TUHS October 2019

tuhs@tuhs.org

120 participants
86 discussions

Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is

by Norman Wilson

Mary Ann Horton: I'm enjoying bwk's book very much, but it has me wondering. There are two stories I've heard that supposedly occurred at Murray Hill, but he didn't include them. ==== You can't expect every story to be there. The book would be too heavy to lift! Could the `monkey picture on a badge' story be that of G. R. Emlin's badge? She was a gremlin doll, not a monkey, but it would be reasonable to mistake the former for the latter. Here's a good pictore of G R herself, with what I believe to be at least a second-generation badge. The original badge was an old-style Bell Labs one with a green border; I forget whether that meant contractor or something else, but a regular MTS badge was blue-bordered at the time. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 2 months

UNIX Backslash History

by Doug McIlroy

> What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And \ as the escape character. \ came from Multics. The first day Multics ran at Bell Labs Bob Morris famously typed backslash-newline at the login prompt and crashed the system. Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how pathnames were punctuated. Doug

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Charles Anthony >> I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? > user_dir_dir>Project>User Oh, right. Too many years spent on Unix! :-) > "Names" are aliases, similar to soft links I feel like they are more similar to hard links; they belong to a segment, and if the name is given to another segment, and the original segment has only that name, it goes away. (See the discussion under "add_name" in the MPM 'Commands and Active Fuinctions'). Also, Multics does real soft links (too), so names can't be soft links! :-) Noel

5 years, 2 months

My EuroBSDCon talk

by Warner Losh

My talk has been posted. https://youtu.be/FTlzaDgzPY8 Thanks to everyone who helped make it better. Warner P.s. this may be a duplicate email... I had domain issues when I sent it before...

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Charles Anthony > /home/CAnthony I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? I seem to remember my homedir on MIT-Multics was >udd>CSR>JNChiappa? And I wonder if the 'dd' directory on PDP-7 Unix owe anything to 'udd'? Getting back to the original query, I'm wondering if '/' was picked as it wasn't shifted, unlike '>'? Noel

5 years, 2 months

My EuroBSDCon Unix Talk is up

by Warner Losh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlzaDgzPY8 has my EuroBSDcon unix talk that everybody here was so kind to assist me on. Warner

5 years, 2 months

Two Unix50 Videos

by Warren Toomey

from the Nokia event are up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUt3L3fLFt4 Unix Today and Tomorrow: Future of Compute & Platforms: The Kernel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz3GADLe__M The origin of Unix panel session Cheers, Warren

5 years, 2 months

UNIX Backslash History

by Caipenghui

Hello everyone, What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And \ as the escape character. Caipenghui

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel

by Dave Horsfall

On Mon, 21 Oct 2019, Andrew Hume wrote: > the gt40??? oh my lord! good job i am en route to the bell labs 50th > anniversary. > its been a long time since i heard the name “Dave Horsfall”! Yep :-) Although now retired, I'm still active in Unix projects. -- Dave

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code

by Doug McIlroy

I was about to add a footnote to history about how the broad interests and collegiality of Bell Labs staff made Space Travel work, when I saw that Ken beat me to telling how he got help from another Turing Award winner. > while writing "space travel," > i could not get the space ship integration > around a planet to keep from either gaining or > losing energy due to floating point errors. > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some > weird simple double integration that self > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can > ascertain, the formula was never published > and no one i have asked (including me) has > been able to recreate it. If I remember correctly, the cause of Ken's difficulty was not roundoff error. It was discretization error in the integration formula--probably f(t+dt)=f(t)+f'(t)dt. Dick saw that the formula did not conserve energy and found an alternative that did.

5 years, 3 months

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TUHS October 2019