Hi all, back from a few days holiday. Just a reminder that the TUHS list
is for things related to Unix. I don't mind a bit of topic drift, but if
the topic goes completely away from Unix then the conversation should
migrate to the COFF (Computer Old Farts Forum) list, coff(a)tuhs.org.
I'll mark the "Isaacson" thread as closed on TUHS, but feel free to
continue it over on COFF.
Thanks, Warren
Been wanting to wade into this for a few days but needed to think about how.
I think that we're all aware that RMS has atrocious personal habits. But I
don't think that this mailing list is the place to discuss them unless it's
somehow in the context of UNIX.
Many seem to excuse RMS's revisionist view of the history of technology on
the grounds that RMS claims that his memory isn't very good. I think that
if he knows that he doesn't remember things then he should refrain from
talking about them as if he does.
As others have said, I don't conflate coding prowess with the ability to
design. I've had many an argument with John Gilmore (one of the people
who doesn't mind footing the cleaning and repair bill after allowing RMS
to stay at his place) where he begins with "When I wrote GNU tar..." I've
always responded by saying that writing tar is no big deal; the specification
was the hard part.
One place where I completely disagree with RMS that I think is in context
for this list is his claim that Linux should be called GNU/Linux. I've
written tons of software in my life, and I don't preface the name of each
one with the parts list.
Even if one believed that such an attribution scheme made sense, I would
claim that it should be called internet/Linux. I would argue that Linux
would not have happened without the internet making it possible for folks
around the world to participate. And I think that there's a good chance
that the tools would have been created anyway.
Of course, I acknowledge that the GNU tools have been ported to Linux.
Big deal. I haven't seen RMS arguing for GNU/Windows now that Microsoft
has seen the light.
Like many of you, Linux is not where I first started using GNU tools; I
started using them on my Sun machines after Sun started charging extra
for the compiler and included a licensing system that was broken and often
interfered with getting work done.
Jon
I think the RMS stuff should go away. It's not because I love the guy,
I don't. It's because we have people like Ken and Rob and other heavy
hitters and my hunch is they have little patience for this sort of thing
(they might correct me if I'm wrong).
I'd love to call out RMS on his BS but this isn't the place. This is
the place for people who actually did real work on Unix to share those
stories. Or so I think, it's up to Warren, not me.
I was given a copy of Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators: How a Group of
Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution". It devotes
ten pages to Stallman and Gnu, Torvalds and Linux, even Tannebaum and
Minix, but never mentions Thompson and Ritchie. Unix is identified only
as a product from Bell Labs from which the others learned something--he
doesn't say what. I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory"
(about Bell Labs) barely mentions Unix. Is Isaacson blind, biased,
or merely brainwashed?
In the case of Steve Jobs, Isaacson tells not just that the Alto system
from Xerox inspired him, but also who its star creators were: Lampson,
Thacker and Kay. But then he stomps on them: "Once again, the greatest
innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs,
but from the people who applied them usefully." While he very describes
innovation as a continuum from invention through engineering to marketing,
he seems to be more impressed by the later stages.
Or maybe he just likes to tell stories, and didn't pick up all the
good ones about Ken. Isaacson describes spacewar, arguably the first
stage of computer-game innovation, at great length. At the same time,
all he has to say about early-stage operating systems is a single
sentence that credits John McCarthy with leading a time-sharing effort
at MIT. (In my recollection, McCarthy proseletized; Corbato led.) He
tells how ARPANET, which he says was mainly developed by BB&N, connected
time-shared computers, but breathes not a word about Berkeley's work,
without which ARPANET would have been an open circuit.
"Innovators" won general critical praise. A couple of reviews predicted
it would become the standard of the field. However, an evidently
knowledgeable review in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing faulted
it for peddling familiar potted legends without really digging for
deeper insight. Regarding Thompson and Ritchie, it looks more like
overt suppression.
Doug
> On Jan 5, 2019,Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ... After Lampson
> left Xerox PARC he set up a similar outfit at Digital'--the Western
> Research Lab (WRL).
Actually, WRL was started by Forest Baskett, formerly of Stanford University. Butler Lampson joined DEC's Systems Research Center (SRC) shortly after it was formed by former PARC manager Bob Taylor.
> ... I was working in the software tools
> engineering group at the time, and we would have loved to take WRL's
> work and to incorporate it in our products. But we couldn't. Why?
> Because they wrote everything in Modula 3, and we were using BLISS.
SRC used Modula-3, and before that a similar language called Modula-2+. Originally, WRL used Modula-2, and then I think switched to C. Perhaps DEC’s engineering groups should also have switched from Bliss to C.
> Yes, PARC invented the modern windows-based GUI, but, as with so many
> PARC innovations, Xerox did nothing with it. Based on how the PARC
> alumni at WRL behaved at DEC,I would argue that this was the fault of
> PARC as much as of Xerox management.
Xerox built its Star office automation system based on PARC technology and with lots of support from PARC. Star was of course not a big success. PARC also invented laser printers, and Xerox made quite a bit of money from them.
Paul McJones (former Xerox SDD and DEC SRC member — I have been on both sides of the fence)
>>I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory" (about Bell Labs)
> Did you mean the work of this title by Jon Gertner?
Indeed. If should fact-check myself if I'm going to challenge
some one else's choice of facts.
Thanks for the catch,
Doug
>> From: Doug McIlroy
>> I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory" (about Bell Labs)
> Did you mean the work of this title by Jon Gertner? (I have yet to pull
> down my copy to see what it says about Unix
I looked, and it too says next to nothing about Unix (which it describes as a
"programming language" - pg. 346). Oh well.
This is really a pretty serious omission, given that the vast majority of
mobile devices now run Android, which is a Unix derivative (Linux). So just
about everyone has a Unix-derived thing in their pocket.
Noel
Long ago when we were running ACSnet
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHSnet) we lacked graphical
workstations so we never saw the Bell Labs face mail
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vismon) mechanism in action. I think
colleagues who later had Sun workstations might have briefly had
X-face in operation.
I see on Luca Cardelli's homepage that there was an icon for ACSnet
email, of course it is Kangaroo...
http://lucacardelli.name/indexArtifacts.html
scroll down Original 48x48 bitmaps for "face mail" at Bell Labs.
From: Doug McIlroy
> I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory" (about Bell Labs)
I was unable to find a book of this title by Isaacson? Did you mean the work
of this title by Jon Gertner? (I have yet to pull down my copy to see what it
says about Unix - it's in another room, and I'm lazy... :-)
> (In my recollection, McCarthy proseletized; Corbato led.)
I think that's an accurate 1-sentence summary.
> breathes not a word about Berkeley's work, without which ARPANET would
> have been an open circuit.
Can you elaborate on this point a bit - I'm not sure what it is you're
referring to?
> A couple of reviews predicted it would become the standard of the
> field.
Among people who spell 'Internet' with a lower-case 'i', perhaps it will
(sadly).
Noel
From: jkh(a)violet.Berkeley.EDU (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Subject: My Broadcast
Date: 2 April 1987 at 21:45:46 CEST
To: hackers_guild(a)ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU, tcp-ip(a)sri-nic.arpa
By now, many of you have heard of (or seen) the broadcast message I sent to
the net two days ago. I have since received 743 messages and have
replied to every one (either with a form letter, or more personally
when questions were asked). The intention behind this effort was to
show that I wasn't interested in doing what I did maliciously or in
hiding out afterwards and avoiding the repercussions. One of the
people who received my message was Dennis Perry, the Inspector General
of the ARPAnet (in the Pentagon), and he wasn't exactly pleased.
(I hear his Interleaf windows got scribbled on)
So now everyone is asking: "Who is this Jordan Hubbard, and why is he on my
screen??"
I will attempt to explain.
I head a small group here at Berkeley called the "Distributed Unix Group".
What that essentially means is that I come up with Unix distribution software
for workstations on campus. Part of this job entails seeing where some of
the novice administrators we're creating will hang themselves, and hopefully
prevent them from doing so. Yesterday, I finally got around to looking
at the "broadcast" group in /etc/netgroup which was set to "(,,)". It
was obvious that this was set up for rwall to use, so I read the documentation
on "netgroup" and "rwall". A section of the netgroup man page said:
...
Any of three fields can be empty, in which case it signifies
a wild card. Thus
universal (,,)
defines a group to which everyone belongs. Field names that ...
...
Now "everyone" here is pretty ambiguous. Reading a bit further down, one
sees discussion on yellow-pages domains and might be led to believe that
"everyone" was everyone in your domain. I know that rwall uses point-to-point
RPC connections, so I didn't feel that this was what they meant, just that
it seemed to be the implication.
Reading the rwall man page turned up nothing about "broadcasts". It doesn't
even specify the communications method used. One might infer that rwall
did indeed use actual broadcast packets.
Failing to find anything that might suggest that rwall would do anything
nasty beyond the bounds of the current domain (or at least up to the IMP),
I tried it. I knew that rwall takes awhile to do its stuff, so I left
it running and went back to my office. I assumed that anyone who got my
message would let me know.. Boy, was I right about that!
After the first few mail messages arrived from Purdue and Utexas, I begin
to understand what was really going on and killed the rwall. I mean, how
often do you expect to run something on your machine and have people
from Wisconsin start getting the results of it on their screens?
All of this has raised some interesting points and problems.
1. Rwall will walk through your entire hosts file and blare at anyone
and everyone if you use the (,,) wildcard group. Whether this is a bug
or a feature, I don't know.
2. Since rwall is an RPC service, and RPC doesn't seem to give a damn
who you are as long as you're root (which is trivial to be, on a work-
station), I have to wonder what other RPC services are open holes. We've
managed to do some interesting, unauthorized, things with the YP service
here at Berkeley, I wonder what the implications of this are.
3. Having a group called "broadcast" in your netgroup file (which is how
it comes from sun) is just begging for some novice admin (or operator
with root) to use it in the mistaken belief that he/she is getting to
all the users. I am really surprised (as are many others) that this has
taken this long to happen.
4. Killing rwall is not going to solve the problem. Any fool can write
rwall, and just about any fool can get root priviledge on a Sun workstation.
It seems that the place to fix the problem is on the receiving ends. The
only other alternative would be to tighten up all the IMP gateways to
forward packets only from "trusted" hosts. I don't like that at all,
from a standpoint of reduced convenience and productivity. Also, since
many places are adding hosts at a phenominal rate (ourselves especially),
it would be hard to keep such a database up to date. Many perfectly well-
behaved people would suffer for the potential sins of a few.
I certainly don't intend to do this again, but I'm very curious as to
what will happen as a result. A lot of people got wall'd, and I would think
that they would be annoyed that their machine would let someone from the
opposite side of the continent do such a thing!
Jordan Hubbard
jkh(a)violet.berkeley.edu
(ucbvax!jkh)
Computer Facilities & Communications.
U.C. Berkeley
