TUHS April 2019

tuhs@tuhs.org

63 participants
43 discussions

by norman＠nose.cita.utoronto.ca

I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the Seventh Edition: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome. (It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)

2 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Paper discussing Unix boot process?

by Pat Barron

The paper I am thinking of (gee, I wish I could remember any other details about it...) was *very* detailed and specific, and was hardware-specific to either the PDP-11 or VAX. It would not at all be applicable to Linux or any kind of modern OS. I am wondering if it is something in the Leffler et al book, I'll have to go back and review that. I'll have to find my copy of it first... --Pat.

5 years, 10 months

OT: Need help getting old 9 track tapes read

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. Scott Lee, who worked with me on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subystem for Pr1me Computers, recently unearthed two tapes with some version of that software. These may be the only copies extant anywhere. He says: | I was cleaning out the basement of my house. They're 35 years old, but | they've never been left in the heat or anything. I opened one of them | up and checked the tape and it's not self-sticky or anything. The odds | that they're readable is slim, because old 9-track bits tended to bleed | through each other. You were supposed to spin through the tape every | couple of years to make them last longer. That's obviously not happened. There was discussion here a while back about services that will recover such tapes and so on. But I didn't save any of that information. If you have information, PLEASE send it to me so that I can relay it to Scott. Dennis Boone & Bill Gunshannon (are you on this list?) - I may ask you to contribute $$ towards this once I know more. Thanks! Arnold

5 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Old Unix manuals, TMs, etc

by Warren Toomey

----- Forwarded message from meljmel-unix(a)yahoo.com ----- Warren, Thanks for your help. To my amazement in one day I received 8 requests for the documents you posted on the TUHS mailing list for me. If you think it's appropriate you can post that everything has been claimed. I will be mailing the Unix TMs and other papers to Robert Swierczek <rmswierczek(a)gmail.com> who said he will scan any one-of-a-kind items and make them available to you and TUHS. The manuals/books will be going to someone else who very much wanted them. Mel ----- End forwarded message -----

5 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] A question about ls(1)

by norman＠oclsc.org

Bakul Shah: This could've been avoided if there was a convention about where to store per user per app settings & possibly state. On one of my Unix machines I have over 200 dotfiles. ==== Some, I think including Ken and Dennis, might have argued that real UNIX programs aren't complex enough to need lots of configuration files. Agree with it or not, that likely explains why the Research stream never supplied a better convention about where to store such files. I do remember some general debate in the community (e.g. on netnews) about the matter back in the early 1980s. One suggestion I recall was to move all the files to subdirectory `$HOME/...'. Personally I think $HOME/conf would have been better (though I lean toward the view that very few programs should need such files anyway). But by then BSD had spread the convention of leaving `hidden' files in $HOME had spread too far to call back. It wouldn't surprise me if some at Berkeley would rather have moved to a cleaner convention, just as the silly uucp-baud-rate flags were removed from wc, but the cat was already out of the bag and too hard to stuff back in. On the Ubuntu Linux systems I help run these days, there is a directory $HOME/.config. The tree within has 192 directories and 187 regular files. I have no idea what all those files are for, but from the names, most are from programs I may have run once years ago to test something, or from programs I run occasionally but have no context I care about saving. The whole tree occupies almost six megabytes, which seems small by current standards, but (as those on this list certainly know) in the early 1980s it was possible to run a complete multi-user UNIX system comfortably from a single 2.5MB RK05 disk. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 12 months

Running sparc Solaris with qemu

by A. P. Garcia

https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/29/new-guide-build-your-own-sparc-worksta…

5 years, 12 months

MASSCOMP MC-500 Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver

by Norman Wilson

Dennis's `The UNIX I/O System' paper in Volume 2 of the 7/e manual is basically about how drivers work. Is that near enough, possibly as augmented by Ken's `UNIX Implementation' paper in the same book? Those were my own starting point, long ago, for understanding how to write device drivers. Along with existing source code as examples, of course, but (unlikely many who hack on device drivers, I'm afraid) I have always preferred to have a proper statement of rules, conventions, and interfaces rather than just reading code and guessing. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 12 months

MASSCOMP MC-500 Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver

by Warner Losh

Greetings, I'm trying to find the predecessor to "Writing a UNIX Device Driver, J. Egan & T. Teixeira, 1st ed, 1988". In the preface, it says: "This book is based on a MASSCOMP manual, Guide to Writing a Unix Device Driver. The first version that MASSCOMP published as part of the documentation set for the MC-500 was based on preliminary drafts prepared for MASSCOMP by Cliff Cary and Tom Albough of Creare R&D." I checked bit keepers and found nothing. I was wondering if people on this list know of this manual, have a copy, etc. In general, I'm looking for pre-SysV driver manuals. I can find all kinds of SysV driver books (some of which cover 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD as well), but nothing for System III or V7 unix. There were a lot of early systems that were based on ports of V7 to different architectures that were then updated to System III or System V (at least according to the big chart of unix history and some wikipedia entries, which may be just repeating marketing schlock and not reflect actual reality). As part of a talk I'm putting together on the 40th anniversary of V7, I wanted to have a bit of history for things we still have in unix today (like strategy) and things that successors to unix have added or left behind (like the packet mux in V7 that was tossed aside for either STREAMS or netinet from BSD, though packet muxing to userland is back with DPDK). Warner

5 years, 12 months

A question about ls(1)

by Anthony Martin

>From at least V2 to V6, the ls(1) command would not show directory entries whose names began with a '.' unless the -a flag was supplied. This was changed in V7: only the directory entries for "." and ".." would be skipped by default. All further versions of Research Unix retain the convention of V7 and Plan 9 ultimately made it unnecessary. However, BSD and its descendants did not follow suit. Instead, they continued behaving like V6 with an additional -A flag to emulate V7. Was the initial behavior intentional or just a matter of expediency? Who made the change and what was their motivation? Was it a reaction to the intentional hiding of what came to be known as "dot files"? Thanks, Anthony

5 years, 12 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: Need help getting old 9 track tapes read

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold Skeeve > If you have information, PLEASE send it to me so that I can relay it > to Scott. IMO, only one choice: Chuck Guzis (cclist(a)sydex.com) he's very active in the vintage computer community, and reads old media professionally. I've used him (to recover those backup tapes of the MIT PWB1 system), which was rather tricky (bad mold; he had to build a special tool to remove it), and I was incredibly happy. Very reasonable price too - although he may have given me a special 'collector' rate.. :-) Noel

5 years, 12 months

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TUHS April 2019