TUHS November 2019

tuhs@tuhs.org

77 participants
41 discussions

Steve Bellovin recounts the history of USENET

by Arnold Robbins

The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14a.html The Early History of Usenet, Part II: Hardware and Economics: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-15.html The Early History of Usenet, Part III: File Format: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-17.html Fun reading. Bellovin is another person we should try to get to join this list. Enjoy, Arnold

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Steve Bellovin recounts the history of USENET

by Jason Stevens

I keep a copy of the utzoo files. And then I hacked the altavista desktop search the files using Apache to filter content inline. https://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com/altavista I know I'd love to feed it more data, the utzoo stuff is massive for 1991, but it's really trivial for 2019. It's around 10GB decompressed. From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org> on behalf of Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2019, 11:53 AM To: Bakul Shah Cc: tuhs(a)tuhs.org Subject: Re: [TUHS] Steve Bellovin recounts the history of USENET On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 07:50:53PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote: > On Wed, 20 Nov 2019 19:14:23 -0800 Larry McVoy wrote: > > Yeah, I'd be super happy if he joined the list. I enjoyed reading > > those, wished he had gone into more detail. > > > > On the Usenet topic, does anyone remember dejanews? Searchable > > archive of all the posts to Usenet. Google bought them and then, > > so far as I know, the searchable part went away. > > > > If someone knows how to search back to the beginnings of Usenet, > > my early tech life is all there, I'd love to be able to show my kids > > that. Big arguing with Mash on comp.arch, following Guy Harris on > > comp.unix-wizards, etc. > > I have occasionally downloaded some mbox.zip files from > https://archive.org/details/usenet > But there are too many files there. Would be nice if there > was a collaborative effort to organize them in a more usable, > searchable state. Pretty much all of it (minus binaries > groups) can be stored locally (or using some global > namespace. So is that all of Usenet? -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

4 years, 5 months

Western Electric "Research Unix" License Contacts

by David C. Brock

Dear All: I was wondering if anyone had any first-hand information about the early decisions at Western Electric to make an education license for Unix that was both royalty-free and with an extremely modest “service charge”/delivery fee, or if anyone knows the names of key people who made these decisions. Best wishes, David .............. David C. Brock Director and Curator Software History Center Computer History Museum computerhistory.org/softwarehistory<http://computerhistory.org/softwarehistory> Email: dbrock(a)computerhistory.org Twitter: @dcbrock Skype: dcbrock 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94943 (650) 810-1010 main (650) 810-1886 direct Pronouns: he, him, his

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold Robbins > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too. And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin, courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site once, whereupon hilarity ensued. Noel

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Western Electric "Research Unix" License Contacts

by Norman Wilson

Clem Cole: Al Arms wrote and administer the license BTW. ==== Aside for entertainment purposes: at one point, the root password for the UNIX systems I ran in the Caltech High Energy Physics group was derived from Al's name, but through a level of punning indirection. I believe Mark Bartelt came up with it. Later we decided to change it. I believe I chose the successor, which continued the UNIX-licensing scheme, but in a different direction: *UiaTMoBL The systems that had either of these passwords are long- since turned off. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

by Kevin Bowling

This stuff is extremely poorly preserved. No time like the present to fix that. I was reading Tom's blog https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart3/ and have been aware of Amdahl UTS a couple of the other ports for a while. I've got an HP 88780 quad density 9-track and access to a SCSI IBM 3490. Can fit them in air cargo and bring a laptop with a SCSI card. Tell me where to go. Regards, Kevin

4 years, 5 months

edx prize

by Doug McIlroy

Tangential, but interesting: https://blog.edx.org/congratulations-edx-prize-2019-winners/ Where would you expect a MOOC about C to originate? Not, it turns out, in a computer-science department. Professor Bonfert-Taylor is a mathematician in the school of engineering at Dartmouth. Doug

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Dave Horsfall

On Tue, 19 Nov 2019, Tony Finch wrote: > Amusingly POSIX says the C standard takes precedence wrt the details of > gets() (and other library functions) and C18 abolished gets(). I'm > slightly surprised that the POSIX committee didn't see that coming and > include the change in the 2018 edition... Didn't know that gets() had finally been abolished; it's possibly the most unsafe function (OK, macro) on the planet. I've long been tempted to remove gets() and see what breaks... -- Dave

4 years, 5 months

buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Norman Wilson

Bakul Shah: Unfortunately strcpy & other buffer overflow friendly functions are still present in the C standard (I am looking at n2434.pdf, draft of Sept 25, 2019). Is C really not fixable? ==== If you mean `can C be made proof against careless programmers,' no. You could try but the result wouldn't be C. And Flon's Dictum applies anyway, as always. It's perfectly possible to program in C without overflowing fixed buffers, just as it's perfectly possible to program in C without dereferencing a NULL or garbage pointer. I don't claim to be perfect, but before the rtm worm rubbed my nose in such problems, I was often sloppy about them, and afterward I was very much aware of them and paid attention. That's all I ask: we need to pay attention. It's not about tools, it's about brains and craftmanship and caring more about quality than about feature count or shiny surfaces or pushing the product out the door. Which is a good bit of what was attractive about UNIX in the first place--that both its ideas and its implementation were straightforward and comprehensible and made with some care. (Never mind that it wasn't perfect either.) Too bad software in general and UNIX descendants in particular seem to have left all that behind. Norman Wilson Toronto ON PS: if you find this depressing, cheer yourself up by watching the LCM video showing off UNICS on the PDP-7. I just did, and it did.

4 years, 5 months

UNIX v0 on a PDP7 - behind the scenes (Living Computers)

by Royce Williams

I hadn't seen this yet - apologies if it's not news: https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/Restoring-UNIX-v0-on-a-PDP-7-A-look-behind… Quoting: "I recently sat down with Fred Yearian, a former Boeing engineer, and Jeff Kaylin, an engineer at Living Computers, to talk about their restoration work on Yerian’s PDP-7 at Living Computers: Museum + Labs." [...] Up until the discovery of Yearian’s machine, LCM+L’s PDP-7 was believed to be the only operational PDP-7 left in the world. Chuckling to himself, Yearian recalls hearing this history presented during his first visit to LCM+L. “I walked in the computer museum, and someone said ‘Oh, this is the only [PDP-7] that’s still working’. And I said, ‘Well actually, I got one in my basement!’” [end quote] Fun story - and worthy work. Nicely done. -- Royce

4 years, 5 months

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TUHS November 2019