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5835 discussions

Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

by Douglas McIlroy

> In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9. Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to have met the same fate. Doug

47 minutes

Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> segaloco wrote: > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that > have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even > just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes > (games with networking notwithstanding)? The machine of the DSSR/RTS group at MIT-LCS, Steve Ward's group (an -11/70 running roughly PWB1) had an implementation of a form of Perquackey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perquackey that was a multi-player game; I'm pretty sure there was a process per player, and they communicated, I'm pretty sure, through pipes, not files - there was certainly no IPC in that system. IIIRC, the way it worked was that there was a parent process, and it spawned a child process for each terminal that was playing, and the children could all communicate through pipes. (They had to communicate because in that version, all the players shared a single set of dice, and once one person had played a word, the other players couldn't play that word. So speed was important in playing; people got really addicted to it.) Alas, although their machine was very similar to CSR's (although ours was an -11/45 with an Able ENABLE and a lot of memory, making it a lot more like a /70), and we shared most code between the machines, and I have a full dump of the CSR machine, we apparently didn't have any of the games on the CSR machine, so I can't look at the source to confirm exactly how it worked. Noel

7 hours, 33 minutes

Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

by Will Senn

All, I just saw this over on dragonflydigest.com: https://0j2zj3i75g.unbox.ifarchive.org/0j2zj3i75g/Article.html It's an article from 2007 about the history and genesis of the Colossal Cave Adventure game - replete with lots of pics. What I found fascinating was that the game is based on the author's actual cave explorations vis a vis the real Colossal Cave. Gives you a whole new appreciation for the game. My question is do y'all know of any interesting backstories about games that were developed and or gained traction on unix? I like some of the early stuff (wumpus, in particular), but know nothing of origins. Or, was it all just mindless entertainment designed to wile away the time? Spacewar, I know a bit about, but not the story, if there is one... Maybe, somebody needed to develop a new program to simulate the use of fuel in rockets against gravity and... so... lunar lander was born? I dunno, as somebody who grew up playing text games, I'd like to think there was more behind the fun that mindless entertainment... So, how about it, was your officemate at bell labs tooling away nights writing a game that had the whole office addicted to playing it, while little did they know the characters were characterizations of his annoying neighbors? If you don't mind, if you take the thread off into the distance and away from unix game origins, please rename the thread quickly :). Thanks, Will

11 hours, 53 minutes

yet another C discussion (YACD) and: Rust is not C++

by ron minnich

I did not want to disrupt the FD 2 discussion, but I could not really let this comment go unanswered: "Smells like C++ to me. Rust in essence is a re-implementation of C++ not C. It tries to pack as much features as it possibly can. " It's hard for me to see how you can say this if you have done any work in Rust and C++. But, short form: Rust is not C++. Full stop. I did not feel that comment should go unanswered, lest people believe it.

15 hours, 42 minutes

Re: yet another C discussion (YACD)

by Warren Toomey

On Wed, Feb 01, 2023 at 01:50:05AM +0000, segaloco via COFF wrote: > COFF'd Thanks Matt. Yes please, C vs. Rust should mv to the COFF list. Cheers, Warren

1 day, 5 hours

Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

by Paul Ruizendaal

Herewith some interesting (somewhat) contemporary papers on early windowing systems: 1. There was a conference in the UK early in 1985 discussing the state of window systems on Unix. Much interesting discussion and two talks by James Gosling, one about NeWS (then still called SunDew), and one about what seems to be SunWindows. It would seem then that these were developed almost in parallel. http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/contents.htm 2. Then there is a 1986 paper by James Gettys, discussing the 18 month journey towards X10. In particular it focuses on the constraints that Unix set on the design of the X system. https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/acrobat/860201-b.pdf 3. Next is the 1989 NeWS book that has a nice overview and history of windowing systems in its chapter 3: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/sun/NeWS/The_NeWS_Book_1989.pdf Both the UK conference and the NeWS book mention a Unix kernel-based windowing system done at MIT in 1981 or 1982, “NU" or “NUnix”, by Jack Test. That one had not been mentioned before here and may have been the first graphical windowing work on Unix, preceding the Blit. Who remembers this one? 4. Finally, an undated paper by Stephen Uhler discussing the design of MGR is here: https://sau.homeip.net/papers/arch.pdf I’ve not included Rob Pike’s papers, as I assume they are well known on this list. Some of the above papers may be worthy of stable archiving.

1 day, 8 hours

FD 2

by ron minnich

I am trying to remember when fd 2 (aka stderr) became a thing. I have a vague memory that it was post-v6 but that may be way off.

1 day, 10 hours

Earliest UNIX Workstations?

by Joseph Holsten

1 day, 14 hours

Unix v6 chess source code?

by Mattis Lind

Hello! I saw someone playing chess on their pdp-11 and thought it could be an interesting project to run on my pdp-11. At this point the RK05s are not yet running so booting unix v6 is not possible. I then thought that if the source code could be found it might be possible to get it to run standalone with some modifications. After some googling I found the archive https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UNSW/7/record0.tar.gz which contained a chess.lib file. It appeared that this archive contained source code for some kind of chess program. I have been told that it isn't the chess written by Ken Thompson so the question is who wrote it? There are not many comments in the code. Could be interesting to know more about this chess implementation. Just looking through the source files and the mk file show that it is missing a set of files. The mk file references a set of "b"-prefixed assembly files, bgen.s, bmove.s, bheur.s and bplay.s which are present in the archive. But it also references a set of files with "w"-prefix, wgen.s, wmove.s, wheur.s and wplay.s which are missing. I also recognise that there is an include file, "old.h" that is included from all c-modules that most likely is present in the overload.lib which seems to be an overlay loader. Anyone that has an idea how this thing was built once upon a time? /Mattis

1 day, 21 hours

Job Control and other terminal fun

by Ron Natalie

A lot of this dates back from the old “tty” days (or at least crt terminals that were still alphanumeric). Even the concept of putting a job in the background with & is really a feature of trying to multiplex multiple tasks on the same dumb terminal. This is indeed less important with windowing things like the DMDs or modern windowing workstatiosn when you can just get another window. The Berkeley job control was an interesting hack. For us at BRL the problem was I absolutely detested the C shell syntax. The Korn shell hadn’t escaped from AT&T yet, so, I spent time figuring out how that really worked in the C shell (not really well documented), mostly by inspection, and then reimplemented it in the Bourne Shell (we were using the System V source code version for that). I still couldn’t get traction at BRL for using the Bourne shell because by that time, tcsh had come out with command line editing. So back to the shell sources I went. By this time, 5R2 had come out so I grabbed the shell source form that. I was very delighted to find that the macros that made C look sorta like Algol had been unwound and the thing was back to straight C. I reworked emacs-ish command line editing into the shell. Subsequently, I had a nice conversation with David Korn at USENIX, being probably at that point the two most familiar with Bourne shell job control internals. I also sat down with the guys writing either bash or the pdksh (can’t remember which) and explained all how this work. As a result my name ended up in the Linux manpages which was pretty much all I found for a while when I googled myself. Years later, I had left the BRL, spent three years as a Rutgers administrator and was working for a small startup in Virginia. There was a MIPS workstation there. I was slogging along using ed (my employees always were amazed that if there was no emacs on the system, I just used ed, having never learned vi). Not thinking about it, I attempted to retrieve a backgrounded job by typing “fg.” To my surprise the shell printed “Job control not enabled.” Hmm, I say. That sounds like my error message. “set -J” I type. “Job control enabled.” Hey! This is my shell. Turns out Doug Gwyn put my mods into his “System V on BSD” distribution tape and it had made its way into the Mach code base and so every Mach-derived system ended up with it. Certainly, I found it convenient. There have been other schemes other than job control to multiplex terminals. IBM in the AIX that ran on the 370/PS2/i860 had a device called the High Function Terminal that allowed you to swap screens on the console. When we implemented the i860 (which was an add in card for the micro channel), we called our console the Low Function Terminal. Then after spending some time on MIT’s ITS and TOPS20, I got intrigued by the fact on those systems you could have a “shell” that persisted across logins and could be detached and reattached on another device at another time. I set about making such an implementation. Not particularly efficient, it essentially grabbed one of the BSD ptys and spawned the shell there and then a small alternative login shell forwarded the real tty to that. You could then detach it leaving the shell running on the PTY and reattach it elsewhere. Much like ITS, on. login it reminded you that you had a detached shell running and offered to reattach it rather than spawning a new one (complete with the ITS-ish: space for yes, rubout for no). It never really caught on. Oh well, pardon my ramblings. -Ron

1 day, 22 hours

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