> I was a BTL person for 8 years between 1976 and 1984. During
> that time there was a spelling corrector that was better than
> anything I see today. There was a concept of "spelling distance"
> that corrected a whole bunch of stuff that even today cannot be >
corrected.
> Who in that era worked on spelling correction at BTL. I was at
> Columbus BTL (1976-1979) and Whippany BTL (1979-1984).
Peter Nelson made an interface to spell(1) that showed putative errors in
context. I believe it could suggest corrections. I remember the project; I
installed hooks for it in spell(1). I don't remember the date, but it would
probably not have been early enough for you to have used it in Columbus.
If there's a chance that Peter's program is the one you remember
and you'd like to get in touch with him, I can give you his
email address.
Doug
Sandy Fraser was kind enough to share some papers from his archive that give further background to early networking at Bell Labs. One of these is about the “File Store”.
For context I refer to an article that Sandy wrote back in 1975 and describes the network setup at Murray Hill at that time:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_kg4CEsbGucsU8-jxi0ptfUdsznWcKWm/view?usp=…
In the figure and legenda at the bottom of page 52/53, the "File Store" is item 10.
The File Store paper itself is (temporarily) here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AhLmjJcHXFtfoIUlfvl0bzbB0zSPzpSq/view?usp=…
The paper has a very interesting introduction: “Five machines currently use the file store. Three of them use it as if were a peripheral device not part of their main backing store. In these cases there exists programs to transmit complete files between the user’s machine and the file store."
This was known and Noel Chiappa found the source for the main transfer program “nfs” (this program is also mentioned in Doug McIllroy’s manual compendium):
https://chiselapp.com/user/pnr/repository/Spider/tree?ci=tip
The introduction continues: “In the other two cases the file store is treated as an extension of the user machine’s backing store. Once a user has opened a file his program does reads, writes, and seeks without being aware of the file’s actual location.”
This -- to me at least -- is a new fact and as such it would predate various other projects for a distributed Unix file system (the paper is dated December 1974). Unfortunately, the paper is short on how the integration was achieved.
On one hand the work may have been related to "Peripheral Unix” as developed by Heinz Lycklama (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TechReports/Heinz_Tech_Memos/TM-…) at the same time -- the memos are dated just a month apart. In essence the approach is to forward system calls over the network 1).
Another possibility is that it worked much like the 1979 “RIDE” system (https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/cmpsac/1979/00762533/12Om…). Here there is a modified C library that recognises certain path names and maps these to file server calls.
A third possibility is that it was a precursor to the work on distributed Unix by Luderer et al. in 1980/81 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1067627.806604). Here file system calls are redirected at the kernel level using the concept of a remote/forwarding inode.
The File Store paper mentions that the server is a modified Unix. At first glance it would seem that the modifications are modest, with the file system partly rewritten to account for storage usage, and an automatic backup feature added.
I am much interested in any recollections, insights and materials about these topics.
Many thanks in advance,
Paul
Note 1)
The tech report on the “high speed serial loop” (the Weller loop) has not surfaced yet, but the document for the Glance terminal gives a quick, high level overview on page 3/4:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TechReports/Heinz_Tech_Memos/TM-…
The recent 516 documents include a detailed description of how it worked:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Other/516-TSS/516-10-11-12-Ring-…
I was a BTL person for 8 years between 1976 and 1984. During that time
there was a spelling corrector that was better than anything I see today.
There was a concept of "spelling distance" that corrected a whole bunch of
stuff that even today cannot be corrected.
Who in that era worked on spelling correction at BTL. I was at Columbus BTL
(1976-1979) and Whippany BTL (1979-1984).
Who ever did that stuff should patent it and sell it. Today there is
nothing like it.
--
Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.
Cicero
Happy new year to all!
Over the holidays I found some time to port the recovered version of
speak(6) to modern Unix systems and make its output compatible with the
espeak system. The resulting sound is barely intelligible. I assume
this is due to the imperfect matching between the speak and espeak
phonemes. The process's details are available at
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20210102#tu and the code at
https://github.com/dspinellis/speak.
Diomidis
His autobiography, Go West, Young German! states it is luderer at asu.edu -- but that was published a decade ago.
Paul Ruizendaal (pnr at planet.nl) wrote:
>
> I am looking for some more background on the 1980/81 "S/F-Unix" system.
>
> Gottfried W. R. Luderer, H. Che, J. P. Haggerty, Peter A. Kirslis, W. T. Marshall:
> A Distributed UNIX System Based on a Virtual Circuit Switch. SOSP 1981: 160-168
> I have that paper, and Bill Marshall was kind enough to provide a lot of info. I think that Gottfried Luderer may have some further background, in particular on how this work relates to earlier distributed file system projects at Bell Labs.
>
> Would anybody have a current e-mail address for him?
>
> Paul
I am looking for some more background on the 1980/81 "S/F-Unix" system.
Gottfried W. R. Luderer, H. Che, J. P. Haggerty, Peter A. Kirslis, W. T. Marshall:
A Distributed UNIX System Based on a Virtual Circuit Switch. SOSP 1981: 160-168
I have that paper, and Bill Marshall was kind enough to provide a lot of info. I think that Gottfried Luderer may have some further background, in particular on how this work relates to earlier distributed file system projects at Bell Labs.
Would anybody have a current e-mail address for him?
Paul
