TUHS January 2020

tuhs@tuhs.org

110 participants
92 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, 4 months

Unix on Zilog Z8000?

by Jon Forrest

There's been a lot of discussion about early Unix on Intel, National Semi, Motorola, and Sparc processors. I don't recall if Unix ran on the Z8000, and if not, why not. As I remember the Z8000 was going to be the great white hope that would continue Zilog's success with the Z80 into modern times. But, it obviously didn't happen. Why? Jon

4 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] screen editors

by Thomas Paulsen

>What's funny is that in doing the work to get 'se' running on Georgia >Tech's Vax, I had to learn vi. By the time I was done, vi had become >my main editor and had burned itself into my finger's ROMs. I do ed/se occasionally for simple tasks, vim frequently , because it loads fast, and emacs for all bigger projects, beside liteide for golang.

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Distributed systems, was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"

by Andrew Warkentin

On 1/17/20, Brantley Coile <brantley(a)coraid.com> wrote: > what he said. > >> On Jan 17, 2020, at 6:20 PM, Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Plan 9 is not a "single-system-image cluster". >> >> -rob >> > > I guess SSI isn't the right term for Plan 9 clustering since not everything is shared, although I would still say it has some aspects of SSI. I was talking about systems that try to make a cluster look like a single machine in some way even if they don't share everything (I'm not sure if there's a better term for such systems besides the rather vague "distributed" which could mean anything from full SSI to systems that allow transparent access to services/devices on other machines without trying to make a cluster look like a single system).

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Screen editors

by Jose R. Valverde

Talking of editors... Once I learned Wordstar in old CP/M (before that it was mostly line editing), and then soon, other editors that supported the Wordstar key combinations, I got hooked on those. Joe is, to date, one of my favorites. On ancient UNIX, my editor of choice was 's' from Software Tools, its main advantage being that it didn't require curses. Then we got VMS and 'eve' and that took over for a while (though I never took advantage of all its power), mostly until I ported 's' and 'joe'. Then came X, and when nedit was released, I was hooked on it. It has been for decades almost the only one that could do block selection 'a la' RAND editor. I have been struggling to continue using it despite it lack of support for UTF, trying various projects spun off nedit, until I recently discovered xnedit, which is an update available on GitHub and is again all I need, with support for UTF8, some minor UI improvements and support for modern fonts. Now, I still use 's' for ancient Unix emulators, 'joe' for the command line and 'xnedit' for X. j -- Scientific Computing Service Solving all your computer needs for Scientific Research. http://bioportal.cnb.csic.es

4 years, 8 months

Atari System V media and books?

by Chris Hanson

I’ve seen the archives of Atari System V Release 4 for the TT030, and the scanned user and developer manuals. Has anything else been preserved, e.g. the installation tapes and any other manuals? Is there even a full accounting of what was in the box and what shipped afterwards (patches etc.)? -- Chris

4 years, 8 months

1984 AT&T Bell Labs Unix Edition

by Warner Losh

Greetings, Is this issue online? I may have a copy buried in my boxes of books, and am on the road. I'd like to read the article on portability and/or the one on performance. One of those has a table of internal vs external release names / dates. archive.org and elsewhere only has through 83. I discovered I might have it this morning 20 minutes before I had to leave for the airport for another talk. :( Thanks for any help you can provide.... Warner

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix quix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > this predates everything except Whirlwind which I can't find a paper for. Given the 'Whirlwind is a ringer' comment, I asssume this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I< is what they mean. Pretty interesting machine, if you study its instruction set, BTW; with no stack, subroutines are 'interesting'. Noel

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > So WD designs and builds a few LSI-11 as a sales demo of what you could > do > ... > he put it on the QBUS which DEC could not lock up because they did not > create it as WD had. Wow! WD created the QBUS? Fascinating. I wonder if DEC made any changes to the QBUS between the original demo WD boards and the first DEC ones? Are there any documents about the WD original still extant, do you know? (FWIW, it seems that whoever did the QBUS interrupt cycle had heard about the metastability issues when using a flop to do the grant-passing arbitrations; see here for more: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Bus_Arbitration_on_the_Unibus_and_QBUS#QBUS_Interr… DEC had previously bent themselves into knots trying to solve it on the UNIBUS: https://gunkies.org/wiki/M782_Interrupt_Control#Revisions so it would be interesting to know if it was WD or DEC who did the DIN thing to get rid of it on the QBUS.) Noel

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] man pages, defensive programming, and bibliographic

by Doug McIlroy

> Always use '\&' (a non-printing, zero width character) to > make it clear to the software, that the _function_ of the > character next to it, is neither a sentence-terminating nor > a control one. It is unfortunate that such advice has to be given. One should not have to defend against stupid AI. This is one of only two really unfortunate design choices (in my opinion) in original [nt]roff. (The other is beginning a new page when the vertical position reaches--as distinct from definitively passing--the bottom of a page.) If AI is used, it should be optional. I happen not to like double-width intersentence space, but it keeps getting foisted on me essentially at random. Instead of fattening the manual with annoying duties like that quoted above, I suggest fattening it with a new request, "turn on/off doubling of spaces between apparent sentences", or "put at least the specified space between apparent sentences". One can still use \&, but then it's for a chosen purpose, not just defense against gremlins. Incidentally, "next to" in the quoted advice must be read with care. Sometimes it means before, sometimes after. ------------------------------------------------------------ In this old AI-induced trouble I see a cautionary lesson for paragraph-based line breaking. fmt(1) is an existing program that tries to do this. On unjustified text (i.e. all text handled by fmt) it produces paragraphs of different "optimal" widths, which can be even more distracting than unusually ragged right margins. Doug

4 years, 8 months

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TUHS January 2020