- TUHS - www.tuhs.org

by Douglas McIlroy

Apropos of the virtue of negative subscripts. > by pointing into the middle of another data structure you've created a data aliasing situation Not if all references are relative to the offset pointer. The following example is silly, but I recently used exactly this trick to simplify calculations on a first-quadrant (x,y) grid by supplying "out-of-bounds" zeroes at (x,-2), (x,-1) and (-1,y). It was much cleaner to access the zeroes like ordinary elements than to provide special code to handle the boundary conditions. /* Fill an N-element array with Fibonacci numbers, f(i), where 0<=i<N. The recursion accesses a zero "out of bounds" at i=-1 */ const int N = 100; int base[N+1]; #define fib(i) base[(i)+1] void fill() { int i; fib(0) = 1; for(i=1; i<N; i++) fib(i) = fib(i-2) + fib(i-1); } Doug

9 months, 2 weeks

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Maximum Array Sizes in 16 bit C

by Henry Bent

Hello all, I know that this isn't strictly a "UNIX history" question, but as I am working with historic UNIX and this list contains a great number of people who were instrumental in its development, I figured it would be appropriate to ask here. If there's a better place for these sorts of questions, please let me know. I'm trying to figure out how the array size limits are set in the 2.11BSD pcc compiler. I've looked through quite a bit of documentation but I don't see anything that describes this. In theory on a 16 bit system I would think that the maximum array size would be 64K, but the actual limit that I found through trial and error is (2^15)-1. Declaring an array that is too large results in an error of "Constant required", which is being produced by c01.c in conexp(). https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/src/lib/ccom/c01.c I did quite a bit of searching through the source but I was not able to determine where this limit is being set. This is where my usual tools fall apart. Normally since I have the source I would compile the program I want with debugging turned on, and then do a backtrace so that I could see how we got to conexp(). But as far as I can tell I can't get a backtrace, since there is no option for debugging information in pcc; adb can only tell me where a process stopped. I would appreciate any enlightenment or pointers to other documentation. Thanks in advance! -Henry

9 months, 3 weeks

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Working at Bell Labs: photos by Larry Luckham, 1967

by George Michaelson

Forgive me if these predate the glory days, found them interesting https://retronaut.com/retronaut-capsules/1967-life-at-bell-labs

9 months, 3 weeks

7
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Re: On computerese

by norman＠oclsc.org

Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM): Oh come on Rob, you should know that for anyone over the age of 50, the moment you see 'dd' your brain automatically switches to JCL mode. === Rob doubtless got IBM out of his system back in the late 1970s, when I think he was one of the authors of a shell that brought the TSO experience to Unix. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

9 months, 3 weeks

4
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Re: V9 Bits (was On computerese)

by segaloco

On Monday, September 16th, 2024 at 6:28 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: > ... > I also have v9 on a Sun in TME > ... > > -Henry > V9 you say...does your setup happen to have the on-line manpages by any chance? I don't think a surviving copy is in the TUHS archive. V9 is a tad bit fragmentary in the archive at present from what I can tell, it may be worth seeing if anything you have fills in blanks. - Matt G.

9 months, 3 weeks

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Re: On computerese

by norman＠oclsc.org

Rob Pike: I don't remember whether late Research Unix [dd] had -if, but Plan 9 certainly did. === I don't have a live 10/e system at the moment, but I have the 10/e source tree handy. Classic parody-IBM syntax only. Aside: I'm curious: does anyone else have 8/e, 9/e, or 10/e running these days? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

9 months, 3 weeks

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Re: On computerese

by Douglas McIlroy

The florid syntax of IBM's DD was rivaled by that of GE's file utility. I always wondered whether it was named FUTIL unwarily or with tongue in cheek. Doug

9 months, 3 weeks

2
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Re: On computerese

by John Dow

> On 15 Sep 2024, at 20:21, Rik Farrow <rik(a)rikfarrow.com> wrote: > > Was the brevity typical of Unix command names a function of the tiny disk and memory available? Or more a function of having a Teletype 33 for input? Of course, it could simply be that 'cat' is more convenient than 'catenate'... Hangover from assembly mnemonics, perhaps. J — John Dow <jmd(a)nelefa.org> Written by a human.

9 months, 3 weeks

2
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Re: Working at Bell Labs: photos by Larry Luckham, 1967

by Douglas McIlroy

> https://retronaut.com/retronaut-capsules/1967-life-at-bell-labs Luckham's introductory remark that all the programmers were men contrasts with the situation 10 years before, when most of the programmers were women. Women got shoved aside when it became apparent that programming was an honorable and challenging engineering profession, not mere routine translation of conceptual designd into machine language. It took almost 10 more years for the Labs to recognize that women programmers were engineers, too. Yet de jure recognition of women programmers has not yet become de facto. Here at Dartmouth, as at many schools, women form a far smaller fraction of computer science than they do of the engineering school. In engineering the proportion of women reflects that in the general population.

9 months, 3 weeks

2
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Edison Design Group C Front End

by Henry Bent

Hi all, I was working with my IRIX 4 machine recently and noticed a mysterious file - /usr/lib/ecfe. It turns out that this is the Edison Design Group C (not C++) Front End, included almost certainly by accident with the last release of the Developer Toolkit for IRIX 4. No other piece of the compiler toolchain references the EDG product in any way and there is no documentation for it whatsoever. The research that I did seems to indicate that this is a source to source translator, akin to the contemporary Kuck & Associates product - is that correct? I also found a reference to EDG's tool being used in the Apogee C compiler. I have a copy of Apogee C for SunOS and it does appear that "cfe" is the same EDG product. Unfortunately there is no documentation specific to the C front end, and I don't have a license for Apogee C so I can't run the compiler to see how it's calling cfe. Just running a C file "blah.c" through the IRIX front end with no switches results in a transformed file "blah.int.c". Unfortunately running anything even moderately complex through the front end results in code that either doesn't compile or doesn't run, so I feel that I must be missing some flags or basic options. Does anyone have any information about SGI's use of this software, or any documentation/information in general about the EDG product? My usual sources came up empty. -Henry

9 months, 3 weeks

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Re: On computerese

by Douglas McIlroy

>> I've despaired over the term ever since it wormed its way into >> computer folks' vocabulary. How does a "use case" differ from a "use"? > > Clarity as to whether one is employing a noun or a verb. Both "use" and > "case" can be either (he said, casing the joint for tomorrow's heist), > but juxtaposing them thus unambiguously makes a noun phrase. Usually context makes the nominal use of "use" clear : "many uses", "the use", "some uses". I'm not persuaded that "use case" disambiguates any more reliably. How do supermarkets display their wares? For some use cases they use cases. Metacomment. While the "use" in "nominal use" above must be a noun, "nominal" isn't compelled to have the intended meaning of "being a noun". It's a game of whac-a-mot. Kill one ambiguity and spawn another. Doug

9 months, 3 weeks

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Re: History tract during the next IWMP9 in Paris next May

by Douglas McIlroy

Two remarks about Plan 9, one about an antecedent and the other about the limits of its influence. "Communication files" in the Dartmouth Time Sharing System have been cited as a predecesssor of Unix pipes, although we at Bell Labs were unaware of the DTSS feature when pipes were first implemented. In fact, communication files more directly foreshadow Plan 9 than they do Unix. Unlike Unix processes, which need not be aware that they are talking to pipes, the process at one end of a communication file, designated as "master", must be aware that it is a communication file. The master end controls the semantics of reads, writes and seeks(!) issued at the other end. Because of this asymmetry, a communication file cannnot serve as a pipe between pairs of unprepared processes. A pipe could be simulated in DTSS by a master process that relays flow between communications files connected to arbitrary end processes, but that seems never to have been done. Communication files are a closer antecedent to Plan 9. A master process's controls correspond to the part of Plan 9's foundational 9P protocol that handles open files. Though I don't think there's an actual ancestral connection, this likeness strengthens DTSS's claim to fame and extends their lead to nearly a quarter century. Linux has adopted surface features of Plan 9 like union directories, append-only files and system data access via file interfaces. Meanwhile Plan 9's revolutionary realization of what Vic Vyssotsky called distributable computing has not caught on. In distributable computing, the physical location of processes does not affect their logical interaction. In today's distributed computing, though, there is a world of difference between how processes interact remotely and locally. When will the crevasse between the possible and the normal be bridged? Doug Having recently read about the playful literary consortium, Oulipo, I am reminded of their term for little-known antecedents of their revolutionary works: "anticipatory plagiarism".

9 months, 4 weeks

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Markdown Unix precursor

by Lynn Grant

Long before there was Markdown, there was a similar Unix tool. I remember reading about it before the Internet was popular, probably mid-to-late 1980s. I may have read about it in “Communications of the ACM”. It was designed to let secretaries compose memos, without learning the dot commands of troff or nroff. If you indented a space or two, it started a new paragraph. If you indented several spaces, it centered the line; very similar to Markdown in concept. It generated a file that could be fed into troff. I was thinking it might have been part of the System V Documentors Workbench, but I read through the doc for it and could not find anything like that. Does anyone remember this? Thanks!

9 months, 4 weeks

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Fwd: History tract during the next IWMP9 in Paris next May

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, Edouard asked me to pass this e-mail on to both TUHS and COFF lists. Cheers, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Edouard Klein <edouardklein(a)gmail.com> ----- Subject: History tract during the next IWMP9 in Paris next May Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 22:46:30 +0200 (1 week, 4 days, 19 hours ago) Dear Unix history enthusiasts, The 11th International Workshop on Plan 9 will be held in Paris on May 22-24 2025. One of the focus area this year will be Plan 9's history and its influence on later computer science and industry trends. The history team at the CNAM (where the conference will be held) has agreed to help us prepare for the event and stands ready to record oral histories, or any other format that would make the participants happy. They had organized in 2017 a "colloque" at which Clem spoke (and I listened somewhere in the audience) on UNIX: https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-europe-ent… I will keep the list posted as our efforts pan out, but I thought I'd get the word out as soon as possible. I you have historical resources on Plan 9 or Inferno, or are reminded of any interesting tidbits, you can also share them here, as this list is already recognized by historians as a legitimate source. The program committee members, many (if not all) of whom roam this very list, would welcome any proposal or contributions in this area :) The CfP is at: http://iwp9.org/ Looking forward to read what you care to share, or to seeing you in person in Paris, Cheers, Edouard. ----- End forwarded message -----

9 months, 4 weeks

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Re: BSD/OS

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Kevin Bowling > https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 and the parent page on seem to suggest > it originated off Net/2 directly. I wouldn't be putting too much weight on what that page says; most of the *BSD pages were done by people I don't know well, and who might have gotten details wrong I myself later just tried to quickly, without much effort, work out roughly what the relationship was between those *BSD systems, based on what other people had written. E.g the now-'BSD/OS' page was originally at '386/BSD', and I seem to have worked out that it's correct name was BSD/OS and moved it there. The BSD/386 page is probably roughly correct, since it contains a scan of a contemporary ad for it. (So confusing that '386BSD' is something different from 'BSD/386'. Was there ever actually a '386/BSD'?) Someone who knows the early history of all the *BSD systems (as in, you lived through all that) is welcome, nay invited, to fix any errors therein. Noel

10 months

16
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Bell Laboratories COBOL Syntax Checker?

by segaloco

So I was flipping through a System V software catalog from Fall 1984 and among the many AT&T Bell Laboratories items is the "COBOL Syntax Checker". From the text: ---QUOTE--- The COBOL Syntax Checker allows programmers to edit and check the syntax of COBOL programs before they are transmitted to mainframes for compilation and execution. The software increases the chances of a 'clean' compilation and execution and reduces the chance of a program being rejected due to syntax and simple semantic errors. As a result, expensive mainframe CPU time is reduced. The COBOL Syntax Checker processes a COBOL source program and produces three listings: 1. a diagnostic listing, 2. a cross-reference listing, 3. a source listing. ---END QUOTE--- There are two distributions listed, a C binary distribution for SVR2 for the 3B20 for $2000 and a C source distribution for SVR2 for the VAX 11/780 for $7500, both listed as released 2Q84. Some quick Googling only offers up additional catalog and magazine mentions. To me this sounds like a linter with some extra bits. Does anyone have any recollections of this software or know if there's much likelihood of the software itself or any documentation surviving? Thanks for any insights! - Matt G.

10 months

4
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HP-UX

by Kevin Bowling

Larry, I'll bite. Tell us about HP-UX :) My observations.. Up til 9.x it was a BSD-alike. In 10 and especially 11 it became much more SysV-alike. VUE desktop was nice for the time, CDE took on its visual style. 11.x becomes bloated like later Solaris releases. Technology transfer is hard. There are some nice internals docs: 6: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/9000_hpux/training/SE390_Series_300_HP-UX_Inte… 9: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/9000_hpux/training/SE390_Series_300_HP-UX_Inte… 11i: https://www.filibeto.org/unix/hp-ux/lib/kernel/inside-hp-ux-os.pdf 11i: ISBN 0130328618 hp-ux 11i internals book (the above doc is a lot more in depth) I wonder if we should collect resources like this on a wiki page or something? I really like this inside the factory stuff. Regards, Kevin

10 months

13
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Re: BSD/OS

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Noel Chiappa > Was there ever actually a '386/BSD'? I decided (for not particular reason) to take a quick read through Marshall Kirk McKusick's "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable": https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.html and he refers to Jolitz's system as "386/BSD" (apparently incorrectly). (So there's a lesson there; even people who '_were_ there' can occasionally get it wrong - something that professional historians are well aware of. I have a funny story of my learning that lesson, here: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/nontech/tmlotus.html in a totally different technical area.) I have yet to see a _scan_ of contemporary documentation (I believe nothing that isn't a contemporary _physical artifact_) that confirms it was actually named "386BSD", but that does seem to be the name as given in the Dr. Dobbs series on it. That series confirms that it was based directly on the 'Net/2' BSD release (although 'diff's on the sources are probably the most reliable proof). Noel

10 months

4
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BSD/OS

by Kevin Bowling

I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox. Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial FreeBSD variant. But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct strain of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD. There seems to be scant information about it online. Does anyone know if its story is told somewhere? Regards, Kevin

10 months

6
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the Y window system

by Rodrigo G. López

hello everyone, i recently came across a little window manager, written in Alef, that i've had in my /tmp folder for the last five years. it's called Y (probably as a response to X), and i grabbed it from 9gridchan's public griddisk; run by the late mycroftiv until 2022. i think it must've been an experimental project by Pike, Rosenthal or Tom Duff, but i can't find any documentation about it anywhere. i'd love to know if any of you remembers this, and if so, would you share the story behind it? i uploaded the source code here: http://antares-labs.eu/isometric/Y.tgz and it runs on 2nd ed plan 9 without issue (see the attached screenshot.) cheers! -rodri

10 months, 1 week

4
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Re: HP-UX

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Kevin Bowling > I wonder if we should collect resources like this on a wiki page or > something? My habit on the CHWiki is to have the articles on subjects where there is a lot of documentation online is to have the articles mostly be 'executive summeries', and corral the links to the stuff online to a section at the end, so that people who want to see the gory details can look at the original documentation. See, for example: https://gunkies.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7 That works well, even for material that later goes 404, because with the URL, one can generally find it later in the Internet Archive (things like Google won't find things that are only there). Don't ask me to add them, though; I still haven't found time to add the links to the BSD/OS stuff you found! Noel

10 months, 1 week

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Re: the Y window system

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rodrigo Lopez >> Google tells me: https://www.y-windows.org/ > from .. the code, that one has nothing to do with this. It actually makes sense that there are two separate ones called 'Y'. The X Window System was a descendant of the W window system, so if someone wanted to do another one, 'Y' was the obvious namee to pick. All it needs now is two separate people who decide they want to do a window system... voila! Noel

10 months, 1 week

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Re: the Y window system

by Bakul Shah

On Aug 31, 2024, at 11:16 AM, Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna(a)xs4all.nl> wrote: > >> On 31 Aug 2024, at 20:09, Angel M Alganza <ama(a)ugr.es> wrote: >> >> On 2024-08-31 11:59, Rodrigo G. López wrote: >> >>> i'd love to know if any of you remembers this, and if so, would you share the story behind it? > > Google tells me: https://www.y-windows.org/ This is likely a different Y window sys than what Rodrigo found, which is written in Alef and runs on 2nd ed plan9. Rodrigo may want to trawl through 9fans mailing list/usenet group archives or ask there.

10 months, 1 week

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Berkeley CSRG Building

by Pete Wright

Hey there folks, I'm going to find myself in Berkeley for the day this week and was curious if the buildings where the CSRG group worked are still standing? Thought it would be a fun place to visit after hacking on BSD for all these years. Cheers, -pete -- Pete Wright pete(a)nomadlogic.org

10 months, 3 weeks

16
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Re: TUHS Digest, Vol 105, Issue 7

by Paul McJones

> On Mon, 12 Aug 2024 01:16:41 -0700,"Erik E. Fair" <fair-tuhs(a)netbsd.org <mailto:fair-tuhs@netbsd.org>> wrote: > > The main campus computer center was in the basement, but they charged by the CPU/second, so only classes used those systems - in my day (1980-1983), the computer center had a CDC 6400 and six or seven DEC PDP-11/70s. The CDC 6400 finally went away in September 1982: September 3rd, 1982 Memo to: Computing Affairs Staff From: M.Stuart Lynn, Director Subject: CDC 6400 Departure The CDC 6400 is no more. ... https://caltss.computerhistory.org/archive/820903-cdc-6400-departure-msl.pdf

10 months, 3 weeks

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Re: Berkeley CSRG Building

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy {Moving this to COFF, as it's not UNIX-related. I'll have another reply there as well, about the social media point.} > The amazing thing, to me, is I was a CS student in very early 1980's > and I had no idea of the history behind the arpanet. I don't think that was that uncommon; at MIT (slightly earlier, I think - -'74-'77 for me) the undergrad's weren't learning anything about networking there either, then. I think the reason is that there wasn't much to teach - in part because we did not then know much about networking, and in part because it was not yet crystal clear how important it would become (more below on that). There was research going on in the area, but even at MIT one doesn't teach (or didn't then; I don't know about now) on-going research subjects to undergrads. MIT _did_ have, even then, a formal UROP ('undergrad research opportunities') program, which allowed undergrads to be part of research groups - a sheer genius idea - which in some fast-moving fields, like CS, was an inestimable benefit to more forward undergrads in those fields. I joined the CSR group at LCS in '77 because I had some operating system ideas I wanted to work on; I had no idea at that point that they were doing anything with networks. They took me on as the result of the sheerest chance; they had just gotten some money from DARPA to build a LAN, and the interface was going to be built for a UNIBUS PDP-11, and they needed diagnostics, etc written; and they were all Multicians. I, by chance, knew PDP-11 assembler - which none of them did - the MIT CS introductory course at that point taught it. So the deal was that I'd help them with that, and I could use the machine to explore my OS ideas in return. Which never really happened; it fairly became clear to me that data networking was going to have an enormous impact on the world, and at that point it was also technically interesting, so I quickly got sucked into that stuff. (I actually have a written document hiding in a file drawer somewhere from 1978 or so, which makes it plain that that I'm not suffering 20-20 hindsight here, in talking about foreseeing the impact; I should dig it up.) The future impact actually wasn't hard to foresee: looking at what printed books had done to the world, and then telgraphs/telephones, and what computers had already started to do at that point, it was clear that combining them all was going to have an incredible impact (and we're still adapting to it). Learning about networking at the time was tricky. The ARPANET - well, NCP and below - was pretty well documented in a couple of AFIPS papers (linked to at the bottom here: https://gunkies.org/wiki/ARPANET which I have a very vague memory I photocopied at the time out of the bound AFIPS proceedings in the LCS library). The applications were only documented in the RFC's. (Speaking of which, at that level, the difference between the ARPANET and the Internet was not very significant - it was only the internals, invisible to the people who did 'application' protocols, that were completely different. HTTP would probably run just fine on top of NCP, for instance.) Anything past that, the start of the internet work, that, I picked up by i) direct osmosis from other people in CSR who were starting to think about networks - principally Dave Clark and Dave Reed - and then ii) from documents prepared as part of the TCP/IP effort, which were distributed electronically. Which is an interesting point; the ARPANET was a key tool in the internet work. The most important aspect was email; non-stop discussion between the widely separated groups who were part of the project. It also made document distribution really easy (which had also been true of the latter stages of the ARPANET project, with the RFC's). And of course it was also a long-haul network that we used to tie the small internets at all the various sites (BBN, SRI, ISI - and eventually MIT) into the larger Internet. I hate to think about trying to do all that work on internets, and the Internet, without the ARPANE there, as a tool. Noel

10 months, 3 weeks

2
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Unix spotted in Mumbai.

by Dan Cross

I thought some may appreciate the linked photo: Unix spotted near Mumbai Central Railway Station, Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India. https://photos.app.goo.gl/acTTsfvYt5suP4wS6 - Dan C.

10 months, 3 weeks

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Re: Unix spotted in Mumbai.

by Bakul Shah

On Aug 13, 2024, at 6:48 AM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > I thought some may appreciate the linked photo: Unix spotted near Mumbai Central Railway Station, Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India. > https://photos.app.goo.gl/acTTsfvYt5suP4wS6 A lot of shells under that Unix umbrella! Coconut water + its jelly like flesh can be quite refreshing on a hot Mumbai day. Did you try any?

10 months, 3 weeks

5
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Re: Berkeley CSRG Building

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Erik E. Fair" > before that, ARPANET was connected NOTE: "ARPANET" is _always_ (**ALWAYS**) used with the definite article ("the"). Don't take my word for it; check out, e.g. A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade https://walden-family.com/bbn/arpanet-completion-report.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA115440.pdf (There are a lot more contemporaneous documents - AFIPS conference papers, etc - if anyone is interested in them.) I was somewhat polite about it _this_ time. Noel

10 months, 4 weeks

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Other POSIX Candidates?

by segaloco

I'm paraphrasing here but I've read in a few places something to the effect that UNIX was "selected" as the basis on which to build a portable operating system standard, which of course we all know as POSIX. However, I got thinking on the implications of that phrasing, and have to ask, was there actually a "selection" made picking UNIX over some other candidate, or was it pretty much established from the outset of pursuing a standard that UNIX was going to get standardized? Another way to put it would be as a chicken and egg, which came first, desire for a portable base system definition that UNIX happened to fit nicely, or the ongoing need for UNIX standardization finding sponsorship by the working groups, IEEE, etc.? Did any other OS contend for this coveted honor? - Matt G.

11 months

15
23
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Debate re optimization between Bill Harrison and Steve Johnson at POPL 8

by Dibyendu Majumdar

Hi I am looking for any write-up or recollection about the debate mentioned here: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~reps/popl00/cfd00.html And also mentioned in an interview with Fran Allen (Coders at Work). Many thanks Regards Dibyendu

11 months

2
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SDF Beget's ICM - Interim Computer Museum

by Clem Cole

Please excuse the wide distribution, but I suspect this will have general interest in all of these communities due to the loss of the LCM+Labs. The good folks from SDF.org are trying to create the Interim Computer Museum: https://icm.museum/join.html As Lars pointed out in an earlier message to COFF there is a 1hr presentation on the plans for the ICM. https://toobnix.org/w/ozjGgBQ28iYsLTNbrczPVo FYI: The yearly (Bootstrap) subscription is $36 They need to money to try to keep some of these systems online and available. The good news is that it looks like many of the assets, such as Miss Piggy, the Multics work, the Toads, and others, from the old LCM are going to be headed to a new home. ᐧ

11 months, 1 week

3
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Interesting history of Bell Labs

by Dan Cross

Steve Bellovin just posted this on Mastodon, I thought it might interest some folks here. It's more about Bell Labs than Unix, but of course Unix, as a product of Bell Labs, is related and is mentioned. - Dan C. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to-recreate-bell

11 months, 1 week

1
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Question regarding Limbo

by Dibyendu Majumdar

Hi, Apologies for the off topic question. I was curious who wrote the Limbo programing language that is part of Inferno. Regards Dibyendu

11 months, 1 week

5
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UNIX Roff Manual

by segaloco

Just sharing a copy of the Roff Manual that I had forgotten I scanned a little while back: https://archive.org/details/roff_manual This appears to be the UNIX complement to the S/360 version of the paper backed up by Doug here: https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/roff71/roff71.pdf From the best I could tell, this predates both 1973's V3 and the 1971 S/360 version of the paper, putting it somewhere prior to 1971. For instance, it is missing the .ar, .hx, .ig, .ix, .ni, .nx, .ro, .ta, and .tc requests found in V3. The .ar and .ro, and .ta requests pop up in the S/360 paper, the rest are in the V3 manpage (prior manpages don't list the request summary). If anyone has some authoritative date information I can update the archive description accordingly. Finally, this very well could be missing the last page, the Page offset, Merge patterns, and Envoi sections of Doug's paper are not reflected here, although at the very least, the .mg request is not in this paper so the Merge patterns section probably wasn't there anyway. - Matt G.

11 months, 3 weeks

6
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Re: UNIX Roff Manual

by Tom Lyon

I had meant to copy TUSH on this/ On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 2:41 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I got excited by your mention of a S/360 version, but Doug's link talks > about the GECOS version (GE/Honeywell hardware). > > Princeton had a S/360 version at about that time, it was a re-write of a > version for the IBM 7094 done by Kernighan after spending a summer at MIT > with CTSS and RUNOFF. I'm very curious whether the Princeton S/360 version > spread to other locations. Found this article in the Daily Princetonian > about the joy and history of ROFF. > https://photos.app.goo.gl/zMWV1GRLZdNBUuP36 > > On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 1:51 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote: > >> Just sharing a copy of the Roff Manual that I had forgotten I scanned a >> little while back: >> >> https://archive.org/details/roff_manual >> >> This appears to be the UNIX complement to the S/360 version of the paper >> backed up by Doug here: >> https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/roff71/roff71.pdf >> >> From the best I could tell, this predates both 1973's V3 and the 1971 >> S/360 version of the paper, putting it somewhere prior to 1971. For >> instance, it is missing the .ar, .hx, .ig, .ix, .ni, .nx, .ro, .ta, and .tc >> requests found in V3. The .ar and .ro, and .ta requests pop up in the >> S/360 paper, the rest are in the V3 manpage (prior manpages don't list the >> request summary). >> >> If anyone has some authoritative date information I can update the >> archive description accordingly. >> >> Finally, this very well could be missing the last page, the Page offset, >> Merge patterns, and Envoi sections of Doug's paper are not reflected here, >> although at the very least, the .mg request is not in this paper so the >> Merge patterns section probably wasn't there anyway. >> >> - Matt G. >> >

11 months, 3 weeks

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When did "man cal" lose the comment about 1752?

by Douglas McIlroy

> Yeah, but if you do that you have to treat the places > acquired in the Louisiana Purchase differently because > they switched in 1582. And Puerto Rico. Bleh. Then there are all the German city states. And the shifting borders of Poland. (cal -s country) is a mighty low-res "solution" to the Julian/Gregorian problem. Doug

11 months, 3 weeks

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When did "man cal" lose the comment about 1752?

by Dave Horsfall

The manpage for "cal" used to have the comment "Try September 1752" (and yes, I know why); it's no longer there, so when did it disappear? The SysV fun police? I remember it in Ed5 and Ed6, but can't remember when I last saw it. Thanks. -- Dave

11 months, 3 weeks

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Reference Cards for PDP8, PDP9, PDP-10, PDP11, TOPS-10

by Clem Cole

A few folks on the PIDP mailing lists asked me to put scans of the cards I have on-line. I included TUHS as some of the new to the PDP-11 folks might find these interesting also. I also included a few others from other folks. Note my scans are in 3 formats (JPG, TIFF, PDF) as each has advantages. Pick which one you prefer. I tried to scan in as a high a resolution as I could in case some one wants to try to print the later. I may try adding some of my other cards, such as my microprocessor and IBM collections. In the future https://drive.google.com/open?id=13dPAlRMQEwNvPwLXwlOC5Q_ZrQp4IpkJ&usp=driv… ᐧ

12 months

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Puzzled about COFF

by Douglas McIlroy

I subscribe to the TUHS mailing list, delivered in digest form. I do not remember having subscribed to COFF, and am not aware of how to do so. Yet COFF messges come in my TUHS digest. How does COFF differ from TUHS and how does one subscibe to it (if at all)? Doug

12 months

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Re: When did "man cal" lose the comment about 1752?

by Rudi Blom

Just had a quick look at 'man cat' on Uixes I've got 'at hand'. Just a 'cut and past' of the relevant parts. SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2 Limitations Note that ``cal 84'' refers to the year 84, not 1984. The calendar produced is the Gregorian calendar from September 14 1752 onward. Dates up to and including September 2 1752 use the Julian calen- dar. (England and her colonies switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in September 1752, at which time eleven days were excised from the year. To see the result of this switch, try cal 9 1752.) Digital UNIX 4.0g DESCRIPTION The cal command writes to standard output a Gregorian calendar for the specified year or month. For historical reasons, the cal command's Gregorian calendar is discontinu- ous. The display for September 1752 (cal 9 1752) jumps from Wednesday the 2nd to Thursday the 14th. -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

12 months

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Fwd: DKUUG, EUUG and 586 issues (3700+ pages) of Unigram-X 1988…1996

by Warren Toomey

All ... ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp ----- Subject: DKUUG, EUUG and 586 issues (3700+ pages) of Unigram-X 1988…1996 (Please forward to the main TUHS list if you think it is warranted) A brief intro: Datamuseum.dk is a volunteer-run effort to collect, preserve and present "The Danish IT-history". UNIX is part of that history, but our interest is seen through the dual prisms of "Danish IT-History" and the computers in our collection. My own personal UNIX interest is of course much deeper and broader, which is why I'm sending this email. Recently we helped clean out the basement under the Danish Unix User's Group (DKUUG) which is winding down, and we hauled of a lot of stuff, which includes much EUUG - (European Unix Users Group) material. As I feed it through the scanner, the EUUG-newsletters will appear here: https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Bits:Keyword/PERIODICALS/EUUG-NEWSLETTER And proceedings from EUUG conferences (etc.) will appear here: https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Bits:Keyword/DKUUG/EUUG I also found four boxes full of "Unigram-X" newsletters. Unigram-X was a newsletter, published weekly out of London. A typical issue was two yellow A3 sheets folded, or if if news was slight, a folded A3 with an A4 insert. … and that is just about all I know about it. But whoever wrote it, they clearly had an amazing Rolodex. In total there a tad more than 3700 pages of real-time news and gossip about the UNIX world from 1986 to 1996. It's not exactly core material for datamuseum.dk, but it is a goldmine for UNIX history, so I have spent two full days day scanning and getting all the pages, sorted, flipped and split into one-year-per-pdf files. I should warn that neither the raw material nor the scan is perfect, but this is it, unless somebody else feels like going through it again. (The paper stays in our collection, no rush.) I need to go through and check for pages being upside down or out of order, before I ingest the PDFSs into the Datamuseum.dk bitarchive, but here is a preview: https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1986_0034_0058.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1987_0059_0108.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1988_0109_0159.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1989_0160_0211.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1990_0212_0262.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1991_0263_0313.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1992_0314_0365.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1993_0366_0416.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1994_0417_0467.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1995_0468_0518.pdf https://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/unigram_x_1996_0519_0616.pdf My ulterior motives for this preview are several: If you find any out-of-order or rotated pages, please let me know. It's not a complete collection, the following issues are missing: 1…33 35 39…49 86…87 105 138 229 321 400 405…406 496 498 507 520 523…524 527…528 548 613 615 617… It would be nice to fill the holes. As a matter of principle, we do not store OCR'ed PDF's in the datamuseum.dk bitarchive[1], and what with me still suffering from a job etc, I do not have the time to OCR 3700+ pages under any circumstances. But even the most crude and buggy OCR reading would be a great resource to grep(1), so I'm hoping somebody else might find the time and inclination ? And a "best-of-unigram-x" page on the TUHS wiki may be warranted, because there are some seriously great nuggets in there :-) Enjoy, Poul-Henning [1] I'm not entertaining any arguments about this: We're trying to align with best practice in historical collection world. The argument goes: Unless the OCR is perfect, people will do a text-search, not find stuff, and conclude it is not there. Such interpretations of artifacts belong in peer-reviewed papers, so there is a name of who to blame or praise, and so that they can be debated & revised etc. [2] The PDF's are archive-quality, you can extract the raw images from them, for instance with XPDF's "pdfimages" program. ----- End forwarded message -----

12 months

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Re: machine code translation,as mental architecture models

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dan Cross > These techniques are rather old, and I think go back much further than > we're suggesting. Knuth mentions nested translations in TAOCP .. > suggesting the technique was well-known as early as the mid-1960s. I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to with "[t]hese techniques"; I gather you are talking about the low-level mechanisms used to implement 'system calls'? If so, please permit me to ramble for a while, and revise your time-line somewhat. There are two reasons one needs 'system calls'; low-level 'getting there from here' (which I'll explain below), and 'switching operating/protection domains' (roughly, from 'user' to 'kernel'). In a batch OS which only runs in a single mode, one _could_ just use regular subroutine calls to call the 'operating system', to 'get there from here'. The low-level reason not to do this is that one would need the addresses of all the routines in the OS (which could change over time). If one instead used permanent numbers to identify system calls, and had some sort of 'system call' mechanism (an instruction - although it could be a subroutine call to a fixed location in the OS), one wouldn't need the addresses. But this is just low level mechanistic stuff. (I have yet to research to see if any early OS's did use subroutine calls as their interface.) The 'switching operating/protection domains' is more fundamental - and unavoidable. Obviously, it wouldn't have been needed before there were machines/OS's that operated in multiple modes. I don't have time to research which was the _first_ machine/OS to need this, but clearly CTSS was an early one. I happen to have a CTSS manual (two, actually :-), and in CTSS a system call was: TSX NAMEI, 4 .. .. NAMEI: TIA =HNAME where 'NAME' "is the BCD name of a legitimate supervisor entry point", and the 'TIA' instruction may be "usefully (but inexactly) read as Trap Into A core" (remember that in CTSS, the OS lived in the A core). (Don't ask me what HNAME is, or what a TSX instruction does! :-) So that would have been 1963, or a little earlier. By 1965 (see the 1965 Fall Joint Computer Conference papers: https://multicians.org/history.html for more), MIT had already moved on to the idea of using a subroutine calls that could cross protection domain boundaries for 'system calls', for Multics. The advantage of doing that is that if the machine has a standard way of passing arguments to subroutines, you natively/naturally get arguments to system calls. Noel

12 months

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Reminder: use the right list

by Warren Toomey

All, just a friendly reminder to use the TUHS mailing list for topics related to Unix, and to switch over to the COFF mailing list when the topic drifts away from Unix. I think a couple of the current threads ought to move over to the COFF list. Thanks! Warren

12 months

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Re: mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by Douglas McIlroy

> In order to port VMS to new architectures, DEC/HP/VSI ... > turned the VAX MACRO assembly language (in which > some of the VMS operating system was written) into a > portable implementation language by 'compiling' the > high-level CISC VAX instructions (and addressing modes) > into sequences of RISC instructions. Clem Pease did the same thing to port TMG from IBM 7000-series machines to the GE 600 series for Multics, circa 1967. Although both architectures had 36-bit words, it was a challenge to adequately emulate IBM's accumulator, which supported 38-bit sign-magnitude addition, 37-bit twos-complement and 36-bit ones-complement. Doug

12 months

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Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by sjenkin＠canb.auug.org.au

I’ve never heard of a Computer Science or Software Engineering program that included a ‘case study’ component, especially for Software Development & Projects. MBA programs feature an emphasis on real-world ‘case studies’, to learn from successes & failures, to give students the possibility of not falling into the same traps. Creating Unix V6, because it profoundly changed computing & development, would seem an obvious Case Study for many aspects of Software, Coding and Projects. There have been many descriptive treatments of Initial Unix, but I’ve never seen a Case Study, with explicit lessons drawn, possibly leading to metrics to evaluate Project progress & the coding process. Developers of Initial Unix arguably were 10x-100x more productive than IBM OS/360, a ‘best practice’ development at the time, so what CSRC did differently is worth close examination. I’ve not seen examined the role of the ‘capability’ of individual contributors, the collaborative, collegiate work environment and the ‘context’, a well funded organisation not dictating deadlines or product specifications for researchers. USG, then USL, worked under ’normal commercial’ management pressure for deadlines, features and specifications. The CSRC/1127 group did have an explicit approach & principles for what they did and how they worked, publishing a number of books & papers on them - nothing they thought or did is secret or unavailable for study. Unix & Unix tools were deliberately built with explicit principles, such as “Less is More”. Plan 9 was also built on explicit Design principles. The two most relevant lessons I draw from Initial Unix are: - the same as Royce's original “Software Waterfall” paper, “build one to throwaway” [ albeit, many, many iterations of the kernel & other code ] - Writing Software is part Research, part Creative ‘Art’: It’s Done when it's Done, invention & creation can’t be timetabled. For the most reliable, widely used Open Source projects, the “Done when it’s Done” principle is universally demonstrated. I’ve never seen a large Open Source project succeed when attempting to use modern “Project Management” techniques. These Initial Unix lessons, if correct and substantiated, should cause a revolution in the teaching & practice of Professional Programming, i.e. Programming In the Large, for both CS & SW. There are inherent contradictions within the currently taught Software Project Management Methodologies: - Individual capability & ability is irrelevant The assumption is ‘programmers’ are fungible/ identical units - all equally able to solve any problem. Clearly incorrect: course evaluations / tests demonstrate at least a 100x variance in ability in every software dimension. - Team environment, rewards & penalties and corporate context are irrelevant, Perverse incentives are widely evident, the cause of many, or all, “Death Marches”. - The “Discovery & Research Phases” of a project are timetabled, an impossibility. Any suggestions for Case Studies gratefully accepted. =========== Professions & Professionals must learn over time: there’s a negative aspect (don’t do this) and positive aspect (do this) for this deliberate learning & improvement. Negatives are “Don’t Repeat, or Allow, Known Errors, Faults & Failures” plus in the Time Dimension, “Avoid Delays, Omissions and Inaction”. Positives are what’s taught in Case Studies in MBA courses: use techniques & approaches known to work. Early Unix, from inception to CACM papers, 1969 to 1974, took probably 30 man-years, and produced a robust, performant and usable system for it’s design target, “Software Development”. This in direct comparison to Fred Brooks IBM OS/360 effort around 5 years before that consumed 3,000-4,000 man-years was known for bugs, poor & inconsistent code quality, needed large resource to run and was, politely, non-performant. This was a commercial O/S, built by a capable, experienced engineering organisation, betting their company on it, who assigned their very best to the hardware & software projects. It was “Best of Breed” then, possibly also now. MULTICS had multiple business partners, without the same, single focus or commercial imperative. I don’t believe it’s comparable to either system. Initial Unix wasn’t just edit, compile & run, but filesystems, libraries, debugging & profiling tools, language & compiler construction tools, ‘man’ pages, document prep (nroff/troff) and 'a thousand' general tools leveraging shell / pipe. This led directly to modern toolchains, config, make & build systems, Version Control, packaging systems, and more. Nothing of note is built without using descendants or derivatives of these early toolchains. All this is wrapped around by many Standards, necessary for portable systems, even based on the same platform, kernel and base system. The “Tower of Babel” problem is still significant & insurmountable at times, even in C-C & Linux-Linux migration, but without POSIX/IEEE standards the “Software Tarpit” and "Desert of Despair” would’ve been unsolvable. The early Unix system proved adaptable and extensible to many other environments, well beyond “Software Development”. =========== [ waterfall model ] Managing the development of large software systems: concepts and techniques W. W. Royce, 1970 [ free access ] <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/41765.41801> STEP3: DO IT TWICE, pg 334 After documentation, the second most important criterion for success revolves around whether the product is totally original. If the computer program in question is being developed for the first time, arrange matters so that the version finally delivered to the customer for operational deployment is actually the second version insofar as critical design/operations areas are concerned. =========== Plan 9, Design <https://9p.io/sys/doc/9.html> The view of the system is built upon three principles. First, resources are named and accessed like files in a hierarchical file system. Second, there is a standard protocol, called 9P, for accessing these resources. Third, the disjoint hierarchies provided by different services are joined together into a single private hierarchical file name space. The unusual properties of Plan 9 stem from the consistent, aggressive application of these principles. =========== Escaping the software tar pit: model clashes and how to avoid them Barry Boehm, 1999 [ free access ] <https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/308769.308775#> =========== Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition Fred Brooks Chapter 1. The Tar Pit Large-system programming has over the past decade been such a tar pit, and many great and powerful beasts have thrashed violently in it. =========== -- 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

12 months

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Is There Teletype DNA In the Blit?

by segaloco

I suppose this question is best directed at Rob or Doug, but just might as well ask at large: Given AT&T's ownership of Teletype and the involvement (AFAIK) of Teletype with other WECo CRT terminals (e.g. Dataspeed 40 models), was there any direct involvement of folks from the Teletype side of things in the R&D on the Jerq/Blit/DMD? Or was this terminal pure Bell Labs? - Matt G.

12 months

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Program Generic Issue 3 Init System?

by segaloco

Good afternoon, I was wondering if anyone currently on list is in possession of a copy of the UNIX Programmer's Manual for Program Generic Issue 3 from March of 1977. This is the version nestled between Issue 2 which Al Kossow has preserved here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/6th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_1… and the MERT 0 release provided by I believe Heinz Lycklama here: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/MERT_Release_0/ If I might make a request of anyone having such a copy, could I trouble you for at the very least scans of the lines(V), getty(VIII), and init(VIII) pages? I can't 100% confirm the presence of the first page, but the instructions for replacing PG3 pages with MERT0 pages above indicate a page called lines was present in section V of the PG3 manual, and there is a fragment of a lines(5) page in the CB-UNIX 2.3 manual here: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/CB_Unix/man/man5/lines.5.pdf In short, lines there appears to be a predecessor to inittab(5) and, if the references in CB and USG PG3 are the same, points to the earliest appearance in the wild of System V-style init in PG3 all the way back in 1977. Granted we don't have earlier CB-UNIX literature to wholly confirm whether this started in PG3 or some pre-'77 issue of CB-UNIX, but I'm quite interested in seeing how these relate. Thanks for any help! - Matt G.

12 months

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Re: mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Steve Jenkin > C wasn't the first standardised coding language, FORTRAN & COBOL at > least were before it There were a ton; Algol-60 is the most imppotant one I can think of. (I was thinking that Algol-60 was probably an important precursor to BCPL, which was the predecessor to C, but Richards' first BCPL paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476793.1476880 "BCPL: A tool for compiler writing and system programming" doesn't call it out, only CPL. However, CPL does admit its dues to Algol-60: "CPL is to a large extent based on ALGOL 60".) Noel

1 year

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3B21D

by Kevin Bowling

Howdy, I now have this pictured 3B21D in my facility http://kev009.com/wp/2024/07/Lucent-5ESS-Rescue/ It will be a moment before I can start work on documentation of the 3B21D and DMERT/UNIX-RTR but wanted to share the news. Regards, Kevin

1 year

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Any Surviving LIL Compilers/Code Artifacts?

by segaloco

So I'm doing a little bit of the footwork in prep for analyzing manual differences between Research, Program Generic, and PWB/UNIX, and found something interesting. The LIL Programming Language[1] was briefly available as a user-supported section 6 command on Fifth Edition (1974) UNIX, appearing as a page but not even making it into the TOC. It was gone as quickly as it appeared in the Research stream, not surviving into V6. However, with Al Kossow's provided Program Generic Issue 2 (1976) manual[2] as well as notes in the MERT Issue 0 (1977) manual [3], it appears that LIL was quite supported in the USG Program Generic line, making it into section 1 of Issue 2 and staying there through to Issue 3. lc(1) happens to be one of the pages excised in the transformation from PG Issue 3 to MERT Issue 0. This had me curious, so I went looking around the extant V5 sources and couldn't find anything resembling the LIL compiler. Does anyone know if this has survived in any other fashion? Additionally, does anyone have any recollection of whether LIL was in significant use in USG-supported UNIX sites, or if it somehow made it into section 1 and spread around due to the state of use in Research at the time USG sampled userland out. Finally, one little tidbit from P.J. Plauger's paper[1] stuck out to me: "...the resulting language was used to help write a small PDP-11/10 operating system at Bell Labs." Does anyone have any information about this operating system, whether it was a LIL experiment or something purpose-driven and used in its own right after creation? [1] - http://www.ultimate.com/phil/lil/ [2] - http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/6th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_19760… [3] - https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/MERT_Release_0/Pgs%2001-…'s%20Manual%20for%20MERT.pdf

1 year

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Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by Douglas McIlroy

> Peter J Denning in 2008 wrote about reforming CACM in 1982/83. [ extract at end ] > <https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/dja-vu-all-over-again/> That "accomplishment" drove me away from the ACM. I hope the following explanation does not set off yet another long tangential discussion. The CACM had been the prime benefit of ACM membership. It carried generally accessible technical content across the whole spectrum of computing. The "Journal for all Members" (JAM) reform resulted in such content being thinly spread over several journals. To get the perspective that CACM had offered, one would have had to subscribe to and winnow a mountain of specialst literature--assuming the editors of these journals would accept some ACM-style articles. I had been an active member of ACM, having serving as associate editor of three journals, member of the publications planning committee, national lecturer, and Turing-Award chairman. When the JAM reform cut off my window into the field at large, I quit the whole organization. With the advent of WWW, the ACM Digital Library overcame the need to subscribe to multiple journals for wide coverage. Fortunately I had institutional acess to that. I rejoined ACM only after its decision to allow free access to all 20th century content in the DL. This public-spirited action more than atoned for the damage of the JAM reform and warranted my support. I have been happy to find that the current CACM carries one important technical article in each issue and a couple of interesting columnists among the generally insipid JAM content. And I am pleased by the news that ACM will soon also give open access to most 21st-century content. Doug

1 year

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Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by Steve Jenkin

Found these two. Anyone seen others? I bought this book soon after it was published. It’s a detailed study of some major IT projects, doesn’t draw “lessons” & rules like I’d expect of an MBA Case Study. Why information systems fail: a case study approach February 1993 <https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/174553> > On 5 Jul 2024, at 09:31, Lawrence Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com> wrote: > > A quick search also shows a number of software engineering case study books. ================ Case Study Research in Software Engineering: Guidelines and Examples April 2012 <https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/2361717> Based on their own experiences of in-depth case studies of software projects in international corporations, in this bookthe authors present detailed practical guidelines on the preparation, conduct, design and reporting of case studies of software engineering. This is the first software engineering specific book on thecase study research method. ================ Case studies for software engineers May 2006 <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1134285.1134497> The topic of this full-day tutorial was the correct use and interpretation of case studies as an empirical research method. Using an equal blend of lecture and discussion, it gave attendees a foundation for conducting, reviewing, and reading case studies. There were lessons for software engineers as researchers who conduct and report case studies, reviewers who evaluate papers, and practitioners who are attempting to apply results from papers. The main resource for the course was the book Case Study Research: Design and Methods by Robert K. Yin. This text was supplemented with positive and negative examples from the literature. ================ -- 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

1 year

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Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by Steve Jenkin

Links for those who’ve not read these articles. Open access, downloadable PDF’s. ================ Peter J Denning in 2008 wrote about reforming CACM in 1982/83. [ extract at end ] <https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/dja-vu-all-over-again/> The space shuttle primary computer system Sept 1984 <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358234.358246> The TWA reservation system July 1984 <https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/358105.358192> ================ After Editor in Chief of the ACM, in 1993 Denning established "The Center for the New Engineer" (CNE) <http://www.denninginstitute.com/cne/cne-aug93.pdf> Great Principles of Computing, paper <https://denninginstitute.com/pjd/PUBS/ENC/gp08.pdf> Website <https://denninginstitute.com/pjd/GP/GP-site/welcome.html> ================ Denning, 2008 Another major success was the case studies conducted by Alfred Spector and David Gifford of MIT, who visited project managers and engineers at major companies and interviewed them about their projects, producing no-holds-barred pieces. This section was wildly popular among the readers. Unfortunately, the labor-intensive demands of the post got the best of them after three years, and we were not able to replace them. Also by that time, companies were getting more circumspect about discussing failures and lessons learned in public forums. ================ > On 5 Jul 2024, at 09:31, Lawrence Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com> wrote: > > Alright, apologies for being late. > > Back in 1984, David Gifford and Al Spector started a series of case studies for CACM. > I think only two were published, on the TWA reservation system and on the Space Shuttle primary computer. -- 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

1 year

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Lions book reprint by Bell Labs

by Tom Lyon

The fabulous Dr. Honeyman made a gift to me of his Lions' books which were printed by Bell Labs. Does anyone know WHEN that happened or WHO made it happen? I figure it must have been at least 1 year and maybe 2 after Lions' originals. See Images: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BIs3Qsihp6nI2iX1Ax3fNU-OFv5dfy0O/view?usp=… https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LoQUl8ND7D18z1W5I3NF-QwIvDkfXk0t/view?usp=… https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xg4TAJNAp5h8FljulJh9Zh0nzFy-YWda/view?usp=… https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u--blfYu5Iuzpc-qiwCGNq0p6u1DgucR/view?usp=… ps. *I* have no problem spelling Lions' name. A problem *with* the spelling, perhaps.

1 year

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seismo/uunet uucp

by Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)

Does the source to the Rick Adams version of UUCP still exist anywhere? --lyndon

1 year

7
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Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by norman＠oclsc.org

Steve Jenkin: I've never heard of a Computer Science or Software Engineering program that included a `case study' component, especially for Software Development & Projects. [...] Creating Unix V6, because it profoundly changed computing & development, would seem an obvious Case Study for many aspects of Software, Coding and Projects. ==== How about the course for which John Lions wrote his famous exegesis of the 6/e kernel? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 year

3
3
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"X Window System At 40"

by Alexis

David Rosenthal reflects on his involvement with the development of the X Window System: > Although most of my time was spent developing NeWS, I rapidly > ported X version 10 to the Sun/1, likely the second port to > non-DEC hardware. It worked, but I had to kludge several areas > that depended on DEC-specific hardware. The worst was the > completely DEC-specific keyboard support. > > Because it was clear that a major redesign of X was needed to > make it portable and in particular to make it work well on Sun > hardware, Gosling and I worked with the teams at DEC SRC and WRL > on the design of X version 11. Gosling provided significant > input on the imaging model, and I designed the keyboard > support. As the implementation evolved I maintained the Sun port > and did a lot of testing and bug fixing. All of which led to my > trip to Boston to pull all-nighters at MIT finalizing the > release. > > My involvement continued after the first release. I was the > editor and main author of the X Inter-Client Communications > Conventions Manual (ICCCM) that forms Part III of Robert > Scheifler and Jim Gettys' X Window System. -- https://blog.dshr.org/2024/07/x-window-system-at-40.html Alexis.

1 year

1
0
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Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

by Clem Cole

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-museum-logs-off-for… These folks hosted the UNIX 50th Celebration and had a physical PDP-7 that was used to bring up UNIX V0 (after first getting it running on SIMH). That later was not easy because the original PDP-7s (like the one Ken had access to) did not have disk storage. BTL had paid DEC's Custom Special Systems (CSS) to splice a Burrough's disk that DEC was selling using for the 15 and later the PDP-9. It started with splicing reverse engineering that code to build a simulation of that disk into the simh, so we could ensure that UNIX ran—finally, modeling that HW with a custom microprocessor-based board with an SD card with a functional replica of a PDP-7 I/O interface on one side obeying the device registers and operations that UNIX expected to see. The LCM-L folks were incredibly gracious and generous. I am so sad to see their collection go away. In particular, I hope the PDP-7s and the CDC-6500 find new homes. Clem

1 year

13
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most direct Unix descendant

by Andrew Lynch

Hi Out of curiosity, what would be considered the most direct descendent of Unix available today? Yes, there are many descendants, but they've all gone down their own evolutionary paths. Is it FreeBSD or NetBSD? Something else? I don't think it would be Minix or Linux because I remember when they came along, and it was well after various Unix versions were around. Does such a thing even exist anymore? I remember using AT&T Unix System V and various BSD variants back in college in the 1980's. System V was the "new thing" back then but was eventually sold and seems to have faded. Maybe it is only available commercially, but it does not seem as prominent as it once was. Any thoughts? Thanks, Andrew Lynch

1 year

11
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Re: On the term "justification"

by Douglas McIlroy

Oops, my last post ascribed Runoff to the 15th century, "sixty decades" ago. Doug

1 year

3
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Re: Documenting a set of functions with -man

by Douglas McIlroy

> The lack of a monospaced font is, I suspect, due either to > physical limitations of the C/A/T phototypesetter[1] or fiscal > limitations--no budget in that department to buy photographic > plates for Courier. Since the C/A/T held only four fonts, there was no room for Courier. But when we moved beyond that typesetter, inertia kept the old ways . Finally, in v9, I introduced the fixed-width "literal font", L, in -man and said goodbye to boldface in synopses. By then, though, Research Unix was merely a local branch of the Unix evolutionary tree, so the literal-font gene never spread. Doug

1 year

4
5
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The thread about standards is now closed

by Warren Toomey

All, I've decided to bring the ANSI C/POSIX thread to a close. While initially the thread was informative, it's recently become host to comments which are inappropriate and certainly well out of scope for a mailing list about UNIX and its history. If someone wants to resurrect a thread about standards, feel free to use the COFF list. But please, keep the conversation on-topic. Thanks, Warren

1 year

1
0
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another OSX 100% less Unix

by ron minnich

I have a directory, t: ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ ls -li total 0 23801442 -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a 23801443 -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b 23801443 -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c note that b and c are the same inode. let's make a cpio. ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -o >../t.cpio a b c ^D 1 block what's in it? ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -ivt < ../t.cpio -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b "c link to b"? wtf? Who thought that was a good idea? because ... ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ touch 'c link to b' ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b and ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -o >../t.cpio a b c c link to b ^D ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -ivt < ../t.cpio -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b so ... it looks like a file is there twice, because somebody thought it was a good idea to confuse a file name and file metadata. And, anyway, it's just as accurate to have it say -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b link to c -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b Right? :-) From the same people who brought you this: ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ bc >>> Somebody needs to get the osx folks a unix manual set :-)

1 year

9
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Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Aron <aki(a)insinga.com> > Now if only his family would take those wishes of his into account and > tell the lawyers to finish the job. I suspect that was his real mistake; he trusted that his family would do what he wanted (perhaps so that instead of putting the final bow on this, he could pay attention to something else that was more important to him) after he was gone - and they decided not to. My suspicion is that there is something else that is more important to his sister (probably political), and she decided that the pittance she'd get from flushing the LCM would be better put towards her project(s). I've just been re-reading Thucydides' extraordinarily outstanding meditation on the revolution on Corcyra (which is really a meditation on the death of the Greek polei - and is a pre-epitaph on the death of many democracies since), and if my pupposition is correct, it applies to this too I wonder what'll happen to all the less-valuable stuff that was given to the LCM? A PDP-10 will fetch 10K's of $, but a lot of the rest is worth pennies. I hope they don't scrap it for pennies, or throw it in the trash. I'm sure that someone who would ignore her brother's wishes about important pieces of history that meant a lot to him would have no qualms about doing either. Noel

1 year

3
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ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

by segaloco

Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1. Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead? Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in publishers? In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations. - Matt G.

1 year

26
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ACM Software System Award to Andrew S. Tanenbaum for MINIX

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

This announcement just arrived on the ACM Bulletins list: >> ... >> Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Vrije Universiteit, receives the ACM Software >> System Award (http://awards.acm.org/software-system) for MINIX, which >> influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple >> generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used >> operating systems, including Linux. >> ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 year

8
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Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

by John S Quarterman

Or like rms claimed Linux as part of GNU, he claimed POSIX and some people believed him. -jsq On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 9:38 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: > > > On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 6:15 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 8:12 AM John S Quarterman <jsqmobile(a)gmail.com> >> wrote: >> > I don't recall rms being involved, certainly not in the name. -jsq >> >> quip: Like childbirth, perhaps the unpleasant memory was simply blocked >> out? >> > > Is it possible that RMS suggested it as maybe an obvious quip to a > committee member who later credited him with that since that conversation > happened before that person heard it from others on the committee? Tricky > to know from this distance in time. > > Warner > > - Dan C. >> >

1 year

1
0
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Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' • The Register

by Charles H Sauer (he/him)

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/version_256_systemd/ I don't see the boast at https://github.com/systemd/systemd/releases/tag/v256, but ... Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

1 year

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Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> <clemc(a)ccc.com> > In particular, I hope the PDP-7s and the CDC-6500 find new homes. Also, their collection of PDP-10's, which is absolutely unrivalled; they had a KA10 and a KI10; also the MIT-MC KL10. Also a Multics front panel; AFAIK, the ony one in the world other than the CHM's. Any idea where it's all being sold? I might enquire about the Multics panel. Noel

1 year

2
1
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Fwd: [multicians] Dennis Ritchie's 1993 Usenet posting "BTL Leaves Multics"

by Dan Cross

FYI, Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multicians list; DMR's recollections of the end of Multics at BTL. I can't resist asking about the nugget buried in here about Ken writing a small kernel for the 645. Is that in the archives anywhere? - Dan C. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Tom Van Vleck via groups.io <thvv=multicians.org(a)groups.io> Date: Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 10:38 AM Subject: [multicians] Dennis Ritchie's 1993 Usenet posting "BTL Leaves Multics" To: <multicians(a)groups.io> in "alt.os.multics" about Unix, CTSS, Multics, BTL, qed, and mail https://groups.google.com/g/alt.os.multics/c/1iHfrDJkyyE Comments by DMR, me, RMF, PAG, PAK, BSG, PWB, JJL, AE, MAP, EHR, DMW Covers many issues. (I feel like we should save this thread somehow. hard to trust Google any more. the posting ends with a heading of a response by JWG but no content.) _._,_._,_ ________________________________ Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5547) | Reply To Group | Reply To Sender | Mute This Topic | New Topic ________________________________ -- sent via multicians(a)groups.io -- more Multics info at https:://multicians.org/ ________________________________ Your Subscription | Contact Group Owner | Unsubscribe [crossd(a)gmail.com] _._,_._,_

1 year

2
2
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Thank you all for your civility

by Warren Toomey

All, recently I saw on Bruce Schneier "Cryptogram" blog that he has had to change the moderation policy due to toxic comments: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/new-blog-moderation-policy.h… So I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your civility and respect for others on the TUHS and COFF lists. The recent systemd and make discussions have highlighted significant differences between people's experiences and opinions. Nonetheless, apart from a few pointed comments, the discussions have been polite and informative. These lists have been in use for decades now and, thankfully, I've only had to unsubscribe a handful of people for offensive behaviour. That's a testament to the calibre of people who are on the lists. Cheers and thank you again, Warren P.S. I'm a happy Devuan (non-systemd) user for many years now.

1 year

1
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Re: autotools

by Steve Simon

my personal frustration with autotools was trying to port code to plan9. i wish autotools had an intermediate file format which described the packages requirements, that way i could have written my own backend to create my config.h and makefiles (or mkfiles) in the end i wrote my own tool which crudely parses a directory of C or F77 sourcecode and uses heuristics to create a config.h and a plan9 mkfile, it was named mkmk(1) it was almost _never_ completely correct, but usually got close enough that the files only needed a little manual hacking. it also took great pains to generate mkfiles that looked hand written; if you are going to auto generate files, make them look nice. -Steve

1 year

1
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Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

by Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)

> This is The Way if you really care about portability. Autoconf, > once you get your head around what, why, and when it was created, > makes for nice Makefiles and projects that are easy to include in > the 100 Linux distributions with their own take on packaging the > world. This is outright claptrap and nonsense. In the latter half of the 90s I was responsible for writing installers and generating platform-native packages for about a dozen different commercial UNIX platforms (AIX, Solaris, Irix, HP/UX, OSF, BSD/OS, ...). Each of these package systems was as different as could be from the others. (HP/UX didn't even have one.) That entire process was driven by not very many lines of make recipes, with the assistance of some awk glue that read a template file from which it generated the native packages. And these were not trivial software distributions. We were shipping complex IMAP, X.400 and X.500 servers, along with a couple of MTAs. Our installers didn't just dump the files onto the system and point you at a README; we coded a lot of the site setup into the installers, so the end user mostly just had to edit a single config file to finish up. --lyndon

1 year

2
1
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Fwd: Anyone have Plexus docs/software squirreled away?

by Al Kossow

FYI, for people like me that care about 80s 68K Unix systemf There is a pretty serious multi-purpose preservation effort that started a few weeks ago around Plexus systems as a result of a series of YouTube videos https://youtu.be/iltZYXg5hZw https://github.com/misterblack1/plexus-p20/

1 year

9
14
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Be there a "remote diff" utility?

by Dave Horsfall

Every so often I want to compare files on remote machines, but all I can do is to fetch them first (usually into /tmp); I'd like to do something like: rdiff host1:file1 host2:file2 Breathes there such a beast? I see that Penguin/OS has already taken "rdiff" which doesn't seem to do what I want. Think of it as an extension to the Unix philosophy of "Everything looks like a file"... -- Dave

1 year

9
9
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Re: [COFF] Re: Supervisor mode on ye olde PDP-11

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > 2.11BSD used a mode between kernel and user for the TCP stack to get > more effective address space... Is there a document for 2.11 which explains in detail why they did that? I suspect it's actually a little more complicated than just "more address space". The thing is that PDP-11 Unix had been using overlays in the kernel for quite a while to provide more address space. I forget where they first came in (I suspect there were a number of local hacks, before everyone started using the BSD approach), but by 2.9 BSD they were a standard part of the system. (See: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/src/sys/conf/Ovmak… for some clues about how this works. There is unfortunately no documentation that I know of which explains clearly how it works; if anyone knows of any, can you please let me know? Otherwise you'll have to read the sources.) I can think of two possible reasons they started using supervisor mode: i) There were a limited number of the 2.9-type overlays, and they were not large; trying to support all the networking code with the existing overlay system may have been too hard. ii) I think this one is unlikely, but I'll list it as a possibility. Switching overlays took a certain amount of overhead (since mapping registers had to be re-loaded); if all the networking code ran in supervisor mode, the supervisor mode mapping registers could be loaded with the right thing and just left. Noel

1 year

3
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Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Frankly my major complaint with much of the modern world is that when we > ignore the past "There are two kinds of fools. One says, 'This is old, therefore it is good'; the other says, 'This is new, therefore it is better.'" -- Dean Inge, quoted by John Brunner in "The Shockwave Rider". Noel

1 year

7
11
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Diff: The seminal water we swim in

by Douglas McIlroy

> this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what > would become a seminal, and is arguably the single most important, > piece of social software ever created. I'm flattered, but must point out that diff was just one of a sequence of more capable and robust versions of proof(1), which Mike Lesk contributed to Unix v3. It, in turn, copied a program written by Steve Johnson before Unix and general consciousness of software tools. Credit must also go to several people who studied and created algorithms for the "longest common subsequence" problem: Harold Stone (who invented the diff algorithm at a blackboard during a one-day visit to Bell Labs), Dan Hirschberg, Tom Szymanksi, Al Aho, and Jeff Ullman. For a legal case in which I served as an expert witness, I found several examples of diff-type programs developed in the late 1960s specifically for preparing critical editions of ancient documents. However, Steve Johnson's unpublished program from the same era appears to be the first that was inspired as a general tool, and thus as "social software". Doug

1 year

1
0
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Diff: The seminal water we swim in

by Rich Salz

From Mastodon, MHoye posting at https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/112615649865163136: I haven't seen anybody mentioning it or even noticing it, like it's just the water we swim in now, but this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what would become a seminal, and is arguably the single most important, piece of social software ever created. Written by Douglas McIlroy and James Hunt and released with the 5th Edition of Unix this month in 1974: diff. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree. <https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/diff1.c>..

1 year

1
0
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5ESS UNIX RTR Reference Manual - Issue 10 (2001)

by segaloco

Good evening, while I'm still waiting on the full uploads to progress (it's like there's a rule any >100MB upload to archive.org for me has to fail like 5 times before it'll finally go...) I decided to scrape out the UNIX RTR manual from a recent trove of 5ESS materials I received and tossed it up in a separate upload: https://archive.org/details/5ess-switch-unix-rtr-operating-system-reference… This time around I've got Issue 10 from December 2001. The last issue of this particular manual I found on another 5ESS disc is Issue 7 from 1998 which I shared previously (https://ia601200.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=%2F12%2Fitems%2F5e…) The manual is in "DynaText" format on the CD in question, unlike Issue 7 which was already a PDF on its respective CD. I used print-to-PDF to generate the above linked copy. Given that the CD itself is from 2007, this may point to UNIX RTR having no significant user-visible changes from 2001 to 2007 that would've necessitated manual revisions. In any case, I intend to upload bin/cue images of all 7 of the CDs I've received which span from 1999 to 2007, and mostly concern the 5ESS-2000 switch from the administrative and maintenance points of view. Once I get archive.org to choke these files down I also intend to go back around to the discs I've already archived and reupload them as proper bin/cue rips. I was in a hurry the last time around and simply zipped the contents from the discs, but aside from just being good archive practice, I think bin/cue is necessary for the other discs as they seem to have control information in the disc header that is required by the interactive documentation viewers therein. All that to say, the first pass will result in bin/cues which aren't easily readable through archive.org's interface, but I intend to also swing back around on these new discs and provide zips of the contents as well to ensure the archives are both correct (bin/cue) and easily navigable (zip). As always, if you have any such documentation or leads on where any may be awaiting archival, I'm happy to take on the work! - Matt G.

1 year

7
8
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Re: [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Doug McIlroy kindly sent me contact information for John Chambers, co-author of the cited book about the S system. I have just heard back from John, who offered a link to his summary paper from the 2020 HOPL conference proceedings S, R, and data science https://doi.org/10.1145/3386334 and reported that S was licensed to AT&T Unix customers only in binary form, and that the original source code may no longer exist. That is a definitive answer, even if not the one that I was hoping to find. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 year

3
2
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Re: most direct Unix descendant

by Douglas McIlroy

Eloquently put. Amen! doug > Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix, > anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park. Today, everything > is GUI and nothing can be automated easily or, most of the time, > not at all. > Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and complexity. > It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most

1 year

9
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Draft: London and Reiser's UNIX/32V paper, reconstructed

by G. Branden Robinson

Hi folks, Reiser and London's paper documenting their preparation of UNIX/32V, a port of Seventh Edition Unix to the VAX-11/780, is an important milestone in Unix development--as much I think for its frank critique of C as "portable assembly" as for the status of the system documented: the last common ancestor of the BSD and System V branches of development. Because the only version I've ever seen of this paper is a scan of, possibly, a photocopy several generations removed from the original, I thought I'd throw an OCR tool at it and see about reconstructing it, not just for posterity but to put the groff implementation of mm to the test. So even if someone has a beautiful scan of this document elsewhere, this exercise remains worthwhile to me for what it has shown me about Documenter's Workbench mm and groff's mostly compatible reimplementation thereof. Please find attached my first draft of the reconstruction as an mm document as well as a PDF rendered by bleeding edge groff. I did not attempt to fix _any_ typos, solecisms, or non-idiomatic *roff usage (like the employment of hyphens as arithmetic signs or operators) in this document. I may have introduced errors, however, due to human fallibility or incorrect inferences about what lay beneath scanning artifacts. Hence its draft status. I welcome review. Assuming this reconstruction survives peer scrutiny, I aim to put it up on GitHub as I did Kernighan & Cherry's "Typesetting Mathematics" paper.[1] For the casual reader, I extract my documentary annotations below. For groff list subscribers, I will add, because people are accustomed to me venturing radical suggestions for reforms of macro packages, I suggest that we can get rid of groff mm's "MOVE" and "PGFORM" extensions. They're buggy (as the man page has long conceded), and I don't think anyone ever mastered them, not even their author. I rewrote "0.MT", essential to rendering of this document, without requiring them at all. I _tried_ to use them, but "MOVE" in particular introduced baffling errors in vertical spacing. When I threw it aside to attack head-on the layout problems facing me, things got easier. Further, simple caching and restoration of `.i` and `.l` register values (when multiple changes were being made to them within a macro) obviated `PGFORM`. I'm not sure that it is tractable to idiot-proof manipulations of basic layout parameters like these, as these macros seem to have tried to do. If a document author wants to seize control of page layout from a full-service macro package and reach deep into the guts of the formatter, they should glove up and put things back where they found them. My opinion. .\" London & Reiser's UNIX/32V porting paper .\" .\" Reconstruction in groff mm (but DWB 3.3 mm compatible) .\" from scanned/OCRed text by G. Branden Robinson, June 2024 .\" .\" The original scan shows no evidence of superscript usage, except on .\" the cover sheet where "TM" superscripts "UNIX". .\" .\" Some differences may arise due to changes in the mm macro package .\" itself from its PWB incarnation (ca. 1978) and DWB 3.3 (July 1992). .\" Thanks to Dan Plassche for the history. .\" https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2022-March/025545.html .\" .\" The groff reimplementation of mm was undertaken mostly from .\" 1991-1999 (by Juergen Haegg), based on the DWB documentation. It .\" added features but also parameterized many aspects of package .\" behavior, for example to facilitate easy localization. Later, .\" Werner Lemberg and G. Branden Robinson contributed enhancements, bug .\" fixes, and improvements to the groff_mm(7) man page. .\" .\" I anticipate adding further parameters to groff mm to better .\" emulate the old version of mm used by this paper. (For example, the .\" format of the caption applied to the reference page differs between .\" PWB mm and DWB 3.3.) Where this document exercises such extensions, .\" they should be prefixed with a `do` request so that AT&T troff will .\" ignore them. .\" Override: "By default, ... bold stand-alone headings are printed .\" in a size one point smaller than the body." .\" XXX: The cover "page" (more like a header block) is a mess when .\" typeset with groff mm, and outright horrific in nroff mode. GBR has .\" fixes for these pending for push to GNU Savannah's Git repository. .\" .\" XXX: Original scan capitalizes "Subject:"; DWB 3.3 renders it in .\" full lowercase. .\" .\" XXX: Original scan bears a "TM:" heading for the technical .\" memorandum number(s). DWB 3.3 lacks this. .\" .\" Memorandum captions may have changed from PWB to DWB 3.3 mm. groff .\" mm has changed in Git (June 2024) to use the captions documented in .\" the DWB 3.3 manual. We override the default for authenticity. .\" XXX: Original scan sets reference marks as a typewriter might, at .\" normal size on the baseline between square brackets. DWB 3.3 .\" converts them to superscripts but keeps the brackets(!). groff mm .\" should add a "Rfstyle" register to control this. .\" 0 = auto (nroff/troff); 1 = bracket; 2 = superscript; 3 = both. (?) \" straight quotes in original .ns \" XXX: Hack to keep `VL` from adding pre-list vertical space. \" recte: *(\-\-p+i) \" bad ellipsis spacing in original \" - missing; error in text or scanner fubar? \" recte: \-1 \" sic .\" Either `AL` worked differently in 1978 mm, or didn't exist, or .\" somebody wanted this list _just so_. .\"AL "" 5 .\" XXX: Scan has signatures set farther to the right, not centered as .\" DWB 3.3 mm sets them. groff mm follows DWB here. .\" .\" XXX: PWB and DWB 3.3 put the signature names in bold; groff mm sets .\" them at normal weight. Bug. .\" .\" XXX: Scan has a couple of vees between the signature line and the .\" flush left secretarial annotation. groff mm sets the annotation on .\" the same line as the last author but also puts its information in .\" the cover page header as DWB 3.3 does, described next. DWB 3.3: (1) .\" omits the secretarial annotation altogether, putting it up in the .\" cover page header under the authors' names; (2) does not use author .\" initials (in the cover header) for this memorandum type; (3) puts .\" the department number after "Org." on the line under the author .\" name; (4) puts the abbreviated AT&T site name below that. Should we .\" consider a `Sgstyle` register for groff mm? .\" .\" XXX: groff mm organizes the department and site name differently .\" from DWB 3.3 in the cover head, and I don't see any reason for it .\" to. Fix this. .\" XXX: Scan only breaks between notations; DWB 3.3 and groff put 1v .\" between them. Should we consider an `Nss` register for groff mm? .\" XXX: Scan has references caption set flush left, in mixed case and .\" bold (just like `HU`). DWB 3.3 and groff center it and set it in .\" full caps in italics (at normal weight). If there were a way to .\" dump the accumulated reference list independently of rendering the .\" caption, that would give the author much more flexibility. .\" .\" XXX: The numbered reference list does not look like one produced .\" with `RL` nor with `AL`. The numeric tag is left-aligned within the .\" paragraph indentation. groff mm aligns it to the right. .\" .\" DWB 3.3 and Heirloom mm don't seem to honor `.RP 2` as the DWB .\" manual documents. They start the table immediately after the .\" reference list and go haywire boxing the table. Bug. Regards, Branden [1] https://github.com/g-branden-robinson/retypesetting-mathematics

1 year

2
1
0 0

PID 0 and the scheduler

by Will Senn

All, There's an interesting dive into PID 0 linked to from osnews: https://blog.dave.tf/post/linux-pid0/ In the article, the author delves into the history of the scheduler a bit - going back to Unix v4 (his assembly language skills don't go to PDP variants). I like the article for two reasons - 1) it's clarity 2) it points out the self-reinforcing nature of our search ecosystem. I'm left with the question - how did scheduling work in v0-v4? and the observation that search really sucks these days. Later, Will

1 year

2
1
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[tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

The book ``S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics'' (Wadsworth, 1984), by Richard A. Becker and John M. Chambers, and an earlier Bell Labs report in 1981, introduced the S statistical software system that later evolved into the commercial S-Plus system (now defunct, I think), and the vibrant and active R system (https://cran.r-project.org/) that we use at Utah in our statistics courses. Almost 21,000 open-source packages for R are available, and they appear to be the dominant form of statistical software package publication, based on extensive evidence in our bibliography archives that completely cover numerous journals in probability and statistics. I'm interested in looking into the early S source code, if possible, to see how some statistical software that I am freshly implementing for high-precision computation was handled at Bell Labs more than four decades ago. Does anyone on this list know whether the original S system was ever distributed in source code to commercial sites, and academic sites, that licensed Unix from Bell Labs in the 1980s? Does that code still exist (and is openly accessible), or has it been lost? As with the B, C, D, and R programming languages, it is rather hard for Web search engines to find things that are known only by a single letter of the alphabet. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 year

1
0
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diving into vi (nvi) - some observations from a slow learner

by Will Senn

Well, I really dove into using vi by way of nvi this past week and I have to say... the water's fine. It turns out that vi is a much simpler editor to understand and use (but no less powerful) than it's great grandchild, vim. To be fair, vim is an interesting editor and having used it off and on since the mid '90s, it's very familiar... but its powers? difficult to attain. vim stands as an excellent example of just how far you can take a product that works, keeping its core, but expanding it in all directions. No matter how much I tried to grasp its essence, it alluded me. The online help files seemed inscrutable to me, mixing environment settings, ex commands, ex mode commands, vi motions, insert mode commands in ways that seemed quite confusing to me. I know that I'm probably among a select few vim users that love it without really having a clue as to how it works. My best resource has been the web and search, but of late I've been wanting more. That's what drove me on this quest to really dig in to how things used to work and nvi is the best surrogate of the old ways that I could find (well, excluding heirloom vi, the traditional vi, which I've confirmed works pretty much the same way as nvi, with lisp support and without a few nice-to-haves nvi has). Anyway, here's something I worked out, after much travail - vi appears to be all about modes, movement, counts, operators, registers, and screens (which I found very weird at first, but simple in retrospect)... with these fundamentals down, it seems like you can do anything and I mean anything... and all of the other functions are just bolted on for the purpose of making their specific tasks work. Getting this out of the existing documentation was a mess. Thankfully the nvi docs (based on the 4.4 docs) are much slimmer and better organized. Even so, they make assumptions of the reader that I don't seem to fit. Take motions as prolly the most glaring example - all of the docs I've ever seen organize these by logical units of text (words, paras, etc), personally and apparently persistently, I think of motion as directed, so it took me a lot of experimentation, head scratching, and writing things out several times in several different ways to realize I could represent the idea on a single notecard as (some commands appear in multiple lines): Leftward motions - [[, {, (, 0, ^|_, B, b, h|^H Rightward Movement - l|SP, e, E, w, W, $, ), }, ]] Upward motions - 1G, ^B, H, ^U, -, k | ^P Downward motions - G, ^F, L, ^D, ^M | +, j | ^J | ^N Absolute - | G Relative - %, H, M, L Marks - m, ', `, '', `` Keeping in mind that movements left-to-right are - section, para, sentence, line, text, word and endword (big, and small), and letter. And up and down are - file, screen, in screen (HML), half-screen, chars-in-line, and line. For me, this inversion from units of motion to direction of motion put forty some-odd commands in much closer reach for me. Looking back at the vim documentation, I see how its sheer volume and the way it is organized got in the way of my seeing the forest. Thankfully, in nvi, there are two incredibly useful ex commands to help - exu[sage] and viu[sage]. I simply printed these out and worked with them making the experimental assumption that they would serve as a baseline that represented the full capabilities of vi... and sure enough, after working and working with them, I am pretty confident they are sufficient for any editing task. Wow, who knew? I loved vi, but now, I'm starting to really appreciate it's simplicity?! I can't believe those words are coming out of my mouth. I never thought of it as simple... those movement commands were far too numerous as I understood them. Are there things I miss from vim? Sure, I miss command line completion in ex mode, I want my help text to appear in a window where I can search, I would like better window control. But, I think I'll stick with nvi a while until I really nail it down. Then all of the cool stuff that vim offers, or neovim, will seem like icing on the cake that is vi. Thanks to Ken Thompson for writing a work of art that serves as the true core of this editor, to Bill Joy for his great work in extending it, again to Bill Joy for bringing vi to life, and to Mary Ann for the macros and making it accessible to the rest of us, and others who contributed. It's 2024 and I still can't find a better terminal editor than vi... as it existed in the late '80s or as it exists today as nvi/vim/neovim. Amazing piece of software. Off to figure out tags!! Arg, seems like it oughtta be really useful in my work with source code, why can't I figure it out?! Sheesh. Will

1 year, 1 month

8
9
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Old documentation - still the best

by Will Senn

A small reflection on the marvels of ancient writing... Today, I went to the local Unix user group to see what that was like. I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite rewarding. Learned some new stuff... and won the door prize, a copy of a book entitled "Introducing the UNIX System" by Henry McGilton and Rachel Morgan. I accepted the prize, but said I'd just read it and recycle it for some other deserving unix-phile. As it turns out, I'm not giving it back, I'll contribute another Unix book. I thought it was just some intro unix text and figured I might learn a thing or two and let someone else who needs it more have it after I read it, but it's a V7 book! I haven't seem many of those around and so, I started digging into it and do I ever wish I'd had it when I was first trying to figure stuff out! Great book, never heard of it, or its authors, but hey, I've only read a few thousand tech books. What was really fun, was where I went from there - the authors mentioned some bit about permuted indexes and the programmer's manual... So, I went and grabbed my copy off the shelf and lo and behold, my copy either doesn't have a permuted index or I'm not finding it, I was crushed. But, while I was digging around the manual, I came across Section 9 - Quick UNIX Reference! Are you kidding me?!! How many years has it taken me to gain what knowledge I have? and here, in 20 pages is the most concise reference manual I've ever seen. Just the SH, TROFF and NROFF sections are worth the effort of digging up this 40 year old text. Anyhow, following on the heels of a recent dive into v7 and Ritchie's setting up unix v7 documentation, I was yet again reminded of the golden age of well written technical documents. Oh and I guess my recent perusal of more modern "heavy weight" texts (heavy by weight, not content, and many hundreds of pages long) might have made me more appreciative of concision - I long for the days of 300 page and shorter technical books :). In case you think I overstate - just got through a pair of TCL/TK books together clocking in at 1565 pages. Thank you Henry McGilton, Rachel Morgan, and Dennis Ritchie and Steve Bourne and other folks of the '70s and '80s for keeping it concise. As a late to the party unix enthusiast, I greatly value your work and am really thankful you didn't write like they do now... Later, Will

1 year, 1 month

6
8
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CSRC Involvement in Non-UNIX AT&T Software Projects

by Douglas McIlroy

> was there ever any crossover regarding UNIX folks applying their developments to other non-UNIX AT&T systems Besides Sandy Fraser's long-term effort to advance digital communication (as distinct from digital transmission), there was TPC; see TUHS https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-April/020802.html and other mentions of TPC in the TUHS archives. Ken Thompson did considerable handholding for early adopters of Unix for applications within the Bell System, notably tracking automatic trouble reports from switching systems and managing the workflow of craftspeople in a wire center. Bob Morris's intimate participation in a submarine signal-processing project that Bell Labs contracted to produce for the US Navy set him on a career path that led to becoming chief scientist at NSA's National Computer Security Center. Gerard Holtzmann collaborated to instill model-checking in switching and transmission projects. Andrew Hume spent much time with AT&T's call records. Lorinda Cherry single-handedly automated the analysis of call centers' notes on customer contacts, This enabled detection of significant human-engineering and public-relations problems. An important part of my role as a department head was to maintain contacts with development labs so that R and D were mutually aware of each other's problems and expertise. This encouraged consulting visits, internships, and occasionally extended collaboration or specific research projects as recounted above. Doug

1 year, 1 month

1
0
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Proliferation of book print styles

by Will Senn

Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and bemoaning the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days and what might have gone wrong with book production that got us where we are today. First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors and early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print on demand... do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did you maybe put too much power into the hands of folks who probably shouldn't have that power? But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot metal typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all recall how it went down? Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area of ease of creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and accurate since 1980? I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever bound to the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for TUHS and isn't yet COFF :). Later, Will

1 year, 1 month

6
10
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Re: Proliferation of book print styles

by Douglas McIlroy

> Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of markup? I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming into prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use. Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, but we weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's potential for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus fostering portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on terminals and in book form or technical papers as TMs and as journal articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. (Microsoft Word clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.) Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for unanticipated purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt. Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?) Doug

1 year, 1 month

15
17
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CSRC Involvement in Non-UNIX AT&T Software Projects

by segaloco

I'm reading about the Automatic Intercept System as discussed in BSTJ Vol. 53 No. 1 this evening. It is a stored program control call handling system designed to respond to calls with potential forwarding or disconnection messages. Reading through the description of the operating system for AIS got me wondering: What with the growing experience in the CSRC regarding kernel technologies and systems programming, was there ever any crossover regarding UNIX folks applying their developments to other non-UNIX AT&T systems projects or vice versa, perhaps folks who worked primarily on switching and support software bringing things over to the UNIX development camp? In other words, was there personnel cross-pollination between Bell System UNIX programmers and the folks working on stuff like AIS, ESS switching software, etc.? Or were the aims and implementation of such projects so different that the resources were relatively siloed? I would imagine some of these projects were at least developed using UNIX given the popularity and demands of PWB. That's just my hunch though, some BSTJs also describe software development and maintenance taking place on S/360 and S/370 machines and various PDPs. Indeed the development process for AIS mentioned above, as of late 1971, involved assembly via S/360 software and then system maintenance and debugging via an attached PDP-9. - Matt G.

1 year, 1 month

2
1
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Mike Karels has died

by Chet Ramey

Sad, horrible news. https://www.facebook.com/groups/BSDCan/permalink/10159552565206372/ -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

1 year, 1 month

3
2
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Wiki Page on UNIX Standards

by segaloco

Good day everyone, I just wanted to share that I've put up a bit of info as well as some book covers concerning UNIX standards that were published from the 80s til now: https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:standards I did my best to put down a bit of information about the /usr/group, POSIX, SVID, and SUS/Open Group standards, although there's certainly more to each story than what I put down there. Still, hopefully it serves to lay out a bit of the history of the actual standards produced over time. I'm kicking myself because one of the things I could've produced a picture of but didn't save at the time is the cover of IEEE 1003.2, a copy of this popped up on eBay some time in the past year and for reasons I can't recall I didn't order it, nor did I save the picture from the auction at the time. In any case, if anyone has any published standards that are not visually represented in this article, I'm happy to add any photos or scans you can provide to the page. Also pardon if the bit on spec 1170/SUS may be shorter than the others. Admittedly even having most of this on the desk in front of me right now, I'm fuzzy on the lines between POSIX, the Single UNIX Specification, the "Open Group Specification", spec 1170, etc. or if these are all names that ultimately just refer to different generations of the same thing. Part of getting this information put down is hoping someone will be along to correct inaccuracies :) Anywho, that's all for now. Feel free to suggest any corrections or additions! - Matt G.

1 year, 1 month

1
0
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Fwd: [ih] Mike Karels has died

by Dan Cross

FYI, this just got passed by Vint Cerf. Very sad news. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: vinton cerf via Internet-history <internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org> Date: Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 3:18 PM Subject: [ih] Mike Karels has died To: internet-history <internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org> Mike Karels died on Sunday. I don’t have any details other than: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BSDCan/permalink/10159552565206372/ https://www.gearty-delmore.com/obituaries/michael-mike-karels Mike was deeply involved in the Berkeley BSD releases as I recall, after he inherited the TCP/IP implementation for Unix from Bill Joy (am I remembering that correctly?). RIP v -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

1 year, 1 month

3
2
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Vi Quick Reference card for 4.4 BSD

by Will Senn

Today after trying to decipher the online help for vim and neovim, I decided I'd had enough and I opted for nvi - the bug for bug vi compatible that I've used for so long on FreeBSD. It handles cursor keys, these days (my biggest gripe back when, now I'm not so sure it's an improvement). It's in-app help pages are about 300 lines long, the docs are just four of the 4.4 docs: An Introduction to Display Editing with VI, Edit: A tutorial, EX Reference Manual, and VI-EX Reference Manual - all very well written and understandable. It does everything I really need it to do without the million and one extensions and "enhancements" the others offer. In doing the docs research, I found many, many references to a "/Vi Quick Reference card"/ in the various manpages and docs. I googled and googled some more and of course got thousands of hits (really many thousands), but I can't seem to find the actual card referenced. I'm pretty sure what I want to find is a scanned image or pdf of the card for 4.4bsd. Do y'all happen to know of where I might find the golden quick ref card for vi from back in the 4.4bsd days or did it even really exist? Will

1 year, 1 month

7
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Re: Old documentation - still the best

by Douglas McIlroy

I keep Lomuto and Lomuto, "A Unix Primer", Prentice-Hall (1983) on my shelf, not as a reference, but because I like to savor the presentation. The Lomutos manage to impart the Unix ethos while maintaining focus on the title in a friendly style that is nevertheless succinct and accurate. Doug

1 year, 1 month

2
1
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OS and vendor identification

by Michael Kjörling

I spotted this elsewhere and thought that maybe someone here might be able to contribute. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/config-patches/2024-05/msg00022.html -- Michael Kjörling 🔗 https://michael.kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

1 year, 1 month

3
2
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IN/ix

by Seth Morabito

A few years ago, someone -- and I've forgotten who, forgive me -- kindly gave me a copy of the source code for a UNIX for the AT&T PC6300 called IN/ix, developed by INTERACTIVE Systems. I have found precious little about this system online. Apparently the PC/ix UNIX for the IBM PC XT is fairly well preserved, but I can't find much about IN/ix. For what it's worth, the login herald in the source code reads: "IN/ix Office System (c) Copyright INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. 1983, 1988" Presumably this was PC/ix, but targeting the AT&T 6300? Does anyone have any more knowledge of IN/ix? If you're interested in digging into it yourself, I've dropped the source here: https://archives.loomcom.com/pc6300/ (N.B.: All the files inside the zip are compressed, that's just how I got it) -Seth -- Seth Morabito * Poulsbo, WA * https://loomcom.com/

1 year, 1 month

1
0
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Was curses ported to Seventh Edition Unix?

by Douglas McIlroy

> Does anyone here have any source material they can point me to > documenting the existence of a port of BSD curses to Unix Version 7? Curses appears in the v8 manual but not v7. Of course a conclusion that it was not ported to v7 turns on dates. Does v7 refer to a point in time or an interval that extended until we undertook to prepare the v8 manual? Obviously curses was ported during or before that interval. If curses was available when the v7 manual was prepared, I (who edited both editions) evidently was unaware of any dependence on it then. Doug

1 year, 1 month

7
14
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Did UNIX Ever Touch SPC-SWAP, EPL, or EPLX (1A Languages)?

by segaloco

So I've been doing a bit of reading on 1A and 4ESS technologies lately, getting a feel for the state of things just prior to 3B and 5ESS popping onto the scene, and came across some BSTJ references to the programming environments involved in the 4ESS and TSPS No. 1 systems. The general assembly system targeting the 1A machine language was known as SPC-SWAP (SWitching Assembly Program)[1](p. 206) and ran under OS/360/370, with editing typically performed in QED. This then gave way to the EPL (ESS Programming Language) and ultimately EPLX (EPL eXtra)[2](p. 1)[3](p. 8) languages which, among other things, were used for later 4ESS work with cross- compilers for at least TSS/360 by the sounds of it. Are there any recollections of attempts by the Bell System to rebase any of these 1A-targeting environments into UNIX, or by the time UNIX was being considered more broadly for Bell System projects, was 3B/5ESS technology well on the way, rendering attempting to move entrenched IBM-based environments for the older switching computation systems moot? For the record, in addition to the evolution of ESS to the 5ESS generation, a revision of TSPS, 1B, was also introduced which was rebased on the 3B20D processor and utilized the same 3B cross-compilation SGS under UNIX as other 3B- targeted applications[4]. Interestingly, the paper on software development in [4](p. 109) still makes reference to Programmer's Workbench as of 1982, implying that nomenclature may have still been the norm at some Bell Labs sites such as Naperville, Illinois, although I can't tell if they're referring to PWB as in the branch of UNIX or the environment of make, sccs, etc. Additionally, is anyone aware of surviving accessible specimens of SWAP assembly, EPL, or EPLX code or literature beyond the BSTJ references and paper referenced in the IEEE library below? Thanks for any insights! - Matt G. [1] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V58N06_1… [2] - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/810323 [3] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V60N06_1… [4] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V62N03_1…

1 year, 1 month

2
2
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Re: A fuzzy awk

by Douglas McIlroy

> Doug McIlroy was generating random regular expressions Actually not. I exhaustively (within limits) tested an RE recognizer without knowingly generating any RE either mechanically or by hand. The trick: From recursive equations (easily derived from the grammar of REs), I counted how many REs exist up to various limits on token counts, Then I generated all strings that satisfied those limits, turned the recognizer loose on them and counted how many it accepted. Any disagreement of counts revealed the existence (but not any symptom) of bugs. Unlike most diagnostic techniques, this scheme produces a certificate of (very high odds on) correctness over a representative subdomain. The scheme also agnostically checks behavior on bad inputs as well as good. It does not, however, provide a stress test of a recognizer's capacity limits. And its exponential nature limits its applicability to rather small domains. (REs have only 5 distinct kinds of token.) Doug

1 year, 1 month

12
14
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Test, test

by Warren Toomey

Just checking that the TUHS mailing list is still working. It's been awfully quiet! Cheers, Warren

1 year, 1 month

13
13
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Was curses ported to Seventh Edition Unix?

by G. Branden Robinson

Hi folks, I'm finding it difficult to find any direct sources on the question in the subject line. Does anyone here have any source material they can point me to documenting the existence of a port of BSD curses to Unix Version 7? I know that curses made it into 2.9BSD for the PDP-11, but that's not quite the same thing. There are comments in System V Release 2's curses.h file[1][2] (very different from 4BSD's[3]) that suggest some effort to accommodate Version 7's terminal driver. So I would _presume_ that curses got ported to Version 7. But that's System V, right when it started diverging from BSD curses, and moreover, presumption is not evidence. Even personal accounts/anecdotes would be helpful. Maybe some of you _wrote_ curses applications for Version 7 machines. Regards, Branden [1] System III apparently did not have curses at all. Both it and 4BSD were released in 1980. System V Release 1 doesn't seem to, either. [2] https://github.com/ryanwoodsmall/oldsysv/blob/master/sysvr2-vax/include/cur… [3] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4BSD/usr/include/curses.h

1 year, 1 month

5
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Re: Was curses ported to Seventh Edition Unix?

by Steve Simon

with my pedantic head on… The “7th Edition” was the name of the Perkin Elmer port (nee Interdata), derived from Richard Miller’s work. This was Unix Version 7 from the labs, with a v6 C compiler, with vi, csh, and curses from 2.4BSD (though we where never 100% sure about this version). You never forget your first Unix :-) -Steve

1 year, 1 month

1
0
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Running v7 in Open-SIMH - update for 2024

by Will Senn

All, I can't believe it's been 9 years since I wrote up my original notes on getting Research Unix v7 running in SIMH. Crazy how time flies. Well, this past week Clem found a bug in my scripts that create tape images. It seem like they were missing a tape mark at the end. Not a showstopper by any means, but we like to keep a clean house. So, I applied his fixes and updated the scripts along with the resultant tape image and Warren has updated them in the archive: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Keith_Bostic_v7/ I've also updated the note to address the fixes, to use the latest version of Open-SIMH on Linux Mint 21.3 "Virginia" (my host of choice these days), and to bring the transcripts up to date: https://decuser.github.io/unix/research-unix/v7/2024/05/23/research-unix-v7… Later, Will

1 year, 1 month

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Gordon Bell has died

by John P. Linderman

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-dead.html?unloc…

1 year, 1 month

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Re: A fuzzy awk.

by Serissa

Well this is obviously a hot button topic. AFAIK I was nearby when fuzz-testing for software was invented. I was the main advocate for hiring Andy Payne into the Digital Cambridge Research Lab. One of his little projects was a thing that generated random but correct C programs and fed them to different compilers or compilers with different switches to see if they crashed or generated incorrect results. Overnight, his tester filed 300 or so bug reports against the Digital C compiler. This was met with substantial pushback, but it was a mostly an issue that many of the reports traced to the same underlying bugs. Bill McKeemon expanded the technique and published "Differential Testing of Software" https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~bylvisa1/cs97/f13/Papers/DifferentialTesting… Andy had encountered the underlying idea while working as an intern on the Alpha processor development team. Among many other testers, they used an architectural tester called REX to generate more or less random sequences of instructions, which were then run through different simulation chains (functional, RTL, cycle-accurate) to see if they did the same thing. Finding user-accessible bugs in hardware seems like a good thing. The point of generating correct programs (mentioned under the term LangSec here) goes a long way to avoid irritating the maintainers. Making the test cases short is also maintainer-friendly. The test generator is also in a position to annotate the source with exactly what it is supposed to do, which is also helpful. -L

1 year, 1 month

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A fuzzy awk. (Was: The 'usage: ...' message.)

by Douglas McIlroy

I'm surprised by nonchalance about bad inputs evoking bad program behavior. That attitude may have been excusable 50 years ago. By now, though, we have seen so much malicious exploitation of open avenues of "undefined behavior" that we can no longer ignore bugs that "can't happen when using the tool correctly". Mature software should not brook incorrect usage. "Bailing out near line 1" is a sign of defensive precautions. Crashes and unjustified output betray their absence. I commend attention to the LangSec movement, which advocates for rigorously enforced separation between legal and illegal inputs. Doug

1 year, 1 month

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The 'usage: ...' message. (Was: On Bloat...)

by Douglas McIlroy

>> Another non-descriptive style of error message that I admired was that >> of Berkeley Pascal's syntax diagnostics. When the LR parser could not >> proceed, it reported where, and automatically provided a sample token >> that would allow the parsing to progress. I found this uniform >> convention to be at least as informative as distinct hand-crafted >> messages, which almost by definition can't foresee every contingency. >> Alas, this elegant scheme seems not to have inspired imitators. > The hazard with this approach is that the suggested syntactic correction > might simply lead the user farther into the weeds I don't think there's enough experience to justify this claim. Before I experienced the Berkeley compiler, I would have thought such bad outcomes were inevitable in any language. Although the compilers' suggestions often bore little or no relationship to the real correction, I always found them informative. In particular, the utterly consistent style assured there was never an issue of ambiguity or of technical jargon. The compiler taught me Pascal in an evening. I had scanned the Pascal Report a couple of years before but had never written a Pascal program. With no manual at hand, I looked at one program to find out what mumbo-jumbo had to come first and how to print integers, then wrote the rest by trial and error. Within a couple of hours I had a working program good enough to pass muster in an ACM journal. An example arose that one might think would lead "into the weeds". The parser balked before 'or' in a compound Boolean expression like 'a=b and c=d or x=y'. It couldn't suggest a right paren because no left paren had been seen. Whatever suggestion it did make (perhaps 'then') was enough to lead me to insert a remote left paren and teach me that parens are required around Boolean-valued subexpressions. (I will agree that this lesson might be less clear to a programming novice, but so might be many conventional diagnostics, e.g. "no effect".) Doug

1 year, 1 month

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Re: On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools

by Douglas McIlroy

I just revisited this ironic echo of Mies van der Rohe's aphorism, "Less is more". % less --help | wc 298 Last time I looked, the line count was about 220. Bloat is self-catalyzing. What prompted me to look was another disheartening discovery. The "small special tool" Gnu diff has a 95-page manual! And it doesn't cover the option I was looking up (-h). To be fair, the manual includes related programs like diff3(1), sdiff(1) and patch(1), but the original manual for each fit on one page. Doug

1 year, 1 month

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The 'usage: ...' message. (Was: On Bloat...)

by Douglas McIlroy

> was ‘usage: ...’ adopted from an earlier system? "Usage" was one of those lovely ideas, one exposure to which flips its status from unknown to eternal truth. I am sure my first exposure was on Unix, but I don't remember when. Perhaps because it radically departs from Ken's "?" in qed/ed, I have subconsciously attributed it to Dennis. The genius of "usage" and "?" is that they don't attempt to tell one what's wrong. Most diagnostics cite a rule or hidden limit that's been violated or describe the mistake (e.g. "missing semicolon") , sometimes raising more questions than they answer. Another non-descriptive style of error message that I admired was that of Berkeley Pascal's syntax diagnostics. When the LR parser could not proceed, it reported where, and automatically provided a sample token that would allow the parsing to progress. I found this uniform convention to be at least as informative as distinct hand-crafted messages, which almost by definition can't foresee every contingency. Alas, this elegant scheme seems not to have inspired imitators. Doug

1 year, 1 month

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If forking is bad, how about buffering?

by Douglas McIlroy

So fork() is a significant nuisance. How about the far more ubiquitous problem of IO buffering? On Sun, May 12, 2024 at 12:34:20PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > But it does come down to the same argument as > https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.… The Microsoft manifesto says that fork() is an evil hack. One of the cited evils is that one must remember to flush output buffers before forking, for fear it will be emitted twice. But buffering is the culprit, not the victim. Output buffers must be flushed for many other reasons: to avoid deadlock; to force prompt delivery of urgent output; to keep output from being lost in case of a subsequent failure. Input buffers can also steal data by reading ahead into stuff that should go to another consumer. In all these cases buffering can break compositionality. Yet the manifesto blames an instance of the hazard on fork()! To assure compositionality, one must flush output buffers at every possible point where an unknown downstream consumer might correctly act on the received data with observable results. And input buffering must never ingest data that the program will not eventually use. These are tough criteria to meet in general without sacrificing buffering. The advent of pipes vividly exposed the non-compositionality of output buffering. Interactive pipelines froze when users could not provide input that would force stuff to be flushed until the input was informed by that very stuff. This phenomenon motivated cat -u, and stdio's convention of line buffering for stdout. The premier example of input buffering eating other programs' data was mitigated by "here documents" in the Bourne shell. These precautions are mere fig leaves that conceal important special cases. The underlying evil of buffered IO still lurks. The justification is that it's necessary to match the characteristics of IO devices and to minimize system-call overhead. The former necessity requires the attention of hardware designers, but the latter is in the hands of programmers. What can be done to mitigate the pain of border-crossing into the kernel? L4 and its ilk have taken a whack. An even more radical approach might flow from the "whitepaper" at www.codevalley.com. In any even the abolition of buffering is a grand challenge. Doug

1 year, 1 month

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Re: Be there a "remote diff" utility?

by Douglas McIlroy

With the disclaimer that I have never used it, I note that FUSE/sshfs allows one to mount remote file systems. Doug

1 year, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] Re: On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools

by Adam Thornton

On Sat, May 11, 2024 at 2:35 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote: > > I bet most of the young'uns would not be trying to do this as a shell > script, but using the Cloud SDK with perl or python or Go, which is > *way* more bloaty than using /bin/sh. > > So while some of us old farts might be bemoaning the death of the Unix > philosophy, perhaps part of the reality is that the Unix philosophy > were ideal for a simpler time, but might not be as good of a fit > today I'm finding myself in agreement. I might well do this with jq, but as you point out, you're using the jq DSL pretty extensively to pull out the fields. On the other hand, I don't think that's very different than piping stuff through awk, and I don't think anyone feels like _that_ would be cheating. And jq -L is pretty much equivalent to awk -F, which is how I would do this in practice, rather than trying to inline the whole jq bit. But it does come down to the same argument as https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.… And it is true that while fork() is a great model for single-threaded pipeline-looking tasks, it's not really what you want for an interactive multithreaded application on your phone's GUI. Oddly, I'd have a slightly different reason for reaching for Python (which is probably how I'd do this anyway), and that's the batteries-included bit. If I write in Python, I've got the gcloud api available as a Python module, and I've got a JSON parser also available as a Python module (but I bet all the JSON unmarshalling is already handled in the gcloud library), and I don't have to context-switch to the same degree that I would if I were stringing it together in the shell. Instead of "make an HTTP request to get JSON text back, then parse that with repeated calls to jq", I'd just get an object back from the instance fetch request, pick out the fields I wanted, and I'd be done. I'm afraid only old farts write anything in Perl anymore. The kids just mutter "OK, Boomer" when you try to tell them how much better CPAN was than PyPi. And it sure feels like all the cool kids have abandoned Go for Rust, although Go would be a perfectly reasonable choice for this task as well (and would look a lot like Python: get an object back, pick off the useful fields). Adam

1 year, 1 month

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nl section delimiters

by Douglas McIlroy

> But it misses the coolness of the empty true(1). Too cool. With an empty true(1), execl("true", "true", 0) is out in the cold. Doug

1 year, 1 month

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Re: On the uniqueness of DMR's C compiler

by Douglas McIlroy

There was nothing unique about the size or the object code of Dennis's C compiler. In the 1960s, Digitek had a thriving business of making Fortran compilers for all manner of machines. To optimize space usage, the compilers' internal memory model comprised variable-size movable tables, called "rolls". To exploit this non-native architecture, the compilers themselves were interpreted, although they generated native code. Bob McClure tells me he used one on an SDS910 that had 8K 16-bit words. Dennis was one-up on Digitek in having a self-maintaining compiler. Thus, when he implemented an optimization, the source would grow, but the compiler binary might even shrink thanks to self-application. Doug

1 year, 1 month

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nl section delimiters

by David Arnold

nl(1) uses the notable character sequences “\:\:\:”, “\:\:”, and “\:” to delimit header, body, and trailer sections within its input. I wondered if anyone was able to shed light on the reason those were adopted as the defaults? I would have expected perhaps something compatible with *roff (like, .\” something). FreeBSD claims nl first appeared in System III (although it previously claimed SVR2), but I haven’t dug into the implementation any further. Thanks in advance, d

1 year, 1 month

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Re: On the uniqueness of DMR's C compiler

by Paul McJones

> On Thu, 9 May 2024 22:40:28 +0200, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl <mailto:pnr@planet.nl>> wrote: > > .... Digging into this more led me to a 1970 report "Programming Languages and their Compilers, Preliminary Notes” by John Cocke and J.T. Schwartz: > https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/paper/Bright-FORTRANC… Actually, the link is here: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/CockeSchwartz_ProgLan… And more about Jack Schwartz is here: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/SETL/index.html#Precursors Paul

1 year, 1 month

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On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools

by Clem Cole

While the idea of small tools that do one job well is the core tenant of what I think of as the UNIX philosophy, this goes a bit beyond UNIX, so I have moved this discussion to COFF and BCCing TUHS for now. The key is that not all "bloat" is the same (really)—or maybe one person's bloat is another person's preference. That said, NIH leads to pure bloat with little to recommend it, while multiple offerings are a choice. Maybe the difference between the two may be one person's view over another. On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 6:08 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Didn't recognize the command, looked it up. Sigh. > Like Rob -- this was a new one for me, too. I looked, and it is on the SYS3 tape; see: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/man/man1/nl.1 > pr -tn <file> > > seems sufficient for me, but then that raises the question of your > question. > Agreed, that has been burned into the ROMs in my fingers since the mid-1970s 😀 BTW: SYS3 has pr(1) with both switches too (more in a minute) > I've been developing a theory about how the existence of something leads > to things being added to it that you didn't need at all and only thought of > when the original thing was created. > That is a good point, and I generally agree with you. > Bloat by example, if you will. I suspect it will not be a popular theory, > however accurately it may describe the technological world. > Of course, sometimes the new features >>are<< easier (more natural *for some people*). And herein lies the core problem. The bloat is often repetitive, and I suggest that it is often implemented in the wrong place - and usually for the wrong reasons. Bloat comes about because somebody thinks they need some feature and probably doesn't understand that it is already there or how they can use it. But they do know about it, their tool must be set up to exploit it - so they do not need to reinvent it. GUI-based tools are notorious for this failure. Everyone seems to have a built-in (unique) editor, or a private way to set up configuration options et al. But ... that walled garden is comfortable for many users and >>can be<< useful sometimes. Long ago, UNIX programmers learned that looking for $EDITOR in the environment was way better than creating one. Configuration was as ASCII text, stored in /etc for system-wide and dot files in the home for users. But it also means the >>output<< of each tool needs to be usable by each other [*i.e.*, docx or xlx files are a no-no). For example, for many things on my Mac, I do use the GUI-based tools -- there is no doubt they are better integrated with the core Mac system >>for some tasks.<< But only if I obey a set of rules Apple decrees. For instance, this email read is easier much of the time than MH (or the HM front end, for that matter), which I used for probably 25-30 years. But on my Mac, I always have 4 or 5 iterm2(1) open running zsh(1) these days. And, much of my typing (and everything I do as a programmer) is done in the shell (including a simple text editor, not an 'IDE'). People who love IDEs swear by them -- I'm just not impressed - there is nothing they do for me that makes it easier, and I have learned yet another scheme. That said, sadly, Apple is forcing me to learn yet another debugger since none of the traditional UNIX-based ones still work on the M1-based systems. But at least LLDB is in the same key as sdb/dbx/gdb *et al*., so it is a PITA but not a huge thing as, in the end, LLDB is still based on the UNIX idea of a single well-designed and specific to the task tool, to do each job and can work with each other. FWIW: I was recently a tad gob-smacked by the core idea of UNIX and its tools, which I have taken for a fact since the 1970s. It turns out that I've been helping with the PiDP-10 users (all of the PiDPs are cool, BTW). Before I saw UNIX, I was paid to program a PDP-10. In fact, my first UNIX job was helping move programs from the 10 to the UNIX. Thus ... I had been thinking that doing a little PDP-10 hacking shouldn't be too hard to dust off some of that old knowledge. While some of it has, of course, come back. But daily, I am discovering small things that are so natural with a few simple tools can be hard on those systems. I am realizing (rediscovering) that the "build it into my tool" was the norm in those days. So instead of a pr(1) command, there was a tool that created output to the lineprinter. You give it a file, and it is its job to figure out what to do with it, so it has its set of features (switches) - so "bloat" is that each tool (like many current GUI tools) has private ways of doing things. If the maker of tool X decided to support some idea, they would do it like tool Y. The problem, of course, was that tools X and Y had to 'know about' each type of file (in IBM terms, use its "access method"). Yes, the engineers at DEC, in their wisdom, tried to "standardize" those access methods/switches/features >>if you implemented them<< -- but they are not all there. This leads me back to the question Rob raises. Years ago, I got into an argument with Dave Cutler RE: UNIX *vs.* VMS. Dave's #1 complaint about UNIX in those days was that it was not "standardized." Every program was different, and more to Dave's point, there was no attempt to make switches or errors the same [getopt(3) had been introduced but was not being used by most applications). He hated that tar/tp used "keys" and tools like cpio used switches. Dave hated that I/O was so simple - in his world all user programs should use his RMS access method of course [1]. VMS, TOPS, *etc.*, tried to maintain a system-wide error scheme, and users could look things like errors up in a system DB by error number, *etc*. Simply put, VMS is very "top-down." My point with Dave was that by being "bottom-up," the best ideas in UNIX were able to rise. And yes, it did mean some rough edges and repeated implementations of the same idea. But UNIX offered a choice, and while Rob and I like and find: pr -tn perfectly acceptable thank you, clearly someone else desired the features that nl provides. The folks that put together System 3 offer both solutions and let the user choose. This, of course, comes as bloat, but maybe that is a type of bloat so bad? My own thinking is this - get things down to the basics and simplest privatives and then build back up. It's okay to offer choices, as long as the foundation is simple and clean. To me, bloat becomes an issue when you do the same thing over and over again, particularly because you can not utilize what is there already, the worst example is NIH - which happens way more than it should. I think the kind of bloat that GUI tools and TOPS et al. created forces recreation, not reuse. But offering choice and the expense of multiple tools that do the same things strikes me as reasonable/probably a good thing. 1.] BTW: One of my favorite DEC stories WRT to VMS engineering has to do with the RMS I/O system. Supporting C using VMS was a bit of PITA. Eventually, the VMS engineers added Stream I/O - which simplified the C runtime, but it was also made available for all technical languages. Fairly soon after it was released, the DEC Marketing folks discovered almost all new programs, regardless of language, had started to use Stream I/O and many older programs were being rewritten by customers to use it. In fact, inside of DEC itself, the languages group eventually rewrote things like the FTN runtime to use streams, making it much smaller/easier to maintain. My line in the old days: "It's not so bad that ever I/O has offer 1000 options, it's that Dave to check each one for every I/O. It's a classic example of how you can easily build RMS I/O out of stream-based I/O, but the other way around is much harder. My point here is to *use the right primitives*. RMS may have made it easier to build RDB, but it impeded everything else.

1 year, 1 month

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Re: On the uniqueness of DMR's C compiler

by Paul McJones

> On Wed, 8 May 2024 14:12:15 -0400,Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com <mailto:clemc@ccc.com>> wrote: > > FWIW: The DEC Mod-II and Mod-III > were new implementations from DEC WRL or SRC (I forget). They targeted > Alpha and I, maybe Vax. I'd have to ask someone like Larry Stewart or Jeff > Mogul who might know/remember, but I thought that the font end to the DEC > MOD2 compiler might have been partly based on Wirths but rewritten and by > the time of the MOD3 FE was a new one originally written using the previous > MOD2 compiler -- but I don't remember that detail. Michael Powell at DEC WRL wrote a Modula 2 compiler that generated VAX code. Here’s an extract from announcement.d accompanying a 1992 release of the compiler from gatekeeper.dec.com <http://gatekeeper.dec.com/>: The compiler was designed and built by Michael L. Powell, and originally released in 1984. Joel McCormack sped the compiler up, fixed lots of bugs, and swiped/wrote a User's Manual. Len Lattanzi ported the compiler to the MIPS. Later, Paul Rovner and others at DEC SRC designed Modula-2+ (a language extension with exceptions, threads, garbage collection, and runtime type dispatch). The Modula-2+ compiler was originally based on Powell’s compiler. Modula-2+ ran on the VAX. Here’s a DEC SRC research report on Modula-2+: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/tech_reports/SRC-RR-3.pdf Modula-3 was designed at DEC SRC and Olivetti Labs. It had a portable implementation (using the GCC back end) and ran on a number of machines including Alpha. Paul

1 year, 2 months

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[ off topic ] History of US computing leading to 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering

by steve jenkin

Sorry for the dual list post, I don’t who monitors COFF, the proper place for this. There may a good timeline of the early decades of Computer Science and it’s evolution at Universities in some countries, but I’m missing it. Doug McIlroy lived through all this, I hope he can fill in important gaps in my little timeline. It seems from the 1967 letter, defining the field was part of the zeitgeist leading up to the NATO conference. 1949 ACM founded 1958 First ‘freshman’ computer course in USA, Perlis @ CMU 1960 IBM 1400 - affordable & ‘reliable’ transistorised computers arrived 1965 MIT / Bell / General Electric begin Multics project. CMU establishes Computer Sciences Dept. 1967 “What is Computer Science” letter by Newell, Perlis, Simon 1968 “Software Crisis” and 1st NATO Conference 1969 Bell Labs withdraws from Multics 1970 GE's sells computer business, including Multics, to Honeywell 1970 PDP-11/20 released 1974 Unix issue of CACM ========= The arrival of transistorised computers - cheaper, more reliable, smaller & faster - was a trigger for the accelerated uptake of computers. The IBM 1400-series was offered for sale in 1960, becoming the first (large?) computer to sell 10,000 units - a marker of both effective marketing & sales and attractive pricing. The 360-series, IBM’s “bet the company” machine, was in full development when the 1400 was released. ========= Attached is a text file, a reformatted version of a 1967 letter to ’Science’ by Allen Newell, Alan J. Perlis, and Herbert A. Simon: "What is computer science?” <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html> ========= A 1978 masters thesis on Early Australian Computers (back to 1950’s, mainly 1960’s) cites a 17 June 1960 CSIRO report estimating 1,000 computers in the US and 100 in the UK. With no estimate mentioned for Western Europe. The thesis has a long discussion of what to count as a (digital) ‘computer’ - sources used different definitions, resulting in very different numbers, making it difficult to reconcile early estimates, especially across continents & countries. Reverse estimating to 1960 from the “10,000” NATO estimate of 1968, with a 1- or 2-year doubling time, gives a range of 200-1,000, including the “100” in the UK. Licklider and later directors of ARPA’s IPTO threw millions into Computing research in the 1960’s, funding research and University groups directly. [ UCB had many projects/groups funded, including the CSRG creating BSD & TCP/IP stack & tools ] Obviously there was more to the “Both sides of the Atlantic” argument of E.W. Dijkstra and Alan Kay - funding and numbers of installations was very different. The USA had a substantially larger installed base of computers, even per person, and with more university graduates trained in programming, a higher take-up in private sector, not just the public sector and defence, was possible. ========= <https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-history> In September 1949, a constitution was instituted by membership approval. ———— <https://web.archive.org/web/20160317070519/https://www.cs.cmu.edu/link/inst…> In 1958, Perlis began teaching the first freshman-level computer programming course in the United States at Carnegie Tech. In 1965, Carnegie Tech established its Computer Science Department with a $5 million grant from the R.K. Mellon Foundation. Perlis was the first department head. ========= From the 1968 NATO report [pg 9 of pdf ] <http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PDF> Helms: In Europe alone there are about 10,000 installed computers — this number is increasing at a rate of anywhere from 25 per cent to 50 per cent per year. The quality of software provided for these computers will soon affect more than a quarter of a million analysts and programmers. d’Agapeyeff: In 1958 a European general purpose computer manufacturer often had less than 50 software programmers, now they probably number 1,000-2,000 people; what will be needed in 1978? _Yet this growth rate was viewed with more alarm than pride._ (comment) ========= -- 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

1 year, 2 months

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Re: Chaosnet in v8

by Douglas McIlroy

Where did chunix (which contains chaos.c) and several other branches of the v8 /usr/sys tree on TUHS come from? This stuff does not appear in the v8 manual. I don't recall a Lisp machine anywhere near the Unix room, nor any collaborations that involved a Lisp machine. Doug

1 year, 2 months

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Word erase?

by Dan Cross

I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the timing and rationale for the introduction of “word erase” functionality to the kernel terminal driver. My surface skim earlier leads me to believe it came to Unix with 4BSD, but it was not reincorporated into 8th Edition or later, nor did it make it to Plan 9 (which did incorporate ^U for the "line kill" command). TOPS-20 supports it via the familiar ^W, but I'm not sure about other PDP-10 OSes (Lars?). Multics does not support it. VMS does not support it. What was the proximal inspiration? The early terminal drivers seem to use the Multics command editing suite (`#` for erase/backspace, `@` for line kill), though at some point that changed, one presumes as TTYs fell out of favor and display terminals came to the fore. - Dan C.

1 year, 2 months

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Chaosnet in v8

by John Floren

I've been doing some research on Lisp machines and came across an interesting tidbit: there was Chaosnet support in Unix v8, e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/sys/chunix/chaos.c Does anyone remember why that went in? My first guess would be for interoperability with the Symbolics users at Bell Labs (see Bromley's "Lisp Lore", 1986), but that's just speculation. john

1 year, 2 months

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Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

by Marcus Clark

Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link to https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan. I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using cscope on their projects or anything about its development. -Marcus.

1 year, 3 months

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Re: Multiflow Compiler

by Paul McJones

> You can always read Josh Fisher's book on the "Bulldog" compiler, I > believe he did this work at Yale. Are you thinking of John Ellis’s thesis: Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures John R. Ellis February 1985 http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf Fisher was Ellis’s advisor. The thesis was also published in ACM’s Doctoral Dissertation Award: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050340/bulldog/ I believe Ellis still has a tape with his thesis software on it, but I don’t know if he’s been able to read it.

1 year, 3 months

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Old Solaris cdroms/docs/manuals

by Maciej Jan Broniarz

Hello Everyone One of polish academic institutions was getting rid of old IT-related stuff and they were kind enough to give me all Solaris related stuff, including lots (and i mean lots) of installation CD-ROMS, documentations, manuals, and some solaris software, mostly compilers and scientific stuff. If anyone would be interested feel free to contact me and i'd be happy to share - almost everything is in more than a few copies and I have no intention of keeping everything for myself. Currently all of the stuff is located in Warsaw, Poland. Best regards, mjb -- Maciej Jan Broniarz

1 year, 3 months

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Re: *roff hyphenation trivia challenge

by Douglas McIlroy

> [Tex's] oversetting of lines caused by the periodic failure of the > paragraph-justification algorithms drove me nuts. Amen. If Tex can't do what it thinks is a good job, it throws a fit and violates the margin, hoping to force a rewrite. Fortunately, one can shut off the line-break algorithm and simply fill greedily. The command to do so is \sloppy--an ironic descriptor of text that looks better, albeit not up to Tex's discriminating standard. Further irony: when obliged to write in Tex, I have resorted to turning \sloppy mode on globally. Apologies for airing an off-topic pet peeve, Doug

1 year, 3 months

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Multiflow Compiler

by Henry Bent

I happened upon https://old.gustavobarbieri.com.br/trabalhos-universidade/mc722/lowney92mul… and I am curious as to whether any of the original Multiflow compilers survive. I had never heard of them before now, but the fact that they were licensed to so many influential companies makes me think that there might be folks on this list who know of its history. -Henry

1 year, 3 months

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.globl directive -- is this a 35-bit constant?

by ron minnich

ACPI has 4-byte identifiers (guess why!), but I just wondered, writing some assembly: is it globl, not global, or glbl, because globl would be a one-word constant on the PDP-10 (5 7-bit bytes)? Not entirely off track, netbsd at some point (still does?) ran on the PDP-10.

1 year, 3 months

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Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

by Douglas McIlroy

> "BI" fonts can, it seems, largely be traced to the impact > of PostScript There was no room for BI on the C/A/T. It appeared in troff upon the taming of the Linotron 202, just after v7 and five years before PostScript. > Seventh Edition Unix shipped a tc(1) command to help > you preview your troff output with that device before you > spent precious departmental money sending it to the > actual typesetter. Slight exaggeration. It wasn't money, It was time and messing with film cartridges, chemicals, and wet prints. You could buy a lot of typesetter film and developer for the price of a 4014. Doug

1 year, 3 months

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Re: 386 PCC

by Jason Stevens

1 year, 3 months

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386 PCC

by Jason Stevens

I'd been on this whole rabbithole exploration thing of those MIT PCC 8086 uploads that have been on the site & on bitsavers, it had me wondering is there any version of PCC that targeted the 386? While rebuilding all the 8086 port stuff, and MIT PC/IP was fun, it'd be kind of interesting to see if anything that ancient could be forced to work with a DOS Extender.. I know there was the Anders Magnusson one in 2007, although the site is now offline. But surely there must have been another one between 1988/2007? Thanks!

1 year, 3 months

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Re: 386 PCC

by Jason Stevens

1 year, 3 months

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Free Books

by Stephen G Searle

Hi Everyone, I’m cleaning the office and I have the following free books available first-come, first-served (just pay shipping). “Solaris Internals.” Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro. 2007 Second Edition. 1020pp hardbound. (2 copies) “Sun Performance and Tuning - Java and the Internet.“ Adrian Cockcroft and Richard Pettit. 1998 Second Edition. 587pp softbound. “DTrace - Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, MacOSX, and FreeBSD.” Brendan Gregg and Jim Mauro. 2011. 1115 pp softbound. (2 copies) “Oracle Database 11g Release 2 High Availability.” Scott Jesse, Bill Burton, & Bryan Vongray. 2011 Second Edition. 515pp softbound. “Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration - The Complete Reference.” Michael Jang, Harry Foxwell, Christine Tran, & Alan Formy-Duval. 2013. 582pp softbound. (12 copies). NOTE, this is an older edition not the one covering 11.2. “Strategies for Real-Time System Specification.” Derek Hatley & Imtiaz Pirbhai. 1988. 386pp hardbound. “Mathematica.” Stephen Wolfram. 1991 Second Edition. 961pp hardbound. (Anyone want to save this from the landfill?) Please send me mail off-list with your name and address and I’ll let you know shipping cost. I expect to have additional books later this year. Regards, Stephen

1 year, 3 months

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Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

by Paul McJones

> From: Rich Salz <rich.salz(a)gmail.com <mailto:rich.salz@gmail.com>> >> Don't forget the Imagen's >> > > What, no Dover "call key operator"? :) (It was a Xerox product based on > their 9700 copier.) Actually, it was based on a Xerox 7000: "The Dover is strip-down [sic] Xerox 7000 Reduction Duplicator. All optical system, electronics, contact relays, top harness, control console and related components are eliminated from the Xerox 7000. The paper feeder, paper transports, engines, solenoid, paper path sensing switches and related components are not disturbed. …" http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/dover/dover.pdf

1 year, 3 months

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Of /dev/tty8

by Dave Horsfall

Evenin' all... I have a vague recollection that /dev/tty8 was the console in Edition 5 (we only used it briefly until Ed 6 appeared), but cannot find a reference to it; lots of stuff about Penguin/OS though... Something to do with 0-7 being the mux, so "8" was left (remember that /dev/tty and /dev/console didn't exist back then), mayhaps? Thanks. -- Dave

1 year, 3 months

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The Mark Williams Company and Coherent

by Douglas McIlroy

> There was lawyerly concern about the code being stolen. Not always misplaced. There was a guy in Boston who sold Unix look-alike programs. A quick look at the binary revealed perfect correlation with our C source. Coincidentally, DEC had hired this person as a consultant in connection with cross-licensing negotiations with AT&T. Socializing at the end of a day's negotiations, our lawyer somehow managed to turn the conversation to software piracy. He discussed a case he was working on, and happened to have some documents about it in his briefcase. He pulled out a page disassembled binary and a page of source code and showed them to the consultant. After a little study, the consultant confidently opined that the binary was obviously compiled from that source. "Would it surprise you," the lawyer asked, "if I told you that this is yours and that is ours?" The consultant did not attend the following day's meeting. Doug

1 year, 3 months

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The Mark Williams Company and Coherent

by Marc Rochkind

In another thread there's been some discussion of Coherent. I just came across this very detailed history, just posted last month. There's much more to it than I knew. https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-mark-williams-company Marc

1 year, 3 months

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Re: History of non-Bell C compilers?

by Heinz Lycklama

VP/ix ran on both System III and UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2. I do still have a copy of the VP/ix Environment documentation and the diskettes for the software. I have the "Introduction to the VP/ix Environment" for further reference for interested folks. Also found some information about VP/ix on these web pages: 1. https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/11/29/fun-with-vp-ix-under-interactive-unix-s… 2. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/interactive_systems_is_adding_to_vpix_wit… 3. https://manualzz.com/doc/7267897/interactive-unix-system-v-386-r3.2-v4.1---… It's been a long time since I looked at this. Heinz On 3/13/2024 8:53 AM, Clem Cole wrote: > Thanks. Fair enough. You mentioned PC/IX as /ISC's System III/ > > I'm not sure I ever ran ISC's System III port—only the V.3 port - > which was the basis for their ATT, Intel, and IBM work and later sold > directly. I'm fairly sure ISCalso called that port PC/IX, but they > might have added something to say with 386 in the name—I've forgotten. > [Heinz probably can clarify here]. Anyway, this is likely the source > of my thinking. FWIW: The copy of PC/IX for the 386 (which I still > have on a system I have not booted in ages) definitely has VPIX. > ᐧ > > On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 11:28 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > > @Clem Cole <mailto:clemc@ccc.com>, > > I don't remember what it was. But, the XT had an 8088, so > certainly no 386 technology was involved. > > Marc > > On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 8:38 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > > @Marc > > On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 1:18 PM Marc Rochkind > <mrochkind(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > At a trade show, I bought a utility that allowed me to run > PC-DOS under PC/IX. I'm sure it wasn't a virtual machine. > Rather, it just swapped back and forth. (Guessing a bit > there.) > > Hmm ... you sure it was not either VPIX or DOS/Merge -- ISC > built VPIX in cooperation with the Phoenix Tech folks for > PC/IX. I always bought a copy with it, but it may have been an > option. LCC did DOS/Merge originally as part of the AIX work > for IBM and would become a core part of OS/2 Warp IIRC. Both > Merge and VPIX had some rough edges but certainly worked fine > for DOS 3.3 programs. The issue tended to be Win and DOS > graphics-based programs/games that played fast and loose, > bypassing the DOS OS interface and accessing the HW directly. > For instance, I never got the flight simulator (Air War over > Germany) for Dad's WWII plane (P-47 Thunderbolt) to run under > either (i.e., only under DOS directly on the HW. FWIW: In that > mode, Dad said the simulator flew a lot like how he remembered > it). > > Both Merge and VPIX used the 386 VM support and a bunch of > work in the core OS. Heinz would have to fill us in here. > The version of the 386 port ISC delivered to AT&T and Intel > only had the kernel changes to allow the VM support for VPIX > to be linked in, but it was not there. IICR (and I'm not > sure I am) is that Merge could run on PC/IX also, but you had > to replace a couple of kernel modules. It certainly would > work on the AT&T and Intel versions. > ᐧ > > > > -- > /My new email address is mrochkind(a)gmail.com/ >

1 year, 3 months

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Is OpenText Corporation the Current System V Copyright Holder?

by segaloco

Did some reading today, curious on the current state of things with AT&T's UNIX copyright genealogy. The series of events as I understand it are: AT&T partners with Novell for the Univel initiative. Novell then acquires System V and USL from AT&T. Novell sells UNIX System V's source to SCO, but as the courts have ruled, not the copyright. Novell gets purchased by Microfocus. Microfocus gets purchased by OpenText Corporation. Does this make OpenText the current copyright holders of the commercial UNIX line from AT&T. What got me looking a bit closer into this is curiosity regarding how the opening of Solaris and the CDDL may impact publication of UNIX code between System III and SVR4. I then felt the need to refresh on who might be the current copyright holder and this is where the trail has lead me. My understanding too is that Sun's release under the CDDL set the precedent that other sub-licencees of System V codebases are also at liberty to relicense their codebases, but this may be reading too far into it. There's also the concern that the ghost of SCO will continue to punish anyone else who tries with costly-but-doomed-to-fail litigation. Have there been any happenings lately with regards to getting AT&T UNIX post-PDP-11 opened up more in the world? Reading up a bit on OpenText's business, they don't seem like they're invested in the OS world, seems that their primary sector is content management. Granted, there's certainly under-the-radar trading of bits and pieces, but it would be nice to have some more certainty about what can happen out in the open. - Matt G.

1 year, 3 months

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SunOS 4 in 2024

by Henry Bent

Hi all, I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5, seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a modern computing environment. I know that TUHS isn't really the right place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is? I've made significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there - for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute to a community if one exists. Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers? -Henry

1 year, 3 months

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early unix rand

by Russ Cox

Hi all (and TUHS), The Third Edition rand(III) page [1] ends with WARNING The author of this routine has been writing random-number generators for many years and has never been known to write one that worked. My understanding is that Ken wrote the rand implementation. But I'm curious about the origin of this warning. I had assumed that Ken wrote it as a combination warning+joke, but Rob suggested that to him it didn't sound like Ken and perhaps Doug or Dennis had written it. Does anyone remember? Separately, I am trying to find out what the very first Unix rand implementation was. In the TUHS archives, the incomplete V2 sources contain a reference to srand in cmd/bas0.s [2], but there is no definition in the tree. The V3 man pages list it, but as far as I can tell full library sources do not appear in the TUHS archives until the V6 snapshot. The V6 rand [3] is: rand: mov r1,-(sp) mov ranx,r1 mpy $13077.,r1 add $6925.,r1 mov r1,r0 mov r0,ranx bic $100000,r0 mov (sp)+,r1 rts pc Perhaps this is the original rand as well? It is hard to imagine a much simpler one, other than perhaps removing the addition, but doing so would create a sequence of only odd numbers. From the man page description it sounds like this has to be the original generator, perhaps with different constants. Thanks! Best, Russ [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V3/man/man3/r… [2] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V2/cmd/bas0.s [3] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V6/usr/source…

1 year, 3 months

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Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

by Henry Bent

I don't know about the PiSCSI in particular. For the SCSI2SD, if you have the drive properly defined in the controller you can just use dd to write the image to the SD card at the offset where the drive is defined. If the drive is the first thing on the card, dd if=image of=drive conv=notrunc will do what you want. -Henry On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:12, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote: > I’ll have to see about pulling stuff out this weekend and maybe move > forward. > > Still am missing one part — how to get an external SCSI emulator to the > point where I can get a disk image to it. > > Is there a way to move the disk created in TME onto an emulator?? (BTW, > I’ll probably be using the PiSCSI for this, since I want to have multiple > images out there, as well as a SD drive so I don’t chance losing stuff > after getting it all set up. > > Earl > > On Mar 13, 2024, at 6:09 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > The emulation of proper tape drive records is present in TME - see this > fragment from the setup file that I have to install SunOS 2: > > ## power up the machine: > ## > # uncomment this line to automatically power up the machine when > # tmesh starts: > # > command tape0 load sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/01 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/02 > sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/03 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/04 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/05 > sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/06 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/07 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/08 > sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/09 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/10 > command mainbus0 power up > > Let me know if you need more of a walkthrough, I'd have to get NetBSD > running in a VM as I haven't worked with this in a long time, but I'm sure > it still works. > > -Henry > > On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:04, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote: > >> I had old instructions to do this but getting TME running was a bit >> quirky. And the package had lost most of it’s support. >> (I did just go out and find that some folks have somewhat resurrected >> it…) >> >> I have the install manual for 3.5 ( >> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.5/800-2089-10A_Release_3.5_Manual_… >> ) >> And did find this about TME Now ( https://pkgsrc.se/wip/tme ) >> And these instructions (which from the link before this page indicated as >> of 2019 they still worked >> http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/sun3-150-nbsd.html ) >> >> That would get me “close” if I could somehow write to an emulated SCSI >> device.. or the SD card that supported it… etc. Blue SCSI, Green SCSI, Pi >> SCSI, etc. I don’t care which (would prefer something that would let me use >> a “real” drive… SSD or similar is fine… rather than SD card). I do have an >> image that gets me “somewhat” booting with a SCSI2SD but the additional >> drive mounts are wrong in the fstab/mtab so I can’t get it fully to boot…. >> >> If I can figure out the process, I’ll make images and share them (for all >> the early Sun OS’s) and write up a web page and post it to archive.org so >> nobody has to go thru this again :-) >> >> Earl >> >> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:56 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what >> you want. Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that >> it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running >> it just works. I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on >> sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures. >> >> -Henry >> >> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote: >> >>> I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a >>> SCSI emulator to it and get the full OS installed. >>> I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it >>> used to work. >>> >>> From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition” >>> and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when >>> needed. >>> So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc. I have all >>> the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated >>> trying to make some progress. >>> >>> Earl >>> >>> >>> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi all, >>>> >>>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation >>>> 5, seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a >>>> modern computing environment. I know that TUHS isn't really the right >>>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is? I've made >>>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there - >>>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute >>>> to a community if one exists. Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers? >>>> >>>> -Henry >>>> >>>> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent... >>>> >>>> I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning >>>> to see how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so >>>> OpenIndiana's a bust)... but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least >>>> for hobbyists (only get release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to >>>> date 'release' was 11.4 in 2018). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I >>>> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM, >>>> turns out things have come a long way on that front: >>>> >>>> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/ >>>> >>>> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I >>>> could just remember how commands work on SunOS :). >>>> >>> >>> Thanks Will! You may also be interested in >>> https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another >>> resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU. I have considered moving my setup >>> to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image >>> since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running >>> these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind. >>> >>> -Henry >>> >>> >>> >> >

1 year, 3 months

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Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

by Henry Bent

The emulation of proper tape drive records is present in TME - see this fragment from the setup file that I have to install SunOS 2: ## power up the machine: ## # uncomment this line to automatically power up the machine when # tmesh starts: # command tape0 load sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/01 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/02 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/03 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/04 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/05 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/06 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/07 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/08 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/09 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/10 command mainbus0 power up Let me know if you need more of a walkthrough, I'd have to get NetBSD running in a VM as I haven't worked with this in a long time, but I'm sure it still works. -Henry On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:04, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote: > I had old instructions to do this but getting TME running was a bit > quirky. And the package had lost most of it’s support. > (I did just go out and find that some folks have somewhat resurrected it…) > > I have the install manual for 3.5 ( > http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.5/800-2089-10A_Release_3.5_Manual_… > ) > And did find this about TME Now ( https://pkgsrc.se/wip/tme ) > And these instructions (which from the link before this page indicated as > of 2019 they still worked > http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/sun3-150-nbsd.html ) > > That would get me “close” if I could somehow write to an emulated SCSI > device.. or the SD card that supported it… etc. Blue SCSI, Green SCSI, Pi > SCSI, etc. I don’t care which (would prefer something that would let me use > a “real” drive… SSD or similar is fine… rather than SD card). I do have an > image that gets me “somewhat” booting with a SCSI2SD but the additional > drive mounts are wrong in the fstab/mtab so I can’t get it fully to boot…. > > If I can figure out the process, I’ll make images and share them (for all > the early Sun OS’s) and write up a web page and post it to archive.org so > nobody has to go thru this again :-) > > Earl > > On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:56 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what > you want. Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that > it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running > it just works. I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on > sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures. > > -Henry > > On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote: > >> I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a >> SCSI emulator to it and get the full OS installed. >> I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it >> used to work. >> >> From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition” >> and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when >> needed. >> So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc. I have all >> the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated >> trying to make some progress. >> >> Earl >> >> >> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote: >>> >>> Hi all, >>> >>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5, >>> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a >>> modern computing environment. I know that TUHS isn't really the right >>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is? I've made >>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there - >>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute >>> to a community if one exists. Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers? >>> >>> -Henry >>> >>> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent... >>> >>> I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning >>> to see how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so >>> OpenIndiana's a bust)... but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least >>> for hobbyists (only get release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to >>> date 'release' was 11.4 in 2018). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I >>> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM, >>> turns out things have come a long way on that front: >>> >>> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/ >>> >>> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could >>> just remember how commands work on SunOS :). >>> >> >> Thanks Will! You may also be interested in >> https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another >> resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU. I have considered moving my setup >> to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image >> since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running >> these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind. >> >> -Henry >> >> >> >

1 year, 3 months

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Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

by Henry Bent

TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what you want. Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running it just works. I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures. -Henry On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote: > I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a SCSI > emulator to it and get the full OS installed. > I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it > used to work. > > From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition” > and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when > needed. > So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc. I have all > the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated > trying to make some progress. > > Earl > > > On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5, >> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a >> modern computing environment. I know that TUHS isn't really the right >> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is? I've made >> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there - >> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute >> to a community if one exists. Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers? >> >> -Henry >> >> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent... >> >> I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning to >> see how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so >> OpenIndiana's a bust)... but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least >> for hobbyists (only get release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to >> date 'release' was 11.4 in 2018). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I >> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM, >> turns out things have come a long way on that front: >> >> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/ >> >> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could >> just remember how commands work on SunOS :). >> > > Thanks Will! You may also be interested in > https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another > resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU. I have considered moving my setup > to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image > since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running > these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind. > > -Henry > > >

1 year, 3 months

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Re: History of non-Bell C compilers?

by Paul Ruizendaal

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024, 4:14 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com> wrote: > For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C > compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at Bell. > Especially for x86. Anyone have tales? > Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX? An unusual one would be the “revenue bomb” compiler that Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie did at Microsoft in 1981. This compiler was intended to provided a uniform environment for the menagerie of 8 and 16-bit computers of the era. It compiled to a byte code which executed through a small interpreter. This by itself was hardly new of course, but it had some unique features. It generated code in overlays, so that it could run a code base larger than 64KB (but it defined only one data segment). It also defined a small set of “system” commands, that allowed for uniform I/O. I still have the implementation spec for that interpreter somewhere. This compiler was used for the first versions of Multiplan and Word, and my understanding is that the byte code engine was later re-used in Visual Basic. I think the compiler also had a Xenix port, maybe it even was Xenix native (and at this time, Xenix would still essentially have been V7). I am not sure to what extent this compiler was independent of the Bell compilers. It could well be that it was based on PCC, Microsoft was a Unix licensee after all and at the time busy doing ports. On the other hand, Charles Simonyi would certainly have been capable of creating his own from scratch. I do know that this compiler preceded Lattice C, the latter of which was distributed by Microsoft as Microsoft C 1.0. Maybe others know more about this Simonyi/Brodie compiler? Paul Notes: http://www.memecentral.com/mylife.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.computerworld.com/sof… http://seefigure1.com/images/xenix/xenix-timeline.jpg

1 year, 3 months

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early unix rand

by Douglas McIlroy

> The author of this routine has been writing > random-number generators for many years and has > never been known to write one that worked. It sounds like Ken to me. Although everybody had his own favorite congruential random number generator, some worse than others, I believe it was Ken who put one in the math library. The very fact that rand existed, regardless of its quality, enabled a lovely exploit. When Ken pioneered password cracking by trying every word in word lists at hand, one of the password files he found plenty of hits in came from Berkeley. He told them and they responded by assigning random passwords to everybody. That was a memorable error. Guessing that the passwords were generated by a simple encoding of the output of rand, Ken promptly broke 100% of the newly "hardened" password file. Doug

1 year, 3 months

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Re: History of non-Bell C compilers?

by Steve Simon

The zorland c compiler from zortech, x86 pc compiler from a small uk company. i used it to write my final year project at college in 1988. sadly i couldn’t use the interdata running v7 as i was doing image processing and needed to access an ISA framestore card. i built a motion compensated video standards converter, and thanks to the 80287 i managed something like 6 hours per frame. i think zortech claimed they wrote one of the first c++ compilers (rather than using c++). -Steve

1 year, 3 months

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History of non-Bell C compilers?

by Tom Lyon

For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at Bell. Especially for x86. Anyone have tales? Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX?

1 year, 3 months

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Fwd: non-Bell C compiler

by Warner Losh

Perspective from a friend... Warner ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk(a)phk.freebsd.dk> Date: Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 2:24 AM Subject: non-Bell C compiler To: <imp(a)freebsd.org> I noticed the "non-bell C" thread on TUHS and can add a data point from datamuseum.dk: The Danish Company "Christian Rovsing A/S" evidently had a C-compiler for their CR80 mini computer, and my guess is that they created it in order to qualify for DoD contracts in the POSIX regime. Example C source: https://datamuseum.dk/aa//cr80/80/802c73092.html Listing file from the compiler: https://datamuseum.dk/aa//cr80/ef/ef65339dc.html Listing file from the assembler: http://datamuseum.dk/aa/cr80/32/32ef5456f.html Listing from the linker: https://datamuseum.dk/aa//cr80/17/170304129.html So far we have not spotted the actual compiler anywhere in the media we have read. Mention of C being used for project delivery: http://datamuseum.dk/aa/cr80/1c/1c0b47f0e.html And btw: That one is from a CDC disc-pack which a father+son team has read by building a SMD-USB converter. That project may be interesting in the TUHS domain as well: https://github.com/Datamuseum-DK/pico-smd-controller -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk(a)FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

1 year, 3 months

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What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

by Jeffry R. Abramson

I've been using some variant of Linux (currently Debian 12) as my primary OS for daily activities (email, web, programming, photo editing, etc.) for the past twenty years or so. Prior to that it was FreeBSD for nearly ten years after short stints with Minix and Linux when they first came out. At the time (early/mid 90's), I was working for Bell Labs and had a ready supply of SCSI drives salvaged from retired equipment. I bought a Seagate ST-01A ISA SCSI controller for whatever 386/486 I owned at the time and installed Slackware floppy by floppy. When I upgraded to a Pentium PC for home, Micron P90 I think, I installed a PCI SCSI controller (Tekram DC-390 equipped with an NCR53c8xx chip) to make use of my stash of drives. Under Linux it was never entirely stable. I asked on Usenet and someone suggested trying the other SCSI driver. This was the ncr driver that had been ported from FreeBSD. My stability problems went away and I decided to take a closer look at FreeBSD. It reminded me of SunOS from the good old pre- System V era along with the version of Unix I had used in grad school in the late 70's/early 80's so I switched. I eventually reverted back to Linux because it was clear that the user community was getting much larger, I was using it professionally at work and there was just a larger range of applications available. Lately, I find myself getting tired of the bloat and how big and messy and complicated it has all gotten. Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering what do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs? Jeff

1 year, 4 months

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What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

by Douglas McIlroy

Because I sometimes use ArcMap, I run Windows. Cygwin plus the sam editor make me feel at home. The main signs of Microsoft are the desktop, Bing, File Explorer and Task Manager.

1 year, 4 months

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Might Have a DMERT SCSI Disk, Need Help Preserving

by segaloco

Hello everyone, I reach out in my time of need regarding a potential source of DMERT materials. I've recently come into possession of a hard disk unit from a 5ESS switch, presumably the 5ESS-2000 variant, part UN 375G: https://i.imgur.com/yQzY5Hs.jpeg The actual disk itself appears to be a Ultra320 SCSI disk, which I unfortunately do not have the tools to do anything with myself. After looking into various solutions, I'm not getting the warm fuzzies about finding the necessary hardware on my first shot, these sorts of hardware specifics are not my strong suit. The story I got is it is from a working system, so could possibly have artifacts, but at the same time, I've already sunk a little over $1,000 into getting this, I'm hesitant to drop more on hardware I'm not 100% confident is correct for the job. Does anyone have any recommendations, whether a service, hardware, anything, that I could use to try and get at what is on this disk? Even if it's just sending it off to someone along with enough storage for them to make me a dd image of the thing, I just feel so close yet so far on finally figuring out if I've managed to land a copy of DMERT. Thanks in advance for any advice, I'm really hoping that the end of this story is I find DMERT artifacts to get archived and preserved, that would be such a satisfying conclusion to all this 3B20/5ESS study as of late. I wish I had the resources to see the rest through myself but this is getting into an area I have quite a bit of trepidation regarding. What I don't want to do is inadvertently damage something by getting it wrong. - Matt G.

1 year, 4 months

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who was that unmasked man

by ron minnich

[image: unnamed.png] CCA EMACS? That's a name I have not heard in a long time ... I forgot if I'm not allowed to load images, sorry if I just made a mistake.

1 year, 4 months

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Interesting post on BSD history (in the comments)

by George Michaelson

Normally I wouldn't cross the beams like this but a comment thread John Nagle posted on this HN story is well written and for me was a great read. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630457

1 year, 4 months

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Re: Honor declined

by segaloco

On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 3:55 PM, Ken Thompson <kenbob(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 1:45 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote: > > > On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 11:53 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > > > > After Multics, I ran interference to keep our once-burned higher management from frowning too much on further operating-system research. > > > > > > Doug > > > > This alone is an all-too-valuable skill that contributes to the cultural success of countless projects. Great ideas can too often die on the vine when the upper echelons have quite different opinions of where time and effort should be placed, and I am glad that in my own career I likewise work with understanding immediate supervisors and business analysts that go to bat for our needs and concerns. The importance of a supportive workplace culture in which work is genuinely valued and defended cannot be understated. > > > > - Matt G. > > unix was written in c, c was written in b, b was written in tmg,and doug wrote tmg. it is all his fault. > > Ken, your modesty is showing :) I feel the same way about big things I'm working on in my day job. No matter how much folks try to laud me as our architect, nothing I did would exist without what my supervisor years and years ago handed me to start with before he moved on to greener pastures. Invention will always be a group effort, I'm just so glad this particular group effort (re: UNIX) has and continues to have the impact that it does. A former manager (and respected colleague) would often say "I'm rubber, you're glue, what you bounce off me sticks to you." and it took me a little bit to appreciate what I thought he meant, but even longer to realize that saying encompassed the good as well. - Matt G. P.S. Hey Dave, I Bcc'd you, discussions with folks here often remind me of your good advice and management. Hope you're well, would love to hear from you if you see this!

1 year, 4 months

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Re: SysV* on a PDP-11

by segaloco

Just to bring it full circle, after a bit of discussion it looks like what Henry is working with is the initial System V release for PDP-11/70, not some fabled PDP-11 SVR2, so the documentation I linked as well as some material on squoze.net concerning System V in SimH all apply directly. Subject adjusted accordingly. - Matt G. On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:55 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 at 16:51, segaloco <segaloco(a)protonmail.com> wrote: > >> On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:16 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hello all, >>> >>> I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user. >>> >>> ... >>> >>> I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks! >>> >>> -Henry >> >> First off I didn't know SVR2 made it to the PDP-11, I thought they cut it off after the initial System V release, is what you have AT&T or some derivative version? >> >> Second, this is the setup instructions for DEC processors for the initial release of System V which included the PDP-11/70: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-administrators-guide-5-0/04%20Setti… >> >> Additionally, here is the Operator's Guide which details bootstrapping the system among other things: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-operators-guide-release-5-0/mode/2up >> >> While not SVR2, hopefully the differences are minimal enough that you can use those. Good luck! >> >> Also regarding finding more documentation, sadly AT&T stripped out the /usr/doc materials with System V, so these critical pieces of documentation actually can't be found in a typical system distribution, rather, you had to get the paper copies. I'm not aware of any discovery of TROFF sources for any of this stuff past System III, I do have it on my long-term list to eventually synthesize copies of said documents from available scans so they can be more easily diff'd, but my current focus is much, much earlier. > > Thank you, this is a wonderful starting point. I often forget that sometimes archive.org will have documentation that is not duplicated in other sources, so this is a welcome reminder. I'll read through all of this and report back. > > -Henry

1 year, 4 months

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SVR2 on a PDP-11

by Henry Bent

Hello all, I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user. The root dump boots on a simulated 11/70 with an RP06: -- sim> boot rp #0=unixgdtm UNIX/sysV: unixgdtm real mem = 3145728 bytes avail mem = 3068864 bytes INIT: SINGLE USER MODE -- I'm mostly a BSD person but I'm familiar enough with some later SysV systems. That being said, the initialization procedure here is completely foreign to me. I have cpio files for the entire system and I know in theory how to extract them, but I'm stuck at the basics of creating /usr, setting up /etc and the like. I have a fully extracted filesystem from the cpio files that I can browse but I can't find enough information in the manpages. I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks! -Henry

1 year, 4 months

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Honor declined

by Douglas McIlroy

> When Rudd, Doug, Ken, Dennis, *et al* start to develop UNIX Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I was not one of those who "start[ed] to develop it". Doug

1 year, 4 months

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Re: Honor declined

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> > Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I was not one of > those who "start[ed] to develop it". http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/pipes/ Dennis wrote that "UNIX is a very conservative system. Only a handful of its ideas are genuinely new." (And quite right he was, too!) Among the ones that are new, pipes, although less important now than they used to be, were a major part of the constellation of things that drove its adoption, early on. And I can't see how pushing pipes was not "developing UNIX"! I'm afraid you'll just have to live with it! :-) Noel

1 year, 4 months

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regex early discussions

by Will Senn

Hi All, I was wondering, what were the best early sources of information for regexes and why did folks need to know them to use unix? In my recent explorations, I have needed to have a better understanding of them, so I'm digging in... awk's my most recent thing and it's deeply associated with them, so here we are. I went to the bookshelf to find something appropriate and as usual, I've traced to primary sources to some extent. I started with Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl, and I won't knock it (it's one of the bestsellers in our field), but it's much to long for my personal taste and it's not quite as systematic as I would like (the author himself notes that his interests are less technical than authors preceding him on the subject). So, back to the shelves... Bourne's, The Unix Environment, and Kernighan & Pike's, The Unix Programming Evironment both talk about them in the context of grep, ed, sed, and awk. Going further back, the Unix Programmer's Manual v7 - ed, grep, sed, awk... After digging around it seems like folks needed regexes for ed, grep, sed and awk... and any other utility that leveraged the wonderful nature of these handy expressions. Fine. Where did folks go learn them? Was there a particularly good (succinct and accurate) source of information that folks kept handy? I'm imagining (based on what I've seen) that someone might cut out the ed discussion or the grep pages of the manual and tape them to their monitors, but maybe I'm stooopid and they didn't need no stinkin' memory device for regexes - surely they're intuitive enough that even a simpleton could pick them up after seeing a few examples... but if that were really the case, Friedl's book would have been a flop and it wasn't :). So seriously, if you remember that far back - what was the definitive source of your regex knowledge and what were the first motivators for learning them? Thanks, Will

1 year, 4 months

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Lions' Commentary Revisions?

by segaloco

I hope everyone's having a lovely tail end of whichever season is gracing your hemisphere. Had some surprise snow this morning up in the NW corner of the US, hoping it bodes well for a mild summer. I'm curious, is anyone aware of any attempts to revise John Lions's UNIX Commentary for versions beyond the Sixth Edition? Having finished my disassembly of the classic video game Dragon Quest this past year, I'm now doing some planning for a similar work and have considered practicing the art a little by doing some diffing of V6 and V7 and feeling out the process by putting down some revisions, that way I've got some of the flow and kinks worked out before I start on my own "Commentary on Dragon Quest" manuscript. I'd hate to double up on something someone else has already done though, so if V7 for instance has gotten this treatment, then perhaps focusing on PWB or the CB-UNIX kernel would minimize the potential rehashing. Also if anyone has any thoughts, suggestions, etc. from their own experiences working up very detailed source-level documentation of a large software product, I'd certainly be interested, as I know this is going to turn into quite the sprawling undertaking once I really get going, especially if I try and work in the differences between the Japanese and U.S. releases (of which there are many.) - Matt G.

1 year, 4 months

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Re: Of flags and keyletters

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Bakul Shah > Use of "flag" for this purpose seems strange. "option" makes more sense. People on this list seem to forget that there were computers before UNIX. The _syntax_ of "-f" probably predates any UNIX; Multics used it extensively. See the "Introduction to Multics", MAC-TR-123, January 1974 (a little after UNIX V1, but I expect I could probably track it back further in time, if I cared to put in the effort); pg. 3-24. Interestingly, I looked though the CTSS manual, and CTSS did not seem to use this syntax for flag arguments: see, e.g., the SAVE command (section AH.3.03). The _name_ "flag" came in early on UNIX. (Multics called them "arguments"; see above, pg. 3-27, top line.) We can see this happen - see: http://squoze.net/UNIX/v1man/man1/du which calls the "-a" and "-s" "arguments"; but in: http://squoze.net/UNIX/v1man/man1/ld "-s", "-u", etc are called "flag arguments". Long enough ago that certainty about the etymology/rationale is probably now lost. Noel

1 year, 4 months

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Floppy Disk

by Boyd Lynn Gerber

Hello, A great article on the floppy disk. https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-floppy-disk -- Boyd Gerber <gerberb(a)zenez.com> 801 849-0213 ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047

1 year, 4 months

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Of flags and keyletters

by Douglas McIlroy

> why did AT&T refer to "flags" as "keyletters" in its SysV documentation? Bureaucracies beget bureaucratese--polysyllabic obfuscation, witness APPLICATION USAGE in place of BUGS. One might argue that replacing "flag" by "option", thus doubling the number of syllables, was a small step in that direction. In fact it was a deliberate attempt to discard jargon in favor of normal English usage. Doug

1 year, 4 months

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Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Al Kossow wrote: > > > there are emulators that can still run it, along with its small library of tools and applications. “NOS/MT was left in an arrested state” as John puts it. > > URL? > > I've never heard of a surviving copy Your best start is here: http://www.powertrancortex.com The UK Powertran Cortex was quite close to the Marinchip M9900 in capabilities and John’s software was ported to it. The website has an emulator and disk images for most of the user land and “MDEX” -- a simple executive that John wrote to bootstrap his software stack. This material survived in the hands of a few Powertran Cortex enthusiasts. They also had disks for NOS/MT (binaries + sysgen), but those were found after that website was made 10+ years ago. The Powertran Cortex design was also used to build an industrial control computer, the PP95. The UK company behind that did most of the porting work and had a complete M9900 system to do the work on. In 2018 the inventory of that company was found in a garage including that M9900 system. Also more disk images and manuals, including the NOS/MT User Manual. The disks included a few that contained reconstituted (partial) source code for NOS/MT. With a little help from John, I was able to reconstitute the remainder of the source code. All this is not online. I will contact you off list to see how this can be best preserved. Paul

1 year, 4 months

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RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

by Paul Ruizendaal

Earlier this year two well known computer scientists passed away. On New Year’s Day it was Niklaus Wirth aged 90. A month later it was John Walker aged 75. Both have some indirect links to Unix. For Wirth the link is that a few sources claim that Plan 9 and the Go language are in part influenced by the design ideas of Oberon, the language and the OS. Maybe others on this list know more about those influences. For Walker, the link is via the company that he was running as a side-business before he got underway with AutoCAD: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/marinchip/ In that business he was selling a 16-bit system for the S-100 bus, based around the TI9900 CPU (which from a programmer perspective is quite similar to a PDP11). For that system he wrote a Unix-like operating system around 1978-1980, called NOS/MT. He had never worked with Unix, but had spelled the BSTJ issues about it. It was fully written in assembler. The design was rather unique, maybe inspired by Heinz Lycklama’s “Satellite Processor” paper in BSTJ 57-6. It has a central microkernel that handles message exchange, process scheduling and memory management. Each system call is a message. However, the system call message is then passed on to a privileged “fat kernel” process that handles it. The idea was to provide multiprocessor and network transparency: the microkernel could decide to run processes on other boards in the same rack or on remote systems over a network. Also the kernel processes could be remote. Hence its name “Network Operating System / Multitasking” or “NOS/MT”. The system calls are pretty similar to Unix. The file system is implemented very similar to Unix (with i-nodes etc.), with some notable differences (there are file locking primitives and formatting a disk is a system call). File handles are not shareable, so special treatment for stdin/out/err is hardcoded. Scheduling and memory management are totally different -- unsurprising as in both cases it reflects the underlying hardware. Just as NOS/MT was getting into a usable state, John decided to pivot to packaged software including a precursor of what would become the AutoCAD package. What was there worked and saw some use in the UK and Denmark in the 1980’s -- there are emulators that can still run it, along with its small library of tools and applications. “NOS/MT was left in an arrested state” as John puts it. I guess it will remain one of those many “what if” things in computer history.

1 year, 4 months

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Of flags and keyletters

by Dave Horsfall

Just recollecting old memories: why did AT&T refer to "flags" as "keyletters" in its SysV documentation? Some sort of denial of Ed5/6/7/BSD's very existence? The one good they did was the TTY driver... -- Dave, who used to work for a SysVile shop

1 year, 4 months

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30,000 TUHS mailing list postings

by Norman Wilson

All, while I'm reminiscing about Minnie's history, I just noticed that we have hit 30,000 postings on the combined TUHS/PUPS mailing list. === In the spirit of early Unix, does that mean the message number has wrapped back to low numbers, skipping those occupied by messages still running, like process IDs? Norman Wilson (temporarily thousands of km from) Toronto ON

1 year, 4 months

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30,000 TUHS mailing list postings

by Warren Toomey

All, while I'm reminiscing about Minnie's history, I just noticed that we have hit 30,000 postings on the combined TUHS/PUPS mailing list. Here is some details about the list's history: Cheers, Warren ## 31st Oct 1995: Start of the PUPS mailing list https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/1995-October/000001.html This catered for the PDP-11 Unix Preservation Society. ## 3rd Sep 1997: Majordomo List Software https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/1997-September/000132.html Before this I was using /etc/aliases and sendmail for the list. ## 13th June 2000: TUHS List Created https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2000-June/001491.html At this point both PUPS and TUHS lists were running at the same time. There was some discussion as to the need for separate lists before this, see https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2000-June/001413.html ## 1st Oct 2001: Changeover to Mailman 2 https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2001-October/001912.html ## Oct 2013: Last PUPS Posting https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2013-October/thread.html ## Feb 2017: PUPS has been Merged with TUHS https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-February/009730.html mentions the merge but not the date. ## 18 May 2022: Mailman 3 Upgrade https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2022-May/025852.html

1 year, 4 months

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The Web Service on Minnie is 30 Years Old Today

by wkt＠tuhs.org

On Wed Feb 23 16:33, 1994, I turned on the web service on my machine "minnie", originally minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au, now minnie.tuhs.org (aka www.tuhs.org) The web service has been running continuously for thirty years, except for occasional downtimes and hardware/software upgrades. I think this makes minnie one of the longest running web services still in existence :-) For your enjoyment, I've restored a snapshot of the web site from around mid-1994. It is visible at https://minnie.tuhs.org/94Web/ Some hyperlinks are broken. ## Web Logs The web logs show me testing the service locally on Feb 23 1994, with the first international web fetches on Feb 26: ``` sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:13 1994] GET / HTTP/1.0 sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:18 1994] GET /BSD.html HTTP/1.0 sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:20 1994] GET /Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0 ... estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:48:21 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0 estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:48:30 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0 estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:49:46 1994] GET /BSD-info/cdrom.html HTTP/1.0 shazam.cs.iastate.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:31:20 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0 shazam.cs.iastate.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:31:24 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0 dem0nmac.mgh.harvard.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:32:04 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0 dem0nmac.mgh.harvard.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:32:10 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0 ``` ## Minnie to This Point Minnie originally started life in May 1991 as an FTP server running KA9Q NOS on an IBM XT with a 30M RLL disk, see https://minnie.tuhs.org/minannounce.txt By February 1994 Minnie was running FreeBSD 1.0e on a 386DX25 with 500M of disk space, 8M of RAM and a 10Base2 network connection. I'd received a copy of the BSDisc Vol.1 No.1 in December 1993. According to the date on the file `RELNOTES.FreeBSD` on the CD, FreeBSD 1.0e was released on Oct 28 1993. ## The Web Server I'd gone to a summer conference in Canberra in mid-February 1994 (see pg. 29 of https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V15.1.pdf and https://minnie.tuhs.org/94Web/Canberra-AUUG/cauugs94.html, 10am) and I'd seen the Mosaic web browser in action. With FreeBSD running on minnie, it seemed like a good idea to set up a web server on her. NCSA HTTPd server v1.1 had been released at the end of Jan 1994, see http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q1/0282.html It was the obvious choice to be the web server on minnie. ## Minnie from Then to Now You can read more about minnie's history and her hardware/software evolution here: https://minnie.tuhs.org/minnie.html I obtained the "tuhs.org" domain in May 2000 and switched minnie's domain name from "minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au" to "minnie.tuhs.org". Cheers! Warren P.S. I couldn't wait until Friday to post this :-)

1 year, 4 months

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Article on BSD, etc history

by Rich Salz

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-berkley-software-distribution

1 year, 4 months

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Re: [idea] troff -Troff

by Douglas McIlroy

To expand on Branden's observation that translating from one member of the roff family to another is hard, I note that the final output usually presents a text in a shape that has been fine-tuned for appearance. In grammatic terms it might best be presented in transformational terms a la Chomsky: a basic text with a fairly simple grammar tweaked by pretty-printing transforms. Translation involves parsing input into an AST according to one grammar and unparsing to generate output according to another. Chomsky's work uses transformational grammars primarily for generation. I'm not aware of any implementation of the inverse: parsing according to a transformational grammar. Certainly no practical tools exist for doing so. Unfortunately, one doesn't consciously write roff according to the model I have outlined. This means that parsing it is more like parsing a natural language than a strictly defined programming language. So, the absence of formal tools is exacerbated. Roff scripts, like everyday English, are written according to an intuitive--and occasionally ad hoc--grammar that varies both with authors and with time. And seventy years of hard work has not yet fully automated the parsing of English. Doug

1 year, 4 months

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Older Geeks: Guy who invented Unix pipes on recent 'fat finger' problem

by steve jenkin

Doug McIlroy is still around and contributing… With same insight & wry sense of humour :) =========== <https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/X5P6FYM…> > Apologies for posting the above title tonTUHS. It's not the first time that > I've crossed signals between groff and TUHS, but hey, I've got 10 years on Biden. > > Doug -- 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

1 year, 4 months

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Re: [idea] troff -Troff

by Douglas McIlroy

Apologies for posting the above title tonTUHS. It's not the first time that I've crossed signals between groff and TUHS, but hey, I've got 10 years on Biden. Doug

1 year, 4 months

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Census of Early (Pre-C Kernel) UNIX Documents

by segaloco

Hello everyone, I'm currently laying the groundwork for a restart of my mandiff project, expanding it to encompass not just the manual-proper, but also the documents leading to the "Documents for UNIX" collections as well. Thus far I'm about halfway done on a ROFF restoration of the earliest surviving draft of Dennis Ritchie's The UNIX Time-Sharing System paper[1], reconstructed from existing, later NROFF text and ROFF conventions from the Third Edition manual[2]. Thus far, the additional documents I've found explicitly referenced in the earlier days are: User's Reference Manual to B - K. Thompson[3] C Reference Manual - D. M. Ritchie[4 - see note] M6 Manual - A. D. Hall[5] ROFF Manual - J. F. Ossanna[6 - see note] A Manual for the TMG Compiler-writing Language - M. D. McIlroy[7] UNIX Assembler Manual - D. M. Ritchie[8 - see note] NROFF Users' Manual - J. F. Ossanna[9 - see note] YACC Manual - S. C. Johnson[10 - see note] Aside from these references, there are two other B papers, one a tutorial[11] by B. W. Kernighan and the other a MH-TSS reference by S. C. Johnson[12]. I don't think I saw either referenced in the manual-proper. The latter then makes further reference to a "Bell Laboratories BCPL" by R. H. Canaday and D. M. Ritchie, although I suspect this is lost, I can't find it. Anywho, my plan is to take any known ROFF/NROFF sources for the above documents and reconstruct the earliest versions possible and then add them to my revamped repository in the timeframes that they first start showing up as references in the manual to derive a more holistic view of the creation of manuals and guides in the early days. A few matters prompted me to start over: 1. Noticing that there is direct lineage between some of the text in the UnixEditionZero paper and later manual pages like as(I), I want to capture the base text as far back as possible, which in this case would mean ensuring a commit in the chain captures the transfer of the text from the UnixEditionZero paper to as(I) to give a more complete history. 2. Al Kossow has now scanned and preserved a UNIX Program Generic II manual, meaning I no longer have to make as many assumptions about what changed and what didn't in the USG/Research split. Thus far, assumptions about the Program Generic line have been based on the extant MERT manual (which in turn is described as deriving from the Program Generic III manual.) 3. The picture of PWB/2.0 is becoming a bit clearer as time goes on, but is still murky, and that has implications for the changes between the Sixth Edition (where my current mandiff repo[13] ends) and the Seventh Edition. Rather than having to go back and redo a bunch of work, I think the first pass can stand on its own as a source of guidance on redoing this. 4. The cleanliness of the repository history is not to my liking, there are several instances of multiple commits across pages related to some larger, holistic change that would really be easier to study if they were in one. Starting over, I now have a much clearer picture of V1->V6 that I can use to produce a tighter history. Anywho, to summarize what I'm looking for feedback on, first, are there any major documents I'm omitting from this investigation? Any particular technical memoranda that are crucial to the big picture? Additionally, is anyone aware whether USG Program Generic I (or earlier?) had a formal edition of the Programmer's Manual or if they would've just referred folks to the research manual prior to PG II? With the latter question I'm trying to determine if USG manual history starts with the PG II manual Al Kossow has scanned or if I should be considering a hole in the record where a PG I manual goes. Thanks for following along, hopefully getting this groundwork in place will ensure the next go at this project is even more fruitful than the last! - Matt G. --- References --- 1 - https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZ… 2 - https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man 3 - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kbman.html 4 - I may have a copy of the earliest version of this I can identify. The earliest version I can find online is dated January 15th, 1974 (https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cman74.pdf) and contains the text "C is also available on the HIS 6070 computer at Murray Hill and on the IBM System/370 at Holmdel" whereas this particular copy of the paper states "C is also available on the HIS 6070 computer at Murray Hill, using a compiler written by A. Snyder and currently maintained by S. C. Johnson. A compiler for the IBM System/360/370 series is under construction." The manual is TROFF printout and isn't formatted as a memorandum like the link included here. References to the C Reference Manual begin to show up as early as the Second Edition manual, although these imply the C manual is still being written. Does anyone know if the C Reference Manual started in ROFF and then moved to NROFF some time before the earliest copies we're aware of? In any case, I intend to scan this copy, it just hasn't bubbled up in my project list yet. 5 - https://tuhs.pdp-11.org.ru/Documentation/TechReports/Bell_Labs/CSTRs/2.pdf 6 - I have a copy that defers from the one I could find here: https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/roff71/roff71.pdf It is not in technical memorandum format and also may be missing a few pages (in mine, the tutorial ends with the "Translation" section but the linked document contains a couple more paragraphs on page offset (.po), merge patterns, and an envoi (conclusion). The most striking difference is that the linked paper is Doug's version for TSS, but the paper I've got lists the invocation in the UNIX style (roff +N -M name1 name2 ...) and is likely representative of the UNIX version with Joe Ossanna's work. Doug if you catch this and believe the attribution on this page (https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=systems:2nd_edition) should have your by-line or both you and jfo, happy to make the edit. The text of the UNIX version I have does seem to descend from your original paper. By the way, an even earlier version of this paper for runoff is available here (https://manpages.bsd.lv/history/runoff69.low.pdf) 7 - https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/1972_stuff/tmg.pdf 8 - This is first referenced in the Third Edition manual. Some of the text may derive from the second Appendix of the "UnixEditionZero" paper linked above, the manpage certainly has influence from that document. Not sure if any of that implies the manual may have started in ROFF, but in any case, constitutes an early reference. 9 - This reference first appears, verifiably, in the Third Edition. However, the Second Edition manual does list nroff(I) in the TOC, but this page is not actually included in the extant PDF in the archive. In any case, the earliest version of the NROFF Users' Manual I'm aware of is the Second Edition, dated 9/11/74. Is any such First Edition extant on the public record? 10 - The earliest reference to this manual I can find is in the Third Edition. Not sure if there are any earlier specimens than the text in the Sixth Edition sources. 11 - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/btut.html 12 - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bref.html 13 - https://gitlab.com/segaloco/mandiff

1 year, 4 months

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Role of Unix in Australian Accounting research: Ball & Brown, founding AGSM

by steve jenkin

Accidentally ran into this today. I’ve never seen this put together and thought it worth adding to the TUHS archives. Hadn’t realised that both the authors of “Ball & Brown” (1968) were Aussies and UNSW alumni. Studying a little accounting, this paper was mentioned as ’the most cited’ paper in the field. The Big New Idea in 1968 was to use computers to analyse stock market data & show correlations. I hadn’t known either had come back to Australia (QLD or WA then UNSW/AGSM), then founded AGSM, with a focus on digital analysis of data. Ian Johnstone, from CSE, went to AGSM to run their computers. He recommended DEC + Unix and was backed by Brown, the director. [ Andy Hume was recruited by Ian J, before leaving for a job at Bell Labs in the Computing Research Centre. ] The AGSM license caused conniptions with the AT&T lawyers. While AGSM fell into the near free “University & Education” license, they weren’t using Unix just for ‘education’. AGSM became the first commercial licensee of Unix, or so I was told at the time. Ian Johnstone was AUUGN editor while at AGSM, before scooting off to the USA and rising to heights there. While Ball & Brown studied in Faculty of Commerce, they obviously had enough of a grounding in ‘computing’ and data collection / handling / analysis to set the stage for their 1968 paper. In 1971, Fortran IV was taught to first year students in Science, using John M Blatt’s (of UNSW) textbook. It’s not unreasonable that Finance & Accounting had courses or training in Computing 5 years before that. Within 10 years, they were both back at UNSW, running AGSM, teaching & using Digital research methods, based solidly on Unix… cheers steve =============== <https://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/editorials/0206edit.html> Looking back, I realise it must have been a fortuitous convergence for me: thanks to Philip Brown and Ian Johnstone, the AGSM had been running Unix machines since 1976; thanks to Bob Wood, I read of Bob Axelrod's work with GAs in examining the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma before it was published (and Axelrod was also at Michigan); thanks to my innate curiosity, I had been reading and contributing to the Usenet news groups on the Internet since 1986. Sydney was not so far from Ann Arbor, finally. =============== Phillip Brown <https://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/accounting/caip/aahof/ceremonies/philip_brown> Philip Brown holds an important and unique place within the annals of Australian accounting. As co-author of the research paper that redefined the course of academic accounting research in the last forty years he inadvertently set the research agendas and directions for a legion of academics that followed. Philip started school at Riverstone in western Sydney with a short stint at Summer Hill in his final two years of primary education proceeding to Canterbury Boys High School where he scored an average pass in his Leaving Certificate. He then worked as a junior clerk in the accounting department of British Motor Corporation at Zetland. Advised to seek tertiary qualifications he thought he should enrol for a commerce degree at the University of NSW. Despite this advice, Philip enrolled as a part-time student in the Faculty of Commerce at University of New South Wales gaining the highest pass in the course. This level of achievement was maintained throughout his degree leading inevitably to an honours year, graduating with First Class Honours and taking a University Medal. After graduation Philip tutored at University of New South Wales, received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the USA heading to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He completed his MBA in 1963 finishing top of the class During this period [2 years after MBS] he met Ray Ball with whom he wrote a seminal paper that defined the course of accounting research for the next forty years. Rather than pursue a career in the United States, Philip returned to Australia as a Reader in Accounting at the University of Western Australia (July, 1968 – June, 1970). In 1974, Philip moved to Sydney to help establish the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM). As inaugural Foundation Director he introduced world-class MBA and MPA (public administration) programs to develop the skills of Australia's future leaders. During his AGSM days Philip championed the development of Australian data in financial accounting research. He saw the need for Australian share price data to be systematically collected and made available to researchers spending a great deal of time personally collecting data and providing programming support for these databases. The existence of these databases as a high quality resource for researchers is often taken for granted today but it was the foresight scholars with foresight like Philip who saw the need and acted accordingly. =============== Ray Ball <https://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/accounting/caip/aahof/ceremonies/ray-ball> Raymond John Ball is one of the most influential contemporary accounting scholars, having held professorial positions in Australia at UNSW and Queensland, and in the United States at Rochester and Chicago. With a first-class honours degree and the University Medal from UNSW, Ray moved to the University of Chicago where he earned an MBA and PhD. In 1968 Ray Ball co-authored the seminal paper ‘An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers’ that revolutionised financial accounting research. Drawing on the developing financial economics literature and linking accounting information and share prices in a novel manner, the paper provided the foundation for modern capital markets-based research. As the inaugural recipient of the American Accounting Association’s Seminal Contributions to the Accounting Literature Award in 1986 it was observed that ‘no other paper … has played so important a role in the development of accounting research during the past thirty years’. It remains the most highly cited accounting research paper. Ray Ball has also had a major influence on accounting education in Australia, h aving been Professor of Accounting at the University of Queensland (1972-1976), and foundation professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management (UNSW) (1976-1986), where he was instrumental in the development of the first US-style PhD program in Accounting and Finance in Australia. During his time at Queensland and UNSW he was instrumental in developing rigorous empirical research in Australian capital markets, addressing issues such as the risk/return trade-off, dividend policy and taxation mechanisms. =============== -- 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

1 year, 4 months

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Original print of V7 manual?

by Mychaela Falconia

Hello fellow lovers of old UNIX, Would anyone happen to have a raster scan (not OCR) of the original printing of UNIX Programmer's Manual, 7th edition? Does such a thing exist? Given that Brian S. Walden produced and published a PDF reprint of this manual (presumably done with some "modern" version of troff) back in 1998, I reason that there probably wasn't much interest in preserving the original print by painstaking scanning (and the files from such a scan would have been ginormous by 1998 standards), hence I am not certain if such a scanned version exists - but I thought I would ask nonetheless. I was however very pleased to discover that some very kind soul named Erica Fischer did scan and upload the complete set of Usenix printed books for 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD - here is the 4.2BSD version: https://archive.org/details/uum-ref-4.2bsd https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd https://archive.org/details/upm-ref-4.2bsd https://archive.org/details/upm-supplement-4.2bsd https://archive.org/details/smm-4.2bsd and here is 4.3BSD: https://archive.org/details/uum-ref-4.3bsd https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.3bsd https://archive.org/details/upm-ref-4.3bsd https://archive.org/details/upm-sup1-4.3bsd https://archive.org/details/upm-sup2-4.3bsd https://archive.org/details/smm-4.3bsd https://archive.org/details/uum-index-4.3bsd It is my understanding that all supplementary docs (the papers that were originally in volumes 2a and 2b in the V7 manual) were retroffed by UCB/Usenix for 4.3BSD edition, but the earlier 4.2BSD Usenix print seems to be different - it looks like for 4.2BSD they only did a new troff run for all man pages and for new (Berkeley-added) supplementary docs, but in the case of docs which originally appeared in V7 vol 2, it appears that Usenix did some kind of analogue mass reproduction from a historical V7 master, *without* doing a new troff run on those docs. *If* this hypothesis is correct, then Erica's uploaded scan of 4.2BSD manuals can serve as a practical substitute for the presumably- missing scan of the original printing of V7 manual - but I would like to double-check my hypothesis with others who are presumably more knowledgeable about this ancient history (some of you actually lived through that history, unlike me!), hence the reason for this post. I would appreciate either confirmation or correction of the guesses and conjectures I expressed above. M~

1 year, 4 months

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32V filesystem images to verify code against.

by Jacob Moody

Hello TUHS, I recently have been working on the Plan 9 fs/v6fs and fs/v32fs programs, another member of the community had noticed bugs within them and I wanted to verify that the new code is working as expected. I haven't had an issue verifying v6fs using files from the TUHS archive but v32fs has proved to be a bit more tricky. After a little bit of work we were able to get the 'file2' located at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/32V/ to mount and read files. But given that all the files here are binaries it was a bit hard to make sure we're getting the correct information. I attempted to cross reference the files I get against the file2.tar also located within that spot in the archive but I am getting tar errors when extracting this file, so its not exactly obvious if what I am checking against is correct. So I would like to ask if someone here knows exactly what the sha1sums of these files are supposed to be and/or has another image with known contents I could test against. I will preface this with the fact that I am not very well versed in old UNIX filesystems so please let me know if I've missed anything. Thank you, Jacob Moody

1 year, 4 months

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Unix System V on the Public Domain 32000 (NS32016 chip set) reproduction

by Andrew Lynch

Hi I am interested in reconstructing the Public Domain 32000 (PD32) which appeared in 1986 edition of MicroCornicopia. It claimed to run Unix System V on a PC 8-bit ISA board using the NS32016 chip set. Does anyone remember this system and/or have any interest in it? Here is a link from Hackaday more fully describing the effort: ISA bus slave NS32016 processor board | Hackaday.io Thanks, Andrew Lynch

1 year, 4 months

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Re: Mills' initial implementation of FTP - best citation?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal >> the ambiguous phrase "had the first implementation of FTP", which >> has been flagged as needing clarification > From RFC 354 ... and from RFC 414 Those are NCP FTP, a slightly different protocol, and implementation, from TCP FTP. (The code from the NCP one was sometimes recycled into the TCP one; see e.g.: https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/sysnet/ftpu.161 which has both in one program.) These RFC's you listed are obviously pre-TCP; the first TCP RFC is RFC-675. (The first RFC that even mentions TCP seems to be RFC-661.) RFC's are all NCP-related until around #700 or so, when the mix starts to change. Maybe the "needing clarification" refers to these two different FTP's? Without an explicit classifier, does that text refer to NCP FTP or TCP FTP? Noel

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Mills' initial implementation of FTP - best citation?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Bakul Shah > He was part of NSFNet, so could have got first FTP on NSFnet or a > later version of FTP. You all are talking about _two separate FTP's_ (as I pointed out previously). If you all would stop confusing yourselves, you'd be able to sort out the bogons. In this particular case, the NSFnet appeared at a _much_ later stage of the growth of the Internet (yes, it is spelled with a capital 'I'; the morons at the AP were not aware that 'internet' was a pre-existing word with a _different meaning_) than when Dave was working with the Fuzzball, and by that point there were _many_ TCP FTP's (e.g. the ITS one I previously sent the URL to the source for), so the 'first FTP on NSFnet' is a non-concept. The best bet for accurate data is to look at the TCP meeting minutes from the IEN series: https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien-index.html Looking quickly, the first one that Dave appears in might be IEN-160, "Internet Meeting Notes -- 7-8-9 October 1980". (He wasn't in the "Attendees" lists of any of the earlier ones I looked at.) Look in the "Status Reports" sections to see if he says anything about where he's at. The one for this one says: "Dave described the configuration of equipment at COMSAT which consists of a number of small hosts, mainly LSI-11s. ... COMSAT has also used NIFTP to transmit files between their hosts and ISIE. The NIFTP software was provided by UCL. ... COMSAT plans to .. arrange a permanent connection to the ARPANET." I have no idea what a "NIFTP" might be. Also, there is a reason that serious historians prefer contemporary written records, not people's memories. Noel

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Mills' initial implementation of FTP - best citation?

by Paul Ruizendaal

> I see that the wording on his Wikipedia page has the ambiguous phrase "had > the first implementation of FTP", which has been flagged as needing > clarification, so I intend to provide it. > > In both this interview: > > https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113899/oh403dlm.pdf > > ... and this video recording of Mills himself giving a lecture at UDel: > > https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?t=428 > > ... it's quite clear that it's literally true - he authored, compiled, > installed, implemented, and tested the very first (and apparently second) > FTP server. It may be impossible to provide hard evidence. From RFC 354 it seems to me that the protocol took on a recognisable shape around July 1972 and from RFC 414 it seems to me that there were a number of implementations by November 1972, and unfortunately Dave Mills is not mentioned. His recollection may well be correct, but finding proof he was the first in a 4 months time slot 50+ years ago may be too ambitious. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc354.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc414.txt Maybe the internet history list can shed some more light on the matter: https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

1 year, 5 months

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(Off topic) Dave Mills

by George Michaelson

Dave Mills, of fuzzball and ntp fame, one time U Delaware died on the 17th of January. He was an interesting, entertaining, prolific and rather idosyncratic emailer. Witty and informative. G

1 year, 5 months

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Mills' initial implementation of FTP - best citation?

by Royce Williams

What is the best public, unambiguous, non-YouTube reference I can cite for the late David Mills' initial FTP work? I see that the wording on his Wikipedia page has the ambiguous phrase "had the first implementation of FTP", which has been flagged as needing clarification, so I intend to provide it. In both this interview: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113899/oh403dlm.pdf ... and this video recording of Mills himself giving a lecture at UDel: https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?t=428 ... it's quite clear that it's literally true - he authored, compiled, installed, implemented, and tested the very first (and apparently second) FTP server. But Wikipedia's guidelines discourage YouTube-only citations, and the text in the interview seems insufficiently detailed to have citation value. What is the best reference I can cite? Thanks! -- Royce

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

by G. Branden Robinson

Hi Lennart, At 2024-01-18T15:45:55+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote: > Quoth John Gardner: > > Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working with > > the latest release of SimH, so that's kind of stalled my ability to develop > > something in K&R-friendly C. > > I went ahead and write a little C/A/T-to-later-troff-output converter in > v7-friendly and C89-conforming C: > > https://git.sr.ht/~humm/catdit This is an exciting prospect but I can't actually see anything there. I get an error. "401 Unauthorized You don't have the necessary permissions to access this page. Index" > I’m not confident in having got the details of spacing right (Is that > 55-unit offset when switching font sizes correct?) I've never heard of this C/A/T feature/wart before. Huh. > and the character codes emitted are still those of the C/A/T, > resulting in the wrong glyphs being used. The codes should probably be remapped by default, with a command-line option to restore the original ones. I would of course recommend writing out 'C' commands with groff special character names. > I created the attached document like this: > > v7$ troff -t /usr/man/man0/title >title.cat > host$ catdit <title.cat | dpost -F. -Tcat >title.ps > > (Where do the two blank pages at the end come from?) Good question; we may need to rouse a C/A/T expert. > PS: Branden, for rougher results, if you happen to have a Tektronix > 4014 at hand (like the one emulated by XTerm), you can use that to > look at v7 troff’s output. Tell your SIMH to pass control bytes > through and run troff -t | tc. I'd love to, just please make your repo available to the public. :) Regards, Branden

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

by Mychaela Falconia

John Gardner wrote: > I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface > authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive > scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work. Are you offering to donate your labor in terms of typeface design, or will it be a type of deal where the community will need to collectively pitch in money to cover the cost of you doing it professionally? In either case, the "C/A/T-printed document" of most value to this project would be the same one G. Branden Robinson is referring to: > If you don't have my scan of CSTR #54 (1976), which helpfully dumps all > of the glyphs in the faces used by the Bell Labs CSRC C/A/T-4, let me > know and I'll send it along. I won't vouch for its high quality but it > should be comprehensive with respect to coverage. The paper in question is Nroff/Troff User's Manual by Joseph F. Ossanna, dated 1976-10-11, which was indeed also CSTR #54. The document is 33 pages long in its original form, and page 31 out of the 33 is the most interesting one for the purpose of font recreation: it is the page that exhibits all 4 fonts of 102 characters each. Here are the few published scans I am aware of: 1) Page 245 of: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seven… 2) Page 235 of: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seven… 3) Page 239 of: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manu… 4) Page 499 of: https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd Question to Branden: the scan you are referring to as "my scan", how does it compare to the 4 I just linked above? If your scan has better quality than all 4 versions I linked above, can you please make it public? M~

1 year, 5 months

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Re: PCS kernel sources

by Paul Ruizendaal

> All, I got this e-mail from Holger a while back. Somehow it went into > a folder and has lurked unseen for way too long. > > Does anybody know any more about PCS Unix and, if so, where should > I place the code that Holger has donated into the Unix Archive? I don’t know much about PCS Unix, but I did come across many references to Newcastle Connection (and Unix United) when researching early networking and the various approaches to giving early Unix a networking API. I think there is no other set of surviving sources for this. Maybe Holger disagrees, but I would say that PCS Unix is best placed in the “Early networking” section. By the way, for those interested, here is a start to read up on Unix United: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_Connection To some extent, it is similar to the “RIDE” software developed at Bell Labs Naperville by Priscilla Lu and to S/F Unix developed by GWR Luderer at Murray Hill. As far as I know the sources for both of those have been lost to time, afaik.

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

by Mychaela Falconia

Hi again John, > I only meant "professional" insofar as aptitude with graphics is concerned. > I won't accept money; I'm offering my labour out of love for typography, > computer history and its preservation, and of course, the technology that > got Unix the funding it needed to revolutionise computing. In any case, > there's no actual "design" work involved: it's literally just tracing > existing shapes to recreate an existing design. I do stuff like this > <https://github.com/file-icons/icons#why-request-an-icon-cant-i-submit-a-pr> > for *fun*, for crying out loud. Sounds great! If you are indeed serious about trying to recreate the ancient C/A/T character set in PostScript fonts (or some other font format that can be converted into a form that can be downloaded into a genuine PostScript printer), I'll try to find some time to produce the following: 1) A set of C/A/T binary files corresponding to that CSTR #54 manual, as well as BWK's troff tutorial which usually follows right after in book compilations. This step is simply a matter of running the original troff executable (with -t option) on the original source files for these docs - but since I actually run an OS that still includes that original version of troff and you said you don't, it would probably be easier for me to produce and publish these files. 2) A converter tool from C/A/T binary codes to PostScript, using whatever fonts you give it. I'll test it initially using the set of fonts which I developed for my 4.3BSD-Quasijarus pstroff - all characters will be there, all positioning will come from original troff, but it won't look pretty because most PS native font characters don't match those of C/A/T. Then as you progress with your font drawing project, you should be able to substitute your fonts instead of mine, and see how the output improves. > Nice! The more material I have, the merrier. As for the scan that Branden > and I were referring to, I've uploaded a copy to Dropbox Using pdfimages utility with -list option, I compared the image format and resolution in various scans I described in my previous mail, plus this new one you just shared, and concluded that the best quality is contained in these two: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seven… http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manu… Here are extracted PNG images of just the relevant page from both PDFs: https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-sri.png https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-ucb.png Each PNG is a lossless extract from the corresponding PDF, made with pdfimages utility. Each image is described as being 600x600 DPI in PDF metadata, and the print is said to be in 12 point - numbers for converting from pixels to .001m units in font reconstruction... M~

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

by G. Branden Robinson

Hi John, At 2024-01-18T00:43:41+1100, John Gardner wrote: > I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface > authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive > scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work. If you don't have my scan of CSTR #54 (1976), which helpfully dumps all of the glyphs in the faces used by the Bell Labs CSRC C/A/T-4, let me know and I'll send it along. I won't vouch for its high quality but it should be comprehensive with respect to coverage. > Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working > with the latest release of SimH, Let me know in private mail where you got stuck. Maybe I can help. > I'm still up for this, assuming you've not already started. No, I haven't--perhaps because I am an Ada fanboy, the prospect of coding in pre-standard C and its mission to turn anything that can be lexically analyzed into _some_ sequence of machine instructions has not stoked my excitement. (Which isn't to say that one _can't_ write safe code using K&R C; my fear is that having to remember all of the things the compiler won't do for you would overwhelm the task at hand. Too bad Unix V7 didn't have Perl, since this is basically a text transformation problem.) Regards, Branden

1 year, 5 months

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PCS kernel sources

by Warren Toomey

All, I got this e-mail from Holger a while back. Somehow it went into a folder and has lurked unseen for way too long. Does anybody know any more about PCS Unix and, if so, where should I place the code that Holger has donated into the Unix Archive? Many thanks, Warren ----- Forwarded message from hveit01(a)web.de ----- From: hveit01(a)web.de To: wkt(a)tuhs.org Subject: PCS kernel sources Hi Warren, Some time ago I subscribed to the tuhs mailing list because of my interests in Unix. I have been working on regenerating the ancient PCS unix (see more details in the README file in the attached archive). Now it is in a state to publish the results. You may decide to put this up on the TUHS website for reference. PCS UNIX (dubbed MINUX) is special in the way that it is derived from an SVR3.2 UNIX with the Newcastle connection integrated. The Newcastle connection is an early attempt for multicomputer networking; it provides a shared file system over the network, similar to the later NFS. To my knowledge, it is the first time that source for it are described (beyond some publicly availablereasearch paper); I haven't yet managed to find the original sources of this. Regards Holger Veit ----- End forwarded message -----

1 year, 5 months

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Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

by tuhs＠cuzuco.com

No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on the software side were - 1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one of his books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that if you wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech. 2) Scribe. From Brian Reid, of Carnegie-Mellon See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/scribe.pdf -Brian Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com wrtoe: > Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF > > On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:19b/PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote: > > > On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and > > one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the > > thing? Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end > > user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of > > example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using > > their new, expensive instrument? Did they have any "packaged bundles" for > > users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs? > > > Basically, the phototypesetter part was turnkey with a built-in > minicomputer with a paper tape unit, later a micro and a floppy disk as a > cost reduction. The preparation for the typesetter was often done > independently, but often the vendor offered some system to prepare the PPT > or Floppy. Different typesetter vendors targeted different parts of the > market, from small local independent newspapers (such as the one my sister > and her husband owned and ran in North Andover MA for many years), to > systems that Globe or the Times might. Similarly, books and magazines > might have different systems (IIRC the APS-5 was originally targeted for > large book publishers). This was all referred to as the 'pre-press' > industry and there were lots of players in different parts. > > Large firms that produced documentation, such as DEC, AT&T *et al*., and > even some universities, might own their own gear, or they might send it out > to be set. > > The software varied greatly, depending on the target customer. For > instance, by the early 80s, the Boston Globe's input system was still > terrible - even though the computers had gotten better. I had a couple of > friends working there, and they used to b*tch about it. But big newspapers > (and I expect many other large publishers) were often heavy union shops on > the back end (layout and presses), so the editors just wanted to set strips > of "column wide" text as the layout was manual. I've forgotten the name of > the vendor of the typesetter they used, but it was one of the larger firms > -- IIRC, it had a DG Nova in it. My sister used CompuGraphic Gear, which > was based on 8085's. She had two custom editing stations and the > typesetter itself (it sucked). The whole system was under $35K in > late-1970s money - but targeted to small newspapers like hers. In the > mid-1908s, I got her a Masscomp at a reduced price and put 6 Wyse-75 > terminals on it, so she could have her folks edit their stories with vi, > run spell, and some of the other UNIX tools. I then reverse-engineered the > floppy enough to split out the format she wanted for her stories -- she > used a manual layout scheme. She still has to use the custom stuff for > headlines and some other parts, but it was a load faster and more parallel > (for instance, we wrote an awk script to generate the School Lunch menus, > which they published each week). >

1 year, 5 months

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V10 monk program

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. V10 had a program called "monk" which was a "document compiler". It produced troff and know how to run eqn, tbl, and pic and I'm guessing also refer. It seems to have been inspired by Scribe. The V10 files from Dan Cross have the device independent troff output for the paper that describes monk. G. Branden Robinson was kind enough to turn it into PostScript for me; his story is below, forwarded by permission. I'm also attaching the PostScript file. I'm curious, did this see a lot of use inside Research or outside of it? At first glance, it looks like the kind of thing that might have caught on, especially for people who weren't already used to troff. Thanks, Arnold > Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 12:25:53 -0600 > From: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> > To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com> > Subject: Re: v10 ditroff output file > > Hi Arnold, > > At 2024-01-09T08:50:28+0200, Aharon Robbins wrote: > > Hi. > > > > The file of interest is attached. It's from vol2/monk in Dan Cross's > > V10 sources in the Distributions/Research directory from TUHS. > > > > If you can get postscript out of it somehow, > > Bad news and good news. > > ...unfortunately there was too much impedance mismatch with groff/grops. > > Some font names differ but that's not a big deal. (Also, today I > learned: the troff that generated this reloaded all the fonts at each > new page.) The troff(1) that generated this also attempted vertical > motion before starting the first page. That also wasn't a big deal. I > thought I was going to be able to text-edit my way to a solution...but > then... > > grops really wants the device resolution to be 72,000 dpi, not 720, and > we'd have to write a rescaling feature to support that. Just editing > the output file won't do because the file uses Kernighan's optimized, > anonymous output command pervasively. > > groff_out(5): > ddc Move right dd (exactly two decimal digits) basic units u, > then print glyph with single‐letter name c. > > In groff, arbitrary syntactical space around and within this > command is allowed to be added. Only when a preceding > command on the same line ends with an argument of variable > length a separating space is obligatory. In classical > troff, large clusters of these and other commands were used, > mostly without spaces; this made such output almost > unreadable. > > So all these two-digit motions would need to become five-digit motions > or all the glyphs would pile up on each other. (And that's exactly what > I happened after doing a couple of fixups and throwing gxditview(1) at > it.) > > Out of curiosity, I tried DWB 3.3 troff. > > It did well, until the fourth page, when it fell over and produced > PostScript that made Ghostscript very angry. > > So I tried Heirloom Doctools troff. > > 20 pages of goodness. > > But be advised: some sort of extension was used to embed other > PostScript files: > > ./bin/dpost: can't open picture file samples/tailor.ps (line 1493) (page 2) > ./bin/dpost: can't open picture file samples/memo.ps (line 1749) (page 3) > ./bin/dpost: can't open picture file samples/tmbody.ps (line 2151) (page 4) > ./bin/dpost: can't open picture file samples/tmcs.ps (line 2694) (page 5) > > So I went to minnie.tuhs.org to see if they were there... > > ...and they were. > > So here you go. Renders without errors (though Heirloom is nowhere near > as validation-happy as groff), and the output seems plausible. > > > I'll really appreciate it. :-) > > Enjoy! > > Regards, > Branden

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Original print of V7 manual?

by Douglas McIlroy

> The <C>omputerphile Youtube channel did a video about 10 years ago about > "The Great 202 jailbreak:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w It may be superfluous in this forum, but one should note that the video's characterization of Brian Kernighan as the father of typesetting at Bell Labs does great disservice to Joe Ossanna, who single-handedly brought the first phototypesetter to the labs, subjected it to computer control, and wrote troff (which lives on 50 years later) to drive it. In passing, the video denigrates the C/A/T because it had a fixed font repertoire and no general graphic capability. But without the antecedent of C/A/T and troff, the famous Linotron summer-vacation project would never have been undertaken. Doug

1 year, 5 months

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XID register

by ron minnich

SunRPC, among other protocols, needs transaction IDs (XIDs) to distinguish RPCs.For SunRPC, it's important that XIDs not be reused (not for all protocols; 9p has no such requirement). Stateless protocols like NFS and reused XIDs can get messy. There is a vague, 30 year old memory, I have, that at some point SPARC got a time register, or some other register, that always provided a different answer each time it was read, even if read back to back, in part to enable creation of non-reused XIDs. Note that things like the TSC or RISC-V MTIME register make no such guarantee. I am pretty sure someone here can fill me in, or tell me I'm wrong, about my SPARC memory. thanks

1 year, 6 months

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Re: Original print of V7 manual?

by Brian Walden

Mychaela Falconia falcon at freecalypso.org wrote: . . . > > It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the troff, tbl, > > eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that time, and NOT any GNU > > ones. Why? These were the versions written by AT&T that Sun got directly from > > them during their SVR4 collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to > > troff (which obviously did not exist in 1979). > > You did the right thing: the version you used certainly feels much more > "right" than anything from GNU. I was just tryting to use the tool that would give the path of least resistance for that troff source. Even between flavors of UNIX in the 1980s, there were issues getting correctly formatted output bewteen Documenter's Workbench (DWB) and UCB. > > That code to produce PostScript > > outout, had a high probability of being written by the graphics group run by > > Nils-Peter Nelson in Russ Archer's Murray Hill Computer Center (department > > 45268). > > So it is a different ditroff-to-PS chain than psdit from Adobe > Transcript? I am not too familiar with the latter, as I ended up > writing my own troff (derived from V7 version, just published) that > emits PS directly, but it is my understanding that Back In The Day > most people used psdit for this type of workflow. The DWB way of troff to PostScript is -- $ pic file | tbl | eqn | troff -mm -Tpost | dpost >file.ps $ # if you want to print it near the "bird cage" printer, near a famous stair case in MH $ i10send -dbirdie -lpost file.ps $ # which would eventually call postio for you $ postio -l /dev/tty?? file.ps As this is pre-ethernet time, QMS printers are connected via RS-232 serial lines and postio does the communication to the printer. You can find dpost at https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/p… (or at https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/dpost/dpost.c ) Looking at the last few lines of https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/lp/filter/p… it is signed, Richard Drechsler MH 2F-241 x7442 mhuxa!drexler Which is that group I mentioned. Rich wrote dpost for sure, also if you look at the last person thanked in the Preface of The C programming Language, Second Edition (1988) -- Rich Drechsler helped greatly with typesetting. On a sad side note, Carmela L'Hommedieu, I was going to say "recently," but it's been almost four years now, who also worked in that group, has passed https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/10822663/Carmela-Scrocca-LHommedi… > > > I did have a volume 2A that also had the correct 7th Edition C Reference > > Manual > > in it. The one you get in my 1988 PDF is from the 6th Edition, notice it is > > the old =+ syntax and not the += one. Dennis said that not even Lucent could > > provide that as a free PDF, as it was a published book by Prentice-Hall. I > > was asked to destroy all PDFs that had that version in it. > > Ouch, until you pointed it out in this ML post, I hadn't even noticed > that the C Reference Manual doc is "wrong" in your PDF version! But > here comes the really important question: if you once had a PDF reprint > with the "right" version of this doc, where did you get the troff > source for it? This is the source that was actually censored from the > V7 tape: > > https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cman Yes that is the missing C Reference Manual. I was gifted the troff source for it, and unfortunately I do not have that gifted copy anymore. > > I don't have this problem for my 4.3BSD reprint: the source for 4.3BSD > version of this doc is included on the tape; the corresponding SCCS > log begins with "document received from AT&T", checked in on 86/05/14, > and then revised by BSD people into what they wanted printed in their > version of the manual. But if someone wishes to do a *proper* reprint > of the V7 manual (or 4.2BSD, where this doc and many others were > literally unchanged duplications from V7 master at the plate level), > we need the troff source for the V7 version of this doc. > > If this source is totally lost, we as in community can probably do an > OCR from a surviving scan (for example, the one in 4.2BSD PSD book) > and then painstakingly produce a new troff source that would format > into an exact replica - but if there is a leaked copy of the original > source somewhere, it would certainly make our job way easier. > > > Larry McVoy asked me for my modified files to make the PDFs too, in 1999 or > > 2000, for bitkeeper or bitsavers. But since I was not allowed to share them > > and I had moved companies, I had lost them. I thought I had saved a copy but > > I could no longer find it. I asked Dennis if he still had them, he did not. > > This work is truly lost. > > Aside from the unresolved issue of "cman" document, we as in community > can produce an even better work if we so wish. I am deferring a more > detailed discussion until I put out my 4.3BSD PS reprint, so I can > point to it as a reference for how I like to do things, and maybe by > then we'll have some clarity on what happened to V7 "cman" troff source. You will need to check on the legality of that. It is missing because it was published as Appendix A of the first edition of The C Programming Language in 1978 by Prentice-Hall, which means they (not Bell Labs, nor successor compaies, AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia) contractually own the rights to it for some period of time. I you read Dennis' old home page at https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ you'll see this verbage -- "The version of the C Reference Manual Postscript (250KB) or PDF, (79K) that came with 6th Edition Unix (May 1975), in the second volume entitled ``Documents for Use With the Unix Time-sharing System''. For completeness, there are also versions of Kernighan's tutorial on C, in Postscript or PDF format. There is also a slightly earlier (January 1974) version of the C manual, in the form of an uninterpreted PDF scan of a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum, visible here, if you can accommodate 1.9MB. No updated version of this manual was distributed with most machine readable versions of the 7th Edition, since the first edition of the `white book' K&R was published about the same time. The tutorial was greatly expanded into the bulk of the book, and the manual became the book's Appendix A. However, it turns out that the paper copies of the 7th Edition manual that we printed locally include not only what became Appendix A of K&R 1, but also a page entitled "Recent Changes to C", and I retyped this. I haven't been able to track down the contemporary machine-readable version (it's possible that some tapes were produced that included it). This is available in PostScript or PDF format." As we know from the recent public domaining of Mickey Mouse, copyright is retained 70 years past the date of death of the (last surviving) author. So if Brian Kernighan lives to the ripe old age of 101, this work cannot be used without permisson until 2113, unless the rights holders place it into the public domian before hand. Since the 1st edition is out of print, it's rights *may* have reverted back, but to which companies? Probabaly Nokia and AT&T jointy. But there is no way to know if you can use it, without an official notice of such. -Brian

1 year, 6 months

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Re: Original print of V7 manual?

by Brian Walden

Arnold, Thank you, it's nice to have one's work appreciated. And I know, you were doing exactly what I was doing, trying to make it more accessible to more people. And Dennis, being who he was, always gave credit where credit was do. There's nothing else he could or would have done. And like I said, it was long ago and has not bothered me in a very long time. Thanks for your continued dedication to gawk. Awk still just flows out of my fingers without even needing to think much or at all. Professionally, I have programmed in python for years, and have never gotten to the same level intimacy I have with awk. -Brian arnold at skeeve.com wrote: > Thanks for this history Brian. > > It was a long time ago, but I think all I did was figure out how > to turn the PDF back into postscript, since I had a postscript printer > at the time and it was easier for me to print postscript. > > I sent the files to Dennis _only_ with the thought that they might be > useful to other people, and certainly with no intent to steal any credit. > > Your files were great; I printed out hardcopy at the time and > still have them on a shelf in my basement. > > Thanks! > > Arnold

1 year, 6 months

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SunOS 4.1.3 and 4.1.4 Release Manuals

by Kevin Bowling

Would anyone happen to have a link to these? I am curious to read the changes in the final SunOS 4.1 versions and see how it yielded to Solaris during that period. Here is the 4.1.2 version for reference https://vtda.org/docs/computing/Sun/software/800-6645-10_SunOS4.1.2ReleaseM…. Regards, Kevin

1 year, 6 months

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