TUHS September 2022

tuhs@tuhs.org

57 participants
31 discussions

by Warner Losh

Greetings, What's the canonical source for patches to 2.9BSD and 2.11BSD? I see we have 2.11BSD patch 469 dated last month in the archive. Where does it come from? Has anybody climbed the hill to import all the patches into a git repo? I've found some mirrors, but moe.2bsd.org has been down for me for ages... How does Warren keep things up to date? I also have a (maybe faulty) memory of a similar series of patches to 2.9BSD because it was the last BSD to support non-split I&D space machines. yet a quick google search turns up nothing other than a set of patches dated August 1985 (also in our archive) and some changes for variants of hardware (pro, mscp). Is that it? Warner

1 month, 2 weeks

Release 5.0 Vs. System V

by segaloco

Good morning all, currently trying to sort out one matter that still bewilders me with this documentation I'm working on scanning. So I've got two copies of the "Release 5.0" User's Manual and one copy of the "System V" User's Manual. I haven't identified the exact differences, lots of pages...but they certainly are not identical, there are at least a few commands in one and not the other. Given this, and past discussion, it's obvious Release 5.0 is the internal UNIX version that became System V, but what I'm curious about is if it was ever released publicly as "Release 5.0" before being branded as System V or if the name was System V from the moment the first commercial license was issued. The reason I wonder this is some inconsistencies in the documentation I see out there. So both of my Release 5.0 User's Manuals have the Bell logo on the front and no mention of the court order to cease using it. Likewise, all but one of the System V related documents I received recently contain a Bell logo on the cover next to Western Electric save for the Opeartor's Guide which curiously doesn't exhibit the front page divestiture message that other documents missing the Bell logo include. Furthermore, the actual cover sheet says "Operator's Guide UNIX System Release 5.0" so technically not System V. In fact, only the User's Manual, Administrator's Manual, Error Message Manual, Transition Aids, and Release Description specifically say System V, all the rest don't have a version listed but some list Release 5.0 on their title page. Furthering that discrepancy is this which I just purchased: https://www.ebay.com/itm/314135813726?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110… Link lives as of this sending, but contains a closed auction for an Error Message Manual from the "Release 5.0" documentation line but no Bell logo. Until the Operator's Guide and this auction link, I haven't seen any "Release 5.0" branded stuff without a Bell logo, and before I bought the System V gold set, I hadn't seen System V branded stuff *with* the Bell logo. This shatters an assumption that I had made that at the same time the documentation branding shifted to System V was the same time the removal of the Bell logo happened, given that divestiture was what allowed them to aggressively market System V, but now this presents four distinct sets of System V gold documentation: Release 5.0 w/ Bell logo Release 5.0 w/o Bell logo System V w/ Bell logo System V w/o Bell logo I'm curious if anyone would happen to know what the significance here is. The covers are all printed, I can't see any indication that a bunch of 5.0 manuals were retroactively painted over nor that any System V manuals got stamped with a Bell post-production. What this means is "Release 5.0" documentation was being shipped post-divestiture and "System V" was being shipped pre-divestiture. If Release 5.0 was publicly sold as System V, then what explains the post-divestiture 5.0 manuals floating around in the wild, and vice versa, if USG couldn't effectively market and support UNIX until the divestiture, how is it so many "Release 5.0" documents are floating around in well produced commercial-quality binding, both pre and post-divestiture by the time the name "System V" would've been king. Were they still maintaining an internal 5.x branch past System V that warranted its own distinct documentation set even into the commercial period? This period right around '82-'83 is incredibly fascinating and I feel very under-documented. - Matt G.

4 months

Strange Reference on Usenix_77 tape

by Warner Losh

Greetings, I was looking at the various Usenix tapes we have in the TUHS archive, trying to sort them all out. In looking at ug091377.tar.gz in Applications/Usenix_77, I found this paragraph at the end of its read_me " Finally, if we have an executed Harvard License on file and if there is room on your tape, the directory "h" contains the newest (July 1977) release of the HRSTS system. We have also in- cluded the old Toronto release in the directory "t" if it was re- quested from a Toronto licensee." This tape had the 'h' directory, so I'll be playing around with the HRSTS system to see if I can get it booting in TUHS (I didn't know we had this til now)... This tape did not have the 't' directory, however. What is 'the old Toronoto release'? I've not seen references to it so far in the other histories of this early period I've encountered. And does anybody have a copy of it? Warner

8 months

Early BSD license thread

by Warner Losh

I hate myself a little bit, but I posted an answer to the 'BSD license origin' in this twitter thread https://twitter.com/bsdimp/status/1572521676268802049 that people might find interesting. Please note the caveats at the end of the thread: This is a bare outline hitting the high points taking only data from release files with no behind the scenes confirmation about why things changed, nor in-depth exploration of variations that I know are present, nor do I got into examples from various USENET postings from the time that stole the license for people's own different uses. Nonetheless, I hope it's useful... Warner

8 months, 1 week

The USL Toolchest from the 80s and 90s

by Clem Cole

Mike Haertel's quest for the 5620 tools got me thinking. Does anyone know of an archive of the USL Toolchest at large? It would be cool if someone had the whole thing on a single tape. But, I suspect many of us have pieces of it. I'm not sure I know all the pieces that made it up. But I would like to see the USDL section of Warren's Archive include a sub directory Toolchest with the collected parts - from Korn shell, the final version of Writer workbench, to DMD tools and the like. IIRC the final edition of PCC2 was released as part of it. thoughts? Clem

8 months, 1 week

Unix timelines

by steve jenkin

In 2007 I started entering the contents of Eric Levenez’s “Unix History” diagram into “dot” format to use with Graphviz. It stalled when I was unable to create a diagram I really liked. My recollection is that I talked with Warren about encoding this data and creating diagrams. He compiled the TUHS “Unix Tree”, presumably now the definitive resource, but I haven’t see a diagram linked from there. There’s the github “Unix History” project by TUHS list folk <https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo> I didn’t research producing timelines & relationships automatically from git: this would be a solid solution, if the Repo was considered as permanent as the TUHS site. The “Linux Distribution Timeline” is based on a tool, gnuclad, that takes CSV files and 'computes a cladogram’ in SVG. conversion to PNG is via ImageMagick’s “convert”. By default, timelines are produced ‘left to right’, with claimed ‘right to left’, ’top to bottom’ and ‘bottom to top’ formats - which I haven’t tested. The CSV file can include links which are built into clickable points in the final image, at least for SVG, unsure of PNG. A concern that I have is the creation of the CSV file from Distrowatch is opaque. Possibly built by hand. New diagrams are uploaded 2-3 times a year. The Levenez "fishbone" diagram doesn’t seem to be updated with Warner Losh’s 2020 “Hidden Early History”. Clem Cole’s Big Block diagram shows “low-res” diagrams are also very useful, eliminating distracting detail when appropriate. Groklaw from 2004-2009 tried to collect information about the Unix/Linux Timelines, but the site is gone now & Wayback machine hasn’t picked up many of the detail / comments page. I’ve no contact with PJ & whoever runs Groklaw now. Would that data collection contain anything more than TUHS, as it does try to include both Linux and Unix? Any suggestions? Something extra in the Linux Distro Tree is a notation for people moving between projects and tracking forks. Unsure how that’s accomplished, and not sure how important that is for Unixes. TUHS is “Early Unix”, not about Linux. However, some degree of compatibility between Unix & Linux Timeline diagrams might be useful for others if they ever try to join multiple trees. If a timeline / relationship table is constructed, designing it to be somewhat compatible will help future people. I’m not sure about tracking the many descendants of BSD. Wikipedia has a list without a timeline . <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems> Someone may already be being doing this somewhere, I didn’t look. Don’t think modern descendants of BSD should be tracked by a Unix Heritage Society, has to be a boundary somewhere. regards steve jenkin ============ Some Questions: 1. Is there any benefit in developing a canonical “Unix Timeline” dataset containing the relationships, allowing programatic conversion to diagrams? There might be better tools in the future. I’d favour tab-separated text files, because they can be read / written by Spreadsheets and converted to CSV. Warren’s solution of tables & pages is good: there’s simply too much information & complexity to capture in simple file formats The gnuclad solution of providing “Clickable Links” is useful, if like TUHS, the pages are well maintained. 2. How to cater for: - adding extra-fine detail for segments of the timeline (Warner Losh) - ‘zooming out’ and providing an overview (Clem Cole) - some sort of compatibility with known tables, like Linux Distro Timeline 3. No simple representation can, or should try, to be “all things to all people”, there’s too much detail and too many events occurred. Is there a useful subset of detail that can be captured in a simple table? There may be useful subsets of the Unix Timeline that show more or less detail, To support programatic zoom In/Out, an indent or level descriptor is required in the table. Does anyone have a good data model for that? ============ Warner Losh, "Hidden Early History of Unix”, Fosdem 2020 -> "Standard History of Unix, in 3 slides” graphviz, coloured names, landscape format [small] “Simplified family tree” 4th Edition Family Tree 6th Edition Family Tree 7th Edition Family Tree Clem Cole, UNIX, Linux and BSD, USENIX 2009, reexamining "A Short UNIX History”, 2000 talk -> "A UNIX Family History 1st 25 Yrs” [69-93] graphviz ?, landscape, coloured, triangle symbols, thin lines & arrows -> Simplified Linux Family Tree, circa ’09 graphviz ?, landscape, coloured, blocks + text, short thick lines & arrows ============ TUHS, The Unix Tree No diagrams, tarball with all content <https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl> Éric Lévénez’s, "UNIX History” landscape format [very wide], lines & arrows, hand drawn, no source <https://www.levenez.com/unix/> David du Colombier, Unix Diagram portrait format, graphviz, source <http://www.unix-diagram.org> Linux Timeline, Fabio Loli et al landscape format, gnuclad, source (CSV + links to <https://distroware.gitlab.io/>) uses ‘curved’ lines, can be changed <https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline> Images: SVG, PNG <https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline/releases/tag/v21.10> Grokline, UNIX TIMELINE, 2004-2009 [dead site] Lists by Date, Vendor, Product detail pages not archived <https://web.archive.org/web/20091217070631/http://www.grokline.net/time_ind…> ============ -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

8 months, 1 week

The MGR window system and the Macintosh

by John Floren

Today I came across an article about the MGR window system for Unix: https://hack.org/mc/mgr/ One thing that interested me was a note that some versions worked on the Macintosh: > The window system ran on many different hardware platforms, at least > these: Sun 3/xx workstations running SunOS, which was the the original > development platform, Sun SPARCstations (SunOS and then ported by me to > Solaris), Intel x86 based PCs (Coherent, Minix, FreeBSD or Linux), > Atari ST (under MiNT), AT&T UnixPC (SysV) and the Macintosh. As the owner of a Macintosh Plus, I think it would be a very interesting thing to experiment with, but I haven't had much luck finding any more information about it. Does anyone know more about MGR, particularly on the Mac? That page has the source for MGR 0.69, but there's no mention of the Macintosh in it (aside from comments about how it was supported on older versions...) John

8 months, 1 week

Re: "9 skills our grandkids won't have" - Is this a TUHS topic?

by Matthias Bruestle

I know something! On Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 04:05:30PM +0300, Ori Idan wrote: > > o why CTRL/S and CTRL/Q are used for flow control in a shell command > > line session > > > Also would be happy to know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_flow_control But I don't know the answer to Ctrl-D. :( And also the bus error and maybe the segmentation fault if it hasn't to do with a segment register. Matthias -- When You Find Out Your Normal Daily Lifestyle Is Called Quarantine

8 months, 2 weeks

Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?

by Douglas McIlroy

> I heard that the IBM 709 > series had 36 bit words because Arthur Samuel, > then at IBM, needed 32 bits to identify the playable squares on a > checkerboard, plus some bits for color and kinged To be precise, Samuel's checkers program was written for the 701, which originated the architecture that the 709 inherited. Note that IBM punched cards had 72 data columns plus 8 columns typically dedicated to sequence numbers. 700-series machines supported binary IO encoded two words per row, 12 rows per card--a perfect fit to established technology. (I do not know whether the fit was deliberate or accidental.) As to where the byte came from, it was christened for the IBM Stretch, aka 7020. The machine was bit-addressed and the width of a byte was variable. Multidimensional arrays of packed bytes could be streamed at blinding speeds. Eight bits, which synced well with the 7020's 64-bit words, was standardized in the 360 series. The term "byte" was not used in connection with 700-series machines. Doug

8 months, 2 weeks

Extracting files from various old dump/restore tapes

by Lars Brinkhoff

Hello, I have on my hands many images of tapes that seems to have been written by various implementaions of dump. I see the magic numbers 60011 and 60012 in little and big endian at offsets 18 (16-bit version?) and 24 (32-bit version?). I don't know the dating of the tapes, but around 1980 would be a reasonable guess. Are there some easy to use (ready to run on a modern Unix) tools to extract files from such tape files? I'm not looking to restore a file system on disk, just extract the files.

8 months, 2 weeks

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TUHS September 2022