TUHS March 2021

tuhs@tuhs.org

78 participants
42 discussions

Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

by Josh Good

Hello UNIX veterans. So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose. I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost spartan. The chapter titles are: 1. Introduction 2. vi: A Text Editor 3. ed 4. mail 5. Communicating with Other Sites 6. bc: A Calculator 7. The Shell 8. The C-Shell 9. Using the Visual Shell And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index. Granted, this Xenix version is derived from System V Release 2, and I think it was for the Intel 286 (not yet ported to the i386), but hey it's 1988 already and the Internet is supposed to be thriving on UNIX in the Pacific Coast, or so the lore says. I see now that it probably was only in the Berkely family that the Internet was going on... In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from those years. I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and the Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version, from a user's point of view. I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of": email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these days. -- Josh Good

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse

by M Douglas McIlroy

> When you're the phone company, calls are free Not so. But the culture prioritized phone use in a way that's been completely forgotten. High execs would answer their own phones when they were at their desks. "Your call is very important to us. Please wait for the first available representative" would have been anathema. One of my few managerial decrees in the Unix lab was to give a year's notice that "research" would stop forwarding Usenet traffic, not because of phones, but because uucp was becoming a burden on our computer. Doug

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

by M Douglas McIlroy

Connectivity evolved rapidly in the early 1980s. In 1980 I served on the board of CSNet, which connected have-not CS departments (including Bell Labs) via dialup and X.25 links onto the periphery of the magic circle of Arpanet. By 1982 it was not extraordinary that I could via international email arrange all aspects of a trip to visit lively universities of the AUUG.

4 years, 1 month

tabs vs spaces - entab, detab

by Will Senn

OK. So, I've been trying to decide (for the last time, I swear) whether to use tabs or spaces in my code... I did a quick pulse-check on the state of argument and it appears to be alive and well in 2021. My question for y'all is, was there a preference in the very early days or not? I saw an article talking about the 20 year feud, but that's not my recollection. In 1994, nobody agreed on this, but I'm sure it predates my entree into the field. I'm thinking the history of entab and detab are somehow related, but I've been wrong on these sorts of thoughts before. What say you? Will

4 years, 1 month

Fred Grampp

by Brian Walden

Amazing coincidences. A week prior I was researching Topper Toys looking for their old factory ("largest toy factory in the world") As there was litte on it's location and it lead me to find out in 1961 it took over the old Singer Factory in Elizabeth, NJ. So looking up the Singer factory led me to "Elizabeth, New Jersey, Then and Now" by Robert J. Baptista https://ia801304.us.archive.org/11/items/ElizabethNewJerseyThenAndNowSecond… Which had no information on Topper, but had had this paragraph in it's Singer section on page 28 -- Boys earned money "rushing the growler" at lunchtime at the Singer plant. German workers lowered their covered beer pails, called growlers, on ropes to the boys waiting below. They earned a nickel by filling them with beer at Grampp's saloon on Trumbull St. One of these boys was Thomas Dunn who later became a long term Mayor. In the early 1920s Frederick Grampp went into the hardware business at the corner of Elizabeth Ave. and Reid St. When I read it I thought funny, as I know the name Fred Grampp. But beleived just a coincidenental same name. After reading the biography post, I went back to the book as it turns out that Fred Grampp is your Fred Grampps's grandfather. You can find more his family and the hardware store and Grampp himself on pages 163-164, and 212. -Brian

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] 4.4BSD sparc, pmax binary recently compiled

by Jason Stevens

Wow this is nothing short of GREAT! I always wanted to tackle this but it was out of my reach as I barely got anything from this lineage to build to anything. Most excellent! -----Original Message----- From: MOCHIDA Shuji To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: 3/6/21 10:42 AM Subject: [TUHS] 4.4BSD sparc, pmax binary recently compiled I compiled 4.4BSD to get pmax and sparc binary, from CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4 source code. http://www.netside.co.jp/~mochid/comp/bsd44-build/ pmax: - Works on GXemul DECstaion(PMAX) emulation. - I used binutils 2.6 and gcc 2.7.2.3 taken from Gnu ftp site, as 4.4BSD src does not contain pmax support part in as, ld, gcc and gdb. - Lack of GDB. I got rid of compile errors of gdb 4.16, but that does not work yet. - gcc included can not deal c++ static constructor. So, contrib/groff can not be compiled. Instead, it uses old/{nroff,troff,eqn,tbl..}. sparc: - Works on sun4c. I use on SPARCstation 2, real hardware. TME sun4c emulation can boot to single user, but it locks up in middle of /etc/rc. CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4's source code (just after Lite2 release) seems have differences from CSRG's binary distributions before (2 times), e.g. mount systemcall is not compatible. I used NetBSD 1.0/sparc, NetBSD 1.1/pmax for 1st (slightly) cross compiling. NetBSD 1.0/sparc boots and works well on TME emulator. SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris7 works too, but this 4.4BSD binary doesn't.. -mochid

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Fred Grampp

by Norman Wilson

As I remember it, the Facilities folks were so upset about someone painting stuff on Their Water Tower that a complaint went to Vic Vyssotsky, then Executive Director of Division 112 (one step up from Sandy Fraser, who was Director of 1127). The story was that Vic and/or Sandy told them that there were 60 people in the research centre and no way to tell who did it. Word was then quietly passed to certain people--Vic and Sandy in fact knew exactly who--that things were getting out of hand, please lay off the Peter-face pranking for a while. I tried to start a rumour that Vic did the painting, but it never took off. I hope Vic at least heard it. He'd have enjoyed the rumour, surely laughed at the prank while knowing he'd have to calm things down, and 20 years earlier might well have been involved in something like that. It was Vic who, on learning I was a cyclist, urged me to try cycling on the newly-constructed but not yet open segment of interstate highway that ran behind the Labs. He apparently had done so and found it lots of fun. Alas, I never did. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] [COFF] Pondering the hosts file

by Paul Ruizendaal

BBN’s TCP implementation contained something akin to the hosts file, called hostmap there: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP/doc I have not looked at the code for a while, but if I remember correctly the BBN kernel code also read in this file (pre-processed into a binary form) to build its internal routing table. I do not recall having seen an equivalent file with UoI's NCP Unix in any of the surviving docs or sources - but that does not exclude a library having existed to do lookups in a local copy the SRI-NIC host file. In fact there is some evidence for that in the 2.9 BSD source. The only surviving copy of the 4.1a (network) source code that I know is in the back-port of this code to 2.8/2.9 BSD. This code includes #ifdef’ed code for accessing the SRI-NIC online host table via NCP: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/local This source also contains tools to convert the SRI-NIC data into - inter alia - a hosts file: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/man/man8/htable.8 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/man/man8/gettable… It would seem that the modern host.txt on Unix evolved late ’81 (BBN code) to early ’82 (4.1a BSD). Possibly NCP Unix has prior work. Paul

4 years, 1 month

Pondering the hosts file

by Grant Taylor

Hi, I'm not sure where this message best fits; TUHS, COFF, or Internet History, so please forgive me if this list is not the best location. I'm discussing the hosts file with someone and was wondering if there's any historical documentation around it's format and what should and should not be entered in the file. I've read the current man page on Gentoo Linux, but suspect that it's far from authoritative. I'm hoping that someone can point me to something more authoritative to the hosts file's format, guidelines around entering data, and how it's supposed to function. A couple of sticking points in the other discussion revolve around how many entries a host is supposed to have in the hosts file and any ramifications for having a host appear as an alias on multiple lines / entries. To whit, how correct / incorrect is the following: 192.0.2.1 host.example.net host 127.0.0.1 localhost host.example.net host -- Grant. . . . unix || die

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] manual humour (was tunefs -m 5%)

by norman＠oclsc.org

In the Seventh Edition manual, a joke was added to the entry for kill(1). It appears in every following Research manual, but seems to have been discarded by all modern descendants. I guess the prejudice against humour in the manual is extreme these days. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 1 month

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TUHS March 2021