Ken's (?) Plan 9 assemblers are well known for their idiosyncratic
syntax, placing identical behaviour across platforms over a sense
of resemblance to people used to normal assemblers. While I am
aware of Rob's talk [1] on the basic design ideas and have read both
the Plan 9 [2] and Go [3] assembler manuals, many aspects of the
design (such as the strange way to specify static data) are
unclear and seem poorly documented.
Is there some document or other piece of information I can read on
the history of these assemblers? Or maybe someone recalls more bits
about these details?
Yours,
Robert Clausecker
[1]: https://talks.golang.org/2016/asm.slide
[2]: https://9p.io/sys/doc/asm.html
[3]: https://golang.org/doc/asm
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This memory just came back to me. There was a UNIX disribution
(PWB/UNIX?) that had a program called 1.
It printed tis quaint bit of propaganda.
One Bell System. It works.
This was fine until one day I’m at work in a big bull pen computer room
when Bernie, one of my co-workers, shouts.
“What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor?”
My reaction is, “Well, it’s all Bell System crud.” I walk over to his
terminal and find he is typing 1 repeatedly at the shell prompt and
getting the above message. (This was back in the old /bin/ed days where
1 got you to the top of the file). I had to point out he wasn’t in
the editor.
Later that day, the program was changed to say:
You’re not in the editor, Bernie.
This I think made it into one of the BRL releases and occassionally got
inquiries as to who Bernie is.
Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John
Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System".
I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of
scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for
some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't
been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on
alt.folklore.computers in 1994. But now it seems that the "book" had
been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was
the license revoked. Does anybody have any insights? What
restrictions were there on its distribution? What was the format?
Was it a real book, or just bound notes?
Greg
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There also exists a latter-day AT&T version of the Lions
book. White cover with deathstar logo; standard US letter-
sized paper, perfect-bound along the short edge. Two
volumes: one for the source code, one for the commentary.
I have a copy, and I bet Andrew does too: as I remember,
he got a handful of them from Judy Macor (who used to
handle licensing requests--I remember speaking to her
on the phone once in my pre-Labs days) when she was
clearing old stuff out of her office, and I nabbed one.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Has anyone gotten Xinu running in SIMH? It seems like it should be straightforward to run the "support" utilities under BSD on an emulated VAX and then run Xinu itself on an emulated LSI-11. If anyone's done so, I'd be interested to learn what all you had to do to set it up and get it working.
-- Chris
-- who needs to figure out SIMH config file syntax to match the board set he wants to simulate
