> From: Tony Finch
> This paper has a nice survey of instruction set densities
And the winner is.... the PDP-11!
I'm not too surprised by this; back in the days of core memory (and limited,
at that - the first PDP-11's came standard with ... 8KB of memory :-), having
the denset possible code had real savings.
Noel
> From: Paul Winalski
> In general, a CISC instruction set encoding can express the same
> algorithm more compactly than a RISC instruction set.
I have often pointed to memory bandwidth as one of the key factors in the
evolution of CISC and RISC. When it was low, compared to CPU speeds (most of
the core era), CISC made sense. When it increased (with DRAM), RISC made more
sense, because it allowed CPUs to run faster (via simpler instructions).
Caching made the picture a little more complex; and today, with the incredible
mismatch between memory speeds and CPU speeds, caching dominates, whether you
have RISC or CISC.
Noel
Hi,
I'm hoping to run System V Release 1 on my pdp11/45, provided I can find
a controller that'll emulate one of the few disks it supports. I've been
looking around trying to find the installation manual to no avail. The
programmers manual, user's manual and error manual are all readily
available, but nothing about install aside from some anecdotal lines from a
simh install. Would anyone have a hint on where to find it or perhaps a
real copy to lend? Happy to scan and mail back if so.
thx
jake
On Sun, 2 Sep 2018, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> [2] This is good enough because Australian ISPs don't believe in IPv6
If I go to a site that reports my IP address, I get IPv6 (I have a static
IPv4 address), which appears to be the default used by my router (a
Fastnet 5355 or something, which T$ appear to be unloading on us).
I tried asking T$ for a static IPv6 range, but was unable to find anyone
who even knew what I was talking about.
-- Dave
Today, a great scientist Dennis Ritchie was born, he did too much for humanity! I can't describe him in words, Dennis wishes you a happy birthday!
Caipenghui
Co-inventor of Unix, and sadly lost to us in 2011, he was born on this day
in 1941.
Thank you Dennis (and of course Ken), for that wonderful OS that we still
use to this day, and imitated by others.
-- Dave
> you can't tell me
> this system was designed with the idea of running it using text terminal
> and no mouse. There is also no cursor addressing, no curses.
The well named Curses and the associated vi were an ugly outgrowth
of glass screens--an outgrowth many of us in the Unix lab never
adopted. That branch of evolution was unrelated to the Blit branch that
essentially preserved the old TTY interface, except that one could have
multiple terminals on screen and a mouse was available to give mechanical
help for manual cut/paste/edit activities. Plan 9 terminal-handling
smoothly continued that evolutionary branch.
Mouse support could have been used to take off in a radical direction,
but it wasn't. To my mind, the primary innovation in Plan 9 was not
terminal support, nor everything-is-a-file. Rather it was an advance in
what Vyssotsky called "distributable computing", where components can
collaborate in a uniform way, no matter where they are. The key was the 9P
protocol that unpacked the notion of file type--a unifying principle
that brought simplicity and generality to a diversity of particulars.
Hello all,
I'm beta-testing a service I've set up to allow public access to a network of computers running System V UNIX Release 3.2. This is only tangentially related to RetroNet, and we hope to peer with them once RetroNet has UUCP peering going!
The network consists of three emulated 3B2/400s linked by UUCP, and connected to the Internet through a gateway system. E-mail (UUCP, UUCP-to-SMTP, and SMTP-to-UUCP) works in and out of the network.
There is a small private Net News setup running BNews for that true historic flair. All machines have access to the "retronet.*" news hierarchy. (There is no public Usenet access, sorry!)
If you're interested in reliving some UNIX history, consider signing up for an account. You'll be randomly assigned a home host in the network.
Account signup form is here:
https://loomcom.net/
Access is via SSH-to-Telnet gateway, by connecting to:
$ ssh access(a)loomcom.net
(No password is needed for the SSH gateway, it is a captive portal)
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web(a)loomcom.com
Andy Kosela:
One still cannot ignore the fact that Unix and Plan 9 offer two
completely different approaches to displaying text.
I admit I've never actually used Plan 9. Can you elaborate on
the different approaches?
One difference from most of what passes for UNIX these days is
probably that the basic terminal model allows one to edit anything
on the screen, using the mouse and keyboard and a simple button-2
menu similar to that of sam. You can edit what some program has
already printed, then pick it up and send it back as input. You
can even edit text in the current line that hasn't been sent yet
(because you haven't hit a return yet); in effect the canonical-line
part of the tty driver is in the terminal.
But you probably don't mean that, both because it's not really
such a radical difference, and because it doesn't conflict at all
with UNIX. In fact it originated on UNIX, five or six years before
Plan 9 was thought of: it's the model from the terminal program
in mux, the more-advanced version of the Blit/Jerq window manager
that nearly everybody used in 1127 by the time I arrived in 1984.
And I still use it every day, even on Linux (and in years past
on Solaris and IRIX and Digital UNIX and Ultrix). The modern
version of the program to do that is called 9term. It doesn't
work quite as well as I'd like on Linux due to changes in the
tty driver that make it hard for a program to learn right away
when tty modes are changed (in particular when echo is turned off
or on), and it does conflict with the GNU readline junk because
that turns off canonical processing, but to those of us who have
a taste for it it's still just fine.
As I say, I don't think that's the difference you mean, so please
step in and supersede me.
(And feel free to use my referring to something that is part of
the latter-day Research editions as an excuse to continue discussing
it. I think of Plan 9 as a successor to those systems anyway, and
therefore related to UNIX heritage, at least as long as we're
comparing and contrasting the systems.)
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
On 08/29/2018 07:46 AM, William Pechter wrote:
> Also... If you run on the internet remember documented security exploits
> are decades old. I recommend no open ports except for ssh if it will
> build and maybe UUCP.
I'm working on a Retro Computing Networking project with a few other
people and I think it would be a benefit for things like running 4.3 BSD
and other old OSs in a relatively safe environment.
I'm bringing this up on TUSH for two reasons:
1) I think THUS members could benefit from RetroNet
2) I (we) would very much appreciate any suggestions or desires that
the THUS community would like to see in such a network.
The idea behind RetroNet is two fold:
1) Create a network of interconnected VPNs between interested parties.
2) Provide ISP like services over said interconnections.
Our hopes are for RetroNet to be able to provide a sandbox / small pool
/ isolated network where members can interconnect with each other (if
they want to) similar to the Internet, but with much less exposure. (We
are planing on RetroNet not having direct Internet connectivity.) We
are also hoping and planing to be able to carry any Ethernet based
traffic between sites, routed or not.
I (we) would be very interested in any input that THUS members might be
able to provide. Particularly what you might like to see in such a network.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
