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[ off topic ] History of US computing leading to 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering

by steve jenkin

Sorry for the dual list post, I don’t who monitors COFF, the proper place for this. There may a good timeline of the early decades of Computer Science and it’s evolution at Universities in some countries, but I’m missing it. Doug McIlroy lived through all this, I hope he can fill in important gaps in my little timeline. It seems from the 1967 letter, defining the field was part of the zeitgeist leading up to the NATO conference. 1949 ACM founded 1958 First ‘freshman’ computer course in USA, Perlis @ CMU 1960 IBM 1400 - affordable & ‘reliable’ transistorised computers arrived 1965 MIT / Bell / General Electric begin Multics project. CMU establishes Computer Sciences Dept. 1967 “What is Computer Science” letter by Newell, Perlis, Simon 1968 “Software Crisis” and 1st NATO Conference 1969 Bell Labs withdraws from Multics 1970 GE's sells computer business, including Multics, to Honeywell 1970 PDP-11/20 released 1974 Unix issue of CACM ========= The arrival of transistorised computers - cheaper, more reliable, smaller & faster - was a trigger for the accelerated uptake of computers. The IBM 1400-series was offered for sale in 1960, becoming the first (large?) computer to sell 10,000 units - a marker of both effective marketing & sales and attractive pricing. The 360-series, IBM’s “bet the company” machine, was in full development when the 1400 was released. ========= Attached is a text file, a reformatted version of a 1967 letter to ’Science’ by Allen Newell, Alan J. Perlis, and Herbert A. Simon: "What is computer science?” <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html> ========= A 1978 masters thesis on Early Australian Computers (back to 1950’s, mainly 1960’s) cites a 17 June 1960 CSIRO report estimating 1,000 computers in the US and 100 in the UK. With no estimate mentioned for Western Europe. The thesis has a long discussion of what to count as a (digital) ‘computer’ - sources used different definitions, resulting in very different numbers, making it difficult to reconcile early estimates, especially across continents & countries. Reverse estimating to 1960 from the “10,000” NATO estimate of 1968, with a 1- or 2-year doubling time, gives a range of 200-1,000, including the “100” in the UK. Licklider and later directors of ARPA’s IPTO threw millions into Computing research in the 1960’s, funding research and University groups directly. [ UCB had many projects/groups funded, including the CSRG creating BSD & TCP/IP stack & tools ] Obviously there was more to the “Both sides of the Atlantic” argument of E.W. Dijkstra and Alan Kay - funding and numbers of installations was very different. The USA had a substantially larger installed base of computers, even per person, and with more university graduates trained in programming, a higher take-up in private sector, not just the public sector and defence, was possible. ========= <https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-history> In September 1949, a constitution was instituted by membership approval. ———— <https://web.archive.org/web/20160317070519/https://www.cs.cmu.edu/link/inst…> In 1958, Perlis began teaching the first freshman-level computer programming course in the United States at Carnegie Tech. In 1965, Carnegie Tech established its Computer Science Department with a $5 million grant from the R.K. Mellon Foundation. Perlis was the first department head. ========= From the 1968 NATO report [pg 9 of pdf ] <http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PDF> Helms: In Europe alone there are about 10,000 installed computers — this number is increasing at a rate of anywhere from 25 per cent to 50 per cent per year. The quality of software provided for these computers will soon affect more than a quarter of a million analysts and programmers. d’Agapeyeff: In 1958 a European general purpose computer manufacturer often had less than 50 software programmers, now they probably number 1,000-2,000 people; what will be needed in 1978? _Yet this growth rate was viewed with more alarm than pride._ (comment) ========= -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

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Imagine an architecture where...

by Dave Horsfall

... every memory location is a stack. I'm thinking of a notation like: A => CADR (yes, I'm a LISP fan) A' => A[0] A'' => A[-1] etc. Not quite APL\360, but I guess pretty close :-) -- Dave

1 year

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Of PL/I

by Dave Horsfall

Has there ever been a full implementation of PL/I? It seems akin to solving the halting problem... Yes, I've used PL/I in my CompSci days, and was told that IBM had trademarked everything from /I to /C :-) -- Dave, who loved PL/360

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Earliest COBOL Compilers

by segaloco

Good morning, I was reading recently on the earliest days of COBOL and from what I could gather, the picture (heh) regarding compilers looks something like this: - RCA introduced the "Narrator" compiler for the 501[1] in November, 1960 (although it had been demonstrated in August of that year) - Sperry Rand introduced a COBOL compiler running under the BOSS operating system[2] sometime in late 1960 or early 1961 (according to Wikipedia which then cites [3]). First, I had some trouble figuring out the loading environment on the RCA 501, would this have been a "set the start address on the console, load cards/PPT, and go" sort of setup, or was there an OS/monitor involved? And for the latter, there is a UNIVAC III COBOL Programmer's Guide (U-3389) cited in [2] but thus far I haven't found this online. Does anyone know if COBOL was also on the UNIVAC II (or I) and/or if any distinct COBOL documents from this era of UNIVAC survive anywhere? - Matt G. [1] - http://bitsavers.org/pdf/rca/501/RCA501_COBOL_Narrator_Dec60.pdf [2] - http://bitsavers.org/pdf/univac/univac3/U-3521_BOSS_III_Jan63.pdf [3] - Williams, Kathleen Broome (10 November 2012). Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea.

1 year, 1 month

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Re: [TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

by Warner Losh

[ moved to coff ] On Thu, Mar 14, 2024 at 7:49 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 14, 2024 at 11:44:45AM +1100, Alexis wrote: > > > > i basically agree. i won't dwell on this too much further because i > > recognise that i'm going off-topic, list-wise, but: > > > > i think part of the problem is related to different people having > > different preferences around the interfaces they want/need for > > discussions. What's happened is that - for reasons i feel are > > typically due to a lock-in-oriented business model - many discussion > > systems don't provide different interfaces/'views' to the same > > underlying discussions. Which results in one community on platform X, > > another community on platform Y, another community on platform Z > > .... Whereas, for example, the 'Rocksolid Light' BBS/forum software > > provides a Web-based interface to an underlying NNTP-based system, > > such that people can use their NNTP clients to engage in forum > > discussions. i wish this sort of approach was more common. > > This is a bit off-topic, and so if we need to push this to a different > list (I'm not sure COFF is much better?), let's do so --- but this is > a conversation which is super-improtant to have. If not just for Unix > heritage, but for the heritage of other collecvtive systems-related > projects, whether they be open source or proprietary. > > A few weeks ago, there were people who showed up on the git mailing > list requesting that discussion of the git system move from the > mailing list to using a "forge" web-based system, such as github or > gitlab. Their reason was that there were tons of people who think > e-mail is so 1970's, and that if we wanted to be more welcoming to the > up-and-coming programmers, we should meet them were they were at. The > obvious observations of how github was proprietary, and locking up our > history there might be contra-indicated was made, and the problem with > gitlab is that it doesn't have a good e-mail gateway, and while we > might be disenfranchising the young'uns by not using some new-fangled > web interface, disenfranchising the existing base of expertise was > even worse idea. > > The best that we have today is lore.kernel.org, which is used by both > the Linux Kernel and the git development communities. It uses > public-inbox to archive the mailing list traffic, and it can be > accessed via threaded e-mail interface, as well as via NNTP. There > are also tools for subscribing to messages that match a filtering > criteria, as well as tools for extracting patches plus code review > sign-offs into a form that can be easily consumed by git. > email based flows are horrible. Absolutely the worst. They are impossible to manage. You can't subscribe to them w/o insane email filtering rules, you can't discover patches or lost patches easily. There's no standard way to do something as simple as say 'never mind'. There's no easy way to follow much of the discussion or find it after the fact if your email was filtered off (ok, yea, there kinda is, if you know which archives to troll through). As someone who recently started contributing to QEMU I couldn't get over how primitive the email interaction was. You magically have to know who to CC on the patches. You have to look at the maintainers file, which is often stale and many of the people you CC never respond. If a patch is dropped, or overlooked it's up to me to nag people to please take a look. There's no good way for me to find stuff adjacent to my area (it can be done, but it takes a lot of work). So you like it because you're used to it. I'm firmly convinced that the email workflow works only because of the 30 years of toolings, work arounds, extra scripts, extra tools, cult knowledge, and any number of other "living with the poo, so best polish up" projects. It's horrible. It's like everybody has collective Stockholm syndrome. The peoople begging for a forge don't care what the forge is. Your philisophical objections to one are blinding you to things like self-hosted gitea, gitlab, gerrit which are light years ahead of this insane workflow. I'm no spring chicken (I sent you patches, IIRC, when you and bruce were having the great serial port bake off). I've done FreeBSD for the past 30 years and we have none of that nonsense. The tracking isn't as exacting as Linux, sure. I'll grant. the code review tools we've used over the years are good enough, but everybody that's used them has ideas to make them better. We even accept pull requests from github, but our source of truth is away from github. We've taken an all of the above approach and it makes the project more approachable.In addition, I can land reviewed and tested code in FreeBSD in under an hour (including the review and acceptance testing process). This makes it way more efficient for me to do things in FreeBSD than in QEMU where the turn around time is days, where I have to wait for the one true pusher to get around to my pull request, where I have to go through weeks long processes to get things done (and I've graduated to maintainer status). So the summary might be email is so 1970s, but the real problem with it is that it requires huge learning curve. But really, it's not something any sane person would design from scratch today, it has all these rules you have to cope with, many unwritten. You have to hope that the right people didn't screw up their email filters. You have to wait days or weeks for an answer, and the enthusiasm to contribute dies in that time. A quick turnaround time is essential for driving enthusiasm for new committers in the community. It's one of my failings in running FreeBSD's github experiment: it takes me too long to land things, even though we've gone from years to get an answer to days to weeks.... I studied the linux approach when FreeBSD was looking to improve it's git workflow. And none of the current developers think it's a good idea. In fact, I got huge amounts of grief, death threads, etc for even suggesting it. Everybody thought, to a person that as badly as our hodge-podge of bugzilla, phabricator and cruddy git push hooks, it was lightyears ahead of Linux's system and allowed us to move more quickly and produced results that were good enough. So, respectfully, I think Linux has succeed despite its tooling, not because of it. Other factors have made it successful. The heroics that are needed to make it work are possible only because there's a huge supply that can be wasted and inefficiently deployed and still meet the needs of the project. Warner

1 year, 1 month

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(redirected from TUHS) What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

On Thursday, 7 March 2024 at 1:47:26 -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote: > > I eventually reverted back to Linux because it was clear that the > user community was getting much larger, I was using it > professionally at work and there was just a larger range of > applications available. Lately, I find myself getting tired of the > bloat and how big and messy and complicated it has all gotten. > Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering > what do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs? I'm surprised how few of the responders use BSD. My machines all (currently) run FreeBSD, with the exception of a Microsoft box (distress.lemis.com) that I use remotely for photo processing. I've tried Linux (used to work developing Linux kernel code), but I couldn't really make friends with it. It sounds like our reasons are similar. More details: 1977-1984: CP/M, 86-DOS 1984-1990: MS-DOS 1991-1992: Inactive UNIX 1992-1997: BSD/386, BSD/OS 1997-now: FreeBSD 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.php

1 year, 1 month

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NOT DELETED 8 (OS/360)

by Dave Horsfall

Can anyone remember what this meant on OS/360? Ken Robinson (one of my CompSci lecturers) used to say "Ah, the old 'NOT DELETED 8 trick!'"... -- Dave

1 year, 1 month

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Re: [ih] Fwd: Some Berkeley Unix history - too many PHDs per packet

by Clem Cole

This is UNIX history, but since the Internet's history and Unix history are so intertwined, I'm going to risk the wrath of the IH moderators to try to explain, as I was one of the folks who was at the table in those the times and participated in my small way in both events: the birth of the Internet and the spreading of the UNIX IP. More details can be found in a paper I did a few years ago: https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-france-et-… [If you cannot find it and are interested send me email off list and I'll forward it]. And ... if people want to continue this discussion -- please, please, move it to the more appropriate COFF mailing list: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff - which I have CC'ed in this reply. On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 11:32 PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Forwarded for Barbara > > > I will admit your response is confusing me. My post only concerns what > I think I remember as a problem in getting BSD UNIX, in particular the > source code. Nothing about getting something we wanted to use on a > hardware platform from one of the commercial vendors. We needed the BSD > source but got hung up. > Let me see if I can explain better ... Assuming you were running BSD UNIX on a Vax, your team would have needed two things: - an AT&T License for 32/V [Research Version 7 -- port to a Vax/780 at AT&T] and a - a license for BSD 3, later 4, then 4.1, *etc*., from the Regents of the University of CA. The first license gave your team core a few rights from AT&T: 1. the right to run UNIX binaries on a single CPU (which was named in your license) 2. the right to look at and modify the sources, 3. the right the create derivative works from the AT&T IP, and 4. the right to exchange your derivative works with others people that held a similar license from AT&T. [AT&T had been forced to allow this access (license) to their IP under the rules of the 1956 consent decree - see paper for more details, but remember, as part of the consent decree allow it to have a legal monopoly on the phone system, AT&T had to make its IP available to the US Gov -- which I'm guessing the crux of Barbara's question/observation]. For not-for-profits (University/Research), a small fee was allowed to be charged (order of 1-2 hundred $s) to process the paperwork and copy the mag tape. But their IP came without any warranty, and you had to hold AT&T harmless if you used it. In those days, we referred to this as *the UNIX IP was abandoned on your doorstep.* BTW: This license allowed the research sites to move AT&T derivative work (binaries) within their site freely. Still, if you look at the license carefully, most had a restriction (often/usually ignored at the universities) that the sources were supposed to only be available on the original CPU named in their specific license. Thus, if you were a University license, no fees were charged to run the AT&T IP on other CPUs --> however, the licensees were not allowed to use it for "commercial" users at the University [BTW: this clause was often ignored, although a group of us at CMU hackers in the late 1970s famously went on strike until the Unversity obtained at least one commercial license]. The agreement was that a single CPU should be officially bound for all commercial use for that institution. I am aware that Case-Western got a similar license soon after CMU did (their folks found out about the CMU strike/license). But I do not know if MIT, Standford, or UCB officials came clean on that part and paid for a commercial license (depending on the type of license, its cost was the order of $20K-25K for the first CPU and an order of $7K-10K for each CPU afterward - each of these "additional cpu' could also have the sources - but named in an appendix for each license with AT&T). I believe that some of the larger state schools like Penn State, Rutgers, Purdue, and UW started to follow that practice by the time Unix started to spread around each campus. That said, a different license for UNIX-based IP could be granted by the Regents of the University of CA and managed by its 'Industrial Laison's Office" at UCB (the 'IOL' - the same folks that brought licenses for tools like SPICE, SPLICE, MOTIS,* et al*). This license gave the holder the right to examine and use the UCB's derivative works on anything as long as you acknowledged that you got that from UCB and held the Regents blameless [we often called this the 'dead-fish license' -- *you could make a chip, make a computer, or even wrap dead-fish in it.* But you had to say you started with something from the Regents, but they were not to be blamed for what you did with it]. The Regents were exercising rights 3 and 4 from AT&T. Thus, a team who wanted to obtain the Berkeley Software Distribution for UNIX (*a.k.a*. BSD) needed to demonstrate that they held the appropriate license from AT&T [send a copy of the signature page from your license to the ILO] before UCB would release the bits. They also had a small processing fee to the IOL in the order of $1K. [The original BSD is unnumbered, although most refer to it today as 1BSD to differentiate it from later BSD releases for UNIX]. Before I go on, in those times, the standard way we operated was that you needed to have a copy of someone else's signature page to share things. In what would later become USENIX (truth here - I'm an ex-president of the same), you could only get invited and come to a conference if you were licensed from AT&T. That was not a big deal. We all knew each other. FWIW: at different times in my career, I have had a hanging file in a cabinet with a copy of the number of these pages from different folks, with whom I would share mag tapes (remember this is pre-Internet, and many of the folks using UNIX were not part of the ARPAnet). However, the song has other verses that make this a little confusing. If your team obtained a* commercial use license* from AT&T, they could further obtain a *commercial redistribution license*. This was initially granted for the Research Seventh Edition. It was later rewritten (with the business terms changing each time) for what would eventually be called System III[1], and then the different System V releases. The price of the redistribution license for V7 was $150K, plus a sliding scale per CPU you ran the AT&T IP, depending on the number of CPUs you needed. With this, the single CPU for the source restriction was removed. So ... if you had a redistribution license, you could also get a license from the Regents, and as long as you obeyed their rules, you could sell a copy of UNIX to run on any licensed target. Traditionally, hardware is part of the same purchase when purchased from a firm like DEC, IBM, Masscomp,* etc*. However, separate SW licenses were sold via firms such as Microsoft and Mt. Xinu. The purchaser of *a binary license* from one of those firms did not have the right to do anything but use the AT&T derivative work. If your team had a binary licensee, you could not obtain any of the BSD distributions until the so-called 'NET2" BSD release [and I'm going to ignore the whole AT&T/BSDi/Regents case here as it is not relevant to Barbara's question/comment]. So the question is, how did a DoD contractor, be it BBN, Ford Aerospace, SRI, etc., originally get access to UNIX IP? Universities and traditional research teams could get a research license. Commercial firms like DEC needed a commercial licensee. Folks with DoD contracts were in a hazy area. The original v5 commercial licensee was written for Rand, a DoD contractor. However, as discussed here in the IH mailing list and elsewhere, some places like BBN had access to the core UNIX IP as part of their DoD contracts. I believe Ford Aerospace was working with AT&T together as part of another US Gov project - which is how UNIX got there originally (Ford Aero could use it for that project, but not the folks at Ford Motors, for instance]. The point is, if you access the *IP indirectly* such as that, then your site probably did not have a negotiated license with a signature page to send to someone. @Barbara, I can not say for sure, but if this was either a PDP-11 or a VAX and you wanted one of the eBSDs, I guess/suspect that maybe your team was dealing with an indirect path to AT&T licensing -- your site license might have come from a US Gov contract, not directly. So trying to get a BSD tape directly from the IOL might have been more difficult without a signature page. So, rolling back to the original. You get access to BSD sources, but you had to demonstrate to the IOL folks in UCB's Cory Hall that you were legally allowed access to the AT&T IP in source code form. That demonstration was traditionally fulfilled with a xerographic copy of the signature page for your institution, which the IOL kept on file. That said, if you had legal access to the AT&T IP by indirect means, I do not know how the IOL completed that check or what they needed to protect the Regents. Clem 1.] What would be called a System from a marketing standpoint was originally developed as PWB 3.0. This was the system a number of firms, including my own, were discussing with AT&T at the famous meetings at 'Ricky's Hyatt' during the price (re)negotiations after the original V7 redistribution license.

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[ih] Fwd: Some Berkeley Unix history - too many PHDs per packet

by steve jenkin

> On 10 Mar 2024, at 06:52, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > > More details can be found in a paper I did a few years ago: https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-france-et-… [If you cannot find it and are interested send me email off list and I'll forward it]. For those playing along at home… INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM - UNIX IN FRANCE AND IN THE UNITED STATES: INNOVATION, DIFFUSION AND APPROPRIATION 19 October 2017 <https://web.archive.org/web/20180110181945/https://technique-societe.cnam.f…> UNIX: A View from the Field as We Played the Game <https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/winter18_cole_unix_cnam.pdf> -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

1 year, 1 month

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Re: [TUHS] History of non-Bell C compilers?

by Paul Winalski

On 3/7/24, Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com> wrote: > For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C > compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at Bell. > Especially for x86. Anyone have tales? > Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX? > [topic of interest to COFF, as well, I think] DEC's Ultrix for VAX and MIPS used off-the-shelf Unix cc. I don't recall what they used for Alpha. The C compiler for VAX/VMS was written by Dave Cutler's team at DECwest in Seattle. The C front end generated intermediate language (IL) for Cutler's VAX Code Generator (VCG), which was designed to be a common back end for DEC's compilers for VAX/VMS. His team also licensed the Freiburghouse PL/I front end (commercial version of a PL/I compiler originally done for Multics) and modified it to generate VCG IL. The VCG was also the back end for DEC's Ada compiler. VCG was superseded by the GEM back end, which supported Alpha and Itanium. A port of GEM to x86 was in progress at the time Compaq sold off the Alpha technology (including GEM and its C and Fortran front ends) to Intel.

1 year, 1 month

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