- TUHS - www.tuhs.org

Re: [TUHS] Work I've done with a PDP-11 simulator

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

>> From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)bitmover.com> >> have you gotten to a point where you can rebuild the world and install >> your newly built stuff? > Well, I haven't tried to do that (it's not something that I'm that > interested in), but it _should_ be possible, since the 'vanilla' V6 > distribution does include the source for pretty much everything > (including the C compiler, assembler, loader, etc). So, just for grins, because I was curious (after your question), I did try recompiling the C compiler, to see what I'd get. What I got were three files (c0, c1 and c2) which were _the exact same size_ (down to the byte) as the binaries on the V6 Research distro, but had a number of differences when compared with 'cmp -l'. Odd! I don't know what the differences result from (and it's too late now to dig into why, I'm fading). I'll take a gander tomorrow and try and work it out. Too bad the binaries in the Research distro have had their symbol tables stripped! That would have made it much easier... My guess is something like 'libraries in different order, so two library routines are swapped around in the linked binary', or something like that (given that the size is an exact match). But I'll need to dig a bit... Noel

11 years, 1 month

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Re: [TUHS] Work I've done with a PDP-11 simulator

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> OK, I have whipped up some material on how to bring V6 up under > Ersatz-11. See here: > http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/V6Unix.html New location (although the old one still works): http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html So it turns out there was a bogon on the old version of this page: it claimed the Windoze version of 'tar' needed Unix system mods (which is incorrect, it was the version for V6 which needed the mods - cut and paste error). Fixed now (it's useful to have a Windoze 'tar' because some of the old TAR files in the archive can't be read by modern tools), and a certain amount of new material added to the page overall. > There is more content/pages coming: the start of an 'advanced things > you can do to improve your V6 Unix' page I've upgraded that somewhat to a complete page (although I'll probably add more at some point in the future, e.g. I have a version of 'ps' which shows sleep channels symbolically, text slots as ordinals, etc but I need to tweak it a bit before I bring it out). The page is here: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/ImprovingV6.html now, although the main page links to it too. And I have another page coming, e.g. a 'what to look out for when you're porting stuff to and from V6' guide. Etc, etc. Noel

11 years, 1 month

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Re: [TUHS] Work I've done with a PDP-11 simulator

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> > If you haven't already, see > <http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2004/homework/hw5.html> et seqq. I had seen a later variant of that course; I wasn't aware that an earlier one used Unix; thanks for the pointer. It's a bit unfortunate (from my PoV) that in the Unix coverage they seemed to mostly focus on the low-level mechanics (e.g. how stacks are switched, etc, etc), and not on the (to me) more interesting lessons to be learned from V6 - most notably, how to get so much bang for so little buck! (I am convinced that one of the primary challenges facing computer science these days is control of complexity, but I don't want to get way off-topic, so I'll stop there.) Although I suppose things like that have to be covered at some point, and they might as well do it in V6 as in anything else! Noel

11 years, 2 months

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Work I've done with a PDP-11 simulator

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

Hello, all: I'm working (long-term) on a project to bring back to life the V6+ Unix system (it wasn't vanilla V6 - it looks like it had some PWB stuff added) that was used on a number of machines at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT in the late 70s - early 80s. As part of that, I've been playing with bringing up V6 on a PDP11 simulator, and have written some stuff that would probably be useful to anyone who's interested in bringing up Unix on a PDP-11 simulator. I used the Ersatz-11 simulator from D-Bit (for no particularly good reason, except it runs under Windoze, and the "FAQ on the Unix Archive and Unix on the PDP-11" page said it was the fastest). I have been very pleased with this simulator; it is indeed fast (my simulated 11/70 runs at about 100 MIPS on a relatively elderly Athlon, which is about 30 times as fast as a real one used to :-), and it has lots of nice features (e.g. you can TELNET in to a terminal port on the simulated PDP-11). It also has this nice virtual device that allows a program running on the simulated PDP-11 i) access to files in the Windows file system, and ii) to issue commands to the emulator. I have written a V6 driver for it (should be fairly easy to adapt to V7 or later), and a suite of Unix commands to grab a file off the Windows file system (both binary and text mode), and issue various commands to the simulator. Finally, I have a number of Windows commands to do various useful things, such as read a file off a simulated Unix V6 file system (hosted in a Windows file), including ports of a number of Unix commands (e.g. ncheck, nm, etc); I don't detail them all here as I don't want this email to get too long (and boring). I'm not sure if anyone's interested in any of this; if so, I can send in more info (or whip up a Web page, whichever would be better). I also ran into a number of pitfalls on the way to getting V6 running, using RK05 disk images from the TUHS archive, and I can do a short writeup on 'How to bring up V6 under Ersatz-11' if anyone's interested. Noel

11 years, 2 months

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Re: [TUHS] Work I've done with a PDP-11 simulator

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> On Sat, May 03, 2014 at 06:20:55PM -0400, Gregg Levine wrote: > What he said. I believe we all are interested. OK, I have whipped up some material on how to bring V6 up under Ersatz-11. See here: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/V6Unix.html That page covers i) how to get the emulator, V6 Unix disks, and what you need to do start it running, and then ii) some of the initial steps to take past that to improve to working environment. Included in that are a couple of things I tripped over, and how to avoid them. The latter part assumes you want to do something more than just start it, so you can see it start up; it includes coverage of the commands that work with the emulator's "DOS device" to do things like read files off the host machine into the Unix; a serious problem on V6 Unix having to do with 21st Century dates; a 'more' command for V6 Unix (Vanilla V6 was back before the days of video terminals... :-); the ability to TELNET into the emulator; and some useful Windows commands (e.g. to read files out of the Unix into the host machine, and create blank disk pack files); and finally configuration file for the E11 emulator. There is more content/pages coming: the start of an 'advanced things you can do to improve your V6 Unix' page, which includes the new C compiler [the 'vanilla' V6 C compiler does not handle longs, unsigned, casts, and a bunch of other things]; tar; the Standard I/O library; etc is already there, but unfinished. And I have some material on things you can trip over in porting stuff back and forth (I found some doozies trying to make V6 commands run under Windoze), etc. But that will be later. For now, I'm interested in hearing: of any errors or issues with the first page; whether people find it completely incomprensible, or totally fantastic (or whereever on the axis between them it lies); what additional topics I should cover; etc, etc. Let me know! And enjoy your V6 experience! Noel

11 years, 2 months

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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 112, Issue 1

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> > I didn't realize that MIT had PDP-11 Unixes. Yes; I don't know exactly when the first one arrived, but I'm pretty sure it was around the end of my freshman year (i.e. the summmer of '75), because I remember a friend showing me Unix sometime in my sophmore year, and they already had it as a going concern then. The first one (I think) at MIT was the 11/70 belonging to the Domain-Specific Systems Research group at LCS (DSSR). I got a copy of theirs for the Computer Systems Research group (CSR) at LCS, that would have been in the fall of '77. I don't think the AI Lab ever had one; with us all together in 545 Tech Sq I think I would have heard (although maybe the Turtle guys on the third floor had one). There were probably others on campus, but Unixes could be pretty small, and MIT is big enough that the left hand wouldn't know of the right (and 545 Tech Sq was kind of insulated from the rest of campus anyway). One I recollect on main campus later on was somewhere in the EE department - maybe Speech? They had the CHAOS protocols installed on it - that was later, say '79-'80 or so. > Other places didn't worry about it, with John Lyons' V6 book being the > biggest leak. Not to mention things like the ACM paper, which was public domain... > From: Win Treese <treese(a)acm.org> > As I understood it, MIT's main objection was that they didn't want to > get entangled in anything that would require students to sign non-disclosure agreements. That sounds likely. > At some point, MIT did have a license with Western Electric that did > not have such a requirement. I'm pretty sure it was at least V7, and > possibly 32V; not sure about V6. Well, I don't know about the license (MIT had a student who was an intern at Bell, and I think a lot of stuff slipped out the back door with him :-), but MIT definitely had V6 in 1976 or so, and V7 wasn't released until 1979. So we had it long before V7. Plus to which I have listings of the kernel; it's definitely pre-V7, but it's not vanilla V6, it has some other stuff in it (I think it's probably PWB). Noel

11 years, 2 months

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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 112, Issue 1

by Doug McIlroy

> V6 ... on a number of machines at the Laboratory for Computer > Science at MIT in the late 70s - early 80s Interesting. I didn't realize that MIT had PDP-11 Unixes. When university CS departments were snapping up licenses right and left, MIT demurred because AT&T licensed it as a trade secret and MIT's lawyers (probably rightly) feared there was no way they could keep Unix knowledge from contaminating research projects. Other places didn't worry about it, with John Lyons' V6 book being the biggest leak. AT&T lawyers did clamp down on general distribution of the book, but Bell Labs eagerly hired Lyons for a sabbatical visit. Did MIT's lawyers relent by V6 time, or did LCS somehow circumvent them? Doug

11 years, 2 months

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OT: Andy Warhol images recovered from 1985 amiga system

by Aharon Robbins

For those of you into retrocomputing: http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/warhol-discovery Arnold

11 years, 2 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Brian S Walden

the short: yes you could chown your own files in 1st to 5th editions, the first pwb was a derivition of 4th ed, so its not the originator of the idea. the long: that "superuser could not even chown setuid files" awoke a long dead memory. I needed to go back to read the 1st ed man entries for chown(1) and (2) again ( see http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/1stEdman.html inc. below) and it is documented that yes, one indeed could give away their own files. also note 1st ed was pre-gid, files had only owner and non-owner, so no setgid to worry about. looking more 2nd and 3rd ed were the same (see ttp://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v2/v2man.pdf and http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v3/v3man.t…) however in the 3rd ed there were now gids yet no restistions on chown of setgid files. 4th and 5th ed still allowed file give away even if the setuid bit was set by stripping that bit out (unless superuser) (but did not strip the setgid bit) (see http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v4/v4man.t… and http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v5/v5man.p…) The 6th ed and on is when only the superuser could change file owners. Since the first PWBs were derived from 4th and 5th editions, they just did not buy into the new chown() restrictions from v6 (and added the missed strippig of the setgid bit) 1st Ed manual enries -- 11/3/71 CHOWN (I) NAME chown -- change owner SYNOPSIS chown owner file DESCRIPTION owner becomes the new owner of the files. The owner may be either a decimal UID or a name found in /etc/uids. Only the owner of a file is allowed to change the owner. It is illegal to change the owner of a file with the set-user- ID mode. FILES /etc/uids SEE ALSO stat DIAGNOSTICS BUGS OWNER ken, dmr 11/3/71 SYS CHOWN (II) NAME chown -- change owner of file SYNOPSIS sys chown; name; owner / chown = 16. DESCRIPTION The file whose name is given by the null-terminated string pointed to by name has its owner changed to owner. Only the present owner of a file (or the super-user) may donate the file to another user. Also, one may not change the owner of a file with the set-user-ID bit on, otherwise one could create Trojan Horses able to misuse other's files. FILES SEE ALSO /etc/uids has the mapping between user names and user numbers. DIAGNOSTICS The error bit (c-bit) is set on illegal owner changes. BUGS OWNER ken, dmr > From Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> > > Indeed, research Unix never allowed ordinary users to > change a uid. And even in the first edition, the superuser > was not allowed to do so on set-uid files, presumably to > prevent inadvertent laying of cuckoo eggs. The v6 note > about interaction with accounting reflected field > experience with the overly liberal stance of other Unixes. >

11 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Pepe

On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 2:00 AM [GMT+1=CET], John Cowan wrote: > SZIGETI Szabolcs scripsit: > > > Well, with the same reasoning, we don't need passwords or protection > > bits on files, since I can always take a piece of steel pipe and > > beat the owner, until he gives out the data, so why bother? > > More like beating my argument with a pipe than the owner. > > > Blocking chown for general users is one level of several controls. > > Its specific purpose was to make per-user quotas practical, but since > per-user quotas are as dead as the dodo, it no longer serves any known > purpose. I don't think quotas are dead. It seems nowadays the "preferred" storage backend for email on Unix/Linux mail servers is Maildir, and Maildir uses the filesystem as its own backend, together with the filesystem's quota facility to give or take storage space to/from mailboxes -- yes, provided the users are real system users and not "virtual users", but still. What is "dead as the dodo" is multi-user shell access. But that does not mean multi-user shell access should be removed from modern systems, no matter how dead it may be. -Pepe.

11 years, 5 months

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History of chown semantics

by Tim Bradshaw

Sorry if this is off-topic but I bet someone here will know. I recently had a significant surprise when I discovered that on HP-UX ordinary users can still give away files. Various of us who remember fairly old Unixes then sat around trying to remember which systems had this and where it came from: getting it almost entirely wrong, it turns out. What we remembered was that it came from BSD, but this seems to be entirely wrong. It looks like it originated with System III / V, and perhaps was imported from there into some SunOS (possibly it was in all versions before Solaris?) which is why we remember it as being in BSD. It must have been in some 80s system or we would not remember it. POSIX still allows it but clearly reluctantly. So the questions are: (a) did it originate in System III or does it go back further than that, and (b) was it in the BSD-derived SunOSes or are we just making that up? And I guess: who thought this was a good idea? Thanks --tim

11 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Brian S Walden

Yea, but that was all much later. It wasn't a problem with PWB as it's file system structure, in practice, was /u[0-9]/{projectname}/{username} so when a mount point ran low on space it wasn't the individual user that got hassled, but the projects under the mount. Makes disc usage accounting easy too, if it's under the project, the project pays for it. You can see that structure and how PWB was actually used by a project at http://9grid.org.uk/pwb/users-view.pdf > From: Ed Carp <erc(a)pobox.com> > > But it was fun to give away large files to someone else to avoid getting > hassled by a sysadmin when you were close to filling up your disk quota. :)

11 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Brian S Walden

Very, very true. PWB was all about introducing UNIX into the comp centers which were all ready in existance, with big iron sitting in them. Existing staff was tapped to run PWB as well, typically consisted of operators, system administrators, system programmers, program counselors, and accounting personal. None were researchers, UNIX was a service to be provided, the goal was to keep the machines up and running to charge for usage. > From: <scj(a)yaccman.com> > > Recall that in those days, "systems administrator" was an entry level, > minimum wage job. Most worked third shift, and their primary duties were > to mount and dismount disc backup tapes. Those people who actually did > administration in the sense we think of it were greatly underpaid and > disrespected. The next decade or two, particularly with networking, > caused a huge change. The Usenix LISA conferences did a lot to raise > consciousness that there was a real there there. >

11 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Brian S Walden

so RJE first, yes as written it did require that chown() work as non-root, as it ran as the "rje" euid and did chown() files to the user's uid, I do not believe that was the cause of the chown() semantics change, just a use of it. iOne could do the same thing by other means (run as root, have a setuid 0, file owner changer, etc) if chown(2) was root only. Why did I believe that? in section V. (iv) Make changes to the UNIX system only after much delibera- tion, and only when major gains can be made. Avoid chang- ing the UNIX system's interfaces, and isolate any such changes as much as possible. Stay close to the Research UNIX system, in order to take advantage of continuing improvements. OK now lets look at a passage from VI -- A good many UNIX (as opposed to PWB/UNIX) systems are run as "friendly-user" systems, and are each used by a fairly small number of people who often work closely together. A large frac- tion of these users have read/write permissions for most (or all) of the files on the system, have permission to add commands to the public directories, are capable of "re-booting" the operating system, and even know how to repair damaged file systems. The PWB/UNIX system, on the other hand, is most often found in a computer-center environment. So the old way, no one even really needs chown() everybody had access to everything. then 8.1 The first major set of reliability improvements concerned the handling of disk files. It is a fact of life that time-sharing sys- tems are continually short of disk space; ... long-term tape backup copies, on the other hand, offer users the chance to delete files that they might want back at some time in the future, without requiring them to make "personal" copies disk is always full, and users are discourged from making multiple copies of f and even encourge to remove stuff you do not need right now and get it from backup later, let alone making copies of someone else's files. next from 8.4, while its abouttrying to solve the uid shortage (only 256 at the time) it shows you the users' mind set, groups tended to functionally operate as single user, but everyone still wanted a unique id. .... depended heavily on the characteristics of the PWB/UNIX user community, which, as mentioned above, consists mostly of groups of cooperating users, rather than of individual users working in isolation from one another. Typical behavior and opinions in these groups were: (i) Users in such a group cared very little about how much protection they had from each other, as long as their files were protected from damage by users outside their group. (ii) A common password was often used by members of a group, even when they owned distinct user-IDs. This was often done so that a needed file could be accessed without delay when its owner was unavailable. (iii) Most users were willing to have only one or two user-IDs per group, but wanted to retain their own login names and login directories. We also favored such a distinction, because experience showed that the use of a single login name by more than a few users almost always produced cluttered directory structures containing useless files. so the group members would know each othesr passwords (but there were many groups on the same machine) thus non-root chown() become self-service in sharing of files between group members, without the need of system administrator involvment. while one could give their files to someone outside the group, it is not productive. And then -- to improve the security of files, a few commands were changed to create files with read/write permission for their own- ers, but read-only for everyone else. The net effect of these changes was to greatly enlarge the size of the user community that could be served, without destroying the convenience of the UNIX system and without requiring widespread and fundamental changes shows the need to lock down file access, which means if you are sharing in Research UNIX you did not need to chown() files, you could just write them, but PWB will lock it down so a different group cannot muck with it. Now you are going to say this could all be done with proper use of group ids and group permissions. I agree, but in practice it was not done, as PWB even consdidered the complete removal of gids, but only decided against it as they would have to change too much software -- considered was that of decreasing the available number of the so-called "group-IDs," or removing them entirely, and using the bits thus freed to increase the number of distinct user-IDs. Although attractive in many ways, this solution required a change in the interpretation of information stored with every single disk file (and every backup copy thereof), changes to large numbers of commands, and a fun- damental departure from the Research UNIX system during a time when thought was being given to possible changes to that system's protection mechanisms. For these reasons, this solution was deemed unwise. > From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> > > Brian - I know the paper and Mash - the 3rd author and lived the times ;-) > > I just don't see how having the ability to give away a file to some one > else made it easier for anyone - system programmer or admin. The idea of > giving a device back begs the question of how did you get ownership in the > first place. > > The one thing I could think of was something like the RJE system that you > would wanted to have made your files be owned by the RJE system, have them > send it to the mainframe, get back information and then give the results > back to you. If they wanted to do that subsystem with out a root style > privilege, you would need some way to give files away. > > But I can think of other ways to do that without needing the chown(2) call > to work with that semantic, so I really don't understand what it was used. > > To me, it does not seem to be worth much. As I said have to ask Mash if > he remembers why it was considered a good idea. > > Clem

11 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Brian S Walden

Yep, but where did the user base from PWB come from? They were existing professional programmers from the mainframe world, still writing for the mainframe, now sumbmitting via UNIX RJE. Where did the sysadmins of PWB that added these users come from? Same answer. If users are not added into the right groups, and the users don't know (or need, care, or be able change) groups, they don't get implemented properly. And if you don't have gids, want to collaborate, and are discouraged from copying, you need to do a ton of chown()s > From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)bitmover.com> > > > Now you are going to say this could all be done with proper use of group ids > > and group permissions. I agree, but in practice it was not done > > Bzzt. We have a solution, they should have used it. >

11 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Brian S Walden

it follows the philosophy of pwb -- a usable system for disparate small groups of developers on the same hardware that could be managed by admins not system programmers. read http://www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/articles/bstj57-6-2177.pdf for the flavor of that time, and you'll understand better. > From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> > > Brian - right as I showed in the code snippet from V6 and PWB. The idea > came into being with PWB. > The question that is still open is why was it added/need in the first > place? I always thought is was a crazy/miss feature, > > I think the argument is that if you owned the file, you should be allowed > to give it to anyone else [including root] - but that actions opens up a > number of issues (you pointed the big security one that was handled by > and-ing off the SUID/SGID bits). There are accounting issues as well as > the practical one that Tim and I pointed out with importing of files on a > tape. > > As I said, the file give-away feature comes into UNIX with PWB, so I would > ask Mash is he remembers why it was needed and why the SVID folks wanted > it. As I said, I personally found it not useful/a bad idea/miss-feature. > I remember that I soon after I learned about it/got bitten by the side > effect, I ran into dmr and srb at a USENIX and asked them about that a few > other System III features that I found a little strange. I don't remember > much of the conversation. But, if there are been a "good" reason I think > I would have remembered it and not always thought it to be a bad idea. > > Clem

11 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Doug McIlroy

Indeed, research Unix never allowed ordinary users to change a uid. And even in the first edition, the superuser was not allowed to do so on set-uid files, presumably to prevent inadvertent laying of cuckoo eggs. The v6 note about interaction with accounting reflected field experience with the overly liberal stance of other Unixes.

11 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics

by Brian S Walden

non-su chown worked in pwb, if the caller owned the file. code had to be added then to the system call to strip the setuid/setgid bits if you were not su, for obvious security reasons. you didnt see that bit stripping in, say the v6/v7 code. > From: Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> > > Sorry if this is off-topic but I bet someone here will know. > > I recently had a significant surprise when I discovered that on HP-UX ordinary users can still give away files. Various of us who remember fairly old Unixes then sat around trying to remember which systems had this and where it came from: getting it almost entirely wrong, it turns out. > > What we remembered was that it came from BSD, but this seems to be entirely wrong. It looks like it originated with System III / V, and perhaps was imported from there into some SunOS (possibly it was in all versions before Solaris?) which is why we remember it as being in BSD. It must have been in some 80s system or we would not remember it. POSIX still allows it but clearly reluctantly. > > So the questions are: (a) did it originate in System III or does it go back further than that, and (b) was it in the BSD-derived SunOSes or are we just making that up? > > And I guess: who thought this was a good idea? > > Thanks > > --tim

11 years, 6 months

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Cleaning out the basement

by ron＠ronnatalie.com

OK, let me try this one more time with links to get around the restrictions on the message size. I was cleaning out my basement and I found a box of stuff from my office at BRL (where I left in 1987). Most of it was buttons I'd picked up at trade shows and SF cons (I had a fabric partition next to my desk that I had them all stuck to. Of course in the box (among a couple of later editions) was Armando's original UNIX license (note no reference to DEC): Also in the box were some buttons from various UNIX conferences. I particularly remember the Sex, Drugs, and Unix one. Some of you will also remember the year I was giving out the No Ada shirts. There's a picture of dmr wearing one floating around somewhere. Sun was giving out these one year: Peter Langston thought this was a little conceited on Bill Joy's part, so the next show he arrived with buttons to hand out that said things like "The psl of UNIX" and "The dmr of UNIX". I had a "The ron of UNIX" somewhere but I couldn't find it in the box. Finally there was this wooden nickle courtesy of Bill Yost...

11 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter

by Doug McIlroy

> The wikipedia description > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_(phototypesetter)> > seems pretty accurate although I have never seen the beast myself. I can confirm the wikipedia description. At Bell Labs, however, we did not use paper tape input. As soon as the machine arrived, Joe Ossanna bypassed the tape reader so the C/A/T could be driven directly from the PDP-11. The manufacturer was astonished. The only operational difficulty we had was with the separate developer. If you didn't hand feed the end of the paper perfectly straight into that machine, the paper would tear. Joe Condon fixed that by arranging for the canister to sit on rollers so it could give when the paper pulled sideways. The first technical paper that came off the C/A/T drew a query from the journal editor, who'd never seen a phototypeset manuscript before: had it been published elsewhere? Doug

11 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter

by Doug McIlroy

> Didn't the BSTJ get phototypeset on your typesetter?? Not that I know of. But Charlie Brown's office did use it. Brown, the CEO of AT&T, did not like wearing reading glasses when he made a speech, so his speechwriters produced the text in large type. Once they were into document preparation they began to use our machine for other things. When I discovered that confidential minutes of AT&T board meetings were in our file system, I told them the facts of life about computer security, especially at the center of the UUCP universe, and persuaded the executive suite to get its own machine. Doug

11 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter

by Brian S Walden

the one at WH was directly connected to a vax 11/780, no paper tape either. so that now finally explains why /dev/cat was write only, it was substituted for a paper tape reader. it was always a curiosity that you could write to it, yet never read it (i.e. get a status). a "cat /dev/cat" would get you a "cat: cannot open /dev/cat" while a "cat /some/file > /dev/cat" would succeed, but act like you used /dev/null instead (as /some/file was not valid phototypeseter input) > From: Doug McIlroy > > > The wikipedia description > > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_(phototypesetter)> > > seems pretty accurate although I have never seen the beast myself. > > I can confirm the wikipedia description. At Bell Labs, however, we > did not use paper tape input. As soon as the machine arrived, Joe > Ossanna bypassed the tape reader so the C/A/T could be driven > directly from the PDP-11. The manufacturer was astonished. > > The only operational difficulty we had was with the separate > developer. If you didn't hand feed the end of the paper perfectly > straight into that machine, the paper would tear. Joe Condon > fixed that by arranging for the canister to sit on rollers so > it could give when the paper pulled sideways. > > The first technical paper that came off the C/A/T drew a query > from the journal editor, who'd never seen a phototypeset > manuscript before: had it been published elsewhere? > > Doug >

11 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter

by Brian S Walden

Look at United States Patent 4074285 http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US4074285.pdf Figure 1 is identical to the machine I ran at Whippany Bell Labs in the early to mid 80s. It was about 4 1/2 feet tall Figure 4 is the font wheel (seen as 16 in Fig 1) there were 4 distinct sectors, each with a different font. One with Times Roman, one with Times Roman Bold, one with Times Roman Italic and the last was the symbol fonts (math, greek chars, left hand (\lh right hand \(rh etc. and this one was made specifically for the Labs as it had a Bell Logo \(bs on it) The paper was a roll of photo paper, glossy on the text side, rough on the reverse, it was thick. It would end up going into the cassette (20 in Fig 1) and would need to be developed. Not shown in the patent figures was the developing and drying apparatus. At the end of a job the exposed paper was in the cassette you'd remove it from the typesetter and put into a device with rollers that would pull it out and run it thru developer and fixer liquid chemicals. Exiting that it would go into a dryer drum. After it was completly dry, as it was still a continuous roll, you would need to cut all the pages apart by hand (that is why there was the cut mark macro (.CM) is -ms so you could tell where to cut) As it came from a roll, no pages ever layed completely flat. The checmical baths were nasty smelling and it gummed up the rollers. You'd needed to regularly take the developer roller and gear guts into the janitor's closet and scrub it with a toothbrush in the slop sink under running water. By the second half of the 80s it was replaced by QMS PostScript laser printers. > From: "Jacob Goense" <dugo(a)xs4all.nl> > All, I'm looking for images of the cat device as mentioned several > times in the 7th edition manual, see e.g. TROFF(1)and CAT(4). > > From what I gathered during my digs is that it should look like a > GSI 8400, but that didn't help. Anyone here who can help me find out > what these machines looked like? A picture would be the best, but > information on what to look for in images of unnamed typesetters will > do as well. > > /Jacob > >

11 years, 7 months

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Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter

by Jacob Goense

All, I'm looking for images of the cat device as mentioned several times in the 7th edition manual, see e.g. TROFF(1)and CAT(4). >From what I gathered during my digs is that it should look like a GSI 8400, but that didn't help. Anyone here who can help me find out what these machines looked like? A picture would be the best, but information on what to look for in images of unnamed typesetters will do as well. /Jacob

11 years, 7 months

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off-topic: resurrecting the IMP

by Aharon Robbins

Hi all. This may be of some interest. From a friend at Utah: > Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 16:06:25 -0700 (MST) > Subject: [it-professionals] computer history: Arpanet IMPs resurrected > > The simh list about simulators for early computers recently carried > traffic about an effort to reconstruct and resurrect the Arpanet > Interface Message Processors (IMPs), which were the network boxes that > connected hosts on the early Arpanet, which later became the Internet. > > There is a draft of a paper about the work here: > > The ARPANET IMP Program: Retrospective and Resurrection > http://walden-family.com/bbn/imp-code.pdf > > Utah was one of the original gang-of-five hosts on the Arpanet, and we > received IMP number 4. Utah is mentioned twice in the article, and > also appears in the map in Figure 3 on page 14. > > One amusing remark in the article (bottom of page 7) has to do with > the fail-safe design of the IMPs: > > In addition ``reliability code'' was developed to allow a > Pluribus IMP to keep functioning as a packet switch in the > face of various bits of its hardware failing, such as a > processor or memory [Katsuki78, Walden11 pp. 534-538]. This > was so successful there was no simple off switch for the > machine; a program had to be run to shut parts of the machine > down faster than the machine could ``fix itself'' and keep > running. > > As happened with early Unix releases, machine-readable code for the > IMPs was lost, but fortunately, some old listings that turned up > recently allowed its laborious reconstruction, verification, assembly, > and simulation. Arnold

11 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 108, Issue 2

by Doug Merritt

Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: >If the original BBN code had >been left alone, since most people did not have the issues Berkeley did, >they would never have bothered with sendmail.cf. Now I might be badly wrong, but nonetheless this strikes me as badly revisionist history. The motivation for sendmail.cf was the collision of multiple namespaces (Arpanet, Bitnet, Usenet, etc.), each implemented in varying nonstandard ways by different mail clients and servers, resulting in messes like "IJQ3SRA%UCLAMVS.BITNET%SU-LINDY(a)SU-CSLI.ARPA", as one of many, many examples, as observed in the famous "The Hideous Name", Rob Pike & P.J. Weinberger, 1985 http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/pike85hideous.pdf The thing is, although sendmail.cf was/is itself hideous to understand and therefore make maintenance changes to (although I have), it is quite capable of actually handling the above kinds of messes, and being extended to handle new messes as they turn up. In short, it got the job done, despite its weaknesses. I may be wrong, but it was my strong impression that, back in the day, this could not be said of anyone else's code, BBN or otherwise. Doug Merritt

11 years, 7 months

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where is "the true arpanet mailer"?

by Jeremy C. Reed

I am reading the delivermail (later known as postbox and then sendmail) code from 4.0BSD and from sccs history from June 1980. Its arpa-mailer(8) manual says it just spools the letter and actual delivery will be performed by the ARPANET mailer daemon and refers to mailer(ARPA) manual. The arpa.c code says "is stuck away in the outgoing arpanet mail queue for delivery by the true arpanet mailer." Where is this true arpanet mailer? I am guessing it periodically looks in /usr/spool/netmail/ and delivers the messages using FTP and RFC458. Where is this mailer(ARPA) manual? Where is the ftp server code used for the incoming mail? (Example code mail-dm.c is provided for the ftp server to "handle the MAIL <user> command over the command connection.") Also where is the uucp-mailer(8) manpage referenced in delivermail(8)? Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{'

11 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: 4.3BSD source tape offered on FreeBSD

by Warren Toomey

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 04:55:58PM -0600, Jeremy C. Reed wrote: > Kashtan's VMS performance comparison paper and Joy's followup from early > 1980 both refered to the VM/UNIX as Version 2.1 of the Berkeley system; > this was the "Third" distribution; by April the kernel was known as 3.1. > > 2.4BSD was mentioned in the kermit source's Makefile. But maybe a > mistake. I stand well corrected! Thanks, Warren

11 years, 7 months

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Fwd: 4.3BSD source tape offered on FreeBSD

by David Ryskalczyk

Just saw this on the ClassicCMP list. Wonder if anyone could read it out... or if it's actually something that's already out there. --Dave Begin forwarded message: > From: Chuck Guzis <cclist(a)sydex.com> > Subject: 4.3BSD source tape offered on FreeBSD > Date: November 25, 2013 at 2:29:19 PM EST > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> > Reply-To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> > > http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=43346

11 years, 7 months

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Univ. of Toronto tape distribution license circa 1977?

by Jeremy C. Reed

(For reference ... I am writing a detailed history of Berkeley Unix ...) Does anyone have a copy of and the story about the Univ. of Toronto license used for their tape distributions around 1977? In an interview in Linux Magazine, Volume 1, Number 6, in November 1999, Joy said he just took a license from the University of Toronto and modified it a little bit and started using that for his BSD. It was a one-page license. I have a copy of an early one page license (from AUUGN newsletter V01.3, Feb/Mar 1979) which was used for the Pascal and Ex release, but it says "(first) Berkeley Software Tape" on it which seems odd to number the real first distribution. Also the copy of the license I have is for $60, but the first distribution tapes were $50; these amounts are both documented in various places for 2BSD and 1BSD respectively. Since maybe the one page license says "(first)" and "$60", maybe there is a different earlier license? I also tried Googling for some of the terminology but didn't find any hits. So does anyone have a copy of the license for the Univ. of Toronto tape distribution from the mid 1970's? On that note, can anyone tell me about the story of the Toronto Unix distributions? I understand in late 1978, the Univ. of Toronto Computing Services group and some other Toronto-area installations were providing their own Unix distributions for standardization of their commonly used commands and were forming the "Toronto Distribution Centre" (mentioned by Gregory Hill, see AUUGN V01.2, Dec-78 / Jan-79). But within a few years, the UTCS was using BSD. Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{'

11 years, 8 months

2
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off-topic: RS232C standard

by Sergey Lapin

Hi, all! Sorry for slightly off-topic question, but do anybody have a copy of original circa 1969 RS232C standard? I need it to resolve conflict with me and my customer regarding if RS-232C REQUIRES the use of DE-25M connector or just RECOMMENDS it? It seems that there is a lot of interpretations of this standard, but no original document anywhere :( I know it might cost $$$, but I will pay all needed fees. All the best, S.

11 years, 8 months

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Re: [pups] Netcom HV-1148 QBus Backplane

by Bill Gunshannon

> Hi all, > I am hoping this list is still alive, since I'd like to find out a bit more info about this backplane. > It's part of an 11/23 system (based on CPU) that is made by Netcom. It had > standard DEC > cards in it DLV11, M8021 bootstrap board etc. Apparently the system ran a > few years back > before it was put in storage. I have a few Netcom boxes at home. I'll try to remember to look at what models when I go home. > I aquired it, in the hopes of bringing it > back to life and getting > it to successfully display a login: prompt. That would depend on the OS more than the hardware. :-) > I have read through the archives, esp. a post from Michael Sokolov back in > 98, where he describes > the different types of QBus'es. Q/Q, Q/CD etc. > It looks like the backplane that I have (according to some documents written at SLAC in late 70's) > is a serpentine or sinusoidal. > A diagram on the cardcage describes as follows: > A B C D > ------------> > <----------- > -------------> > <------------ > There is also a blurb about slot 2/CD being wired differently. Two slots on the diagram are pre-printed for RL controllers. There were backplanes like that for the two card RL controller. > My CPU card is a later rev. D so it can do 22bit addressing. I'd like if possible to run 22bits, since this would allow > me at a later time to put in a 11/73 cpu that would run 2.11. I may be wrong (but I am sure someone here will correct me) but if the backplane is designed for the two card RL controller I think it will be 18 bit and not capable of 22 bit. > How would I go about checking if the backplane is wired for 22bits or not. > I seem to remeber the standard qbuses had the W1-W4 pins (?) > that you could wirewrap to change from 18to22, but this backplane has nothing like that. I would guess you could look at it and see how many bits are wired thru. And, if you have a clear view of the wirewrap side you should be able to see if it has two A-B-C-D slots in the middle. Difference in wirewrap pattern will be obvious. :-) > Also, in the present configuration, with an 11/23 and 128Kw, could I run v6 or v7 (assuming I can get some form of supported disk storage)? At present > I only have a floppy controller and a bunch of 8" Shugart 801 drives.. What floppy controller? Dec didn't use the standard Shugart 8" inteface for RX01/RX02 disks. If it is like the Terak which also used 801's you are going to need to find drivers for what OS you decide to use. Good luck with that. > thanks in advance for any replies. You might try asking on alt.sys.pdp11 as there are a lot much more knowlegable people than I active over there. bill -- Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves bill(a)cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. University of Scranton | Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>

11 years, 8 months

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Re: [pups] Netcom HV-1148 QBus Backplane

by azd30

Ian, Thanks for the response and the pointer to the web page. Looks like I can run 2.9 on the machine - I just have to find myself some RL's 8-) Did some digging around on QBus, and think i found enough info, that coupled with some contiuity tests should allow me to figure out exactly how the backplane is laid out. regards alex ----- Original Message ----- >From: "Ian King" <IanK(a)LivingComputerMuseum.org> >To: "azd30" <azd30(a)telus.net>, pups(a)minnie.tuhs.org >Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2013 11:47:19 AM >Subject: RE: Netcom HV-1148 QBus Backplane >You would probably be better served on the ClassicCmp mailing list. This list is primarily about software, specifically Unix on the PDP-11. >I'd have to dig to answer your question, and there's probably someone on ClassicCmp who can do so off the top of his/her head. (And I already have my hands full: I'm at work looking at bringing up an IFS to talk to a Xerox Alto.) >Take a look at the PUPS webpage for more information on installing e.g., V6 or V7 on various machines. My recollection is that these versions have requirements in hardware, such as the switch register, that may make them unsuitable for a Qbus machine - but the PUPS page >has a section that can answer definitively. -- Ian

11 years, 8 months

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[pups] Netcom HV-1148 QBus Backplane

by azd30

Hi all, I am hoping this list is still alive, since I'd like to find out a bit more info about this backplane. It's part of an 11/23 system (based on CPU) that is made by Netcom. It had standard DEC cards in it DLV11, M8021 bootstrap board etc. Apparently the system ran a few years back before it was put in storage. I aquired it, in the hopes of bringing it back to life and getting it to successfully display a login: prompt. I have read through the archives, esp. a post from Michael Sokolov back in 98, where he describes the different types of QBus'es. Q/Q, Q/CD etc. It looks like the backplane that I have (according to some documents written at SLAC in late 70's) is a serpentine or sinusoidal. A diagram on the cardcage describes as follows: A B C D ------------> <----------- -------------> <------------ There is also a blurb about slot 2/CD being wired differently. Two slots on the diagram are pre-printed for RL controllers. My CPU card is a later rev. D so it can do 22bit addressing. I'd like if possible to run 22bits, since this would allow me at a later time to put in a 11/73 cpu that would run 2.11. How would I go about checking if the backplane is wired for 22bits or not. I seem to remeber the standard qbuses had the W1-W4 pins (?) that you could wirewrap to change from 18to22, but this backplane has nothing like that. Also, in the present configuration, with an 11/23 and 128Kw, could I run v6 or v7 (assuming I can get some form of supported disk storage)? At present I only have a floppy controller and a bunch of 8" Shugart 801 drives.. thanks in advance for any replies. -- alex

11 years, 8 months

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how to extract tap file?

by Jeremy C. Reed

How to to extract a ".tap" file? What tools? I found http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/tap manual but I haven't found corresponding tool (even in tuhs source code archive). The file I am trying to extract is http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz (12 MB). I can view some of the plain text in it. I tried historical ar (which I have used for some other 1970's images), restore, and tar. file(1) says it is a "Maple help database". Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{'

11 years, 9 months

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Museo dell'Informatica Funzionante: APPLE 1 PRESENTATION, 13/9/2013

by asbesto

PRESS RELEASE - PLEASE COPY AND SHARE! APPLE 1 FRIDAY, Sept. the 13th at the "Museo dell'Informatica Funzionante" Computer Museum Via Carnevale 17, 96010 Palazzolo Acreide (SR) - ITALY http://museo.freaknet.org/en/presentazione-progetto-apple-1/ The APPLE 1 marked the start of the era of "personal computing", a computer that people could keep at home on their desks, a pioneer vision at that time, that opened the way for the future of human-machine interfaces. Born from the genius of Steve Wozniak, it transformed Apple into today ‘s success, thanks also to the entrepreneurial audacity of Steve Jobs. At that time only about 200 pieces were produced; today only about 50 of them survived, of which only a dozen are fully working. The APPLE 1 was an open project since its birth: he schematics and instructions were already circulating among fans well before the creation of Apple as a company. From this early computer, Steve Wozniak created the legendary APPLE 2, a colossal success that transformed him and Steve Jobs into billionaires. We started this adventure almost two years ago at the "Museo dell'Informatica Funzionante" Computer Museum: to rebuild from scratch, starting from a completely blank electronic card, a working APPLE 1, using tools and components dated exactly or before its creation: 1976. A year and a half was spent searching for integrated circuits, connectors, electronic components of various types, bought new or second-hand, found in various parts of the world, but all identical to the originals, with the right features and from the same historical period. The project, managed by a local team, involved fans and professionals from all the world. So we present today our creation, made entirely in Sicily, Palazzolo Acreide, Italy: a specimen of APPLE Computer 1, fully functional, rebuilt with attention to every detail and using only original components at the best of our possibility! With this release we intend to invite everyone to the event of his first start, in person or remotely via our live streaming. Friday, September 13, 2013: 19:00 - Presentation of the APPLE 1 project and the computer 19.30 - Booting up the rebuilt APPLE 1 Computer, and operational demo 20:00 - Aperitif Remote presence: Via live chat on IRC: https://irc.dyne.org, channel #museo Live video streaming: http://bambuser.com/channel/musif On Twitter: follow @FreaknetMuseum All people in Palazzolo Acreide can also have a guided tour of our exibithion "Apple, il genio di Steve Wozniak", dedicated to the genius of Steve Wozniak and his creations, with working Apple computers and memorabilia from 1978 to 1999. For more information, press kits and interviews please write to museo(a)freaknet.org

11 years, 10 months

3
3
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Re: [TUHS] Museo dell'Informatica Funzionante: APPLE 1 PRESENTATION, 13/9/2013

by JP＠eukor.com

Spam detection software, running on the system "www.oztivo.net", has identified this incoming email as possible spam. The original message has been attached to this so you can view it (if it isn't spam) or label similar future email. If you have any questions, see @@CONTACT_ADDRESS@@ for details. Content preview: ÀÎÁõÆäÀÌÁö½Ã¾È1 [...] Content analysis details: (6.0 points, 5.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- 1.4 RCVD_IN_BRBL_LASTEXT RBL: RCVD_IN_BRBL_LASTEXT [211.32.24.57 listed in bb.barracudacentral.org] 0.7 SPF_SOFTFAIL SPF: sender does not match SPF record (softfail) 1.1 URI_HEX URI: URI hostname has long hexadecimal sequence 0.0 WEIRD_PORT URI: Uses non-standard port number for HTTP 0.4 HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02 BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image area 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message 0.8 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayes spam probability is 40 to 60% [score: 0.5000] 0.7 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts 0.8 RDNS_NONE Delivered to internal network by a host with no rDNS 0.0 T_REMOTE_IMAGE Message contains an external image The original message was not completely plain text, and may be unsafe to open with some email clients; in particular, it may contain a virus, or confirm that your address can receive spam. If you wish to view it, it may be safer to save it to a file and open it with an editor.

11 years, 10 months

1
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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 106, Issue 1

by Doug McIlroy

> CB/UNIX was developed to address deficiencies inherent in Research Unix, > notably the lack of interprocess communication and file locking CB/UNIX was one of several versions in various divisions of Bell Labs to implement IPC facilities beyond pipes and signals. Top management in a division would declare that they wanted to use Unix, but needed some particular IPC mechanism: semaphores, events, message passing, etc.-- and needed it right away. I always believed that these demands stiffer as they percolated up through channels to the point that no alternative mechanism would do. We in research would have preferred to seek a general solution that would suffice to serve the various demands. Besides, anything that we produced but didn't use ourselves would automatically be suspect. We were very wary of featuritis. Roughly speaking, each demand led to a different local flavor of Unix, each (I like to think) reflecting the particular variant of IPC with which one of its system designers worked in graduate school. Somewhere between the wariness of research Unix, where an ethos of generality ruled, and Linux, which offers a dozen ways to do anything, there must lie a happy medium--a medium that I believe would be much closer to Unix than Linux. That, alas, has not proved to be the way of open source.

11 years, 10 months

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CB/UNIX Manual Scans

by Warren Toomey

All, I'll be moving house sometime in the next few months, so I thought I would start scanning in the paper documents that I've got. I've just completed the scan of the CB/UNIX manuals that Larry Cipriani sent in a while back. You can find them here: http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/other/CB_Unix/ and here is the blurb I put in there. Cheers, Warren CB/UNIX was a variant of the UNIX operating system internal to Bell Labs. It was developed at the Columbus, Ohio branch and was little-known outside the company. CB/UNIX was developed to address deficiencies inherent in Research Unix, notably the lack of interprocess communication and file locking, considered essential for a database management system. Several Bell System operation support system products were based on CB/UNIX such as Switching Control Center System. The primary innovations were power-fail restart, line disciplines, terminal types, and IPC features similar to System V's messages and shared memory. So far we have a scanned copy of the CB/UNIX manuals which were donated to TUHS by Larry Cipriani. Copies of the binaries and source code would be much appreciated. There were two volumes of manuals. The first volume held cbunix_intro, cbunix_man1 and cbunix_man1L. The second volume held the remaining sections. The 'L' in the scans indicates local sections of the manuals, i.e. those elements created and maintaned at Columbus. In an e-mail from Larry, he asked a retired CB/UNIX developer about the major features that were added to UNIX by CB/UNIX. Was it primarily messages, semaphores, named pipes, shared memory? The developer replied: Other things that immediately come to mind that we added first in Columbus Unix were power-fail restart (myself and Jim McGuire did the initial work) and line-disciplines and terminal types (Bill Snider did the initial work). Hal Person (or Pierson?) also rewrote the original check disk command into something that was useful by someone other than researchers. Bill Snider and Hal Pierson were really instrumental in taking UNIX from research and applying it to SCCS (Switching Control Center System). I worked with them when I first hired on. When we first used UNIX on an 11/20 with core memory it was written in assembler (1974). It quickly went through "B" and we started using the C version in early 1975 as I recall. We also did some enhancements to the scheduling algorithms in UNIX to make them more "real-time" capable.

11 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 105, Issue 2

by David Barto

On Jul 24, 2013, at 7:00 PM, tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote: > What parts are missing from the archive mentioned by Poul-Henning Kamp? > > http://www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/ > > It has 1922 to 1983. I was assuming that missing issues like 1942 issues 2 > through 4 were not ever published. I've got Vol 68, No. 8 October 1984, the second 'Unix System' edition of the BLTJ. Additional articles on all things Unix: Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing system Program Design in the UNIX System Environment The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal Debugging C programs with the Blit UNIX Operation System Security File Security and the UNIX System Crypt Command The Evolution of C - Past and Future Data Abstration in C by B. Stroustrup - The first C++ mention that I know of in the Journal Multiprocessor UNIX Systems A UNIX System Implementation for System/370 UNIX Operating System Porting Experiences The evolution of UNIX System Performance Cheap Dynamic Instruction Counting Theory and Practice in the Construction of a Working Sort Routine The Fair Share Scheduler The Virtual Protocol Machine A Network of Computers Running the UNIX System A Stream Input-Output System (D M Richie) - SYS V streams implementation description David

11 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: A cameo by UNIX in BSTJ

by Doug McIlroy

Ken Thompson has famously said that the only thing he'd do differently if he were to do Unix afresh would be to spell "create" with a final e. The BSTJ cameo (or product placement?) reveals another example: he'd spell Unix as an ordinary proper name. Once the marketers had glommed onto "UNIX" as a trademark, we were regularly badgered when when we tried to naturalize the name. References to "Unix" in internal documents were scrubbed to "UNIX" for external consumption. I'd like to think that by exhibiting "Unix" in an image Netravali et al intentionally cocked a snook at corporate orthodoxy. Incidentally, the online BSTJ is complete. A new publication, the AT&T Technical Journal took its place after 1983, with a new format and quite different content. The replacement publication was a house organ, not a research journal. Doug

11 years, 11 months

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Fwd: A cameo by UNIX in BSTJ

by Warren Toomey

All, I got this interesting e-mail from Poul-Henning a few days ago. Warren ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp <phk(a)phk.freebsd.dk> ----- Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 13:27:27 +0000 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk(a)phk.freebsd.dk> To: wkt(a)tuhs.org Subject: A cameo by UNIX in BSTJ Some months ago I faced a flight from Denmark to NZ and back again, so I bought a Kobo eBook reader and reformatted the entire BSTJ to fit the screen. That gave me about 100k "pages" to read, plenty for my NZ-flights and a large number of otherwise wasted moments since then. Highly recommeded. Recently I came over what I belive is the first mention of UNIX in BSTJ. We all know about the v57i6, July-August 1978 "UNIX Time-Sharing System" issue, but it transpires that UNIX made a cameo two years earlier in an article about compression-schemes for TeleFax: www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol55-1976/articles/bstj55-10-1539.pdf Enjoy, Poul-Henning -- 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. ----- End forwarded message -----

11 years, 11 months

3
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Re: [TUHS] Mac G5 Tower

by Derrik Walker v2.0

Just to be clear, that can't run OS 9 natively, it can only run OS 8/9 apps in Classic Mode. Other than Mach 10, I'm sure it run one of the BSD's just fine though. - Derrik On 6/17/13 9:04 AM, Brian Zick wrote: >> So I know this isn't directly related to the normal discussion on >> here, but if anyone is interested in a working Power Mac. It should >> be able to run Mac Classic up through OS 10.5, and any flavor of Un*x >> that will run on PPC. >> >> http://www.ebay.com/itm/111095185935?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p398…. >> <http://www.ebay.com/itm/111095185935?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p398…>l2649 >> <http://www.ebay.com/itm/111095185935?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p398…> >> >> If anyone else has use for it, that would be great! >> >> Brian Zick >> zickzickzick.com <http://zickzickzick.com/> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TUHS mailing list >> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs >

12 years

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Mac G5 Tower

by Brian Zick

So I know this isn't directly related to the normal discussion on here, but if anyone is interested in a working Power Mac. It should be able to run Mac Classic up through OS 10.5, and any flavor of Un*x that will run on PPC. http://www.ebay.com/itm/**111095185935?ssPageName=STRK:** MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.**<http://www.ebay.com/itm/111095185935?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p398…> l2649<http://www.ebay.com/itm/111095185935?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p398…> If anyone else has use for it, that would be great! Brian Zick zickzickzick.com

12 years

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John Sundman's takes on Evgeny Morozov, Open Source, et al

by Clem Cole

My apologies if some find this as spam, but I suspect this group might also find this a worth while read. Full discloser, I have known John since 1983 or 1984 (I do not remember when we were co-worked at the firm he talks about in the article [Masscomp]. I have also read of number of his books and liked them. In my role as President of USENIX, I allowed John to hawk his books at some of our conferences, but other than buying his books, I have never given him $s. http://my-thoughts-exactly.wetmachine.com/the-meme-hustler-hustler-evgeny-m… Clem Note: I predated John at Masscomp (and I think he left for Sun before I left for Stellar). Many of you know that MSCP was an early 1980s a start up with a lot of ex-VMS/VAX guys (that predated Sun and actually did $20M in business the year Sun did it's first $1M).. Tim, Janet and I shared a card table as our first desk. I think John and Steve did get hired until we expanded to the 2 bldg in Littleton and kicked SW out. Everything in the piece WRT to Masscomp I will valid as true, and like John; when I have run into Tim in the past few years I'm not sure he recognized me either [although unlike John, I do still exchange christmas cards with Steve Talbot and just two weeks ago got an email from Tim about something else]. I completely agree with John's point about about Eric Raymond too BTW. And John makes a side bar, that "open source" being co-opted from the 60s. He's stumbled on that right. I have always said the "father" of Open Source was the late Prof Donald O. Peterson (aka dop) from what he did in the late 1960s. But that's a story for another time.

12 years, 1 month

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Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by Clem Cole

I fear a sad part of this slide show is that many of us remember and were part of it all. Some of us programmed these machines (I admit that I still have some of these pieces in my basement). I was disappointed they did not show a "stinger tap." The picture of the Alto shows the first mouse – the Hawley Labs mechanical mouse (which I miss for its feel). Check out the picture of the first Cisco router using Intel Multibus (with a Motorola 68k in it) looking so awkward. http://www.eweek.com/networking/slideshows/ethernet-marks-40-years-linking-…

12 years, 1 month

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Need a new PDP-11 or VAX?

by Dave Horsfall

http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/04/need-new-pdp-11-or-vax.html -- Dave

12 years, 1 month

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Re: [TUHS] Need a new PDP-11 or VAX?

by David Barto

Larry McVoy said: On Apr 28, 2013, at 7:00 PM, tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote: > We build source management systems and we still drop into assembler for > some stuff. For example, we want to give ourselves a stack traceback > when something dies. Another example is inner loops that are performance > critical, we stare at the assembler. I don't mind staring at the assembly, I just don't want to hand crank it any longer. :-/ I'll spend quite some time fussing with the compiler and optimization flags to get loops to run at maximum speed before I'll take the assembly in hand to 'make it right.' For stack traces, I've found the GNU compiler support for stack tracing quite handy and for my company it works quite well. On the discussion of x86 assembly, I have to agree that it is horrific. I'll take ARM (and I have done context switchers and trap handers in ARM) any time. David Barto /my name in your iPhone, it is more likely than you think.

12 years, 2 months

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Re: [TUHS] Login names of early Unix contributors

by Doug McIlroy

About two queries on the topic. Yes, L. L. Cherry is Lorinda Lillian Cherry. Rudd Canaday was in on building the foundation, but not the ground floor. When the Thompson/Ritchie/Canaday (and independently Strachey/Stoy) file system came to be built, Rudd had completed his visiting assignment in Computing Science Research. When he did get a login, he was rhc, but his UID was not among the single-digit set. Doug McIlroy

12 years, 3 months

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Fwd: TUHS Digest, Vol 102, Issue 1

by Jonah G. Sinowitz

rudd canaday? > From: tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Subject: TUHS Digest, Vol 102, Issue 1 > Date: March 31, 2013 9:00:01 PM EDT > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Reply-To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > > Send TUHS mailing list submissions to > tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > tuhs-owner(a)minnie.tuhs.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of TUHS digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Login names of early Unix contributors (Doug McIlroy) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:44:11 -0400 > From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Subject: [TUHS] Login names of early Unix contributors > Message-ID: <201303311444.r2VEiBjR027109(a)stowe.cs.dartmouth.edu> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > >> Does anyone have a record or pointer regarding the login names of the >> early Unix contributors? > [...] >> In particular I'm interested in the login names of following people: >> S. R. Bourne >> D. Haight >> S. C. Johnson >> J. F. Maranzano >> L. E. McMahon >> S. I. Feldman >> J. F. Ossanna >> M. E. Lesk >> R. H. Morris >> D. A. Nowitz > [...] > > Your correspondents have done a good job of reconstructing the > old list. Alas, I can't remember the only missing entry, Dick > Haight's login. The above list, however, wants one small > correction. Robert Morris did not have a middle name, the > "h" was a figment for filling in forms that wanted a middle > initial. > Another important name is > L. L. Cherry llc > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > > > End of TUHS Digest, Vol 102, Issue 1 > ************************************

12 years, 3 months

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Login names of early Unix contributors

by Doug McIlroy

> Does anyone have a record or pointer regarding the login names of the > early Unix contributors? [...] > In particular I'm interested in the login names of following people: > S. R. Bourne > D. Haight > S. C. Johnson > J. F. Maranzano > L. E. McMahon > S. I. Feldman > J. F. Ossanna > M. E. Lesk > R. H. Morris > D. A. Nowitz [...] Your correspondents have done a good job of reconstructing the old list. Alas, I can't remember the only missing entry, Dick Haight's login. The above list, however, wants one small correction. Robert Morris did not have a middle name, the "h" was a figment for filling in forms that wanted a middle initial. Another important name is L. L. Cherry llc

12 years, 3 months

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mancvt

by Steve Simon

I was trying to generate PDFs of some PWB manual pages but they use V6 macros. I have found tmac.an6 which generates somthing readable but stamps each page with: THIS MANUAL ENTRY NEEDS TO BE CONVERTED - SEE mancvt(1) and man(7) Anyone know of mancvt, I cannot find it. -Steve

12 years, 3 months

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xargs - where from?

by Steve Simon

Ok, another trivia question. where did xargs come from? I started with Edition 7 (Perkin Elmer V7 + bits of BSD 2.1) and I am pretty sure it wasn't there. I have a feeling it was printed in a book as shell script, somthing like Bourne's book, or Kernighan and Pike but I'am not sure. Anyone remember? -Steve

12 years, 4 months

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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 100, Issue 12

by Sheila M. Morrissey

Thanks for this alert Sheila -----Original Message----- From: tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:00 PM To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Subject: TUHS Digest, Vol 100, Issue 12 Send TUHS mailing list submissions to tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org You can reach the person managing the list at tuhs-owner(a)minnie.tuhs.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of TUHS digest..." Today's Topics: 1. opensolaris.org will be close soon (Cyrille Lefevre) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2013 05:15:37 +0100 From: Cyrille Lefevre <cyrille.lefevre-lists(a)laposte.net> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org Subject: [TUHS] opensolaris.org will be close soon Message-ID: <51244DE9.2060901(a)laposte.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed Hi, FYI, as seen on opensolaris.org : ATTENTION: This website and all services within the opensolaris.org domain will be unavailable after March 24, 2013. at least, http://hub.opensolaris.org/ and http://dlc.sun.com/osol/ will be available at : http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://hub.opensolaris.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://dlc.sun.com/osol/ but not http://src.opensolaris.org/source/ due to robot.txt any other subdomain to check ? Regards, Cyrille Lefevre -- mailto:Cyrille.Lefevre-lists@laposte.net ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs End of TUHS Digest, Vol 100, Issue 12 *************************************

12 years, 4 months

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opensolaris.org will be close soon

by Cyrille Lefevre

Hi, FYI, as seen on opensolaris.org : ATTENTION: This website and all services within the opensolaris.org domain will be unavailable after March 24, 2013. at least, http://hub.opensolaris.org/ and http://dlc.sun.com/osol/ will be available at : http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://hub.opensolaris.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://dlc.sun.com/osol/ but not http://src.opensolaris.org/source/ due to robot.txt any other subdomain to check ? Regards, Cyrille Lefevre -- mailto:Cyrille.Lefevre-lists@laposte.net

12 years, 4 months

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"Electronic Mail Without Aliases"

by Aharon Robbins

Hi All. Mike Lesk sent me the paper and gave me permission to send it out. See attached. Warren, please find a spot for this in the archives. Thanks! Arnold -- Aharon (Arnold) Robbins arnold AT skeeve DOT com P.O. Box 354 Home Phone: +972 8 979-0381 Nof Ayalon D.N. Shimshon 9978500 ISRAEL

12 years, 4 months

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Login names of early Unix contributors

by Diomidis Spinellis

Does anyone have a record or pointer regarding the login names of the early Unix contributors? A few (aho, dmr, bwk, doug) are listed in http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/, but many others seem to be missing. In particular I'm interested in the login names of following people: S. R. Bourne D. Haight S. C. Johnson J. F. Maranzano L. E. McMahon S. I. Feldman J. F. Ossanna M. E. Lesk R. H. Morris D. A. Nowitz I guess the /etc/passwd file from a Bell Labs system of the mid 1970s would be ideal, but even partial recollections would help me.

12 years, 4 months

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Re: [TUHS] [9fans] Ancient History: "Electronic Mail Without Aliases"

by Aharon Robbins

Adding the TUHS people... In article <3b6a67956d8b807d3d3319a395892b67(a)9srv.net> you write: >Does anyone on the list have a copy of or pointer to >"Electronic Mail Without Aliases", by Elliott and Lesk? >It's referenced in the 8th Edition Unix manual, but >I've never read it (and only have vol1 of the manual). Thanks, Arnold -- Aharon (Arnold) Robbins arnold AT skeeve DOT com P.O. Box 354 Home Phone: +972 8 979-0381 Nof Ayalon D.N. Shimshon 9978500 ISRAEL

12 years, 4 months

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10th Edition, 8th Edition

by Benjamin Huntsman

While the subject of historical stuff has been brought up, anyone thought about going another round with Attachmate to see if they'd extend the Ancient UNIX License to include v10, v9, and v8? Attachmate is the current owner these days, aren't they? I'm sure they, Novell, AT&T, and Lucent all don't care. But someone's still got to sign the line. I'm really hoping to see v10x86, like v7x86 someday!! I've got a copy of v8 I'd love to make available some day, and I know there are at least one or two copies of v10 still in existence. last I heard, there was no v9. Anyone here know anybody at Attachmate? Many thanks! -Ben

12 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] history of sbin?

by Norman Wilson

Armando Stettner: > decvax!aps Larry McVoy: ...!uwvax!lm ===== Well, if we're going to play the one-up game: research!norman though for a few years before that it was research!cithep!norman Norman Wilson (now) Toronto ON

12 years, 5 months

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1974 CACM Paper, was Re: history of sbin?

by norman＠oclsc.org

Herr Doctor Wkt: Does anybody have a PDF of the 1974 Unix CACM paper, I seem to have misplaced my copy. ======= It appears to be generally available via the ACM Digital Library, of all places. (No, I'm not so smart: Google pointed me there.) http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=361061 It appears to be the genuine 1974 version, though my paper copy of that issue of CACM is buried behind too many boxes right now for me to dig it out and check. Disk storage for `The PDP-11/45 on which our UNIX installation is implemented' is as Warren describes for the 6th Edition update: 1MB fixed-head disk, four 2.5MB removable-cartridge drives, and a single 40MB removable-pack drive. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

12 years, 5 months

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history of sbin?

by Jeremy C. Reed

I have heard the story a few times about sbin split is due to disk space, such as told at http://www.osnews.com/story/25556/Understanding_the_bin_sbin_usr_bin_usr_sb… http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html But I don't see any mention of it in 32V and not in BSD until around Net2 (like in 1991 src.README said ``... there has been a major reorganization of the file system. (You may have seen similar reorganizations on systems shipped by Sun Microsytems [sic] and Digital Equipment Corporation, among others.) ... /sbin same as /bin, but binaries for the root user''. The slides from Feb. 1988 for a BSD BOF at USENIX mentioned this sbin reorganization. Looking at "Unix Text Processing" (1987) and "Life with Unix" (1989) I didn't see any use of sbin/. (I didn't look at my other old books.) >From searching old 1980 usenet archives I only saw a few mentions (like /usr/brl/sbin/...). When did some (non-BSD) systems ship and document /sbin, /usr/sbin? Is the common story (liked linked above) the right story? Jeremy C. Reed echo uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/ofq-uvfgbel/ | \ tr "noqruvxzabcefgl" "abdehikmnoprsty"

12 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of strncpy

by msokolov＠ivan.Harhan.ORG

Ronald Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: > I suspect strcpy arrived with the "portable I/O library", an abomination > that eventually evolved into the stdio library and to this day is still > stinking up the standard C language. What's so bad about stdio? That's a genuine question - I've never had a reason to dislike stdio... SF

12 years, 5 months

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Museo dell'Informatica Funzionante - PRESS RELEASE

by asbesto

Museo dell'Informatica Funzionante Computer Museum in Palazzolo Acreide, Italy http://museum.freaknet.org Just a few lines to announce that some of our historical computers are back online 24/7 for free use! We have 2 VAX/VMS systems and an emulated PDP-11/34 running RT-11 (that's the exact copy of our physical RL01 boot disk) Have a look here, and enjoy! :) http://museo.freaknet.org/en/computer-storici-vaxvms-nuovamente-online/

12 years, 5 months

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can anyone use QIC 6250 tape cartridges?

by Aharon Robbins

Hi. I have two QIC 6250 tape cartridges that have been in (I hope) dry boxes for over 15 years. I suspect they're still usable but have no equipment with which to test them or try to read them. It'd be nice to get a CD back with copies of what's on them if that's possible, but that'd be icing on the cake. Drop me a note and we'll see if we can figure something out for mailing them. Thanks, Arnold

12 years, 5 months

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History of strncpy

by Nevin Liber

On another list I am on, a discussion about the history and purpose of strncpy has arisen. The only reference I have found to it is < http://lwn.net/Articles/507432/>: The original reason for strncpy() was when directory names were limited to 14 chars. The other two bytes contained the inode number. For that particular case, strncpy() worked quite well. Is that really the reason it came into being? Just a bit curious, -- Nevin ":-)" Liber <mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com> (847) 691-1404

12 years, 5 months

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OpenLook CDs in the Unix Archive

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, Arnold Robbins has donated a couple of OpenLook CDs to the Unix Archive. I've put them into Applications/OpenLook. Here is his note: I have a CD from ian(a)darwinsys.com dated 9/2005 with OpenLook-XView-1.0e on it, and what looks like another one with the same date with version 1.2. I'm still extracting the first one onto disk; it's in the 550+ Megabyte range. Files are dated 1995. Right now it's only on minnie until the mirrors pick it up: http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/OpenLook/ Cheers & thanks Arnold & Ian, Warren

12 years, 5 months

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Unable to boot v7 UNIX

by Rox 64

Hi guys, new SIMH (and Research Unix) user here coming from the future (Linux), haha. Well, as the mail subject says, I have a problem. After creating a bootable disk from a virgin Unix v7 distribution tape by following this guide, http://homepages.thm.de/~hg53/pdp11-unix/, and after umounting the usr file system and halting the machine, SIMH returns: HALT instruction, PC: 000002 (HALT) after running the command: pdp11 run.conf and I cannot boot my 87,9 MB 'system.hp' disk. I thought the problem was on the final line of 'run.conf': run 2002 But when I use SIMH without .conf files and by manually typing the following commands: set cpu 11/45 set cpu 256k set rp0 rp04 attach rp0 system.hp boot rp0 I see the same HALT message too. I'm currently unning SIMH from Debian/Ubuntu package 3.8.1-5build1. Should I update to a newest one? Or did I make a mistake when creating my bootable disk?

12 years, 6 months

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The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive

by Cyrille Lefevre

Hi, Don't remember if this was already posted to this list, so, just in case it wasn't... The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2012/2/22/AT&T-Archives-The-UNIX-… In the late 1960s, Bell Laboratories computer scientists Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson started work on a project that was inspired by an operating system called Multics, a joint project of MIT, GE, and Bell Labs. The host and narrator of this film, Victor Vyssotsky, also had worked on the Multics project. Ritchie and Thompson, recognizing some of the problems with the Multics OS, set out to create a more useful, flexible, and portable system for programmers to work with. What's fascinating about the growth of UNIX is the long amount of time that it was given to develop, almost organically, and based on the needs of the users and programmers. The first installation of the program was done as late as 1972 (on a NY Telephone branch computer). It was in conjunction with the refinement of the C programming language, principally designed by Dennis Ritchie. Because the Bell System had limitations placed by the government that prevented them from selling software, UNIX was made available under license to universities and the government. This helped further its development, as well as making it a more "open" system. This film "The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive", is one of two that Bell Labs made in 1982 about UNIX's significance, impact and usability. Even 10 years after its first installation, it's still an introduction to the system. The other film, "The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use", is roughly the same, only a little shorter. The former film was geared towards software developers and computer science students, the latter towards programmers specifically. The film contains interviews with primary developers Ritchie, Thompson, Brian Kernighan, and many others. While widespread use of UNIX has waned, most modern operating systems have at least a conceptual foundation in UNIX. Release date: 02/22/2012 http://wpc.5C42.att-acdn.net/005C42/techchannel/10959/videos/10959_AA11180_… Regards, Cyrille Lefevre -- mailto:Cyrille.Lefevre-lists@laposte.net

12 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Change of IP address for tuhs.org mail server

by Rudi Blom

I'm still getting 404's. using https://65.49.60.197/mailman/listinfo/tuhs also 404 just the IP address leads me to https://www.oztivo.net/twiki/bin/view a site where the stuff is now hosted I guess. Cheers, Rudi

12 years, 7 months

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Change of IP address for tuhs.org mail server

by Warren Toomey

All, I've had to move my machine minnie.tuhs.org out from where I work at Bond University. The new IP address is 65.49.60.197. I've updated the A and MX DNS records but they are still propagating. If you have any future troubles sending e-mail to tuhs(a)tuhs.org, contact me at wkt(a)tuhs.org. And if that fails, try my Gmail account "warren.toomey" :) Cheers, Warren

12 years, 7 months

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4 BSD manuals committed

by Aharon Robbins

Hi All. Thanks for the responses! I have someone who replied first, so he gets the manuals. It's nice to know there are people who can give these things good homes. :-) Arnold

12 years, 8 months

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USENIX 4.x BSD manuals free for the shipping

by Aharon Robbins

Hello All. I'm trying to clean up my basement. I have the following: USENIX 4.2 BSD manuals - 4 volumes USENIX 4.3 BSD manuals - 6 volumes USENIX / O'Reilly 4.4 BSD manuals - 5 volumes + CD-ROM companion They are all in excellent shape - close to new actually. First come first serve, if you're willing to pay postage from Israel. I also have a copy of "Concurrent Euclid, Tunis, and the Unix system" which I suspect is a fairly historic book that I'd like to send to a good home. Please reply directly to me without bothering the list. Thanks! Arnold

12 years, 8 months

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gatekeeper mirror?

by Clem Cole

As I told Phil off-line, I wold ask around the DEC Unix alumni and see what I could find out. On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 5:02 PM, Richard Schedler wrote: > Before leaving HP Labs, I moved the Gatekeeper Archives over to > apotheca.hpl.hp.com . I just checked and was pleasantly surprised to see > that they're still around. > > --Richard > HP Labs FTP Server This is the FTP server for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. It replaces the following servers: - ftp.hpl.hp.com - gatekeeper.hpl.hp.com - gatekeeper.research.compaq.com - gatekeeper.dec.com This system is not for file storage nor any other use without express authorization from the Hewlett-Packard Company. All logins and file transfers on this system are logged and monitored. Please use the feedback link below to report problems or ask questions. *Repository Services* - *Access the repository via FTP* <ftp://apotheca.hpl.hp.com/> - *Access the repository via HTTP* <http://apotheca.hpl.hp.com/ftp/> *Other Information* - *What happened to gatekeeper.dec.com?*<http://apotheca.hpl.hp.com/what-happened-to-gatekeeper.html>

12 years, 8 months

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Bryan Cantrill on bfs & ta

by Sevan / Venture37

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk8aZv0JJuk&feature=player_detailpage#t=3493s "SunOS has never run on a 16bit machine" My response was M68000 & 386 but his counter response was they both supported 32bit addressing. Sevan

12 years, 8 months

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off-topic: retrocomputing: HP Laserjet 6MP question

by Aharon Robbins

Hello All. This is a bit off topic, but I figure people on this list may have the experience and also the knowledge I need... I have an HP Laserjet 6MP printer; it is 16 years old but still going strong. It has a level 2 Adobe Postscript interpreter and a whopping 3 Megs of memory. It is attached to an ethernet-to-parallel port thingy that lets me spool to it over the network; I am printing from Linux systems running CUPS. Here's the problem: No matter how I have the printer settings set for the paper source, when I use tiff2ps to convert a TIFF file into PostScript: 1. If I use the 'make level 2 postcript' option to tiff2ps, I get a much smaller file, but the printer decides it wants paper to come from the manual feed paper tray. The problem is that this paper tray usually doesn't have paper in it, so I have to go to the basement and put paper in. 2. OTOH, if I use the default which makes level 1 postscript, I get a file that is 10 times bigger, but the printer then decides it will take paper from the tray, like it's supposed to. I keep the postscript file around for easy reprinting. I don't care for big files, and they take longer to send, too. Googling has not helped. If anyone knows what kind of magic string to add to the generated level 2 postscript to make it choose a paper source, or has any other ideas, I would love to hear from you. Thanks! Arnold Robbins

12 years, 8 months

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gatekeeper mirror?

by A. P. Garcia

Hi, Does anyone have a mirror of the old ftp site gatekeeper.dec.com? I have only a small fragment of it, but I'd very much like a full copy. I believe I have a full copy of ftp.uu.net from October 2003, if anyone's interested. Also, I apologize if this question is considered inappropriate here, but did anyone manage to snag a full copy of the titor-special torrent? Thanks, Phil Garcia

12 years, 8 months

1
0
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AT&T Blit terminal plus terminal OS

by Wesley Parish

I had a look at OSNews.com and found a story about a nifty little terminal and its OS called Blit. http://www.osnews.com/story/26315/ Blit_a_multitasking_windowed_UNIX_GUI_from_1982 I suspect getting hold of it would be like getting blood from a stone, much like getting the Research Unix source trees ... but still it would be interesting to look at if at all possible. Wesley Parish

12 years, 8 months

12
13
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APL\360 Source Code Released

by Lyndon Nerenberg

After a 10-year quest, the Computer History Museum has convinced IBM to make the source code for APL\360 available to the public. The license terms are for personal use only, no copying allowed. The code itself is quite entertaining to read in some areas :-) About 37K lines of 360 macro assembler, which includes most of an interactive time-shared terminal OS environment upon which to run the APL interpreter. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-language-source-co… has lots of background material, and the link to the download page. Note that the links in the bibliography section on that page are broken – the all contain a spurious '.' at the end of the URL anchors. --lyndon

12 years, 8 months

2
1
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Old DEC books for sale

by Warren Toomey

All, as I have to move office at the end of the year, I have a few old DEC books which I'd like to re-home to good families. I am happy to give them away, but I would like to be reimbursed for postage and packing. I've put up the details of the books at this link: http://minnie.tuhs.org/DECBooks/ Feel free to pass this on to anybody else who might be interested. Cheers, Warren

12 years, 9 months

1
0
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unix guru test

by A. P. Garcia

too easy for everyone on this list :-) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.unix.questions/Dfbry3j1x6w/nF4Ic…

12 years, 9 months

3
2
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Interesting comment about /usr/share/calendar.computer

by David Ryskalczyk

So I was digging around some time back, and noticed these lines in the *BSD "Computer" calendar file: 06/30 First advanced degree on computer related topic: to H. Karamanian, Temple Univ., Phila, 1948, for symbolic differentiation on the ENIAC Since I'm attending Temple, this caught my attention. However, a search for "H. Karamanian" didn't turn up anything, so I gave up. Recently, I tried again and found this: http://diamond.temple.edu/record=b1850797 In short, the name in calendar.computer is misspelled, and the date is wrong too! The correct year is 1953, at least according to that record. (I haven't looked at the actual thesis yet.) Whether this is indeed the "First advanced degree on computer related topic" is something I'm not sure about — a cursory search didn't turn up any others that predate this one, but I didn't search very far. --David R

12 years, 9 months

3
2
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unix horror stories

by A. P. Garcia

i happened across this cute document in my archives... ---- *na Bblisa-Announce-Owner(a)cs.umb.edu Tue Dec 28 14:10:50 1993 *to bblisa-announce(a)cs.umb.edu *su Some notes from December 1, 1993 meeting *fr "John P. Rouillard" <rouilj(a)terminus.cs.umb.edu> *se Bblisa-Announce-Owner(a)cs.umb.edu *da Tue, 28 Dec 1993 12:42:01 -0500 *mi <199312281742.AA17997(a)cs.umb.edu> *re from cs.umb.edu (daemon(a)cs.umb.edu [158.121.104.2]) by argali.opal.com (8.6.4/jr2.9) with SMTP id OAA27752; Tue, 28 Dec 1993 14:10:43 -0500 *re by cs.umb.edu id AA18007 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for bblisa-announce-outgoing); Tue, 28 Dec 1993 12:42:08 -0500 *re from terminus.cs.umb.edu by cs.umb.edu with SMTP id AA17997 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for <bblisa-announce(a)cs.umb.edu>); Tue, 28 Dec 1993 12:42:01 -0500 *ex Precedence: bulk *tx Here are the notes from the December 1, 1993 meeting. Names have been deleted to protect the innocent. The topic was: UNIX Horror Stories (Actually Computer Horror Stories) and away we go. Story 1: A new user I knew was trying to clean out some old accounts on a system he was given. As root, he changed directories to one of the old user directories, and then did 'rm -r *' but noticed it left a directory called .X11 behind. To get rid of it, and to be sure it wouldn't fail, he did 'rm -rf .*'. Sad to say he didn't realize that '.*' could and would expand into '..', and it would continue to do so recursively. I thought this was better than the 'garden variety' 'rm -rf' scenario. The guy though, worst case, he'd blow away the old user accounts, but got the entire disk instead! Needless to say, it was time for the install disketts (yes, diskettes, about 30 of them...). Story 2: SunOS 4.0 NFS server configured with IP address 192.9.200.0 by suninstall (default - a suninstall bug) and rebooted after OS installation... (nice DECnet meltdown) Story 3: /etc/reboot - then noticing you were in the wrong window... Story 4: Coming in at 7:00AM Saturday to upgrade to Ultrix 2.2, then 5 hours later having the other guy type in rm -rf - then realising he forgot to cd out of /etc... Story 5: Having a user request some files to be restored - but forgetting when they existed except that it was "sometime around a year or so ago"... Story 6: Would you all be interested in the time a workman disassembled the cubicle containing my NIS master and dropped a 1.3 gig disk several feet to the floor ...? (Prior to telling me he was taking it apart of course ...) Story 7: talking to an end-user who just called in over the phone my root filesystem filled up, so I looked around; I found & removed vmunix and boot, and that seems to have fixed things, so I typed fastboot. Story 8: Back in the days when UNIX V6 was new, we installed it on a PDP 11/44 in the CS lab. It ran fine. We allowed students on it. It ran fine. People started using it for real work, albeit tentatively. It ran fine. It was a bit slow if several people were on -- what do you expect for a PDP11/44 -- but, it ran fine. Then occasioanlly, we started noticing that troff would go wrong and it would mis-format some portions of a document. Funnily enough, when you re-ran the job, it ran fine. We opened up the CAT. Have you ever been inside a CAT? These were serious phototypesetters. And, we could find nothing wrong with ours. After a few days of frustratedly looking for problems with the CAT, and the wiring, and the troff config, it seemed to start working OK again, so we closed it all up, and forgot about the problem. About 12 weeks later, students working on simulation class assignments started complaining that if they came in and ran their programs during the day, the programs would give the wrong results. But, if they ran the SAME programs in the evening, they'd be fine. Thinking to ourselves that students are a real pain in the ass, we took a look. Thing is, they were right. The programs DID indeed give different results depending on when you ran them. Mostly, they were OK, but occasional daytime runs were flaky. Problem with the core (yes, we had core storage on that system)? We swapped core boards. No change. We swapped CPU boards. No change. We practically swapped every board and the bus and built a new machine. No change. Of course, the number of failures were few -- the programs ran OK MOST of the time, so pinning this down was a slow process. Eventually, the students all got their assignments done, and they went on to other exercises, and we didn't have any more problems, so we got on with our lives, and forgot about it. Another 12 weeks go by. We were all happy. Life was good. The 11/44 is still running fine. Until... Aaargh! Someone using the dc calculator reported errors in the results... sometimes! And, at the same time, someone using troff reported mis-set pages. We took the machine down to single user. We ran all the programs. We turned on all sorts of debugging and tracing. Everything was fine. Nothing went wrong. We pulled our hair out! We went back multi-user. Everything was fine. We'd run dc. It was fine. We'd troff the document. It was fine. We'd go to the bar. The users would come and find us and show us printouts of their dc and troffs that had gone wrong!! Aaaargh! Well, this was one of those problems. Eventually, we made an observation. Dc works fine. Troff works fine. The simulation assignment program works fine. But... run any of them at the same time...!!!! That was it! It turned out, that these three programs used the floating point hardware. They were the ONLY programs that used the floating point hardware. Our machine had floating point hardware; the one at Bell Labs did not have. UNIX V6 was not saving the floating point registers on context switching. If you were the only floating point program on the system, this did not matter -- you context switched out, and when you switched back in, your registers were all there as you left them. But, if there was another floating point program around, your registers were corrupted! Over 8 months to diagnose the problem. Just 2 minutes to fix it! Story 9: I received umpty-three million requests at LISA, from people that wanted me to e-mail them the text of NET's infamous "Eng_Adm Get List" T-shirt. So here it is, even if you didn't want it. :-) (Eng_Adm is our systems administration mail alias) FRONT * I didn't touch a thing. * Why can`t you give me the root password? * I want more disk space, now! * It was working fine a minute ago. * I typed rm -rf, but I didn't really mean to. * How come SPARC binaries won't work on my 3/50? * I just turned it off and on a couple of times. * What's an alias? * It must be a hardware problem. * This will only take you a minute. * Can you restore /tmp/junk from February of 87? * X Windows isn't working on my VT100! * I didn't realize the type of coax made any difference. * How do I post an article to alt.sex.bondage? * I just plugged my RS-232 port into my phone jack. * Is the unix broken? * My bin directory is missing! * Someone spilled coffee on my keyboard. * I need to be the owner of all of the files in /usr/kvm. * How can I send mail to my friend on BITNET? * What makes you think it is my software? * My Mac is much easier to use. * Why is her disk quota bigger than mine? * What jumpers? * I can't login to my ethernet. * Don't you know where I put my source code? * I need to borrow your CD-ROM for 2 months. * Where can I find all of those GIF files? * Honest, it just stopped working. * But I like the old OS a lot better. * Can you read this TK50 VMS tape onto my Sun? * I can do it... I used to be a Systems Administrator. * Can`t this be done after I go home? * It says, "Run fsck manually". * I need you to reboot my floppy drive. * What does RTFM mean? * How hard can it be to do a simple upgrade? * My system just crashed. * Now how did that file get in there? * But the vendor says this should be, "Plug and play". * This is going to cost us how much!? * A System Administrator doesn't do hardware. * My machine needs more memory. * Is my monitor suppose to smoke? * Just stay late. * It was fine, until I moved the disk drive over to there. * I can guarantee you that my program is flawless. * Oops... * ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- BACK Eng_Adm "Get List" [X] A Clue [X] A Life [X] Lost Remember... just send mail. Copyright ) 1992 Network Equipment Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Story 10: A Dec F/S rep in to service a line printer managed to trip on the power cord to a DEC 11/750. An operator trying to be helpful immediately (no intermediate steps) plugged the power back in, faulting the system. Upon the F/S rep's request to hit the reset, a second operator hit the reset on the wrong 11/750. All mail, printing and a substantial number of other services at a small but busy academic site to came to an abrupt mid-day halt. Story 11: A system administrator logged in to a fileserver from home after two days of vacation to find her environment not working as expected. Some poking around revealed that the filesystem supporting /usr/local had been unmounted after disk problems. A call to the night operator to see if more info was available yielded the message "the system was down" waiting for F/S. The systems administrator's manager was shocked to find her in early next morning using the "dead" system's console to distribute alternate /usr/local mount configurations to the 15 desktops that received it from the server. Back tracking of the problem revealed that the system was probably pronounced dead after help desk/operations staff could not login using a non-standard shell found in /usr/local. No evidence could be found that a software support person had been consulted or that anyone other than users had actually looked at the physical system. A user was determined as being the person responsible for removing /usr/local from mount configurations and bringing the system up multiuser. Story 12 After testing a new nfs patch on a few test cases, an administrator began batch kernel installation and system reboots on 5 Sun Servers, ~50 clients, ~15 diskful desktops. One server on which the others had the several dependencies failed to reboot. This server was also the only one with a spare client slot. It had the only tape drive that could support the SunOS install tapes for it's architecture that was immediately accessible to the administrator. The system administrator determined the server could not be fixed in single user. It was not going to be possible to borrow a tape drive off hours. The administrator proceded to juggle filespace on another server to setup a client slot for booting over the net. About this time, numerous nfs woes surfaced. The administrator proceded to address references to the down server. After these had been addressed (including a few reboots), the administrator realized that the test cases hadn't determined the nfs patch would cause more problems than it solved. Life was going to be miserable until it was removed. The distribution mechanisms then in use were partially dependent on nfs, so the patch had to be backed out manually on systems that had come up. [Fortunately, the practice was to halt diskless clients and distribute nfs/lockd patches to /export/root on the servers after the servers came up using the new patch. None of the diskless clients had yet been rebooted.] Once the patches were backed out and the dead server was finally booted over the net, examination of the root filesystems revealed that a *well intentioned* person had, without informing the administrator, very recently resolved a root overflow problem by making the contents of /sbin links to /usr. -- John John Rouillard Special Projects Volunteer University of Massachusetts at Boston rouilj(a)cs.umb.edu (preferred) Boston, MA, (617) 287-6480 =============================================================================== My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.

12 years, 9 months

1
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Classic Unix workstation GUIs

by Michael Kerpan

The recent FOSS release of CDE has got me thinking of other Unix GUIs from the "golden age" of workstation Unix. Obviously, stuff like SunView and OpenWindows from Sun and 4DWM/Indigo Desktop from SGI are pretty well known, but I've always wondered what else was out there.So far, I've come across Looking Glass, DECWindows and HP VUE. Is there anything else of any importance/interest out there? Mike

12 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Classic Unix workstation GUIs

by William von Hagen

Though Apollos were much more Unix-like than actual Unix, the DM environment (display manager?) on Apollo Aegis, Domain/IX, and Domain/OS workstations was pretty interesting, most notably for the sophisticated interaction between the command-line and GUI. The DM was a lot like the Moxie carbonated beverage - you either liked it or you really wanted to spit it out. Apollo systems also ran various versions of the X Window system, but the unique stuff was in the DM. Site such as Toastytech's GUI Timeline (http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline.html) and Typewritten Software's Retrotechnology Media page (http://www.typewritten.org/Media/) have many screen shots of old GUIs and apps, many on Unix or Unix-like systems. Bill

12 years, 10 months

5
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Re: [TUHS] Classic Unix workstation GUIs

by Berny G

Open Look, Motif, NextStep. Dare I say it but I also enjoyed OS/2 Workplace.

12 years, 10 months

1
0
0 0

the origin of dotfiles

by Kuroishi Mitsuo

Hi. Just FYI. It's an interesting article about the origin of dotfiles. https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/R58WgWwN9jp -- Kuroishi Mitsuo

12 years, 10 months

7
6
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Re: [TUHS] Caldera ancient UNIX license question

by Norman Wilson

Werner Losh: However, the complicating factor here is, I think, that SYS V uses a lot of code from the later editions of Unix, so relicensing the newer research versions might cut into the license streams from them in some way. At least that was reported at the time of the only through 7th edition licensing. ======= I'm not sure who would have reported that `System V uses a lot of code from [post-7th] editions of UNIX.' I may be misled by having had my hands and eyes mainly on the kernel and the most-basic commands like the shell, but offhand I can't think of any System V code at all that was adopted directly from the Research systems in the 8th, 9th, or 10th Edition eras. There were certainly ideas that were picked up, mulled over, and re-implemented in changed form by the System V people, sometimes better and sometimes worse than the original; but not straight code transplants. The systems had diverged far too much for that to be easy. If anything, the licensing problem runs the other way: System V code taken in by the Research system. For example, the C compiler we used most was based on pcc2, developed on the System V side of the company after Steve Johnson moved there. I think our version of make may have been based on a System V version as well. I'm sure there are other (mainly smaller) examples, though since we used no source-code control mechanism, tracing the details is non-trivial. None of which invalidates the basic point: there's certainly plenty of entanglement, whether because 10/e includes ideas that were used commercially in System V and whose mutant descendants are still present in Solaris, or because 10/e includes some source code directly descended from System V. It's a shame we didn't get the several companies whose lawyers might care to agree that there's nothing of commercial value in the latter-day Research systems back when it was simpler to figure out who those companies were. As I've reported here before, there was actually some thought by certain persons here (and one who is, alas, no longer able to be here) of doing that, some years back, but a certain irksome legal circus about UNIX IP got going too quickly for that to happen, and left us with the confused situation we have today. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

12 years, 11 months

6
5
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Caldera ancient UNIX license question

by סטֵפָן פָּבִיקֵבִיק

Hello all! Since by the jury of 2010 we now know that Novell, not SCO, owns the UNIX copyright, is the Caldera ancient UNIX 4-clause BSD-license still valid? Thanks in advance, God bless! - Stefan.

12 years, 11 months

7
6
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Oldest Unix source code still in modern systems

by Warren Toomey

I was doing a trawl of related Unix source trees, and found that some early C code from around 2nd Edition Unix is still in OpenSolaris today: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V2/cmd/if.c Choose: Compare this file to OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/fmli/sys/test.c and then click on the Side Scroll or the Printable button. There's about 15 lines of code in common between the 2 files. Cheers, Warren

13 years, 1 month

5
4
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Re: [TUHS] Oldest Unix source code still in modern systems

by arnold＠skeeve.com

> I was doing a trawl of related Unix source trees, and found that some early > C code from around 2nd Edition Unix is still in OpenSolaris today: If it ain't broke, don't fix it? :-)

13 years, 1 month

1
0
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4.4BSD installed image or login shell?

by Jeremy C. Reed

Does anyone have installation instructions (with binary distribution) or a ready-to-use image for an historical 4.4BSD (encumbered or -Lite plus needed parts or -Lite2) with gxemul, tme, or other emulator? Or any login shell available? (For my tests, I want to use the real thing instead of a *BSD from the time of the 4.4BSD-lite merge.) Thanks

13 years, 2 months

4
10
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RetroBSD

by A. P. Garcia

2.11 BSD ported to a mips-based microcontroller: http://retrobsd.org/ http://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/unix-on-pic32-meet-retrobsd-for-duin…

13 years, 3 months

1
0
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man.cat-v.org

by Norman Wilson

I ran across this web site, which conveniently hosts man pages for a number of bell labs operating systems. Does anyone have the man pages for 9th or 10th edition that you could please share? That's problematic. Neither the limited-release V8 tape, the even-more-limited V9 (I'm not sure there even was a single such release, maybe we just sent out a few snapshots), nor the never-really-sent-to-anyone 10th Edition system has ever, so far as I know, escaped its original restrictive licensing. That includes the manual pages as well as the software proper. 10/e is even tricker, because it was published as a book; the ordinary book copyright on the contents may apply. And since all that stuff is 20 years or more, and several corporate reorgs/splits/buyouts, in the past, it may be very hard to find anyone who will agree that the stuff is no longer of any commercial value (the software all long since outdated, the printed book long out of print). Warren and Dennis and I talked about this many years ago. As I recall, we concluded that if we could get at least one of AT&T, Lucent, or the then-believed-owner of the UNIX commercial intellectual property to say it was OK, the others would likely go along; Warren had at the time a good contact with the latter entity; but said entity was still settling down after a buyout, so it seemed wisest to wait a few months before pushing for anything more. Alas, said entity was Caldera, which had just bought up The Santa Cruz Operation. Before a few months had passed, they had rebranded themselves as The SCO Group and shifted their primary business from technology development to pursuing untenable legal claims. I've no idea where one would start these days even to find the Gordian knot, let alone to cut it. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (who wrote some of them there manual pages, and some of the software they describe too, all a long time ago in a hill atop a swamp far far away) Email secured by Check Point

13 years, 3 months

2
1
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man.cat-v.org

by A. P. Garcia

I ran across this web site, which conveniently hosts man pages for a number of bell labs operating systems. Does anyone have the man pages for 9th or 10th edition that you could please share? http://man.cat-v.org/

13 years, 3 months

1
0
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Understanding the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin Split

by A. P. Garcia

http://www.osnews.com/story/25556/Understanding_the_bin_sbin_usr_bin_usr_sb…

13 years, 3 months

13
23
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"Slow system call" and EINTR

by Dan Stromberg

I gather system calls can return EINTR only when they are "slow". True? What makes a system call "slow"? Is it the ability to block for a while? But I wouldn't think dup(2) would block, for example. (I -=Love=- *ix!)

13 years, 4 months

2
1
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Re: [TUHS] why the leading under score added to function names?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. This is interesting. It shows that (apparently) early on, assembler was viewed as the primary programming language. It also shows the consequences a small, apparently local decision can have: here we are 40+ years later and GCC on Windows is still preprending underscores to function names! In 15 minutes I helped the guy at work solve a problem he'd been working on for two days! Thanks everyone, Arnold > From: Brantley Coile <brantley(a)coraid.com> > To: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> > Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:34:26 -0600 > Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> > Subject: Re: [TUHS] why the leading under score added to function names? > > correct. we could link to assembler code with _entry points and not i> worry about symbol collisions in the rest of the code. > > iPhone email > > On Feb 20, 2012, at 6:23 PM, "Dave Horsfall" <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > > > On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > > > > [...] > > > >> I'm pretty sure this dates back to PDP-11 days. I'm wondering "why?". > >> Why did the C compiler prepend an underscore to function names? > > > > Sure was the PDP-11 :-) I vaguely recall that it was to make sure that > > user functions did not conflict with predefined assembler functions, as > > that would be a pain to diagnose (much like having swap overlap root). > > > > -- Dave

13 years, 4 months

9
9
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[Unix-jun72] Invitación a conectarnos en LinkedIn

by Sergio Pedraja

LinkedIn ------------ Me gustaría añadirte a mi red profesional en LinkedIn. -Sergio Sergio Pedraja IT Security Administrator / Information Security Manager en Savings Bank Santander y alrededores, España Confirma que conoces a Sergio Pedraja: https://www.linkedin.com/e/-p9hg1j-gyzit23b-16/isd/6035310103/YCHqBtRa/?hs=… -- Estás recibiendo invitaciones a conectar. Haz clic para darte de baja: http://www.linkedin.com/e/-p9hg1j-gyzit23b-16/pQvcBySBaffs0LLhMMtx8DQb3x_CT… (c) 2012 LinkedIn Corporation. 2029 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043, EE.UU.

13 years, 4 months

2
1
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Invitación a conectarnos en LinkedIn

by Sergio Pedraja

LinkedIn ------------ Me gustaría añadirte a mi red profesional en LinkedIn. -Sergio Sergio Pedraja IT Security Administrator / Information Security Manager en Savings Bank Santander y alrededores, España Confirma que conoces a Sergio Pedraja: https://www.linkedin.com/e/-amg4ei-gyzit20d-4/isd/6035310080/f1t_FAOT/?hs=f… -- Estás recibiendo invitaciones a conectar. Haz clic para darte de baja: http://www.linkedin.com/e/-amg4ei-gyzit20d-4/IES2kw2WbAK2tgMLcf1q-MI/goo/tu… (c) 2012 LinkedIn Corporation. 2029 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043, EE.UU.

13 years, 4 months

1
0
0 0

Invitación a conectarnos en LinkedIn

by Sergio Pedraja

LinkedIn ------------ Me gustaría añadirte a mi red profesional en LinkedIn. -Sergio Sergio Pedraja IT Security Administrator / Information Security Manager en Savings Bank Santander y alrededores, España Confirma que conoces a Sergio Pedraja: https://www.linkedin.com/e/-9arw1o-gyzisxbk-15/isd/6035309375/9Ym-js9F/?hs=… -- Estás recibiendo invitaciones a conectar. Haz clic para darte de baja: http://www.linkedin.com/e/-9arw1o-gyzisxbk-15/_SZkCeK7HqzqROuy9YxIdtKYnud5R… (c) 2012 LinkedIn Corporation. 2029 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043, EE.UU.

13 years, 4 months

1
0
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why the leading under score added to function names?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. Recently at work I helped someone figure out that when working with ld, the name of a function "foo" gets turned into "_foo" by the compiler. (It took this old-timer 15 minutes to solve a problem he had been working on for two days!) I'm pretty sure this dates back to PDP-11 days. I'm wondering "why?". Why did the C compiler prepend an underscore to function names? Thanks, Arnold

13 years, 4 months

7
6
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Yet Another Kernel Description Document

by Warren Toomey

All, I've just received from Poul-Henning Kamp a document entitled "UNIX Program Description", dated January 1976 and written by the UNIX Support Group. It contains detailed descriptions of the functions inside a Unix kernel. Given the date and the USG origin, I'm guessing that the system described is PWB/1.0. Can anybody confirm this at all? The URL is http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/usdl/unix_program_descr… but I'll move it if it turns out not to be about PWB. I love how new documents and artifacts keep appearing! Thanks phk. Cheers, Warren

13 years, 4 months

2
2
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Understanding the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin Split

by Hendrik Jan Thomassen

If I recall well the /sbin directory first appeared in HP/UX, and the name stood for 'Static binaries'. Its reason for existence was that with the introduction of shared libraries the file with the C-library had become a single point of failure. Therefore this sbin was introduced to hold Statically linked executables for the most important commands needed to fix a broken system (sh, ls, mv, cp, find, tar, fsck etcetera). With this directory earlier than /bin in his PATH the administrator could at least restore a working libc.so file. And, while we are at it, the name 'executable' was not commonly used: they were called 'binaries' (except in IBM mainframe terminology were they were called 'load modules'). Only much later the habit of /sbin = System binaries emerged. An important reason to split /bin vs. /usr/bin and /lib vs. /usr/lib etc. was that the root file system had to be kept small. The fsck program, while at work, builds tables. If possible, they stay in memory, but if memory runs out fsck writes them to disk. However, you don't want them to be written to an untrusted/unchecked file system, and certainly not to the file system currently under repair. Since the root file system has to be checked before the others, it had to be small enough so ensure that fsck could run memory-based only. Therefore: the /bin, /lib and other root-fs based directories held the minimal stuff needed for booting and for repairs/restores, while all the rest had to go into the "overflow" directories /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc (and, obviously, /usr was a separately mounted partition). Remember: those were the days that every reboot included a full fsck on all your partitions. -- Hendrik-Jan Thomassen <hjt(a)ATComputing.nl> AT Computing 6546 BE Nijmegen NL Fax +31 24 352 72 92 info(a)atcomputing.nl www.atcomputing.nl 'If you think education is expensive, then try ignorance.'

13 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Understanding the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin Split

by Pepe

"Jose R. Valverde" <jrvalverde(a)cnb.csic.es> said: > Beyond that, the original articles and comments complained also about > directory naming (/bin /etc /lib) as "unintuitive". I fail to > understand in > what way is it easier for someone new to a computer to learn a "/bin > /etc /var /lib" alien terminology and what it means, than to learn > "System Config Libraries > etc..." or "Windows Windows32 Windows64 Temp Users and Settings, > etc..." In SCO Xenix/UNIX, the home directory is usually mounted on /u. I was amused the first time I saw it.

13 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Understanding the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin Split

by Norman Wilson

Lyndon Nerenberg: A well designed system without library bloat can pump out some pretty skinny static binaries. ======= V6, for example. Or even V7 if carefully pruned. Once upon a time, I made an RK05 disk (5MB) with a stripped-down post-V7 for an 11/45. It had just enough programs to allow basic file manipulation and text-processing. We used this compact system to allow our secretaries (in a small university department in the early 1980s) to continue typing up papers and letters on the day the machine-room air conditioning was being replaced. With the doors standing open and a big fan, we were willing to leave the 11/45 running, but not the VAX-11/780. Due to contractor screwups (when the chilled water was turned on, it rained up and down the hall--many poorly-soldered joints in the copper pipes), we actually needed this for a couple of days, so for safety I shut the system down every evening, removed the RK05 cartridge, and took it downstairs to the 11/34 that had a tape drive, where I booted RT11 and took an image backup with ROLLOUT. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

13 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Understanding the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin Split

by arnold＠skeeve.com

> http://www.osnews.com/story/25556/Understanding_the_bin_sbin_usr_bin_usr_sb… Cute, but most of the history is wrong. The distinction between /bin and /usr/bin is true - / held the things need to boot the system. Other things were on /usr. The Berkeley guys did NOT invent shared libraries. Shared libraries as we know them came originally from Sun, on SunOS 4.x for sure, possibly on SunOS 3.x. (Larry?) Many commercial vendors adopted the design (Ultrix, I think, and maybe others) and finally around 4.4 they found their way into "pure" BSD. /home and /opt came into the picture circa 1989 with SVR4 when Berkeley, AT&T and Sun (and maybe a few others?) got together to standardize the layout and make diskless booting possbile and reasonable with NFS sharing of home directories. /sbin & /usr/sbin came into the picture at this point also, to hold executables that until then had lived in /etc. The idea was that /etc should only have per-machine configuration files. The general point of the article and of some of the postings, that the proliferation doesn't make a lot of sense today, is well taken. The Bell Labs guys themselves recognized this when they did Plan 9. The problem is even worse on 64 bit Linux systems, which can handle two different architectures. /lib and /lib64 confuse a lot of the older 'configure' programs. Personally, I hate reading articles by "experts" where 85% of the facts are wrong. I lived through all of it, and I know better... :-) Arnold

13 years, 5 months

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xv6

by A. P. Garcia

saw this on osnews under 'related articles'; it's a rewrite of sixth edition for x86: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/xv6.html

13 years, 5 months

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History of man pages

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

I've received a link http://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html claiming to be about man pages; in fact, it's a lot more than that, including the prehistory of troff. Interesting stuff. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer Finger grog(a)FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua

13 years, 5 months

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awkcc source code available

by Aharon Robbins

Hi. I announced this in comp.lang.awk in December and tried to BCC the TUHS list but it didn't seem to happen. Here's the announcement I posted. Arnold ----------------------------------------------- From: arnold(a)skeeve.com (Aharon Robbins) Newsgroups: comp.lang.awk Subject: AWKCC source now available Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:27:39 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <jcfdfr$qt9$1(a)dont-email.me> [ BCC to TUHS list, Brian Kernighan & Chris Ramming ] awk 'BEGIN { print "Sherman, set the wayback machine for 1988" }' Hello All. This note is to announce that through the valiant efforts of Brian Kernighan, Alcatel-Lucent has been persuaded to make the source for awkcc available. It can be found at: https://open-innovation.alcatel-lucent.com/projects/awkcc You have to register (no cost) before being able to download, but it's easy. The license terms are at the site. It's a straightforward "for personal use" kind of license. For those who don't know, awkcc is an adaptation of Unix awk to translate nawk programs into C. It was originally implemented by Chris Ramming (then at Bell Labs, although no longer) circa 1988, and the source dist includes some doc that Chris wrote. Given how fast machines are these days, this program is mostly of historical interest. But it's nice to have this bit of Unix / awk history generally available. And, if you really need to turn an awk program into C, this may provide a starting point. Enjoy! -- Aharon (Arnold) Robbins arnold AT skeeve DOT com P.O. Box 354 Home Phone: +972 8 979-0381 Nof Ayalon Cell Phone: +972 50 729-7545 D.N. Shimshon 99785 ISRAEL

13 years, 5 months

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uunet ftp sources archive available

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. I announceced this some years ago but it's been renewed, so I'll announce it again. In 2004 sometime I downloaded all the comp.sources stuff I could from uunet.uu.net, which was still making it available for anonymous ftp. I've made a tarball of it available from http://www.skeeve.com/Usenet.tar.bz2 Warren, if you don't have this in the TUHS archives, maybe you could add it? Thanks, Arnold

13 years, 6 months

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qemu and virtualbox

by Andrzej Popielewicz

Hi, For those who want to refresh old memories. Hans Bezemer has made big progress as far as performance of qemu is concerned. His specific experience concerns Coherent, but other old unixes could use it. Details can be found in comp.os.coherent news group http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.coherent/topics The older tuhs message can be mentioned : http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2008-July/001815.html I have also noticed , that Coherent boots well and is very fast in newest virtualbox 4.1.8, running in XP. Dell Optiplex 755 was used with Core 2 Duo. Details can be found in forums for "Other quests" http://www.virtualbox.org It suggests , that other old Unixes could benefit in new virtualbox. Regards Andrzej

13 years, 6 months

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hello, world

by Norman Wilson

Rather a nice tribute to Dennis and C, published in the New York Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/22/magazine/the-lives-they-lived…

13 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] hello, world

by David Barto

A long time ago at the University that I graduated from. . . Shell scripts had just added the ability to have functions in them, so I wrote a script to do some processing of files that I had, and then logged off to let it run in the background. The shell script was named 'A'. In the script was a function, named 'A' When the script ran, instead of calling 'A' the function, it called 'A' the script, and you can see where this goes from here. 2 days later I received an email from the admin (thankfully a friend) who enclosed the 'ps -axl' output from the machine. It showed thousands of copies of my script running and a load that indicated that the machine was useless for almost everything. With the admonishment: "Don't ever do this again." I haven't. David David Barto barto(a)kdbarto.org barto(a)ucsd.edu

13 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] hello, world

by Tim Newsham

On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 8:15 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > On Tue, 27 Dec 2011, Warren Toomey wrote: >> Yes, a good reminder on the power that programming brings us. A question >> though: what command would "bring the system down"? > > It's right here: "Programmers were free to poke around to see and directly > manipulate what was in the computer's memory." http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/unix-jun72/2008-May/000250.html > -- Dave -- Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com

13 years, 6 months

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early version of top

by Oliver Lehmann

Hi, I wonder if someone has an early version of top lying around? I'd like to try getting it to work on my ZEUS clone. I'd start with 1.0 from 1984 if possible ;) Regards, Oliver

13 years, 6 months

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recreating C source from binary

by Oliver Lehmann

Hi, I'm trying to re-create the source files for the Z8000 UNIX I have on my Z8000 system (it is a S8000+ZEUS clone). Easy programs like sync.c where easy. But when argc/argv is involved, I'm not able to generate 1:1 matching binary code. I'm working on /etc/unlink for now. I tried the following C file: char whatstr[] = "@[$]unlink.c 2.1 07/23/82 21:19:30 - 87wega3.2"; main(argc, argv) int argc; char **argv; { if(argc!=2) { write(2, "Usage: /etc/unlink name\n", 24); exit(1); } unlink(argv[1]); exit(0); } The original ASM code for the beginning of main() until the argc check is: 0042 abf3 dec r15,#4 0044 5df60000 ldl %0000(r15),rr6 0048 0b070002 cp r7,#%0002 The ASM code my C file generates is: 0042 abf3 dec r15,#4 0044 1df6 ldl @r15,rr6 0046 0b070002 cp r7,#%0002 keep in mine, that r15 is considered as the "stack pointer". I wonder how to get the ldl from the original binary. I also tried to declare argv with "char *argv[]" which resulted in the same code. Forcing the compiler to store argv into a register by using the "register" keyword results in completly different code: (sp = stack pointer = r15) #17 adb unlink ADB: P8000 1.6 ? 0x0042/i %0042: dec sp,#6 ? %0044: ld %0004(sp),r14 ? %0048: ld %0002(sp),r7 ? %004c: ld r14,r6 ? %004e: cp r7,#%0002 ? $q #18 Maybe the C compiler used to compile /etc/unlink differs from the C compiler shipped with the system (maybe an older version) but I don't want this to be true for now ;) Anyone with deeper ASM and C knowledge than me sees what could be done here? Before someone asks - yes I'm sure the source file was in C and not ASM based on the whatstr. Symboltable of the original /etc/unlink is empty as well (striped binary). Regards, Oliver

13 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] Command line post-arguments with #!

by Norman Wilson

Sven Mascheck: With "original implementation (post 7th ed", I meant the undistributed BellLabs-internal further development of 7th, the first system ever to implement #!, leading to 8th ed, etc. (4BSD just incorporated this). Not System V or other relatives, though. ======= Can you cite a reference? I'm quite familiar with what went on inside the system that was later called 8th Edition, having been on the inside at Bell Labs starting in mid-1984. But that was after the original research group's general move to VAXes--they had no PDP-11s left by then, except a few LSI-11s running special-purpose systems rather than UNIX. In fact the VAX kernel they had adopted, I think sometime earlier that year, was derived from that of 4.1 BSD. (It diverged quite a bit from that start later, for which I am appreciably to blame, but that has nothing to do with #!). So if #! was implemented in an earlier kernel I don't know just what was done. I'd assumed it was no different; if I'm mistaken I'd love to see just how it really was. Alas, the person I know was on the spot and was likely to remember just what happened in what order can no longer answer questions ... Norman Wilson Toronto ON

13 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] Command line post-arguments with #!

by norman＠oclsc.org

Sven Mascheck: Well the original implementation (post 7th ed and 4.0/4.1 BSD) didn't allow arguments at all ;-) ====== I believe you're mistaken. All the implementations I've ever used allowed a single argument in the #! line, and inserted the name of the script between that (if present) and the arguments given to exec. e.g. if ./lipsum began with #!/usr/bin/awk -f awk would be invoked with `/usr/bin/awk -f ./lipsum ...'. Without allowing one argument for -f or the like, #! wouldn't have been useful for much but the shell. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

13 years, 6 months

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speak.c, or sometimes the bits are under your nose

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, in the past few days I've been getting some interesting e-mails from a new TUHS member, Jonathan Gevaryahu. He has been searching for some lost software, and his story of how he found it is a good reminder to check through all the zeroes and ones on the digital media at hand. With his permission, I reproduce the e-mails below. Cheers, Warren Hi, I'm Jonathan Gevaryahu, one of the developers of MESS but also a speech synthesis history buff. I've been trying to find a copy of the old unix 'speak' command source code and rule tables that M. D. Mcilroy wrote back in 1974ish, but the TUHS archives only have the man pages for it, and not the actual program or its tables. As for the "why?" of this, its an important piece of history, and the phoneme set used on the Federal Screw Works "VOTRAX" Model VS-4 unit which was used with 'speak' at Bell Labs is compatible with the later Votrax Model VS-6 unit at CHM, and also with the Votrax "SC-01" chip used in some arcade/video games, several computer peripherals, and on the "Type 'N' Talk" and "Personal Speech System" products. So actually running the old code and having it speak should be quite doable, if we can recover enough of it to be useful. [ Jonathan assumed that the 'speak' source code had been lost. ] I even asked Doug McIlroy about it a few years ago and he didn't have a copy, and I had assumed it was just plain lost... Until today. I was poking around in random TUHS files (after reading about the v1 unix restoration project) and noticed that the size of recovered files from the ritchie v6 tapes in the .tar.gz files is actually significantly smaller than the tapes themselves. I assumed there had to be some other data there, possibly corrupt or fragmentary, and got down to peeking at the file contents themselves. There were some mentions of speak.m and .c and .v, but finally, in http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v6/v6do… I found the remains of the speak program. See http://pastebin.com/FdvRYM2T for what I've managed to recover so far (actually since i pasted that I recovered a good deal more of it, but a lot is out of order and bits are missing) The file is fragmentary as far as I can see, and is only speak.c (the .m file containing the rules I haven't found yet, but since Doug has a scanned copy of the paper describing speak on his website, hopefully I can just regenerate the rule tables if needed), but it is there! Hopefully speak.m or .v are still waiting to be found on that or one of the other tape images. Also there are other things on that tape like the chess program, and tic tac toe, which may not exist elsewhere. (Though, for these two I honestly haven't checked) Also, in the last 5 minutes I found a chunk of what I'm pretty sure is either speak.m or speak.v, so there's more than just the .c file there. Further progress attached of recovering speak from deleted disk pack sectors: I have all of speak.c in order except for one 512-byte sector, which was overwritten at some point, in the phoneme table. (This has to be the least "damaging" sector of the entire program. lucky!) I also have a good chunk (maybe 50-60%) of what may be a mix of speak.m and speak.v, both out of order. I did not yet find a copy of 'speakm', the rule displayer program for speak.m/.v. There is a program, located after speak.c on the disk image, which looks like it would convert numbers and months to their full speakable names. In addition, either slightly more or slightly less of the files may be intact on the http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Ken_Wellsch_v6… image, which appears to be originally an exact dd-copy of the dennis_v6 disk packs. Ok, here's the 'repaired' speak.c file, with the missing entries of the table filled in (this was IMMENSELY helped by the fact that speak.o, the compiled object file, was also on the disk pack and appears to be fully intact including the table; the ruleset files are fragmentary so far.)

13 years, 6 months

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Provenance of the documents used to restore 1st Ed Unix

by Warren Toomey

All, here's a special Christmas present, especially for those who helped out with the restoration of the 1st Ed Unix system, see http://code.google.com/p/unix-jun72/ To do the restoration we needed a copy of the 1st Ed Unix kernel source code, and Al Kossow had found these two documents and scanned them in: http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v1/Kern… http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Dennis_v1/Prel… At the time nobody could work out who had studied the kernel source code, why they had done it etc. Nor could we work out who Ted Bashkow was and why he was involved. After my IEEE Spectrum article I was contacted by Jim DeFelice to say thanks for the article. I recognised him as one of the people named in the above documents, and asked him about the kernel study. He has contacted some of the people involved and sent me the e-mail below, which gives a full description of the work! Before I get to it, just an aside. According to Berkley Tague, Ted Bashkow "was a visiting Professor for the summer some time around 1970 or 1971 and worked with me and others in research on various topics. I don't believe he contributed much to UNIX at that time, but was an early user of the early systems." Cheers, Warren [ Jim's story] Here is as coherent a story as I can piece together Let me know if you have any more questions. Jim. The documents that describe the UNIX system as it was implemented on the PDP-11/20 circa 1971 originated as a consequence of a project undertaken within the comptrollers department of the AT&T General Departments. The project was titled the Investment and Cost Information System (ICIS). It was a major new accounting system intended to track detailed cost information for the operating telephone companies of the Bell System. ICIS was a major IBM mainframe based system which was being developed in COBOL. I transferred from Bell Labs in late 1970 to join Chuck Everhart who preceded me from the Labs. In 1971 we were joined by Ron Silacci, Cathy Judge, and later (early '72?) Jerry Conser all from Bell Labs. We formed the core of what would become a much larger Development staff by 1973. In preparation for a major development effort, we wanted to develop a system to maintain the spate of expected ICIS specification and design documents including graphics such as flowcharts. We decided on the PDP-11/20 with a Tecktronix T4002 graphics terminal as the hardware platform for the development of our document maintenance system. For obscure reasons, in order to purchase the PDP-11/20, the ICIS team needed to get approval from the Bell Labs computer aquisition review department headed by Berkley Tague. Berk made the approval for the purchase contingent us agreeing to use UNIX as the operating system.First hearing of this "UNIX" verbally, my mind was filled with scenes from the Arabian Nights. "Eunuchs" seemed a strange name for an operating system. At the time, the only instances of UNIX were to be found in the hands of the developers (Ken Thompson & Co.) at Murray Hill, NJ. We naturally asked for all the documentation. We were told there was none. What we got was a source listing of the PDP-11 assembly language UNIX Kernel. It was virtually without any commentary or external description. In order to proceed we undertook to reverse engineer the listing in order to understand how to modify UNIX to support the T4002. To that end, in late 1971, we set up shop at a Labs facility in Piscataway, NJ. The team got occasional hints and pointers from the UNIX developers at Murray Hill, but they tended to be focussed on their own work (the C programmimg language, troff, etc.). Initial progress was slow, but as the overall design structure emerged and the team became fluent with PDP assembly language and the coding style of the UNIX developers things moved along. Early work was done with paper and pencil resulting in the document named by you as "Kernel Subroutine Description...". Once we took delivery of our PDP-11/20, we were able to make use of the UNIX tools "ed" and "roff" to create a more easily edited digital document "Preliminary UNIX Implementation Document" The detailed timing of all this is uncertain. The hand work was done from late 1971 through March 1972 resulting in the Kernel Subroutine documentation. Chuck Everhart left AT&T in late 1971 and I became the group supervisor. A draft of the machine based Preliminary Implementation document was completed by June 1972 per the date on my cover letter for its first distribution. By June 1972 there was evidently a lot of interest in UNIX inside Bell Labs. The computer commitee was pushing UNIX for all PDP based projects inside Bell Labs. The ICIS owned PDP-11/20 was probably received after March 1972. The hand written cover letter to Ted Bashkow is dated 4/3/72. Once we had use of the PDP-11 we would have entered our work directly. The modifications for the T4002 are not dated in your PDF version and do not appear in the original printout that I still have. I don't know why the date on all the printed pages is 3/17/72. Also, missing in the PDF version of the Preliminary Implementation document that is in the paper version is a subroutine cross reference listing that lists which subroutines are called by which. Regarding the authorship of the documents. Looking at the handwriting it seems at least four people contributed to the Kernel Subroutine document. Myself and Ron have actually reviewed the document and can claim authorship to specific sections. By sections: J. DeFelice H0_01, H0_02, H0_03,H0_04,H0_05, H2-11_sysexec call chain, H2.4,H2_1.7,H2-8, H2-9 H4-3, H5-1, H5-2, H5-3, H5-4, H5-7, H7-1, H7-2, H7-4, H7-5,H7-6, H8-01.2, H8-02, H8-03, H8-05, H8-06, H8-07, H8-08, h8-09-00, h5-6 Ron Silacci sysclose, syscreate, sysent, sysexit, sysfork, sysmdate, sysgetty, sysmdir, error, badsys, sysopen, sysret, sysrele, sysstty, syswait, read, write, ani, sysstat, sysgetuid, sysintr, syslink, sysseek, syssetuid, sysstat, sysstime, systime, sysquit, sysunlink, wdir, fclose, isdir, isown, maknod, mkdir, getf, seektell, sysbreak, syschdir, syschmod, syschown, clear, idle, putlu, swap, tswap, unpack, rswap, wswap, clock, isintr, retisp, sleepo, setisp, tty0, wakall, ttyi, wakeup, itrunc, imap, dskr, cpass, readi, canon, cesc, ctty, ttych, getspl, iclose, iopen, sysmount, sysumount, bread, bwrite, dioreg, drum, preread, rtap, tape, tstdeve, trapt, rw1, intract, otty. Unknown 1 (all caps) H4_00, H4_01, H4_02, H4_2.1, H6_2.2, H6_3.0, H6_6, H7_0.0.4, H7_3.0, H7_3.2 H7_3.3, H9_00.1, H9_01, H9_02, H9_03 Unknown 2 H0_06, H0_07, H2_0.2, H2_3,H2_4, H3_2, H3_4, H5_2.0, H5_2.1,H6_0.9, H6_1.0, H6_1, H6_2.0, H6_2.2, H6_3, H6_4, H8_09, H8_11 The two unknowns would be Jerry Conser and Cathy Judge. I have not been able to track them down. The comments in the listing were made by the people who authored the corresponding man pages. We would comment the listing and as understanding dawned write up the man page. I had a major hand in Section F but can't claim sole responsibility. The people listed in the recipients list in Ted Bashkow's cover letter are the members of the computer aquisition department. According to Joe Maranzano: "Ted Bashkow was a professor from Columbia who was on a 6-month sabbatical in Berkley Tague's department. The other names on the memo are: Dan Clayton David Copp Gwen Hansen Jossie Hintz Ruth Klein Jim Ludwig Georgette Petit Joe Ritacco Berk Tague Dan Vogel Linda Wright This was the composition of the Department in 1972 and most of us were working on Computer Acquisition Reviews for the Computer Centers. The Unix Support Group was formed in 1973." By the time the Tecktronix application was developed, the ICIS development project was ramping up. The developers were using punch cards for their Cobol programs. It occurred to me that we could utilize our UNIX system to eliminate punch cards which were difficult to manage and instead enter and edit the Cobol code using "ed". My management (rotated in from Bell Operating Companies) was not keen on diverting resources towards more tool building but I had enough autonomy to push through the ordering of a PDP-11/45 and a DEC developed Bisync communications interface card. This configuration allowed the UNIX system to emulate an IBM card reader/printer. The PDP11/45 had memory protection, which made committing all the source code for a major project to UNIX thinkable. I did all the development work on a bisync driver myself while my group attacked the main IBM development. The resulting system worked well and over the course of a few months all the die hard card rearder afficianados had converted to the new system. This despite the occasional file system crash. At the time you could go in and edit i-nodes by hand to recover lost files and directories. So with frequent tape backups for insurance we never lost more that a few hours worth of work. The Bell Labs UNIX support department (formed in 1973) eventually took over the maintenance of the system and dubbed it the Programmers Work Bench. Other types of workbench were to follow. I lost track of developments in the UNIX world till I transferred back to Bell Labs in 1982. By then the UNIX support organization was an entire Laboratory. The hardware platform was the DEC VAX system, UNIX was rewritten in C, and Berkely UNIX was a major competitor to the AT&T version. I still have the design and code for the Bisync driver if you are interested.

13 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] E-mail address for Dick Haight?

by Norman Wilson

Arnold Skeeve: Have you asked Doug McIlroy? ======= Actually I did, last night, on Warren's behalf. I had meant to drop Doug a note anyway to apologize for not letting him know I was in his general neighborhood last week. Here's Doug's reply: Pipes were first documented in v3, Feb 1973. At that time my original clumsy shell syntax, cmd>cmd>[file] was still in use. Within a few months, Ken invented today's pipe symbol as something more presentable at a talk he'd been invited to give in England--an Infosys "State of the Art" conference if I remember correctly (not the same Infosys as the current Indian giant). I also remember the very blackboard in the garret lab where I sketched my syntax and Ken exclaimed, "I'll do it". That was late in the day and I'm quite sure it was dark outside. Unlike Ken, I was not in the habit of staying in the lab into the evening. That makes me think that pipe day was not too far off the solstice. It would be nice to believe that pipes preciptated the third edition, but in fact the first four editions came out almost like clockwork at 8-month intervals, so any correlation with pipes is highly speculative. ====== Norman Wilson Toronto ON (actually Ramsey NJ at the moment, a good bit north of Murray Hill)

13 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] E-mail address for Dick Haight?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Have you asked Doug McIlroy?

13 years, 7 months

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E-mail address for Dick Haight?

by Warren Toomey

All, would anybody have an e-mail address for Dick Haight? I am still trying to narrow done the date when pipes were added to Unix, so far between June 72 and January 73. I have this quote from Dick: "I happened to have been visiting the research crew the day they implemented pipes. It was clear to everyone practically minutes after the system came up with pipes working that it was a wonderful thing. Nobody would ever go back and give that up if they could help it." so he might be able to provide a smaller date range than what I have at present. Cheers, Warren

13 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Strange Birth of Unix

by John Cowan

Dave Horsfall scripsit: > Great atricle :-) Great ventricle, too. -- But you, Wormtongue, you have done what you could for your true master. Some reward you have earned at least. Yet Saruman is apt to overlook his bargains. I should advise you to go quickly and remind him, lest he forget your faithful service. --Gandalf John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org>

13 years, 7 months

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Field Circus

by Warren Toomey

All, not terribly Unix specific, but here's a good read for those who have suffered at the hands of field circus engineers :) http://nemesis.lonestar.org/stories/stages.html Have a good Xmas everyone. Warren

13 years, 7 months

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Downloadable Usenet groups?

by Warren Toomey

Also, is there a place where I can download archives of Usenet groups in a plain text format? I think I've got v6.bugs and v7.bugs and some of comp.sources.unix. I just came across net.unix on Google Groups, but I'd rather not have to wget all that HTML! Thanks, Warren

13 years, 7 months

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Strange Birth of Unix

by Warren Toomey

All, My IEEE Spectrum article finally got published and you can read it on-line here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-strange-birth-and-long-life… I've had a few e-mails about it. This one has a few more snippets about early Unix history (from Rey Bonachea): It was with great pleasure and a bit of nostalgia that I read your IEEE article below. Thank you very much for writing it. One aspect that did not get mention, and that perhaps you may or may not be aware of, was the pseudo real time applications of Unix. In 1972 I joined Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ working on a project by the name of Switching Control Center System. At the beginning I was just a brand new member of the technical staff working on circuit design for interfaces to the PDP11/20. This project was meant to centralize the data streams from the maintenance channel of switching machine. Then, in a multi-user environment , would analyze the incoming data streams and raise alarms as appropriate. It also provided a whole suite of analysis tools to allow switch maintenance personnel to trouble shoot the electronic switches. Because the switches could not buffer messages or be slowed by flow control, the Unix system had to catch messages in real time and put it away on disk for later analysis. Due to the near real time requirements, a number of features were added to Unix such as semaphores. The Unix based Switching Control Center System (SCCS) software was trialed in New Brunswick NJ in 1973 and later that year was released as the first commercial application of the Unix OS. I learned to program on that PDP 11/20 computer running Unix and eventually wrote many applications for the SCCS, initially in assembly language and then in C as we were also the first project to use C commercially. Cheers, Warren

13 years, 7 months

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b remnants?

by A. P. Garcia

Hi, In memoriam, I read The Development of the C Language: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html It talks a bit about how B was originally implemented somewhat like ETH Pascal (p-code). Are there any B interpreters or programs in the archive? Thank you, A. P. Garcia

13 years, 8 months

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RIP Dennis

by Berny G

Thank you Dennis. None of us would be here without you. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family. Berny

13 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] b remnants?

by Jason Stevens

Yep, dungeon runs great on RT-11 ... I've docuemnted the experence here... http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=169 Building the fortran compiler was... an adventure onto its own, but luckily I found some documentation @ bitsavers, and could ask on the PDP11 lists for help... I'm amazed it compiled and runs! .. Oh and TripOS is the BCPL based OS that ran on all kinds of machines, it was very portable, the best known port would be AmigaDOS for the Commodore Amiga. I wonder if it was licensing fees and BCPL/TripOS being based in the UK what seperated them from C/Unix... I guess we'd be living in the B++, B# and ObjectiveB world if it wasn't for DMR's wonderful world of C .. :) -----Original Message----- From: Gregg Levine [mailto:gregg.drwho8@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2011 12:37 AM To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Cc: Jason Stevens Subject: Re: [TUHS] b remnants? On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 12:20 AM, Jason Stevens <jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote: > Wasn't the other 'advantage' of threaded/pcode that it'd be smaller than a > native executable? > > I know it's out of left field, but building Dungeon on RT-11, you have to > use the treaded compiler, and I assume it was a space thing.. Just as on > MS-DOS (Yeah I know...) a save for fitting stuff in 64kb for the later > compilers was to compile to p-code.. > > Wikipedia gives p-code for Pascal a timeframe of the 'early 70's and > attribes the whole interpeted code as O-Code for BCPL .... > > I wonder if anyone ever did save any TripOS tapes for the PDP-11..... > > -----Original Message----- > From: A. P. Garcia [mailto:a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com] > Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 11:58 PM > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Subject: Re: [TUHS] b remnants? > > > On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 9:52 AM, A. P. Garcia > <a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> In memoriam, I read The Development of the C Language: >> http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html >> >> It talks a bit about how B was originally implemented somewhat like >> ETH Pascal (p-code). Are there any B interpreters or programs in the >> archive? > > What intrigued me about this is that it's such an early example of an > abstract machine running as an interpreter. BCPL, roughly > contemporaneous, used ocode as an intermediate language, but it seems > this was intended to be further translated into assembly. While it's > possible to interpret ocode, in practice it seems this was rare, if it > was done at all. Almost everything I've read about abstract/vitual > machines traces its roots back to the following source: > > James R. Bell. 1973. Threaded code. Commun. ACM 16, 6 (June 1973), > 370-372. DOI=10.1145/362248.362270 > http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/362248.362270 > > Here's where dmr mentions implementing B using this technique: > > The B compiler on the PDP-7 did not generate machine instructions, but > instead `threaded code' [Bell 72], an interpretive scheme in which the > compiler's output consists of a sequence of addresses of code > fragments that perform the elementary operations. The operations > typically-in particular for B-act on a simple stack machine. > > Note he says it was published in 1972, when it actually appeared in > print in 1973 (same page numbers). Two paragraphs later he writes: > > By 1970, the Unix project had shown enough promise that we were able > to acquire the new DEC PDP-11. The processor was among the first of > its line delivered by DEC, and three months passed before its disk > arrived. Making B programs run on it using the threaded technique > required only writing the code fragments for the operators, and a > simple assembler which I coded in B; ; soon, dc became the first > interesting program to be tested, before any operating system, on our > PDP-11. Almost as rapidly, still waiting for the disk, Thompson > recoded the Unix kernel and some basic commands in PDP-11 assembly > language. Of the 24K bytes of memory on the machine, the earliest > PDP-11 Unix system used 12K bytes for the operating system, a tiny > space for user programs, and the remainder as a RAM disk. This version > was only for testing, not for real work; the machine marked time by > enumerating closed knight's tours on chess boards of various sizes. > Once its disk appeared, we quickly migrated to it after > transliterating assembly-language commands to the PDP-11 dialect, and > porting those already in B. > > The abstract machine is also mentioned in Thompson's "Users' Reference > to B", dated January 7, 1972. If the 1970 date is correct, they were > using this technique some three years before most of the computing > world knew about it!? Hello! This discussion is beginning to strike a heck of a lot of chords. Jason what is this TripOS you are describing here about? And did you actually get Dungeon to work? ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

13 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] b remnants?

by Jason Stevens

Wasn't the other 'advantage' of threaded/pcode that it'd be smaller than a native executable? I know it's out of left field, but building Dungeon on RT-11, you have to use the treaded compiler, and I assume it was a space thing.. Just as on MS-DOS (Yeah I know...) a save for fitting stuff in 64kb for the later compilers was to compile to p-code.. Wikipedia gives p-code for Pascal a timeframe of the 'early 70's and attribes the whole interpeted code as O-Code for BCPL .... I wonder if anyone ever did save any TripOS tapes for the PDP-11..... -----Original Message----- From: A. P. Garcia [mailto:a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 11:58 PM To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Subject: Re: [TUHS] b remnants? On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 9:52 AM, A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > In memoriam, I read The Development of the C Language: > http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html > > It talks a bit about how B was originally implemented somewhat like > ETH Pascal (p-code). Are there any B interpreters or programs in the > archive? What intrigued me about this is that it's such an early example of an abstract machine running as an interpreter. BCPL, roughly contemporaneous, used ocode as an intermediate language, but it seems this was intended to be further translated into assembly. While it's possible to interpret ocode, in practice it seems this was rare, if it was done at all. Almost everything I've read about abstract/vitual machines traces its roots back to the following source: James R. Bell. 1973. Threaded code. Commun. ACM 16, 6 (June 1973), 370-372. DOI=10.1145/362248.362270 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/362248.362270 Here's where dmr mentions implementing B using this technique: The B compiler on the PDP-7 did not generate machine instructions, but instead `threaded code' [Bell 72], an interpretive scheme in which the compiler's output consists of a sequence of addresses of code fragments that perform the elementary operations. The operations typically-in particular for B-act on a simple stack machine. Note he says it was published in 1972, when it actually appeared in print in 1973 (same page numbers). Two paragraphs later he writes: By 1970, the Unix project had shown enough promise that we were able to acquire the new DEC PDP-11. The processor was among the first of its line delivered by DEC, and three months passed before its disk arrived. Making B programs run on it using the threaded technique required only writing the code fragments for the operators, and a simple assembler which I coded in B; ; soon, dc became the first interesting program to be tested, before any operating system, on our PDP-11. Almost as rapidly, still waiting for the disk, Thompson recoded the Unix kernel and some basic commands in PDP-11 assembly language. Of the 24K bytes of memory on the machine, the earliest PDP-11 Unix system used 12K bytes for the operating system, a tiny space for user programs, and the remainder as a RAM disk. This version was only for testing, not for real work; the machine marked time by enumerating closed knight's tours on chess boards of various sizes. Once its disk appeared, we quickly migrated to it after transliterating assembly-language commands to the PDP-11 dialect, and porting those already in B. The abstract machine is also mentioned in Thompson's "Users' Reference to B", dated January 7, 1972. If the 1970 date is correct, they were using this technique some three years before most of the computing world knew about it!? _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

13 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] b remnants?

by Jason Stevens

I didn't see it as immeditaly obvious on slackware 1.0 ... or SLS .. it very well may have been some addon or something somehwere.... If anyone knew it's filename that'd go a long long way! :) -----Original Message----- From: Derrik Walker [mailto:lorddoomicus@mac.com] Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 12:36 PM To: Gregg Levine Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Subject: Re: [TUHS] b remnants? On Oct 14, 2011, at 11:53 AM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Derrik Walker <lorddoomicus(a)mac.com> wrote: > > Many, many eons ago, in the early '90's, there was an implementation of B > > for Linux ( I believe it was written in C, ironically enough ). I think it > > was part of a bigger collection of "ancient" software for Linux that use to > > be around in the early Slackware days. > > > > Alas, I have searched for it in the recent past, as I was thinking about > > porting it to OS X for kicks, but it seems to have vanished. > > > > Having an B, implemented in a modern language for a modern OS would be cool. > > > > > Hello! > How early a time period for the Slackware Linux group? (Which is what > I run.) There's a repository of older distributions on the Ibib site, > and a more comprehensive one situated on a mirror in the UK. It would have been around '92 or '93, back when Slackware really only provided a very basic boot system, gcc, some fancy scripts, and a crap load of tarballs to compile everything. I'm not even sure it was part of the Slackware collection, it might have been something someone added to the server - I didn't build that computer. It was an experimental system at CSU, where I was going to school at the time - and the first actually Linux computer I ever had an account on. One of the older professors had a bunch of B code he got from someplace and put the compiler on there to see if he could get it to build. I remember he also put f2c on there too as he had a tape full of Fortran code he wanted to compile. But, for all I know, he may have written the B compiler himself, but I seem to remember him telling me about this collection of ancient software for Linux that someone else had written, and he had gotten it up and running on the experimental Linux system. Just not sure how faulty my memory is. I just remember looking at B, and asking why he just doesn't covert it to C? Funny thing was, some of the younger professors were complaining saying the preferred their "REAL UNIX". Unfortunately, he as long since retired. And that Computer was retired when they moved the main Student system from HPUX to Redhat in the late '90's. - Derrik

13 years, 8 months

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Mirror with link

by Jose R. Valverde

Just for the record. The correct way to mirror a site with links corrected is wget -c -m -k -np -e robots=off URL Seems most people have problem remembering this incantation. -- EMBnet/CNB Scientific Computing Service Solving all your computer needs for Scientific Research. http://bioportal.cnb.csic.es http://www.es.embnet.org

13 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] RIP Dennis

by Jose R. Valverde

We could set up a web site inmemoriamdmr.org maybe initially as a wiki and ask people to add their contribution and then maybe we could try to collect there his works or add a blog with articles about him that could be commented... Just an idea, I am in the middle of a Congress, seated in the front row and trying to listen to speakers through my consternation, and can do very little now. j -- EMBnet/CNB Scientific Computing Service Solving all your computer needs for Scientific Research. http://bioportal.cnb.csic.es http://www.es.embnet.org

13 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] dmr has passed away

by Jose R. Valverde

Truly a great loss. I just saw this (I have traveling to some international meetings). I wonder if we could come up with a way to pay hommage to him all together to acknowledge his legacy. Don't know what could be best, but I am sure there are people here who knew him and through their consternation can give us an idea of what would be the best way to publicly honor him. Can we all get together to do something jointly for him? I guess a global collaborative initiative would be most in his spirit and philosophy of life. Dunno, maybe create web site to celebrate him. Where everybody can leave a testimony of how his work has affected our lives. j -- EMBnet/CNB Scientific Computing Service Solving all your computer needs for Scientific Research. http://bioportal.cnb.csic.es http://www.es.embnet.org

13 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] Mirror for http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/

by Warren Toomey

True. I had to mirror via ftp as the robots.txt stopped the http mirroring. It should be possible to fix the mirror in the tarball. I'll see what I can do. Thanks, Warren -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. Hans Ottevanger <hansot(a)gmail.com> wrote: On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 6:57 AM, Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote: > All, I've taken a mirror of http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ > and placed it at http://minnie.tuhs.org/dmr/ > > Feel free to mirror from minnie, in case the Labs' server gets overloaded. > It's 112 Megs. > Warren, Thanks for this excellent action, but your links are still absolute, i.e. point to the original content on the Bell Labs website. If that content disappears for whatever reason you will have a lot of links to convert. Kind regards, Hans Ottevanger

13 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] Mirror for http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/

by Warren Toomey

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 10:02:08PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote: > >Feel free to mirror from minnie, in case the Labs' server gets overloaded. > >It's 112 Megs. > > A tarball, perhaps? Of course. ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/misc/dmr_cm.bell-labs_mirror.tar.gz 90M Cheers, Warren

13 years, 8 months

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Death of dmr

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

For those of you who haven't heard yet, dmr died on Sunday. Rob Pike announced it at https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP I don't know what to say. A *real* giant is dead. And almost the saddest thing is that nobody has paid any attention. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer Finger grog(a)FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua

13 years, 8 months

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Mirror for http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/

by Warren Toomey

All, I've taken a mirror of http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ and placed it at http://minnie.tuhs.org/dmr/ Feel free to mirror from minnie, in case the Labs' server gets overloaded. It's 112 Megs. Cheers, Warren

13 years, 8 months

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dmr has passed away

by Warren Toomey

https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP?hl=en I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend. I have no more information. I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately. He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind. - Pob Pike With great thanks and appreciation to him, Warren

13 years, 8 months

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Dennis Ritchie...rip?

by Jason Stevens

wikipedia is listing that Dennis Ritchie just passed.. If that is so, then it really is a sad week to lose such a visionary. I wish I had some real details, but Rob Pike has it mentioned on his google+ account.... https://plus.google.com/u/0/101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP?hl=en

13 years, 8 months

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System V Interface Definition?

by Larry McVoy

Does anyone know where I might be get a bunch of copies of the 3 volume SVID 2nd edition (the 1986 release)?

13 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] UNIX V 6.9999999 ?

by Jason Stevens

That is kind of what I'd imagine... In 1983 I thought 160kb was infinate storage.. lol > -----Original Message----- > From: Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX) [SMTP:lyndon@orthanc.ca] > Sent: Friday, September 09, 2011 6:23 PM > To: jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com; dave(a)horsfall.org; tuhs(a)tuhs.org > Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX V 6.9999999 ? > > > It is insteresting reading about people haveing > > 600MB of storage back in 1981 > > You mean both of them?

13 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] UNIX V 6.9999999 ?

by Jason Stevens

Ah that makes sense, I could totally see that happening.. Esp with the cost of hardware back then! It is insteresting reading about people haveing 600MB of storage back in 1981.. I can only imagine how much it'd have cost! Thanks again! Jason -----Original Message----- From: Dave Horsfall [mailto:dave@horsfall.org] Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 11:36 PM To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX V 6.9999999 ? On Wed, 7 Sep 2011, Jason Stevens wrote: > What is UNIX V 6.9999999?? I suspect it's v6 with a bunch of patches, > but not quite v7? I've seen from some Russian stuff that they prefered > v6 on pdp-11's as it "ran faster" than v7 and needed far less ram/disk > space... I know it's 30 years too late to ask them what it is but I > figure someone may have actually ran/used 6.9999999... Back in the V6 days, I was known as Mr Unix 6-and-a-half, because I'd spliced all sorts of V7 features into V6 - notably XON/XOFF, and there was no way that V7 would run on the 11/40, I rewrote the Calcommp and Versatec plotter drivers to use the block interface, and they went like a bat out of hell. Sigh... We had fun in those days. -- Dave _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

13 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] 4.0 BSD confusion....

by Keith Bostic

> > Interesting. I've taken a look at the sources from the CD set and > found that the text there (in /usr/src/sys/sys/machdep.c) is the same > > as above. Looking further, the entire directory has the same files in > > 4.0 and 4.1, with the same modification dates. So it looks as the 4.0 > > sources accidentally got replaced by the 4.1 sources. > Hmmm, no, I don't have anything useful to add. I suspect you could check the modification dates on the files, and the file SCCS IDs, against the source-code revision logs to figure this out for sure. --keith =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Keith Bostic keith(a)bostic.com

13 years, 10 months

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UNIX V 6.9999999 ?

by Jason Stevens

While cruising olduse.net I came across this puzzling entry in net.general Department of Computer Engineering and Science Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio We would like to announce our connection to Usenet. We are a private university located in Cleveland, vacation spot of the midwest. The department's primary facilities consist of: VAX 11/780: hardware: RM05's, TU77, DZ-11, DH-11 (able), 2.5 Mbytes. software: 4.1 BSD PDP 11/45: hardware: RM02, DS330 (RP04), RK05, RX02, RS04(solid state) cache45 (able), DH-11 software: UNIX V 6.9999999 What is UNIX V 6.9999999?? I suspect it's v6 with a bunch of patches, but not quite v7? I've seen from some Russian stuff that they prefered v6 on pdp-11's as it "ran faster" than v7 and needed far less ram/disk space... I know it's 30 years too late to ask them what it is but I figure someone may have actually ran/used 6.9999999... Thanks Jason Stevens

13 years, 10 months

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Ideas for a Unix paper I'm writing

by Warren Toomey

All, IEEE Spectrum have asked me to write a paper on Unix to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of 1st Edition in November 1971. I'm after ideas & suggestions! I think my general thrust is that Unix is an elegant design, and the design elements are still relevant today. The implementation is mostly irrelevant (consider how much the code has changed from assembly -> C, from the simple data structures in V7 through to current BSD), but the original API is classic. Note that about 28 of the 1st Ed syscalls are retained in current BSDs and Linux, and with the same syscall numbers. I'm having some trouble thinking of the right way to explain what is an elegant design at the OS/syscall level, so any inspirations/ideas would be most welcome. I might highlight a couple of syscall groups: open/close/read/write, and fork/exec/exit/wait. If you have any references/URLs you think I should look at, please pass them on to me. I'm also trying to chase down some quotes; my memory seems to be failing me but I'm sure I've seen these somewhere: - in a paper, I think by Thompson & Ritchie, where they assert that the kernel should provide no more than the most minimal services to the userland programs. I thought this was the CACM paper, but I can't spot this bit. Maybe it's in Thompson's preface to the Lions Commentary, of which my copy is elsewere at present. - I'm sure I remember someome (Kernighan?) say that Ritchie encouraged them to espouse the use of processes as context switching was cheap, but later measurements showed that in fact it wasn't that cheap in the early versions of Unix. Anyway, if you can think of good ideas/references about the elegance of Unix, especially from the design perspective, I would much appreciate them. Cheers, Warren

13 years, 10 months

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Photos of PDP-11s running Unix

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, As part of my IEEE Spectrum article on 40 years since 1st Edition Unix, I've been asked for some suitable imagery/photos. Has anybody brought 1st Edition up on a real PDP-11/20, and if so, could they take some photos of the system? I think they would even be happy with photos of PDP-11s running V6 or V7. Anything that you can supply would be great - there is not a lot of photos from the early days of Unix. Thanks in advance, Warren

13 years, 10 months

2
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4.0 BSD confusion....

by Jason Stevens

I was looking at Tom Yam's 4.0 BSD 'starunix' restoration project, and I had a question about the version number that is reported vs the dates... I'm using wikipedia as a source (I know I know..) Anyways Tom's 4.0 boots up like this: : hp(0,0)vmunix 87844+15464+130300 start 0x530 VM/UNIX (Berkeley Version 4.1) 11/10/80 But the wiki page lists 4.1 being from June of 1981, and 4.0 being from November of 1980.. Did 4.0 BSD ship reporting itself as 4.1? I guess there is the possibility that the kernel may include patches to bring it up to 4.1? Does anyone have tape dumps of 4.0 & 4.1 ...? I did find some iso image that has various levels of BSD but they are not in tape dumps but rather extracted to the filesystem.. the 4.0 & 4.1 from there seem identical Or at a minimum they use the same kernel that reports itself as 4.1 ... Anyways I'm just wondering.... Jason Stevens

13 years, 10 months

4
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4.1c BSD

by Jason Stevens

Also from that cd image there was enough of 4.1c to make a working system by untarring it from within 4.2 BSD ... VAX780 simulator V3.8-1 Listening on port 23 (socket 156) loading ra(0,0)boot Boot : ra(0,0)vmunix 215688+63964+69764 start 0xf98 4.1c BSD UNIX #2: Tue Aug 28 09:39:12 PDT 1984 real mem = 8384512 avail mem = 7036928 using 148 buffers containing 838656 bytes of memory mcr0 at tr1 mcr1 at tr2 uba0 at tr3 hk0 at uba0 csr 177440 vec 210, ipl 15 rk0 at hk0 slave 0 rk1 at hk0 slave 1 uda0 at uba0 csr 172150 vec 774, ipl 15 ra0 at uda0 slave 0 ra1 at uda0 slave 1 zs0 at uba0 csr 172520 vec 224, ipl 15 ts0 at zs0 slave 0 dz0 at uba0 csr 160100 vec 300, ipl 15 mba0 at tr8 root on ra0 WARNING: should run interleaved swap with >= 2Mb Automatic reboot in progress... Tue Aug 28 09:54:53 PDT 1984 /dev/rra0a: 836 files, 6010 used, 1419 free (35 frags, 173 blocks) /dev/rra0h: 6598 files, 41780 used, 320080 free (160 frags, 79980 blocks) Tue Aug 28 09:54:58 PDT 1984 local daemons: telnetd ftpd tftpd syslog sendmail. preserving editor files clearing /tmp standard daemons: update cron accounting berknet mail printer. starting network: rshd rexecd rlogind rwhod routed. Tue Aug 28 09:55:00 PDT 1984 ucbmonet login: root Last login: Tue Aug 28 09:44:44 on tty00 4.1c BSD UNIX #2: Tue Aug 28 09:39:12 PDT 1984 Master source now lives here; freeze your 4.1c stuff now. monet# For those who are curious.... http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/install/simh/4.1c%20BSD.7z

13 years, 10 months

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/usr/bin on V7?

by Dan Stromberg

When I boot V7 in SIMH (pdp11), I get a root shell and a root filesystem, but... I see that /usr/bin is on root's default PATH, but I have no /usr/bin directory. Is there some way I could get a /usr/bin with additional executables, to get the full flavor of V7? By way of introduction, I first started with *ix on an AT&T 3Bmumble, and started really getting into it with SunOS 4.1.1. I've recently become interested in trying a large number of different *ix's - I guess it was the ease with which VirtualBox allowed many of those, and then seeing Nordier's V7 port to x86 got me curious about trying some really old versions - he mentioned that there was a pdp11 emulator available...

13 years, 10 months

4
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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 84, Issue 3

by A. P. Garcia

> Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 20:35:15 -0700 > From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)bitmover.com> > To: Dan Stromberg <drsalists(a)gmail.com> > Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Subject: Re: [TUHS] /usr/bin on V7? > >> By way of introduction, I first started with *ix on an AT&T 3Bmumble, and >> started really getting into it with SunOS 4.1.1. > > SunOS 4.1.1, ah, sweet memories. I and a bunch of my friends worked on > that one. Guy Harris, even though he had left for Auspex, would come back > to building 5 at Sun around 5:30, bang on the door, John Pope or I or one > of the other kernel guys who worked into the night, would let him in and > give him a place to work, and for the next few hours you'd hear "Jesus, > they still haven't fixed this?" and some fix would get pushed in. > > That was how much we loved SunOS. Solaris? Not so much. We put in tons > of effort to make SunOS good and it was a very pleasant version of Unix. :-) if you haven't yet, check out tme sometime: http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/

13 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] /usr/bin on V7?

by Dan Stromberg

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 8:24 PM, Michael Davidson <m_d(a)pacbell.net> wrote: > You probably don't have /usr/bin because you haven't mounted /usr yet. > That's a good hypothesis, especially given the info I presented, but I do have -some- things under /usr, and if I manually rerun sh -x /etc/rc in multiuser, I get an error about /usr already being mounted. > On V7 as best I can remember. /usr was always a mounted filesystem. > > So, somewhere in your V7 image there should be a disk image for /usr that > can be hooked up to an appropriate device under SIMH and then mounted. > Actually, it might already be there if your disk image is the entire device > and not just the root filesystem - if you can figure out what your root > device is then I would expect /usr to be on the same major device number but > with aminor device # of 2 (root being 0 and swap being 1). > I'm thinking /usr is /dev/rp3, because my /etc/rc looks like: # cat /etc/rc PATH=/bin:/usr/bin echo "Restricted rights: Use, duplication, or disclosure is subject to restrictions stated in your contract with Western Electric Company, Inc." >/dev/console rm /etc/mtab cat /dev/null >/etc/utmp /etc/mount /dev/rp3 /usr rm -f /usr/spool/lpd/lock : /etc/accton /usr/adm/acct rm -f /usr/tmp/* rm -f /tmp/* /etc/update date >/dev/console /etc/cron > Actually if you just take the system multi-user it might even do it for > you. This does seem to at least try to mount /usr for me - hitting ctrl-d at the initial singleuser #, that is. Interestingly though, it seems that the number of directories in /usr is the same on first boot into single user, as after /etc/rc has run as part of entering multiuser, so perhaps my root filesystem has things in /usr that would normally be obscured by a /usr mount. Also, /etc/mtab seems untouched (in fact, it's nonexistent) after entering multiuser, and the output of /etc/mount continues to be nothing. touch /t does create a file named t in the root directory, so it's not something about the root filesystem being readonly. I'm puzzled. And yet, I'm enjoying it. :) Any suggestions? > --- On *Wed, 8/3/11, Dan Stromberg <drsalists(a)gmail.com>* wrote: > > > From: Dan Stromberg <drsalists(a)gmail.com> > Subject: [TUHS] /usr/bin on V7? > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Date: Wednesday, August 3, 2011, 7:53 PM > > > > When I boot V7 in SIMH (pdp11), I get a root shell and a root filesystem, > but... I see that /usr/bin is on root's default PATH, but I have no > /usr/bin directory. Is there some way I could get a /usr/bin with > additional executables, to get the full flavor of V7? > > By way of introduction, I first started with *ix on an AT&T 3Bmumble, and > started really getting into it with SunOS 4.1.1. I've recently become > interested in trying a large number of different *ix's - I guess it was the > ease with which VirtualBox allowed many of those, and then seeing Nordier's > V7 port to x86 got me curious about trying some really old versions - he > mentioned that there was a pdp11 emulator available... > > > > -----Inline Attachment Follows----- > > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org <http://mc/compose?to=TUHS@minnie.tuhs.org> > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > >

13 years, 11 months

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early INGRES licenses?

by Jeremy C. Reed

What type of licensing agreements (maybe informal) were used for the early INGRES tape distributions? I am trying to see if they were an example for BSD or how compared with early BSD. The BSD-style licenses were not introduced until 1987 and later (starting in but not completed in 4.3BSD-Tahoe). But various earlier BSD (distribution) components did have open source licenses long before that -- such as Eric Allman's trek (circa 1977) in 1BSD and MIT's X components (1985) shipped with 4.3BSD. The COPYRIGHT for INGRES 6.3/-1 (February 1, 1981) source shipped with 2.79BSD (Febuary 1981) indicated it was not open source: "... may not be reproduced or disclosed without the prior written permission of the owner." My BSD history book in progress has at least 15+ pages of examples and commentary and interview quotes about the history of proprietary and open source licensing in early BSDs. I also plan to research the history of licensing for W and early X.

13 years, 11 months

2
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Re: [TUHS] ken: # of children?

by Aharon Robbins

Hi Warren. Here's your answer. :-) Arnold > Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:39:24 -0400 (EDT) > From: Brian Kernighan <bwk(a)CS.Princeton.EDU> > To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com> > Subject: Re: can you help warren w/this? > > well, he only has one child; that i know for sure. can't vouch for > the quote, however; i have not heard it before. > > On Thu, 28 Jul 2011, Aharon Robbins wrote: > > > Hi. Warren runs The Unix Historical Society and is working on a paper. > > Can you help him with this? > > > > Thanks, > > > > Arnold > > > >> Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:31:09 +1000 > >> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> > >> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org > >> Subject: [TUHS] ken: # of children? > >> > >> All, apologies for these seemingly random questions. How many children does > >> Ken Thompson have? I want to use the phrase that Unix was "Ken's other child", > >> but it would be inaccurate if he had several real children. > >> > >> Thanks, > >> Warren > >> _______________________________________________ > >> TUHS mailing list > >> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org > >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

13 years, 11 months

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ken: # of children?

by Warren Toomey

All, apologies for these seemingly random questions. How many children does Ken Thompson have? I want to use the phrase that Unix was "Ken's other child", but it would be inaccurate if he had several real children. Thanks, Warren

13 years, 11 months

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Citation for Spencer quote?

by Warren Toomey

All, thanks for the help with that image of Ken and Dennis at the 11/20 console. Now I'm after a reference/citation to a great quote attributed to Henry Spencer: Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. Any ideas if/when Henry said this and where: date, first time it appeared in print etc. While we are at it, are there any other good Unix quotes that spring to mind? Thanks, Warren

13 years, 11 months

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Has dmr's home page moved?

by Warren Toomey

I went to Dennis' home page this morning to find something, and it seems to be gone. The URL I'm using is http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ Does anybody know if it's moved or, if not, who to contact to fix it? I'm actually after the hi-res version of the photo with dmr and ken at the PDP-11/20 console. I think I have a copy cached away. If not, does anybody else have a copy? Cheers, Warren

13 years, 11 months

2
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Has dmr's home page moved?

by Norman Wilson

Warren: I went to Dennis' home page this morning to find something, and it seems to be gone. The URL I'm using is http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ ======= Looks like there has been substantial reorganization of the company's web pages, doubtless to reflect reorganization of the company itself. I dug around to see where personal web pages seem to be now, and tried some obvious guesses, and still couldn't find Dennis's stuff. I've sent a query to someone on the inside; I'll report back if I find the answer. It might be worth trying the Wayback Machine in the mean time. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

13 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Has dmr's home page moved?

by Warren Toomey

> On Wed, 2011-07-27 at 08:53 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > > I'm actually after the hi-res version of the photo with dmr and ken > > at the PDP-11/20 console. On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 01:07:29AM +0200, Hellwig Geisse wrote: > I don't know if this is the resolution you are looking for: > http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/pdp-11/Images/ken-den.jpeg No, there's a huge one around, something like 4000x3000 pixels. Also, Dennis is the bearded one standing, and Ken is the beardless one sitting, to answer Jason's question. Cheers, Warren

13 years, 11 months

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SVR4 x86 -- Sources

by Michele Ghisolfo

Hi, I'm currently reading J. Lion's commentary of Unix Code Level Six. It is the most useful commentary to operating system kernel I have ever read. It would be really useful to also have the source code of SVR4 kernel for Intel x86. Does anyone have that?

13 years, 11 months

15
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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 83, Issue 8

by A. P. Garcia

> To call this joint is complete nonsense. Sun was in a cash bind, AT&T > wanted to make SVR4 the main Unix platform and SunOS was winning. The > story I heard, not widely known, is that AT&T bought a big pile of Sun > stock at 35% over market - in return for which Sun had to dump their BSD > based SunOS and go to SVR4. > > Biggest mistake Sun ever made in my opinion. "Sun has helped spark a major controversy within the UNIX community that may have split it into different directions. The controversy began to heat up in October 1987, when AT&T announced that it would license Sun's SPARC architecture as the basis for AT&T computer systems. Furthermore, said AT&T, it was going to collaborate with Sun to develop a UNIX "standard" that would eliminate deficiencies in the operating system--such as lack of features for commercial applications--and be compatible at the binary level across the entire SPARC architecture. Not surprisingly, other companies in the UNIX Community smelled incipient monopolistic practices that would give AT&T and Sun an unqualified advantage in the UNIX market. These moves would effectively make the Sun/AT&T-developed System V and SPARC proprietary standards controlled by the two companies. This perception was bolstered in January 1988, when AT&T announced that it had agreed to purchase 20 percent of Sun by buying shares, in amounts and at times determined by Sun, at 25 percent above current market value." [Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems, p. 112-113]

13 years, 11 months

1
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SVR4 x86 -- Sources

by Michele Ghisolfo

> Contrary to a lot of the distant opinions here, > SVr4 was actually a joint project between USL > (the AT&T commercial-UNIX organization) and Sun. > The intent was to bring together the two different > commercial-UNIX cults (what Stu Feldman once referred > to as Sunni and Shiite UNIX). > > I was at Bell Labs while this was going on, but > well off to the side of the effort, in a research > group where we tended (foolishly) to look down > our noses a bit at the whole thing. I do know that > there were a lot of ruffled feathers within USL > about the allegedly overbearing Sun guys, and it > wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that there > were similar feelings going the other way. On > the other hand there were some pretty smart > people involved at a technical level on all > sides. > > Certainly it wasn't a one-way street, with BSD-isms > being injected into a USG system or vice versa. > > Norman Wilson > Toronto ON Thanks, Norman. This clarify a lot my confusion about SysV. I'm reading the J. Lions Commentary to V6 UNIX, the ancestor of all UNIXes, including SysV (if I understood correctly). The last Research Unix release was Tenth Edition Unix. Is the source code of releases 8, 9 and 10 available? Are there other commentaries of ancient Research Unixes, like Lions book? Thanks, --Michele P.S. to Cyrille: Again, my apologies for the confusion. I realized my mistake just after I sent the mail. I'm really sorry!

13 years, 11 months

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[pups] Archive access

by Matthias Bruestle

Mahlzeit, some years after losing my MO drive and unable to access my PUPS copy I would like to redownload it before it perhaps vanishes. I have forgotten my access data. I believe it was with rsync. And with all the borken links on the website and the time going by I am not sure what the current status is. Is Warren still here? His last posting was from April last year. Mahlzeit, Matthias -- kitty mea felis duodeviginti annos nata requiescat in pace. laeta gaudiumque meum erat. desiderio eius angor.

13 years, 12 months

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Re: [TUHS] SVR4 x86 -- Sources

by Norman Wilson

Contrary to a lot of the distant opinions here, SVr4 was actually a joint project between USL (the AT&T commercial-UNIX organization) and Sun. The intent was to bring together the two different commercial-UNIX cults (what Stu Feldman once referred to as Sunni and Shiite UNIX). I was at Bell Labs while this was going on, but well off to the side of the effort, in a research group where we tended (foolishly) to look down our noses a bit at the whole thing. I do know that there were a lot of ruffled feathers within USL about the allegedly overbearing Sun guys, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that there were similar feelings going the other way. On the other hand there were some pretty smart people involved at a technical level on all sides. Certainly it wasn't a one-way street, with BSD-isms being injected into a USG system or vice versa. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

13 years, 12 months

1
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Re: [TUHS] SVR4 x86 -- Sources

by Michele Ghisolfo

On Mon, 2011-07-11 at 23:25 +0200, Cyrille Lefevre wrote: > Le 11/07/2011 12:29, Michele Ghisolfo a écrit : > > Hi, > > > > I'm currently reading J. Lion's commentary of Unix Code Level Six. It > > is the most useful commentary to operating system kernel I have ever > > read. > > > > It would be really useful to also have the source code of SVR4 kernel > > for Intel x86. Does anyone have that? > > Hi, > > Try this : > > ed2k://|file|usl-4x-source.emulecollection|84|A15FBAA27D00C2C4147EA58EAB629B1C|h=VHD37XHFUXWKQJMQUWGNXZHD6NCQONEQ|/ > > Regards, > > Cyrille Lefevre I downloaded it and I only got a 4k file named "usl-4x-source.emulecollection". Doesn't seem a tar. I'm using aMule client and I put the address on the "ed2k Link" field. What I am doing wrong?

13 years, 12 months

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Re: [TUHS] SVR4 x86 -- Sources

by Sergio Aguayo

There is a somewhat modern port of V6 to the 286, which is in the archive (http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/Other/V6on286/) There is also a modern x86 port of V7 available at http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/ This one is more interesting as it aims to run in modern machines and includes a bootable CD image. Best regards, Sergio Aguayo ----- Mensaje original ----- De: "Michele Ghisolfo" <ghisolfo.m(a)gmail.com> Para: "Sergio Aguayo" <sergioag(a)qmailhosting.net> Enviados: Lunes, 11 de Julio 2011 7:02:37 Asunto: Re: [TUHS] SVR4 x86 -- Sources On Mon, 2011-07-11 at 08:50 -0400, Sergio Aguayo wrote: > If you're reading the Lion's book, better get Unix V6 from the archive. SVR4 is quite different in many aspects. > > Best regards, > > Sergio Aguayo I got them, but they work on PDP-11. I'd like to see an version of Unix working on Intel x86. As far as I know, SVR4 was the first Unix working on this architecture. If I recall correctly Unix V6 was only ported on Interdata 7/32 computers. I'd like to get the sources of a small Unix kernel working on x86. Has anyone ported Unix V6 on x86? Thanks for your replies, -- Michele

13 years, 12 months

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Audio of Maike Mahoney's oral history interviews?

by Warren Toomey

All, several years back Mike Mahoney interviewed several of the original Unix players for a Unix oral history. The transcripts are at: http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/ At the time AT&T were going to release these in audio format, but it seems to have fizzled out. Does anybody know if the audio interviews ever got out? The transcripts are fine, but in places they show "(unclear)" when a word or name is used, and of course it's exactly that name you want to find out. Many thanks for any leads. Warren

14 years

2
2
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bob morris

by Brian S Walden

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/technology/30morris.html?_r=1&partner=rss…

14 years

3
2
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Re: [TUHS] Ideas for a Unix paper I'm writing

by A. P. Garcia

> All, IEEE Spectrum have asked me to write a paper on Unix to celebrate the > 40th anniversary of the release of 1st Edition in November 1971. I'm after > ideas & suggestions! of course this quote is always good for a chuckle: Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e." [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Thompson] and I always liked this quote from Linus Torvalds: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Rik van Riel wrote: > The real issue here is paradigms. The classical "everything's > a file" broke down with the advent of networking, sockets and > non-blocking reads. At the moment the file paradigm is so much > out of touch with computational reality that web servers need > to fork for each client and people are crying out for asynchronous > sendfile and other weird interfaces. Sure. But I think it's still a valid paradigm to consider "everything is a stream of bytes". And that's _really_ what the UNIX paradigm has been from the first: the whole notion of pipes etc is not all that different from networking. [http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/7bcbbfeaea2b93c9?hl=en&d…] > I'm also trying to chase down some quotes; my memory seems to be failing me > but I'm sure I've seen these somewhere: ugh..my memory is failing too at the moment. I'm sure I once read a nice rant of sorts about how Unix has proven to be of sound design that has adapted well to changes in the computing landscape...

14 years

1
0
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dwb picasso

by Steve Simon

Anyone remember picasso, a vector graphics GUI app that generated pic(1) source? I know nothing of it, anyone got a screenshot even? is the source available? was its frontend X11 or blit terminal? Was it related to the blit cip and xcip tools or are they a different genus? Thanks for any info. -Steve

14 years, 1 month

6
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DEMOS (Soviet Unix) for the PDP-11

by Jason Stevens

I figured you guys may get a kick out of this... You can download a 'ready to run' version here: http://code.google.com/p/vak-opensource/downloads/detail?name=dvk-demos.zip… Included is a modified version of SIMH's PDP-11 emulator with a new disk controller. Binaries are included for both Linux & Win32. Source to his additions are here: http://vak-opensource.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/bk/simh-dvk/ And the source to version 2.2 of Demos has been provided here: ftp://ftp.besm6.org/pub/archives/d22.tar.gz Oh control+n lets you input in russian, and control+o lets you input in english. >From what I understand DEMOS is derived from 2.9 BSD.. I don't speak Russian and what I end up doing is cutting & pasting into google translate... For some really bizarre translations. Demos is Copyright 1991 by Research Institute "Scientific Centre", lab 462/2.

14 years, 2 months

1
0
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Unix v6 running on a javascript pdp-11

by Jason Stevens

I thought you guys may enjoy this... http://aiju.de/code/pdp11/ It's a PDP-11 with a teletype console, and a RK05 with Unix v6. Because browsers are weird, here is some of the keycommands... DEL is the interrupt key (^C on modern *nix), Pause the quit key (^\ or ^L) and PrtScr is EOF (^D). Jason

14 years, 2 months

2
1
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Novell and Ancient Unix

by Michael Kerpan

Now that Novell has definitively been found by the courts to own the Unix copyrights AND decided not to sell them in their latest batch of financial flailing about, I'm wondering what they're going to do about the Ancient Unix license. While they've promised not to sue anybody about Unix, I'm wondering if they'll ever officially endorse the Ancient Unix 4-clause license or perhaps even switch it to something a little less awkward like a 3-clause BSD clone or the MIT license. Also, I wonder if perhaps they might be convinced to expand the license to cover things like System III or maybe even some early versions of System V. How might one go about making these inquiries?

14 years, 2 months

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when did new awk first appear?

by Aharon Robbins

Hi. Does anyone remember for sure if "new" awk shipped with System V Release 3.1 or 3.2? I know it wasn't 3.0. Thanks! Arnold Robbins

14 years, 2 months

3
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Re: [TUHS] when did new awk first appear?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi. > > Hi. Does anyone remember for sure if "new" awk shipped with System V > > Release 3.1 or 3.2? I know it wasn't 3.0. > > Hi, > > http://www.levenez.com/lang/ says 1978 for oawk and 1985 for nawk. New awk existed inside the Research group for some time before it filtered out through System V. It was even available separately, directly from them, to educational institutions. Circa 1986 I got a copy that way when I worked at the Emory University computing center. > regarding http://www.levenez.com/unix/, 1978 is between v6 and v7, > and 1985 is between SVr2 and SVr3.0. True but not relevant; new awk was released with System V at either 3.1 or 3.2; I'm leaning towards 3.1 since that is what I wrote way back when in the gawk manual when I knew for sure. :-) Unless anyone can check the actual sources, I think we should declare this closed... Thanks to everyone for the feedback. Arnold

14 years, 2 months

1
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Re: [TUHS] when did new awk first appear?

by Brian S Walden

Jaap Akkerhuis wrote: > Officially it was written by Aho Weinberger Kernighan but > I suspect Brian did most of the actual coding. quote of Aho from an interview --- "We [Aho and Kernighan] had created a grammatical specification for AWK but hadn't yet created the full run-time environment. Weinberger came along and said 'hey, this looks like a language I could use myself', and within a week he created a working run time for AWK." see http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/216844/a-z_programming_languages_aw…

14 years, 3 months

1
0
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Re: [TUHS] when did new awk first appear?

by Brian S Walden

I know for sure that in 1988's svr3.2 the "awk" command was the 1988 version and the "oawk" command was the version from 1979. In svr3.0 the "awk" command was the old and we'd get the new one from Holmdel's unix tools distribution group (called USTOP) and install it as "nawk" I think you could get the new one in stock svr3.1 but cannot remember it it was provide as "awk" or "nawk." > Hi. Does anyone remember for sure if "new" awk shipped with System V > Release 3.1 or 3.2? I know it wasn't 3.0. > > Thanks! > > Arnold Robbins

14 years, 3 months

7
7
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Re: [TUHS] Tracing origins of errno names/numbers

by Michael Davidson

Regardless of its technical merits (and I suspect that the implementation may have been pretty bad) RFS was doomed by AT&T's licensing policies and general ineptitude at marketing UNIX. Similarly the widespread adoption of NFS was driven by the fact that Sun made it a de facto standard. On Thu Mar 31st, 2011 7:51 PM PDT Nick Downing wrote: >I also looked up EDOTDOT and found reference to RFS but not much info about >it. Why was it not used? Not reliable enough? I have often thought that >the stateless, idempotent NFS protocol leaves a lot to be desired due to its >inability to implement unix semantics (as discussed in the wikipedia stub >article on RFS), has this been improved with NFS4? Should RFS be revived >and used? Some of its features sounded quite attractive (location >transparency, etc). It does appear to have the ability to execute a program >remotely?? What happens with regard to PIDs, home directory etc in this >case? Does anyone know? >cheers, Nick > >On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Michael Davidson < >michael_davidson(a)pacbell.net> wrote: > >> --- On *Thu, 3/31/11, Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.us>* wrote: >> >> >> EDOTDOT caught my eye for some reason - maybe because it's the only one >> you attributed to linux in a long list of SVr1 ones... what were 72 >> through 76 in SVR1? >> >> >> As the comment indicates, EDOTDOT came from "RFS" - the almost never used >> "remote file system" that was (optionally, I think) part of System V Release >> 3. >> >> As best I can recall, that is also where several of the other error numbers >> in the 72 - 79 range probably came from. >> >> Michael Davidson >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TUHS mailing list >> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs >> >>

14 years, 3 months

4
3
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Tracing origins of errno names/numbers

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, PJ from groklaw.net has asked me to trace the origin of the errno names and values in recent versions of Linux. Attached is where I am up to. The columns are: - errno name - errno value in Linux, and its original value if different - system which originally defined it - release date of that system There are a few errno names which I don't think I have the correct original system: EDOTDOT, ENOMEDIUM, EMEDIUMTYPE, ECANCELED, ENOKEY, EKEYEXPIRED, EKEYREVOKED, EKEYREJECTED, EOWNERDEAD, ENOTRECOVERABLE, ERFKILL Can anybody shed some light on these ones, that would be great, especially if they come from SysV or Unixware. Also, if you can spot any other mistakes, let me know! Many thanks in advance, Warren

14 years, 3 months

4
3
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Ken Olsen passed away

by Wilko Bulte

Ohttp://hightechhistory.com/2011/02/08/ken-olsen-co-founder-of-digital-equi…

14 years, 4 months

1
0
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History of #! interpretation in Unix

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, best wishes for 2011. I had an e-mail from Sven Mascheck asking about the history of #! interpretation in System V. I couldn't find any #! code in the kernels before SysVR4. However, I thought I'd pass the query onto the TUHS list, in case others can shed some light on the question. Did SysV systems before r4 do #! interpretation, and if so where was it done: kernel, library, shell? Any code references, e.g. function names etc.? Many thanks, Warren

14 years, 5 months

9
22
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dmr & ken win japan prize

by Warren Toomey

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/25/BUTI1HDJSA.DTL&… "The two Bell Labs computer scientists - named today as winners of the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications - just wanted to build a better operating system." Just in case you didn't see it! Cheers, Warren

14 years, 5 months

1
0
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the wollongong editor

by Steve Simon

My interest is tweeked, do you still have the source for the paper on your editor and perhaps the plan9 source? I never moved across to acme, I am still a sam addict, but I am always interested in new ideas. The Only editors I ever used on Edition-VII where vi and le, and le I only brushed up against. -Steve

14 years, 5 months

4
3
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Re: [TUHS] Anybody recognise this Unix editor?

by Richard Miller

Warren Toomey said: > I first encountered Unix in 1982 at a summer school held by the University > of Wollongong in Australia. They had an modeless text editor installed, > and I have never been able to determine if this was a homegrown editor, or > an editor which was more widely distributed. The editor was homegrown in Wollongong in 1981, as a late addition to the Interdata Unix port. I wrote it in response to an elegant and concise formal mathematical specification of a "display-oriented text editor" written by Bernard Sufrin of Oxford University's Programming Research Group. Bernard's specification was essentially an abstract model of an existing minimalist (and modeless) screen editor 'ded' developed by his colleague Richard Bornat at Queen Mary College in London. I've never seen 'ded' itself, but I expect that if you tried both editors you would see a close family resemblance. The Wollongong editor was not widely disseminated. I don't think it got into any official Unix distribution except perhaps for Edition VII - its austere minimalism could not compete with the dazzling complexity of emacs or vi. I did license it to Interdata (later aka Perkin-Elmer) for use on their own OS/32 operating system, where it was called MEDIT. I carried on for many years using it myself and porting it to various flavours of Unix, Minix, even MS/DOS, and most recently Plan 9. It was only after giving up Unix for Plan 9 that I finally switched to using Rob Pike's 'acme', which is, in its way, even more elegantly minimal. -- Richard Miller

14 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Anybody recognise this Unix editor?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Could it be the Rand Editor? I think it was usually invoked as 'e'. Arnoldd

14 years, 5 months

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Anybody recognise this Unix editor?

by Warren Toomey

I thought I'd pop in another question here, given the good response we had with #! I first encountered Unix in 1982 at a summer school held by the University of Wollongong in Australia. They had an modeless text editor installed, and I have never been able to determine if this was a homegrown editor, or an editor which was more widely distributed. I've attached the first 2 pages of the editor's tutorial; the rest are temporarily at http://minnie.tuhs.org/Z2/WollongongEdit/ Does anybody recognise this at all? Many thanks in advance, Warren

14 years, 5 months

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Oracle SQR 3.0.13.3 for Solaris

by DG UX

Hello, Looking for an old version of SQR (Oracle's reporting program) - 3.0.13/.0.15 for >= SunOs5, a.k.a Solaris (>=2.x). We've got SQR 3.0.13 for SunOS 4, but of course it is not compatible with our Solaris Oracle client (which isn't sunos4, but sunos 5.8). According to some records and posts online, there is an 3.0.13 for Solaris :) just need to find a copy We've already posted a request in SQRUG (SQR User Group) mailing list and of course contacted our local Oracle provider (who gave us the SunOS4 version). Needles to say, we're in contract with Oracle, once we get a correct version of the program and according to a successful P.O.C, fully payed licenses will be purchased. Check with your ex MITI/Sqribe, Oracle contacts. Cash prize - $1,000 to finder. Thanks a lot, A', D' and friends at the DGUX Project

14 years, 6 months

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NetBSD 0.9

by Jason Stevens

I asked a while back if anyone had any NetBSD 0.8 or 0.9 archives.. I thought I'd let the list know that I did manage to find NetBSD 0.9, and using VMWare I've managed to revive it into something that Qemu can run. If anyone has VMWare and wants to stroll down memory lane, I've uploaded the install diskettes here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/Install%20tapes/NetBSD/0.9/NetB… And I've setup an archive with Qemu & NetBSD all ready to go here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20Windows/v0.4/Net… If anyone wants to use their own qemu for their own platform, I've had to modify the hw/pc.c and remove the NE2000 definition of 0x300,9 as irq 9 is in use somewhere else in the emulator and it won't allow any sharing on Irq9.. (Wasn't IRQ 9 shared anyways with the cascade controller???) At any rate, I built irc, lynx & bzip2 on there, and they seem to function just fine. Again if anyone has any lead on NetBSD 0.8 that'd be great, I'd like to save these from the digitial dumpster....

14 years, 7 months

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386BSD 0.0 booting on Bochs

by Jason Stevens

For anyone that is even remotely interested, I found a way to 'cheat' the install process, and I've gotten 386 BSD 0.0 to install under bochs. Qemu is convinced it can't read the disk for a kernel.... But it does work, well as well as 386BSD 0.0 can work. http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/install/386BSD/386bsd-0.0/bochs/ I'll try to clean up what I can later.......

14 years, 7 months

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NetBSD 0.8 built

by Jason Stevens

well I think I've flogged this dead horse enough... :) Basically I've mashed in as much as I could figure out, and got the majority of a make install (build world?) on this thing to work.. I still don't know where /usr/bin/install comes from as I couldn't readily identify the source in NetBSD 0.9 or any of the 386 BSD's... I'm probably looking in the wrong place or maybe it's just from Net/2? I didn't spend too long trying to work out stuff like that. If anyone wants, it's in a Qemu runnable image here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20Windows/v0.4/Net… It is just under 50MB, which I guess isn't bad since it's source and binaries.. I've manually copied over a few things from etc, and it seems that NetBSD 0.8 still identifies itself as 386BSD.. did anyone run 0.8 and remember? The CVS history on /etc/motd seems to have the 0.8 still reporting as 386BSD which didn't change until 0.9 ...

14 years, 7 months

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NetBSD 0.8 kernel builds & runs!

by Jason Stevens

I had to use a good chunk of 386 BSD pl 23 to fill in the missing parts from the CVS archive of the kernel, but I got it to build! >From the NetBSD 0.8 release/announcement it doe say: The source for NetBSD is derived from 386BSD 0.1, patched with the 0.2.2 patch kit. In addition, many programs in UCB's second BSD Networking Software Release which were missing from 386BSD have been integrated into NetBSD, some of the changes from the upcoming 0.2.3 patch kit have been included, and many local additions and bug fixes have been performed. So I'm assuming this wouldn't be too far off then. So for the curious, here is a dmesg: 386BSD 0.1 (GENERICISA) #2: Sun Dec 5 13:30:14 PST 2010 root@branch.oldbsd.org:/usr/src/sys.386bsd/arch/compile/J real mem = 67104768 avail mem = 64663552 pc0 at 0x60-0x6f irq 1 on isa pc0: color wdc0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7 irq 14 on isa wdc0: <QEMU HARDDISK> wd0 at wdc0 slave 0 fdc0 at 0x3f0-0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2 on isa ne0 at 0x320 irq 10 on isa ethernet address 52:54:00:12:34:56 npx0 at 0xf0 irq 13 on isa wdc0: extra interrupt wdc0: extra interrupt ISA strayintr 4004ff ISA strayintr 4004ff ISA strayintr 4004ff ISA strayintr 2ff ISA strayintr 2ff ISA strayintr 2ff ISA strayintr 2ff ISA strayintr 2ff ISA strayintr 2ff ISA strayintr 2ff Too many ISA strayintr not logging any more I'm not sure if the 386BSD name is hanging around because of all the 386 BSD files I included of if it wasn't renamed in NetBSD 0.8 ... I can give anyone the list of files, steps etc, or it may be easier to just download the merged & built sources here: http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/install/NetBSD/NetBSD-0.8/Resurrecti… Thanks to everyone for providing the CVS and a few hints on what was going on with it..!

14 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] claunia.com

by Jason Stevens

I hate to post this publicly, but Natalia's email address that I have is also on the domain... Anyways it's expired, you may want to renew clanuia.com. I'm sorry for posting this publicly, wasting peoples time bandwidth etc etc..... Jason

14 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] NetBSD 0.9

by Johnny Billquist

On 12/03/10 03:00, "Jeremy C. Reed"<reed(a)reedmedia.net> wrote: >> > Maybe I'm totally dense, or something...? >> > >> > cvs -P :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot co -R netbsd-0-8 src > > cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot co -r netbsd-0-9 \ > src/sys/kern/kern_exit.c > > (note I changed -P and -R to -d and -r respectively) Wow. Did I really write that? :-) Thanks for the correction. I have no excuse. > cat src/sys/kern/kern_exit.c Anything in particular we should look for? Johnny

14 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] NetBSD 0.8

by Johnny Billquist

On 11/17/10 03:00, Jason Stevens<neozeed(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I don't suppose anyone has this kicking around, or any pre-release vax > images of netbsd? > > I did manage to get 1.2 installed on SIMH for what it's worth.... Btw, fwiw, I'm pretty sure VAX only started working with NetBSD 0.9, and the first machine supported was the VAX-11/750. Johnny

14 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] NetBSD 0.9

by Johnny Billquist

On 12/02/10 03:00, Jason Stevens<neozeed(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I asked a while back if anyone had any NetBSD 0.8 or 0.9 archives.. I > thought I'd let the list know that I did manage to find NetBSD 0.9, and > using VMWare I've managed to revive it into something that Qemu can run. > > If anyone has VMWare and wants to stroll down memory lane, I've uploaded the > install diskettes here: > http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/Install%20tapes/NetBSD/0.9/NetB… > > And I've setup an archive with Qemu& NetBSD all ready to go here: > http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20Windows/v0.4/Net… > > If anyone wants to use their own qemu for their own platform, I've had to > modify the hw/pc.c and remove the NE2000 definition of 0x300,9 as irq 9 is > in use somewhere else in the emulator and it won't allow any sharing on > Irq9.. (Wasn't IRQ 9 shared anyways with the cascade controller???) > > At any rate, I built irc, lynx& bzip2 on there, and they seem to function > just fine. > > Again if anyone has any lead on NetBSD 0.8 that'd be great, I'd like to save > these from the digitial dumpster.... Maybe I'm totally dense, or something...? cvs -P :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot co -R netbsd-0-8 src or substitute the tag netbsd-0-9 or netbsd-0-9-base if you need those revisions. Nothing is going to disappear into a digital dumpster when you have revision control systems... (There are bunch of more tags related to NetBSD 0.9 as well, if you want to know, and you can get at any other version you want as well, just as easily.) If you want binaries and not just sources, then it might be a bit more tricky. But since you can build the system from the sources, I can't see that this should be a big hurdle. Johnny

14 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] pdp11 question

by Norman Wilson

Just to loop things around a bit: Some of the larger VAXes used small PDP-11s (and their bastard offspring) as console processors. This started with the very first VAX, the 11/780, which used an 11/23 as a console. The console ran a stripped-down system, possibly based on RT-11 or RSX-11, I forget (and am typing this on a train in the Outer Mongolia part of Texas where it's hard to look up references). I don't know the whole list of what was used as a console for different VAXes, but I do remember that the Nautilus series (8500-8550-8700-8800) used either a Pro/350 or a Pro/380, running P/OS, which was slightly more satisfactory than the rude English non-computer expansion of PoS might imply, but only slightly. Especially for those of us who wrote code to fit into UNIX on the VAX and talk to the console processor. I also vaguely remember that although Digital were reluctant (at least early on) to make an RT-11 that would run on the Pro-series systems, someone made a UNIX for those systems. I never knew a lot about this stuff and have forgotten much of what I did know, but perhaps my words will trigger others' memories. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

14 years, 7 months

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NetBSD 0.8

by Jason Stevens

I don't suppose anyone has this kicking around, or any pre-release vax images of netbsd? I did manage to get 1.2 installed on SIMH for what it's worth.... Jason

14 years, 7 months

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pdp11 question

by Tim Newsham

How much does an old pdp-11 type system cost these days (ie. a pdp-11/40 with disks and terminal capable of running something like 1st, 6th or 7th ed)? How much power do they take up to power on? Whats maintenance like on those things? I've always been curious. Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com

14 years, 7 months

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