TUHS March 2017

tuhs@tuhs.org

87 participants
136 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ron Natalie" >>> I think most people will attribute the desktop metaphor to Xerox. >> Strictly speaking, to Smalltalk (from PARC) ^^^^ > I beg to differ. The Star not only pioneered the WISIWYG application > presentation PARC _was_ Xerox. The Star was a product based on the Alto, but much of the Star stuff was pioneered on the Alto. For instance, WYSIWYG was one of the modes that the Alto's Bravo editor could be run in; it definitely pre-dates the Star. > also the concept of the desktop. Depending on exactly what you mean by 'desktop', that also pre-dated the Star. I heard the multiple overlapping windows of Smalltalk (an Alto application) likened to a collection of sheets of paper on a desktop (which is where the term came from); clicking on one with the mouse brought it to the top, just like pulling a particular sheet of paper out from the ones on a physical desktop. > The whole conscept of dropping documents as icons on the desktop appears > to have orginated there. Yes, as I mentioned: >> things like Bravo, and the basic user command interface on the Alto >> [the Exec, my brain finally coughed up the name - can't find my Alto >> manual at the moment] didn't have any concept of windows/desktop The concept of having a graphical front end as the main user interface was not from the Alto, and the Alto didn't have icons either; both came later (I'll let the Lisa people and Star people argue that one out). Noel

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] X, Suntools, and the like

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ron Natalie" > I think most people will attribute the desktop metaphor to Xerox. Strictly speaking, to Smalltalk (from PARC); things like Bravo, and the basic user command interface on the Alto (I forget what its name was), didn't have any concept of windows/desktop (although Bravo did use the bitmap screen). Noel

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] System Economics

by Doug McIlroy

"Open" was certainly not a work heard in the Unix lab, where our lawyers made sure we knew it was a "trade secret". John Lions was brought into the lab both because we admired his work and because the lawyers wanted to reel that work back in-house. Out in the field, the trade secret was treated in many different ways. Perhaps the most extreme was MIT, whose lawyers believed it could not be adequately protected in academia and forbade its use there. I don't know what eventually broke the logjam. Doug

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX")

by Norman Wilson

William Pechter: VMS source fiche was very common of sites owned by large corporations. Their IT staff used it to research bugs... and as sample code for writing their own drivers etc... ===== Indeed, I used the VMS source microfiche to learn how to handle various sorts of errors (machine checks, memory errors) better in UNIX. Stock VAX systems at the time just crashed on any error, but it turned out that many of them admitted recovery: some errors were transient, others could be ridden over by disabling some piece of the hardware. This led to an amusing event on the VAX-11/750 that at the time handled e-mail as uucp node research!. (Its internal name on our datakit node was grigg.) People noticed that the system was running slowly. I checked and discovered that the CPU itself seemed to be a bit slower. Then I checked logs and discovered that a week earlier, there had been a cache error; my new recovery code had turned off the failing half of the cache, logged the error, and forged ahead. At the next convenient time, we took the system down and ran DEC's standalone diagnostics. (Contrary to the rude stories one hears, those diags were in fact pretty thorough.) The problem didn't show up, so we booted grigg back up again, secure in the knowledge that if the problem was persistent, my code would let us know without crashing. (I don't think it ever showed up again.) We also learned to pay more attention to console messages! Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] System Economics

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Do you know the time frame of the banishment? Noel any memories of what > allowed it be used? Sorry, this is something I know nothing of; it must have happened while I was still an early undergrad. The first Unix I knew of at MIT was the one in the DSSR/RTS group in LCS, which arrived (I think) roughly around the start of my sophmore year (so early '76 or so) - I have a memory of one of my friends (who was an undergrad working in that group) telling me about it, and showing it to me. (I remember being totally blown away with the way you could write a command 'foo', compile it, and jut say 'foo' to run it...) Actually, it may have shown up well before that - perhaps they had it well before I first saw it. Certainly by the time I showed up at LCS (fall of '77) it had already spread to CSR; they had an 11/40 with Unix on it, cloned from the DSSR system. Again, I don't know if there was any paperwork that had to happen, or if that system was already covered under whatever license the DSSR machine was under. Of course, this was all DARPA-funded work, and there may have been something there that allowed it. We certainly passed Unix source around with other DARPA projects (e.g. at BBN) without, AFAICR, worrying much about paperwork. > we had a sign a document with the university stating something that we > understood it was AT&Ts IP I don't recall anything like that at MIT; maybe in the very early days, there was something, but certainly not by '77. If it's important to know what happened, I can ask (e.g. Prof. Ward, head of DSSR). Noel

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Random832 > I think he means the fact that MIME specifies the type of the main > message body (not just attachments), so you can have a message with *no* > text parts. Right, that I could discern; what I couldn't get with an definitiveness was _why_ that was particularly a problem. (Another possibility, other than the one I previously gave, is perhaps that there simply is no text part, which one can peruse, ignoring the rest?) Noel

7 years, 1 month

"Xenix 2.2.3c Restoration" articles by Michael Casadevall

by Josh Good

Hello. Perhaps you haven't been made aware yet of these series of --IMHO-- very interesting articles about Xenix 386, entitled "Xenix 2.2.3c Restoration", by Michael Casadevall, a.k.a. NCommander at the geek site https://soylentnews.org (of which he is one of the founders): Part 1: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/03/03/1620222 Part 2: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/03/07/1632251 Part 3: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/03/11/2014253 I wish Bela Lubkin, ex- kernel engineer at "classic" SCO, would have joined the list to comment on those articles and pour some light into the more obscure points. I sent an email to Bela some time ago telling him about the TUHS mailing list, but I didn't hear back from him. -- Josh Good

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] X, Suntools, and the like

by Nick Downing

Hmm yes although perhaps controversially I see this as a bad feature and one area where Microsoft actually gets it right. Despite the old issues of "DLL Hell" which have largely been resolved by standardizing all DLLs and in newer code by using assemblies... you have to admit that they provide a direct, local API (indeed ABI) to every subsystem you would want to use, here I am thinking of GDI, but also lots of things that would require ioctls (CD burning, say) or domain specific languages (such as Postscript) on Linux. This makes it really easy for Windows developers to use the feature and the interface is fast and reliable. And where a domain specific language is actually NEEDED (printing to a Postscript printer on Windows, or RDP-type desktop remoting etc) it is easy to insert a proxy DLL or object or device driver that does the necessary scrambling and unscrambling. It is not so easy to go the other way as it requires extensive emulation (think of ghostscript driving my Canon non-PS printer). I wrote about this issue earlier using some examples like an "ESC [" capable terminal as opposed to a memory mapped local console, or an "AT" capable external modem as opposed to an internal "WinModem" that just exposes its D/A and A/D converters with minimal signal processing and needs the host to do the heavy lifting. Same thing applies to a graphics terminal. Of course it should be programmed at a high level by specifying shapes, etc to be drawn, regions to be blitted, clipping regions and pens etc, a font manager, and it should be possible to load bitmaps, etc, into its offscreen memory and/or create offscreen drawing buffers, if these features are used correctly by applications then it is of course trivial to add a remoting proxy driver similar to Microsoft's RDP, or indeed X Windows. But the difficulty with X Windows is that the remoting layer is always there, even though it is almost completely redundant today. This hurts performance but more importantly it requires extensive workarounds as you described, which add enormous extra complexity and in my view sharply increase the learning curve and setup costs. Having said that, Xlib does offer a decent API/ABI so if we just code to that it's not TOO bad, I would like to see the rest of it deprecated though, and vendors encouraged to implement Xlib with whatever backend seems appropriate. The ridiculous thing here is that X setup is so damn convoluted and incestuously tied in with the window, session and display managers, THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO RUN X REMOTELY ANYMORE AND HAVE A FULL FEATURED DESKTOP, I have tried many times and have had various tries at thin clients and terminal serving in my home network and it basically fell over because environments like Gnome do not support multiple sessions of the same home directory, not to mention numerous other problems that mean if you login remotely you basically just get a blank screen with a default X cursor and maybe a context menu that can run an Xterm. Bleh! In my experience you have to use a remoter like VNC and guess what that does, tricks X into thinking it's running locally and then intervenes further up in the display stack to do the actual remoting. It's a complete dog's breakfast and frankly could never compete with Windows in any realistic way. I use it because it is the least bad of the available options (no way am I having advertising in my start menu and my computer loaded with bloatware and spyware before I even open the box, and no way am I putting up with vague messages like "Something went wrong" or "Windows is making some checks to optimize your experience" or whatnot), and because my computer is so fast despite being 6yrs old that X only feels borderline sluggish, i.e. is tolerable. But so much better would be possible with a redesign. CUPS is also a dogs breakfast and hugely unreliable, Windows GDI printing just wins hands down for all the same reasons. End rant. Nick On Mar 15, 2017 5:49 AM, "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: Nice thing about X was that it would talk to remote displays. I still remember sitting in the Pentagon demonstrating that the Suntools screen lock wasn't particularly secure. Then there was NeWS. This was Gosling's first attempt at a deployable language. However PostScript (even with Owen Densmore's class extensions), while a reasonable intermediary language is really sucky to actually develop. Java was a bit more refined. Of course, lots of things either implement X under the native window system or backdoor X with local extensions. We got around doing high frame rate image work on X via the SharedMemoryExtension and the ability to flip buffers on the retrace interval (both extensions, but commonly implemented by many servers).

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX")

by Arthur Krewat

Sorry, in this context, SunOS means 4.1.4 - not Solaris SVR4 I run Solaris myself, and love it. On 3/15/2017 11:48 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote: > Arthur Krewat <krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote: > >> You make a valid point, and re-reading what I wrote, I find that I >> pushed the example too far :) >> >> The subject was originally that SunOS at it's end-of-life did not have >> the features that Linux now does, and comparing their development >> lengths brings up an interesting question. What would SunOS have become > So you believe that SunOS-5.11 is no longer alive? > > There is an Oracle based version and a OpenSolarisd based version developed by > the community. > > Jörg >

7 years, 1 month

Does this mean Linux is now "officially branded UNIX"?

by Josh Good

Hello all. I was perusing the list of officially branded UNIX systems, according to the "UNIX 03" specification and tests done by the Open Group, and I found there listed something called "Huawei EulerOS 2.0". https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xy.htm Intriguing, ain't it? So I went to Wikipedia, to see what it has to say about such a beast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#EulerOS And I quote: "EulerOS 2.0 for the x86-64 architecture were certified as UNIX 03 compliant. The UNIX 03 conformance statement shows that the standard C compiler is from the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc), and that the system is a Linux distribution of the Red Hat family." So, Linux (some variety of it, very closely resembling Red Hat) is now a "officially branded" UNIX. I think Mr. Stallman can now say: mission accomplished. GNU *is* now UNIX. (Linux the kernel might not be a FSF project, but it certainly is under the GNU General Public License.) -- Josh Good

7 years, 1 month

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TUHS March 2017