- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dave Horsfall

In 1990 a certain Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir) published a proposal for the World Wide Web (often confused with the Internet by newbies). -- Dave

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In Memoriam: Jay W. Forrester, happy birthday Gene Amdahl, and LSD

by Dave Horsfall

Weird day... Computer architect Gene Amdahl was born in on this day in 1922; he had a hand in the IBM 704 and the System/360, founded Amdahl Corporation (maker of /360 clones), and devised Amdahl's Law in relation to parallel processing. But we lost Jay W. Forrester in 2016; another computer pioneer, he invented core memory (remember that, with its destructive read cycle?). Oh, and LSD was first synthesised in 1938 by Dr. Hofmann of Sandoz Labs, Switzerland; it had nothing to do with Berkeley and BSD, man... -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Happy birthday, computer mouse!

by Dave Horsfall

On this day in 1970 computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart was awarded the patent for the computer mouse. It was a fugly thing: just a squarish box with two wheels underneath it mounted at right-angles and a button. Ergonomic it wasn't... -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6? (fwd)

by Dave Horsfall

Meant to go to the list... -- Dave ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 07:23:19 +1100 (EST) From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> To: Paul Winalski Subject: Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6? On Thu, 14 Nov 2019, Paul Winalski wrote: > I used to think that "Emacs" stood for > "escape-meta-alt-control-shift". :-) It's too finger-busy with all > that alt, escape, and meta stuff for my taste. Hey, that's a bit old :-) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 17:28:41 +0000 From: Benjamin Huntsman To: "tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix taste (Re: terminal - just for fun) >> EMACS - eight megs and constantly swapping :) >I like my own version: "Enough Memory? A Concept Strange!" I thought it stood for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift :) I thought I came up with it independently, but obviously it was in the back of my mind. -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6?

by Clem Cole

Moving to a COFF On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 4:16 AM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de> wrote: > 'T'was before my time, but the legend has it that the original BLISS-10 bootstrap > compiler was a set of TECO macros that Chuck Geschke (Adobe's > founder) wrote.' > Really? TECO = Tape Editor and Corrector TECO started as that for PDP-1 or maybe TX-1 (at MIT I believe). But over time, TECO became the primary text editor on the PDP-10's for many, many people in the ARPA community. I learned it as my second, PDP-10 text editor (I learned a line editor, who's name I forget, that was similar to the IBM's editor when I got my first PDP-10 account, but quickly moved to TECO). FWIW: The original EMACS was a set of TECO macros. The historical truth is that besides being the primary text editor, it was so rich in function that TECO became for the PDP-10 what Jon Bentley describes as a 'little language' and was used for all sorts of small hacks. The later Unix world created other tools, be it sed, later awk, and the like. But for the PDP-10 world, TECO very much that low level engine that a lot of people used. When BLISS was written, CMU did not have UNIX (and thus nor any of the UNIX tools - as I had a small hand in making UNIX happen @ CMU in the early 1970s). But when I arrived, the two PDP-10's (CMU-A and CMU-B) reigned supreme as primary CS (and EE) systems, along with the CMU hacked version of IBM's TSS running on the 360 for everyone else (and where I got my first real programming job), plus CMU's own TSS/8 on couple of PDP-8s that were scattered about. FWIW: Chuck used the PDP-10's for his work as a grad student. He also is famous for being the first PhD to produce his thesis on a 'laser printer', the CMU XGP (it was not a laser as today, it was modified FAX machine made by Xerox). The fun story is that CMU's administration would not accept his thesis originally because the library wanted the 'originals' to put in the archives. It took 6-9 months for his thesis advisor (Bill Wulf) to convince the library, that they had the originals. Anyway, the use of TECO in such a manner was very much the way things were done in those days, so the legend is very much possible.

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6?

by Lars Brinkhoff

I suggest continuing this on COFF. Thomas Paulsen wrote: > I have a account on a remote twenex PDP10. There is a editor named > emacs. This is a very archaic piece of software. It doesn't know any > teco commands no matter how I tried. I'm pretty sure that this is > teco-emacs. Yes, it should be TECO Emacs. Normal use of Emacs rarely needs TECO commands. To get a TECO minibuffer type Meta-Altmode (Esc Esc). You should get a small window at the top of the terminal in which you can enter TECO commands. Execute them with double altmode as you would in any TECO. > I draw my own conclusions from these observations which are far away > from all these myths. I try to stay with the facts. I actually use TECO Emacs almost daily, and I have built it from sources. Some other information is based on email conversations among those who wrote Emacs.

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Peter Jeremy

On 2019-Nov-12 17:49:46 -0500, Arthur Krewat <krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote: >On 11/12/2019 5:41 PM, Robert Clausecker wrote: >> Oh please no. One of the things we've hopefully all learned from Pascal >> is that length-prefixed strings suck because you can't perform anything >> useful without copying the entire string. Keep in mind that C doesn't have a "string" type. The use of a NUL terminated char array is purely convention. There's nothing to stop someone using a length-prefixed array (though there's virtually no standard library support for that). >> Rob Pike and friends showed >> how to get strings and vectors right in the Go language where you have a >> builtin slice type which is essentially a structure >> >> struct slice(type) { >> type *data; >> size_t len, cap; >> }; That approach would have incurred a 12-byte overhead for each string or vector on a PDP-11 - that would have been a substantial disincentive on a memory-constrained system. >And none of that stops some programmer from doing slice.cap=255 - or is >it read-only? ;) Slices and strings are built-in types in Go. They can be modelled as the above structure but that is an implementation detail. It is possible to reduce the capacity of a slice (but not a string) but attempting to increase it will result in a runtime exception ("panic" in Go speak). -- Peter Jeremy

5 years, 5 months

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Happy birthday, Per Brinch Hansen!

by Dave Horsfall

Computer scientist Per Brinch Hansen was born on this day in 1938; he was known for his work on "monitors" (now known as operating systems), concurrent programming, parallel processing, etc. -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Dave Horsfall

(Narrowly diverted in time to COFF from TUHS when I saw Warren's email, so I hope Warner is on it.) On Tue, 12 Nov 2019, Warner Losh wrote: > POSIX can't even recognize that leap seconds exist :( There's a movement afoot to abolish leap seconds because they are "inconvenient" or something; that will upset the astronomers and other people who care about the exact time. > All is not lost, though; use strncpy() instead of strcpy() etc. > > strncpy has two issues. First, it doesn't guarantee NUL termination. > Second, it always writes N bytes. It's for a fixed width data field, not > a variable length string whose buffer size is known. strlcpy is much > better, but still has some issues... Yeah, I knew about the NUL termination (or lack of it) - I didn't think to mention it. When I use it, I copy n-1 bytes and plant the NUL in there myself (depending on how I'm using it). And I wasn't aware of strlcpy() - thanks. Too many functions to keep track of these days.... Trivia: curious to see how Australia's "talking clock" (long gone in favour of NTP, alas) handled the leap second, I recorded it (it puts a gap before the last beep). It can be heard (and seen!) over on www.horsfall.org/leapsecond.webm . And yes, that old long-haired hippie is me... -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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In memoriam: Gene Amdahl

by Dave Horsfall

We lost computer architect Gene Amdahl on this day in 2015; responsible for "Amdahl's Law" (referring to parallel computing), he had a hand in the IBM-704, the System/360, and founded Amdahl Corporation (a clone of the 360/370 series). -- Dave

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