intel i310 systems. Xenix was a "secondary" OS for these systems, the main OS being iRMX. Xenix for these systems was distributed on 5.25" floppies. Lots and lots of floppies... They came in a 3-ring binder, many pages of floppies... We also had a couple of i380 systems, Xenix for those came on 8" floppies... That was time consuming, but it was just manual labor. The most unpleasasnt install I can recall was AIX 2.2.1 on the IBM-PC/RT. Which also was really (under the covers) Interactive UNIX, with some other stuff mixed in. Not only was this also time-consuming with a binder full of 5.25" floppies, but my recollection is that there were too many opportunities to make a tiny little mistake during the install and have to start all over again. --Pat. From pontus at Update.UU.SE Wed Oct 16 16:36:38 2019 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:36:38 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] The Unix Game In-Reply-To: <655e3240-0795-bdf1-4997-b35041cd1863@aueb.gr> References: <655e3240-0795-bdf1-4997-b35041cd1863@aueb.gr> Message-ID: <20191016063638.ptabgs7v27hpu45g@Update.UU.SE> On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 03:55:25PM +0300, Diomidis Spinellis wrote: > The game at https://www.unixgame.io/unix50 has you solve challenges by > arranging Scratch-like blocks into shell pipelines. Neat! This was fun! I've had it on my to-do list for years to make a tool like this. If you include "tee" (and I guess any command line tool) it could be quite interesting. With a preview function at each pipe it could be pretty useful too. But I'm digressing from the topic of this mailing list, sorry. /P From mrudge at ubuntu.com Wed Oct 16 18:20:29 2019 From: mrudge at ubuntu.com (Matt Rudge) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2019 09:20:29 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Simple Unix install? (was: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?) In-Reply-To: <56623FD9-B886-46C2-A32D-6B4B2AC20F3E@alchemistowl.org> References: <20191015042708.GD7292@eureka.lemis.com> <56623FD9-B886-46C2-A32D-6B4B2AC20F3E@alchemistowl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2019 at 10:55, Arrigo Triulzi wrote: > > On 15 Oct 2019, at 06:27, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > Clearly you weren't installing Interactive UNIX/386 from floppy, like > > my first experience. It was like pulling teeth. > > Not to mention Xenix/286… the never ending 5”1/4 “HD” floppies… the ones which somehow were almost readable but not quite… then you started the install again and a different floppy failed. > I can remember having to reinstall Xenix on a Wang PC-002. The floppy disks had been kept in a folder next to a radiator, and I had to clean the floppy drive with compressed air before we could start. Surprisingly the reinstall went smoothly, but very slowly! The real issue was getting the serial terminal board working again! Matt -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pdagog at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 23:29:45 2019 From: pdagog at gmail.com (Pierre DAVID) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2019 15:29:45 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <3171e2de-fa39-2112-f2fc-bd901885962e@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20191016132945.GA19109@vagabond> On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 02:45:37PM -0700, Steve Johnson wrote: > > >My Aha, Unix! moment was the Unix man pages, especially that they had >a section for BUGS.  The very reality of it attracted me.  As Gloria >Steinem said, "Something doesn't have to be perfect to be >wonderful!"  I notice that on Linux the older man pages still have >BUG sections, but the newer ones don't.  Telling.   Even more >telling is that 'man python' gives you a lot of information, but at >the end where the Bugs section used to be is a section labled >"LICENSING"... > >I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to >several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers >and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System.  The sequence that >initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was: >%  echo hello joe > hijoe >% cat hijoe >hello joe > Coming from a Multics background, my first view of Unix (sort of v7 ported to a Bull Mini6) was more like a rant: "cwd" on Multics has been renamed to a more cryptic "cd" on Unix, these guys have done worse! The Aha! came when I realized that redirections were so simple... Pierre From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Thu Oct 17 00:39:22 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:39:22 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <201910161439.x9GEdMjb108350@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) > > > From: Doug McIlroy > > > doing legwork for Multics I ran the following experiment on a lot of > > then-current time-sharing systems. > > Fascinating; you don't happen to remember the ones you tried, do you? > > Also, when you say "legwork for Multics", was this something done during > the planning stages (so, say '64-'65), or later on? It was probably 1965. The places we visited included at least Rand, NBS, Michigan, and Dartmouth. I specifically remember trying the experiment at Michigan and Dartmouth. There were other places, too, but they've dropped from memory. Doug From lbickley at bickleywest.com Fri Oct 18 05:29:10 2019 From: lbickley at bickleywest.com (Lyle Bickley) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 12:29:10 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] New: The Earliest UNIX Code - From the Collection of the Software History Center, Computer History Museum Message-ID: <20191017122910.40253af0@asrock> THE EARLIEST UNIX CODE: AN ANNIVERSARY SOURCE CODE RELEASE http://bit.ly/31pWcvM Cheers, Lyle -- 73 NM6Y Bickley Consulting West Inc. https://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero" From lbickley at bickleywest.com Fri Oct 18 05:21:05 2019 From: lbickley at bickleywest.com (Lyle Bickley) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 12:21:05 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] New: The Earliest UNIX Code - From the Collection of the Software History Center, Computer History Museum Message-ID: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> THE EARLIEST UNIX CODE: AN ANNIVERSARY SOURCE CODE RELEASE http://bit.ly/31pWcvM Cheers, Lyle -- 73 NM6Y Bickley Consulting West Inc. https://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero" From wkt at tuhs.org Fri Oct 18 06:44:38 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 06:44:38 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> Message-ID: <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 12:21:05PM -0700, Lyle Bickley wrote: > THE EARLIEST UNIX CODE: AN ANNIVERSARY SOURCE CODE RELEASE > http://bit.ly/31pWcvM Thanks Lyle. Yay, one of the two artifacts I've been waiting for has dropped. This is the second half of the PDP-7 source code "book", of which we've only had the first half from Norman Wilson. We now have the source to Space Travel, plus roff and sh, for the PDP-7! I've broken the single PDF from CHM into several sections and put them here: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/ 09-1-35.pdf user-mode programs: maths functions, ln, ls, moo,nm 10-36-55.pdf user-mode programs: pool game 11-56-91.pdf user-mode programs: pd, psych, rm, rn, roff, salv, sh 12-92-119.pdf user-mode programs: space travel 13-120-147.pdf user-mode programs: stat, tm, t (B interpreter?) 14-148-165.pdf user-mode programs: ttt, un We may also have the B interpreter, but I'm not sure about that. Cheers all, Warren From michael at kjorling.se Fri Oct 18 06:39:10 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 20:39:10 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] New: The Earliest UNIX Code - From the Collection of the Software History Center, Computer History Museum In-Reply-To: <20191017122910.40253af0@asrock> References: <20191017122910.40253af0@asrock> Message-ID: On 17 Oct 2019 12:29 -0700, from lbickley at bickleywest.com (Lyle Bickley): > THE EARLIEST UNIX CODE: AN ANNIVERSARY SOURCE CODE RELEASE > http://bit.ly/31pWcvM https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-earliest-unix-code-an-anniversary-source-code-release/ -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From imp at bsdimp.com Fri Oct 18 08:39:34 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 16:39:34 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 2:45 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 12:21:05PM -0700, Lyle Bickley wrote: > > THE EARLIEST UNIX CODE: AN ANNIVERSARY SOURCE CODE RELEASE > > http://bit.ly/31pWcvM > > Thanks Lyle. Yay, one of the two artifacts I've been waiting > for has dropped. This is the second half of the PDP-7 source > code "book", of which we've only had the first half from > Norman Wilson. > > We now have the source to Space Travel, plus roff and sh, for > the PDP-7! > > I've broken the single PDF from CHM into several sections and > put them here: > > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/ > > 09-1-35.pdf user-mode programs: maths functions, ln, ls, moo,nm > 10-36-55.pdf user-mode programs: pool game > 11-56-91.pdf user-mode programs: pd, psych, rm, rn, roff, salv, sh > 12-92-119.pdf user-mode programs: space travel > 13-120-147.pdf user-mode programs: stat, tm, t (B interpreter?) > 14-148-165.pdf user-mode programs: ttt, un > > We may also have the B interpreter, but I'm not sure about that. > Have these been OCR'd yet? Or just the scans? Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wkt at tuhs.org Fri Oct 18 08:51:06 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 08:51:06 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <58778A1D-5640-475A-8BF3-6F4F2A5F9B5F@tuhs.org> No OCRs yet. Warren On 18 October 2019 8:39:34 am AEST, Warner Losh wrote: >On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 2:45 PM Warren Toomey wrote: >> This is the second half of the PDP-7 source >> code "book", of which we've only had the first half from >> Norman Wilson. >> >> We now have the source to Space Travel, plus roff and sh, for >> the PDP-7! >Have these been OCR'd yet? Or just the scans? > >Warner -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. From dave at horsfall.org Fri Oct 18 11:49:59 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 12:49:59 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? When I discovered that there was nothing special about the Shell i.e. I could write/modify it, as it was not privileged in any way (unlike, cough cough, DCL etc). -- Dave From wkt at tuhs.org Fri Oct 18 13:01:03 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 13:01:03 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191018030103.GA11296@minnie.tuhs.org> On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 06:44:38AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > We now have the source to Space Travel, plus roff and sh, for > the PDP-7! > I've broken the single PDF from CHM into several sections. A few people have asked me if the scans have been OCR'd yet. The answer is no. Also, the input is not easily recognisable with automated OCR technology: I've already tried. We will have to hand transcribe the files as we did with the first half. There is already a PDP7 Unix mailing list from the past resurrection effort. If you'd like to join and help out with the transcribing, please e-mail me and I'll add you to the list. The list archive is: https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/pdp7-unix/ Cheers, Warren From lbickley at bickleywest.com Fri Oct 18 15:02:40 2019 From: lbickley at bickleywest.com (Lyle Bickley) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 22:02:40 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] New: The Earliest UNIX Code - From the Collection of the Software History Center, Computer History Museum In-Reply-To: References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> Message-ID: <20191017220240.7778b12d@asrock> I didn't do all the work - I'm just a volunteer and "messenger" from the Computer History Museum (CHM). The real work was done by David C. Brock, who is a historian of technology and director at the CHM Software History Center. Cheers, Lyle -- On Fri, 18 Oct 2019 04:52:17 +0000 William Corcoran wrote: > Thanks for all of your effort Mr. Bickley! > > From Your biggest “fan!” > > Truly, > > Bill Corcoran > > > On Oct 17, 2019, at 4:38 PM, Lyle Bickley wrote: > > > > THE EARLIEST UNIX CODE: AN ANNIVERSARY SOURCE CODE RELEASE > > http://bit.ly/31pWcvM > > > > Cheers, > > Lyle > > -- > > 73 NM6Y > > Bickley Consulting West Inc. > > https://bickleywest.com > > > > "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero" -- 73 NM6Y Bickley Consulting West Inc. https://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero" From lars at nocrew.org Fri Oct 18 15:07:50 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 05:07:50 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> (Warren Toomey's message of "Fri, 18 Oct 2019 06:44:38 +1000") References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <7wv9smpro9.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Warren Toomey wrote: > We now have the source to Space Travel Is it here, and if so, which pages? https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2019/09/102785108-05-001-acc.pdf From lars at nocrew.org Fri Oct 18 15:10:12 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 05:10:12 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <7wv9smpro9.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> (Lars Brinkhoff's message of "Fri, 18 Oct 2019 05:07:50 +0000") References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> <7wv9smpro9.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: <7wr23aprkb.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> >> We now have the source to Space Travel > Is it here, and if so, which pages? Oh, the PDF is searchable. Very nice. Page 109. From wlc at jctaylor.com Fri Oct 18 14:52:17 2019 From: wlc at jctaylor.com (William Corcoran) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 04:52:17 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] New: The Earliest UNIX Code - From the Collection of the Software History Center, Computer History Museum In-Reply-To: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> Message-ID: Thanks for all of your effort Mr. Bickley! From Your biggest “fan!” Truly, Bill Corcoran > On Oct 17, 2019, at 4:38 PM, Lyle Bickley wrote: > > THE EARLIEST UNIX CODE: AN ANNIVERSARY SOURCE CODE RELEASE > http://bit.ly/31pWcvM > > Cheers, > Lyle > -- > 73 NM6Y > Bickley Consulting West Inc. > https://bickleywest.com > > "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero" From lars at nocrew.org Fri Oct 18 15:59:30 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 05:59:30 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <58778A1D-5640-475A-8BF3-6F4F2A5F9B5F@tuhs.org> (Warren Toomey's message of "Fri, 18 Oct 2019 08:51:06 +1000") References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> <58778A1D-5640-475A-8BF3-6F4F2A5F9B5F@tuhs.org> Message-ID: <7wftjqppa5.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Warren Toomey wrote: > Warner Losh wrote: >>> We now have the source to Space Travel, plus roff and sh, for the >>> PDP-7! >>Have these been OCR'd yet? Or just the scans? > No OCRs yet. Warren What is everyone's experience with source code OCR? I have tried it a few times, and the resutls haven't been that good. In my experience it's about as much effort as typing it manually. I'm working on a GRAPHICS-2 simulation so we can run Space Travel. Obviously I'd like a machine readable version of the program. However, I'm not volunteering to do all the typing myself. From lars at nocrew.org Fri Oct 18 17:40:36 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 07:40:36 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] File system salvager, "salv" In-Reply-To: <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> (Warren Toomey's message of "Fri, 18 Oct 2019 06:44:38 +1000") References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <7wwod2o617.fsf_-_@junk.nocrew.org> Warren Toomey wrote: > 11-56-91.pdf user-mode programs: pd, psych, rm, rn, roff, salv, sh My attention is drawn to "salv". Clem Cole wrote in 2016: > The original FS tools for UNIX icheck/dcheck/ncheck were very crude. > TSS and MTS (used a similar/same FS format) and and had a similar > program in the key of fsck that Ted was familiar (as did a number of > DEC systems for that matter). Ted wrote the original version of > premordial fsck for v6 at UMich (maybe v5 - Joy probably would know > what the version of UNIX was there then). Ted took "pre-fsck" to Bell > Lab the summer between Mich and CMU. [...] https://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TUHS/Mail_list/2016-April.txt There are these V2 and V3 man pages. https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v2/v2man.pdf https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man/man8/salv.8 I see a V3 man page for dcheck, but nothing for icheck until V6. So it appears before fsck, and before icheck etc, there was salv, the file system salvager tool. Some quick searching reveals that CTSS, Multics, and ITS all also used the term salv and/or salvager for the corresponding program, so there's ample precedent. From spedraja at gmail.com Fri Oct 18 19:30:52 2019 From: spedraja at gmail.com (SPC) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 11:30:52 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <7wftjqppa5.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> <58778A1D-5640-475A-8BF3-6F4F2A5F9B5F@tuhs.org> <7wftjqppa5.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: El vie., 18 oct. 2019 8:00, Lars Brinkhoff escribió: > > What is everyone's experience with source code OCR? I have tried it a > few times, and the resutls haven't been that good. In my experience > it's about as much effort as typing it manually. > I use Office Lens with my móviles. Impressive results (for good) in some moments. Cordiales saludos / Best Regards / Salutations / Freundliche Grüße ----- Sergio Pedraja -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lars at nocrew.org Fri Oct 18 21:35:48 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 11:35:48 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Sun Spacewar Message-ID: <7w1rvanv57.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Hello, A 1983 implementation of the Spacewar game for a Sun computer has appeared. Here is some information from the author: http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2019-October/050060.html Here is a copy of the tarball: https://github.com/PDP-10/Spacewar/blob/not-pdp10/orbit.tar.gz?raw=true From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Fri Oct 18 21:52:09 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 07:52:09 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code Message-ID: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > 10-36-55.pdf user-mode programs: pool game This game, written by ken, used the Graphic 2. One of its earliest tests--random starting positions and velocities on a frictionless table with no collision detection--produced a mesmerizing result. This was saved in a program called "weird1", which was carried across to the PDP11. Weird1 was a spectacular accidental demonstration of structure in pseudo-random numbers. After several minutes the dots representing pool balls would evanescently form short local alignments. Thereafter from time to time ever-larger alignments would materialize. Finally in a grand climax all the balls converged to a single point. It was stunning to watch perfect order emerge from apparent chaos. One of my fondest hopes is to see weird1 revived. Doug From ron at ronnatalie.com Fri Oct 18 22:07:20 2019 From: ron at ronnatalie.com (Ronald Natalie) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 07:07:20 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <6F78AA08-8CCE-4BC5-9011-2A3867C54F1F@ronnatalie.com> Indeed, the shell and just about any command (save a few setuid ones) were just programs that you could just as soon have your own copies of. that was always very neat coming from more “canned” systems. > On Oct 17, 2019, at 8:49 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote: > >> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. > Welcome. >> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you >> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. >> >> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd >> previously used? > > When I discovered that there was nothing special about the Shell i.e. I could write/modify it, as it was not privileged in any way (unlike, cough cough, DCL etc). > > -- Dave From imp at bsdimp.com Fri Oct 18 23:37:06 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 07:37:06 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <7wr23aprkb.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> <7wv9smpro9.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> <7wr23aprkb.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:10 PM Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > >> We now have the source to Space Travel > > Is it here, and if so, which pages? > > Oh, the PDF is searchable. Very nice. Page 109. > Searchable means at least some ocr uas happened. I have had at best mediocre results trying to ocr the cb unix file. Maybe these will be different. Warner > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Sat Oct 19 00:28:34 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 09:28:34 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] File system salvager, "salv" In-Reply-To: <7wwod2o617.fsf_-_@junk.nocrew.org> References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> <7wwod2o617.fsf_-_@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: +1 On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 2:41 AM Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > Warren Toomey wrote: > > 11-56-91.pdf user-mode programs: pd, psych, rm, rn, roff, salv, sh > > My attention is drawn to "salv". > > Clem Cole wrote in 2016: > > > The original FS tools for UNIX icheck/dcheck/ncheck were very crude. > > TSS and MTS (used a similar/same FS format) and and had a similar > > program in the key of fsck that Ted was familiar (as did a number of > > DEC systems for that matter). Ted wrote the original version of > > premordial fsck for v6 at UMich (maybe v5 - Joy probably would know > > what the version of UNIX was there then). Ted took "pre-fsck" to Bell > > Lab the summer between Mich and CMU. [...] > > https://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TUHS/Mail_list/2016-April.txt > > There are these V2 and V3 man pages. > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v2/v2man.pdf > https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man/man8/salv.8 > > I see a V3 man page for dcheck, but nothing for icheck until V6. > > So it appears before fsck, and before icheck etc, there was salv, the > file system salvager tool. Some quick searching reveals that CTSS, > Multics, and ITS all also used the term salv and/or salvager for the > corresponding program, so there's ample precedent. > -- Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From krewat at kilonet.net Sat Oct 19 00:34:21 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 10:34:21 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <8736g06byw.fsf@vuxu.org> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <3054d652-7320-a99b-df24-67001f974d39@kilonet.net> <8736g06byw.fsf@vuxu.org> Message-ID: <90ffe509-76b5-6629-c55a-7785815fda2e@kilonet.net> This has been solved. First attempted was a full 8-character upper/lower/numeric brute force which took over 6 days and failed. Second attempt was lower-case with control characters, and succeeded in around 40 minutes. There's a control character in it ;) Because of the outpouring of negativity about these disclosures, I am reluctant to post the actual password without the user's consent, since he's still alive. If anyone knows Bill, and can contact him, please ask for permission. This was done on three nodes of a Dell HPC cluster, each node containing two Tesla V100 nVidia GPU cards, for a total of 30720 CUDA cores. Session..........: hashcat Status...........: Running Hash.Type........: descrypt, DES (Unix), Traditional DES Hash.Target......: .2xvLVqGHJm8M Time.Started.....: Fri Oct 18 06:53:25 2019 (40 mins, 1 sec) Time.Estimated...: Fri Oct 18 08:06:55 2019 (33 mins, 29 secs) Guess.Mask.......: ?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1 [8] Guess.Charset....: -1 lowernonprint.hcchr, -2 Undefined, -3 Undefined, -4 Undefined Guess.Queue......: 1/1 (100.00%) Speed.#2.........:  1666.0 MH/s (401.65ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:256 Vec:1 Speed.#3.........:  1663.7 MH/s (402.23ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:256 Vec:1 Speed.#*.........:  3329.7 MH/s Recovered........: 0/1 (0.00%) Digests, 0/1 (0.00%) Salts Progress.........: 22674229475111/29366087151182 (77.21%) Rejected.........: 0/22674229475111 (0.00%) Restore.Point....: 108847949/714924299 (15.23%) Restore.Sub.#2...: Salt:0 Amplifier:147456-148480 Iteration:0-1024 Restore.Sub.#3...: Salt:0 Amplifier:134144-135168 Iteration:0-1024 Candidates.#2....: $HEX[6e7010627170696d] -> $HEX[076710740f150509] Candidates.#3....: $HEX[0a1f676c0f150509] -> $HEX[1f710c1979060809] Hardware.Mon.#2..: Temp: 61c Util:100% Core:1380MHz Mem: 877MHz Bus:16 Hardware.Mon.#3..: Temp: 57c Util:100% Core:1380MHz Mem: 877MHz Bus:16 On 10/10/2019 8:07 AM, Leah Neukirchen wrote: > Arthur Krewat writes: > >> Oh well. Late to the party as usual ;) (time is EST, New York) >> >> -rw------- 1 ******** ***      23 Oct  9 06:09 cracked.node006.txt >> >>  $ cat cracked.node006.txt >> >> ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4! > I was notified Bill Joy's password does not yet appear in any list: > > bill:.2xvLVqGHJm8M:8:10:& Joy,4156424948:/usr/bill:/bin/csh > From royce at techsolvency.com Sat Oct 19 01:01:12 2019 From: royce at techsolvency.com (Royce Williams) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 07:01:12 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <90ffe509-76b5-6629-c55a-7785815fda2e@kilonet.net> References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <3054d652-7320-a99b-df24-67001f974d39@kilonet.net> <8736g06byw.fsf@vuxu.org> <90ffe509-76b5-6629-c55a-7785815fda2e@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 6:35 AM Arthur Krewat wrote: > This has been solved. > > First attempted was a full 8-character upper/lower/numeric brute force > which took over 6 days and failed. > > Second attempt was lower-case with control characters, and succeeded in > around 40 minutes. > > There's a control character in it ;) > I'd long suspected that someone would have done this; it would be a great way to expand the total keyspace, and extend the life of But given Ken's seminal work in password stretching and keyspace analysis, I always suspected that it was ken, not bill. in 2015, I was intrigued by the idea that he'd left a little puzzle in a hash that he knew would be publicly available. I even went so far as to construct a small FPGA cluster in pursuit of that theory: https://www.techsolvency.com/passwords/ztex/ What original caught my attention was the logic behind enforcing password quality in passwd.c during a specific era of BSD code, which exited ambiguously in a double negative of sorts, where control characters were not disallowed during password entry. (I'll try to dig up the source.) Anyway, I must have made an error in my original work in 2015, in which I found both of ken's: https://twitter.com/TychoTithonus/status/1182181560264491008 ... but managed to miss bill's entirely, thinking that it had already been cracked. In the superset of all CSRG-published distros, there are slightly more than 1400 total hashes, and one of bill's appears to have been lost in the shuffle (the other was trivial). So some hearty (and bittersweet!) kudos for solving this puzzle! It is what drove me into password auditing as a passion (and profession). Royce -- Royce Williams Tech Solvency -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From royce at techsolvency.com Sat Oct 19 01:05:01 2019 From: royce at techsolvency.com (Royce Williams) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 07:05:01 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <3054d652-7320-a99b-df24-67001f974d39@kilonet.net> <8736g06byw.fsf@vuxu.org> <90ffe509-76b5-6629-c55a-7785815fda2e@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 7:01 AM Royce Williams wrote: > On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 6:35 AM Arthur Krewat wrote: > >> There's a control character in it ;) >> > > I'd long suspected that someone would have done this; it would be a great > way to expand the total keyspace, and extend the life of > Er, "[...] extend the life of descrypt as a hashing algorithm". :) Royce -- Royce Williams Tech Solvency -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cym224 at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 03:36:57 2019 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 13:36:57 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <7wftjqppa5.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <20191017122105.0c8b07bf@asrock> <20191017204438.GA1224@minnie.tuhs.org> <58778A1D-5640-475A-8BF3-6F4F2A5F9B5F@tuhs.org> <7wftjqppa5.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: On 18/10/2019, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > Warren Toomey wrote: >> Warner Losh wrote: >>>> We now have the source to Space Travel, plus roff and sh, for the >>>> PDP-7! >>>Have these been OCR'd yet? Or just the scans? >> No OCRs yet. Warren > > What is everyone's experience with source code OCR? I have tried it a > few times, and the resutls haven't been that good. In my experience > it's about as much effort as typing it manually. Doug had an excellent comment on OCR: https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2019-February/017474.html From royce at techsolvency.com Sat Oct 19 04:32:37 2019 From: royce at techsolvency.com (Royce Williams) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 10:32:37 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <3054d652-7320-a99b-df24-67001f974d39@kilonet.net> <8736g06byw.fsf@vuxu.org> <90ffe509-76b5-6629-c55a-7785815fda2e@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 7:01 AM Royce Williams wrote: > What original caught my attention was the logic behind enforcing password quality in passwd.c during a specific era of BSD code, which exited ambiguously in a double negative of sorts, where control characters were not disallowed during password entry. (I'll try to dig up the source.) Specifically, see the eras in which passwd.c looked something like this: https://github.com/dank101/4.2BSD/blob/708b3890ac0c2f034f2840b5ee9125b3c83a05bc/bin/passwd.c#L69-L107 while (c = *p++) { if (c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') flags |= 2; else if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z') flags |= 4; else if (c >= '0' && c <= '9') flags |= 1; else flags |= 8; } if (flags >= 7 && pwlen >= 4) ok = 1; I was intrigued that the "special characters" character set was defined negatively, such that control characters would also count. Royce From steffen at sdaoden.eu Sat Oct 19 04:36:10 2019 From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 20:36:10 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <20191018183610.diq_a%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Doug McIlroy wrote in <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809 at coolidge.cs.Dartmouth\ .EDU>: |> 10-36-55.pdf user-mode programs: pool game | |This game, written by ken, used the Graphic 2. One of its |earliest tests--random starting positions and velocities on |a frictionless table with no collision detection--produced |a mesmerizing result. This was saved in a program called |"weird1", which was carried across to the PDP11. | |Weird1 was a spectacular accidental demonstration of structure |in pseudo-random numbers. After several minutes the dots |representing pool balls would evanescently form short local |alignments. Thereafter from time to time ever-larger alignments |would materialize. Finally in a grand climax all the balls |converged to a single point. | |It was stunning to watch perfect order emerge from apparent |chaos. One of my fondest hopes is to see weird1 revived. Not about random orders chaos, no, quite the opposite, but the IOCCC context 2012 was won by endoh1, a fluid simulator using "Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH)", and the "marching squares" algorithm to render particles. If the defaults for gravity (1 -> 0), pressure (4 -> 1) and viscosity (8 -> 2) are changed entertaining effects can be seen. It is like swirling, not self-organizing order out of chaos, but i wanted to post it nonetheless because of some properties of the code, for example the IOCCC Makefile introduces "make love", may also echo "You are not expected to understand this", and what else can be expected. The xxx.txt is an input file i made for this post, the competition ones are neat (a fountain, for example), but for normal gravity etc. $ make endoh1_color $ ./endoh1_color < xxx.txt And spend some time. |Doug --End of <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809 at coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: endoh1_color.c Type: text/x-csrc Size: 2275 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- #!/usr/bin/env make # # 2012 makefile # # This work by Landon Curt Noll, Simon Cooper, and Leonid A. Broukhis # is licensed under: # # Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. # # See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ ################ # tool locations ################ # SHELL= /bin/bash CP= cp CPP= cpp GUNZIP= gunzip LD= ld MAKE= make RM= rm SED= sed TAR= tar TRUE= true # Set X11_LIBDIR to the directory where the X11 library resides # X11_LIBDIR= /usr/X11R6/lib # Set X11_INCLUDEDIR to the directory where the X11 include files reside # X11_INCDIR= /usr/X11R6/include # Compiler warnings # #CWARN= #CWARN= -Wall -W CWARN= -Wall -W -pedantic # compiler standard # #CSTD= #CSTD= -ansi CSTD= -std=c99 # compiler bit architecture # # Some entries require 32-bitness: # ARCH= -m32 # # Some entries require 64-bitess: # ARCH= -m64 # # By default we assume nothing: # ARCH= # optimization # # Most compiles will safely use -O2. Some can use only -O1 or -O. # A few compilers have broken optimizers or this entry make break # under those buggy optimizers and thus you may not want anything. # #OPT= #OPT= -O #OPT= -O1 OPT= -O2 #OPT= -O3 # Libraries needed to build # LIBS= -lm # default flags for ANSI C compilation # CFLAGS= ${CWARN} ${CSTD} ${ARCH} ${OPT} # ANSI compiler # # Set CC to the name of your ANSI compiler. # # Some entries seem to need gcc. If you have gcc, set # both CC and MAY_NEED_GCC to gcc. # # If you do not have gcc, set CC to the name of your ANSI compiler, and # set MAY_NEED_GCC to either ${CC} (and hope for the best) or to just : # to disable such programs. # CC= cc #CC=clang MAY_NEED_GCC= gcc ############################## # Special flags for this entry ############################## # ENTRY= endoh1 DATA= column.txt column2.txt column3.txt corners.txt dripping-pan.txt \ evaporation.txt flat.txt fountain.txt funnel.txt funnel2.txt \ funnel3.txt leidenfrost.txt logo.txt pour-out.txt tanada.txt ALT_OBJ= endoh1_color.o ALT_ENTRY= endoh1_color # The factor of gravity # G=0 # The factor of pressure # P=1 # The factor of viscosity # V=2 ################# # build the entry ################# # all: ${ENTRY} ${DATA} @${TRUE} ${ENTRY}: ${ENTRY}.c ${CC} ${CFLAGS} -DG=$G -DP=$P -DV=$P $< -o $@ ${LIBS} # alternative executable # alt: ${ALT_ENTRY} @${TRUE} endoh1_deobfuscate: endoh1_deobfuscate.c ${CC} ${CFLAGS} -DG=$G -DP=$P -DV=$P $< -o $@ ${LIBS} endoh1_color: endoh1_color.c ${CC} ${CFLAGS} -DG=$G -DP=$P -DV=$P $< -o $@ ${LIBS} # data files # data: ${DATA} @${TRUE} ############### # utility rules ############### # everything: all alt clean: ${RM} -f ${ENTRY}.o ${ALT_OBJ} clobber: clean ${RM} -f ${ENTRY} ${ALT_ENTRY} nuke: clobber @${TRUE} dist_clean: nuke @${TRUE} install: @echo "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!" @${TRUE} # backwards compatibility # build: all @${TRUE} ################## # 133t hacker rulz ################## # love: @echo 'not war?' @${TRUE} haste: $(MAKE) waste @${TRUE} waste: @echo 'waste' @${TRUE} easter_egg: @echo you expected to mis-understand this $${RANDOM} magic @echo chongo '' "/\\oo/\\" @echo Readers shall be disallowed from not being unable to partly misunderstand this partocular final echo. # Understand the history of "I Am the Walrus" and # and in particular John Lennon's remarks on that # song and you might be confused about these next # rules in a different way. :-) # supernova: nuke @-if [ -r .code_anal ]; then \ ${RM} -f .code_anal_v3; \ else \ echo "You are not expected to understand this"; \ fi @${TRUE} deep_magic: @-if [ -r .code_anal ]; then \ ccode_analysis --deep_magic 1c2c85c7a02c55d1add91967eca491d53c101dc1 --FNV1a_hash 256-bit "${ENTRY}"; \ else \ echo "Understand different"; \ fi @${TRUE} magic: deep_magic @-if [ -r .code_anal ]; then \ ccode_analysis --mode 21701 --level 23209 --FNV1a_hash 256-bit "${ENTRY}"; \ else \ echo "These aren't the droids you're looking for Mr. Spock!"; \ fi @${TRUE} -------------- next part -------------- @ ############################################################################### # xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # # xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # # # # # # # # # # xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # # xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # # xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ # # @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ # # @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ # # # ############################################################################### From spedraja at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 06:19:14 2019 From: spedraja at gmail.com (SPC) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 22:19:14 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <20191018183610.diq_a%steffen@sdaoden.eu> References: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20191018183610.diq_a%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Message-ID: Well, It appears that CHM has published an article about "Space Travel" code... https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-earliest-unix-code-an-anniversary-source-code-release/ Cordiales saludos / Kind Regards. Gracias | Regards - Saludos | Greetings | Freundliche Grüße | Salutations -- *Sergio Pedraja* -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ken at google.com Sat Oct 19 08:04:59 2019 From: ken at google.com (Ken Thompson) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:04:59 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: References: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20191018183610.diq_a%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Message-ID: while writing "space travel," i could not get the space ship integration around a planet to keep from either gaining or losing energy due to floating point errors. i asked dick hamming if he could help. after a couple hours, he came back with a formula. i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some weird simple double integration that self corrected for fp round off. as near as i can ascertain, the formula was never published and no one i have asked (including me) has been able to recreate it. i look forward to the OCR of the code. On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 1:20 PM SPC wrote: > > Well, It appears that CHM has published an article about "Space Travel" code... > > https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-earliest-unix-code-an-anniversary-source-code-release/ > > Cordiales saludos / Kind Regards. > > Gracias | Regards - Saludos | Greetings | Freundliche Grüße | Salutations > -- > Sergio Pedraja > -- From krewat at kilonet.net Sat Oct 19 09:20:35 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 19:20:35 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: References: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20191018183610.diq_a%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Message-ID: <9053c41b-e306-8547-50fd-207e0bfb49af@kilonet.net> On 10/18/2019 6:04 PM, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > while writing "space travel," > i could not get the space ship integration > around a planet to keep from either gaining or > losing energy due to floating point errors. > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some > weird simple double integration that self > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can > ascertain, the formula was never published > and no one i have asked (including me) has > been able to recreate it. > > This reminds me of an experiment I performed comparing speeds of x86 assembler, and C, when I first started working in it. The experiment was to generate a 3D cube wireframe, and rotate it about any (or all three) of it's axes, moving it X degrees at a time. Simple vector math, really. Included perspective, so that the back-end of the wireframe cube would look smaller than the front side. I had been an assembler snob, having started in MACRO-10 on a KA10 PDP-10 in 9th grade. I always assumed assembler would be faster for anything, given the right amount of optimization. The assembler side of the experiment, I did the CGA graphics directly. I think in the C version, I used the built-in library that came with it. I no longer have the source for the C version, but I do, for the assembler version. I didn't have an 8087 floating point accelerator, so I wrote my assembler example to use two 16-bit words of integers, combining them for a 31-bit integer value with sign. Timing 1000 rotations, the assembler version took X amount of time. The C version took X*1.5 Now mind you, the C version used real floating point, and a software floating point library with no hardware accelerator. At that point, I realized C was the way to go. It had passed my experiment with flying colors. The C compiler, I believe, was from Computer Innovations, Copyright (c)1981,82,83,84,85 The reason this is similar to Ken's statement above: In the assembler version, the cube would deform quite a bit before the run would finish. A 31-bit integer didn't accurately reflect the result of the math. Over time, that slight inaccuracy really added up. The accuracy of the C version using floats was spot on.  So while I basically cheated for the assembler version, causing the deformation of the cube over time, the C version was 100% accurate even though it was slower. I wonder, is there something inherently different between PDP-11/7 floats and Intel's leading to the inaccuracy Ken mentions? Was the PDP-11 (or the -7) floating point that much different than IEEE-754 ? art k. From g.branden.robinson at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 10:57:55 2019 From: g.branden.robinson at gmail.com (G. Branden Robinson) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 11:57:55 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <9053c41b-e306-8547-50fd-207e0bfb49af@kilonet.net> References: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20191018183610.diq_a%steffen@sdaoden.eu> <9053c41b-e306-8547-50fd-207e0bfb49af@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <20191019005752.3r7srxe73v47rtuy@localhost.localdomain> At 2019-10-18T19:20:35-0400, Arthur Krewat wrote: > I didn't have an 8087 floating point accelerator, so I wrote my > assembler example to use two 16-bit words of integers, combining them > for a 31-bit integer value with sign. > > Now mind you, the C version used real floating point, and a software > floating point library with no hardware accelerator. At that point, I > realized C was the way to go. It had passed my experiment with flying > colors. The C compiler, I believe, was from Computer Innovations, > Copyright (c)1981,82,83,84,85 > > The reason this is similar to Ken's statement above: In the assembler > version, the cube would deform quite a bit before the run would > finish. A 31-bit integer didn't accurately reflect the result of the > math. Over time, that slight inaccuracy really added up. The accuracy > of the C version using floats was spot on.  So while I basically > cheated for the assembler version, causing the deformation of the cube > over time, the C version was 100% accurate even though it was slower. > > I wonder, is there something inherently different between PDP-11/7 > floats and Intel's leading to the inaccuracy Ken mentions? Was the > PDP-11 (or the -7) floating point that much different than IEEE-754 ? It sounds like it could be a simple matter of precision to me. It takes 32 bits to store a single-precision floating point value. Double-precision requires 64. In IEEE 754, the significand is 53 bits (52 bits plus the implicit leading 1). I can never remember the C type promotion rules without looking them up, but IIRC at least in some circumstances C promotes floats to doubles, at least for intermediate results. And the software floating-point library you used could well have done the same, or perhaps it used doubles all the way internally. Either of these could have prevented accumulated roundoff. I've heard, with a level of conviction somewhere between folklore and formal demonstration[1], that for many practical numerical problems, single-precision is just not quite good enough, but double-precision is ample. Somewhere between 24 and 53 bits of significant, perhaps, there is a sweet spot. The wisdom I've absorbed is, if you have to do floating-point, use doubles, unless you can clearly and convincingly articulate why you absolutely need more precision, or can get away with less. (For same 3D game-rendering applications, half-precision is adequate.) A non-quantified "single-precision will be faster" declaration should be understood to include a lot of "!!1!11" punctuation after it, and such people should be handled as delicately as any other Gentoo user. Regards, Branden [1] Example: Ben Klemens, _21st-Century C_, O'Reilly. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 833 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dave at horsfall.org Sat Oct 19 11:06:23 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 12:06:23 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] In memoriam: Ken Iverson Message-ID: We lost Ken Iverson on this day in 2004; a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, he gave us APL (and its obscure one-liners). -- Dave From krewat at kilonet.net Sat Oct 19 11:11:09 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 21:11:09 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <20191019005752.3r7srxe73v47rtuy@localhost.localdomain> References: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20191018183610.diq_a%steffen@sdaoden.eu> <9053c41b-e306-8547-50fd-207e0bfb49af@kilonet.net> <20191019005752.3r7srxe73v47rtuy@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: On 10/18/2019 8:57 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > and such people should be handled as delicately as any other Gentoo user. You sir, win the Internet today ;) From dave at horsfall.org Sat Oct 19 11:15:23 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 12:15:23 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Vaxen, my children... Message-ID: A little off-topic, but quite amusing... -- Dave ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Time to post this classic; I don't recall who wrote it. Note that the references are pretty obscure now... ----- VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. In my business, I am frequently called by small sites and startups having VAX problems. So when a friend of mine in an Extremely Large Financial Institution (ELFI) called me one day to ask for help, I was intrigued because this outfit is a really major VAX user - they have several large herds of VAXen - and plenty of sharp VAXherds to take care of them. So I went to see what sort of an ELFI mess they had gotten into. It seems they had shoved a small 750 with two RA60s running a single application, PC style, into a data center with two IBM 3090s and just about all the rest of the disk drives in the world. The computer room was so big it had three street addresses. The operators had only IBM experience and, to quote my friend, they were having "a little trouble adjusting to the VAX", were a bit hostile towards it and probably needed some help with system management. Hmmm, hostility... Sigh. Well, I thought it was pretty ridiculous for an outfit with all that VAX muscle elsewhere to isolate a dinky old 750 in their Big Blue Country, and said so bluntly. But my friend patiently explained that although small, it was an "extremely sensitive and confidential application." It seems that the 750 had originally been properly clustered with the rest of a herd and in the care of one of their best VAXherds. But the trouble started when the Chief User went to visit his computer and its VAXherd. He came away visibly disturbed and immediately complained to the ELFI's Director of Data Processing that, "There are some very strange people in there with the computers." Now since this user person was the Comptroller of this Extremely Large Financial Institution, the 750 had been promptly hustled over to the IBM data center which the Comptroller said, "was a more suitable place." The people there wore shirts and ties and didn't wear head bands or cowboy hats. So my friend introduced me to the Comptroller, who turned out to be five feet tall, 85 and a former gnome of Zurich. He had a young apprentice gnome who was about 65. The two gnomes interviewed me in whispers for about an hour before they decided my modes of dress and speech were suitable for managing their system and I got the assignment. There was some confusion, understandably, when I explained that I would immediately establish a procedure for nightly backups. The senior gnome seemed to think I was going to put the computer in reverse, but the apprentice's son had an IBM PC and he quickly whispered that "backup" meant making a copy of a program borrowed from a friend and why was I doing that? Sigh. I was shortly introduced to the manager of the IBM data center, who greeted me with joy and anything but hostility. And the operators really weren't hostile - it just seemed that way. It's like the driver of a Mack 18 wheeler, with a condo behind the cab, who was doing 75 when he ran over a moped doing its best to get away at 45. He explained sadly, "I really warn't mad at mopeds but to keep from runnin' over that'n, I'da had to slow down or change lanes!" Now the only operation they had figured out how to do on the 750 was reboot it. This was their universal cure for any and all problems. After all it works on a PC, why not a VAX? Was there a difference? Sigh. But I smiled and said, "No sweat, I'll train you. The first command you learn is HELP" and proceeded to type it in on the console terminal. So the data center manager, the shift supervisor and the eight day-operators watched the LA100 buzz out the usual introductory text. When it finished they turned to me with expectant faces and I said in an avuncular manner, "This is your most important command!" The shift supervisor stepped forward and studied the text for about a minute. He then turned with a very puzzled expression on his face and asked, "What do you use it for?" Sigh. Well, I tried everything. I trained and I put the doc set on shelves by the 750 and I wrote a special 40 page doc set and then a four page doc set. I designed all kinds of command files to make complex operations into simple foreign commands and I taped a list of these simplified commands to the top of the VAX. The most successful move was adding my home phone number. The cheat sheets taped on the top of the CPU cabinet needed continual maintenance, however. It seems the VAX was in the quietest part of the data center, over behind the scratch tape racks. The operators ate lunch on the CPU cabinet and the sheets quickly became coated with pizza drippings, etc. But still the most used solution to hangups was a reboot and I gradually got things organized so that during the day when the gnomes were using the system, the operators didn't have to touch it. This smoothed things out a lot. Meanwhile, the data center was getting new TV security cameras, a halon gas fire extinguisher system and an immortal power source. The data center manager apologized because the VAX had not been foreseen in the plan and so could not be connected to immortal power. The VAX and I felt a little rejected but I made sure that booting on power recovery was working right. At least it would get going again quickly when power came back. Anyway, as a consolation prize, the data center manager said he would have one of the security cameras adjusted to cover the VAX. I thought to myself, "Great, now we can have 24 hour video tapes of the operators eating Chinese takeout on the CPU." I resolved to get a piece of plastic to cover the cheat sheets. One day, the apprentice gnome called to whisper that the senior was going to give an extremely important demonstration. Now I must explain that what the 750 was really doing was holding our National Debt. The Reagan administration had decided to privatize it and had quietly put it out for bid. My Extreme Large Financial Institution had won the bid for it and was, as ELFIs are wont to do, making an absolute bundle on the float. On Monday the Comptroller was going to demonstrate to the board of directors how he could move a trillion dollars from Switzerland to the Bahamas. The apprentice whispered, "Would you please look in on our computer? I'm sure everything will be fine, sir, but we will feel better if you are present. I'm sure you understand?" I did. Monday morning, I got there about five hours before the scheduled demo to check things over. Everything was cool. I was chatting with the shift supervisor and about to go upstairs to the Comptroller's office. Suddenly there was a power failure. The emergency lighting came on and the immortal power system took over the load of the IBM 3090s. They continued smoothly, but of course the VAX, still on city power, died. Everyone smiled and the dead 750 was no big deal because it was 7 AM and gnomes don't work before 10 AM. I began worrying about whether I could beg some immortal power from the data center manager in case this was a long outage. Immortal power in this system comes from storage batteries for the first five minutes of an outage. Promptly at one minute into the outage we hear the gas turbine powered generator in the sub-basement under us automatically start up getting ready to take the load on the fifth minute. We all beam at each other. At two minutes into the outage we hear the whine of the backup gas turbine generator starting. The 3090s and all those disk drives are doing just fine. Business as usual. The VAX is dead as a door nail but what the hell. At precisely five minutes into the outage, just as the gas turbine is taking the load, city power comes back on and the immortal power source commits suicide. Actually it was a double murder and suicide because it took both 3090s with it. So now the whole data center was dead, sort of. The fire alarm system had its own battery backup and was still alive. The lead acid storage batteries of the immortal power system had been discharging at a furious rate keeping all those big blue boxes running and there was a significant amount of sulfuric acid vapor. Nothing actually caught fire but the smoke detectors were convinced it had. The fire alarm klaxon went off and the siren warning of imminent halon gas release was screaming. We started to panic but the data center manager shouted over the din, "Don't worry, the halon system failed its acceptance test last week. It's disabled and nothing will happen." He was half right, the primary halon system indeed failed to discharge. But the secondary halon system observed that the primary had conked and instantly did its duty, which was to deal with Dire Disasters. It had twice the capacity and six times the discharge rate. Now the ear splitting gas discharge under the raised floor was so massive and fast, it blew about half of the floor tiles up out of their framework. It came up through the floor into a communications rack and blew the cover panels off, decking an operator. Looking out across that vast computer room, we could see the air shimmering as the halon mixed with it. We stampeded for exits to the dying whine of 175 IBM disks. As I was escaping I glanced back at the VAX, on city power, and noticed the usual flickering of the unit select light on its system disk indicating it was happily rebooting. Twelve firemen with air tanks and axes invaded. There were frantic phone calls to the local IBM Field Service office because both the live and backup 3090s were down. About twenty minutes later, seventeen IBM CEs arrived with dozens of boxes and, so help me, a barrel. It seems they knew what to expect when an immortal power source commits murder. In the midst of absolute pandemonium, I crept off to the gnome office and logged on. After extensive checking it was clear that everything was just fine with the VAX and I began to calm down. I called the data center manager's office to tell him the good news. His secretary answered with, "He isn't expected to be available for some time. May I take a message?" I left a slightly smug note to the effect that, unlike some other computers, the VAX was intact and functioning normally. Several hours later, the gnome was whispering his way into a demonstration of how to flick a trillion dollars from country 2 to country 5. He was just coming to the tricky part, where the money had been withdrawn from Switzerland but not yet deposited in the Bahamas. He was proceeding very slowly and the directors were spellbound. I decided I had better check up on the data center. Most of the floor tiles were back in place. IBM had resurrected one of the 3090s and was running tests. What looked like a bucket brigade was working on the other one. The communication rack was still naked and a fireman was standing guard over the immortal power corpse. Life was returning to normal, but the Big Blue Country crew was still pretty shaky. Smiling proudly, I headed back toward the triumphant VAX behind the tape racks where one of the operators was eating a plump jelly bun on the 750 CPU. He saw me coming, turned pale and screamed to the shift supervisor, "Oh my God, we forgot about the VAX!" Then, before I could open my mouth, he rebooted it. It was Monday, 19-Oct-1987. VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. -- Dave From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 23:11:10 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 09:11:10 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: References: <1570559927.29337.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <2e6e1005-3bbf-5dcc-3fcc-099864c752dc@kilonet.net> <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net> <3054d652-7320-a99b-df24-67001f974d39@kilonet.net> <8736g06byw.fsf@vuxu.org> <90ffe509-76b5-6629-c55a-7785815fda2e@kilonet.net> Message-ID: Related story. A user came to us with a problem while we were in our computer room. We asked him to log in at the VAX console, so we could look into the problem. Moments later, dozens of users flooded in, asking what had happened. Seems the first user had a CTRL-P in his password, which, when entered at the console, triggered the VAX to pause. On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 2:34 PM Royce Williams wrote: > On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 7:01 AM Royce Williams > wrote: > > > What original caught my attention was the logic behind enforcing > password quality in passwd.c during a specific era of BSD code, which > exited ambiguously in a double negative of sorts, where control characters > were not disallowed during password entry. (I'll try to dig up the source.) > > Specifically, see the eras in which passwd.c looked something like this: > > > https://github.com/dank101/4.2BSD/blob/708b3890ac0c2f034f2840b5ee9125b3c83a05bc/bin/passwd.c#L69-L107 > > while (c = *p++) { > if (c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') > flags |= 2; > else if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z') > flags |= 4; > else if (c >= '0' && c <= '9') > flags |= 1; > else > flags |= 8; > } > if (flags >= 7 && pwlen >= 4) > ok = 1; > > I was intrigued that the "special characters" character set was > defined negatively, such that control characters would also count. > > > Royce > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Sat Oct 19 23:13:48 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 09:13:48 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code Message-ID: <201910191313.x9JDDmVJ021440@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Apropos of OCR on shabby typewriting, I've had good luck with doing the OCR twice with the paper differently positioned, then using diff to spot discrepancies. For a final proofreading, a team of two--one reading the original aloud, the other checking the copy, works much faster and more accurately than a single person checking side-by-side texts. Doug From norman at oclsc.org Sat Oct 19 23:45:30 2019 From: norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 09:45:30 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files Message-ID: <1571492733.19343.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> I'm amused (in a good way) that this thread persists, and without becoming boring. Speaking as someone who was Ken's sysadmin for six years, I find it hard to get upset over someone cracking a password hash that has been out in the open for decades, using an algorithm that became pragmatically unsafe slightly fewer decades ago. It really shouldn't be in use anywhere any more anyway. Were I still Ken's sysadmin I'd have leaned on him to change it long ago. So far as I know, my password from that era didn't escape the Labs, but nevertheless I abandoned it long ago--when I left the Labs myself, in fact. I do have one password that has been unchanged since the mid-1990s and is stored in heritage hash on a few computers that don't even have /etc/shadow, but those are not public systems. And it's probably time I changed it anyway. None of this is to excuse the creeps who steal passwords these days, nor to promote complacency. At the place I now work we had a possible /etc/shadow exposure some years back, and we reacted by pushing everyone to change their passwords and also by taking various measures to keep even the hashes better-hidden. But there is, or should be, a difference between a password that is still in use and one that was exposed so long ago, and in what is now so trivial an algorithm, that it is no more than a puzzle for fans of the old-fart days. Norman Wilson Toronto ON From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Sun Oct 20 00:40:08 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 10:40:08 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code Message-ID: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> I was about to add a footnote to history about how the broad interests and collegiality of Bell Labs staff made Space Travel work, when I saw that Ken beat me to telling how he got help from another Turing Award winner. > while writing "space travel," > i could not get the space ship integration > around a planet to keep from either gaining or > losing energy due to floating point errors. > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some > weird simple double integration that self > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can > ascertain, the formula was never published > and no one i have asked (including me) has > been able to recreate it. If I remember correctly, the cause of Ken's difficulty was not roundoff error. It was discretization error in the integration formula--probably f(t+dt)=f(t)+f'(t)dt. Dick saw that the formula did not conserve energy and found an alternative that did. From krewat at kilonet.net Sun Oct 20 00:47:17 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 10:47:17 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Vaxen, my children... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <25e29217-2f55-eb72-95e7-6f41fc054627@kilonet.net> On 10/18/2019 9:15 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > A little off-topic, but quite amusing... > > -- Dave > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > Time to post this classic; I don't recall who wrote it.  Note that the > references are pretty obscure now... > > ----- I've read this a few times, but every time, I have to laugh out loud. ;) art k. From abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 04:32:56 2019 From: abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com (Abhinav Rajagopalan) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 00:02:56 +0530 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. Surmising from some personal experience that writing mathematical programs is hard even now, although there exist certain functional paradigms, and specialised environments such as MATLAB or Mathematica. The complexity seems to remain the same if not more now, due to the vast oodles of data to handle stemming from the nature of the world. Were they loaded as just words as any other instruction or were there separate coprocessors that did the number crunching? I'm guessing Fortran-ish kind of implementations were done, but the hardware level computation itself I just can't process. It just blows my mind now thinking backwards in terms of those monster machines being loaded with trails of paper tape instructions to play Space Travel. Being born in the late 90's doesn't help me too. Also, on a related note, don't know if you've watched the interview of Ken done by Brian at the Vintage Comptuer Federation 2019, there might be a few surprises lurking around the middle of that when they discuss pipes and grep. Thank you! On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 8:11 PM Doug McIlroy wrote: > I was about to add a footnote to history about > how the broad interests and collegiality of > Bell Labs staff made Space Travel work, when > I saw that Ken beat me to telling how he got > help from another Turing Award winner. > > > while writing "space travel," > > i could not get the space ship integration > > around a planet to keep from either gaining or > > losing energy due to floating point errors. > > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after > > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. > > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some > > weird simple double integration that self > > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can > > ascertain, the formula was never published > > and no one i have asked (including me) has > > been able to recreate it. > > If I remember correctly, the cause of Ken's > difficulty was not roundoff error. It > was discretization error in the integration > formula--probably f(t+dt)=f(t)+f'(t)dt. > Dick saw that the formula did not conserve > energy and found an alternative that did. > -- Abhinav Rajagopalan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 04:44:13 2019 From: abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com (Abhinav Rajagopalan) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 00:14:13 +0530 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: After some poking around, a Program library (PDP-7) and a Floating point reference manual for a PDP-8 turned up and is now slowly dawning on me that libraries could exist back then too, and that complex polynomials could also be written into routines albeit a bit tedious. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp7/DIGITAL-7-30-A_FltPtPkg.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp8/software/DEC-08-YQYB-D_PDP-8_Floating-Point_System_Programmers_Reference_Manual_Sep69.pdf On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 12:02 AM Abhinav Rajagopalan < abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com> wrote: > Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish > gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral > equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines > such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated > on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. > Surmising from some personal experience that writing mathematical programs > is hard even now, although there exist certain functional paradigms, and > specialised environments such as MATLAB or Mathematica. The > complexity seems to remain the same if not more now, due to the vast oodles > of data to handle stemming from the nature of the world. > > Were they loaded as just words as any other instruction or were there > separate coprocessors that did the number crunching? I'm guessing > Fortran-ish kind of implementations were done, but the hardware level > computation itself I just can't process. > > It just blows my mind now thinking backwards in terms of those > monster machines being loaded with trails of paper tape instructions to > play Space Travel. Being born in the late 90's doesn't help me too. > > Also, on a related note, don't know if you've watched the interview > of Ken done by Brian at the Vintage > Comptuer Federation 2019, there might be a few surprises lurking around the > middle of that when they discuss pipes and grep. > > Thank you! > > On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 8:11 PM Doug McIlroy > wrote: > >> I was about to add a footnote to history about >> how the broad interests and collegiality of >> Bell Labs staff made Space Travel work, when >> I saw that Ken beat me to telling how he got >> help from another Turing Award winner. >> >> > while writing "space travel," >> > i could not get the space ship integration >> > around a planet to keep from either gaining or >> > losing energy due to floating point errors. >> > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after >> > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. >> > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some >> > weird simple double integration that self >> > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can >> > ascertain, the formula was never published >> > and no one i have asked (including me) has >> > been able to recreate it. >> >> If I remember correctly, the cause of Ken's >> difficulty was not roundoff error. It >> was discretization error in the integration >> formula--probably f(t+dt)=f(t)+f'(t)dt. >> Dick saw that the formula did not conserve >> energy and found an alternative that did. >> > > > -- > > Abhinav Rajagopalan > > > -- Abhinav Rajagopalan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Sun Oct 20 05:19:40 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 15:19:40 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: Abhinav -- it is still done today. For Intel's MKL we must have a team of programmers that specialize in writing math at the lowest levels. DEC, CDC, Cray, IBM did the same thing back in the day. Check out: Intel Math Kernel Library (*a.k.a.* MKL) . On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 2:34 PM Abhinav Rajagopalan < abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com> wrote: > Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish > gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral > equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines > such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated > on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. > Surmising from some personal experience that writing mathematical programs > is hard even now, although there exist certain functional paradigms, and > specialised environments such as MATLAB or Mathematica. The > complexity seems to remain the same if not more now, due to the vast oodles > of data to handle stemming from the nature of the world. > > Were they loaded as just words as any other instruction or were there > separate coprocessors that did the number crunching? I'm guessing > Fortran-ish kind of implementations were done, but the hardware level > computation itself I just can't process. > > It just blows my mind now thinking backwards in terms of those > monster machines being loaded with trails of paper tape instructions to > play Space Travel. Being born in the late 90's doesn't help me too. > > Also, on a related note, don't know if you've watched the interview > of Ken done by Brian at the Vintage > Comptuer Federation 2019, there might be a few surprises lurking around the > middle of that when they discuss pipes and grep. > > Thank you! > > On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 8:11 PM Doug McIlroy > wrote: > >> I was about to add a footnote to history about >> how the broad interests and collegiality of >> Bell Labs staff made Space Travel work, when >> I saw that Ken beat me to telling how he got >> help from another Turing Award winner. >> >> > while writing "space travel," >> > i could not get the space ship integration >> > around a planet to keep from either gaining or >> > losing energy due to floating point errors. >> > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after >> > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. >> > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some >> > weird simple double integration that self >> > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can >> > ascertain, the formula was never published >> > and no one i have asked (including me) has >> > been able to recreate it. >> >> If I remember correctly, the cause of Ken's >> difficulty was not roundoff error. It >> was discretization error in the integration >> formula--probably f(t+dt)=f(t)+f'(t)dt. >> Dick saw that the formula did not conserve >> energy and found an alternative that did. >> > > > -- > > Abhinav Rajagopalan > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Sun Oct 20 05:26:51 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 15:26:51 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Vaxen, my children... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: An old Usenet Apocrypha message. IIRC this show up after the great automated crash in 1987 and was being used an example of why the IBM monoculture led to the melt down of the markets. On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 9:16 PM Dave Horsfall wrote: > A little off-topic, but quite amusing... > > -- Dave > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > Time to post this classic; I don't recall who wrote it. Note that the > references are pretty obscure now... > > ----- > > VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. In my business, I am > frequently called by small sites and startups having VAX problems. So > when a > friend of mine in an Extremely Large Financial Institution (ELFI) called > me one > day to ask for help, I was intrigued because this outfit is a really major > VAX > user - they have several large herds of VAXen - and plenty of sharp > VAXherds to > take care of them. > > So I went to see what sort of an ELFI mess they had gotten into. It seems > they > had shoved a small 750 with two RA60s running a single application, PC > style, > into a data center with two IBM 3090s and just about all the rest of the > disk > drives in the world. The computer room was so big it had three street > addresses. The operators had only IBM experience and, to quote my friend, > they > were having "a little trouble adjusting to the VAX", were a bit hostile > towards > it and probably needed some help with system management. Hmmm, > hostility... > Sigh. > > Well, I thought it was pretty ridiculous for an outfit with all that VAX > muscle > elsewhere to isolate a dinky old 750 in their Big Blue Country, and said > so > bluntly. But my friend patiently explained that although small, it was an > "extremely sensitive and confidential application." It seems that the 750 > had > originally been properly clustered with the rest of a herd and in the care > of > one of their best VAXherds. But the trouble started when the Chief User > went > to visit his computer and its VAXherd. > > He came away visibly disturbed and immediately complained to the ELFI's > Director of Data Processing that, "There are some very strange people in > there > with the computers." Now since this user person was the Comptroller of > this > Extremely Large Financial Institution, the 750 had been promptly hustled > over > to the IBM data center which the Comptroller said, "was a more suitable > place." > The people there wore shirts and ties and didn't wear head bands or cowboy > hats. > > So my friend introduced me to the Comptroller, who turned out to be five > feet > tall, 85 and a former gnome of Zurich. He had a young apprentice gnome > who was > about 65. The two gnomes interviewed me in whispers for about an hour > before > they decided my modes of dress and speech were suitable for managing their > system and I got the assignment. > > There was some confusion, understandably, when I explained that I would > immediately establish a procedure for nightly backups. The senior gnome > seemed > to think I was going to put the computer in reverse, but the apprentice's > son > had an IBM PC and he quickly whispered that "backup" meant making a copy > of a > program borrowed from a friend and why was I doing that? Sigh. > > I was shortly introduced to the manager of the IBM data center, who > greeted me > with joy and anything but hostility. And the operators really weren't > hostile > - it just seemed that way. It's like the driver of a Mack 18 wheeler, > with a > condo behind the cab, who was doing 75 when he ran over a moped doing its > best > to get away at 45. He explained sadly, "I really warn't mad at mopeds but > to > keep from runnin' over that'n, I'da had to slow down or change lanes!" > > Now the only operation they had figured out how to do on the 750 was > reboot it. > This was their universal cure for any and all problems. After all it works > on a > PC, why not a VAX? Was there a difference? Sigh. > > But I smiled and said, "No sweat, I'll train you. The first command you > learn > is HELP" and proceeded to type it in on the console terminal. So the data > center manager, the shift supervisor and the eight day-operators watched > the > LA100 buzz out the usual introductory text. When it finished they turned > to me > with expectant faces and I said in an avuncular manner, "This is your most > important command!" > > The shift supervisor stepped forward and studied the text for about a > minute. > He then turned with a very puzzled expression on his face and asked, "What > do > you use it for?" Sigh. > > Well, I tried everything. I trained and I put the doc set on shelves by > the > 750 and I wrote a special 40 page doc set and then a four page doc set. I > designed all kinds of command files to make complex operations into simple > foreign commands and I taped a list of these simplified commands to the > top of > the VAX. The most successful move was adding my home phone number. > > The cheat sheets taped on the top of the CPU cabinet needed continual > maintenance, however. It seems the VAX was in the quietest part of the > data > center, over behind the scratch tape racks. The operators ate lunch on > the CPU > cabinet and the sheets quickly became coated with pizza drippings, etc. > > But still the most used solution to hangups was a reboot and I gradually > got > things organized so that during the day when the gnomes were using the > system, > the operators didn't have to touch it. This smoothed things out a lot. > > Meanwhile, the data center was getting new TV security cameras, a halon > gas > fire extinguisher system and an immortal power source. The data center > manager > apologized because the VAX had not been foreseen in the plan and so could > not > be connected to immortal power. The VAX and I felt a little rejected but > I > made sure that booting on power recovery was working right. At least it > would > get going again quickly when power came back. > > Anyway, as a consolation prize, the data center manager said he would have > one > of the security cameras adjusted to cover the VAX. I thought to myself, > "Great, now we can have 24 hour video tapes of the operators eating > Chinese > takeout on the CPU." I resolved to get a piece of plastic to cover the > cheat > sheets. > > One day, the apprentice gnome called to whisper that the senior was going > to > give an extremely important demonstration. Now I must explain that what > the > 750 was really doing was holding our National Debt. The Reagan > administration > had decided to privatize it and had quietly put it out for bid. My > Extreme > Large Financial Institution had won the bid for it and was, as ELFIs are > wont > to do, making an absolute bundle on the float. > > On Monday the Comptroller was going to demonstrate to the board of > directors > how he could move a trillion dollars from Switzerland to the Bahamas. The > apprentice whispered, "Would you please look in on our computer? I'm sure > everything will be fine, sir, but we will feel better if you are present. > I'm > sure you understand?" I did. > > Monday morning, I got there about five hours before the scheduled demo to > check > things over. Everything was cool. I was chatting with the shift > supervisor > and about to go upstairs to the Comptroller's office. Suddenly there was > a > power failure. > > The emergency lighting came on and the immortal power system took over the > load > of the IBM 3090s. They continued smoothly, but of course the VAX, still > on > city power, died. Everyone smiled and the dead 750 was no big deal > because it > was 7 AM and gnomes don't work before 10 AM. I began worrying about > whether I > could beg some immortal power from the data center manager in case this > was a > long outage. > > Immortal power in this system comes from storage batteries for the first > five > minutes of an outage. Promptly at one minute into the outage we hear the > gas > turbine powered generator in the sub-basement under us automatically start > up > getting ready to take the load on the fifth minute. We all beam at each > other. > > At two minutes into the outage we hear the whine of the backup gas turbine > generator starting. The 3090s and all those disk drives are doing just > fine. > Business as usual. The VAX is dead as a door nail but what the hell. > > At precisely five minutes into the outage, just as the gas turbine is > taking > the load, city power comes back on and the immortal power source commits > suicide. Actually it was a double murder and suicide because it took both > 3090s with it. > > So now the whole data center was dead, sort of. The fire alarm system had > its > own battery backup and was still alive. The lead acid storage batteries > of the > immortal power system had been discharging at a furious rate keeping all > those > big blue boxes running and there was a significant amount of sulfuric acid > vapor. Nothing actually caught fire but the smoke detectors were > convinced it > had. > > The fire alarm klaxon went off and the siren warning of imminent halon gas > release was screaming. We started to panic but the data center manager > shouted > over the din, "Don't worry, the halon system failed its acceptance test > last > week. It's disabled and nothing will happen." > > He was half right, the primary halon system indeed failed to discharge. > But the > secondary halon system observed that the primary had conked and instantly > did > its duty, which was to deal with Dire Disasters. It had twice the > capacity and > six times the discharge rate. > > Now the ear splitting gas discharge under the raised floor was so massive > and > fast, it blew about half of the floor tiles up out of their framework. It > came > up through the floor into a communications rack and blew the cover panels > off, > decking an operator. Looking out across that vast computer room, we could > see > the air shimmering as the halon mixed with it. > > We stampeded for exits to the dying whine of 175 IBM disks. As I was > escaping > I glanced back at the VAX, on city power, and noticed the usual flickering > of > the unit select light on its system disk indicating it was happily > rebooting. > > Twelve firemen with air tanks and axes invaded. There were frantic phone > calls > to the local IBM Field Service office because both the live and backup > 3090s > were down. About twenty minutes later, seventeen IBM CEs arrived with > dozens > of boxes and, so help me, a barrel. It seems they knew what to expect > when an > immortal power source commits murder. > > In the midst of absolute pandemonium, I crept off to the gnome office and > logged on. After extensive checking it was clear that everything was just > fine > with the VAX and I began to calm down. I called the data center manager's > office to tell him the good news. His secretary answered with, "He isn't > expected to be available for some time. May I take a message?" I left a > slightly smug note to the effect that, unlike some other computers, the > VAX was > intact and functioning normally. > > Several hours later, the gnome was whispering his way into a demonstration > of > how to flick a trillion dollars from country 2 to country 5. He was just > coming to the tricky part, where the money had been withdrawn from > Switzerland > but not yet deposited in the Bahamas. He was proceeding very slowly and > the > directors were spellbound. I decided I had better check up on the data > center. > > Most of the floor tiles were back in place. IBM had resurrected one of > the > 3090s and was running tests. What looked like a bucket brigade was > working on > the other one. The communication rack was still naked and a fireman was > standing guard over the immortal power corpse. Life was returning to > normal, > but the Big Blue Country crew was still pretty shaky. > > Smiling proudly, I headed back toward the triumphant VAX behind the tape > racks > where one of the operators was eating a plump jelly bun on the 750 CPU. > He saw > me coming, turned pale and screamed to the shift supervisor, "Oh my God, > we > forgot about the VAX!" Then, before I could open my mouth, he rebooted > it. It > was Monday, 19-Oct-1987. VAXen, my children, just don't belong some > places. > > -- Dave > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From henry.r.bent at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 05:50:04 2019 From: henry.r.bent at gmail.com (Henry Bent) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 15:50:04 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: I think the astonishment is not so much that tailored specialty floating point libraries exist, or that programmers are able to squeeze performance out of processors using hardware floating point and/or vector units. What is impressive to me is that floating point was being done on processors that had essentially no hardware support for floating point whatsoever, and that the processors in question were running at what we would consider infinitesimally slow speeds by the standards of what is inside my barely modern home thermostat. These hacks make me think of the "demoscene" folks who write programs for early '80s home 8 bit microcomputers in assembly. The idea is to squeeze as much apparent visual performance out of a system as possible, so an example might be scrolling characters across the screen while a wireframe cube rotates in the background, all on a Commodore VIC-20 with 4K of RAM. The idea is to start with a mathematically sound algorithm but then cut every corner possible and account for every single timing bug and hardware quirk. It's a fun demonstration for two or three minutes but I imagine that after an hour or two the numerical inaccuracies would set in, just as described earlier in this thread. -Henry On Sat, 19 Oct 2019 at 15:20, Clem Cole wrote: > Abhinav -- it is still done today. For Intel's MKL we must have a team > of programmers that specialize in writing math at the lowest levels. DEC, > CDC, Cray, IBM did the same thing back in the day. Check out: Intel > Math Kernel Library (*a.k.a.* MKL) . > > > On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 2:34 PM Abhinav Rajagopalan < > abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com> wrote: > >> Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish >> gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral >> equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines >> such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated >> on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. >> Surmising from some personal experience that writing mathematical programs >> is hard even now, although there exist certain functional paradigms, and >> specialised environments such as MATLAB or Mathematica. The >> complexity seems to remain the same if not more now, due to the vast oodles >> of data to handle stemming from the nature of the world. >> >> Were they loaded as just words as any other instruction or were there >> separate coprocessors that did the number crunching? I'm guessing >> Fortran-ish kind of implementations were done, but the hardware level >> computation itself I just can't process. >> >> It just blows my mind now thinking backwards in terms of those >> monster machines being loaded with trails of paper tape instructions to >> play Space Travel. Being born in the late 90's doesn't help me too. >> >> Also, on a related note, don't know if you've watched the interview >> of Ken done by Brian at the Vintage >> Comptuer Federation 2019, there might be a few surprises lurking around the >> middle of that when they discuss pipes and grep. >> >> Thank you! >> >> On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 8:11 PM Doug McIlroy >> wrote: >> >>> I was about to add a footnote to history about >>> how the broad interests and collegiality of >>> Bell Labs staff made Space Travel work, when >>> I saw that Ken beat me to telling how he got >>> help from another Turing Award winner. >>> >>> > while writing "space travel," >>> > i could not get the space ship integration >>> > around a planet to keep from either gaining or >>> > losing energy due to floating point errors. >>> > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after >>> > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. >>> > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some >>> > weird simple double integration that self >>> > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can >>> > ascertain, the formula was never published >>> > and no one i have asked (including me) has >>> > been able to recreate it. >>> >>> If I remember correctly, the cause of Ken's >>> difficulty was not roundoff error. It >>> was discretization error in the integration >>> formula--probably f(t+dt)=f(t)+f'(t)dt. >>> Dick saw that the formula did not conserve >>> energy and found an alternative that did. >>> >> >> >> -- >> >> Abhinav Rajagopalan >> >> >> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thomas.paulsen at firemail.de Sun Oct 20 05:55:55 2019 From: thomas.paulsen at firemail.de (Thomas Paulsen) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 21:55:55 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel related question In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <1bdfce73d1d30be76bee52287a510334@firemail.de> s there a authentic space travel release available in C for Linux? From michael at kjorling.se Sun Oct 20 06:12:43 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 20:12:43 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On 20 Oct 2019 00:02 +0530, from abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com (Abhinav Rajagopalan): > Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish > gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral > equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines > such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated > on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. As long as you have the basic instructions (which pretty much any computer capable of doing useful arithemtic calculations will need anyway), you can implement the rest of what you need using those building blocks. Specific _hardware_ support for floating point calculations is not needed. If nothing else, you can always implement your own routines to do fixed-point multi-word arithmetic. Really about all you need for that is the basic arithmetic and binary operations, the concept of a carry or overflow flag, and conditional and unconditional jumps. With the _possible_ exception of a carry flag of some kind, a digital computer really wouldn't be very useful without those! >From there to emulating floating-point instead is not a huge leap. Given that, the kind of equations you can use the computer to solve is just a matter of how fast you need to have the answers. Emulation might be slow, and implementing your own might not be pretty by today's standards where we're taught to rely on standard libraries, but it definitely can get the job done. If you want an example that might perhaps be easier to relate to, on the IBM PC, it wasn't until the Pentium that you could actually count on having a floating-point unit available. The 8086/8088, 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486 all either didn't ever include a FPU on-die, or only some variants included a FPU. (In the IBM PC world, that's pretty much from 1981 to the late 1990s.) On some systems, and with some of those CPUs, a FPU was an extra chip the user would install, or have someone install, on the motherboard; with others, the user could choose to purchase variants with or without a FPU. As a result, for the better part of two decades, PC software that needed the ability to do floating-point calculations but couldn't require a separate hardware FPU shipped with support for emulating floating point in software. Again, the emulation was slower, but it got the job done, and it allowed running the software on a huge portion of the hardware base which otherwise wouldn't have been able to do so. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From imp at bsdimp.com Sun Oct 20 06:19:14 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 14:19:14 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel related question In-Reply-To: <1bdfce73d1d30be76bee52287a510334@firemail.de> References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <1bdfce73d1d30be76bee52287a510334@firemail.de> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 1:56 PM Thomas Paulsen wrote: > s there a authentic space travel release available in C for Linux? > Nope > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From krewat at kilonet.net Sun Oct 20 06:24:52 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 16:24:52 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <4b8b55d6-d4a2-1743-898d-ef61a44de088@kilonet.net> On 10/19/2019 3:50 PM, Henry Bent wrote: > The idea is to squeeze as much apparent visual performance out of a > system as possible, so an example might be scrolling characters across > the screen while a wireframe cube rotates in the background, all on a > Commodore VIC-20 with 4K of RAM. You ain't lived until you try to take Impossible Mission from the Commodore 64, and convert it to an Atari 7800 using that Maria steaming-pile-of-doodoo. Talk about optimizing ;) art k. From rich.salz at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 06:29:10 2019 From: rich.salz at gmail.com (Richard Salz) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 16:29:10 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Vaxen, my children... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: In other words, not true. On Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 3:29 PM Clem Cole wrote: > An old Usenet Apocrypha message. IIRC this show up after the great > automated crash in 1987 and was being used an example of why the IBM > monoculture led to the melt down of the markets. > > On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 9:16 PM Dave Horsfall wrote: > >> A little off-topic, but quite amusing... >> >> -- Dave >> >> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >> >> Time to post this classic; I don't recall who wrote it. Note that the >> references are pretty obscure now... >> >> ----- >> >> VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. In my business, I am >> frequently called by small sites and startups having VAX problems. So >> when a >> friend of mine in an Extremely Large Financial Institution (ELFI) called >> me one >> day to ask for help, I was intrigued because this outfit is a really >> major VAX >> user - they have several large herds of VAXen - and plenty of sharp >> VAXherds to >> take care of them. >> >> So I went to see what sort of an ELFI mess they had gotten into. It >> seems they >> had shoved a small 750 with two RA60s running a single application, PC >> style, >> into a data center with two IBM 3090s and just about all the rest of the >> disk >> drives in the world. The computer room was so big it had three street >> addresses. The operators had only IBM experience and, to quote my >> friend, they >> were having "a little trouble adjusting to the VAX", were a bit hostile >> towards >> it and probably needed some help with system management. Hmmm, >> hostility... >> Sigh. >> >> Well, I thought it was pretty ridiculous for an outfit with all that VAX >> muscle >> elsewhere to isolate a dinky old 750 in their Big Blue Country, and said >> so >> bluntly. But my friend patiently explained that although small, it was >> an >> "extremely sensitive and confidential application." It seems that the >> 750 had >> originally been properly clustered with the rest of a herd and in the >> care of >> one of their best VAXherds. But the trouble started when the Chief User >> went >> to visit his computer and its VAXherd. >> >> He came away visibly disturbed and immediately complained to the ELFI's >> Director of Data Processing that, "There are some very strange people in >> there >> with the computers." Now since this user person was the Comptroller of >> this >> Extremely Large Financial Institution, the 750 had been promptly hustled >> over >> to the IBM data center which the Comptroller said, "was a more suitable >> place." >> The people there wore shirts and ties and didn't wear head bands or >> cowboy >> hats. >> >> So my friend introduced me to the Comptroller, who turned out to be five >> feet >> tall, 85 and a former gnome of Zurich. He had a young apprentice gnome >> who was >> about 65. The two gnomes interviewed me in whispers for about an hour >> before >> they decided my modes of dress and speech were suitable for managing >> their >> system and I got the assignment. >> >> There was some confusion, understandably, when I explained that I would >> immediately establish a procedure for nightly backups. The senior gnome >> seemed >> to think I was going to put the computer in reverse, but the apprentice's >> son >> had an IBM PC and he quickly whispered that "backup" meant making a copy >> of a >> program borrowed from a friend and why was I doing that? Sigh. >> >> I was shortly introduced to the manager of the IBM data center, who >> greeted me >> with joy and anything but hostility. And the operators really weren't >> hostile >> - it just seemed that way. It's like the driver of a Mack 18 wheeler, >> with a >> condo behind the cab, who was doing 75 when he ran over a moped doing its >> best >> to get away at 45. He explained sadly, "I really warn't mad at mopeds >> but to >> keep from runnin' over that'n, I'da had to slow down or change lanes!" >> >> Now the only operation they had figured out how to do on the 750 was >> reboot it. >> This was their universal cure for any and all problems. After all it >> works on a >> PC, why not a VAX? Was there a difference? Sigh. >> >> But I smiled and said, "No sweat, I'll train you. The first command you >> learn >> is HELP" and proceeded to type it in on the console terminal. So the >> data >> center manager, the shift supervisor and the eight day-operators watched >> the >> LA100 buzz out the usual introductory text. When it finished they turned >> to me >> with expectant faces and I said in an avuncular manner, "This is your >> most >> important command!" >> >> The shift supervisor stepped forward and studied the text for about a >> minute. >> He then turned with a very puzzled expression on his face and asked, >> "What do >> you use it for?" Sigh. >> >> Well, I tried everything. I trained and I put the doc set on shelves by >> the >> 750 and I wrote a special 40 page doc set and then a four page doc set. >> I >> designed all kinds of command files to make complex operations into >> simple >> foreign commands and I taped a list of these simplified commands to the >> top of >> the VAX. The most successful move was adding my home phone number. >> >> The cheat sheets taped on the top of the CPU cabinet needed continual >> maintenance, however. It seems the VAX was in the quietest part of the >> data >> center, over behind the scratch tape racks. The operators ate lunch on >> the CPU >> cabinet and the sheets quickly became coated with pizza drippings, etc. >> >> But still the most used solution to hangups was a reboot and I gradually >> got >> things organized so that during the day when the gnomes were using the >> system, >> the operators didn't have to touch it. This smoothed things out a lot. >> >> Meanwhile, the data center was getting new TV security cameras, a halon >> gas >> fire extinguisher system and an immortal power source. The data center >> manager >> apologized because the VAX had not been foreseen in the plan and so could >> not >> be connected to immortal power. The VAX and I felt a little rejected but >> I >> made sure that booting on power recovery was working right. At least it >> would >> get going again quickly when power came back. >> >> Anyway, as a consolation prize, the data center manager said he would >> have one >> of the security cameras adjusted to cover the VAX. I thought to myself, >> "Great, now we can have 24 hour video tapes of the operators eating >> Chinese >> takeout on the CPU." I resolved to get a piece of plastic to cover the >> cheat >> sheets. >> >> One day, the apprentice gnome called to whisper that the senior was going >> to >> give an extremely important demonstration. Now I must explain that what >> the >> 750 was really doing was holding our National Debt. The Reagan >> administration >> had decided to privatize it and had quietly put it out for bid. My >> Extreme >> Large Financial Institution had won the bid for it and was, as ELFIs are >> wont >> to do, making an absolute bundle on the float. >> >> On Monday the Comptroller was going to demonstrate to the board of >> directors >> how he could move a trillion dollars from Switzerland to the Bahamas. >> The >> apprentice whispered, "Would you please look in on our computer? I'm >> sure >> everything will be fine, sir, but we will feel better if you are >> present. I'm >> sure you understand?" I did. >> >> Monday morning, I got there about five hours before the scheduled demo to >> check >> things over. Everything was cool. I was chatting with the shift >> supervisor >> and about to go upstairs to the Comptroller's office. Suddenly there was >> a >> power failure. >> >> The emergency lighting came on and the immortal power system took over >> the load >> of the IBM 3090s. They continued smoothly, but of course the VAX, still >> on >> city power, died. Everyone smiled and the dead 750 was no big deal >> because it >> was 7 AM and gnomes don't work before 10 AM. I began worrying about >> whether I >> could beg some immortal power from the data center manager in case this >> was a >> long outage. >> >> Immortal power in this system comes from storage batteries for the first >> five >> minutes of an outage. Promptly at one minute into the outage we hear the >> gas >> turbine powered generator in the sub-basement under us automatically >> start up >> getting ready to take the load on the fifth minute. We all beam at each >> other. >> >> At two minutes into the outage we hear the whine of the backup gas >> turbine >> generator starting. The 3090s and all those disk drives are doing just >> fine. >> Business as usual. The VAX is dead as a door nail but what the hell. >> >> At precisely five minutes into the outage, just as the gas turbine is >> taking >> the load, city power comes back on and the immortal power source commits >> suicide. Actually it was a double murder and suicide because it took >> both >> 3090s with it. >> >> So now the whole data center was dead, sort of. The fire alarm system >> had its >> own battery backup and was still alive. The lead acid storage batteries >> of the >> immortal power system had been discharging at a furious rate keeping all >> those >> big blue boxes running and there was a significant amount of sulfuric >> acid >> vapor. Nothing actually caught fire but the smoke detectors were >> convinced it >> had. >> >> The fire alarm klaxon went off and the siren warning of imminent halon >> gas >> release was screaming. We started to panic but the data center manager >> shouted >> over the din, "Don't worry, the halon system failed its acceptance test >> last >> week. It's disabled and nothing will happen." >> >> He was half right, the primary halon system indeed failed to discharge. >> But the >> secondary halon system observed that the primary had conked and instantly >> did >> its duty, which was to deal with Dire Disasters. It had twice the >> capacity and >> six times the discharge rate. >> >> Now the ear splitting gas discharge under the raised floor was so massive >> and >> fast, it blew about half of the floor tiles up out of their framework. It >> came >> up through the floor into a communications rack and blew the cover panels >> off, >> decking an operator. Looking out across that vast computer room, we >> could see >> the air shimmering as the halon mixed with it. >> >> We stampeded for exits to the dying whine of 175 IBM disks. As I was >> escaping >> I glanced back at the VAX, on city power, and noticed the usual >> flickering of >> the unit select light on its system disk indicating it was happily >> rebooting. >> >> Twelve firemen with air tanks and axes invaded. There were frantic phone >> calls >> to the local IBM Field Service office because both the live and backup >> 3090s >> were down. About twenty minutes later, seventeen IBM CEs arrived with >> dozens >> of boxes and, so help me, a barrel. It seems they knew what to expect >> when an >> immortal power source commits murder. >> >> In the midst of absolute pandemonium, I crept off to the gnome office and >> logged on. After extensive checking it was clear that everything was >> just fine >> with the VAX and I began to calm down. I called the data center >> manager's >> office to tell him the good news. His secretary answered with, "He isn't >> expected to be available for some time. May I take a message?" I left a >> slightly smug note to the effect that, unlike some other computers, the >> VAX was >> intact and functioning normally. >> >> Several hours later, the gnome was whispering his way into a >> demonstration of >> how to flick a trillion dollars from country 2 to country 5. He was just >> coming to the tricky part, where the money had been withdrawn from >> Switzerland >> but not yet deposited in the Bahamas. He was proceeding very slowly and >> the >> directors were spellbound. I decided I had better check up on the data >> center. >> >> Most of the floor tiles were back in place. IBM had resurrected one of >> the >> 3090s and was running tests. What looked like a bucket brigade was >> working on >> the other one. The communication rack was still naked and a fireman was >> standing guard over the immortal power corpse. Life was returning to >> normal, >> but the Big Blue Country crew was still pretty shaky. >> >> Smiling proudly, I headed back toward the triumphant VAX behind the tape >> racks >> where one of the operators was eating a plump jelly bun on the 750 CPU. >> He saw >> me coming, turned pale and screamed to the shift supervisor, "Oh my God, >> we >> forgot about the VAX!" Then, before I could open my mouth, he rebooted >> it. It >> was Monday, 19-Oct-1987. VAXen, my children, just don't belong some >> places. >> >> -- Dave >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ewe2 at ewe2.ninja Sun Oct 20 06:27:45 2019 From: ewe2 at ewe2.ninja (ewe2) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 16:27:45 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <1571492733.19343.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1571492733.19343.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <20191019202745.GA31260@mail.ewe2.ninja> On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 09:45:30AM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote: > I'm amused (in a good way) that this thread persists, and > without becoming boring. > > Speaking as someone who was Ken's sysadmin for six years, > I find it hard to get upset over someone cracking a password > hash that has been out in the open for decades, using an > algorithm that became pragmatically unsafe slightly fewer > decades ago. It really shouldn't be in use anywhere any > more anyway. Were I still Ken's sysadmin I'd have leaned > on him to change it long ago. I have a disk from one of Melbourne Uni's old Alpha servers from back in the 1990's and the passwd file is a who's who of staff, but I could only crack 3 of the student's passwords. The system is interesting in other ways, it's a snapshot of the old oz.au network. -- I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by. From krewat at kilonet.net Sun Oct 20 06:40:14 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 16:40:14 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> On 10/19/2019 4:12 PM, Michael Kjörling wrote: > As long as you have the basic instructions (which pretty much any > computer capable of doing useful arithemtic calculations will need > anyway), you can implement the rest of what you need using those > building blocks. Specific_hardware_ support for floating point > calculations is not needed. Not to mention, if you start using log/alog tables, and/or sin/cos/tan tables, and interpolation, you can quickly ramp up computation speed for simple games that have a small matrix of coordinates. Something like EMPIRE becomes quite easy. Imagine my distress when, after cutting my teeth on a PDP-10, that working on a 6502 I had to do my own division. Oh, the HORROR! art k. From krewat at kilonet.net Sun Oct 20 06:41:23 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 16:41:23 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files In-Reply-To: <20191019202745.GA31260@mail.ewe2.ninja> References: <1571492733.19343.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191019202745.GA31260@mail.ewe2.ninja> Message-ID: <239097c0-a864-079b-a5da-ce99a530a3e5@kilonet.net> On 10/19/2019 4:27 PM, ewe2 wrote: > On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 09:45:30AM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote: >> I'm amused (in a good way) that this thread persists, and >> without becoming boring. >> >> Speaking as someone who was Ken's sysadmin for six years, >> I find it hard to get upset over someone cracking a password >> hash that has been out in the open for decades, using an >> algorithm that became pragmatically unsafe slightly fewer >> decades ago. It really shouldn't be in use anywhere any >> more anyway. Were I still Ken's sysadmin I'd have leaned >> on him to change it long ago. > > I have a disk from one of Melbourne Uni's old Alpha servers from back in the > 1990's and the passwd file is a who's who of staff, but I could only crack 3 > of the student's passwords. The system is interesting in other ways, it's a > snapshot of the old oz.au network. > Contact me off list ;) art k. From michael at kjorling.se Sun Oct 20 07:15:03 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 21:15:03 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On 19 Oct 2019 16:40 -0400, from krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat): > Not to mention, if you start using log/alog tables, and/or sin/cos/tan > tables, and interpolation, you can quickly ramp up computation speed for > simple games that have a small matrix of coordinates. Indeed; like I said, at some point, it becomes just a matter of how quickly you need the answer. It's not really _difficult_ to do any of this if you're willing to wait a while to learn the value of 1/2. It's a little more involved if you want log10(e^pi * pi^e) _fast_. After all, Apollo navigated to, around, and back from, the Moon, using an on-board computer that today would barely run that thermostat that someone mentioned. 2048 15+1-bit word RAM (3840 bytes, plus parity), 36864 15+1-bit word ROM (69120 bytes, again plus parity). It could display three general-purpose five-digit decimal numbers, each with sign, plus three specific-purpose two-digit decimal numbers, and was operated using a 19-key keyboard (0-9, plus, minus, and a few function keys). In fairness, a lot of the heavier calculations were performed by Mission Control on the ground and the results were uplinked either digitally or via voice transmission to the spacecraft, but still... Those programmers didn't exactly have the luxury of, when they realized they were running out of memory, just sending along the rest of the software on tape and telling the user to load it on an as-needed basis. Premature optimization is the root of all evil in 99% of the cases, but in that last 1%, a targeted optimization effort is exactly what you need. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From rminnich at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 10:36:48 2019 From: rminnich at gmail.com (ron minnich) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 17:36:48 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] 1: jmp 1b Message-ID: where did the relative labels come from? I still show them to people when we're doing assembly and still use them all the time. Most people have not seen them and find them wonderfully convenient. I know they were in as by the time I came along in 1976; when did they first show up? From imp at bsdimp.com Sun Oct 20 10:44:59 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2019 18:44:59 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] 1: jmp 1b In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 6:37 PM ron minnich wrote: > where did the relative labels come from? I still show them to people > when we're doing assembly and still use them all the time. Most people > have not seen them and find them wonderfully convenient. I know they > were in as by the time I came along in 1976; when did they first show > up? > The pdp7 as sources have them... Warner > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aap at papnet.eu Sun Oct 20 17:14:32 2019 From: aap at papnet.eu (Angelo Papenhoff) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 09:14:32 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] 1: jmp 1b In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20191020071432.GB20503@indra.papnet.eu> On 19/10/19, Warner Losh wrote: > On Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 6:37 PM ron minnich wrote: > > > where did the relative labels come from? I still show them to people > > when we're doing assembly and still use them all the time. Most people > > have not seen them and find them wonderfully convenient. I know they > > were in as by the time I came along in 1976; when did they first show > > up? > > > > The pdp7 as sources have them... I seem to remember they were suggest by Knuth, but I don't know when and where, sorry. I very much agree that they are great. aap From norman at oclsc.org Sun Oct 20 23:38:24 2019 From: norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 09:38:24 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] 1: jmp 1b Message-ID: <1571578708.16814.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> In `UNIX Assembler Reference Manual,' Dennis credits Knuth for numeric temporary labels, with a reference to volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming. I'm several thousand kilometers from my copy of Knuth (though rather nearer to Knuth himself, albeit not within asking range), so I'll leave it to others to track down the exact reference. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (temporarily Sacramento CA) From norman at oclsc.org Mon Oct 21 05:25:52 2019 From: norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 15:25:52 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Bakul Shah: Being an OS student I had read "The Unix Timesharing System" paper by Ritchie and Thompson and had wanted to use Unix years before I actually had the chance. I don't remember an "Aha!" moment but I took to it like a duck to water. Most everything felt just so comfortable and right. It was very much as I had imagined it to be. ===== That's more or less what it was like to me. Not so much an aha! moment, more just a feeling of coming home. It took a while to understand the different way things worked in UNIX (I had previously used TOPS-10 for several years) but as it all sank in it felt more and more right. C felt the same way. It took me a while to grok the pointer syntax (I had done a lot of MACRO-10 programming so I certainly understood the concept, just not how it fit into the higher- level language), but things like the three-clause condition in for so that all control for a loop could be in one place were just magically right. I don't think I read the CACM paper before I touched UNIX, but I had read both editions of Software Tools, so my brain was perhaps pre-seeded with some of the ideas. Norman Wilson Toronto ON From ewe2 at ewe2.ninja Mon Oct 21 06:12:19 2019 From: ewe2 at ewe2.ninja (Sean Dwyer) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 16:12:19 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 03:25:52PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote: > That's more or less what it was like to me. Not so much > an aha! moment, more just a feeling of coming home. It > took a while to understand the different way things worked > in UNIX (I had previously used TOPS-10 for several years) > but as it all sank in it felt more and more right. Up to my 30s I had only vaguely known about computers, it definitely wasn't my thing, I was a musician. But one day I found myself buying a $3k Packard Bell 486, learnt DOS and began buying CD-ROMS with software often taken straight off the big ftp sites. That is how I discovered Unix and how much better than DOS it was. Within a year (1994) I was running my own Linux system. There was a lot of stuff being ported from Solaris and the BSDs and I was learning C just to build utilities I wanted, but if there was a 'killer app' for me that was the aha! moment, it was a close contest between adventure and ching. The odd thing was that adventure was certainly playable, but ching only existed as a weird hybrid of shell script and two C programs and used some kind of manpage macros and I didn't understand why but I loved it. That was my introduction really to the Unix tools philosophy and suddenly the way my Linux system worked made sense. Being also a history buff I wanted to know how this all happened and that led to Don Libes and Life With Unix and my fate was sealed. -- I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by. From tuhs at t.lastninja.net Mon Oct 21 07:34:57 2019 From: tuhs at t.lastninja.net (Naveen Nathan) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:34:57 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out Message-ID: It can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552/ - Naveen From imp at bsdimp.com Mon Oct 21 08:05:30 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 16:05:30 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Any way to buy it on kindle? On Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 3:35 PM Naveen Nathan wrote: > It can be purchased here: > https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552/ > > - Naveen > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From norman at oclsc.org Mon Oct 21 08:43:46 2019 From: norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 18:43:46 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out Message-ID: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in bricks-and-mortar bookshops any time soon? Norman Wilson Toronto ON From lm at mcvoy.com Mon Oct 21 10:06:03 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 17:06:03 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20191021000603.GE27969@mcvoy.com> Ordered. Now can we get bwk on the list? On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 08:34:57AM +1100, Naveen Nathan wrote: > It can be purchased here: > https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552/ > > - Naveen -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm From jacob.ritorto at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 10:54:23 2019 From: jacob.ritorto at gmail.com (Jacob Ritorto) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 20:54:23 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <20191021000603.GE27969@mcvoy.com> References: <20191021000603.GE27969@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: heh. +1 on both points On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 8:06 PM Larry McVoy wrote: > Ordered. Now can we get bwk on the list? > > On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 08:34:57AM +1100, Naveen Nathan wrote: > > It can be purchased here: > > https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552/ > > > > - Naveen > > -- > --- > Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com > http://www.mcvoy.com/lm > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ken at google.com Mon Oct 21 12:31:55 2019 From: ken at google.com (Ken Thompson) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 19:31:55 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> Message-ID: i was writing the small utilities for the first pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....) so, cd was next. % pwd /usr/ken % cd /tmp % pwd /usr/ken Aha! On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 1:12 PM Sean Dwyer wrote: > > On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 03:25:52PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote: > > That's more or less what it was like to me. Not so much > > an aha! moment, more just a feeling of coming home. It > > took a while to understand the different way things worked > > in UNIX (I had previously used TOPS-10 for several years) > > but as it all sank in it felt more and more right. > > Up to my 30s I had only vaguely known about computers, it definitely wasn't my > thing, I was a musician. But one day I found myself buying a $3k Packard Bell > 486, learnt DOS and began buying CD-ROMS with software often taken straight > off the big ftp sites. That is how I discovered Unix and how much better than > DOS it was. Within a year (1994) I was running my own Linux system. There was > a lot of stuff being ported from Solaris and the BSDs and I was learning C > just to build utilities I wanted, but if there was a 'killer app' for me that > was the aha! moment, it was a close contest between adventure and ching. > > The odd thing was that adventure was certainly playable, but ching only > existed as a weird hybrid of shell script and two C programs and used some > kind of manpage macros and I didn't understand why but I loved it. That was my > introduction really to the Unix tools philosophy and suddenly the way my Linux > system worked made sense. Being also a history buff I wanted to know how this > all happened and that led to Don Libes and Life With Unix and my fate was > sealed. > > -- > I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by. From wkt at tuhs.org Mon Oct 21 12:37:20 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:37:20 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> Message-ID: <20191021023720.GA12808@minnie.tuhs.org> On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 07:31:55PM -0700, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > i was writing the small utilities for the first > pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....) > > so, cd was next. > > % pwd > /usr/ken > % cd /tmp > % pwd > /usr/ken > > Aha! As in, 'cd' has to be built into the shell. If it's external, the forked child gets to change directory and the parent shell doesn't. I'm just putting this in for those who didn't spot the nuance immediately -- took me a few tens of seconds. But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell? Thanks, Warren From bakul at bitblocks.com Mon Oct 21 12:40:50 2019 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 19:40:50 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 20 Oct 2019 19:31:55 -0700." References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> Message-ID: <20191021024058.1D136156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 19:31:55 -0700 Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > i was writing the small utilities for the first > pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....) > > so, cd was next. > > % pwd > /usr/ken > % cd /tmp > % pwd > /usr/ken > > Aha! It was probably more like this: % pwd /usr/ken ? Aha! From Caipenghui_c at 163.com Mon Oct 21 12:41:37 2019 From: Caipenghui_c at 163.com (Caipenghui) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 10:41:37 +0800 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: ok,He looks good..Hope to produce an electronic version...... 于 2019年10月21日 GMT+08:00 上午6:05:30, Warner Losh 写到: >Any way to buy it on kindle? > >On Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 3:35 PM Naveen Nathan >wrote: > >> It can be purchased here: >> https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552/ >> >> - Naveen >> >> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Mon Oct 21 12:45:04 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 19:45:04 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> Message-ID: <20191021024504.GI27969@mcvoy.com> On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 07:31:55PM -0700, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > i was writing the small utilities for the first > pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....) > > so, cd was next. > > % pwd > /usr/ken > % cd /tmp > % pwd > /usr/ken > > Aha! I'm old and slow, had to think about that one. Aha indeed! From dave at horsfall.org Mon Oct 21 14:55:30 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 15:55:30 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Oct 2019, Michael Kjörling wrote: > If you want an example that might perhaps be easier to relate to, on the > IBM PC, it wasn't until the Pentium that you could actually count on > having a floating-point unit available. [...] Am I the only one who remembers the Defectium (as we called it)? Intel denied the the problem until their noses got rubbed into it, after which they instructed Sales to refuse replacements for any chip that failed after using a demo program that demonstrated said defect, claiming that it would hardly ever happen. Err, would you fly on an aircraft designed by Defectiums? Or cross a bridge, etc? -- Dave From dave at horsfall.org Mon Oct 21 15:03:08 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 16:03:08 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Vaxen, my children... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Oct 2019, Richard Salz wrote: > In other words, not true. I never claimed that it was true, given that I saw it in a humo[u]r newsgroup many years ago. Perhaps net.humor.funny? The line at the end, "It was Monday, 19-Oct-1987" ought to provide a chrome-plated hint; I snagged it around then and saved it, reposting it at various times on its anniversary. -- Dave From dave at horsfall.org Mon Oct 21 15:14:09 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 16:14:09 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote: > Not to mention, if you start using log/alog tables, and/or sin/cos/tan > tables, and interpolation, you can quickly ramp up computation speed for > simple games that have a small matrix of coordinates. Something like > EMPIRE becomes quite easy. Star Wars on a GT-40, which Andrew Hume (formerly UNSW, who is now at Bell last I heard) reverse-engineered to support three players, not two. Oddly enough, DEC Field Circus stopped replacing GT-40 switch consoles after that (certain keys were worn out)... > Imagine my distress when, after cutting my teeth on a PDP-10, that > working on a 6502 I had to do my own division. Oh, the HORROR! And you tell that to the young people of day, and they won't believe you... Now, where did I put my Z-80 full ANSI C Compiler... -- Dave From lars at nocrew.org Mon Oct 21 15:23:45 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 05:23:45 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: (Dave Horsfall's message of "Mon, 21 Oct 2019 16:14:09 +1100 (EST)") References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <7w7e4yisda.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Dave Horsfall wrote: > Star Wars on a GT-40, which Andrew Hume (formerly UNSW, who is now at > Bell last I heard) reverse-engineered to support three players, not > two. Does that still exist? From aap at papnet.eu Mon Oct 21 16:22:42 2019 From: aap at papnet.eu (Angelo Papenhoff) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:22:42 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem Message-ID: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> DMR explained how PDP-7 UNIX was used in "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System" but having played with it myself, I stumbled in a couple of cases and found it a bit awkward to use. Maybe someone (ken and doug?) can shed some light on "elaborate set of conventions" that dmr mentioned. My questions are these: you cannot execute a program if you're in a directory you can't write into. I asked Warren about this when I first tried pdp7 unix and he explained it to me: the shell creates a link to the binary and executes it. If it can't write into the current directory, it fails to create the link and hence can't execute the program. How was this handled in practice? did users have write permissions on all directories? did you just stay in your directory all the time? . and .. Was this introduced first with PDP-11 unix or did the convention start on the PDP-7 already? It certainly seems to be the case with . but how about ..? the dd directory seems to take on the role of a sort of root directory and the now discovered program pd actually creates a file .. (haven't tried to understand what it does though yet) What does dd stand for, dotdot? directory directory? aap From abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 20:43:54 2019 From: abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com (Abhinav Rajagopalan) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 16:13:54 +0530 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: > > . and .. > > Was this introduced first with PDP-11 unix or did the convention > start on the PDP-7 already? It certainly seems to be the case with . > but how about ..? the dd directory seems to take on the role of a sort > of root directory and the now discovered program pd actually creates a > file .. (haven't tried to understand what it does though yet) > What does dd stand for, dotdot? directory directory? > > > . and .. are quite intuitive the more I think about it, they're essentially acting as symbolic representations of the 'current' and 'parent' dirs as in, when we look at it from / : / |--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--| /etc /bin /root /home /mnt /dev /usr |--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--| ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ As we see, each of the subdirectories hold a / prefix to them as we're used to seeing, and this translated to the subfolders having their ../ descriptor denoting their parent (I think of them as recursive pointers to parent dirs), where the parent holds ../ and child dir has a name like /.. and invoking I don't know if it wasn't until the mkdir() syscall was added this approach took form. There was an earlier 'Aha, Unix!' thread where Ken had mentioned a similar thing, where invoking pwd gave only the /usr/name directory even if the directory had been changed with chdir, essentially stemming out of only the forked child changing dirs, when the cd wasn't built into the shell (this was in the PDP-11 when he was writing the initial set utilities like cd, ls) Also, depending on the implementation of 'ls' we were to try this out today, these are bound to have their differences. The original syscalls on the PDP-7 had chdir, swp: " system call dispatch table jmp . " base instruction .save; .getuid; .open; .read; .write; .creat; .seek; .tell .close; .link; .unlink; .setuid; .rename; .exit; .time; .intrp .chdir; .chmod; .chown; badcal; .sysloc; badcal; .capt; .rele .status; badcal; .smes; .rmes; .fork mkdir was probably in the works at this stage. We should also touch upon the "cd -" as this one takes you back like a back button into the directory you were last inside, whereas the cd ../.. takes you up or down the hierarchy depending on the placement of the / and adding placeholders i.e directory names in place of the .. (dots). Of course, only the creators can embark upon the design details of the hierarchical system and the reasons behind all the above and more. Since you mentioned the word dd, the utility which serves me like none other for my frequent rewrites of images, it too has an interesting past, it seems like 'dd' was non-unixy in it's design approach, if I'm to believe the lores around, which leads me to think that this might have been another one of the many idiosyncratic naming conventions used back then. More on the dd stuff: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html Personally, I just like to think of it in my head as disk-disk. -- Abhinav Rajagopalan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jason-tuhs at shalott.net Mon Oct 21 20:45:40 2019 From: jason-tuhs at shalott.net (jason-tuhs at shalott.net) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 03:45:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191021024504.GI27969@mcvoy.com> References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> <20191021024504.GI27969@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: >> % pwd >> /usr/ken >> % cd /tmp >> % pwd >> /usr/ken >> >> Aha! > I'm old and slow, had to think about that one. Aha indeed! I've actually been asking this (or, as a variation, how a child can set environment in its parent) as an interview question for unix sysadmins for the past fifteen or so years. Maybe one in three gets it. The answer that I'm secretly hoping for, no one has ever yet given me: hashbrown/home/jason-112719: /bin/pwd /home/jason hashbrown/home/jason-112720: ./cd.sh /tmp hashbrown/home/jason-112721: /bin/pwd /tmp hashbrown/home/jason-112722: cat cd.sh cat: cd.sh: No such file or directory hashbrown/home/jason-112723: cat ~/cd.sh #!/bin/sh test -n "$1" && TARGET=$1 || TARGET=$HOME ( echo "call (int) chdir(\"$TARGET\")" ; echo detach ; echo quit ) | gdb -q -p $PPID >/dev/null 2>&1 & "With ptrace(2) all things are possible." -Jason From abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 21:38:11 2019 From: abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com (Abhinav Rajagopalan) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 17:08:11 +0530 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: Also, I only now realized that only mknod existed, up until a long time, only later on with the GNU coreutils did mkdir as a command come into existence. Running the PDP-11 v7 on SIMH showed that, gotten so accustomed to the Linux env that thinking backwards seemed suddenly arcane. On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 4:13 PM Abhinav Rajagopalan < abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com> wrote: > > >> . and .. >> >> Was this introduced first with PDP-11 unix or did the convention >> start on the PDP-7 already? It certainly seems to be the case with . >> but how about ..? the dd directory seems to take on the role of a sort >> of root directory and the now discovered program pd actually creates a >> file .. (haven't tried to understand what it does though yet) >> What does dd stand for, dotdot? directory directory? >> >> >> > . and .. are quite intuitive the more I think about it, they're > essentially acting as symbolic representations of the 'current' and > 'parent' dirs as in, when we look at it from / : > > / > |--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--| > /etc /bin /root /home /mnt /dev /usr > |--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--| > ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ > > As we see, each of the subdirectories hold a / prefix to them as we're > used to seeing, and this translated to the subfolders having their ../ > descriptor denoting their parent (I think of them as recursive pointers to > parent dirs), where the parent holds ../ and child dir has a name like /.. > and invoking > > I don't know if it wasn't until the mkdir() syscall was added this > approach took form. There was an earlier 'Aha, Unix!' thread where Ken had > mentioned a similar thing, where invoking pwd gave only the /usr/name > directory even if the directory had been changed with chdir, essentially > stemming out of only the forked child changing dirs, when the cd wasn't > built into the shell (this was in the PDP-11 when he was writing the > initial set utilities like cd, ls) > > Also, depending on the implementation of 'ls' we were to try this out > today, these are bound to have their differences. The original syscalls on > the PDP-7 had chdir, > > swp: " system call dispatch table > jmp . " base instruction > .save; .getuid; .open; .read; .write; .creat; .seek; .tell > .close; .link; .unlink; .setuid; .rename; .exit; .time; .intrp > .chdir; .chmod; .chown; badcal; .sysloc; badcal; .capt; .rele > .status; badcal; .smes; .rmes; .fork > > > mkdir was probably in the works at this stage. > > We should also touch upon the "cd -" as this one takes you back like a > back button into the directory you were last inside, whereas the cd ../.. > takes you up or down the hierarchy depending on the placement of the / and > adding placeholders i.e directory names in place of the .. (dots). > > Of course, only the creators can embark upon the design details of the > hierarchical system and the reasons behind all the above and more. > > Since you mentioned the word dd, the utility which serves me like none > other for my frequent rewrites of images, it too has an interesting past, > it seems like 'dd' was non-unixy in it's design approach, if I'm to believe > the lores around, which leads me to think that this might have been another > one of the many idiosyncratic naming conventions used back then. More on > the dd stuff: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html > > Personally, I just like to think of it in my head as disk-disk. > > -- > > Abhinav Rajagopalan > > > -- Abhinav Rajagopalan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wlc at jctaylor.com Mon Oct 21 21:55:38 2019 From: wlc at jctaylor.com (William Corcoran) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 11:55:38 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> <20191021024504.GI27969@mcvoy.com>, Message-ID: <5640BEA7-8340-4E65-B786-E08EF2BB3EA7@jctaylor.com> You could cheat a little: CHDIR=/usr/newFolder echo “cd ${CHDIR}” > ./changeEnv . ./changeEnv Bill Corcoran > On Oct 21, 2019, at 6:52 AM, "jason-tuhs at shalott.net" wrote: > > >>> % pwd >>> /usr/ken >>> % cd /tmp >>> % pwd >>> /usr/ken >>> >>> Aha! > >> I'm old and slow, had to think about that one. Aha indeed! > > I've actually been asking this (or, as a variation, how a child can set environment in its parent) as an interview question for unix sysadmins for the past fifteen or so years. Maybe one in three gets it. > > The answer that I'm secretly hoping for, no one has ever yet given me: > > > hashbrown/home/jason-112719: /bin/pwd > /home/jason > > hashbrown/home/jason-112720: ./cd.sh /tmp > > hashbrown/home/jason-112721: /bin/pwd > /tmp > > hashbrown/home/jason-112722: cat cd.sh > cat: cd.sh: No such file or directory > > hashbrown/home/jason-112723: cat ~/cd.sh > #!/bin/sh > > test -n "$1" && TARGET=$1 || TARGET=$HOME > > ( echo "call (int) chdir(\"$TARGET\")" ; echo detach ; echo quit ) | gdb -q -p $PPID >/dev/null 2>&1 & > > > "With ptrace(2) all things are possible." > > > -Jason > From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon Oct 21 21:58:29 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 07:58:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem Message-ID: <20191021115829.C05FB18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Abhinav Rajagopalan > I only now realized that only mknod existed, up until a long time, only > later on with the GNU coreutils did mkdir as a command come into > existence. Huh? See: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/man/man1/mkdir.1 (And probably before that, that was the quickest one to find?) Maybe that was a typo for 'mkdir as a system call'? (I recall having to do a fork() to execute 'mkdir', back when.) But 4.2 had mkdir(). Noel From thomas.paulsen at firemail.de Mon Oct 21 22:00:30 2019 From: thomas.paulsen at firemail.de (Thomas Paulsen) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 14:00:30 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: > Also, I only now realized that only mknod existed, up until a long time, > > only later on with the GNU coreutils did mkdir as a command come into > existence. Running the PDP-11 v7 on SIMH showed that, gotten so accustomed > > to the Linux env that thinking backwards seemed suddenly arcane. > that's not true. mkdir isn't a GNU invention. Its much older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mkdir#History http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mknod.2.html From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon Oct 21 22:10:00 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:10:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <20191021121000.34E3B18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Warren Toomey > But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell? No. See "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", in section "Process control". Also, the old 'cd' had different syntax than today's (since there was no notion of a pathname in the earliest Unix); it took instead a list of directories (e.g. "cd dd ken"). Noel From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon Oct 21 22:34:20 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:34:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <20191021123420.EB37518C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> {Been meaning to get to this one for a while...} > From: Pat Barron > The idea of processes being able to talk to each other (without some > kind of pre-arrangement, like setting up a pipe between them, or using > temporary files) was just amazing ... On V7m, I stumbled across the > mpx(5) man page. It's probably worth pointing out that before V7, stock Unix _didn't_ have a way for two un-related processes to communicate, hence the invention of port() by Rand. See: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6 https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6/doc/ipc (Note: BBN did _not_ do the original port() stuff, they just used it.) Noel From abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 23:31:45 2019 From: abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com (Abhinav Rajagopalan) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 19:01:45 +0530 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: Thanks, didn't mean it as a GNU thing at all. Sure, mkdir would've existed back in research Unix too. My experience has only been limited to the Linux envs, which is why I was led to attribute mkdir to the evolution in mknod(), I only know that they all either descended down from SysV or BSD, those who have used the real Unices would know better. Seeing as I haven't had the privilege of using any except briefly on an emulator. On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 5:30 PM Thomas Paulsen wrote: > > > Also, I only now realized that only mknod existed, up until a long time, > > > > only later on with the GNU coreutils did mkdir as a command come into > > existence. Running the PDP-11 v7 on SIMH showed that, gotten so > accustomed > > > > to the Linux env that thinking backwards seemed suddenly arcane. > > > that's not true. mkdir isn't a GNU invention. Its much older. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mkdir#History > http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mknod.2.html > > > -- Abhinav Rajagopalan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 23:59:28 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 09:59:28 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: <7w7e4yisda.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> <7w7e4yisda.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: Andrew left Bell Labs for AT&T Labs when Alcatel took over the Bell Labs name. He is/was reachable at andrew at humeweb.com. I'm cc-ing him. He might enjoy the goings-on here. On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 1:24 AM Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > Dave Horsfall wrote: > > Star Wars on a GT-40, which Andrew Hume (formerly UNSW, who is now at > > Bell last I heard) reverse-engineered to support three players, not > > two. > > Does that still exist? > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leah at vuxu.org Tue Oct 22 00:05:17 2019 From: leah at vuxu.org (Leah Neukirchen) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 16:05:17 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] 1: jmp 1b In-Reply-To: <1571578708.16814.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> (Norman Wilson's message of "Sun, 20 Oct 2019 09:38:24 -0400") References: <1571578708.16814.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <87v9sinqhu.fsf@vuxu.org> Norman Wilson writes: > In `UNIX Assembler Reference Manual,' Dennis credits Knuth > for numeric temporary labels, with a reference to volume 1 > of The Art of Computer Programming. > > I'm several thousand kilometers from my copy of Knuth (though > rather nearer to Knuth himself, albeit not within asking > range), so I'll leave it to others to track down the exact > reference. TAOCP 1 (1968), page 147: "Local symbols have a different nature; we write, for example 2H ("2 here") in the location field, and 2F ("2 forward") or 2B ("2 backward") in the address field of a MIXAL line: 2B means the closest previous location 2H 2F means the closest following location 2H [...] The idea of local symbols was introduced by M. E. Conway in 1958, in connection with an assembly program for the UNIVAC 1." This is the originator of Conway's Law, btw. I could not find more detail about this assembler. -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org/ From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 00:09:32 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 10:09:32 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] 1: jmp 1b In-Reply-To: <1571578708.16814.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1571578708.16814.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: I'm seldom more than a couple feet from my Knuth, Second Printing 1969, $19.50 at the Tech Coop. On page 147, Knuth credits The idea of local symbols was introduced by M. E. Conway in 1958, in connection with an assembly program for the UNIVAC 1. On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 9:41 AM Norman Wilson wrote: > In `UNIX Assembler Reference Manual,' Dennis credits Knuth > for numeric temporary labels, with a reference to volume 1 > of The Art of Computer Programming. > > I'm several thousand kilometers from my copy of Knuth (though > rather nearer to Knuth himself, albeit not within asking > range), so I'll leave it to others to track down the exact > reference. > > Norman Wilson > Toronto ON > (temporarily Sacramento CA) > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From patbarron at acm.org Tue Oct 22 01:10:49 2019 From: patbarron at acm.org (Pat Barron) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 11:10:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] Vaxen, my children... Message-ID: On the copy of this story that appears here: http://crash.com/fun/texts/vaxen-dont.html it is atrributed as such: 'The author of this piece is Jack Harvey, harvey(at)eisner.decus.org, and it was originally published under the title "The Immortal Murderer" on January 18th, 1989 on DECUServe, the DECUS member bulletin board.' --Pat. From abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 01:44:20 2019 From: abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com (Abhinav Rajagopalan) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 21:14:20 +0530 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <20191021115829.C05FB18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20191021115829.C05FB18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: Thanks, mkdir actually seems to go back to V4. Also, V4 was the first to have the kernel in a 'high level language' C, from the V4 tree, The files in nsys/ come from nsys.tar.gz > , > which was donated by Dennis Ritchie. This is a version of the kernel quite > close to that released in Fourth Edition, but *without pipes*. Dennis > Ritchie writes: > This is a tar archive derived from a DECtape labelled "nsys". What is > contains is just the kernel source, written in the pre-K&R dialect of C. It > is intended only for PDP-11/45, and has setup and memory-handling code that > will not work on other models (it's missing things special to the later, > smaller models, and the larger physical address space of the still later > 11/70.) It appears that it is intended to be loaded into memory at physical > address 0, and transferred to at location 0. The efforts behind the PDP-7 file system were quite tedious and was a general directed graph, only word addressable which meant lack of path names as it ignored null chars, the link call being used to link directories together which is where dd arises as the precursor to .. today. The required files for the user was just linked in together in their dirs. Quoting from DMR's Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing system, So that every user did not need to maintain a link to all directories of > interest, there existed a directory called *dd* that contained entries > for the directory of each user. Thus, to make a link to file *x* in > directory *ken*, I might do ln dd ken ken > ln ken x x > rm ken > This scheme rendered subdirectories sufficiently hard to use as to make > them unused in practice. Another important barrier was that there was no > way to create a directory while the system was running; all were made > during recreation of the file system from paper tape, so that directories > were in effect a nonrenewable resource. No mkdir/mknode while the system was running, the whole file system had to be recreated from the paper tape each time! Thank DEC for the PDP-11. And of course, no pipes until '72. Earlier parent had pondered on the write permissions required to execute programs, this below explanation from the paper might help. Another mismatch between the system as it had been and the new process > control scheme took longer to become evident. Originally, the read/write > pointer associated with each open file was stored within the process that > opened the file. (This pointer indicates where in the file the next read or > write will take place.) The problem with this organization became evident > only when we tried to use command files. Suppose a simple command file > contains ls > who and it is executed as follows: sh comfile >output The sequence of events was 1) The main shell creates a new process, which opens *outfile* to receive > the standard output and executes the shell recursively. 2) The new shell creates another process to execute *ls*, which correctly > writes on file *output* and then terminates. 3) Another process is created to execute the next command. However, the IO > pointer for the output is copied from that of the shell, and it is still 0, > because the shell has never written on its output, and IO pointers are > associated with processes. The effect is that the output of *who* > overwrites and destroys the output of the preceding *ls* command. Solution of this problem required creation of a new system table to contain > the IO pointers of open files independently of the process in which they > were opened. Source: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.html On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 5:28 PM Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Abhinav Rajagopalan > > > I only now realized that only mknod existed, up until a long time, > only > > later on with the GNU coreutils did mkdir as a command come into > > existence. > > Huh? See: > > https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/man/man1/mkdir.1 > > (And probably before that, that was the quickest one to find?) > > Maybe that was a typo for 'mkdir as a system call'? (I recall having to do > a > fork() to execute 'mkdir', back when.) But 4.2 had mkdir(). > > Noel > > -- Abhinav Rajagopalan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dario at darioniedermann.it Tue Oct 22 02:16:11 2019 From: dario at darioniedermann.it (Dario Niedermann) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 18:16:11 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <5dadd9cb.Gu7JyQSQNtzyNZ/y%dario@darioniedermann.it> Warren Toomey wrote: > [...] What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems > you'd previously used? Not particularly serious, but still enlightening, was the first time I did: cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp on Linux and had white noise come out of the speaker. It was one of the first things that made me realize how far the "everything is a file" concept can be taken. OK, Unix-like moment. -- Dario Niedermann. Also on the Internet at: gopher://darioniedermann.it/ <> https://www.darioniedermann.it/ From will.senn at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 02:35:39 2019 From: will.senn at gmail.com (Will Senn) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 11:35:39 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 47, Issue 31 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 10/21/19 9:05 AM, tuhs-request at minnie.tuhs.org wrote: > Message: 17 > Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:10:00 -0400 (EDT) > From:jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) > To:tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org > Cc:jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu > Subject: Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? > Message-ID:<20191021121000.34E3B18C09F at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > > > From: Warren Toomey > > > But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell? > > No. See "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", in section "Process > control". > > Also, the old 'cd' had different syntax than today's (since there was no notion > of a pathname in the earliest Unix); it took instead a list of directories (e.g. > "cd dd ken"). > > Noel > Wanna have some fun? chdir system then try to find your way back 'home'... v0's subdirectories suck. -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF From aap at papnet.eu Tue Oct 22 02:50:42 2019 From: aap at papnet.eu (Angelo Papenhoff) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 18:50:42 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191021121000.34E3B18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20191021121000.34E3B18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20191021165042.GA18793@indra.papnet.eu> On 21/10/19, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Warren Toomey > > > But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell? > > No. See "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", in section "Process > control". In fact, in our code it is: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/cmd/sh.s#L367 Probably a later version than what dmr described. And it would contradict the timing of ken's aha-moment story. aap From aap at papnet.eu Tue Oct 22 02:54:50 2019 From: aap at papnet.eu (Angelo Papenhoff) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 18:54:50 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: <20191021165450.GB18793@indra.papnet.eu> On 21/10/19, Angelo Papenhoff wrote: > . and .. To this I seem to have found an answer by checking how stat.s and ls.s work. 'stat foo' will check whether '../foo' (using /-notation) exists and will then print the status. 'ls foo' will check whether '../foo' is a directory and will then open foo and list it. It will default to .. if no argument is given. This to me suggests that .. (confusingly) refers to the current directory. . does not seem to have any conventional meaning. To the first question I still have no answer. aap From paul.winalski at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 05:21:34 2019 From: paul.winalski at gmail.com (Paul Winalski) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 15:21:34 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On 10/21/19, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > Am I the only one who remembers the Defectium (as we called it)? Intel > denied the the problem until their noses got rubbed into it, after which > they instructed Sales to refuse replacements for any chip that failed > after using a demo program that demonstrated said defect, claiming that it > would hardly ever happen. I'm sure that's become a textbook case study in classes on public relations. It really WAS an obscure corner case, and every CPU chip has an errata list, but that's not the point. Intel would have been far better off admitting the problem and replacing the chips at the get-go. In the end they had to replace them anyway, and the $$$ cost to Intel's reputation way outstripped the cost of replacing the chips. David Letterman even did a "9.9998 reasons to buy genuine Intel" routine. That for me was the definitive proof that computers had gone mainstream in society. > Err, would you fly on an aircraft designed by Defectiums? Or cross a > bridge, etc? I'm much more alarmed by the lack of memory error detection and correction on a lot of modern computers. This is one of my big concerns with the use of GPUs for heavy-duty computation. GPUs typically don't have memory with error detection because the worst that happens if there's a memory error in the GPU is you get a bad pixel or two displayed. I'd not like to cross a bridge whose design software used CUDA. -Paul W. From khm at sciops.net Tue Oct 22 05:38:04 2019 From: khm at sciops.net (Kurt H Maier) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:38:04 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <20191021193804.GA75174@wopr> On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 03:21:34PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote: > > I'm much more alarmed by the lack of memory error detection and > correction on a lot of modern computers. This is one of my big > concerns with the use of GPUs for heavy-duty computation. GPUs > typically don't have memory with error detection because the worst > that happens if there's a memory error in the GPU is you get a bad > pixel or two displayed. I'd not like to cross a bridge whose design > software used CUDA. > This might be true of gaming cards and low-end workstation cards, but the higher-end Quadro cards and all the dedicated GPGPUs have had at least ECC since at least the Maxwell era. Of course, nobody does a single run and stamps the drawings, so the process itself should catch these problems, but any correctly-configured CAD workstation or compute cluster has error-correcting memory, both on the system and in the accelerators. AMD's Radeon Pro and Intel's Xeon Phi accelerators do ECC as well. khm From bakul at bitblocks.com Tue Oct 22 07:40:44 2019 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 14:40:44 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I would pay extra for a copy titled A History of the Unix-speaking Peoples. > On Oct 20, 2019, at 2:34 PM, Naveen Nathan wrote: > > It can be purchased here: > https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552/ > > - Naveen > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jaapna at xs4all.nl Tue Oct 22 12:09:26 2019 From: jaapna at xs4all.nl (Jaap Akkerhuis) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 10:09:26 +0800 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <20191021115829.C05FB18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20191021115829.C05FB18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <8C03B0A4-B24D-47A1-8B92-641F7CAD804D@xs4all.nl> > On Oct 21, 2019, at 19:58, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > Maybe that was a typo for 'mkdir as a system call'? (I recall having to do a > fork() to execute 'mkdir', back when.) But 4.2 had mkdir(). I believe, it was 4.2 (or 4.1c) according to David Tilbrook's paper on rename. The site qef.com seems to have disappeard, but the wayback machine has copies[1] jaap [1] as example, https://web.archive.org/web/20070228190911/http://www.qef.com/html/docs/rename.ps -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 267 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP URL: From athornton at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 15:19:39 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 22:19:39 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> <20191021024504.GI27969@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <67BD97E1-2D05-4C77-999E-9FAEDC0C6C5E@gmail.com> > On Oct 21, 2019, at 3:45 AM, jason-tuhs at shalott.net wrote: > > hashbrown/home/jason-112723: cat ~/cd.sh > #!/bin/sh > > test -n "$1" && TARGET=$1 || TARGET=$HOME > > ( echo "call (int) chdir(\"$TARGET\")" ; echo detach ; echo quit ) | gdb -q -p $PPID >/dev/null 2>&1 & > > > "With ptrace(2) all things are possible.” I honestly don’t know whether to applaud or vomit. Adam From peter at rulingia.com Tue Oct 22 15:25:47 2019 From: peter at rulingia.com (Peter Jeremy) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 16:25:47 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191021023720.GA12808@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> <20191021023720.GA12808@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191022052547.GA7075@server.rulingia.com> On 2019-Oct-21 12:37:20 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: >As in, 'cd' has to be built into the shell. If it's external, the forked >child gets to change directory and the parent shell doesn't. I'm just >putting this in for those who didn't spot the nuance immediately -- took >me a few tens of seconds. I'm still amazed at the number of people who don't get this and write shellscripts that save the working directory on entry and do an explicit cd at the end (usually without considering that the shellscript could die at other locations). -- Peter Jeremy -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 963 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ewe2 at ewe2.ninja Tue Oct 22 16:29:44 2019 From: ewe2 at ewe2.ninja (Sean Dwyer) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 02:29:44 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191021023720.GA12808@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> <20191021023720.GA12808@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191022062944.GA26946@mail.ewe2.ninja> On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 12:37:20PM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 07:31:55PM -0700, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > > i was writing the small utilities for the first > > pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....) > > > > so, cd was next. > > > > % pwd > > /usr/ken > > % cd /tmp > > % pwd > > /usr/ken > > > > Aha! > > As in, 'cd' has to be built into the shell. If it's external, the forked > child gets to change directory and the parent shell doesn't. I'm just > putting this in for those who didn't spot the nuance immediately -- took > me a few tens of seconds. > > But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell? > > Thanks, Warren Aha indeed, Ken & Warren! chdir seems to be a syscall in 7 (sys4.c), its handling in sh mostly in xec.c, a real workout for the preprocessor ;) -- I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by. From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Oct 22 23:36:13 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 09:36:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Message-ID: <20191022133613.D6E8C18C0B7@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Sean Dwyer > chdir seems to be a syscall in 7 (sys4.c) It's been a system call forever, see e.g.: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man2/chdir.2 (And the working dir was a property of the process, not data in the shell.) Noel From abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com Wed Oct 23 00:22:32 2019 From: abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com (Abhinav Rajagopalan) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 19:52:32 +0530 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191022133613.D6E8C18C0B7@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20191022133613.D6E8C18C0B7@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On a somewhat related note, if someone could shine some light on, if such chdir() which wasn't yet integrated into the shell function independent of fork() as in did fork() just spawn off a new child shell if one did chdir() or more generally how did processes interact when/if more than one child existed. I know PDP-7 had some archaic IPC but haven't gotten around to grokking fork.s or others to understand the actual operation. On Tue, 22 Oct 2019 at 7:06 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Sean Dwyer > > > chdir seems to be a syscall in 7 (sys4.c) > > It's been a system call forever, see e.g.: > > https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man2/chdir.2 > > (And the working dir was a property of the process, not data in the shell.) > > Noel > -- Abhinav Rajagopalan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From peter at rulingia.com Wed Oct 23 04:07:05 2019 From: peter at rulingia.com (Peter Jeremy) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 05:07:05 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> On 2019-Oct-21 16:13:54 +0530, Abhinav Rajagopalan wrote: >We should also touch upon the "cd -" as this one takes you back like a back >button into the directory you were last inside, whereas the cd ../.. takes >you up or down the hierarchy depending on the placement of the / and adding >placeholders i.e directory names in place of the .. (dots). There are two different mechanisms here. "-" as a "cd" argument is a relatively recent shell builtin: More modern shells keep track of the previous working directory ($OLDPWD) and evaluate "cd -" as "cd $OLDPWD", which will return to the previous working directory (modulo filesystem changes). Note that it's a "swap" operation, not a "back" operation: Repeated "cd -" invocations will swap between two directories, not keep going back through previous working directorie. I'm not sure when this feature was introduced but don't believe it was part of ancient Unix. OTOH, "cd ../.." just passes "../.." to the kernel as a pathname and the kernel evaluates it using its normal pathname lookup. Having it move up (towards the root of) the filesystem relies on the presence of a ".." directory entry being the parent directory inode. >Since you mentioned the word dd, the utility which serves me like none >other for my frequent rewrites of images, it too has an interesting past, >it seems like 'dd' was non-unixy in it's design approach, if I'm to believe >the lores around, which leads me to think that this might have been another >one of the many idiosyncratic naming conventions used back then. More on >the dd stuff: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html As noted in the jargon file, the dd(1) syntax is deliberately reminiscent of the DD statement in IBM JCL. This was presumably a joke and one of the BTL old-timers on the list may know more of the background. -- Peter Jeremy -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 963 bytes Desc: not available URL: From wkt at tuhs.org Wed Oct 23 06:08:55 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 06:08:55 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191022133613.D6E8C18C0B7@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20191022200855.GA16140@minnie.tuhs.org> On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 07:52:32PM +0530, Abhinav Rajagopalan wrote: > On a somewhat related note, if someone could shine some light on, if > such chdir() which wasn't yet integrated into the shell function > independent of fork() as in did fork() just spawn off a new child shell > if one did chdir() or more generally how did processes interact when/if > more than one child existed. I know PDP-7 had some archaic IPC but > haven't gotten around to grokking fork.s or others to understand the > actual operation. The best place to learn all this is Dennis' paper on the Evolution of Unix: http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/aosref/ritchie84evolution.pdf Cheers, Warren From wkt at tuhs.org Wed Oct 23 06:27:20 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 06:27:20 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Two Unix50 Videos Message-ID: <20191022202720.GA21600@minnie.tuhs.org> from the Nokia event are up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUt3L3fLFt4 Unix Today and Tomorrow: Future of Compute & Platforms: The Kernel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz3GADLe__M The origin of Unix panel session Cheers, Warren From aap at papnet.eu Wed Oct 23 07:38:03 2019 From: aap at papnet.eu (Angelo Papenhoff) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 23:38:03 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20191022213803.GA87610@indra.papnet.eu> Found an easter egg: Grace Emlin is credited with helping with the book on page xiii. From robpike at gmail.com Wed Oct 23 07:51:00 2019 From: robpike at gmail.com (Rob Pike) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 08:51:00 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <20191022213803.GA87610@indra.papnet.eu> References: <20191022213803.GA87610@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: Telling secrets out of school. -rob On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 8:38 AM Angelo Papenhoff wrote: > Found an easter egg: Grace Emlin is credited with helping with the book > on page xiii. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mah at mhorton.net Wed Oct 23 10:07:33 2019 From: mah at mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 17:07:33 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> dd is deprecated?  I'm surprised. I use it all the time. It's great when a blocksize of 512 is too slow, like for large files onto slow backup disks or network transfers, I might use dd bs=10240 or some such thing. I suppose the block size on Linux might be bigger these days, but the command is still standard.     Mary Ann On 10/22/19 11:07 AM, Peter Jeremy wrote: > Since you mentioned the word dd, the utility which serves me like none >> other for my frequent rewrites of images, it too has an interesting past, >> it seems like 'dd' was non-unixy in it's design approach, if I'm to believe >> the lores around, which leads me to think that this might have been another >> one of the many idiosyncratic naming conventions used back then. More on >> the dd stuff: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html > As noted in the jargon file, the dd(1) syntax is deliberately reminiscent > of the DD statement in IBM JCL. This was presumably a joke and one of the > BTL old-timers on the list may know more of the background. > From cbbrowne at gmail.com Wed Oct 23 12:00:55 2019 From: cbbrowne at gmail.com (Christopher Browne) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 22:00:55 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <8C03B0A4-B24D-47A1-8B92-641F7CAD804D@xs4all.nl> References: <20191021115829.C05FB18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <8C03B0A4-B24D-47A1-8B92-641F7CAD804D@xs4all.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:16 PM Jaap Akkerhuis wrote: > > > On Oct 21, 2019, at 19:58, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > Maybe that was a typo for 'mkdir as a system call'? (I recall having to do > a > fork() to execute 'mkdir', back when.) But 4.2 had mkdir(). > > > I believe, it was 4.2 (or 4.1c) according to David Tilbrook's paper on > rename. The site qef.com seems to have disappeard, but the wayback > machine has copies[1] > Timing being everything, I happily have a copy of it all, as I used wget to pull it into a git repo. It's doubtless not in "native" form as he used one of his little languages (that were part of qef) to generate it. But HTML isn't too bad for this. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From khm at sciops.net Wed Oct 23 12:02:03 2019 From: khm at sciops.net (Kurt H Maier) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 19:02:03 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> Message-ID: <20191023020203.GA47206@wopr> On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 05:07:33PM -0700, Mary Ann Horton wrote: > dd is deprecated?  I'm surprised. I use it all the time. dd is not deprecated. The maintainer of the jargon file is not a reliable narrator. dd(1) is even specified in IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, which mentions the JCL history and explains that it takes 'operands' and not 'options' to retain compatibility with the original syntax. dd(1) on Plan 9 changes to regular option flags, such as -if= and -of=, and some folks get disproportionately annoyed by the change. Can't please everyone, I guess. khm From lm at mcvoy.com Wed Oct 23 12:19:30 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 19:19:30 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <20191023020203.GA47206@wopr> References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> <20191023020203.GA47206@wopr> Message-ID: <20191023021930.GM27969@mcvoy.com> On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 07:02:03PM -0700, Kurt H Maier wrote: > On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 05:07:33PM -0700, Mary Ann Horton wrote: > > dd is deprecated?? I'm surprised. I use it all the time. > > dd is not deprecated. The maintainer of the jargon file is not a > reliable narrator. dd(1) is even specified in IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, > which mentions the JCL history and explains that it takes 'operands' and > not 'options' to retain compatibility with the original syntax. > > dd(1) on Plan 9 changes to regular option flags, such as -if= and -of=, > and some folks get disproportionately annoyed by the change. Can't > please everyone, I guess. I really need to move this into the distros, it's dd on steriods and the docs don't list the latest options, I made it go backwards, I made it use the crc/xor stuff that bk has, I made it use the compression stuff that bk has: LMDD(8) LMBENCH LMDD(8) NAME lmdd - move io for performance and debugging tests SYNOPSIS lmdd [ option=value ] ... DESCRIPTION lmdd copies a specified input file to a specified output with possible conversions. This program is primarily useful for timing I/O since it prints out the timing statistics after completing. OPTIONS if=name Input file is taken from name; internal is the default. internal is a special file that acts like Sun's /dev/zero, i.e., it provides a buffer of zeros without doing a system call to get them. The following file names are taken to mean the standard input: -, 0, or stdin. of=name Output file is taken from name; internal is the default. internal is a special file that acts like /dev/null, without doing a system call to get rid of the data. The following file names are taken to mean the standard output: -, 1, or stdout. The following file names are taken to mean the standard error: 2, or stderr. bs=n Input and output block size n bytes (default 8192). Note that this is different from dd(1), it has a 512 byte default. Also note that the block size can be followed by 'k' or 'm' to indicate kilo bytes (*1024) or megabytes (*1024*1024), respectively. ipat=n If n is non zero, expect a known pattern in the file (see opat). Mismatches will be displayed as "ERROR: off=%d want=%x got=%x". The pattern is a sequence of 4 byte integers with the first 0, second 1, and so on. The default is not to check for the pattern. opat=n If n is non zero, generate a known pattern on the output stream. Used for debugging file system correctness. The default is not to generate the pattern. mismatch=n If n is non zero, stop at the first mismatched value. Used with ipat. skip=n Skip n input blocks before starting copy. fsync=n If n is non-zero, call fsync(2) on the output file before exiting or printing timing statistics. sync=n If n is non-zero, call sync(2) before exiting or print- ing timing statistics. rand=n This argument, by default off, turns on random behavior. The argument is not a flag, it is a size, that size is used as the upper bound for the seeks. Also note that the block size can be followed by 'k' or 'm' to indicate kilo bytes (*1024) or megabytes (*1024*1024), flush=n If n is non-zero and mmap(2) is available, call msync(2) to invalidate the output file. This flushes the file to disk so that you don't have unmount/mount. It is not as good as mount/unmount because it just flushes file pages - it misses the indirect blocks which are still cached. Not supported on all systems, compile time option. rusage=n If n is non-zero, print rusage statistics as well as timing statistics. Not supported on all systems, com- pile time option. count=n Copy only n input records. EXAMPLES This is the most common usage, the intent is to measure disk perfor- mance. The disk is a spare partition mounted on /spare. # mount /spare # lmdd if=internal of=/spare/XXX count=1000 fsync=1 7.81 MB in 3.78 seconds (2.0676 MB/sec) : Flush cache # umount /spare # mount /spare # lmdd if=/spare/XXX of=internal 7.81 MB in 2.83 seconds (2.7611 MB/sec) AUTHOR Larry McVoy, lm at sun.com (c)1994 Larry McVoy $Date$ LMDD(8) From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Wed Oct 23 12:22:10 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 22:22:10 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX file systam Message-ID: <201910230222.x9N2MAg2080740@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > As noted in the jargon file, the dd(1) syntax is deliberately reminiscent > of the DD statement in IBM JCL. This was presumably a joke That is certainly true and reflects its major early usage to prepare tapes to carry to other systems. Though I haven't use dit in ages, I recall that the joke was so fully engtained that the command was more likely to be written "dd ifile=x ofile=y" than "dd y" Doug From gilles at gravier.org Wed Oct 23 15:13:24 2019 From: gilles at gravier.org (Gilles Gravier) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 09:13:24 +0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: Hi! Mine was more of an "oh oh" moment... when, back in 1994, I needed to clean up /tmp on the company Data General Aviion that I was administering... and I typed "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" Notice the involuntary space between /tmp and /* ... hence the "oh oh..." moment when I started seeing this take long... and when I typed Ctrl-C and started seeing some things like "/bin/ls not found" when I looked for the files in / ... Gilles Le ven. 11 oct. 2019 à 00:55, Warren Toomey a écrit : > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > -- *Gilles Gravier* - Gilles at Gravier.org GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437 Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0xA610DB098DE6D026 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lars at nocrew.org Wed Oct 23 15:48:04 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 05:48:04 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> (Angelo Papenhoff's message of "Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:22:42 +0200") References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: <7wpnioc8rv.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Does anyone have any input for Angelo? I think the questions he asks are interesting. Please note he's asking about PDP-7 Unix, not the unrelated "dd" command and how "." and ".." work in later Unix versions. Angelo Papenhoff wrote: > you cannot execute a program if you're in a directory you can't write into. > > I asked Warren about this when I first tried pdp7 unix and he > explained it to me: the shell creates a link to the binary and executes > it. If it can't write into the current directory, it fails to create the > link and hence can't execute the program. > How was this handled in practice? did users have write > permissions on all directories? did you just stay in your directory all > the time? > . and .. This part is apparently resolved. From athornton at gmail.com Wed Oct 23 16:19:41 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 23:19:41 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: I can't remember an epiphanal "a-ha!" moment. I remember that by 1999 I had migrated from OS/2 to Linux as my primary computing environment, and I've never really left; I ran Linux for a bunch of years, and then slid over to OS X, where I've mostly remained--the host OS on most of the modern stuff I own is either OS X or Linux, with other Unixes usually running under emulation (I have a NeXTStation and three Sparc machines of varying vintage, all running period-appropriate Unixes, when I fire them up, but they don't stay running; the MicroVAX comes frustratingly close to running but doesn't quite, and I haven't even powered up the VAX 11/730 I got a couple months ago to see how close it is to usable). Turning back the clock farther... In 1998 I remember someone saying, with a mixture of awe and horror, "I've never seen anyone use a GUI as just a place to stash a bunch of terminal windows before." I also remember screwing with dialup scripts to run PPP on my Linux machine at home, which must have been '96 or so? So that early I was clearly living in it at least enough that I didn't want to leave to fire up another OS (although I also remember learning far too much about PPP on OS/2), and spending enough time connected to the Internet that I wanted a network stack running all the time. I remember Cygwin on NT and ... EMX, I think it was? ... to let me use and build Unixy-feeling things on NT and OS/2 respectively, which suggests that while I was still using them in the mid-to-late 90s I kinda hated them. (That's not quite fair; OS/2 had some nice points.) In 1992 or 1993 I remember fiddling with definitions inside kernel include files to make my soundcard, my parallel port, and my modem all work at the same time (again on Linux), and not finding that a big deal (I had some nonstandard IRQs set up to get everything to play nice together, IIRC). I guess that was also about when I was hand-editing my partition table to multiboot a 386DX/25 of my very own so it could run Linux and DOS/Win3.11 off the same drive. I remember some very early Linux experiences (late '91 or early '92) as my first exposure to bash (the Sun workstations at school ran SunOS and my environment, at least, was csh, which was certainly less unpleasant than /bin/sh) and realizing how vastly much more I liked using bash than csh, as well as the difficulty my muscle memory had transitioning from esc-completion to tab-completion. I remember that I didn't really speak C at that point. Though come to think of it I didn't really get _fluent_ at C until the late-ish 90s. The first Unix system I used was something, probably Xenix, on a Dell '386 in a physics lab at UT Austin in the summer of '89, and while I didn't really "get" Unix at that point, I knew I liked it better than DOS, and it let me access Usenet, which was a huge deal. That was the same summer and same lab where I discovered the flight simulator on the SGI IRIS. I'm sure that hardware was expensive and used to do complex nonlinear dynamic simulations for people, but it was also certainly used for flying pretend planes in what seemed then like an astonishingly realistically rendered 3-D world. That summer was when I made the choice between Emacs and vi, and that choice has stuck with me for 30 years. In two more years the core of my .emacs file (which I inherited, obviously) will be old enough to be president. Adam On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 10:14 PM Gilles Gravier wrote: > Hi! > > Mine was more of an "oh oh" moment... when, back in 1994, I needed to > clean up /tmp on the company Data General Aviion that I was > administering... and I typed "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" > > Notice the involuntary space between /tmp and /* ... hence the "oh oh..." > moment when I started seeing this take long... and when I typed Ctrl-C and > started seeing some things like "/bin/ls not found" when I looked for the > files in / ... > > Gilles > > Le ven. 11 oct. 2019 à 00:55, Warren Toomey a écrit : > >> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. >> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you >> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. >> >> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd >> previously used? >> >> Mine was: Oh, I can: >> + write a simple script >> + to edit a file on the fly >> + with no temporary files (a la pipes) >> + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! >> >> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. >> >> Cheers, Warren >> > > > -- > *Gilles Gravier* - Gilles at Gravier.org > GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437 > Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0xA610DB098DE6D026 > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thomas.paulsen at firemail.de Wed Oct 23 18:34:09 2019 From: thomas.paulsen at firemail.de (Thomas Paulsen) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 10:34:09 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> Message-ID: <9f77f0d4cba8e6bc1f6fb9b5e26e883a@firemail.de> > dd is deprecated?  I'm surprised. I use it all the time. It's great when I don't think so. A quick google search doesn't support that. From krewat at kilonet.net Thu Oct 24 01:08:57 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:08:57 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: > "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" From lm at mcvoy.com Thu Oct 24 01:11:51 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 08:11:51 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191023151151.GA1655@mcvoy.com> I posted a "paper" here about how to recover from that on a Masscomp so yeah, guilty as well. It was a learning experience. On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:08:57AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote: > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) > > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: > >"sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm From rich.salz at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 01:17:17 2019 From: rich.salz at gmail.com (Richard Salz) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:17:17 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: I turned it into a reflex tester: trap "ls | wc ; exit" 1 2 3 15 echo go... `ls | wc` rm -f * And I got a prize at Usenix for it. On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM Arthur Krewat wrote: > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) > > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: > > "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From arrigo at alchemistowl.org Thu Oct 24 01:22:52 2019 From: arrigo at alchemistowl.org (Arrigo Triulzi) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 17:22:52 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On 23 Oct 2019, at 17:17, Richard Salz wrote: > > I turned it into a reflex tester: > trap "ls | wc ; exit" 1 2 3 15 > echo go... `ls | wc` > rm -f * > > And I got a prize at Usenix for it. I assume this was tested both on personal and work systems to see if the reflex speed changed? Arrigo From arrigo at alchemistowl.org Thu Oct 24 01:26:03 2019 From: arrigo at alchemistowl.org (Arrigo Triulzi) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 17:26:03 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191023151151.GA1655@mcvoy.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <20191023151151.GA1655@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <2464C07E-66EA-45AF-8952-BF30D2DC7D63@alchemistowl.org> I had posted a question on sys.unix.wizards about this a long long time ago when in academia. The gist of it was: “when does the system die after issuing the lethal command?” We tested on a limited number of systems (Linux with kernel around 1.0, SunOS 4.1.4, SGI Irix and both DEC OSF/1 and Ultrix) but I lost the results :( > On 23 Oct 2019, at 17:11, Larry McVoy wrote: > > I posted a "paper" here about how to recover from that on a Masscomp > so yeah, guilty as well. It was a learning experience. > > On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:08:57AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote: >> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) >> >> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: >>> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" > > -- > --- > Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm From crossd at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 01:33:42 2019 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:33:42 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <2464C07E-66EA-45AF-8952-BF30D2DC7D63@alchemistowl.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <20191023151151.GA1655@mcvoy.com> <2464C07E-66EA-45AF-8952-BF30D2DC7D63@alchemistowl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:26 AM Arrigo Triulzi wrote: > I had posted a question on sys.unix.wizards about this a long long time > ago when in academia. The gist of it was: “when does the system die after > issuing the lethal command?” > > We tested on a limited number of systems (Linux with kernel around 1.0, > SunOS 4.1.4, SGI Irix and both DEC OSF/1 and Ultrix) but I lost the results > :( > The irony.... - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From krewat at kilonet.net Thu Oct 24 02:19:32 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 12:19:32 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <20191023151151.GA1655@mcvoy.com> <2464C07E-66EA-45AF-8952-BF30D2DC7D63@alchemistowl.org> Message-ID: <13626f0b-8dc4-d94f-527c-72ca4520054e@kilonet.net> Laugh out loud moment of the day... On 10/23/2019 11:33 AM, Dan Cross wrote: > > The irony.... > >         - Dan C. From will.senn at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 02:45:06 2019 From: will.senn at gmail.com (Will Senn) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:45:06 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <31872e63-ff9a-e2d5-0642-d23ec58817bd@gmail.com> On 10/23/19 10:08 AM, Arthur Krewat wrote: > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) > > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: >> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" > Oh yeah. Did something similar on my Powerbook back around Panther: sudo rm -fr /bin I heart my Macs (all of 'em), it was just a matter of copying back the bin directory or reinstalling over the existing files or grabbing the timemachine copy or somesuch... whatever it was, it was 20 minutes of frustration, then all good. Try that on linux... no, don't :), unless you're doing timeshift or something similar and just wanna have some fun. Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF From athornton at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 08:19:12 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 15:19:12 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <31872e63-ff9a-e2d5-0642-d23ec58817bd@gmail.com> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <31872e63-ff9a-e2d5-0642-d23ec58817bd@gmail.com> Message-ID: _These_ days on the Mac, the root filesystem is mounted ro with some cute overmounting tricks such that everything mutable in normal operations lives in /System/Volumes/Data. I presume updates take the form of booting into single-user-mode and running a script to remount rw and copy, but I haven't actually looked into it. Adam On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 9:45 AM Will Senn wrote: > On 10/23/19 10:08 AM, Arthur Krewat wrote: > > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) > > > > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: > >> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" > > > Oh yeah. Did something similar on my Powerbook back around Panther: > > sudo rm -fr /bin > > I heart my Macs (all of 'em), it was just a matter of copying back the > bin directory or reinstalling over the existing files or grabbing the > timemachine copy or somesuch... whatever it was, it was 20 minutes of > frustration, then all good. Try that on linux... no, don't :), unless > you're doing timeshift or something similar and just wanna have some fun. > > Will > > > -- > GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From arnold at skeeve.com Thu Oct 24 09:28:48 2019 From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 17:28:48 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <201910232328.x9NNSmia001653@freefriends.org> Norman Wilson wrote: > ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. > > I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently > published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in bricks-and-mortar > bookshops any time soon? > > Norman Wilson > Toronto ON BWK used Create Space, which is Amazon, to self publish. So, I suspect that it won't be in brick-and-mortar shops. They may can order for you but in that case it'd probably be more expensive than just ordering it yourself. Arnold From imp at bsdimp.com Thu Oct 24 09:38:19 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 17:38:19 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <201910232328.x9NNSmia001653@freefriends.org> References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <201910232328.x9NNSmia001653@freefriends.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 5:29 PM wrote: > Norman Wilson wrote: > > > ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. > > > > I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently > > published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in > bricks-and-mortar > > bookshops any time soon? > > > > Norman Wilson > > Toronto ON > > BWK used Create Space, which is Amazon, to self publish. So, I suspect > that it won't be in brick-and-mortar shops. They may can order for > you but in that case it'd probably be more expensive than just ordering > it yourself. > Mine arrived today. Yippie. Warner > Arnold > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From athornton at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 09:59:40 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 16:59:40 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <201910232328.x9NNSmia001653@freefriends.org> Message-ID: Since at least some of you are in contact with bwk, and since I haven't seen it mentioned here, can someone please pass along a typo correction with some semantic value? The RTM worm was 1988, not '98. And when you do, please pass along my appreciation for his kind words about Mike Mahoney (my former thesis advisor, RIP) at the back when he was talking about his sources. And since Lee was mentioned in bwk's book...does anyone here know for sure that Lee and Melinda Varian are still alive, and would they have contact info for them they would be willing to share? I worked for Melinda for a while but have fallen out of touch. Adam On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 4:39 PM Warner Losh wrote: > > > On Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 5:29 PM wrote: > >> Norman Wilson wrote: >> >> > ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. >> > >> > I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, >> `Independently >> > published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in >> bricks-and-mortar >> > bookshops any time soon? >> > >> > Norman Wilson >> > Toronto ON >> >> BWK used Create Space, which is Amazon, to self publish. So, I suspect >> that it won't be in brick-and-mortar shops. They may can order for >> you but in that case it'd probably be more expensive than just ordering >> it yourself. >> > > > Mine arrived today. Yippie. > > Warner > >> Arnold >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 10:05:09 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 20:05:09 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Two Unix50 Videos In-Reply-To: <20191022202720.GA21600@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191022202720.GA21600@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: Here (I hope) is a link to the Tribute to Dennis. My apologies for my "laugh track". https://www.dropbox.com/s/jsie49r6rk6cwm7/RitchieTribute.mov?dl=0 On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 4:28 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > from the Nokia event are up: > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUt3L3fLFt4 > Unix Today and Tomorrow: Future of Compute & Platforms: The Kernel > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz3GADLe__M > The origin of Unix panel session > > Cheers, Warren > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From imp at bsdimp.com Thu Oct 24 10:06:50 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 18:06:50 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <9f77f0d4cba8e6bc1f6fb9b5e26e883a@firemail.de> References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> <9f77f0d4cba8e6bc1f6fb9b5e26e883a@firemail.de> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 3:04 AM Thomas Paulsen wrote: > > > > dd is deprecated? I'm surprised. I use it all the time. It's great when > > I don't think so. A quick google search doesn't support that. > dd isn't deprecated. There's no heir apparent, it's in POSIX.1 and there's no advantage to changing. There's not even been talk of that, at east in *BSD land. Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mparson at bl.org Thu Oct 24 12:23:57 2019 From: mparson at bl.org (Michael Parson) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 21:23:57 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> <9f77f0d4cba8e6bc1f6fb9b5e26e883a@firemail.de> Message-ID: <496001dc0ab086a1e2d6d3a5f47dc5f1@bl.org> On 2019-10-23 19:06, Warner Losh wrote: > On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 3:04 AM Thomas Paulsen > wrote: > >>> dd is deprecated? I'm surprised. I use it all the time. It's >> great when >> >> I don't think so. A quick google search doesn't support that. > > dd isn't deprecated. There's no heir apparent, it's in POSIX.1 and > there's no advantage to changing. There's not even been talk of that, > at east in *BSD land. I'm sure the systemd people are eyeballing it. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ From cbbrowne at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 12:29:42 2019 From: cbbrowne at gmail.com (Christopher Browne) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 22:29:42 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 06:45, Abhinav Rajagopalan < abhinavrajagopalan at gmail.com> wrote: > >> > Since you mentioned the word dd, the utility which serves me like none > other for my frequent rewrites of images, it too has an interesting past, > it seems like 'dd' was non-unixy in it's design approach, if I'm to believe > the lores around, which leads me to think that this might have been another > one of the many idiosyncratic naming conventions used back then. More on > the dd stuff: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html > > Personally, I just like to think of it in my head as disk-disk. > I am pretty sure that "dd" derives from the "DD" statement in IBM JCL that stands for "Data Definition" Here's a link to practical-ish documentation about that: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/zosbasics/com.ibm.zos.zjcl/zjclc_jclDDstmt.htm On MVS, TSO, and such systems, compiled programs would be written in languages like COBOL, PL/1, FORTRAN, and such, and the programs would commonly reference input and output devices. The programs are controlled (we could say, "scripted") by JCL code that indicate the files (possibly other devices) to be connected up. Each file that is accessed gets its own DD line in the JCL script that indicates the various metadata about the file, such as its name, block size, storage class, how much space is allocated, literally dozens of options. Back in the '90s my "Y2K remediation" involvement was at American Airlines; I was one of the Unix guys working alongside mainframe guys; as soon as I started seeing the JCL for their TSO batch jobs, it was pretty obvious that this was from whence derived the dd command on Unix. The mainframe guys enthused a lot about a sorting tool with similar syntax called SyncSort that they'd use to do many of the things we'd do with cut and grep. The Jargon File claim that dd is deprecated makes little sense; dd is THE good tool for grabbing exact chunks of data out of binary files, and I haven't seen a would-be successor. It would be interesting to see some alternative constructed; given that it's all about dealing with pretty messy sorts of I/O work, an alternative is liable to have its messiness in different places. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thomas.paulsen at firemail.de Thu Oct 24 18:25:09 2019 From: thomas.paulsen at firemail.de (Thomas Paulsen) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2019 10:25:09 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> Message-ID: <54b31e5e60363ff3b84159b819c07a0b@firemail.de> MVS(Z/OS).DD statement means Data definition, //DD-name DD Parameters whereas DD-NAME identifies the dataset (=file). The real file is referenced by this name within the program. Say DD hello then the program source says: open hello; read hello, and so on. Thus MVS(Z/OS).DD having nothing todo withUNIX.DD. From jra at andrusk.com Fri Oct 25 03:31:50 2019 From: jra at andrusk.com (Justin Andrusk) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2019 17:31:50 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: Just got ordered for my birthday, w00t! Justin ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Sunday, October 20, 2019 6:43 PM, Norman Wilson wrote: > ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. > > I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently > published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in bricks-and-mortar > bookshops any time soon? > > Norman Wilson > Toronto ON From tih at hamartun.priv.no Fri Oct 25 03:32:38 2019 From: tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2019 19:32:38 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <31872e63-ff9a-e2d5-0642-d23ec58817bd@gmail.com> (Will Senn's message of "Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:45:06 -0500") References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> <31872e63-ff9a-e2d5-0642-d23ec58817bd@gmail.com> Message-ID: Will Senn writes: > Try that on linux... no, don't :) We accidentally totally hosed a Linux system running MySQL a dozen or so years back. Redhat, and pretty much "rpm -qa | xargs rpm -e". Totally destroyed the ability to do anything at all on that box, of course, even using the logged-in shell that caused the damage. We set up a new host, replicated the running database across, and retired the original. No down time, no data loss. :) -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay From earl.baugh at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 12:45:28 2019 From: earl.baugh at gmail.com (Earl Baugh) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2019 22:45:28 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4906DB3B-701F-43DF-863A-64FB42EC95F6@gmail.com> I got mine the other day and am at least a third of the way thru...I’m trying to pace myself because I’m really enjoying it and am torn by wanting to see what I’ll learn next and how bummed I’ll be when I’m done :-) Earl Sent from my iPhone > On Oct 24, 2019, at 1:42 PM, Justin Andrusk wrote: > > Just got ordered for my birthday, w00t! > > Justin > > > ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ >> On Sunday, October 20, 2019 6:43 PM, Norman Wilson wrote: >> >> ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. >> >> I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently >> published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in bricks-and-mortar >> bookshops any time soon? >> >> Norman Wilson >> Toronto ON > > From jsqmobile at gmail.com Sat Oct 26 06:58:54 2019 From: jsqmobile at gmail.com (John S Quarterman) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 16:58:54 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: Manual small enough to pick up. Man pages for each program. IO simple and made sense. -jsq On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michael at kjorling.se Sat Oct 26 07:08:04 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 21:08:04 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: <496001dc0ab086a1e2d6d3a5f47dc5f1@bl.org> References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> <9f77f0d4cba8e6bc1f6fb9b5e26e883a@firemail.de> <496001dc0ab086a1e2d6d3a5f47dc5f1@bl.org> Message-ID: On 23 Oct 2019 21:23 -0500, from mparson at bl.org (Michael Parson): >>>> dd is deprecated? I'm surprised. I use it all the time. >>> >>> I don't think so. A quick google search doesn't support that. >> >> dd isn't deprecated. There's no heir apparent, it's in POSIX.1 and >> there's no advantage to changing. There's not even been talk of that, >> at east in *BSD land. The only thing resembling "deprecation" of dd that I'm aware of is the recommendation I saw many years ago to not use it to copy potentially problematic storage media (for data recovery), but to use ddrescue for that purpose instead. The reason for this is that with conv=noerror (without which it'd simply abort if it encounters an I/O error), dd would simply skip past data in the input that it can't read, but not adjust any offsets in the output, which wreaks havoc with anything where offsets matter (such as in file system metadata). > I'm sure the systemd people are eyeballing it. That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From krewat at kilonet.net Sat Oct 26 07:34:22 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 17:34:22 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> <9f77f0d4cba8e6bc1f6fb9b5e26e883a@firemail.de> <496001dc0ab086a1e2d6d3a5f47dc5f1@bl.org> Message-ID: On 10/25/2019 5:08 PM, Michael Kjörling wrote: > The only thing resembling "deprecation" of dd that I'm aware of is the > recommendation I saw many years ago to not use it to copy potentially > problematic storage media (for data recovery), but to use ddrescue for > that purpose instead. The reason for this is that with conv=noerror > (without which it'd simply abort if it encounters an I/O error), dd > would simply skip past data in the input that it can't read, but not > adjust any offsets in the output, which wreaks havoc with anything > where offsets matter (such as in file system metadata). Which is where conv=sync,noerror comes in. Of course, I have no freakin' idea what version of UNIX that came into being. ;) art k. From will.senn at gmail.com Sat Oct 26 08:11:08 2019 From: will.senn at gmail.com (Will Senn) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 17:11:08 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On 10/25/19 3:58 PM, John S Quarterman wrote: > Manual small enough to pick up. Man pages for each program. IO simple > and made sense. -jsq > > On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey > wrote: > > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. > Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the > systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: >   + write a simple script >   + to edit a file on the fly >   + with no temporary files (a la pipes) >   + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > I've been watching this thread and thinking to myself, what was my personal aha moment? I guess it came to me in 1993 when I downloaded Patrick Volkerding's magnificent 11 floppy labor of love via my amazingly fast 300 baud modem attached to the University of Texas at Arlington's VMS system with a gateway to the internet. After many weeks of trying, I eventually got Slackware downloaded and burned to floppies. After booting up and after another couple of weeks of configuration frustration, I was able to run X on my machine and while it would be another decade before I switched over permanently, I never got over how much more powerful *nix was than anything I'd been exposed to and way more interesting than Windows 3 which was prevalent at the time. I was a C programmer back then and to have access to a system that was predicated on the language was awesome. Then In 2005, I bought a powerbook with my bonus, I learned you could have your cake (beautiful gui - thank you Next) and eat it too (thank you FreeBSD) and after that you couldn't pay me enough to ever switch back to windows :). Then, In 2019, I downloaded Mint 19.2 Tina Cinnamon 64 bit edition to my $300 Lenovo Thinkpad T430, installed zfsutils and marveled at how far linux has come. Oh, wait! Last week, I... But seriously, I am constantly surprised at how Unix underpins so much of my computing happiness. Gone are the doldrums of blue screens, stoopid command lines, even stoopider menus, microsoft bob's, and paper clip wizards,. Every time I move a mouse in the classroom and windows shows up, I shudder. Then I calmly connect my hdmi cable from my laptop to the projector, breathe a sigh of relief, and fire up my Mac/Linux/FreeBSD/Unix v6/v7/v0 environment and show my students what it means to be free :). OK, so technically speaking these aren't exactly Unix recollections, but they are certainly dependent on their Unix forebears and wouldn't exist without that heritage. Thank you Unix pioneers for making such a fun (something new to learn every day) system. Oh, and thanks for the file metaphor, and thanks for vi, best editor ever, and for C, and and and... Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reed at reedmedia.net Sat Oct 26 07:50:57 2019 From: reed at reedmedia.net (reed at reedmedia.net) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 16:50:57 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> <9f77f0d4cba8e6bc1f6fb9b5e26e883a@firemail.de> <496001dc0ab086a1e2d6d3a5f47dc5f1@bl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote: > Which is where conv=sync,noerror comes in. Of course, I have no > freakin' idea what version of UNIX that came into being. ;) Looks like dd was introduced in Fifth Edition (and had those conversion values). From imp at bsdimp.com Sat Oct 26 08:54:43 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 16:54:43 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem In-Reply-To: References: <20191021062242.GA91599@indra.papnet.eu> <20191022180705.GD51849@server.rulingia.com> <7455e361-b2fd-96b3-b9cd-37730f9aeed7@mhorton.net> <9f77f0d4cba8e6bc1f6fb9b5e26e883a@firemail.de> <496001dc0ab086a1e2d6d3a5f47dc5f1@bl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 3:35 PM Arthur Krewat wrote: > On 10/25/2019 5:08 PM, Michael Kjörling wrote: > > The only thing resembling "deprecation" of dd that I'm aware of is the > > recommendation I saw many years ago to not use it to copy potentially > > problematic storage media (for data recovery), but to use ddrescue for > > that purpose instead. The reason for this is that with conv=noerror > > (without which it'd simply abort if it encounters an I/O error), dd > > would simply skip past data in the input that it can't read, but not > > adjust any offsets in the output, which wreaks havoc with anything > > where offsets matter (such as in file system metadata). > > Which is where conv=sync,noerror comes in. Of course, I have no freakin' > idea what version of UNIX that came into being. ;) > Ddrescue tries multiple times with different sizes, which dd doesn't do. Warner art k. > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Sat Oct 26 10:33:45 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2019 11:33:45 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Wed, 23 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote: > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) > > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: >> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" It's almot becomea rite of passage :-) -- Dave From wlc at jctaylor.com Sat Oct 26 10:57:57 2019 From: wlc at jctaylor.com (William Corcoran) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2019 00:57:57 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? In-Reply-To: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <17663F7E-1E54-4BA7-BC4C-F10BD3BF5368@jctaylor.com> The year was 1986. Top Gun was in the theaters. Lionel Ritchie was belting out “Say you, say me” on serious overplay. I was working on the coolest machine I ever saw. The Motorola S290. Initially, we had System III and eventually System V. At the time, I learned MS DOS months before I was exposed to UNIX. I could not understand how a new small Motorola UNIX Super-microcomputer could have such an extensive set of documentation. I had to read these huge books to learn this same system could run computers from DEC and others. These UNIX books were so extensive and I found there were two ways to use UNIX: (1) sign on to the system at at work; or, (2) sign on to the system in my imagination. Both were equally as fun. The Motorola S290 had a small DPU tower called Data Processing Unit and several other similar shaped small towers linked by a SCSI bus that housed 5.25” devices of the day. This included 50MB hard disks, Wangtek Streaming Tape Drive. Yes! You could mount a streaming tape as a block device! It would “shoe shine” the tape heads if you “cd” into a formatted tape. It was not practical as a block device, but it worked. The Motorola S290 DPU ran a primary operating system called ISOS. It was UNIX like. But not UNIX. Boot disks had to have an ISOS partition and a UNIX partition. The Motorola S290 would first boot ISOS. Then, UNIX would start afterwards. ISOS has similar UNIX commands like “cd”, “ls”, and “ps” After working in a UNIX shell one day, I signed on to ISOS. I wanted to understand how UNIX integrated with ISOS. What blew my 1986 kid mind: After signing on to ISOS, I did a “ps” PID PPID ... COMMAND 123 2 “/UNIX” Aha UNIX! UNIX was a process running under ISOS! Bill Corcoran > On Oct 10, 2019, at 4:56 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren From dave at horsfall.org Sat Oct 26 12:09:59 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2019 13:09:59 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: <7w7e4yisda.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> <7w7e4yisda.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Oct 2019, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: >> Star Wars on a GT-40, which Andrew Hume (formerly UNSW, who is now at >> Bell last I heard) reverse-engineered to support three players, not >> two. > > Does that still exist? Most unlikely; a lot of stuff got lost from those days :-( -- Dave From dave at horsfall.org Sat Oct 26 12:24:02 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2019 13:24:02 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel In-Reply-To: <68553366-4E6F-4E17-8903-282C67186D16@humeweb.com> References: <201910191440.x9JEe8PB035921@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <443935c0-b033-e3ae-ea63-6a0fb3f8eb9e@kilonet.net> <7w7e4yisda.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> <68553366-4E6F-4E17-8903-282C67186D16@humeweb.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Oct 2019, Andrew Hume wrote: > the gt40??? oh my lord! good job i am en route to the bell labs 50th > anniversary. > its been a long time since i heard the name “Dave Horsfall”! Yep :-) Although now retired, I'm still active in Unix projects. -- Dave From Caipenghui_c at 163.com Sat Oct 26 19:39:40 2019 From: Caipenghui_c at 163.com (Caipenghui) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2019 17:39:40 +0800 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History Message-ID: <63A5F607-CDFC-45E1-8FDD-A040EF8A2424@163.com> Hello everyone, What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And \ as the escape character. Caipenghui -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lars at nocrew.org Sun Oct 27 01:10:11 2019 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2019 15:10:11 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> (Doug McIlroy's message of "Fri, 18 Oct 2019 07:52:09 -0400") References: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <7wmudn7dbg.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Doug McIlroy writes: >> 10-36-55.pdf user-mode programs: pool game > > This game, written by ken, used the Graphic 2. One of its > earliest tests--random starting positions and velocities on > a frictionless table with no collision detection--produced > a mesmerizing result. This is what the pool game looks like: https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/754#issuecomment-546611076 From salewski at att.net Sun Oct 27 11:51:12 2019 From: salewski at att.net (Alan D. Salewski) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2019 21:51:12 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Two Unix50 Videos In-Reply-To: References: <20191022202720.GA21600@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191027015112.GF7489@att.net> On 2019-10-23 20:05:09, John P. Linderman spake thus: > Here (I hope) is a link to the Tribute to Dennis. My apologies for my > "laugh track". > > https://www.dropbox.com/s/jsie49r6rk6cwm7/RitchieTribute.mov?dl=0 Thanks you -- that just made my weekend! My oldest fork() joined me for another viewing to appreciate it, too. -Al -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- a l a n d. s a l e w s k i salewski at att.net 1024D/FA2C3588 EDFA 195F EDF1 0933 1002 6396 7C92 5CB3 FA2C 3588 ----------------------------------------------------------------- From imp at bsdimp.com Mon Oct 28 02:32:14 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 10:32:14 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] My EuroBSDCon Unix Talk is up Message-ID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlzaDgzPY8 has my EuroBSDcon unix talk that everybody here was so kind to assist me on. Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Mon Oct 28 06:31:28 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 16:31:28 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History Message-ID: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And \ as the escape character. \ came from Multics. The first day Multics ran at Bell Labs Bob Morris famously typed backslash-newline at the login prompt and crashed the system. Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how pathnames were punctuated. Doug From rich.salz at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 06:42:55 2019 From: rich.salz at gmail.com (Richard Salz) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 16:42:55 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: > > > Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how > pathnames were punctuated. > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bakul at bitblocks.com Mon Oct 28 06:46:21 2019 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 13:46:21 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 27 Oct 2019 16:31:28 -0400." <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <20191027204628.7EFFE156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> On Sun, 27 Oct 2019 16:31:28 -0400 Doug McIlroy wrote: > > What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And > \ as the escape character. > > \ came from Multics. The first day Multics ran at Bell Labs Bob Morris > famously typed backslash-newline at the login prompt and crashed the > system. > > Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how > pathnames were punctuated. From what I read: >dir1>dir2>file1 -- absolute: /dir1/di2/file1 file1 -- relative: if >dir1>dir2 is the working dir dir1>file2 file4 -- ../dir3/file3 <file5 -- ../../dir4/file5 == >dir4>file5 << is more compact thant ../.. and I like the vertical symmetry of < and >! From charles.unix.pro at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 06:49:01 2019 From: charles.unix.pro at gmail.com (Charles Anthony) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 13:49:01 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2019 at 1:43 PM Richard Salz wrote: > >> Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how >> pathnames were punctuated. >> > > > > >> /home/CAnthony >user_dir_dir>User>CAnthony ../foo From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon Oct 28 07:31:33 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 17:31:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History Message-ID: <20191027213133.9907E18C083@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Charles Anthony > /home/CAnthony I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? I seem to remember my homedir on MIT-Multics was >udd>CSR>JNChiappa? And I wonder if the 'dd' directory on PDP-7 Unix owe anything to 'udd'? Getting back to the original query, I'm wondering if '/' was picked as it wasn't shifted, unlike '>'? Noel From charles.unix.pro at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 07:51:28 2019 From: charles.unix.pro at gmail.com (Charles Anthony) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 14:51:28 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: <20191027213133.9907E18C083@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20191027213133.9907E18C083@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2019 at 2:31 PM Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Charles Anthony > > > /home/CAnthony > > I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? I seem to remember my > homedir on MIT-Multics was >udd>CSR>JNChiappa? > > >user_dir_dir>Project>User >user_dir_dir Home directories of users >daemon_dir_dir Home directories of daemons >process_dir_dir /proc "Names" are aliases, similar to soft links; "udd" is a name for "user_dir_dir" so ">udd" and ">user_dir_dir" point to the same directory. >user_dir_dir>SysAdmin>admin or >udd>sa>a is ~root/ Circulating back to the original question, backslash is used as an escape character on Multics. "\f" is end-of-file-ish, used eg to leave input mode in text editors. -- Charles And I wonder if the 'dd' directory on PDP-7 Unix owe anything to 'udd'? > > Getting back to the original query, I'm wondering if '/' was picked > as it wasn't shifted, unlike '>'? > > Noel > -- X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net Mon Oct 28 09:01:44 2019 From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 17:01:44 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> On 10/27/19 2:49 PM, Charles Anthony wrote: > /home/CAnthony     >user_dir_dir>User>CAnthony Is there any relation between Multics' use of ">" as a directory separator and MS-DOS's default use of ">" at the end of the command prompt? -- Grant. . . . unix || die -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4008 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: From usotsuki at buric.co Mon Oct 28 11:11:25 2019 From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 21:11:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 27 Oct 2019, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote: > On 10/27/19 2:49 PM, Charles Anthony wrote: >> /home/CAnthony     >user_dir_dir>User>CAnthony > Is there any relation between Multics' use of ">" as a directory separator > and MS-DOS's default use of ">" at the end of the command prompt? I can't imagine there's any such connection. MS-DOS got it from CP/M, which didn't even have the concept of subdirectories until after MS-DOS did. -uso. From imp at bsdimp.com Mon Oct 28 12:46:52 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 20:46:52 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] My EuroBSDCon talk Message-ID: My talk has been posted. https://youtu.be/FTlzaDgzPY8 Thanks to everyone who helped make it better. Warner P.s. this may be a duplicate email... I had domain issues when I sent it before... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ewe2 at ewe2.ninja Mon Oct 28 15:54:46 2019 From: ewe2 at ewe2.ninja (Sean Dwyer) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 01:54:46 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] My EuroBSDCon talk In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20191028055445.GA30376@mail.ewe2.ninja> On Sun, Oct 27, 2019 at 08:46:52PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote: > My talk has been posted. > > https://youtu.be/FTlzaDgzPY8 > > Thanks to everyone who helped make it better. Really interesting talk, good luck with the Venix stuff! -- I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by. From michael at kjorling.se Mon Oct 28 22:00:02 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 12:00:02 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On 27 Oct 2019 21:11 -0400, from usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas): > On Sun, 27 Oct 2019, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote: >> Is there any relation between Multics' use of ">" as a directory >> separator and MS-DOS's default use of ">" at the end of the command >> prompt? > > I can't imagine there's any such connection. MS-DOS got it from CP/M, which > didn't even have the concept of subdirectories until after MS-DOS did. If there was such a relationship, it would probably make more sense for the command prompt termination character to be ":", not ">", as DOS labelled devices as [whatever]: (like "A:" or "NUL:"). So I agree with Steve; I imagine it's unrelated. They just had to use _something_ as a default to indicate that the computer is waiting for a command, and ">" is as good a character as any. In either case, since MS-DOS/PC-DOS did what CP/M already did in that regard, the question would probably need to be posed to Kildall where he got it from. Unless Kildall wrote it down, getting a first hand account on the reasoning behind that particular choice would be... nontrivial. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From clemc at ccc.com Mon Oct 28 23:44:18 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 09:44:18 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 8:01 AM Michael Kjörling wrote: > the question would probably need to be posed to Kildall where he got it > from. > Kildall was in record stating that CP/M's model was RT-11, which came from DOS-11 which came from DOS-8 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From usotsuki at buric.co Tue Oct 29 01:08:44 2019 From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 11:08:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Michael Kjörling wrote: > On 27 Oct 2019 21:11 -0400, from usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas): >> >> I can't imagine there's any such connection. MS-DOS got it from CP/M, which >> didn't even have the concept of subdirectories until after MS-DOS did. > > If there was such a relationship, it would probably make more sense > for the command prompt termination character to be ":", not ">", as > DOS labelled devices as [whatever]: (like "A:" or "NUL:"). So I agree > with Steve; I imagine it's unrelated. They just had to use _something_ > as a default to indicate that the computer is waiting for a command, > and ">" is as good a character as any. 86-DOS actually did use ":" as a prompt character. This was changed for IBM's release, for some clone releases, and for MS-DOS 2.0. -uso. From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Oct 29 01:51:44 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 11:51:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History Message-ID: <20191028155144.ACBAB18C07E@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Charles Anthony >> I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? > user_dir_dir>Project>User Oh, right. Too many years spent on Unix! :-) > "Names" are aliases, similar to soft links I feel like they are more similar to hard links; they belong to a segment, and if the name is given to another segment, and the original segment has only that name, it goes away. (See the discussion under "add_name" in the MPM 'Commands and Active Fuinctions'). Also, Multics does real soft links (too), so names can't be soft links! :-) Noel From ality at pbrane.org Tue Oct 29 03:36:10 2019 From: ality at pbrane.org (Anthony Martin) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 10:36:10 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: <20191027204628.7EFFE156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20191027204628.7EFFE156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> Message-ID: <20191028173539.GA129556@alice> Bakul Shah once said: > >dir1>dir2>file1 -- absolute: /dir1/di2/file1 > file1 -- relative: if >dir1>dir2 is the working dir > dir1>file2 > file4 -- ../dir3/file3 > <file5 -- ../../dir4/file5 == >dir4>file5 > > << is more compact thant ../.. and I like the vertical symmetry of < and >! "Getting Less Than Right" would have been an interesting title. ;) Unix uses dot for the current directory. Was there any notation for this in Multics? Anthony From charles.unix.pro at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 04:17:26 2019 From: charles.unix.pro at gmail.com (Charles Anthony) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 11:17:26 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: <20191028173539.GA129556@alice> References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20191027204628.7EFFE156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> <20191028173539.GA129556@alice> Message-ID: > > > > Unix uses dot for the current directory. Was > there any notation for this in Multics? > > Not as a special symbol. As a command parameter, [pwd] is equivalent to UNIX `pwd`; [hd] would be equivalent to ~, evaluating to the home directory, -- Charles -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Tue Oct 29 04:47:33 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 05:47:33 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Steve Nickolas wrote: > 86-DOS actually did use ":" as a prompt character. This was changed for > IBM's release, for some clone releases, and for MS-DOS 2.0. The best I've ever seen was RT-11's "." - talk about minimalist... Actually this thread probably belongs on COFF by now. -- Dave From fuz at fuz.su Tue Oct 29 06:07:45 2019 From: fuz at fuz.su (Robert Clausecker) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 21:07:45 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax Message-ID: <20191028200745.GA36348@fuz.su> Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T assembler syntax. While I'm still not quite sure if everything in there is correct, this explanation seemed plausible to me; the PDP-11 assembler being adapted for the 8086, then the 80386 and then ELF targets, giving us today's convoluted syntax. The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. Supposedly, it would get away without % as a register prefix, thus being much less obnoxious to use. Any idea if such an assembler ever existed and if yes where? I suppose Xenix might have shipped something like that. The only AT&T syntax assemblers I know today are those from Solaris, the GNU project, the LLVM project, and possibly whatever macOS ships. Are there (or where there) any other x86 AT&T assemblers? Who was the first party to introduce this? Yours, Robert Clausecker [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501 -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments From paul.winalski at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 06:43:16 2019 From: paul.winalski at gmail.com (Paul Winalski) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:43:16 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History In-Reply-To: References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On 10/28/19, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Steve Nickolas wrote: > >> 86-DOS actually did use ":" as a prompt character. This was changed for >> IBM's release, for some clone releases, and for MS-DOS 2.0. > > The best I've ever seen was RT-11's "." - talk about minimalist... > > Actually this thread probably belongs on COFF by now. RT-11 was following standard DEC practice by using "." as its command prompt. The "monitor dot" was the command prompt in both TOPS-10 and TOPS-20. Most DEC operating systems, including RT-11, TOPS-10/20, and VMS, used "/" as a prefix on command options; "-" performs this function on UNIX since "/" is the directory delimiter. Back in the days of stand-alone programs, physical switches on the console were used to set program options. This of course won't work when you have multiprogramming. I was told that DEC chose "/" because it looks like a toggle switch. Command options in fact were initially called "switches". -Paul W. From fuz at fuz.su Tue Oct 29 06:14:08 2019 From: fuz at fuz.su (Robert Clausecker) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 21:14:08 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax Message-ID: <20191028201408.GA37167@fuz.su> Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T assembler syntax. While I'm still not quite sure if everything in there is correct, this explanation seemed plausible to me; the PDP-11 assembler being adapted for the 8086, then the 80386 and then ELF targets, giving us today's convoluted syntax. The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. Supposedly, it would get away without % as a register prefix, thus being much less obnoxious to use. Any idea if such an assembler ever existed and if yes where? I suppose Xenix might have shipped something like that. The only AT&T syntax assemblers I know today are those from Solaris, the GNU project, the LLVM project, and possibly whatever macOS ships. Are there (or where there) any other x86 AT&T assemblers? Who was the first party to introduce this? Yours, Robert Clausecker [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501 -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments From web at loomcom.com Tue Oct 29 07:06:12 2019 From: web at loomcom.com (Seth Morabito) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 14:06:12 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax In-Reply-To: <20191028201408.GA37167@fuz.su> References: <20191028201408.GA37167@fuz.su> Message-ID: <4a3383f9-473b-430c-8b91-6324a2793437@www.fastmail.com> On Mon, Oct 28, 2019, at 1:14 PM, Robert Clausecker wrote: > Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T > assembler syntax. Thanks for pointing this out, I think it's a really interesting read. I'm a bit of an oddball among my friends, because I actually like and prefer AT&T syntax. I think most of the other developers I know find my attitude to be abhorrent :) -Seth -- Seth Morabito Poulsbo, WA web at loomcom.com From mah at mhorton.net Tue Oct 29 07:41:39 2019 From: mah at mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 14:41:39 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: I'm enjoying bwk's book very much, but it has me wondering. There are two stories I've heard that supposedly occurred at Murray Hill, but he didn't include them. I've read past the badge section and the "grepping for my keys" comment, so I believe I've come past the right point. Without telling the actual stories here, one involves a monkey picture pasted onto a Bell Labs badge, the other is about an MTS who was late to a meeting because she was grepping her apartment for her keys. I've told these stories often, and they get a good laugh. Does anyone have first hand knowledge of these stories, who told them, whether they are true, etc? Thanks,     Mary Ann On 10/20/19 3:43 PM, Norman Wilson wrote: > ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. > > I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently > published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in bricks-and-mortar > bookshops any time soon? > > Norman Wilson > Toronto ON From alec at sensi.org Tue Oct 29 07:48:29 2019 From: alec at sensi.org (Alexander Voropay) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:48:29 +0300 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax Message-ID: Robert Clausecker wrote: > The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style > assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. There were alot of AT&T codebase ports to x86 architecture except Xenix: Microport, INTERACTIVE, Everex, Wyse e.t.c. using AT&T x86 syntax. I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF as format for executables: See: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?67736-History-behind-the-disk-images-of-AT-amp-T-UNIX-System-V-Release-4-Version-2-1-for-386&p=560039#post560039 (Rather interesting kernel ABI/Call convention) and https://gunkies.org/wiki/Unix_SYSVr3 There were also SystemV R2 to i286 ports i.e.: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Microport_System_V with a.out binary format. From norman at oclsc.org Tue Oct 29 07:54:26 2019 From: norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 17:54:26 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is Message-ID: <1572299670.14422.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Mary Ann Horton: I'm enjoying bwk's book very much, but it has me wondering. There are two stories I've heard that supposedly occurred at Murray Hill, but he didn't include them. ==== You can't expect every story to be there. The book would be too heavy to lift! Could the `monkey picture on a badge' story be that of G. R. Emlin's badge? She was a gremlin doll, not a monkey, but it would be reasonable to mistake the former for the latter. Here's a good pictore of G R herself, with what I believe to be at least a second-generation badge. The original badge was an old-style Bell Labs one with a green border; I forget whether that meant contractor or something else, but a regular MTS badge was blue-bordered at the time. Norman Wilson Toronto ON From norman at oclsc.org Tue Oct 29 07:55:29 2019 From: norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 17:55:29 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is Message-ID: <1572299735.14620.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Bother: Here's a good pictore of G R herself, with what I believe to be at least a second-generation badge. Forgot to paste in the URL. Here it is: http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/g-r-emlin/ From fuz at fuz.su Tue Oct 29 07:59:16 2019 From: fuz at fuz.su (Robert Clausecker) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 22:59:16 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20191028215916.GA43520@fuz.su> Hi Alexander, On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 12:48:29AM +0300, Alexander Voropay wrote: > Robert Clausecker wrote: > > > The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style > > assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. > > There were alot of AT&T codebase ports to x86 architecture except Xenix: > Microport, INTERACTIVE, Everex, Wyse e.t.c. using AT&T x86 syntax. > > I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF > as format for executables: > See: > http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?67736-History-behind-the-disk-images-of-AT-amp-T-UNIX-System-V-Release-4-Version-2-1-for-386&p=560039#post560039 > (Rather interesting kernel ABI/Call convention) Nice find! It seems to use lcall to selector 7 for system calls. A similar choice was made in 386BSD all the way through FreeBSD 2.2.8 where it was replaced with int $0x80 as in Linux. > and > https://gunkies.org/wiki/Unix_SYSVr3 > > There were also SystemV R2 to i286 ports i.e.: > https://gunkies.org/wiki/Microport_System_V > with a.out binary format. I'll have a look at that. Thank you for the help! Yours, Robert Clausecker -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments From imp at bsdimp.com Tue Oct 29 08:08:53 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:08:53 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax In-Reply-To: <20191028200745.GA36348@fuz.su> References: <20191028200745.GA36348@fuz.su> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 2:16 PM Robert Clausecker wrote: > Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T > assembler syntax. While I'm still not quite sure if everything in there > is correct, this explanation seemed plausible to me; the PDP-11 > assembler being adapted for the 8086, then the 80386 and then ELF > targets, giving us today's convoluted syntax. > > The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style > assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. Supposedly, it would get > away without % as a register prefix, thus being much less obnoxious to > use. Any idea if such an assembler ever existed and if yes where? > I suppose Xenix might have shipped something like that. > > The only AT&T syntax assemblers I know today are those from Solaris, > the GNU project, the LLVM project, and possibly whatever macOS ships. > Are there (or where there) any other x86 AT&T assemblers? Who was > the first party to introduce this? > VENIX 2.0 had this. It was a Pure AT&T syntax w/o % signs: eg | | VENIX/86 start off (bootstrap starts execution at location 0 `start'). | | Relocate complete kernel down to low memory. .text start: cli mov dx,#LOWMEM | base of relocated kernel mov cx,cs cmp cx,dx | are we there (put there by bootstrap) ? beq L0002 | Yes. mov ds,cx which is clearly op dst, src. VENIX's compiler was from the MIT compiler collection which was a port of the portable C compiler to x86 that everybody used (it seems, I don't have a reference for that, just speculation). You can find a version of this code in the TUHS archive in Applications/Portable_CC which has the 8086.zip. There's follow on work from a university in Queens in 286.zip that adds near/far stuff (the original one didn't, and the VENIX code assumes none of the segment registers change in userland code for its context switching code). I've not looked at this code. All this code is dyed in the wool K&R code from a V7-level C compiler, so it won't compile on newer systems. And it's a right-royal pain in the backside to convert on the fly because it wasn't written to be portable to ANSI compilers and modern C compilers no longer have a K&R mode... Thanks again to Al Kossow for this being in the archive. It's possible to find this on FTP sites if you look hard enough. I found them in the past, but I can't find it now that I went looking, so I'm quite happy that it's in the archive. VENIX 2.1 released a newer version of the compiler than was in VENIX 2.0. I don't know if those pre-date or post-date this stuff. Sadly, the modern PCC project no longer works with 16-bit code, but I suppose that's par for the course these days. Warner Yours, > Robert Clausecker > > [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nobozo at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 08:09:53 2019 From: nobozo at gmail.com (Jon Forrest) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 15:09:53 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <91571786-c448-c7d9-995f-4bf7c434a29e@gmail.com> On 10/28/19 2:41 PM, Mary Ann Horton wrote: > Without telling the actual stories here, one involves a monkey picture > pasted onto a Bell Labs badge, the other is about an MTS who was late to > a meeting because she was grepping her apartment for her keys. I've told > these stories often, and they get a good laugh. I don't know what happened at Bell Labs but I can tell a similar story about what happened at Ford Aerospace, which was a very early commercial Unix user (e.g. PWB in 1978). Ford had secure entry points into the buildings, where you would go into a pod that's similar to what you go though in airports these days. While you were in the pod, you were supposed to show your badge to a camera which was being monitored by a security person sitting nearby. Most of these security people were humorless and seemed to enjoy this task. One of the people in my group was real joker. So, one day he decided to paste a piece of a brown paper bag over his picture on his badge. Along with this, he put a brown paper bag over his head, and went into the security pod. The reaction of the security person was classic. It took him a little while to overcome the fact that the badge matched what he was seeing, and that he needed to investigate further. Jon From fuz at fuz.su Tue Oct 29 08:24:17 2019 From: fuz at fuz.su (Robert Clausecker) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 23:24:17 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax In-Reply-To: References: <20191028200745.GA36348@fuz.su> Message-ID: <20191028222417.GA45136@fuz.su> Hi Warner, On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 04:08:53PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote: > VENIX 2.0 had this. It was a Pure AT&T syntax w/o % signs: > > eg > | > | VENIX/86 start off (bootstrap starts execution at location 0 `start'). > | > | Relocate complete kernel down to low memory. > .text > start: cli > mov dx,#LOWMEM | base of relocated kernel > mov cx,cs > cmp cx,dx | are we there (put there by bootstrap) ? > beq L0002 | Yes. > mov ds,cx > > which is clearly op dst, src. op dst, src is Intel syntax. AT&T syntax has op src, dst like MACRO-11. There are a number of other differences: (a) | instead of / or # as a comment character (b) different mnemonics (beq instead of je) and (c) # instead of $ as the comment character. Without seeing some more code, I'd say it's not AT&T syntax. > VENIX's compiler was from the MIT compiler collection which was a port of > the portable C compiler to x86 that everybody used (it seems, I don't have > a reference for that, just speculation). You can find a version of > this code in the TUHS archive in Applications/Portable_CC which has the > 8086.zip. > > There's follow on work from a university in Queens in 286.zip that adds > near/far stuff (the original one didn't, and the VENIX code assumes none of > the segment registers change in userland code for its context switching > code). I've not looked at this code. Will have a look! > All this code is dyed in the wool K&R code from a V7-level C compiler, so > it won't compile on newer systems. And it's a right-royal pain in the > backside to convert on the fly because it wasn't written to be portable to > ANSI compilers and modern C compilers no longer have a K&R mode... > > Thanks again to Al Kossow for this being in the archive. It's possible to > find this on FTP sites if you look hard enough. I found them in the past, > but I can't find it now that I went looking, so I'm quite happy that it's > in the archive. VENIX 2.1 released a newer version of the compiler than was > in VENIX 2.0. I don't know if those pre-date or post-date this stuff. Thank you for trying to dig up the source. > Sadly, the modern PCC project no longer works with 16-bit code, but I > suppose that's par for the course these days. OpenWatcom still works, but it's not too compatible. > Warner > > Yours, > > Robert Clausecker > > > > [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501 Yours, Robert Clausecker -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments From imp at bsdimp.com Tue Oct 29 08:29:26 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:29:26 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax In-Reply-To: <20191028222417.GA45136@fuz.su> References: <20191028200745.GA36348@fuz.su> <20191028222417.GA45136@fuz.su> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 4:24 PM Robert Clausecker wrote: > Hi Warner, > > On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 04:08:53PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote: > > VENIX 2.0 had this. It was a Pure AT&T syntax w/o % signs: > > > > eg > > | > > | VENIX/86 start off (bootstrap starts execution at location 0 `start'). > > | > > | Relocate complete kernel down to low memory. > > .text > > start: cli > > mov dx,#LOWMEM | base of relocated kernel > > mov cx,cs > > cmp cx,dx | are we there (put there by bootstrap) ? > > beq L0002 | Yes. > > mov ds,cx > > > > which is clearly op dst, src. > > op dst, src is Intel syntax. AT&T syntax has op src, dst like MACRO-11. > There are a number of other differences: (a) | instead of / or # as a > comment > character (b) different mnemonics (beq instead of je) and (c) # instead of > $ > as the comment character. > > Without seeing some more code, I'd say it's not AT&T syntax. > Doh! I've been mixing the two up since the 90s :(. Yea, this stuff isn't AT&T syntax... It's from a compiler from MIT... I should have taken the hint that it used MIT sequence :) Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mah at mhorton.net Tue Oct 29 09:01:02 2019 From: mah at mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:01:02 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <91571786-c448-c7d9-995f-4bf7c434a29e@gmail.com> References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <91571786-c448-c7d9-995f-4bf7c434a29e@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4caae9f3-a9dd-1a77-6f2b-633cba870562@mhorton.net> That's similar but different in a couple of important ways. And it's not G.R. Emlin's, that's what reminded me of it. Here is the badge story as I heard it. Two MTS at Murray Hill were discussing their badges. It was routine to walk into the building, show the guard your badge, and keep walking. One guy said "They never look at those things!  I'll bet I could paste a picture of a monkey on my badge, and he'd never notice it!". The other guy said "You're on!". So the first guy pastes a monkey picture on his badge. The second guy tips off the guard, and watches from inside the building. The first guy comes into the building and flashes his monkey badge to the guard. No reaction, so he keeps on walking. A few second later, the guard calls after him. "Hey, come back here! Let me see your badge." The guy knows he's in trouble, but he comes back and hands the guard his badge. The guard looks at the badge. He looks at the employee. He looks at the badge. He looks at the employee. He looks at the badge. Handing the badge back to the employee, he says "OK, you can go!" On 10/28/19 3:09 PM, Jon Forrest wrote: > > > On 10/28/19 2:41 PM, Mary Ann Horton wrote: > >> Without telling the actual stories here, one involves a monkey >> picture pasted onto a Bell Labs badge, the other is about an MTS who >> was late to a meeting because she was grepping her apartment for her >> keys. I've told these stories often, and they get a good laugh. > > [brown paper bag story] > From nobozo at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 09:18:47 2019 From: nobozo at gmail.com (Jon Forrest) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:18:47 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <4caae9f3-a9dd-1a77-6f2b-633cba870562@mhorton.net> References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <91571786-c448-c7d9-995f-4bf7c434a29e@gmail.com> <4caae9f3-a9dd-1a77-6f2b-633cba870562@mhorton.net> Message-ID: On 10/28/2019 4:01 PM, Mary Ann Horton wrote: > That's similar but different in a couple of important ways. And it's not > G.R. Emlin's, that's what reminded me of it. > > Here is the badge story as I heard it. You're right. Your story is very similar to mine. I wonder if my friend heard the Bell Labs story and decided to try it at Ford. Your description of the guard's reaction was better, and more accurate, than mine. In my case, I know it happened because I was there. Jon From steffen at sdaoden.eu Tue Oct 29 09:49:00 2019 From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:49:00 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <4caae9f3-a9dd-1a77-6f2b-633cba870562@mhorton.net> References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <91571786-c448-c7d9-995f-4bf7c434a29e@gmail.com> <4caae9f3-a9dd-1a77-6f2b-633cba870562@mhorton.net> Message-ID: <20191028234900.LOEFm%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Mary Ann Horton wrote in <4caae9f3-a9dd-1a77-6f2b-633cba870562 at mhorton.net>: |That's similar but different in a couple of important ways. And it's not |G.R. Emlin's, that's what reminded me of it. | |Here is the badge story as I heard it. | |Two MTS at Murray Hill were discussing their badges. It was routine to |walk into the building, show the guard your badge, and keep walking. | |One guy said "They never look at those things!  I'll bet I could paste a |picture of a monkey on my badge, and he'd never notice it!". The other |guy said "You're on!". | |So the first guy pastes a monkey picture on his badge. The second guy |tips off the guard, and watches from inside the building. | |The first guy comes into the building and flashes his monkey badge to |the guard. No reaction, so he keeps on walking. A few second later, the |guard calls after him. "Hey, come back here! Let me see your badge." The |guy knows he's in trouble, but he comes back and hands the guard his badge. | |The guard looks at the badge. He looks at the employee. He looks at the |badge. He looks at the employee. He looks at the badge. | |Handing the badge back to the employee, he says "OK, you can go!" Early side channel attack. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) From cym224 at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 10:31:16 2019 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 20:31:16 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax In-Reply-To: <4a3383f9-473b-430c-8b91-6324a2793437@www.fastmail.com> References: <20191028201408.GA37167@fuz.su> <4a3383f9-473b-430c-8b91-6324a2793437@www.fastmail.com> Message-ID: <5623d077-218b-4b15-ae62-8b84ab4bbfae@gmail.com> On 10/28/19 17:06, Seth Morabito wrote: >> >> Thanks for pointing this out, I think it's a really interesting read. >> >> [...] because I actually like and prefer AT&T syntax. +1 > I think most of the other developers I know find my attitude to be abhorrent :) > > -Seth From stewart at serissa.com Tue Oct 29 12:05:50 2019 From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 22:05:50 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: <4caae9f3-a9dd-1a77-6f2b-633cba870562@mhorton.net> References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <91571786-c448-c7d9-995f-4bf7c434a29e@gmail.com> <4caae9f3-a9dd-1a77-6f2b-633cba870562@mhorton.net> Message-ID: Regarding badge stories, my favorite is Richard Feynman, who found a hole in the fence at Los Alamos and one day exited four times without going in. (Recollection of the story, I think in Surely You’re Joking…) But that reminds me of my favorite arithmetic problem: Q: explain negative numbers A; Four people go into an empty room. Seven people leave. How many people have to go into the room before it is empty again? From wkt at tuhs.org Tue Oct 29 12:18:43 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 12:18:43 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Fwd: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129 Message-ID: <20191029021843.GA24461@minnie.tuhs.org> All, I just received this from Stephen Jones at the LCM+L. ----- Forwarded message from Stephen Jones ----- Subject: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129 Hello Folks .. you’ll hear through official channels along with videos and pictures (hopefully soon) that we just got PDP-7 UNICS to boot on a real PDP-7 (sn 129) using our newly designed “JK09” disk drive. The recent posting of source is going to be great .. we’ve been using the simh image that has been available for a while. BTW, compiling the B Hello World on a real 7 is much more satisfying than it is under simh … More to come, please watch Living Computers for updates. (PS sorry we’re late to the BTL party). Stephen M. Jones ----- End forwarded message ----- From stewart at serissa.com Tue Oct 29 12:18:46 2019 From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 22:18:46 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code In-Reply-To: References: <201910181152.x9IBq95P001809@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20191018183610.diq_a%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Message-ID: <363F5ECC-7F3E-4441-B9E7-2828BF21F303@serissa.com> > On 2019, Oct 18, at 6:04 PM, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > > while writing "space travel," > i could not get the space ship integration > around a planet to keep from either gaining or > losing energy due to floating point errors. > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some > weird simple double integration that self > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can > ascertain, the formula was never published > and no one i have asked (including me) has > been able to recreate it. > > i look forward to the OCR of the code. > I think this must be a variant of “Symplectic Integration”. My son had an internship at Mitre having something to do with orbit determination and I got to reading papers about it. Symplectic integration is what you want for systems described by a Hamiltonian, such as orbits because the usual integrators (Euler, Runge-Kutta) don’t conserve the interchange between position and momentum, or something like that. As far as I can tell, this sort of stuff started getting published in the 1980s, so Hamming may well have tossed it off earlier and just not written it up. Could be a nice historical footnote for the development of orbit calculations. Could be fun to reverse engineer the code. -L From imp at bsdimp.com Tue Oct 29 13:57:47 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 21:57:47 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Fwd: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129 In-Reply-To: <20191029021843.GA24461@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191029021843.GA24461@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: That's awesome. I'll wager it is only the second PDP-7 to boot unix, and the first PDP-7A. And maybe the 6th machine ever. Well done. Warner On Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 8:19 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > All, I just received this from Stephen Jones at the LCM+L. > > ----- Forwarded message from Stephen Jones > ----- > > Subject: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129 > > Hello Folks .. you’ll hear through official channels along with videos > and pictures (hopefully soon) that we just got PDP-7 UNICS to boot on > a real PDP-7 (sn 129) using our newly designed “JK09” disk drive. > > The recent posting of source is going to be great .. we’ve been using > the simh image that has been available for a while. > > BTW, compiling the B Hello World on a real 7 is much more satisfying > than it is under simh … > > More to come, please watch Living Computers for updates. > (PS sorry we’re late to the BTL party). > > Stephen M. Jones > ----- End forwarded message ----- > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wkt at tuhs.org Tue Oct 29 14:04:34 2019 From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 14:04:34 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 Message-ID: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7. So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ Cheers, Warren P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well. From imp at bsdimp.com Tue Oct 29 15:07:08 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 23:07:08 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: This looks awesome. The readme says it's unsure if this is v6 or v7. Diff of a few files suggests v6 with the 'u' area being a pointer instead of a struct and a few of the elements names changed a bit... The dates are from 1976 or 1977, which also matches... And we have this from wikipedia: "By 1976, the operating system was in use at various academic institutions, including Princeton , where Tom Lyon and others ported it to the S/370, to run as a guest OS under VM/370 ." which matches the dates as well found on the tape. This is seriously cool. There are a few corrupted files (like dsk.h). Kernel sources are there, but there's no userland programs apart from the assembler and C compiler. Looking at the kernel dskio.s routines suggests it's making an upcall to something with the sio instructions which suggests this is the VM/370 version. The hits keep coming! Warner On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 10:04 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7. > > So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ > > Cheers, Warren > > P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From athornton at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 15:19:43 2019 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 22:19:43 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: > On Oct 28, 2019, at 9:04 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7. > > So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ > > Cheers, Warren > > P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well. Well. Time to dust of Hercules again. Too bad the LCM+L has my P/390 and I had to give my Integrated Server back to IBM. Adam From spedraja at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 17:14:46 2019 From: spedraja at gmail.com (SPC) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 08:14:46 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: El mar., 29 oct. 2019 6:20, Adam Thornton escribió: > > > > On Oct 28, 2019, at 9:04 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > > > > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has > > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting > PDP-7. > > > > So, cast your eyes on > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ > > Time to dust of Hercules again. > Amazing, Warren. And for sure the Hercules reference. Just today I was searching for Hercules VM/370 Packs (Four & Six). Succesfully, I must say. I will appreciate to read about all the attempts to put it on working state. Sadly, this used to be managed on Hercules groups under Yahoogroups, but this platform is closing. I can provide some details in [COFF] list later. Cordiales saludos / Best Regards / Salutations / Freundliche Grüße ----- Sergio Pedraja > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alec at sensi.org Wed Oct 30 00:38:36 2019 From: alec at sensi.org (Alexander Voropay) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:38:36 +0300 Subject: [TUHS] Design of the AT&T assembly syntax Message-ID: Robert Clausecker wrote: > > I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF > Nice find! It seems to use lcall to selector 7 for system calls. A > similar choice was made in 386BSD all the way through FreeBSD 2.2.8 > where it was replaced with int $0x80 as in Linux. Technically speaking lcall $0x07,$0 uses selector 0 with RPL=3 (bit0 and bit1==1) and LDT (bit2==1) It seems it's oldest way to call kernel from userspace on x86 architecture. AT&T's programmers used this sycall convention for SysVR3 and SysVR4 on i386 (not sure about SysVR2 on i286). There are very few examples with lcall-type syscall i.e. http://www.sco.com/developers/devspecs/abi386-4.pdf (figure 3-26) (and leaked SysVR4 i386 sources) William Jolitz used this convention in his amazing articles about porting BSD4.3 to the i386 (c)1991 http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix-source-code/research/1991/0101.html (p."System Call Inteface"). See also 386BSD 0.0: https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/blob/0.0/arch/i386/i386/locore.s#L361 (Did he run AT&T userspace on his kernel ???) As you mentioned, most of early *BSD systems on i386 also used lcall. Linus selected to use "DOS-style" call with INT 0x80. More recent BSD on i386 also use INT. https://john-millikin.com/unix-syscalls http://asm.sourceforge.net/intro/hello.html Solaris on x86 (ex. SysVR4) also uses lcall. See a https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/sergey/cs258/solaris-on-x86.pdf p.4.2.3 and Solaris (later OpenSolaris and later Illumos) sourcecode. From imp at bsdimp.com Wed Oct 30 01:10:51 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 09:10:51 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 1:15 AM SPC wrote: > > > El mar., 29 oct. 2019 6:20, Adam Thornton escribió: > >> >> >> > On Oct 28, 2019, at 9:04 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: >> > >> > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has >> > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting >> PDP-7. >> > >> > So, cast your eyes on >> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ >> >> Time to dust of Hercules again. >> > > Amazing, Warren. And for sure the Hercules reference. Just today I was > searching for Hercules VM/370 Packs (Four & Six). Succesfully, I must say. > I will appreciate to read about all the attempts to put it on working > state. Sadly, this used to be managed on Hercules groups under Yahoogroups, > but this platform is closing. I can provide some details in [COFF] list > later. > I sure hope the internet archive pulls it all down before it goes away. Geocities used to have a lot of obscure hardware info on it and that was mostly lost when they went away :( Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spedraja at gmail.com Wed Oct 30 01:22:42 2019 From: spedraja at gmail.com (SPC) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 16:22:42 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: El mar., 29 oct. 2019 a las 16:11, Warner Losh () escribió: Amazing, Warren. And for sure the Hercules reference. Just today I was >> searching for Hercules VM/370 Packs (Four & Six). Succesfully, I must say. >> I will appreciate to read about all the attempts to put it on working >> state. Sadly, this used to be managed on Hercules groups under Yahoogroups, >> but this platform is closing. I can provide some details in [COFF] list >> later. >> > > I sure hope the internet archive pulls it all down before it goes away. > Geocities used to have a lot of obscure hardware info on it and that was > mostly lost when they went away :( > > Warner > Just in case and for knowledge of anyone interested, I have made a backup pf the messages and contents at date of all the Hercules-related groups under Yahoogroups. It's saved in SQLite format plus the files accesibles individually. I've added too some new URLs with the VM packs and some other stuff as Hercules v.4, Turnkey TK4 distro, and so. In fact I am thinking to raise one webpage dedicated to this matter, in english and spanish languages. I had the same idea for a TUHS mirror some time ago but it's just now when I have some free time to think seriously about it. Kind Regards Sergio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mah at mhorton.net Wed Oct 30 06:13:48 2019 From: mah at mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 13:13:48 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out In-Reply-To: References: <1571611430.28265.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <2b4f016b-5f54-199f-523b-866daf4d11b7@mhorton.net> Thanks to Jon's super response on the first story, we know it originally occurred at Ford Aerospace. Let me tell the other story. Perhaps someone will know some details. When I tell it, usually to nontechnical people, I prefix it by explaining that UNIX has 3 different grep programs, all of which find text in files. There is regular grep. There is fgrep, the "fixed grep", which is simpler and only looks for basic text. And there is egrep, the "enhanced grep", that will look for fancy patterns and is very powerful. You would expect that fgrep, being the simplest, would be the fastest, but as it turns out, egrep is the fastest and fgrep is the slowest. One day at a meeting at Bell Labs, an MTS came rushing into the meeting, all out of breath. "Sorry I'm late, I was grepping my apartment for my keys." Dryly, the boss replied "You should have used egrep. It's faster." From pugs at ieee.org Thu Oct 31 13:56:04 2019 From: pugs at ieee.org (Tom Lyon) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2019 20:56:04 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: Hi, folks. Tom Lyon here - this UNIX 370 stuff was recovered by Stephen at LCM+L from DECtapes that I've had sitting around for 40+ years. You can read all about the Princeton/Amdahl project here: https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart1/ If anyone wants to get serious with the code, you'll need Hercules with a VM/370 image as well as a PDP-11 emulator running V6. There's not a lot beyond the kernel, I got the shell working enough to prove that fork worked, and then ran out of steam because of the awful communication problems between the PDP and the IBM. [ But that was my start as a networking guy ]. I personally haven't had time to do anything with the recovered bits. I've been lurking on TUHS for a while - a special Hi to Ken Thompson and Steve Johnson. I owe a lot to each of them. Read about my summer at Bell with the Interdata 8/32 here: https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/16/belllabspart1/ On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 9:04 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7. > > So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ > > Cheers, Warren > > P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well. > -- - Tom -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Thu Oct 31 14:16:53 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2019 21:16:53 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20191031041653.GL6515@mcvoy.com> Hijacking this a bit but much props to Tom, he has done so much. I learned he exposed the IOMMU to user space in Linux, you have to be a geek to get how cool that is, it's life changing for VMs and Tom just sort of said yeah, I did that, like it was not a big deal. So I hosted Tom and a bunch of other systems guys at my place, we did a rib fest and talked about systems. It's the most fun I've had in years, Kirk and Eric came and spent the night in my guest house and Kirk dryly said "could we do this more often than every 20 years" because I used to go to their house for wine tastings. But it had been at least 20 years. Kevin Bowling was the energy that got that meeting going and he has asked me if there was some way to get an East Coast version of that going. He really wants the DEC people, he has a theory that if we could get the PDP-11 people and the VAX people there would be so many good stories. Would there be any interest in getting the DEC people together and getting them to tell stories? I hate to travel but I'd travel for that, especially if we got bwk and other Bell Labs people like Doug to show up. Pugs, happy to see you here, this list is fun. On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 08:56:04PM -0700, Tom Lyon wrote: > Hi, folks. Tom Lyon here - this UNIX 370 stuff was recovered by Stephen at > LCM+L from DECtapes that I've had sitting around for 40+ years. > You can read all about the Princeton/Amdahl project here: > https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart1/ > > If anyone wants to get serious with the code, you'll need Hercules with a > VM/370 image as well as a PDP-11 emulator running V6. There's not a lot > beyond the kernel, I got the shell working enough to prove that fork > worked, and then ran out of steam because of the awful communication > problems between the PDP and the IBM. [ But that was my start as a > networking guy ]. I personally haven't had time to do anything with the > recovered bits. > > I've been lurking on TUHS for a while - a special Hi to Ken Thompson and > Steve Johnson. I owe a lot to each of them. Read about my summer at Bell > with the Interdata 8/32 here: https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/16/belllabspart1/ > > On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 9:04 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > > > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has > > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7. > > > > So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ > > > > Cheers, Warren > > > > P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well. > > > > > -- > - Tom -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm From arnold at skeeve.com Thu Oct 31 17:51:19 2019 From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 01:51:19 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <201910310751.x9V7pJ26030054@freefriends.org> Hi Tom, Kudos for making these things available. The links are great reading as well. I have the strong impression that this is different from the port at Bell Labs described in the 1984 BSTJ article; can you confirm? Warren, can you add the links into the README or whatever that's in the archive? Thanks, Arnold Tom Lyon wrote: > Hi, folks. Tom Lyon here - this UNIX 370 stuff was recovered by Stephen at > LCM+L from DECtapes that I've had sitting around for 40+ years. > You can read all about the Princeton/Amdahl project here: > https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart1/ > > If anyone wants to get serious with the code, you'll need Hercules with a > VM/370 image as well as a PDP-11 emulator running V6. There's not a lot > beyond the kernel, I got the shell working enough to prove that fork > worked, and then ran out of steam because of the awful communication > problems between the PDP and the IBM. [ But that was my start as a > networking guy ]. I personally haven't had time to do anything with the > recovered bits. > > I've been lurking on TUHS for a while - a special Hi to Ken Thompson and > Steve Johnson. I owe a lot to each of them. Read about my summer at Bell > with the Interdata 8/32 here: https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/16/belllabspart1/ > > On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 9:04 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > > > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has > > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7. > > > > So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ > > > > Cheers, Warren > > > > P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well. > > > > > -- > - Tom From spedraja at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 18:09:34 2019 From: spedraja at gmail.com (SPC) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 09:09:34 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: El jue., 31 oct. 2019 a las 4:57, Tom Lyon () escribió: > Hi, folks. Tom Lyon here - this UNIX 370 stuff was recovered by Stephen at > LCM+L from DECtapes that I've had sitting around for 40+ years. > You can read all about the Princeton/Amdahl project here: > https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart1/ > Welcome. > If anyone wants to get serious with the code, you'll need Hercules with a > VM/370 image as well as a PDP-11 emulator running V6. There's not a lot > beyond the kernel, I got the shell working enough to prove that fork > worked, and then ran out of steam because of the awful communication > problems between the PDP and the IBM. [ But that was my start as a > networking guy ]. I personally haven't had time to do anything with the > recovered bits. > Both items are available. Hoping it could be helpful, I share below some links to related IBM 370 and DEC PDP-11 stuff that I've recently found and more or less organized: *HERCULES* The Hercules System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture Emulator - http://www.hercules-390.eu/ SoftDevLabs (SDL) version of Hercules 4.x, code named Hyperion - http://www.softdevlabs.com/hyperion.html *A branch of the original development of Hercules numbered itself as v.4 with more or less regular compilations * *VM/370* Robert O'Hara Six Pack Distribution v1.2 of VM/370 - http://www.smrcc.org.uk/members/g4ugm/VM370.htm *Very interesting because he includes in the same webpage downloads of the previous VM/370 packs (Paul Gorinskey's, Andy Norrie's, Bob Abele's)* *There is a BETA version v1.3 available too.* Implementing VSAM under VM/370 SixPack v1.2 - http://www.kicksfortso.com/same/KooKbooK/KooKbooK-14.htm A compilation of Operating Systems for IBM S/370 available for download on the Internet - https://geronimo370.nl/s370/s-370-operating-systems/<< *It includes one direct link to the page of Robert O'Hara SixPack BETA version v1.3 * A relatively wide explanation of the features available in SixPack v1.2 - https://hub.docker.com/r/rbanffy/vm370 *It includes something inusual: one link to Github where you can find one DOCKER implementation of theSixPack v1.2 * A surprising (and interesting) bunch of videoclips about VM/370 - https://bestofclip.net/search?s=VM/370 *PDP-11* SIMH (Conputer History Sinulator Project). The original distribution, V3.10-0, updated 24-Feb-2019 - http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ SIMH Original Software Kits (including bootable UNIX v7 and v6 disks) - http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html The SIMH v.4.x Github place, a branch of the original project with some interesting additions - https://github.com/simh/simh SIMH v4.0 development binaries - https://github.com/simh/Win32-Development-Binaries Kind Regards Sergio Pedraja -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pugs at ieee.org Thu Oct 31 23:51:08 2019 From: pugs at ieee.org (Tom Lyon) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 06:51:08 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370 In-Reply-To: <201910310751.x9V7pJ26030054@freefriends.org> References: <20191029040434.GA29996@minnie.tuhs.org> <201910310751.x9V7pJ26030054@freefriends.org> Message-ID: The Bell Labs 370 port was different, it was based on running inside of TSS/370, which was an IBM OS which hardly anyone besides Bells's ESS group used. Clem can tell us all about the IBM/Locus port to the 370. And maybe there was another IBM port?? Much later, Sun ported Solaris to the Hitachi HDS 370 clones (for Hitachi), and then to Amdahl clones for Amdahl/Fujitsu. On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 12:51 AM wrote: > Hi Tom, > > Kudos for making these things available. The links are great reading > as well. > > I have the strong impression that this is different from the port > at Bell Labs described in the 1984 BSTJ article; can you confirm? > > Warren, can you add the links into the README or whatever that's > in the archive? > > Thanks, > > Arnold > > Tom Lyon wrote: > > > Hi, folks. Tom Lyon here - this UNIX 370 stuff was recovered by Stephen > at > > LCM+L from DECtapes that I've had sitting around for 40+ years. > > You can read all about the Princeton/Amdahl project here: > > https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart1/ > > > > If anyone wants to get serious with the code, you'll need Hercules with a > > VM/370 image as well as a PDP-11 emulator running V6. There's not a lot > > beyond the kernel, I got the shell working enough to prove that fork > > worked, and then ran out of steam because of the awful communication > > problems between the PDP and the IBM. [ But that was my start as a > > networking guy ]. I personally haven't had time to do anything with the > > recovered bits. > > > > I've been lurking on TUHS for a while - a special Hi to Ken Thompson and > > Steve Johnson. I owe a lot to each of them. Read about my summer at Bell > > with the Interdata 8/32 here: > https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/16/belllabspart1/ > > > > On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 9:04 PM Warren Toomey wrote: > > > > > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has > > > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting > PDP-7. > > > > > > So, cast your eyes on > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/ > > > > > > Cheers, Warren > > > > > > P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well. > > > > > > > > > -- > > - Tom > -- - Tom -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: