TUHS March 2005

tuhs@tuhs.org

9 participants
10 discussions

by norman＠nose.cita.utoronto.ca

I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the Seventh Edition: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome. (It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)

3 years

Not strictly TUHS, but

by Wesley Parish

wotthehell, I'm going to ask anyway. Soemtime during the late 1980s, Clarkson U., came out with a GPLed MS-DOS word processor package called Galahad, released under the Galahad Public License, which is a rebadged GNU Emacs Public License. I've sent them the CS Professor an email requesting the source. I was wondering if anyone on this list might have the sources, because as yet I've had no reply. Thanks Wesley Parish -- Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish ----- Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui? You ask, what is the most important thing? Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.

20 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Why you should not be wasting electricity powering old computers

by Kenneth Stailey

--- Kenneth Stailey <kstailey(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > http://kimaura.com/peakoil/peakoil-56k.ram Good Old 7-bit ASCII transcript of the dialog in that streaming video. Doesn't have any of the charts so there are places you will find you can't follow it since Roscoe is just point to a chart. Excerpts from the US Congressional Record follow: OIL PRODUCTION -- (House of Representatives - March 14, 2005) The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) is recognized for 5 minutes. Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Speaker, in just a few minutes, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) will address the House for some period of time talking about energy sources, oil in particular, and the fact that many experts say that oil production, especially in the United States, but actually throughout the world, oil production of conventional oil under current patterns is expected to grow at a rate much faster, that means the use of oil by the world community is supposed to grow much faster than oil discovery production. [Time: 19:45] What is clear, because we are not sure exactly when that peak will come in oil production, some say it is peaking right now, some say it will peak in 10 years, the amount of oil we get out of the ground will exceed the demand; but what is clear is that at some point in this century, world oil production will peak and then begin to decline. There is uncertainty about the date because many countries that produce oil do not provide credible data on how big their reserves are. But more uncertainty calls for more caution, not less; and caution in this case means working to develop alternatives. When production of conventional oil peaks, we can expect a large increase in the price up to the price of the substitutes, whether so-called unconventional oil or renewable fuels. Although increasing domestic production may ease oil dependence slightly, the United States is only 3 percent of the world's estimated oil reserves and uses 25 percent of the world's oil. I want to explain just from the perspective of the United States the huge increase in energy demand in the last century. I am going to use the word ``quadrillion.'' Quadrillion is a number. If I put 1 followed by 15 zeroes, I have the number quadrillion. To measure energy use in a country, we use BTUs, British thermal units. A new furnace, whether oil or natural gas, you see the BTU to determine how much energy it is going to use. When you use BTUs to determine how much energy a country uses, you use a short term for quadrillion called ``quads.'' In 1910, the United States used 7 quads of BTUs. That is 7 quadrillion BTUs. In 1950, the United States used 35 quadrillion BTUs. In 2005, the United States uses 100 quadrillion BTUs, and we are accelerating that. We are increasing demand for oil for our energy needs. The world right now, 2005, uses 345 quadrillion BTUs, an enormous amount of energy. We know today that our appliances, whether a washing machine, a refrigerator or dishwasher, we know they are much more efficient than they ever were, certainly 20, 30, 40 years ago; and yet we are using more electricity, not less. We know that automobiles and trucks and our transportation is much more efficient than it was 20 years ago, and yet the demand is increasing. We burn more coal, more natural gas. Each home, as efficient as each home is today, burns much more oil and electricity because of the demand on energy needs. We are not decreasing by getting efficient. Because our demand is greater, we are using more and more. The question is if we are increasing demand and production is going to peak now or in the next decade or two and our production goes down while the demand goes up, especially with oil reserves, are we at the early stages of the twilight for oil as an energy source? And if we are, what do we do? Well, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) will speak on a number of aspects of oil production decline. We will talk much further about the details of the solution to the problems of [Page: H1409] our energy decline, but I want to close with two last things: How do we harness a new alternative energy source and make it replace what we have been using for more than 2 centuries? How do we do that? We do it with initiative, ingenuity, intellect, vision, and leadership. [portions deleted] OIL DEMAND -- (House of Representatives - March 14, 2005) MR. ROSCOE BARTLETT A couple of Congresses ago, I was privileged to chair the Energy Subcommittee on Science. One of the first things I wanted to do was to determine the dimensions of the problem. We held a couple of hearings and had the world experts in. Surprisingly from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic, there was not much deviation in what the estimate is as to what the known reserves are out there. It is about 1,000 gigabarrels. That sounds like an awful lot of oil. But when you divide into that the amount of oil which we use, [Page: H1410] about 20 million barrels a day, and the amount of oil the rest of the world uses, about 60 million barrels a day, as a matter of fact, the total now is a bit over the 80 million that those two add up to. About 83 1/2 , I think. If you divide that into the 1,000 gigabarrels, you come out at about 40 years of oil remaining in the world. That is pretty good. Because up until the Carter years, during the Carter years, in every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Let me repeat that, because that is startling. In every decade, we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. The reason for that, of course, was that we were on the upward side of this bell curve. The bell curve for usage, only part of it is shown on this chart. That is the green one down here, the bell curve for usage. Notice that we are out here now about 2005. Where is it going? The Energy Information Agency says that we are going to keep on using more oil. This green line just going up and up and up is a projection of the Energy Information Agency. But that cannot be true. That cannot be true for a couple of reasons. We peaked in our discovery of oil way back here in the late sixties, about 1970. In our country it peaked much earlier than that, by the way. But the world is following several years behind us. And the area under this red curve must be the same as the area under the green curve. You cannot pump any more oil than you have found, quite obviously. If you have not found it, you cannot pump it. If you were to extend this on out where they have extended their green line, even if it turned down right there at the end of that green line, the area under the green curve is going to be very much larger than the area under the red curve. That just cannot be. We will see in some subsequent charts that we probably have reached peak oil. Let me mention that M. King Hubbert looked at the world situation. He was joined by another scientist, Colin Campbell, who is still alive, an American citizen who lives in Scotland. Using M. King Hubbert's predictive techniques, oil was predicted to reach a maximum in about 1995, without perturbations. But there were some perturbations. One of the perturbations was 1973, the Arab oil embargo. Other perturbations were the oil price shocks and a worldwide recession that reduced the demand for oil. And so the peak that might have occurred in 1995 will occur later. How much later? That is what we are looking at this evening. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that if not now, then very quickly we should see world production of oil peak. [portions deleted] What now? Where do we go now? One observer, Matt Savinar, who has thoroughly researched the options, and this is not the most optimistic assessment, by the way, but may be somewhat realistic, he starts out by saying, Dear Readers, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. I hope not. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is a scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon known as global peak oil. [portions deleted]

20 years, 1 month

JPLDIS - still extant?

by Wesley Parish

I was looking around for stuff to play with on FreeDOS and I thought, do they have any DBMS yet? So I googled for (dbase public domain) and got something about the aforesaid JPLDIS, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Display and Information System. Anyone got any ideas of its continued existence? (It's written in Fortran, I judge, and I think there are a few PD Fortrans out there that could be used to reanimate it. ;) Thanks Wesley Parish -- Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish ----- Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui? You ask, what is the most important thing? Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.

20 years, 1 month

[TUHS] Why you should not be wasting electricity powering old computers

by Norman Wilson

Kenneth Stailey: http://kimaura.com/peakoil/peakoil-56k.ram ======= Because it's too much bother to set up Real Audio on the ancient or unusual operating systems that are the reason such old computers are interesting? In any case, let he who has gone the longest without owning or operating an internal-combustion engine cast the first stone. (Mind your head, Jim.) Norman Wilson Toronto ON

20 years, 1 month

[TUHS] Why you should not be wasting electricity powering old computers

by Kenneth Stailey

http://kimaura.com/peakoil/peakoil-56k.ram

20 years, 1 month

Got old MVII critter and wanna bring up a 4.3BSD family thingy.....but no tape..

by Robertdkeys＠aol.com

Having fallen into that trap of another one dollar vax.....of the Qbus variety, and, wanting to try to bring up another round of some sort of 4.3BSD related thingy, but, with no tape drive or tape cartridges, can anyone come up with a dd'able root image that is known to work on an MVII critter, AND, have a footprint of 1mb or less (i.e., a disklabel of only 1mb size or less)? Sadly, all my tapes have decomposed to dust, and I am down to one questionable TK50 tape drive. I can get a boot of the Quasijarus boot, off a floppy, but it won't read a miniroot that was dd'd onto a swap partition correctly. I can boot a NetBSD 1.4.1 and work back to a NetBSD-1.0A which is usable to unroll file systems onto a drive, but, it won't boot the kernel correctly into a 4.3BSDish system. I still need the correct boot blocks and boots. I did try an image from vaxpower's root, and that booted and ran mostly OK, but, it had a label set up for a 4 gig drive, and my controller has early enough proms that it won't handle anything larger than a 1 gb drive. I tried a couple of other images from here and there, but the boot blocks are not quite right to run on my vax. So, anyone have handy a dd'able root with boot blocks, set up for a 1gb or smaller drive, that is known to work on an MVII critter for some flavor of 4.3BSD (4.3, Tahoe, Reno, Quasijarus) that I could use to get my machine up? The only constraints on the image are that it must have a label set up for a 1gb or smaller drive, and it must have a usable ftp from usr/bin dropped into bin, so I can ftp in the rest of the system after booting up the root image. One other thought might be to create a bootable dd image with a root only system that contains all the requisite user bits on say a 100mb or so root file system. That is non-standard, from the traditionalists point of view, but, at least the system would come up essentially running, and complete. It could then be partitioned and cloned off onto a standardly partitioned drive, as a next step. Like a fool, the last time I ran the system, about 5 years ago, I religiously copied off all the bits onto cd, except for a dd'able boot/root image... drat! Kick, Kick, Kick... etc.....(:+{{..... Any pointers to such an image, or anyone that has a system up that might create me such an image, would be greatly appreciated. With the EOL of many tapes at hand, I suspect that it may be the only good way to bring up a 4.3BSDish system on a Qbus box, and we might should save up a such usable image in the TUHS archives. Thanks Bob Keys

20 years, 2 months

Intergraph 2700

by Paul Ward

Hello all, A friend of mine has liberated an old Intergraph 2700 workstation from a basement. The system looks to be in fine condition and boots up to multiuser+X. However, there appears to be a problem. I am not sure whether the problem is hardware or software, but the digitizer puck seems to have stopped sending anything back to the workstation. I have to say that I am not 100% sure how Intergraph digitizers are wired up -- the cable from the digitizer is run via a split cable, so one can be wired up to the mouse port, and the other to the RS232 port, right now I have plugged both in. Is there anyone with Intergraph experience who can enlighten me in regards to the cables, or maybe some diagnostics that can be done on the puck? The puck is a 12-button grey creature, and the digitizer is a Kurta XLC (sorry, I am not infront of the system right now, and can't remember the model number). Another thing to note is that I can't recover the root password without some sort of pointer device input, and thus cannot log in to diagnose any possible software problems. -- Best regards, Paul mailto:asmodai@ao.mine.nu http://ao.mine.nu/ (NeXTmail) mailto:nextmail@ao.mine.nu

20 years, 2 months

ultrix and y2k

by alex＠lava-net.com

Hi, Since the ultrix-4.2 source was "liberated" has anyone atempted to fix some of the y2k issues? (I'd like to run it on some vaxen I have access to and it's kinda useless without y2k support). Does this source even compile? thanks.

20 years, 2 months

Lion's

by Tim Newsham

For those looking for a copy of Lion's: http://www.lulu.com/content/99701

20 years, 2 months

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TUHS March 2005