TUHS July 2025

tuhs@tuhs.org

54 participants
19 discussions

primary sources for the 1966 Multics ASCII cutover as the first "Flag Day"?

by Royce Williams

I see the Wikipedia "Flag day (computing)" [1] article references two semi-different ESR sources [2,3] to support the claim: > This systems terminology originates from a major change in the Multics operating system's definition of ASCII, which was scheduled for the United States holiday, Flag Day, on June 14, 1966. I don't doubt the validity, but I'm looking for other "citation worthy" sources that supplement this claim --- ideally that predate the ESR ones, so that they are unambiguously independent. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_(computing) 2. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/flag-day.html 3. *The New Hacker's Dictionary* <https://books.google.com/books?id=g80P_4v4QbIC&pg=PA192>pp. 192– -- Royce Williams Tech Solvency

1 week

Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

by segaloco

As someone who has been quite attentive to the documentation situation with UNIX, I've managed to build out a pretty appreciable library of historic works. Among my most treasured bits are my 3B20S Release 4.1 manual and Bell Labs copies of the Lions's Commentary. What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions? - Matt G.

1 week

Re: Sam and Late BTL Work (was End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference))

by segaloco

On Thursday, July 17th, 2025 at 10:44 PM, Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Sam had it, acme took it (and much else) from Sam. > > -rob > > > On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 3:22 PM Noel Hunt <noel.hunt(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > But that is far less useful than having two windows into the same > > > file where the mods to each window go to the same file. Think > > > looking at code that has the structs at the top of the file and you > > > need to wack a struck and wack the code that uses that struct. > > > Quite pleasant. > > > > > > You will find that this is exactly what 'Zerox' in acme does. Sam is indeed nice but I have not quite gotten to the point of using it daily. For my hobby projects I rarely launch an X session, opting to simply work from the framebuffer console instead. I don't have a graphical editor of choice these days though so Sam is certainly on the docket whenever I start using a windowing environment heavily outside of web browsing again. End of the day though I like being able to do the bulk of what I do sitting at any given computer from the console. I have a VT100 that I've finally restored to perfect health I plan on setting up in my bedroom as a true terminal (routed through my Dataphone modems down to my office machine). To hopefully inspire some interesting discussion, was Sam ever formally supported by AT&T as an editor in System V, either OpenLook or X environments? Or did it never escape Plan 9 as far as AT&T's commercial UNIX offerings go? In a more general sense I find the later genetic flow from BTL et. al. to USL intriguing since the Labs were already onto things so far ahead of what System V was in the commercial scene. - Matt G.

1 week, 1 day

Re: End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference)

by norman＠oclsc.org

Cameron_M��e��l_Tyre_via_TUHS: I got obsessed with getting ed running on every device I have including my phones and then the big rabbit hole off that first one was learning how to use it properly and to the fullest of its abilities. == Of course. ed(1) is the standard editor. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 week, 3 days

troff, Gremlin terminals, and the grn preprocessor

by G. Branden Robinson

Hi folks, I'm trying to clear up a historical matter. In reviewing groff's "LICENSES" file, I find myself stuck on the following paragraph. >grn, written by Barry Roitblat <barry(a)rentonww.com> and David >Slattengren <slatteng(a)Xinet.COM>, was part of the Berkeley >troff distribution. The files contain no AT&T code >and are in the public domain. Historically, the original package could >be found at <http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/misc/grn.tar.Z>. I'm not sure about that reference to "Berkeley troff". I already deleted the modifier "device-independent" from that sentence because I've never seen even a whisper of evidence that the CSRG ever distributed Kernighan's device-independent troff; that was locked up behind AT&T's revenue-seeking aims. But also, I can't find evidence that "grn" was distributed by Berkeley at all. At Warren's "Unix Tree",[1] I see what looks superficially like evidence of support for Gremlin terminals in "libplot", but that's not the same thing. However there is evidence of support for grn, the troff preprocessor, in other unquestionable BSD artifacts, like Eric Allman's "me" package. Can someone clear up my misconceptions or suggest non-misleading alternative wording? Was the grn preprocessor one of these "USENIX tape" things, like nethack and jove? Regards, Branden [1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl

1 week, 6 days

Toronto's Numerical Turing compiler

by Adam Sampson

Hi TUHS, A poster on the Stardot Acorn forum asked whether the Numerical Turing compiler had survived. I figure this is probably the best place to ask. Numerical Turing was a mid-80s variant of the University of Toronto's Turing programme language that provided arbitrary-precision decimal float arithmetic, developed by Tom Hull and others. It's described in this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1057947.1057949 It ran on Toronto's ai VAX under 4.2BSD. The paper mentions the compiler ntc and its man page, the demo program ntdemo.x, and the standard include directory /usr/include/nt. There are a few references to it in the utzoo Usenet archive but it looks like it was distributed upon request. Has anybody seen a surviving copy? Thanks, -- Adam Sampson <ats(a)offog.org> <http://offog.org/>

2 weeks

Other implementations of Alef?

by Skip Tavakkolian

In the 2nd Edition Plan 9, in the Alef Language Reference Manual by Phil Winterbottom, the title of section 7 is "The Plan 9 Implementation". Were there other implementations?

2 weeks

Old UNIX newsletters?

by Tom Lyon

Anyone sitting on piles of old UNIX newsletters? I find they make for fascinating reading. I haven't found any online archives. If you have a pile, I can scan them. I'm going to scan my 3 copies of commUNIXations, the /usr/group newsletter, and 4 copies of "UNIQUE - Your independent UNIX and C Advisor" - all from 1983/4. Warren can hopefully find a home for these.

3 weeks, 1 day

xview and open motif files

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. I found the following files recently: $ ls -l total 8748 -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 5661471 Oct 1 2007 openmotif-2.3.0.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 4888 Jan 18 1999 xvfc.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 3281277 Jan 18 1999 xview3.2.tar.gz They can be retrieved under https://www.skeeve.com/X11/. I have sent them to Warren, who currently has them in his hidden archive. I also have a copy of the OpenLook CDROM, but I notice it's available from GitHub: https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM. Enjoy, Arnold

3 weeks, 3 days

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TUHS July 2025