> 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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.8https://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
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
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
In all that's been written about the Research Unix players,
Fred Grampp has gotten far less coverage than he deserves.
I hope to rectify that with this post, most of which was
written soon after his death.
Doug
During Fred's long career at Bell Laboratories, his coworkers
were delighted to work with him, primarily because of his
innovative and often surprising ways of attacking problems.
Fred's unique approach was by no means limited to work-related
matters. Fred arranged an annual canoe-camping trip on the
Delaware River replete with nearly professional grade fireworks.
He also arranged a number of trips to New York City (referred
to as culture nights) which included, among other things,
trips to the planetarium and visits to various tea rooms.
To his friends at Bell Labs, Fred Grampp was a true original. He
knew the urban community of small, scrabbling business
as well as the pampered life of industrial research in the
country's greatest industrial research lab. And he brought
the best of each to his approach to work.
In his father's hardware store, Fred learned on the front line
what "customer-oriented" meant--a far cry from the hypothetical
nonsense on the subject put forth by flacks in a modern PR
department, or by CEO Bob Allen thinking big thoughts on the
golf course.
Fred ran the computing facilities for the Computer Science
Research Center. He had his finger on the pulse of the machinery
at all hours of day and night. He and his colleague Ed Sitar
rose early to pat the hardware and assure that everything was
in order just as had been done at the hardware store. The rest
of us, who kept more nerdish hours, could count on everything
running.
Packed with equipment, the machine room depended on
air conditioning. Fred saw this as a threat to dependable
service. As a backup, he had big galvanized barn fans installed
in several windows--incongruous, but utterly practical. And
they saw actual use on at least one occasion.
Fred cooked up ingenious software to sniff the computers'
health and sound alarms in his office and even by his bed when
something was amiss. When a user found something wrong and
popped into Fred's office to report the trouble, more often
than not he'd find Fred already working on it.
With his street smarts, Fred was ahead of the game when
computer intrusion began to become a problem in the 1970s.
He was a real white-hat marshall, who could read the the bad
guys' minds and head them off at the pass. With Bob Morris,
Fred wrote a paper to alert system administrators to the kinds
of lapse of vigilance that leave them open to attack; the paper
is still read as a classic. Other sage advice was put forth
by Fred in collaboration with G. R. Emlin, who would become an
important adjunct member of the lab, as several TUHS posts attest.
Quietly he developed a suite of programs that probed a
computer's defenses--fortunately before the bad guys really
got geared up to do the same. That work led to the creation
of a whole department that used Fred's methods to assess and
repair the security of thousands of computers around Bell Labs.
Fred's avocations of flying and lock-picking lent spice to
life in the Labs. He was a central figure of the "computer
science airforce" that organized forays to see fall colors,
or to witness an eclipse. He joined Ken Thompson, who also
flew in the department air force, on a trip to Russia to fly
a MIG-29. Ken tells the story at cs.bell-labs.com/ken/mig.html.
Fred's passion for opera was communicated to many. It was
he who put the Met schedule on line for us colleagues long
before the Met discovered the World Wide Web. He'd press new
recordings on us to whet our appetites. He'd recount, or take
us to, rehearsals and backstage visits, and furnish us with
librettos. When CDs appeared on the scene, Fred undertook to
build a systematic collection of opera recordings, which grew
to over two hundred works. They regularly played quietly in the
background of his office. To Fred the opera was an essential
part of life, not just an expensive night on the town.
Fred's down-to-earth approach lightened life at Bell Labs. When
workmen were boarding up windows to protect them from some major
construction--and incidentally to prevent us from enjoying the
spectacle of ironworkers outside. Fred posted a little sign
in his window to the effect that if the plywood happened to
get left off, a case of Bud might appear on the sill. For the
next year, we had a close-up view of the action.
Fred, a graduate of Stevens Institute, began his career in
the computer center, under the leadership of George Baldwin,
perhaps the most affable and civic-minded mathematician I have
ever met. At the end of one trying day, George wandered into
Fred's office, leaned back in the visitor chair, and said,
"I sure could use a cold one about now." Fred opened his window
and retrieved a Bud that was cooling on the sill.
Fred lived his whole life in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At one
point he decided that for exercise he could get to the Labs by
train to Scotch Plains and bike from there up to Bell Labs--no
mean feat, for the labs sat atop the second range of the
Watchung Mountains, two steep climbs away from Scotch Plains.
He invested in a folding bike for the purpose. Some days
into the new routine a conductor called him out for bringing
a bicycle onto the train. Fred had looked forward to this
moment. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a timetable
and pointed to the fine print: bicycles were prohibited with
the exception of folding bikes.
Originally dated October 25, 2000. Lightly edited and three
paragraphs added February 22, 2021.
