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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Fwd: Old and Tradition was V9 shell

by Clem Cole

First please continue this discussion on COFF (which has been CC'ed). While Fortran is interesting to many, it not a UNIX topic per say. Also, as I have noted in other places, I work for Intel - these comments are my own and I'm not trying to sell you anything. Just passing on 45+ years of programming experience. On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:34 AM Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I would think that FORTRAN is likelier to be passed around as folk wisdom > and ancient PIs (uh, Primary Investigators, not the detective kind) > thrusting a dog-eared FORTRAN IV manual at their new grad students and > snarling "RTFM!" than as actual college courses. > FWIW: I was at CMU last week recruiting. Fortran, even at a leading CS place like CMU, is hardly "folk wisdom". All the science PhD's (Chem, Mat Sci, Bio, Physics) that I interviewed all knew and used Fortran (nad listed on their CV's) as their primary language for their science. As I've quipped before, Fortran pays my own (and a lot of other people's salaries in the industry). Check out: https://www.archer.ac.uk/status/codes/ Fortran is about 90% of the codes running (FWIW: I have seen similar statistics from other large HPC sites - you'll need to poke). While I do not write in it, I believe there are three reasons why these statistics are true and* going to be true for a very long time*: 1. The math being used has not changed. Just open up the codes and look at what they are doing. You will find that they all are all solving systems of partial differential equations using linear algebra (-- see the movie: "Hidden Figures"). 2. 50-75 years of data sets with know qualities and programs to work with them. If you were able to replace the codes magically with something 'better' - (from MathLab to Julia or Python to Java) all their data would have to be requalified (it is like the QWERTY keyboard - that shipped sailed years ago). 3. The *scientists want to do their science* for their work to get their degree or prize. The computer and its programs *are a tool* for them look at data *to do their science*. They don't care as long as they get their work done. Besides Adam's mention of flang, there is, of course, gfortran; but there are also commerical compilers available for use: Qualify for Free Software | Intel® Software <https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/qualify-for-free-software> I believe PGI offers something similar, but I have not checked in a while. Most 'production' codes use a real compiler like Intel, PGI or Cray's. FWIW: the largest number of LLVM developers are at Intel now. IMO, while flang is cute, it will be a toy for a while, as the LLVM IL really can not handle Fortran easily. There is a huge project to put a number of the learnings from the DEC Gem compilers into LLVM and one piece is gutting the internal IL and making work for parallel architectures. The >>hope<< by many of my peeps, (still unproven) is that at some point the FOSS world will produce a compiler as good a Gem or the current Intel icc/ifort set. (Hence, Intel is forced to support 3 different compiler technologies internally in the technical languages group).

5 years, 4 months

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non-volatile main memory (NVMM)

by George Ross

Seen on one of our local "seminars" lists recently... > Emerging hardware, such as non-volatile main memory (NVMM) [...] > changes the way system software should be designed and implemented, > because they are not just an enhanced version of existing devices, > but provide new qualitative features and software interfaces. Core store, mutter, mutter. We used to regularly restart machines which had been turned off for a while, and they would happily pick up where they left off. One PDP-8 was happy to resume after several years of idleness. Sorry, had to send that, mutter... -- George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9LE Mail: gdmr(a)inf.ed.ac.uk Voice: 0131 650 5147 PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5 B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A 426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5 The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Who is the inventor of email?

by Dave Horsfall

[ Moved to COFF ] On Wed, 19 Feb 2020, Richard Salz wrote: > He's a loon. Search for the techdirt.com articles. > > > On Wed, Feb 19, 2020, 7:07 PM Ed Carp <erc(a)pobox.com> wrote: > > I've noticed that some guy named Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai is all over > > Twitter, claiming that he is the inventor of email. He doesn't > > look like he's nearly old enough. I thought it was Ray > > Tomlinson. Looks like he's trying to create some press for his > > Senate run. > > > > Anyone older that me here that can either confirm or deny? > > Thanks! Back when I was posting "On this day" events, I had this for Ray Tomlinson for 23rd April: Ray Tomlinson, computer pioneer, was born on this day in 1941. He is credited with inventing this weird thing called "email" on the ARPAnet, in particular the "@" sign to designate a remote host (although some jerk -- his name is not important -- is claiming that he was first). -- Dave

5 years, 4 months

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Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

by Clem Cole

Moving to COFF where this belongs… Here is my basic issue. I'm not 'blind' as Larry says. I lived it and I try to awknowledge who did what and why if I can. I try to remember we got here by a path and that path was hardly straight, but you don't get to join the convoy late and they say -- hey the journey began someplace else. @FLAME(on) Open/Free/Available/Access – whatever you want to call it, did not just pop up in the late 1980’ with the Free Software Foundation or in the 90s with the Linux Foundation *et al*. The facts are that in the early years, a computer customer got everything including schematics from the cpu manufacturer. The ‘culture’ described in Levi’s circa 1980 book “Hackers” that took off at MIT, Stanford, CMU, *et al.* because everything *was available* and people *shared things because it saved us all time and trouble*. In fact, the name of the IBM user group was just that, SHARE. IBM published patched to the OS or their compilers, in the source as 'PTFs' - program temporary fix'. Each site might have modified things a little (or a lot), so got the PTF and tape and looked at how the patch affected you. That was my first job support York APL/360 on TSS. (CMU had TSS working before IBM did, so a lot of PTFs from IBM would be things we already had dealt). Certainly, when I started programming in the late 1960s, the idea of proprietary SW had been around, but it was still somewhat constrained to the commercial side (Banking/Insurance *etc*… parts – where the real money was). The research and university community (which of course DEC was heavily part) was very much, we are all in together. Still everyone had sources and we moved things back and forth via mag tape at DECUS conferences or eventually the ARPAnet. At some point that started to change. Doug, Ken and others older than I can probably tell you more than I can about that transition. But the vendors started to lock up more and more of their IP. A user no longer got a mag tape with the sources and you did not do a full system generation. The end users/customers only got parts of the system, the rest was binaries. Unless you paid huge fees, the source at best was available on microfiche, and often you lacked important things needed to recreate the binaries. Thus the concept of the closed or proprietary systems started to become the norm, not as it has been previously. I remember, since CMU had VAX Serial #1, and a 'special' relationship with DEC, we have VMS sources. One spring/summer we were doing a consulting job (moving ISPS to the Vax for the Israel Government), and that was were I realized they only had the code on fiche, and CMU was 'different.' But here is the interesting thing, as the vendors started becoming less and less 'open', *AT&T was required by the 1956 consent decree to be 'open' and license its IP *for ‘fair and reasonable terms’ to all interested parties. (Which, they did, and the world got the transistor and UNIX as two of the best examples). So AT&T UNIX behavior is the opposite of what the hardware manufacturers were doing at the time!!! The argument comes back to a few basic issues. What is ‘fair and reasonable’ and ‘who gets to decide’ what is made available. As the creators of some content, started to close access to ‘secret sauce’ a tension can and did start to build between the creators and some users. BTW, the other important thing to remember is that you needed a $100K-$250K hunk of HW from DEC to use that ‘open’ IP from AT&T and *the hardware acquisition was the barrier to entry*, not the cost the SW. Folks, those of us that lived it. UNIX was 100% open. Anyone could get a license for it. The technologies that AT&T developed was also published in the open literature detailing how it was made/how it worked. They did this originally because they were bound by the US Gov due to a case that started in 1949 and settled witht that 1956 decree! The folks at AT&T were extremely free to talk about and they did give away what they had. The ‘sauce’ was never secret (and thus AT&T would famously lose its case when they later tried to put the cat back in the bag in AT&T *vs*. UCB/BSDi case) . The key is that during the PDP-11 and Vaxen times, the UNIX community all had licenses, commercial or university. But soon the microprocessor appears, we start to form new firms and with those sources, we created a new industry, the *Open Systems Industry* with an organization called /usr/group. This is all in the early 1980s (before FSF, much less Linux). What was different here, was *we** could all share* between other licensees (and anyone could get a license if they >>wanted<< it). But something interesting happens. These new commercial Open Systems folk won the war with the proprietary vendors. They were still competing with the old guard and they competed against each other (surprise/surprise – some were the same folks who had been competing against each other previously, now they just was using somewhat standard ammunition – UNIX and a cheap processor). Moreover, the new people with the UNIX technology (Sun, DEC, HP, Masscomp, IBM *et al*) start to handle their own version of UNIX just like they handled their previous codes. They want to protect it. And this is where the famous fair and reasonable comes in. Who gets to set what is fair? Certainly, $150 fee to recover the cost of writing the magtape (the IP was really free) seemed fair at the time – particularly since you had to ‘cons up’ another $150K for that PDP-11. Stallman, in particular, wants to go back to old days, where he got access toeverything and he had his playground. To add insult to all, he currently fighting the same war with some of MIT's ideas and the LISP machine world. So his answer was to try to rewrite everything from scratch and then try to give it away/get people to use it but add a funny clause that said you have to give to anyone else that asked for it. He still has a license, he just has different rules (I’ll not open if this is fair or reasonable – but it was the rules FSF made). BTW: that only works if you have something valuable (more in a minute). Moore’s law starts driving the cost of the hardware down and at some point, the computer to run UNIX costs $50K, then $10K, $5K, and even $1K. So now the fees that AT&T is charging the commercial side can be argued (as Larry and other have so well) are no longer ‘reasonable.’ At some point, FSF’s movement (IMO – after they got a compiler that was ‘good enough’ and that worked on ‘enough’ target ISA’s) starts to take off. I think this is the real 'Christensen Disruption'. GCC was not as good as Masscomp or Sun's compilers for the 68k or DEC's for the Vax, but it was free. As I recall, Sun was charging for its compiler at the time (we did manage to beat back the ex-DEC marketing types at Masscomp and the C compiler was free, Fortran and Pascal cost $s). Even though gcc is not as good, its good enough and people love it, so it builds a new market (and gets better and better as more people invest in it -- see Christensen's theory for why). But this at least 5 years *after* the Open Systems Community has been birthed. Sorry guys -- the term has been in use for a while to mean the >>UNIX<< community with its open interfaces and sharing of code. BTW: Linux itself would happen for another 5 years after that and couple of more years before the Linux Foundation, much less the community that has grown around it. But that’s my point… Please at least here in the historic mailing lists, start to admit and be proud that we are standing on people's shoulders and >>stop<< trying to stepping on people’s toes. The current FOSS movement is just that – Free and Open. That’s cool – that’s great. But recognize it started long before FSF or Linux or any of that. For a different time, the person I think who should really be credited as the start of the FOSS movement as we know it, is the late Prof. Don Pederson. In the late 1960s, he famously gave away his first ECAD program from UCB (which I believe was called MOTIS – and would later begat SPICE). As ‘dop’ used to tell his students (like me) back in the day – ‘*I always give away my sources. Because that way I go in the back door and get to see everything* at IBM/HP/Tektronix/AT&T/DEC etc..*. If I license and sell *our code*, I *have to *go in the front door like any other salesman.’* For the record a few years later, my other alma mater (CMU) was notorious for licensing it's work -- hence the SCRIBE debacle of the late 1970s and much of the CMU SPICE project/Andrew results of the early 1980s - while MIT gave everything away in Athena and more everything from the NU projects. I notice that the things that lived the longest from CMU were things that were given away without any restrictions... but I digress. So... coming back to the UNIX side of the world. Pederson’s work would create UCB’s ‘industrial liaison office’ which was the group that released the original ‘Berkeley Software Distribution’ for UNIX (*a.k.a.* BSD). They had a 10 year history of ‘giving away’ free software before UNIX came along. They gave their UNIX code anyone that asked for it. You just had to prove you had a license from AT&T, but again anyone could get that. i.e. it was 'open source.'

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

by Clem Cole

moved to coff On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 4:29 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I don't recall ever seeing "open source" used as a description of the > Unix "ecosystem" during the 90s. > Yes, that's my point. The term 'open' meant was published, open available anyone could use .. i.e. UNIX remember the SPEC 1170 work on the 1990s -- the define the 1170 interfaces and >>publish<< them so anyone could write code to it. > It was in the air with the (minimal) charges Prentice-Hall charged for > the Minix 0.x and 1.x disks and source; not dissimilar in that sense > to the charges the FSF were charging for their tapes at the time. > Right... there were fees to write magtapes (or floppies) Which comes back to my point... 'open source' was not picking. The whole community is standing on the shoulders of the UNIX ecosystem that really started to take off in the 1970s and 1980s. But the 'free' part was even before UNIX. We stood on the shoulders of things before us. There just was not (yet) a name for what we were doing. As Ted saids, I'll give the Debian folks credit for naming it, but the idea really, really goes back to the early manufacturers and the early community. FSF was a reaction to the manufacturers taking away something that some people thought was their 'birth right.'

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [Simh] Of DEC and cards

by Clem Cole

One last reply here, but CCing COFF where this thread really belongs... On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 12:34 PM Timothe Litt <litt(a)ieee.org> wrote: > OTOH, and probably more consistent with your experience, card equipment was > > almost unheard of when the DEC HW ran Unix... > You're probably right about that Tim, but DEC world was mostly TOPS/TENEX/ITS and UNIX. But you would think that since a huge usage of UNIX systems were as RJE for IBM gear at AT&T. In fact, that was one of the 'justifications' if PWB. I'm thinking of the machine rooms I saw in MH, WH and IH, much less DEC, Tektronix or my university time. It's funny, I do remember a lot of work to emulate card images and arguments between the proper character set conversions, but I just don't remember seeing actual card readers or punches on the PDP-11s, only on the IBM, Univac and CDC systems. As other people have pointed out, I'm sure they must have been around, but my world did not have them.

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [Simh] Of DEC and cards

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > I just don't remember seeing actual card readers or punches on the > PDP-11s I'm not sure DEC _had_ a card punch for the PDP11's. Readers, yes, the CR11: https://gunkies.org/wiki/CR11_Card_Readers but I don't think they had a punch (although there was one for the PDP-10 family, the CP10). I think the CR11 must have been _relatively_ common, based on how many readers and CR11 controller cards survive. Maybe not in computer science installations, though... :-) Noel

5 years, 4 months

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Video service on FreeBSD (was: Also, a video service)

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

On Sunday, 9 February 2020 at 22:09:47 -0800, jason-tuhs(a)shalott.net wrote: > >>> All, I've also set this up to try out for the video chats: >>> https://meet.tuhs.org/COFF >>> Password to join is "unix" at the moment. > >> Just tried it out. On FreeBSD I get a blank grey screen. I could >> only get something more on a Microsoft box, not quite what I'd want to >> do. Is there some trick? > > * Install /usr/ports/net-im/jitsi. (Comment out the BROKEN line from the > Makefile and "make install" should work as usual; the source can actually > be fetched just fine...) In fact, the package was indeed unfetchable, but the ports collection had a cached version, which is what you got. But now I've brought it up to date (only 2 years old rather than 4). > * kldload cuse > > * Run firefox and surf to that URL. I haven't found that necessary. In fact, installing jitsi doesn't seem to be necessary. All you need is a more recent browser than the antiques I was running. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)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

5 years, 4 months

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Also, a video service

by Warren Toomey

All, I've also set this up to try out for the video chats: https://meet.tuhs.org/COFF Password to join is "unix" at the moment. I just want to test it to confirm that it works; I'll be heading out the door to go to the shops soon. Cheers, Warren

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] V9 shell [was Re: Warner's Early Unix Presentation]

by Steffen Nurpmeso

Jon Steinhart wrote in <202002120012.01C0CpEC3910426(a)darkstar.fourwinds.com>: |Steffen Nurpmeso writes: |> Of course you are right, you will likely need to focus your mind, |> and that requires an intellectual context, knowledge, to base upon. | |Interesting that you mention this as I'm about to leave for a multi-day |advanced yoga workshop. One of the things that I like about yoga is that Then i wish you a good time, and deep breath! |you do have to learn to focus your mind, and it's amazingly difficult to |be focused on something as seemingly simple as standing up straight. I |don't think that it's reasonable to expect people to be able to focus |without training. Can you imagine if a computer tried to follow all of |your fleeting thoughts? I feel clearly overrated. The last time i had such fleeting was i know when, no good, i "collapsed with overflow" like John Falkens computer in Wargames. But i have the impression that "the only winning move is not to play" is not very hip. |In some respects, this takes me back to the early days of speech recogni\ |tion. |I remember people enthusiastically telling me how it would solve the \ |problem |of repetitive stress injuries. They were surprised when I pointed out that |most people who use their voice in their work actually take vocal training; |RSIs are not uncommon among performers. | |So really, what problem are we trying to solve here? I would claim \ |that the |problem is signal-to-noise ratio degradation that's a result of too many |people "learning to code" who have never learned to think. Much like \ |I feel |that it became harder to find good music when MIDI was invented because \ |there |was all of a sudden a lot more noise masquerading as music. I am chewing on that one. You can be lucky to have lived in times with great classical music artists as well as a tremendous flurry of styles, ideas etc. otherwise. In the 60s and 70s and even the first half of the 80s so much has happened. Not only in music. Just take psychological treatment, before there was lobotomy and electrical shocks, and studied persons stood on these ground solid as rocks, but then it exploded. Today the situation is really bad. And that "everyone is an artist" was surely as naive as "everyone shall learn coding". But i have spend long hours in MIDI piano rolls and i think you are right. Unfortunately. |I'm reminded of a Usenix panel session that I moderated on the future \ |of window |systems a long time ago. Rob was on the panel as was some guy whose name I |can't remember from Silicon Graphics. The highlight of the presentation \ |was |when Robin asked the question "So, if I understand what the SGI person \ |is saying, |it doesn't matter how ugly your shirt is, you can always cover it up \ |with a nice |jacket...." While she was asking the question Rob anticipated the \ |rest of the |question and started unbuttoning his shirt. | |So maybe I'm just an old-school minimalist, but I think that the biggest \ |problem |that needs solving is good low-level abstractions that are simple and \ |work and |don't have to be papered over with layer upon layer on top of them. \ | I just find |myself without the patience to learn all of the magic incantations \ |of the package |of the week. I like that. --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)

5 years, 4 months

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