I just saw this headline. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen dead of cancer,
aged 65. Relevancy to TUHS as Microsoft has been both a competitor to and
supporter of both Unix and (much more recently) Linux.
Allen also funded the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, where one can log
into a real PDP-11/70 running 7th Edition Unix.
- Dan C.
Dan Cross:
Allen also funded the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, where one can log
into a real PDP-11/70 running 7th Edition Unix.
And see a real live PDP-7, and many other marvellous artifacts.
Their basic idea is to be a museum of history that runs. Well
worth a visit when in Seattle.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
> From: Norman Wilson
> Unfortunately all the quick hacks and poorly-considered tweaks of the
> past have long since been cast in stone by widespread convention
There seem to be two kind of people in the world; i) those who cannot bring
themselves to change anything, and ii) those who change all sort of things,
usually with no good reason (perhaps just to be different).
The world of Unix seems to be thickly stocked with both.
Noel
Dave Horsfall:
Before I started using /home (Slowaris had yet to appear), I used /u/*
instead (I didn't want to pollute /usr with home directories).
===
I'm late to the party, but I'll chime in too:
The first UNIX system I ever used, ca. 1980, had users' home
directories in /u. I suspect it was that way (as suggested
in some earlier messages) just for storage management: separate
file system from /usr.
I've carried /u around with me ever since to other systems
I've set up from scratch, except in my home environment
where I've made a radical departure: everything that isn't
part of the base OS is in a tree rooted at /con, so home
directories are /con/u. /con was `constant,' inspired
by /var, meaning stuff that should be preserved when the OS
is reinstalled--everything else should come from installation
media or configuration management.
But in any case there's nothing especially novel about moving
users' home directories out of /usr, and since it's UNIX,
nothing that says there has to be any standard at all. On
the systems I am currently paid to help run, most users have
home-directory names like /h/u12/c4/00/c4ntest. There is no
attempt to glue together a single name hierarchy; we have in
excess of 17000 users so that would be something of a mess.
(I guess enormous directories aren't the resource pigs they
used to be, though symlinks are just as bad as they have
ever been.) There's the ~user shell syntax for those who like
that; I don't, but I have a little shell script in my personal
bin directory so I can do things like ls `home c4ntest`; it all
just works.
I once thought of writing a paper entitled `/usr and /etc
considered harmful,' in which I would have proposed:
a. It no longer matters a whit whether the (real) root file
system can fit into a 5MB slice of the disk or the like, so
just merge everything that spilled into /usr in the tiny-disk
days back into the root where it belongs.
b. /etc is largely junk. Executables have long since moved
into /sbin. Pretty much everything else that's there belongs
(according to the original scheme, not the latter-day complications
inflicted by those who didn't understand) in /lib.
Unfortunately all the quick hacks and poorly-considered tweaks
of the past have long since been cast in stone by widespread
convention, so it's fruitless to try to clean any of this up.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Leah Neukirchen:
I tried contacting David Tilbrook several times and got no replies.
I think some people around Toronto still use qed, but they seem to be
very secretive about it.
====
David is likely well-retired by now, but I don't really know.
Even though I walk within a block of his house fairly often,
we've never really been consistently in touch.
But he was responsible for a distinct branch of the qed that
originated at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s
(same one Rob supplied). Certainly worth tracking down.
I don't know your definitions of `people around Toronto' or
`secretive.' I still use qed daily; my copy is one I've been
carrying around, and occasionally tweaking, since my time at
Caltech (where I got it from Rob). I'll send Arnold a copy.
I'm really tired both of having to recompile it (and deal with
yet another bit of obsolete-C assumption that no previous
compiler or C library has shown up) now and then, and with
its private variant of regular expressions, so I keep threatening
(mainly to myself) to rewrite it in Python, but I have no idea
whether I'll ever get around to that. If I do I suspect I'll
throw away some of the programmability hooks, which I never use,
and perhaps extend it here and there (I really want nesting
globals, and they're not that hard to do--I did them in my
half-baked personal mail reader, which has an ed-like interface).
I don't know offhand of anyone else around Toronto using my
branch of qed. I do know of a couple of friends in California,
one who left Caltech before I did but is now back there, another
elsewhere in Los Angeles, who still use my version at least
occasionally. It wouldn't surprise me if there were people
around Toronto who use Tilbrook's branch, since it was part
of his qef toolkit and he introduced several companies to it
when consulting for them; but I don't know of any specifics.
None of which is as archaeologically interesting as the
non-UNIX qeds, of course.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Hi,
The earliest I've found to be in the FHS from '94. Are there any earlier
examples of a home directory being at /home instead of /usr/$(user)? Are
there any current Unix systems that don't use /home by default (except
OSX)? Does anybody here do it intentionally? Also, what was the
rationale of moving the directory to /home?
Thanks!
--
caóc
I've just finished reading another article in the latest print issue
of Communications of the ACM that arrived in my mailbox earlier this
week:
Jean-Fran{\c{c}}ois Abramatic, Roberto Di Cosmo, and Stefano Zacchiroli
Viewpoint: Building the universal archive of source code
Comm. ACM 61(20) 29--31 October 2018
https://doi.org/10.1145/3183558https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3281635.3183558
I draw it to your attention to it because it has favorable mention of
the Computer History Museum, and of Diomidis Spinellis's work on the
Unix source code archive, described in his article
A repository of Unix history and evolution
Empirical Software Engineering 22(3) 1372--1404 June 2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9445-5https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-016-9445-5
The project that Abramatic describe is impressive: a goal of a
triplicated complete archive of the world's software history,
including both open source and proprietary code. They report holding
200TB of data already, covering 80 million code projects.
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