- TUHS - www.tuhs.org

by M Douglas McIlroy

> fairly early in PDP-11 development ed gained three features: & in the > rhs of substitutions plus k and t commands. (I'm not sure about & .... Oh, and backreferencing, which took regular expressions way up the complexity hierarchy--into NP-complete territory were it not for the limit of 9 backreferenced substrings. (Proof hint: reduce the knapsack problem to an ed regex.) Also g and s were generalized to allow escaped newlines. I was indeed wrong about &. It was in v1. Doug

4 years, 5 months

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More archeology

by Jon Steinhart

Another stack of old notebooks. I can scan these in if anyone is interested and if they're not available elsewhere. In addition to what's below, I have a fat notebook with the BRL CAD package docs. These are V/W papers from Stanford - Lantz/Cheriton et. al. Multi-process Structuring of User Interface Software Refernce Models, Window Systems, and Concurrency An Experiment in Integrated Multimedia Conferencing An Architecture for Configurable User Interfaces An Empirical Study of Distributed Application Performance Third Generation Graphics for Distributed Systems Virtual Terminal Management In A Multiple Process environment Distributed Process Groups in the V Kernel The Distributed V Kernel and its Performance for Diskless Workstations Effective Use of Large RAM Memories on Diskless Workstations with the V Virtual Memory System Evaluating Hardware Support for Superconcurrency with the V Kernel Fault-tolerant Transaction Management in a Workstation Cluster File Access Performance of Diskless Workstations An Introduction to the V System The Multi-Satellite Star: Structuring Parallel Computations for a Workstation Cluster UIO: A Uniform I/O System Interface for Distributed Systems The V Kernel: A Software Base for Distributed Systems Other random stuff Bitmap Graphics (SIGGRAPH '84 Course Notes, Pike et. al.) A Window Manager with a Moduler User Interface (Whitechapel?) IRIS-4D Superworkstation and Visual Computing IRIS GT Graphics Architecture Position Paper on the Importance and Application of Video Mixing Display Architectures (Jack Grimes) A Data-Flow Manager for an Interactive Programming Environment (Paul Haeberli) Multiple Programs in One UNIX Process (Don Libes - from ;login:) Lightweight Processes for UNIX Implementation and Applications (Jonathan Kepecs) A Capability Based Hierarchic Architecture for UNIX Window Management (R. D. Trammell) MEX - A Window Manager for the IRIS (Rocky Rhodes et. al.) Windows for UNIX at Lucasfilm (Hawley, Leffler) Next-Generation Hardware for Windowed Displays (McGeady) Problems Implementing Window Systems in UNIX (Gettys) Mach: A New Kernel Foundation For UNIX Development (Accetta et. al.) Uwm: A User Interface for X Windows (Ganearz) Programming with Windows on the Major Workstations or Through a Glass Darkly (Daniel, Rogers) PIX, the latest NeWS (Leler) Ace: a syntax-driven C preprocessor Overview (Gosling) Attribute Considerations in Raster Graphics (Bresenham) Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View (Teitelman) W User's Manual (Asente) The WA Beyond Traditional Window Systems (An Overviw of The Workstation Agent (Lantz et. al., draft, marked not to to be redistributed) Performance Measurements of the WA (Islam) STDWIN: A Standard Window System Interface (Rossum) Summary of Current Research (Lantz et. al. at Olivetti) User Interfaces in Window Systems: Architechure and Implementation (Farrell, Schwartz; SIGCHI) Introduction to the GMW Window System (Hagiya) UNIX Window Management Systems Client-Server Interface Specification (Williams et. al., Rutherford Apleton Laboaratory) Curves Made Trivial (Gosling) Smart Code, Stupid Memory: A Fast X Server for a Dumb Color Frame Buffer (McCormack) Jon

4 years, 5 months

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[TUHS} Qed vs ed

by M Douglas McIlroy

I used Ken's qed in pre-Unix days. I understand its big departure from the original was regular expressions. Unix ed was the same, with multi-file capability dropped. Evidently the lost function was not much missed, for it it didn't come back when machines got bigger. I remember that fairly early in PDP-11 development ed gained three features: & in the rhs of substitutions plus k and t commands. (I'm not sure about &--that was 50 years ago.). With hindsight it's surprising that a "minimalist" design had m but not t, for m can be built from t but not vice versa. A cheat sheet for multics qed is at h <http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condens…> ttp:// www.bitsavers.org/pdf//honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condensed-gui…. It had two commands I don't remember: sort(!) and transform, which I assume is like y in sed. Doug

4 years, 5 months

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Qed vs ed

by Will Senn

Hi all, So. On a lighter note. I was tooling around the web and came across a discussion of QED, the editor. It’s been resurrected in no small part based on discussions on this list (and members like Rob Pike). Anyhow, there’s a version that compiles in modern systems and that handles wide characters. My question for the group is this how different is QED from ed? I’ve read Dennis’ paper on the history of QED and it’s fascinating, but all I really got out of the discussion related to ed, was that QED was a precursor. I’m curious about functional parity or lack thereof, more than technical differences. In full disclosure, and at the risk of drawing fire from lovers of other editors, I have to confess a love of the original ed (and it’s decendent ed’s and vi). Cheers, Will Sent from my iPhone

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jim Geist > When did mmap(2) come about? Pretty sure it's a Berserkleyism. I think it came in with the VM stuff that DARPA mandated for VAX Unix (for the research project they funded). Noel

4 years, 5 months

7
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/bin vs /sbin

by Grant Taylor

One of the things that I've noticed in my explorations into the H.J. Lu bootable root disks is that some of them predate the /sbin split in Linux. One of them has exactly one file in /sbin and other commands spread across /bin, /usr/bin, and /etc. The single file in /sbin is sln. To me, this makes it fairly self evident that /sbin was originally for statically linked binaries. At least in Linux. Does anyone have any history of /sbin from other traditional Unixes? I'd be quite interested in learning more. I also noticed that (at least) one of the early versions of the H.J. Lu disks had root's home directory in /usr/root. I seem to recall that one version used an atypical of /users vs /usr. Which as I understand it, goes back to the original / vs /usr split in Unix, before /home became a thing. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] bas(1) and bs(1) videos including features and use

by M Douglas McIlroy

Nice archaeology. Blinded by my distaste for Basic , I never bothered to try bs--and should have. Dave has highlighted features that deserve respect. One telling example suggests this should be legalized in C: printf("%s\n", {"true", "false"}[1]); Doug

4 years, 5 months

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Troff to ps

by Will Senn

All, So... I've moved on from v7 to 2.11bsd - shucks, vi and tar and co. just work there and everything else seems to be similar enough for what I'm interested in anyway. So yay, I won't be pestering y'all about vi anymore :). One the other hand, now I'm interested in printing the docs. 2.11bsd comes with docs in, of all places, /usr/doc. In there are makefiles for making the docs - ok, make nroff will make ascii docs, and troff will make troff? docs using Ossana's 'original' troff. So, after adding -t to it so it didn't complain about 'typesetter busy', I got no errors. I mounted a tape, tar'ed my .out file and untar'ed it on my macbook (did it for the nroff and troff output). Then I hit the first snag, groff -Tps -ms troff.out > whatever.ps resulted in cannot adjust line and cannot break line errors and groff -Tps -ms nroff.out > whatever.ps resulted in a bunch of double vision. I seem to recall doing this in v6 and it working ok (at least for nroff). My questions: 1. Is there a troff to postcript conversion utility present in a stock 2.11 system (or even patch level 4xx system)? 2. Is there a way to build postscript directly on the system? 3. Is there an alternative modern way to get to ps or pdf output from the nroff/troff that 2.11 has? I'm still digging into the nroff stuff as that may be just minor diffs between ancient nroff macros and "modern" macros or even just errors (.sp -2 rather than .sp or .sp -1, .in -2 instead of .in +2), etc. Although, the files display ok in 2.11bsd using nroff -ms nroff.out... Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Norman Wilson > You get a good deal and support a worthwhile small business (not just > ABE but the individual selling shop) at the same time. ABE isn't a small business (any more); Amazon bought them a couple of years ago. Biblio (https://www.biblio.com/) is the same basic thing ("more than 6500 independent book stores"), but independent. There's also Alibris (https://www.alibris.com/) but I like Biblio's site better; YMMV. Noel

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

by Norman Wilson

Nemo Nusquam: Borenstein wrote a book ("Programming as if people mattered: Friendly Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions") in which he mused about W and X and Andrew. (A very nice read but horribly expensive -- fortunately I bought it when PUP had reasonably priced paperbacks.) ====== abebooks.com is your friend here. I just bought a used paperback copy for about USD 15 including shipping to Canada. There are others of similar price. Shipping to the US is probably a little cheaper. There's at least one copy available from a seller in the UK as well (and doubtless some from other countries if you dig further in the listings). For those who don't know, ABE is a central place for independent booksellers, including used-book shops, to sell online. You get a good deal and support a worthwhile small business (not just ABE but the individual selling shop) at the same time. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

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David Tilbrook, RIP 2021-01-15

by Greg A. Woods

Since nobody seems to have mentioned his passing yet, I thought I might. David Tilbrook died (from complications of COVID-19) in the early hours of January 15, 2021. He had been in long term care in Toronto for just over a year. His web site remains up and running for now at http://qef.com/ though I don't know for how long that may last. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods(a)acm.org> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods(a)robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods(a)planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods(a)avoncote.ca>

4 years, 5 months

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The terminal, the console, and the shell - what are they?

by Will Senn

All, I came across this note on vermaden's valuable news blog and thought y'all might enjoy it - it's not pure unix, but it's got a lot of crossover. The history is interesting and to us relative newbs, informative. I can't confirm its accuracy on the history side of things, but I'm sure you can :). http://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-terminal-the-console-and-the-shell-what-… Later, Will

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] System V Release 2, adding swap?

by Jason Stevens

SIMH has 3b2 emulation... Much of the work was documented here: https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator.html <https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator.html> -----Original Message----- From: Henry Bent [SMTP:henry.r.bent@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2021 12:05 AM To: Arnold Robbins Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Subject: Re: [TUHS] System V Release 2, adding swap? On Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 11:02, Arnold Robbins < arnold(a)skeeve.com <mailto:arnold@skeeve.com> > wrote: Hi. Does anyone know how to add swap space on a System V Release 2 system? In particular, on an emulated AT&T 3B1. The kernel is S5R1 or S5R2 vintage. I don't see any commands with 'swap' in their names. A little bit of Google Groups trawling turned up this: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.att/c/8XLILI3K8-Y/m/VxVMJNdt9NQJ <https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.att/c/8XLILI3K8-Y/m/VxVMJNdt9NQJ> But I don't have one of those systems, so I have no way to verify. -Henry

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Three-quarters to the next Epoch

by John Foust

At 03:46 PM 1/23/2021, Dave Horsfall wrote: >Sent to me from a fellow weirdo... > >At 19:25:36 AEDT (00:25:36 UTC), Unix time reached 0x60000000. We're three quarters of the way to 2038... That was January 14, 2021, right? https://www.epochconverter.com/hex - John

4 years, 5 months

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System V Release 2, adding swap?

by Arnold Robbins

Hi. Does anyone know how to add swap space on a System V Release 2 system? In particular, on an emulated AT&T 3B1. The kernel is S5R1 or S5R2 vintage. I don't see any commands with 'swap' in their names. Thanks, Arnold

4 years, 5 months

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Favorite unix design principles?

by Tyler Adams

I'm writing about my 5 favorite unix design principles on my blog this week, and it got me wondering what others' favorite unix design principles are? For reference, mine are: - Rule of Separation (from TAOUP <http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/> ) - Let the Machine Do the Dirty Work (from Elements of Programming Style) - Rule of Silence (from TAOUP <http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/>) - Data Dominates (Rob Pike #5) - The SPOT (Single Point of Truth) Rule (from TAOUP <http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/>) Tyler

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > Is LSX the only option on the 11/03, or could I run V6 or Mini-Unix with > more RAM? All PDP-11 Unix versions from V4 on require the MMU, so the -11/03 is out for them. We don't have the code for V2-V4, though. So V1 (mostly all assembler, no C :-), LSW and Mini-Unix are the only options for it. V6 can be run on an -11/23 (I've done it), but not straight out of the box; it requires a few minor tweaks first: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_UNIX_V6_on_an_-11/23 Noel

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Apollo/token-ring networks

by Ed Carp

On 1/24/21, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote: > So I never liked Apollos much. What I was referring to was Apollo's claim > that their token-ring network performed better for large numbers of nodes. > And they were correct. However, they didn't consider the eventually > invention of switches that solved the problem. A problem that shouldn't have ever been there in the first place. When I was at EDS, we did a lot of benchmarks against token-ring vs. CSMA-CD. Token-ring was slower than CSMA-CD until the traffic got to be more than about 10% of capacity - then the collision detection exponential backoff algorithm would clobber the network. The argument that "well, we will never get above that anyway, so we want the fastest we can get" sort of short-sightedness won the day. It wasn't until switches and virtual LANs came into existence that (as you said) solved the problem.

4 years, 5 months

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Three-quarters to the next Epoch

by Dave Horsfall

Sent to me from a fellow weirdo... At 19:25:36 AEDT (00:25:36 UTC), Unix time reached 0x60000000. We're three quarters of the way to 2038... Stock up on food, load dem guns, and batten down the hatches :-) -- Dave

4 years, 5 months

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bas(1) and bs(1) videos including features and use

by Dave Plonka

Hi folks, In case you're interested: I've published a couple videos on these ancient Unix tools, sharing including some language details and showing them in action on v7 and System III, respectively: Ken Thompson's bas(1): https://youtu.be/LZUMNZTUJos Dick Haight's bs(1): https://youtu.be/ELICIa3L22o Thanks much for the help from TUHS, Mashey, Kernighan, McIlroy, and others cited therein. Peace, Dave -- dave(a)plonka.us http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/

4 years, 5 months

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ACM Fellow, Ken Thompson

by Royce Williams

Congratulations to Ken Thompson, the newly-minted ACM Fellow: https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/thompson_4588371 (It seemed of historical interest, and therefore on-topic. :) ) -- Royce

4 years, 5 months

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Happy Birthday to Marshall Kirk McKusick

by Caipenghui

Thank you for your work to make the world a better, happy birthday to you. God bless us. #define FS_UFS2_MAGIC 0x19540119 Caipenghui

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Bearded Fellow, Ken Thompson

by Norman Wilson

Dave Horsfall: At one place I worked, every Unix bod sported facial fungus; it must be a Unix thing... ==== Not really. I've seen bare faces and beards and operating systems over the decades that would scare the bugs out of any of the above beards and operating systems. There really isn't a lot of consistency. I've known plenty of bare-faced UNIX hacks, and plenty of RSX and VMS and Windows and IBM programmers who hide their embarrassment behind beards. The ultimate reference is, of course, the inhabitants of the UNIX Room. During my time there in mid-to-late 1980s, some people wore beards, some didn't. I have never seen Ken or Dennis or Brian clean-shaven, but I have never seen Doug or Rob or Tom Duff or Lorinda with a beard. And despite a certain remark attributed to the late Vic Vyssotsky (who I've never seen with a beard either), I am quite sure that my appearance had nothing to do with my being recruited by the group. Norman `too lazy to shave' Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

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EGREG

by norman＠oclsc.org

Andrew Hume (dammit andrew): i have probed recently about the origins of the bEGREGb (its all greg cession's fault) error in Research Unix. alas, i recall nothing about this, and can't recall ever getting the message. === Your memory fails you, which is not unreasonable for stuff you probably haven't thought about in more than 30 years: /* SCSI Pass-Thru driver for the TD Systems UD? -- Andrew Hume Ninth Edition Unix */ [...] scsiwrite(dev) dev_t dev; { register count; register struct scsi *p = &scsi[minor(dev)]; register struct mscmd *cmd = &p->junk->cmd.msg; unsigned char flag, bus_id; if(p->flag&NEXTWR) p->flag &= ~NEXTWR; else { u.u_error = EGREG; return; } As I remember it, EGREG went into errno.h and libc out of a desire to have some never-normally-used error to be returned when debugging. I forget just who was in the UNIX Room conversation that created it; almost certainly I was. I thought andrew was as well; very likely one or more of andrew td presotto. I do remember being a bit annoyed at Andrew for putting it in permanent use in the raw-SCSI driver (which was at the time of interest mainly to Andrew for controlling an early optical-disc jukebox, used by the original File Motel backup system). As to the origin of `It's all Greg's fault' as a meme, that was already around and established when I arrived at the Labs in mid-1984, though Greg himself had already moved west. Maybe Doug or Ken remembers how that started. Andrew himself was responsible for or blamed by more than one meme of the days. The scsi driver spawned one, in fact: the first attempt used a SCSI interface from Emulex, which never worked quite right, and despite repeated phone calls to Emulex Andrew could never get it figured out. He tried and tried, though, and his attempts spawned the catch phrase `Time to call Emulex again!' Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

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sam leffler, rob pike

by Andrew Hume

an urgent request: can someone please send me sam leaflet’s email address? its needed for a funeral (dave tilbrook just died). also, rob pike, can you send me your email please? (these are for tilbrook’s son.)

4 years, 5 months

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EGREG

by Andrew Hume

i have probed recently about the origins of the “EGREG” (its all greg cession’s fault) error in Research Unix. alas, i recall nothing about this, and can’t recall ever getting the message. however, courtesy of Dave Presotto (i am fairly sure), there was an equivalent error in Plan 9, where more or less randomly, if your user id was ‘andrew’, system calls would fail. and yes, i did feel special; this was one of my lesser contributions to Plan 9. this stopped after a while (several to many months, maybe). andrew hume

4 years, 5 months

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Fwd: Writer's Workbench on Plan 9/9front

by Stanley Lieber

fyi -------- Original Message -------- From: joel(a)sirjofri.de Sent: January 13, 2021 11:30:31 AM EST To: sl(a)stanleylieber.com Subject: Writer's Workbench on Plan 9/9front Hello TUHS, I don't know if that mail arrives since I'm not subscribed to the tuhs mailing list. I just thought this might be interesting to some of you, especially since I noticed there are some threads about the writer's workbench. Some weeks ago I started porting V10 wwb tools to 9front (which is a fork of Plan 9). I have still many things to do and currently only limited time, but the greater tools (style, diction and suggest) work. Most code worked fine, btw, only minor changes needed. Especially implicit C declarations and missing #includes. Comparison with the original code in the archive is possible. I also tried porting (or rewriting) the shell scripts in rc, and made mkfiles that better fit the Plan 9 build systems. I also included acme commands, they also translate the locations into the plumber format for the files (filename:line). Here's a link to the git repository (yes, we have a native git implementation now): https://git.sr.ht/~sirjofri/wwb9 sirjofri

4 years, 5 months

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The 2038 bug...

by Dave Horsfall

As the new year is about to kick in (down-under anyway), it got me to thinking (always dangerous): how many here will be around for it to pick up the pieces that are no doubt still lying around? I'll be about the ripe old age of 85, so I may be around to see the Imminent Death of the Internet (Film at 11). 2100? Forget it... Too bad, as "Revolt in 2100 (?)" is one of my favourite Heinlein books. Others? -- Dave

4 years, 5 months

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History of the UNIX Beard

by Tyler Adams

We all know and love the UNIX beard, but I can't find anything on how the beards started other than an old photo of Ken and Dennis with majestic manes. And, to make the question a bit more meta, what's the history of the joke of the "UNIX beard"? Tyler

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Question

by Rudi Blom

>From output of 'what' on /bin/sh in SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2 - spname.c 23.2 91/02/21 Cheers, uncle rubl >Date: Sat, 09 Jan 2021 03:39:16 -05 >From: Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org> >To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org >Subject: Re: [TUHS] Question >Message-ID: <1610181560.23999.for-standards-violators(a)oclsc.org> > >Rob Pike, re the spelling corrector in V8 and later Research >versions of sh: > > That was done by Tom Duff, I believe before he came to Bell Labs. I might > have brought the idea with me from Toronto. > >Very likely, since you left it behind at Caltech as well; it was >in sh on cithep (a hostname meaningless to many but rob will remember) >when I arrived in 1980. > >It was in the version of p you left behind there as well. > >I can confirm that spname remained in the shell through V10 >(it's still in my copy), but it seems to have disappeared from p. > >Norman Wilson >Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Question

by Norman Wilson

Rob Pike, re the spelling corrector in V8 and later Research versions of sh: > That was done by Tom Duff, I believe before he came to Bell Labs. I might > have brought the idea with me from Toronto. Very likely, since you left it behind at Caltech as well; it was in sh on cithep (a hostname meaningless to many but rob will remember) when I arrived in 1980. It was in the version of p you left behind there as well. I can confirm that spname remained in the shell through V10 (it's still in my copy), but it seems to have disappeared from p. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] The 2038 bug...

by Norman Wilson

Warner Losh: Less ugly would be to declare time_t to be unsigned instead of signed... It would break less code... Making time_t 64 bits also breaks code, even if you declare you don't care about binary compat since many older apps know time_t is 32-bits. === I remember chatting in 1998 with a consultant who worked with clients in the financial industry. They still used 32-bit systems at the time, and had already converted critical programs (I don't know whether that included parts of libc or they had their own conversion routines) to make time_t unsigned. It mattered early to those folks because of 40-year bonds. That suggests to me that the financial-services world may have a head start on the 2038 problem, but I fear many others are still lagging behind. 64 bits will help but not as much for embedded systems and legacy stuff. Us hobbyists will doubtless have fun too, as we already do (ask Warren) when running the earliest existing UNIX images, in which times are stored in sixtieths of a second. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

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Re: [TUHS] Question

by Rudi Blom

The spell check in 'cd' commands I remember from SCO UNIX 3.2 The 'sh' manual page has Spelling checker When using cd(C) the shell checks spelling. For example, if you change to a different directory using cd and misspell the directory name, the shell responds with an alternative spelling of an existing directory. Enter ``y'' and press <Return> (or just press <Return>) to change to the offered directory. If the offered spelling is incorrect, enter ``n'', then retype the command line. In this example the sh(C) response is boldfaced: $ cd /usr/spol/uucp cd /usr/spool/uucp?y ok Cheers, uncle rubl >Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2021 02:08:09 -0700 >From: arnold(a)skeeve.com >To: m.douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu, egbegb2(a)gmail.com >Cc: tuhs(a)tuhs.org >Subject: Re: [TUHS] Question >Message-ID: <202101040908.104989TF022830(a)freefriends.org> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > >The spelling corrector in the shell rings vague bell. I think >it's in the 8th or 9th edition Bourne shell. You should be able to >find those in the archives. > >Geoff Collyer has a modern port of the V9 shell at >http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/v9sh.tar. > >HTH, .> >Arnold

4 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] Question

by M Douglas McIlroy

> I was a BTL person for 8 years between 1976 and 1984. During > that time there was a spelling corrector that was better than > anything I see today. There was a concept of "spelling distance" > that corrected a whole bunch of stuff that even today cannot be > corrected. > Who in that era worked on spelling correction at BTL. I was at > Columbus BTL (1976-1979) and Whippany BTL (1979-1984). Peter Nelson made an interface to spell(1) that showed putative errors in context. I believe it could suggest corrections. I remember the project; I installed hooks for it in spell(1). I don't remember the date, but it would probably not have been early enough for you to have used it in Columbus. If there's a chance that Peter's program is the one you remember and you'd like to get in touch with him, I can give you his email address. Doug

4 years, 6 months

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The "File Store" at mid 1970's Murray Hill

by Paul Ruizendaal

Sandy Fraser was kind enough to share some papers from his archive that give further background to early networking at Bell Labs. One of these is about the “File Store”. For context I refer to an article that Sandy wrote back in 1975 and describes the network setup at Murray Hill at that time: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_kg4CEsbGucsU8-jxi0ptfUdsznWcKWm/view?usp=… In the figure and legenda at the bottom of page 52/53, the "File Store" is item 10. The File Store paper itself is (temporarily) here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AhLmjJcHXFtfoIUlfvl0bzbB0zSPzpSq/view?usp=… The paper has a very interesting introduction: “Five machines currently use the file store. Three of them use it as if were a peripheral device not part of their main backing store. In these cases there exists programs to transmit complete files between the user’s machine and the file store." This was known and Noel Chiappa found the source for the main transfer program “nfs” (this program is also mentioned in Doug McIllroy’s manual compendium): https://chiselapp.com/user/pnr/repository/Spider/tree?ci=tip The introduction continues: “In the other two cases the file store is treated as an extension of the user machine’s backing store. Once a user has opened a file his program does reads, writes, and seeks without being aware of the file’s actual location.” This -- to me at least -- is a new fact and as such it would predate various other projects for a distributed Unix file system (the paper is dated December 1974). Unfortunately, the paper is short on how the integration was achieved. On one hand the work may have been related to "Peripheral Unix” as developed by Heinz Lycklama (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TechReports/Heinz_Tech_Memos/TM-…) at the same time -- the memos are dated just a month apart. In essence the approach is to forward system calls over the network 1). Another possibility is that it worked much like the 1979 “RIDE” system (https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/cmpsac/1979/00762533/12Om…) Here there is a modified C library that recognises certain path names and maps these to file server calls. A third possibility is that it was a precursor to the work on distributed Unix by Luderer et al. in 1980/81 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1067627.806604) Here file system calls are redirected at the kernel level using the concept of a remote/forwarding inode. The File Store paper mentions that the server is a modified Unix. At first glance it would seem that the modifications are modest, with the file system partly rewritten to account for storage usage, and an automatic backup feature added. I am much interested in any recollections, insights and materials about these topics. Many thanks in advance, Paul Note 1) The tech report on the “high speed serial loop” (the Weller loop) has not surfaced yet, but the document for the Glance terminal gives a quick, high level overview on page 3/4: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TechReports/Heinz_Tech_Memos/TM-… The recent 516 documents include a detailed description of how it worked: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Other/516-TSS/516-10-11-12-Ring-…

4 years, 6 months

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Question

by Ed Bradford

I was a BTL person for 8 years between 1976 and 1984. During that time there was a spelling corrector that was better than anything I see today. There was a concept of "spelling distance" that corrected a whole bunch of stuff that even today cannot be corrected. Who in that era worked on spelling correction at BTL. I was at Columbus BTL (1976-1979) and Whippany BTL (1979-1984). Who ever did that stuff should patent it and sell it. Today there is nothing like it. -- Advice is judged by results, not by intentions. Cicero

4 years, 6 months

1
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Reviving the Research Unix speak(6) program

by Diomidis Spinellis

Happy new year to all! Over the holidays I found some time to port the recovered version of speak(6) to modern Unix systems and make its output compatible with the espeak system. The resulting sound is barely intelligible. I assume this is due to the imperfect matching between the speak and espeak phonemes. The process's details are available at https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20210102#tu and the code at https://github.com/dspinellis/speak. Diomidis

4 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] G.W.R. Luderer

by Brian Walden

His autobiography, Go West, Young German! states it is luderer at asu.edu -- but that was published a decade ago. Paul Ruizendaal (pnr at planet.nl) wrote: > > I am looking for some more background on the 1980/81 "S/F-Unix" system. > > Gottfried W. R. Luderer, H. Che, J. P. Haggerty, Peter A. Kirslis, W. T. Marshall: > A Distributed UNIX System Based on a Virtual Circuit Switch. SOSP 1981: 160-168 > I have that paper, and Bill Marshall was kind enough to provide a lot of info. I think that Gottfried Luderer may have some further background, in particular on how this work relates to earlier distributed file system projects at Bell Labs. > > Would anybody have a current e-mail address for him? > > Paul

4 years, 6 months

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G.W.R. Luderer

by Paul Ruizendaal

I am looking for some more background on the 1980/81 "S/F-Unix" system. Gottfried W. R. Luderer, H. Che, J. P. Haggerty, Peter A. Kirslis, W. T. Marshall: A Distributed UNIX System Based on a Virtual Circuit Switch. SOSP 1981: 160-168 I have that paper, and Bill Marshall was kind enough to provide a lot of info. I think that Gottfried Luderer may have some further background, in particular on how this work relates to earlier distributed file system projects at Bell Labs. Would anybody have a current e-mail address for him? Paul

4 years, 6 months

1
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Re: [TUHS] The 2038 bug...

by M Douglas McIlroy

> I'll be (G-d willing) 79 then; I hope around, but I also hope not > overly involved with computers. >From the vantage point of 88, I can attest to the permanence of computing's grip. I guess the key word is "overly". The only code I've written in the last couple of weeks is a few lines of PostScript to touch up my seasonal map/greeting card, the creative part of which is at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/2020map.pdf. Doug

4 years, 6 months

3
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Which years saw the introduction of (1) #! and (2) symbolic links

by ron minnich

I think I remember but want to ask the experts.

4 years, 6 months

4
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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: For the archives: UNIX/24V for the Harris /6 Docs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> Bill passed away this summer - you may have seen his epic farewell > message. Anyone have a copy of this? I did a Web search, but all I could find was the Subject line ("public static final void goodbye ()"). holding back the night with its increasing brilliance the summer moon -- Yoshitoshi's death poem Noel

4 years, 6 months

2
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Fwd: For the archives: UNIX/24V for the Harris /6 Docs

by Warren Toomey

All, a while back Tom Lyon sent me the following e-mail and I'd been sitting on my hands, but I've finally placed these two theses in the Unix Archive at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Theses/ Thanks Tom! Cheers, Warren -------- Forwarded Message -------- Hi, Warren - as you may know, Bill Shannon and Sam Leffler ported UNIX to the Harris /6 minicomputer at Case Western. Bill passed away this summer - you may have seen his epic farewell message. Anyways, that prompted me to get the CWRU librarians to scan copies of Shannon's and Leffler's theses where they describe the work. It took a while due to Covid, but I have them now (attached). There is a copyright disclaimer at the end of each, but it allows for research purposes, which is all that I can imagine this being used for. Please give them a home in the archives, and announce as you please. - Tom

4 years, 6 months

3
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Re: [TUHS] Style and diction commands available?

by Richard Salz

I pulled copies from Clem's recommendation, > The DWB distribution from the Toolkit is not around to my knowledge, but: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd look for the diction and style directories, which should be close. I got them to compile with modern C. Then I found that FSF has their own rewrites.https://www.gnu.org/software/diction/ It's only three years old, not 30. :) Just FYI.

4 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] History of the UNIX Beard

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Tyler Adams > We all know and love the UNIX beard, but I can't find anything on how > the beards started other than an old photo of Ken and Dennis I'm not sure the term is Unix-specific. At a fairly early stage, people who worked on the ARPANET/Internet (when PDP-10's were still the 'usual' host, and Unix systems were just starting to beceome common) were jokingly known as 'network grey-beards': the prototypical one being Jon Postel. (Vint Verf's beard was too tidy to qualify, IIRC!) Noel

4 years, 6 months

3
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Algol 68 and Unix (was cron and at ...)

by M Douglas McIlroy

> Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if A68 had become the medium-level language of Unix My knowledge of A68 comes from reading the official definition back in the day. It took effort to see the clarity of the design through the fog of the description. Until more accessible descriptions came along (which I admit to not having seen) it would have been a big barrier to acceptance. A68 was very much in the air (though not much on the ground) in the early days of Unix, as was PL/I. Although we had implemented and used PL/I for Multics, it was never considered for Unix due to Its size and the rise of other attractive languages during the 6-year gestation of Multics. BCPL had the most influence, particularly in its clever identity a[i] = i [a] = *(a+i).It was OK to write 2[x], which served to implement structs like this: field=2; field[x]=3. (Actually the BCPL indirection operator was not *. Dennis borrowed the more perspicuous *from the SAP assembler for IBM 700-series machines.) >From Algol 68 Dennis borrowed addition operators like +=, though at first he unwisely reversed their spelling, underestimating the inherent hazard of a=-b. He rejected A68's automatic dereferencing as too inflexible. He considered whether semicolons should be separators as in Algol, or terminators as in PL/I. (Separators are more convenient for macro substitution, but macros were not in the original design.) He also considered making statements and expressions mutually recursive as in A68. My recollection is that his choices were finally based on a guess about user acceptance--how many radical innovations would prospective users buy into. Perhaps Ken would have more to say about this, I tried to persuade Dennis to provide simultaneous assignments like a,b = b,a, In the end, the comma operator got hijacked for a partial realization of embedded statements.(We could still get parallel assignment by, interpreting the existing {a,b,c} syntax as an lvalue thus: {a,b,c}={b,c,a}.) Then came Steve Bourne, with real experience in A68. Its influence on the shell, including the story of do...done, has often been told. It shows up most vividly in the condition part of if and while statements. Doug

4 years, 6 months

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Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?

by M Douglas McIlroy

This pair of commands exemplifies a weakness in the way Unix evolved. Although it was the product of a shared vision, It was not a product-oriented project. Unix commands work well together, but they don't necessarily work alike. It would be nice if identifiable families of commands had similar user interfaces. However, cron and at were written by different individuals, apparently with somewhat different tastes. Unix folks were close colleagues, but had no organized design committee. Time specs in cron and at are markedly different. A more consequential example is data-field specs (or lack thereof) in sort, join, cut, comm and uniq. The various specs were recognized as "wildly incongruent" in a BUG remak. However there was no impetus for unification. To paraphrase John Cocke (speaking about Fortran): one must understand that Unix commands are not a logical language. They are a natural language--in the sense that they developed by organic evolution, not "intelligent design". Doug

4 years, 6 months

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sh and goto

by srbourne

Message: 4 Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:59:18 -0800 (PST) From:jason-tuhs@shalott.net To:tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org Subject: Re: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976) Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.2.23.453.2011301946410.14253(a)waffle.shalott.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed" > "The UNIX Command Language is the first-ever paper published on the Unix > shell. It was written by Ken Thompson in 1976." > > https://github.com/susam/tucl Thanks for that. This reminded me that the Thompson shell used goto for flow control, which I had forgotten. Bourne commented on the omission of goto from the Bourne shell, "I eliminated goto in favour of flow control primitives like if and for. This was also considered rather radical departure from the existing practice." Was this decision contentious at all? Was there a specific reason for goto's exclusion in the Bourne shell? Thanks. -Jason At the time it may have raised a few eyebrows but I don't recall much discussion about it then. My email tracks at the time don't mention it. Doug McIlroy or Steve Johnson (or Ken) on this forum might recall differently. At the time scripts were not that complicated and so error recovery to a far off place in the script was not common. As an aside I did persuade Dennis to add "setjmp" and "longjmp" so the shell code itself could recover from some kinds of script errors. So I did not have a "religious" aversion to "goto" at the time. Steve

4 years, 6 months

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sh and goto

by M Douglas McIlroy

> Bourne commented on the omission of goto from the Bourne shell ... > Was this decision contentious at all? Was there a specific reason for goto's exclusion in the Bourne shell? I don't believe I ever used a shell goto, because I knew how it worked--maybe even spinning a tape drive, not too different from running a loop on the IBM CPC. There you stood in front of the program "read head" (a card reader), grabbed the "used" cards at the bottom and put them back in the top feed. Voila, a program loop. The shell goto differed in that it returned to the beginning by running the tape backward rather than going around a physically looped path. And you didn't have to spin the tape by hand. It also reminds me of George Stibitz's patent on the goto. The idea there was to stop reading this tape and read that one instead. The system library was a bank of tape readers with programs at the ready on tape loops . (This was in the late 1940s. I saw the machine but never used it. I did have hands-on experience with CPCcards.) Doug

4 years, 6 months

1
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Knuth and Pascal (was "Were cron and at ...")

by M Douglas McIlroy

Off topic, but too much fun to pass up. >> You wrote your algorithm in Pascal, debugged it, and then rewrote it in your favourite language (in my case, ALGOL-W). > Now why didn't Don Knuth think of that for TeX? I'm glad he didn't. He might have written it in Mix. Knuth once said he didn't believe in higher-level languages. Of course he knew more about them than anybody else and was CACM's associate editor for the subject--like a minister who doesn't believe in God. Doug

4 years, 6 months

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Re: [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" > Having a clean architecture is useful in so far as it makes reduces > maintenance overhead and improves reliability. I would put it differently, hence my aphorism that: "the sign of great architecture is not how well it does the things it was designed to do, but how well it does things you never imagined it would be used for". I suppose you could say that reducing maintenance and improving reliability are examples of the natural consequences of that, but to me those are limited special cases of the more general statement. My sense is that systems decline over time because of what I call 'system cancer': as they are modified to do more and more (new) things, the changes are not usually very cleanly integrated, and eventually one winds up with a big pile. (Examples of this abound; I'm sure we can all think of several.) Noel

4 years, 6 months

2
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Happy birthday, Ada Lovelace and JFO!

by Dave Horsfall

Sorta relevant to both groups... Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron), was born on this day in 1815; arguably the world's first computer programmer and a highly independent woman, she saw the potential in Charles Babbage's new-fangled invention. J.F.Ossanna was given unto us on this day in 1928; a prolific programmer, he not only had a hand in developing Unix but also gave us the ROFF series. Who'ld've thought that two computer greats would share the same birthday? -- Dave

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Niklas Karlsson > Just consider Multics, or IBM's "Future System". Here's a nice irony for you: one of the key people in killing off FS was reported to me (by someone who should have known) to be Jerry Saltzer (of Multics fame). That wasn't the only time he did something like thst, either; when MIT leaned on him to take over Athena, the first thing he did was to take a lot of their ambitious system plans, and ditch them; they fell back to mostly 'off the shelf' stuff: pretty much vanilla 4.2, etc. Multics itself has an interesting story, quite different from the popular image among those who know little (or nothing) of it. The system, as it was when Honeywell pulled the plug on further generations of new hardware (in the mid-80's) was very different from the system as originally envisaged by MIT (in the mid-60's); it had undergone a massive amount 'experience-based evolution' during those 20 years. For instance, the original concept was to have a process per command (like Unix), but that was dropped early on (because Multics processes were too 'expensive'); they wound up going with doing commands with inter-segment procedure calls. (Which has the nice benefit that when a command faults, you can get dropped right into the debugger, with the failed instance there to look at.) If you read the Organick book on Multics, it describes a much different system: e.g. in Organick there's a 'linkage segment' (used for inter-segment pointers, in pure-code segments) per code segment, but in reality Multics, as distributed, used a single 'combined linkage segment' (which also contained the stack, also unlike the original design, where the stack was a separate segment). There were also numerous places where major sub-systems were re-implemeneted from scratch, with major changes (often great simplifications): one major re-do was the New Storage System, but that one had major new features (based on operationally-shown needs, like the 4.1/.2 Fast File System), so it's not a 'simplification' case. There's one I read about which was much simpler the second time it was implemented, I think it was IPC? Noel

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?

by John Foust

At 09:40 AM 12/9/2020, Clem Cole wrote: >My own take on this is what I call "Cole's Law"Â Â Simple economics always beats sophisticated architecture. I thought that was finely sliced cabbage with a tart salad dressing. - John

4 years, 7 months

1
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Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?

by ron minnich

When I got into Unix in 1976 cron and at were both there. I got to wondering for no particular reason which came first -- I had always assumed cron, but ...? Anyone know?

4 years, 7 months

6
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The origin of Goto considered harmful?

by Bakul Shah

Last night I stumbled upon this speech by Doug McIlroy at Dijkstra's retirement banquet @ UT Austin where he tells the story of his first encounter with EWD and the origins of programming without goto.... Given that we recently had a discussion on "Goto considered harmful", you all may enjoy it. Make sure you watch the start of part 10 as well as that is where the story ends. https://youtu.be/5OUPBwrufKA?list=PL328C7EFFC1F41674&t=326

4 years, 7 months

3
3
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Command name of the B compiler; One letter command names

by markus schnalke

Hoi, I'm wondering what the name of the B compiler was. Doug's ``Unix Reader'' lists: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + + + . . . . . . b compile b program . . . . . + + + + bc arbitrary-precision arithmetic language Via Wikipedia I found a scan of the ``Users' Reference to B'', a technical memorandum by Ken, dated 1972-01-07 (which is between the releases of the 1st and 2nd Edition). https://web.archive.org/web/20150317033259/https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dm… There on page 25: 10.0 Usage Currently on UNIX, there is no B command. The B compiler phases must be executed piecemeal. The first phase turns a B source program into an intermediate language. /etc/bc source interm The next phase turns the intermediate language into assembler source, at which time the intermediate language can be removed. /etc/ba interm asource rm interm The next phase assembles the assembler source into the object tile a.out. After this the a.out file can be renamed and the assembler source file can be removed. as asource mv a.out object rm asource The last phase loads the various object files with the necessary libraries in the desired order. ld object /etc/brtl -lb /etc/bilib /etc/brt2 Now a.out contains the completely bound and loaded program and can be executed. a.out A canned sequence of shell commands exists invoked as follows: sh /usr/b/rc x It will compile, convert, assemble and load the file x.b into the executable file a.out. It lists /etc/bc, as a command to convert into the intermediate language, and /etc/ba, to convert the intermediate language into assembler source, but lists no `b' command. The wrapper script is /usr/b/rc. Can someone clarify? I came to this question because I was looking for one letter commands. I always thought them to be a reserved namespace for the user ... Any background on that topic is appreciated as well. ;-) meillo

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)

by M Douglas McIlroy

There's a back story. The paper appears in the proceedings of a conference held in London in 1973, a few months after the advent of pipes. While preparing the presentation, Ken was inspired to invent and install the pipe operator. His talk wouldn't have been nearly as compelling had it been expressed in the original pipeline syntax (for which I take the blame). References to eqn (v5), bc (v6), and ratfor (v7) obviously postdate the London conference. Ken must have edited--or re-created--the transcript for the proceedings sometime after v6 (May, 1975). Bibliographic citations are missing. Can they be resurrected? Reference 137, about Unix itself, probably refers to a presentation by Ken and Dennis at SOSP in January1973. Alas, only an abstract of the talk appears in the conference proceedings. But the abstract does contain the potent and often-repeated sentence, "It offers a number of features seldom found even in larger operating systems, including ... inter-process IO ..." The talk--in Yorktown Heights--was memorable, and so was a ride to the same place in Ken's 'vette. (I can't recall whether the two happened on the same occasion.) Given that the talk at SOSP preceded the talk in London, and that the Unix manual was widely distributed by (1976) when the revised London talk was printed, the claim that "The Unix command language" was the first publication of Unix seems hyperbolic. In no way, though, does this detract from the inherent interest of the paper. Doug

4 years, 7 months

14
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Apple IIe Unix?

by Will Senn

Hi All, So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not aware of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know of any from back in the day? It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's also pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about how to do stuff w/those slots. Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 7 months

10
11
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Re: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)

by norman＠oclsc.org

I'm also forwarding this message that arrived in my mailbox. Is this **THE** Ken Thompson? Yes, that's the real Ken. Those who have communicated with him in the past (and didn't get a direct note as some of us did) should notice the new e-mail address, kenbob(a)gmail.com. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 7 months

4
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Re: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?

by Jose R. Valverde

Somewhat late to the discussion, but GeckOS may be another curious contender. You can find more information in http://6502.org http://www.6502.org/users/andre/index.html j -- Scientific Computing Service Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, CSIC. c/Darwin, 3. 28049 Madrid +34 91 585 45 05 +34 659 978 577

4 years, 7 months

2
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Re: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)

by Joachim

I'm also forwarding this message that arrived in my mailbox. Is this **THE** Ken Thompson? Joachim -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Re: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 21:47:16 -0800 From: Ken Thompson <kenbob(a)gmail.com> To: Joachim <j(a)tllds.com> yes. the unix manual was published before that, but i dont think it was released that early. it had a manual page on the shell. this paper might be the first paper ever released outside bell labs. On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 7:18 PM Joachim via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org <mailto:tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>> wrote: Apologies if this has already been linked here. "The UNIX Command Languageis the first-ever paper published on the Unix shell. It was written by Ken Thompson in 1976." https://github.com/susam/tucl Joachim

4 years, 7 months

3
2
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Re: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Steve Nickolas > there's no easy way to do preemptive multitasking without extra > hardware. Perhaps you're using some idiosyncratic definition of "preemptive" and "multitasking", but to me that statement's not accurate. Let's take the "multitasking" part first: that just means 'two or more computations can run at the same time, sharing the machine' - and that's not hard to do, without special hardware, provided there's some way (in the organization of the software) to save the state of one when the other is running. Many simple systems do this; e.g. the MOS system that I used on LSI-11's, BITD. "Preemptive" is a bit trickier, because things have to be organized so that one 'task' can be temporarily stopped arbitrarily (i.e. without it explicitly giving up the processor, which is what e.g.MOS did) to let another run. There does need to be some asynchronous way of inciting the second 'task' to run, but interrupts (either clock, or device) do that, and pretty much every machine has those. MINI-UNIX, for example, has premptive multitasking. The thing that takes special hardware is _protecting_ one task from a bug in another - a bug which could trash the first tasks's (or the system's!) memory. One has to have memory management of some kind to do that. > From: Dave Horsfall > I would start with something like Mini-Unix MINI-UNIX would be a good place to start if one wanted to bring up a system on a machine without memory management; there's nothing in the kernel which is PDP-11 dependent that I can think of (unlike V6, which had a fairly heavy dependency on the PDP-11 memory management hardware - although one could of course rip that all out, as MINI-UNIX did). However, one's still looking at a fair amount of work, both to get rid of any traces of PDP-11isms (e.g. stack growth direction), and translate the assembler part (startup, and access to non-C operations). Something like FUZIX might be an easier option. Noel

4 years, 7 months

4
3
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Why do compress(1) and pack(1) use the .Z / .z extension?

by Hans Wennborg

I'm trying to find out why compress(1) uses .Z as filename extension. My theory is that it was inspired by pack(1), which uses the .z extension. However, I haven't been able to find any info on why pack(1) uses that extension. Does anyone here know? Some searching led me to [1] which is a man page for pack from AUSAM. It's written by Steve Zucker in 1975, so perhaps the extension is z for Zucker? Was Zucker's pack(1) the first, though? This message [2] talks about a Bell version. Does anyone here have any information about this? Cheers, Hans 1. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM/doc/man/man1/pack.1 2. https://tech-insider.org/unix/research/1984/0319.html

4 years, 7 months

4
4
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W. Richard Stevens wife's email?

by Larry McVoy

I was making coffee into the cup I've had for decades that talks about his networking books. I realized I might have something that would help his wife a bit. I had her email but long since lost it. Anyone have it? --lm

4 years, 7 months

1
0
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Re: [TUHS] free dead trees, to the best possible home

by Rich Morin

Back in mid-January, I posted a note saying: > TL; DR. I'm trying to find the best possible home for some dead trees. ... A lot (far too much, IMNSHO!) has happened since then. In any case, I thought folks here might appreciate an update. In brief, Iain Maoileoin offered to pay for shipping a largely unknown amount of technical (mostly computer-related) books to his repurposed missile sile (!) near Inverness, Scotland. Early this Fall, I packed up 16 cardboard boxes (designated 0-F, of course :-) and the shippers hauled them off. Dunno when they'll arrive, let alone in what condition, but trying to save them from recycling seemed worth the effort. FYI, the total weight was a bit over a ton. Meanwhile, my spouse and I gave away and/or packed up the rest of our things and drove ourselves and five cats up to Seattle, WA, USA. Somewhere in a shipping container, there is still a cubic foot or so of historical Unix papers from Jim Joyce; when it surfaces, I'll post again about rehoming it. -r

4 years, 7 months

1
0
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516-TSS documents

by Jon Steinhart

Well, it's a very rainy day and since COVID is keeping me home I just fed my 516-TSS notebooks into the scanner. It's about 17MB of stuff. Not sure what to do with it since I don't have a place to serve it and since they're scanned images they're too big to post. Here's the list of documents; email me if you're wanting something in a hurry while the archive stuff is figured out. Note that the smell of mildew wasn't preserved in the scanning process. 516-1-516-DOCUMENTATION.pdf 516-3-DDP-516-PRICE-LIST.pdf 516-4-Disk-Layout.pdf 516-5-System-Table-Formats.pdf 516-6-Segment-Format.pdf 516-8-Disk-Hole-Format.pdf 516-7-DMA-Mnemonics.pdf 516-9-Addresses.pdf 516-10-11-12-Ring-Formats.pdf 516-12-Specifications-For-The-Node-Modem-Interface.pdf 516-13-Trac-Character-Strings.pdf 516-14-GMAP-Assembler-for-the-Multi-Programmed-516.pdf 516-15-A-Suggested-Graphic-Display-with-Keyboard-for-Graphic-Terminals.pdf 516-16-516-Assembler-And-Post-Processor-For-Unsegmented-Programs.pdf 516-18-Format-For-Ring-Interrupt.pdf 516-19-Thread-Save-Blocks.pdf 516-20-Card-Reader-Bootstrap-and-Programs.pdf 516-21-Octal-Package.pdf 516-22-A-Repeater-For-The-Node-Modem.pdf 516-23-CLEAR-CORE-CARD.pdf 516-24-SOROBAN-CARD-READER-TEST-PROGRAM.pdf 516-25-IO-Table.pdf 516-26-Disk-DMA-Queue.pdf 516-27-GE-Disc-Files-For-516-Programming.pdf 516-27-Thread-Table.pdf 516-28-IO-Ring_Device-Codes.pdf 516-29-Five-Bit-Character-Codes.pdf 516-30-Text-Editor.pdf 516-31-Relocatable-Segment-Octal-Package.pdf 516-32-ASCII-Character-Mnemonics.pdf 516-34-Display-List-For-Glance.pdf 516-35-Internal-Megacycle-Clock.pdf 516-36-Node-Modem-Interface-For-Computer-Terminals.pdf 516-38-P8SYS.pdf 516-39-Resource-Monitor-Meters.pdf 516-40-SNAP-Time-Sharing-Calculator.pdf 516-41-516-Segment-Assembler.pdf 516-42-Memory-Service-Unit-Format.pdf 516-43-GEBKUP-and-FLOAD.pdf 516-44-FSNAP-Floating-Point-Time-Sharing-Calculator.pdf 516-45-516-316-Assembler-and-Binder.pdf 516-46-CALC-A-Desk-Calculator-Program.pdf 516-47-Remote-Data-Plotting.pdf 516-48-CODING-FOR-GLANCE-G-Graphics.pdf 516-49-516-Segment-Assembler.pdf 516-50-Use-Of-The-516-Segment-Assemblers-Macros-In-Application-Programs.pdf 516-51-FSNAP-Designers-Guide.pdf 516-51-FSNAP-Users-Guide.pdf 516-52-DESK-A-Desk-Calculator.pdf 516-53-FSEOF-Flag-End-Of-File.pdf 516-54-Context-Editing.pdf 516-55-One-Card-Core-Save-Program.pdf 516-56-PRIME-An-Integer-Factoring-Program.pdf 516-57-Format-For-The-516-Node-T-I-U-Spider-Interface.pdf 516-59-Calling-Procedures-For-Math-Routines.pdf 516-59-INITIALIZATION-OF-THE-516-TSS-SYSTEM.pdf 516-60-SORT-SUBR-FOR-SEGMENTED-PROGRAMS.pdf 516-61-516-TSS-SYSTEM-BOLTED-IN-CORE-SUBROUTINES.pdf 516-63-Display-Controller-Glance-G.pdf 516-65-SOME-DIGITAL-FILTER-APPLICATION-PROGRAMS.pdf 516-66-TSS-516-GE-Communication.pdf 516-67-Node-Format-For-PDP-11.pdf 516-68-DFILE-N-A-Program-for-TSS-516.pdf 516-69-GLANCE-G-COMMUNICATION-FORMAT-TSS-516-TO-SCOPE.pdf 516-70-Routines-to-Perform-Character-String-IO-in-a-FSNAP-Program.pdf 516-71-FSNAP-Debugging-Aids.pdf 516-72-Node-Test.pdf 516-73-Node-IO-Software.pdf 516-75-Display-Text-Editor-DTE.pdf 516-76-LOCAL-DATA-PLOTTING.pdf 516-77-GLANCE-PLOTTING-ROUTINES-GPLOT-GLANCE-CHRGEN.pdf 516-77-V2-GLANCE-PLOTTING-ROUTINES-GPLOT-GLANCE-CHRGEN.pdf 516-78-DUMP.pdf 516-79-New-File-Features-in-FSNAP.pdf 516-81-OPTION-CHANGING-IN-GPLOT.pdf 516-86-MODIFICATIONS-TO-201-DATAPHONE-SOFTWARE.pdf DDP-516-PROGRAMMERS-REFERENCE-CARD.pdf DDP-516-Instruction-Set-Summary.pdf Index.pdf README

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" > was there anything that had similar functionality which pre-dated Bill > Joy and termcap in late 70's? Is your question purely in Unix, or more general? If the latter, there's the terminal-independent support of video terminals in ITS; that dates to the mid-1970's (i.e. circa V5 or so). User programs output device-independent display control codes (I have this memory that they were called P-Codes, but that could be my memory failing), and the OS translated them to the appropriate screen-control characters. One additional hack was that the number of terminal types supported in the OS was limited; there was however a protocol called SUPDUP which sent (basically) those device-independent codes over a remote login (originally over NCP) frm the server machine to the client. The User SUPDUP client supported a lot more terminal types; so people with odd-ball terminals used to log in, SUPDUP _back_ to their machine, and away they went. Noel

4 years, 7 months

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Package Management

by Henry Bent

Hello All, I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new replies or insight. How did package management start? Were sites keeping track of packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god intended) somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without significant announcement? At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to have a central way to track additional software"? I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the '80s. What was the mechanism before that? -Henry

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [TUHS] 516-TSS Documents

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 12:28 PM Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs(a)netbsd.org> wrote: > The Honeywell DDP-516 was the computer (running specialized software > written by Bolt, Bernanek & Newman (BBN)) which was the initial model of > the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMP). The IMPs had a lot of custom interface hardware; sui generis serial interlocked host interfaces (so-called 1822), and also the high-speed modem interfaces. I think there was also a watchdog time, IIRC (this is all from memory, but the ARPANET papers from JCC cover it all). Noel

4 years, 7 months

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516-TSS Documents

by Jon Steinhart

These are in Warren's hands now and he'll let us know where their permanent home ends up being. Since these are pretty much uncirculated unlike the UNIX documents I wrote a README to go along with them which Heinz reviewed so it's the best that two aging sets of memories can do. Here it is: - - - 516-TSS is a little-known but groundbreaking and influential operating system that was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories. I came across this system because Carl Christensen and later Heinz Lycklama were major contributors to it, and they were also advisors for the Bell Labs Explorer Scout Post at Murray Hill. I was a member of that post which allowed us to play with computers on Monday evenings, and 516-TSS was what most of us used. Through a series of amazingly lucky events, I ended up working as a summer student for Carl and Heinz and got to contribute to the system. Long before the term "code spelunking" was coined Carl and Heinz taught us both code and spelunking. This is not a complete set of 516-TSS documents, it's a couple of notebooks that I found in a box in the basement. Probably my ancient work-at-home copy. I don't know enough history to know if it was the first, but 516-TSS was an early department-level time-sharing system. It was built around a Honeywell DDP-516. While other time-sharing systems predate 516-TSS, they weren't systems that one's department could afford. CTSS certainly came earlier, but it used a monster IBM 7090 mainframe. In round numbers, a 7090 cost $3,000,000 dollars, a DDP-516 cost $50,000. 516-TSS was also a virtual memory system; again not the first but a rarity in that era. My recollection is that it used the 516's index register as the base address register, and there was some complicated mucking around that a program had to do if it needed to use the index register including disabling interrupts and eventually restoring the register from .PRESB (present base address), one of those weird things stuck in my memory from long ago. I believe that the system's development predated UNIX although I remember our department getting a PDP-11/45 running UNIX Version 3 in the summer of 1973. This machine was acquired so that Doug Bayer and Heinz Lycklama could develop the MERT operating system. The 516 was a testbed for a lot of novel technologies. It had a local area network called the ring which was later made to work on PDP-11s including Ken and Dennis's machine up in the attic of building 2. It was also used to develop the GLANCE graphics terminals. My recollection is that one of the main drivers behind getting the ring to work on PDP-11s and UNIX was so that Ken could get a GLANCE-G terminal for playing chess. Sandy Fraser's Spider network was developed there. It supported a number of novel applications including Dick Hause's DTE graphics editor; way ahead of its time. I remember that one GLANCE terminal was fitted with an array of LEDs and photodiodes to make an early version of a touch screen. While it wasn't exactly work related, a number of the people in the department had purchased property up in Vermont for ski cabins. An important use of the 516-TSS system and GLANCE-G terminals was to figure out survey closures. The property surveys were ancient, of the "from the big rock to the left of the tree that's no longer there" sorts of things, so figuring out the actual property lines was an interesting problem. The 516 also had a wide area network which consisted of picking up the phone and calling the computer center. It had a monster GE-635 or maybe 645 left over from the Multics project. It may have been renamed to be a Honeywell 6070 with Honeywell's acquisition of GE's computer business. The computer center kept department costs down by hoarding all of the really expensive peripherals. For example, we didn't have a card punch; that was effectively done via remote job entry. We didn't have a graphics printer either, so when I was working on GPLOT I'd submit remote jobs to the computer center for printing. Matter of fact, I don't think that we even had a printer in our department; we sent stuff up to the computer center for printing. Although, in those days many terminals used paper. The 516 console was an ASR-33. There was also the ability to send jobs to the computer center and have it call back with results. This early approach to a WAN showed up as the tss command in UNIX. One of the missions of the department was the development of an all-digital telephone exchange which is why some of the documents describe programs that assist with digital filter design. Both Jim Kaiser and Hal Alles were in the department. One of the side-effects of all this was Hal figuring out how to use the filter hardware connected to a LSI-11/03 to make sound, followed by Dave Hagelbarger building a very interesting keyboard for it, culminating in a visit by Stevie Wonder trailed by a large number of screaming secretaries. No sexism intended, it was a different world back then. The LSI-11 was one of the motivations for Heinz to create the LSX operating system. My recollection is that on Dave's keyboard each key was an antenna, and that there was strip of ribbon cable underneath where each wire was driven by a different bit on a binary counter. This allowed the position of each key to be determined which I think was way ahead of its time. I don't think that any commercially available keyboards did this at the time, they were all just on/off. Dave also designed the GLANCE keyboard which spoiled me for life. I don't remember how he did it, but the keys had a really good feel where once they got pushed past a certain point they snapped down. I do recall that there was a small solenoid mounted on the circuit board so that the keys gave a satisfying click that you could feel in your fingers. Another of Dave's gizmos was the chess board that he made for Ken. My recollection is that there was a tuned circuit in the base of each chess piece and an antenna grid in the board so that the PDP-11 could read the position of each piece. Some of the success of the 516 system was that other departments used it. I spent some time working an a 516-based integrated circuit test system where the test equipment stations were on the ring. Seems really dumb now, it's hard to believe that there was a time in which a computer cost more than a wafer stepper. In addition to his work on 516-TSS, Carl Christensen was one of the people who interviewed Ken Thompson for a job at the labs and gave a thumbs up. The 516-TSS documents don't have author names, just initials. Here's who they are to the best of my recollection. ADH Dick Hause CC Carl Christensen DJB Doug Bayer DRW Dave Weller EPR ? HL Heinz Lycklama JCS John Schwartzwelder JES Jon Steinhart JFK Jim Kaiser JHC Joe Condon JVC John Camlet LIS ? MAS ? RFG Rudy Garcia There is one mysterious document in the collection about a "memory service unit". I had this filed under "zapper". To the best of my recollection it was the PROM programmer that we used to burn the microcode PROMs for the GLANCE terminals. Jon Steinhart, 11/20/2020

4 years, 7 months

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UNIX NEWS and ; login: archives, particularly from 1975-1978

by John Gilmore

While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977. It was renamed to ;login: in 1977 and has continued publication to this day. The envelope also contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978). I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here: http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/ These have not been OCR'd, and many of the pages were rotated by 90 degrees in the original publication, to fit two pages of typewritten correspondence (or recipient address lists) into one page of newsletter. Still, in a quick web search I was unable to find copies of these anywhere else, so I invested a few hours to scan them in and post them for historical interest. As an example, Sixth Edition (v6) UNIX was announced in issue number 1. These are all free to publish nowadays. USENIX was one of the first technical organizations to establish an Open Access policy for its publications, a step which distinguishes them from ACM and many academic publishers who favor revenue for themselves over the progress of science. (I voted for this policy decades ago when I was a USENIX board member.) This page, for example, says: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/schwarz "USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone." The ;login: archives at USENIX.org are complete from October 1997 to today: https://www.usenix.org/publications/login Also, most but not all issues of ;login: from 1983 to 1997 have been scanned by USENIX and uploaded to the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?&sort=date The USENIX Association apparently has paper copies of the stuff I scanned in today, but they are still trying to locate ;login: issues from 1979 and parts of 1980 and 1981. In addition, they are backlogged on scanning in their old materials (including copies of ;login: between 1978/09 and 1983/02). If you have old copies of ;login: that you don't see visible in these places, please scan them, or offer them to USENIX. Also, if you have old proceedings of USENIX conferences, there are still three that the USENIX staff do not have any copy of: XFree86 Technical Conference https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/xfree86/ 2001-11-08 5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als01/tech.h… 2001-11-08 WORLDS '04 https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/worlds04/tech/ 2004-12-05 If you have any of these three, please let <info(a)usenix.org> know. They also lack about twenty more for which they have posted the academic papers, but don't have the covers or front-matter, so if you have other proceedings from between 1989 and 2004 that you'd be willing to part with or scan, also let them know. Thanks! John

4 years, 7 months

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Where did the "~" come from

by Clem Cole

A couple of my friends from UC Berkeley were musing on another email thread. The question from one of them came up: *"I'm teaching the undergrad OS course this semester ... Mention where ~ comes."* This comment begets a discussion among the 4 of us at where it showed up in the UNIX heritage and it if was taken from somewhere else. Using the tilde character as a short cut for $HOME was purely a userspace convention and not part of the nami() kernel routine when it came into being. We know that it was supported by Mike Lesk in UUCP and by Bill Joy in cshell. The former was first widely released as part of Seventh Edition but was working on V6 before that inside of BTL. Joy's cshell came out as part of 2BSD (which was V7 based), but he had released "ashell" before that and included it in the original BSD (*a.k.a.* 1BSD) which was for V6 [what I don't remember is if it supported the convention and I can not easily un- ar(1) the cont.a files in the 1BSD tar image in Warren's archives. In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked it up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, which were popular at UCB [*i.e.* the reason hjkl are the movement keys on vi is the were embossed on the top of those keys on the ADM3A]. It also was noted that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its keyboard. But Lesk definitely needed something to represent a remote user's home directory because each system was different, so he was forced to use something. It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on as students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have been BTL to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether. So two questions for this august body are: 1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX? 2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as CTSS, TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?

4 years, 7 months

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Mach386 manual

by Deborah K Scherrer

Anybody want a little manual "Installing and Operating Mt Xinu Mach386? Will send (free). Deborah

4 years, 7 months

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The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Tyler Adams

Fun read and it's totally wild that people's emotional comfort with *text* drives a lot of their love or hate of unix. http://theody.net/elements.html Tyler

4 years, 8 months

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Plan 9 assembly syntax design history?

by Robert Clausecker

Ken's (?) Plan 9 assemblers are well known for their idiosyncratic syntax, placing identical behaviour across platforms over a sense of resemblance to people used to normal assemblers. While I am aware of Rob's talk [1] on the basic design ideas and have read both the Plan 9 [2] and Go [3] assembler manuals, many aspects of the design (such as the strange way to specify static data) are unclear and seem poorly documented. Is there some document or other piece of information I can read on the history of these assemblers? Or maybe someone recalls more bits about these details? Yours, Robert Clausecker [1]: https://talks.golang.org/2016/asm.slide [2]: https://9p.io/sys/doc/asm.html [3]: https://golang.org/doc/asm -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments

4 years, 8 months

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/usr/bin/1

by Ron Natalie

This memory just came back to me. There was a UNIX disribution (PWB/UNIX?) that had a program called 1. It printed tis quaint bit of propaganda. One Bell System. It works. This was fine until one day I’m at work in a big bull pen computer room when Bernie, one of my co-workers, shouts. “What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor?” My reaction is, “Well, it’s all Bell System crud.” I walk over to his terminal and find he is typing 1 repeatedly at the shell prompt and getting the above message. (This was back in the old /bin/ed days where 1 got you to the top of the file). I had to point out he wasn’t in the editor. Later that day, the program was changed to say: You’re not in the editor, Bernie. This I think made it into one of the BRL releases and occassionally got inquiries as to who Bernie is.

4 years, 8 months

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Lions notes, early history

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System". I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on alt.folklore.computers in 1994. But now it seems that the "book" had been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was the license revoked. Does anybody have any insights? What restrictions were there on its distribution? What was the format? Was it a real book, or just bound notes? Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

4 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history

by norman＠oclsc.org

There also exists a latter-day AT&T version of the Lions book. White cover with deathstar logo; standard US letter- sized paper, perfect-bound along the short edge. Two volumes: one for the source code, one for the commentary. I have a copy, and I bet Andrew does too: as I remember, he got a handful of them from Judy Macor (who used to handle licensing requests--I remember speaking to her on the phone once in my pre-Labs days) when she was clearing old stuff out of her office, and I nabbed one. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 8 months

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Xinu in emulation, e.g. SIMH?

by Chris Hanson

Has anyone gotten Xinu running in SIMH? It seems like it should be straightforward to run the "support" utilities under BSD on an emulated VAX and then run Xinu itself on an emulated LSI-11. If anyone's done so, I'd be interested to learn what all you had to do to set it up and get it working. -- Chris -- who needs to figure out SIMH config file syntax to match the board set he wants to simulate

4 years, 8 months

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Eric

by Larry McVoy

Does anyone have an email for Eric Schmidt? My vibe is he is super private so contact me off list if you need to know why I am looking. I overlapped with him at Sun and talked to him a few times but I doubt he remembers me. --lm

4 years, 8 months

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LSI-11 MINI-UNIX improvements

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

I've made a number of 'improvements' to the LSI-11 version of MINI-UNIX. (I'm starting to be fairly impressed with MINI-UNIX; for people who have a hardware PDP-11 with no memory management, it's a very capable system; most of V6, and very good source compatability.) First, with help from feedback from Paul Riley, I've improved the "Running MINI-UNIX on the LSI-11" page: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/Mini/Mini.html It should be pretty usable at this point, but more feedback on further improvements gratefully accepted! (Hint, hint :-) In code changes, I have a new version of mch.s: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/Mini/mch.s The main improvements are a tiny prs() and prn(), to allow systems to leave out prf.c to save space, but still be able to print messages (rather than simply dying silently, as is MINI-UNIX's wont). The prs() also saves and restores the console'e CSR, and prints with console interrupts off (to prevent spurious interrupts). An idea from Milo Velimirovic (use the top of the stack!) resulted in minor improvements in two places where there wasn't a register free to use MFPS/MTPS. Also,I have a working RL driver for MINI-UNIX now (I was able to attach a V6 filesystem to RL0 and then could do "icheck /dev/rl0" and it worked); I'll be up-loading that, and adding directions for using it, 'soon'. (It pretty much just worked; pulled out the XMem bits, and the raw I/O calls, and it worked right off.) To make an RL the root filesystem, I need to tweak a few more things; the parameters ROOTDEV, etc - crucially, including SWPLO and NSWAP - are currently set in param.h, so you'd have to recompile the OS to switch disk types. I'm going to put them back as externals in conf.c, the way they are in V6; that way you'll only need an 'rlconf.c' to switch roots. (I'm not sure why they were moved; it only saves one word each to make them #define's.) Noel

4 years, 8 months

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[ Slightly OT ] Vaxen, my children, just don't belong some places

by Dave Horsfall

[ Warning: you need to be an OF to understand the references ] Time to re-post this... And trust me, an IBM 3090 was really big iron in those days. I don't recall the author, but I found it on the 'net. ----- VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. In my business, I am frequently called by small sites and startups having VAX problems. So when a friend of mine in an Extremely Large Financial Institution (ELFI) called me one day to ask for help, I was intrigued because this outfit is a really major VAX user - they have several large herds of VAXen - and plenty of sharp VAXherds to take care of them. So I went to see what sort of an ELFI mess they had gotten into. It seems they had shoved a small 750 with two RA60s running a single application, PC style, into a data center with two IBM 3090s and just about all the rest of the disk drives in the world. The computer room was so big it had three street addresses. The operators had only IBM experience and, to quote my friend, they were having "a little trouble adjusting to the VAX", were a bit hostile towards it and probably needed some help with system management. Hmmm, hostility... Sigh. Well, I thought it was pretty ridiculous for an outfit with all that VAX muscle elsewhere to isolate a dinky old 750 in their Big Blue Country, and said so bluntly. But my friend patiently explained that although small, it was an "extremely sensitive and confidential application." It seems that the 750 had originally been properly clustered with the rest of a herd and in the care of one of their best VAXherds. But the trouble started when the Chief User went to visit his computer and its VAXherd. He came away visibly disturbed and immediately complained to the ELFI's Director of Data Processing that, "There are some very strange people in there with the computers." Now since this user person was the Comptroller of this Extremely Large Financial Institution, the 750 had been promptly hustled over to the IBM data center which the Comptroller said, "was a more suitable place." The people there wore shirts and ties and didn't wear head bands or cowboy hats. So my friend introduced me to the Comptroller, who turned out to be five feet tall, 85 and a former gnome of Zurich. He had a young apprentice gnome who was about 65. The two gnomes interviewed me in whispers for about an hour before they decided my modes of dress and speech were suitable for managing their system and I got the assignment. There was some confusion, understandably, when I explained that I would immediately establish a procedure for nightly backups. The senior gnome seemed to think I was going to put the computer in reverse, but the apprentice's son had an IBM PC and he quickly whispered that "backup" meant making a copy of a program borrowed from a friend and why was I doing that? Sigh. I was shortly introduced to the manager of the IBM data center, who greeted me with joy and anything but hostility. And the operators really weren't hostile - it just seemed that way. It's like the driver of a Mack 18 wheeler, with a condo behind the cab, who was doing 75 when he ran over a moped doing its best to get away at 45. He explained sadly, "I really warn't mad at mopeds but to keep from runnin' over that'n, I'da had to slow down or change lanes!" Now the only operation they had figured out how to do on the 750 was reboot it. This was their universal cure for any and all problems. After all it works on a PC, why not a VAX? Was there a difference? Sigh. But I smiled and said, "No sweat, I'll train you. The first command you learn is HELP" and proceeded to type it in on the console terminal. So the data center manager, the shift supervisor and the eight day-operators watched the LA100 buzz out the usual introductory text. When it finished they turned to me with expectant faces and I said in an avuncular manner, "This is your most important command!" The shift supervisor stepped forward and studied the text for about a minute. He then turned with a very puzzled expression on his face and asked, "What do you use it for?" Sigh. Well, I tried everything. I trained and I put the doc set on shelves by the 750 and I wrote a special 40 page doc set and then a four page doc set. I designed all kinds of command files to make complex operations into simple foreign commands and I taped a list of these simplified commands to the top of the VAX. The most successful move was adding my home phone number. The cheat sheets taped on the top of the CPU cabinet needed continual maintenance, however. It seems the VAX was in the quietest part of the data center, over behind the scratch tape racks. The operators ate lunch on the CPU cabinet and the sheets quickly became coated with pizza drippings, etc. But still the most used solution to hangups was a reboot and I gradually got things organized so that during the day when the gnomes were using the system, the operators didn't have to touch it. This smoothed things out a lot. Meanwhile, the data center was getting new TV security cameras, a halon gas fire extinguisher system and an immortal power source. The data center manager apologized because the VAX had not been foreseen in the plan and so could not be connected to immortal power. The VAX and I felt a little rejected but I made sure that booting on power recovery was working right. At least it would get going again quickly when power came back. Anyway, as a consolation prize, the data center manager said he would have one of the security cameras adjusted to cover the VAX. I thought to myself, "Great, now we can have 24 hour video tapes of the operators eating Chinese takeout on the CPU." I resolved to get a piece of plastic to cover the cheat sheets. One day, the apprentice gnome called to whisper that the senior was going to give an extremely important demonstration. Now I must explain that what the 750 was really doing was holding our National Debt. The Reagan administration had decided to privatize it and had quietly put it out for bid. My Extreme Large Financial Institution had won the bid for it and was, as ELFIs are wont to do, making an absolute bundle on the float. On Monday the Comptroller was going to demonstrate to the board of directors how he could move a trillion dollars from Switzerland to the Bahamas. The apprentice whispered, "Would you please look in on our computer? I'm sure everything will be fine, sir, but we will feel better if you are present. I'm sure you understand?" I did. Monday morning, I got there about five hours before the scheduled demo to check things over. Everything was cool. I was chatting with the shift supervisor and about to go upstairs to the Comptroller's office. Suddenly there was a power failure. The emergency lighting came on and the immortal power system took over the load of the IBM 3090s. They continued smoothly, but of course the VAX, still on city power, died. Everyone smiled and the dead 750 was no big deal because it was 7 AM and gnomes don't work before 10 AM. I began worrying about whether I could beg some immortal power from the data center manager in case this was a long outage. Immortal power in this system comes from storage batteries for the first five minutes of an outage. Promptly at one minute into the outage we hear the gas turbine powered generator in the sub-basement under us automatically start up getting ready to take the load on the fifth minute. We all beam at each other. At two minutes into the outage we hear the whine of the backup gas turbine generator starting. The 3090s and all those disk drives are doing just fine. Business as usual. The VAX is dead as a door nail but what the hell. At precisely five minutes into the outage, just as the gas turbine is taking the load, city power comes back on and the immortal power source commits suicide. Actually it was a double murder and suicide because it took both 3090s with it. So now the whole data center was dead, sort of. The fire alarm system had its own battery backup and was still alive. The lead acid storage batteries of the immortal power system had been discharging at a furious rate keeping all those big blue boxes running and there was a significant amount of sulfuric acid vapor. Nothing actually caught fire but the smoke detectors were convinced it had. The fire alarm klaxon went off and the siren warning of imminent halon gas release was screaming. We started to panic but the data center manager shouted over the din, "Don't worry, the halon system failed its acceptance test last week. It's disabled and nothing will happen." He was half right, the primary halon system indeed failed to discharge. But the secondary halon system observed that the primary had conked and instantly did its duty, which was to deal with Dire Disasters. It had twice the capacity and six times the discharge rate. Now the ear splitting gas discharge under the raised floor was so massive and fast, it blew about half of the floor tiles up out of their framework. It came up through the floor into a communications rack and blew the cover panels off, decking an operator. Looking out across that vast computer room, we could see the air shimmering as the halon mixed with it. We stampeded for exits to the dying whine of 175 IBM disks. As I was escaping I glanced back at the VAX, on city power, and noticed the usual flickering of the unit select light on its system disk indicating it was happily rebooting. Twelve firemen with air tanks and axes invaded. There were frantic phone calls to the local IBM Field Service office because both the live and backup 3090s were down. About twenty minutes later, seventeen IBM CEs arrived with dozens of boxes and, so help me, a barrel. It seems they knew what to expect when an immortal power source commits murder. In the midst of absolute pandemonium, I crept off to the gnome office and logged on. After extensive checking it was clear that everything was just fine with the VAX and I began to calm down. I called the data center manager's office to tell him the good news. His secretary answered with, "He isn't expected to be available for some time. May I take a message?" I left a slightly smug note to the effect that, unlike some other computers, the VAX was intact and functioning normally. Several hours later, the gnome was whispering his way into a demonstration of how to flick a trillion dollars from country 2 to country 5. He was just coming to the tricky part, where the money had been withdrawn from Switzerland but not yet deposited in the Bahamas. He was proceeding very slowly and the directors were spellbound. I decided I had better check up on the data center. \Most of the floor tiles were back in place. IBM had resurrected one of the 3090s and was running tests. What looked like a bucket brigade was working on the other one. The communication rack was still naked and a fireman was standing guard over the immortal power corpse. Life was returning to normal, but the Big Blue Country crew was still pretty shaky. Smiling proudly, I headed back toward the triumphant VAX behind the tape racks where one of the operators was eating a plump jelly bun on the 750 CPU. He saw me coming, turned pale and screamed to the shift supervisor, "Oh my God, we forgot about the VAX!" Then, before I could open my mouth, he rebooted it. It was Monday, 19-Oct-1987. VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. -- Dave

4 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by norman＠oclsc.org

Just for completeness: I have one OpenBSD 6.7 system at home and look after several more at work, and yes, OpenBSD still has raw disk devices. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> I noticed a place where I used R0 as a temp ... and was being bashed. > So I fixed it, and now the shell starts OK, but attempting to do any > command (e.g. "echo foo"), things hang Well, I had 'fixed' it; it turned out my 'fix' had a bug. :-( (The code I had to change for the /03 there was pushing the old PS, and that and the temp I had to push got intermangled.) Anyway, with that fixed, the /03 Mini-Unix works now. The old user command binaries seem to work OK on the /03; not that I've tried the all, but the ones I have tried (including the C compiler) all worked. They all should all work (there's nothing in user code that's model-dependent). I have tweaked the shell (to allow 'cd') and init (to get rid of the annoying long rights message), but that's all. The latest, greatest mch.s is uploaded: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/Mini/mch.s Although a couple of files (bio.c, clock.c, slp.c, and tty.c) had minor changes (to remove direct rerferences to the PS; they now call getps() and putps() for that), and main.c has minor changes to work when there's no KW11 or switch register, really the only file with significant changes for the /03 is mch.s. It's the only one where the object code is model-dependent; all the other changed ones use the same object code for all CPU models. I'll put up a Web page with details, links to sources, etc, 'soon'. A couple of other things. Mini-Unix has removed 'raw' devices (not sure why, probably seemed un-needed), so other disk drivers (e.g. the RL11 driver) aren't straight drop-ins. Minimal tweaks needed, though; just remove the read and write routines, I think. If there was a real use for 'raw' devices, they could probably be added back, but physio() would have to be modified (simplified). Not sure if anything else special would be needed; the process can't be swapped while raw I/O is ongoing, and so on Mini-Unix no other process could run. Probably OK, but needs to be checked. I recommend that everyone trying to run Mini-Unix on a hardware /03 invest in a KEF11 chip. (There are a few on eBait.) That way, you can leave the EIS emulator out of the build, which will save some space, and allow more room for device drivers. I added kernel printf() into the build, to help with debugging, but it can be removed to save space. You can change the system to use more room for the kernel (see the Mini-Unix docs), but that involves re-linking _every single user command_, including the shell and init. Not recommended. Noel

4 years, 8 months

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Stanley lieber

by Andrew Hume

can stanley lieber contact me please (regarding an 8th edition manual)? i can’t contact you via sl(a)stanleylieber.com (because of an SPF error), so perhaps via another email address. thanks

4 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > port Mini-Unix will create some demand for device drivers on the /03 > systems, so may be worthwhile to implement RAW device. I'm not sure I understand this ("worthwhile to implement RAW device"); let me explain what the removal of 'raw' I/O devices from MINI-UNIX really means, and then ask what it is that you are after. Early Unix (no idea about later ones) supports two classes of devices; 'block' devices, which can be used to hold file-systems, and 'character' devices, which cannot. (I seem to recall a paper, perhaps from the Unix BSTJ issue, which talks about them in some detail.) The former are those where the underlying physical device has restricted semantics; they are block-addressable mass storage devices. All access to them is via the system's block buffer pool, so reads/writes by the user of arbitrary size and location are possible. 'Character' devices are everything else. 'Raw' devices are an interface to the devices of 'block' devices which does not go through the system's buffer pool; I/O operations to them perform DMA directly to the user process' memory. They are 'character' devices, in the Unix device taxonomy. The only semantics available are those supported by the hardware - e.g. seeks only to block boundaries. So when I say that MINI-UNIX doesn't have 'raw' devices, it just means that e.g. the RK disk controller device _only_ talks to the Unix block buffer system; if a user program wants to look at the disk contents, it has to go via that system. So, with that in hand, what exactly is the need you forsee for raw devices in MINI-UNIX? Also, I've started to work on getting the V6 RL driver to work in MINI-UNIX; it should have been easy (just delete the charater device interface), but for some reason it didn't work when I tried it. I'll look at it in more detail 'soon'. Noel

4 years, 8 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jay Logue > Are your other changes available anywhere? Yeah, they're all up-loaded, and linked to from my 'Running MINI-UNIX on the LSI-11' page: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/Mini/Mini.html It's mostly done, but I'll probably continue to tweak it a bir. If anyone notices any errors, or has questions that aren't answered there, etc please let me know. > Also, I was wondering if it might be useful to have a github repo with > these changes. I'd be happy to help set this up. Feel free to go for it, if people think it would be useful. (I'm not sure there is a 'basic' MINI-UNIX repo to start on.) Noel

4 years, 8 months

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Origins of globbing

by Tyler Adams

How did globbing come about in unix? Related, as regexes were already well known because of qed/ed, why wasn't a subset of regular expressions used instead? Tyler

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > Always darkest before the dawn. Well, we'll see. I found _that_ one; process 1 managed to exec() init, do a fork(), and then the child process exec()'d the shell - then that apparently died, and the code in init falls through into: termall(); execl(init, minus, 0); when the single-user shell exits, so then init restarted; rinse, repeat. So a _lot_ of the code in mch.s seemed to be working correctly; system calls (2 exec()'s, and a fork()) worked, processing switching worked, device interrupts (for the disk and console tty) seemed to be working.. Not sure what's left! So I looked at mch.s again, to see what else _was_ there, and I noticed a place where I used R0 as a temp - with the MFPS/MTPS thing to get to the PS, instructions like: BIS #340, PS need to change to: MFPS R0 BIS #340, R0 MTPS R0 and R0 was being used to hold an arg (in pword:), and was being bashed. So I fixed it, and now the shell starts OK, but attempting to do any command (e.g. "echo foo"), things hang (the shell doesn't fork). If I type the interrupt character, the shell exits, and init restarts. Oh well, hopefully this one won't be too painful to work out. The system's mostly working, which I think will really help. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> Now to see if 'cc' works on an '-11/40' Yeah, the C compiler works fine on a /40; so the SOB bug (or perhaps some _other_ one I haven't found yet) must have affected it too. The thing that's odd about that bug is that SOB works _sometimes_ on an /05; the 'rkmx' on the distro tape will boot (which if the SOB _never_ worked, it wouldn't). So there must be a data dependency somehow. John Wilson says the SOB is very optimized, so maybe there's a bug. > then back to the /03. Well, I tried /03 version, and it doesn't work; /etc/init continually restarts. The thing is that _every_ file except mch.s is identical between the '05' version (which runs fine on the /40; above), and the /03 version. So the bug must be in mch.s - unless there's somehow an /03 dependency somewhere else I missed. I looked through init.c, didn't see anything. Here: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/Mini/mch.s is the mch.s source, if anyone wants to look through it and see if they see anything. It's conditionalized for the /03; there's a very simple header file (here: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/Mini/03mch.s for the 03 version) to set the flags (so one doesn't have to edit the main file to change the flag settings). I had a careful look at mch.s, before I started, checking all the added conditionalized code; found one that could have been an issue (I was using a temporary register, r0, that had needed data in it), but the rest all looked OK. I have some ideas on how to proceed on working out what's going on, but I'm done for today, gotta do other stuff. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> I suspect there must be an issue with the -11/05 emulation in Ersatz-11 There is. The C compiler on MiniUnix emits SOB instructions. The -11/05 doesn't implement SOB; however, the instruction emulator in MiniUnix (emul.s) is prepared to emulate it. (So MiniUnix should work fine on real -11/05's.) However, when set to an -11/05, Ersatz-11 treats SOBs as NOPs; they fall through without any effect. Without a trap, they can't be emulated either. This caused the problem with namei() failing (namei() calls bcopy(), which has a SOB in it), and probably caused the problem I was seeing with the C compiler, but I'm too burned out to check right now. Tomorrow. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> I just realized that the _first_ entry, #'9', is actually #0 _in the > directory_; u_count counts _down_, whereas the code looks through dir > entries going _up_. Fixed that (kept my own index of which entry it was working on, and caculated the name location in the buffer, and got: chk 0 15 2 '..' chk 1 14 18 '.' chk 2 13 34 'bin' chk 3 12 50 'dev' chk 4 11 66 'etc' etc... and it blew right past the 'etc' entry, to the end of the directory. WTF? > Still don't understand why I can't print the dir entries out of the u > area, though. Now that my brain has turned on, I'll bet that's not _my_ bug, I'll bet it's _the_ bug! If the directory entry in u.u_dent.u_name is all 0's, _of course_ the match is going to fail. Just for grins, I set the CPU type in Ersatz-11 to "40 EIS NOMMU" and... it booted up fine! I suspect there must be an issue with the -11/05 emulation in Ersatz-11, since MiniUnix worked fine on _real_ -11/05's. Now to see if 'cc' works on an '-11/40' - then back to the /03. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> it looks at the following entries: > Anyway, after printing the entry for 5, it goes to 'done' Uh, I just realized that the _first_ entry, #'9', is actually #0 _in the directory_; u_count counts _down_, whereas the code looks through dir entries going _up_. Still don't understand why I can't print the dir entries out of the u area, though. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: jay-tuhs9915 > Are there any notes you can share on how to get to the point you're at? Well, there are three areas where the /03 version needs work, over the /05: - No LTC clock register - No switch register - PS access only via MFPS/MTPS instructions For the first two, the needed changes are identical to the ones detailed here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_UNIX_V6_on_an_-11/23 These have all been tested on the /23. Rather than anyone make the exact same changes independently, I can put up the modified versions of the MiniUnix files for them (low.s, main.c and param.h). For the third, I have an mch.s with a conditional assembly flag that _should_ do it all; like I said, there are also really minor edits to bio.c, clock.c, slp.c, and tty.c. Again, I can upload the mch.s which is already done. I haven't been able to _confirm_ that these work, but it should be mostly good; the changes are pretty straight-foward. > The code is doing a string comparison between the name in the current > directory entry (u_dent) and the current pathname component (in > u_dbuf). The expression in brackets is the relative distance between the > two name fields within the u struct. Yeah, I'd worked that out (the immediately preceding comment in the code - "String compare the directory entry and the current component" - indicates what it's doing, and as my "the term inside the []'s seems to be an offset .. into the copy of the current directory entry" indicates, I'd worked out how it did that. I was still puzzled by some othet aspects of the code, I just included that to give a flavour of the code. > In what way does it fail? Is it simply that namei() doesn't find the > file its looking for? Right. It's looking for 'etc' in the root directory (only one block), and it looks at the following entries: 9 146 '05mx' 8 130 'usr' 7 114 'tmp' 6 98 'mnt' 5 82 'lib' (I put a printf() in the loop; I've added prf.c to the load so I can do that. The numbers are the index, u.u_count - although it's already been descremented at that point, so it will be '0' when doing the last entry - and location of that entry in the directory, given next to it. For some reason, I can't get the entry to print from u.u_dent.u_name, so I'm printing it straight from the block buffer, bp->b_addr[]. I can print the _inode number_, u.u_dent.u_ino as a string, but not the dir entry. Wierd.) Anyway, after printing the entry for 5, it goes to 'done', with u_error containing '2'. I can't see how it could do that. I'm using printf() because I'm too lazy to figure out how to build a kernel with a debugger like DDT included. (We never did that when we were working on V6 at MIT BITD; ISR we mostly just used printf() back then, too.) Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

>> Then on to trying to find out why MiniUnix crashes whenever I try and do >> anything significant. > I decided I wasn't up to tackling that, so instead I did all the edits > to produce an LSI-11 version of MX. ... I need to go > back and put conditional assembly flags in mch.s so there's only one > source file for both kinds of system. Doesn't boot, though. So this has turned into a big swamp. I went back and did the conditionals, and I can turn off the -11/03 flag and produce the identical binary to the original mch.o file. -11/05 systems built with that still won't boot, though! So I had made some minor changes elsewhere in the system; e.g. a few files (bio.c, clock.c, slp.c, and tty.c) refer the the PS explicitly (a no-no in the -11/03) so I changed them all to call getps() and putps(), and added /05 versions of those to mch.s; so I backed them out, and re-built the system using the original binaries of those; _still_ won't boot. I then tried the original 'rkmx', and that _does_ boot; so there's no mysterious damage to the file system. But now I'm deeply puzzled, since the new system (which won't boot) should be basically identical (OK, not bit-for-bit identical, but close). So then I started trying to see why the new /05 system won't boot; the exec() call in process 1 that starts /etc/init seems to be failing. Digging into that, the call to namei() (in sys1$exec()) seems to be failing? Huh? The file-system is OK (see above)? So I'm trying to work out how that is happening. Which is non-trivial; namei() is pretty convoluted. I can deal with the fact that there are two nested loops using goto's (not the best form, but I can grok it), but then I run into things like this: for(cp = &u.u_dbuf[0]; cp < &u.u_dbuf[DIRSIZ]; cp++) if(*cp != cp[u.u_dent.u_name - u.u_dbuf]) Check out that second line! (And Heinz didn't touch it; this copy is from the V6 source.) I'm not sure I 100% grok it, but I think I get roughly what it's doing: 'cp' seems to be a (moving) pointer into the filename being matched, and the term inside the []'s seems to be an offset from there into the copy of the current directory entry in the 'u' structure. (Which is a constant, it doesn't need to be recomputed each time around the loop, though.) It seems to check most of the (wrong) directory entries OK, but then inexplicably (to me) fails. At this point I'm getting a bad feeling that there could be a sim issue; that could also explain the problem I'm seeing with the crashes, when trying to run 'cc' under the as-distributed -11/05 version.` I'm not a SIMH user, though (I'm an Ersatz-11 person); is there anyone who is, who'd like to play with MiniUnix with me? Noel

4 years, 9 months

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off-topic: Nominating Chet Ramey for USENIX flame award

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. I know this is off topic, but this list is full of the people who can help me with this. I'd like to nomimate Chet Ramey for the USENIX lifetime achievement award (yes, he's aware). I need 2-4 letters of support for this; anyone who agrees that he deserves it should send me such a letter, please (PDF, I guess) and I'll send in the whole package. See the details below. The deadline is October 19; please send a letter sooner rather than later. Let's start by sending me "yes, I'll write a letter" and then if there are lots, I'll pick four. PLEASE reply directly to me; no need to inundate TUHS with mail on this. Thanks, Arnold > Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 16:00:19 -0700 (PDT) > From: Casey Henderson <casey.henderson(a)usenix.org> > To: Arnold Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com> > Subject: Call for Nominations for the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award > > Dear Arnold: > > USENIX offers several awards that recognize public service and technical > excellence in the fields, including the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award > ("The Flame"): https://www.usenix.org/about/flame > > The Flame recognizes and celebrates singular contributions to the USENIX > community of both intellectual achievement and service that are not > recognized in any other forum. Please consider nominating a deserving > colleague! > > We invite you to submit nominations for USENIX's awards at any > time. However, to help us offer the award this year, we strongly encourage > nominations for The Flame by October 19. > > A nomination should include: > *Name and contact information of the person making the nomination > *Name(s) and contact information of the nominee(s) > *A citation, approximately 100 words long > *A statement, at most one page long, on why the candidate(s) should receive the award > *Between two and four supporting letters, no longer than one page each > > Please submit your nominations to the Awards Committee via awards(a)usenix.org. > > Best Wishes, > Casey Henderson > Executive Director > USENIX Association

4 years, 9 months

1
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Status of Space Travel

by Warner Losh

What's the current state of efforts to get space travel working again? Warner

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> At some point, I'll produce a 'MiniUnix ld' on vanilla V6, so I can > build MiniUnix versions of applications there; the first will be the > shell, so I don't have to keep typing 'chdir' instead of 'cd'! :-) OK, that was pretty smooth. I now have (on the main V6 system) a linker in V6 binary form that outputs MX binary files, so I can do things like: mld sh.o /mnt/lib/lib[ca].a to produce a new shell (which worked fine). (I think to build 'mld' all I had to do was 'cc ld.c', in usr/sys/source on the MX disk.) This whole 'futz with MX by mounting the MX disk under V6' thing works really well. > Then on to trying to find out why MiniUnix crashes whenever I try and do > anything significant. I decided I wasn't up to tackling that, so instead I did all the edits to produce an LSI-11 version of MX. Doesn't boot, though; tries to do a panic, I think. I'm too burned out to keep going, I will continue tomorrow morning (US East Coast time). Once I get it running, before I make it available for download, I need to go back and put conditional assembly flags in mch.s so there's only one source file for both kinds of system; I had originally planned on doing that, but I was in such a 'code attack' mode I forgot all about it. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > So mounting Mini-Unix on a running V6 system I guess allows you to run > Mini-Unix user mode binaries stuff Ah, no. They are all link-loaded to run at TOPSYS (060000), so won't run on V6 native. > Or do you plan to recompile on a stable system? Well, I need to find out what the problem is, first. Still, notable progress: using my 'mount the Mini-Unix RK pack on a V6 system' hack (which woked fine; the native V6 'icheck' and 'dcheck' work on that pack), I was able to sucessfully compile a few tweaked system modules (to get my usual line-editing chars, and turn off that irritating lower-case mode), and then build an OS load which could sucessfully boot. So good progress there. A couple of things I learned: - MiniUnix tools use the 'new' archive format, so the V6 vanilla 'ar' doen't grok MiniUnix archives (e.g. lib1/lib2). I have a 'nar', which I found on the 'Shoppa disks', which can deal with them. (We don't have source for it, but I'll bet the MIT PWB1 system has that; I'll get to that eventuallly. There's also an 'ar.c' on the MiniUnix disk; between the two, we'll be able to reconstitute source for 'nar'.) - Also, the vanilla V6 linker, 'ld', _also_ doesn't understand new archives; so the shell file to build a new system, 'shld': ld -a -x low.o conf.o lib1 lib2 blows out because it doesn't grok the libraries. Also, the '-a' flag, which says 'link starting at 0, not TOPSYS', doesn't exist in the V6 'ld'. I got around all that by unpacking lib1 (using 'nar', above) - it only contains two files - and then listing the files to link directly: ld -x low.o conf.o syso emulo dev/kl.o dev/devstart.o dev/rk.o The vanilla V6 linker of course produces an output linked at 0 without the -a flag. At some point, I'll produce a 'MiniUnix ld' on vanilla V6, so I can build MiniUnix versions of applications there; the first will be the shell, so I don't have to keep typing 'chdir' instead of 'cd'! :-) Then on to trying to find out why MiniUnix crashes whenever I try and do anything significant. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> I think before I try debugging it directly, I'll try one of the other > Mini-Unix repositories; the one I've been using (from Bob Eager's site) > may have some bit-rot. Well, foo, the one from TUHS has the same symptom: random re-starts. Looks like I'm going to have to actually debug this. I guess the first step is to work out how the re-start is happening; I suspect it's not a trap (I'll check, but I think Mini-Unix catches them all). My best guess is a jump to 0 (somehow); if so, that should be easy to catch. Then the next thing is to try and work out where/how/why that is happening. Following a suggestion of Warner Losh, I think there's a good idea on how to make progress, which is to mount the Mini-unix pack under V6 (running on a simulator); that's rock-solid - and the V6 tool-chain can be used to build Mini-Unix binaries. And here I thought it was going to be easy to convert Mini-unix to run on an -11/03. Well, it still might - if I can get Mini-Unix to run reliably! Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Bell Labs January 1968 Organizational Directory

by Diomidis Spinellis

David C. Brock posted on Twitter links to the Bell Labs January 1968 Organizational Directory scans. The Research, Communications Sciences Division is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/171jywFyIDyyWUMX4jYl3Czblqe5VGX2q/view In it the Computing Science Research Center appears on tab 13, page 15 (PDF page 6). Most of the names are very familiar to members of this list; some are even posting here. Diomidis - https://www.spinellis.gr

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> It is definite, though, that Q22 memory won't work with an LSI-11/2 > (M7270) ... I'll try an LSI-11 (M7264) tomorrow, make sure it's the > same; it and the LSI-11/2 are similar enough that it should, but it'd be > good to confirm it. Yes, it too won't work with Q22 memory (tried it, no go - ODT won't even start). > Then back to trying to work out why Mini-Unix is so fragile for me. I tried some changes in the simulator set-up, to see if that would fix my issue; no luck. It's quite problematic: if I boot Mini-Unix on a clean copy of the RK pack, cd to /usr/sys/dev, cp kl.c to nkl.c, and 'cc -c nlk.c', Mini-Unix reliably restarts (trashing the disk in the process). (If I omit the 'cp', I can 'cc -c kl.c' 3 times, and Mini-Unix restarts on the third.) Something's seriously wrong. I think before I try debugging it directly, I'll try one of the other Mini-Unix repositories; the one I've been using (from Bob Eager's site) may have some bit-rot. > From: Paul Riley <paul(a)rileyriot.com> > I'm checking with Peter Schranz about whether or not his RLV12/RL02 > boards can run on the '03. Dave Bridgham and I discussed whether the QSIC would work with an -11/03, and that analysis should apply equally to the RLV12. Our conclusion was that it should; here's our reasoning: The device registers on the board should work fine on either Q18 or Q22. That's because when going to the I/O page, the CPU asserts a special bus line, BBS7 (that says 'this cycle is to the I/O page'). The device doesn't look at the higher address lines when that's on, just BDAL00-12; so if the LSI-11 is messing with some of BDAL181-21, it shouldn't matter. For DMA cycles from the device to memory, since the CPU requires Q18 memory to work, the device too should be able to read/write to Q18 memory. At least, that's our theory. I guess all this PDP-11 hardware detail isn't really on-topic for this list; I should move it to Classic Computers, or something. Sorry all; it's intermingled with early Unix stuff, and it was easier to keep it all in one place. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > Can you clarify something for me regarding memory? I understand the > bottom area of memory in a Unix system is for the Kernel and it's stuff, > and that the top 8kB is set aside for device I/O Well, technically, the top 8KB of _address space_, not of memory - it's mostly used for device registers, etc. Here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Unix_V6_kernel_memory_layout is a bit more detail on how the memory is laid out. > The LSI-11 board has 4kW of RAM on it, and I have already a 16KW > board. If I want to further expand the RAM, and say I buy another 16kW > board, that makes an arithmetic sum of 32kW for the boards, making 36kW > total. Can the 4kW of on-board RAM be disabled, and only the 32kW on > the boards be used? Yeah, if you look at LSI-11 documentation, there are jumpers that allow configuration of the on-board memory. Depending on the etch revision; for my F revision, jumper W11 (at the top, towards the handle edge, in the middle of that edge; just below the W1/W2 jumper pair) should be out to disable the on-board memory. Or you could configure the two 32KB boards to be at 020000 and 0120000; there will be 72KB of memory total on the QBUS, but the LSI-11 CPU (no memory management) will only be able to 'see' the bottom 56KB. > Is it ok for the installed RA mto overlap the 8kW at the high memory > area? Yeah, what the CPU sees as the I/O page (at 0160000-0177776 in its address space) is actually at 0760000-0777776 on the QBUS (on a Q18 QBUS); the CPU automagically translates the 0160000-0177776 addresses up. On a PDP-11 with memory management, the MMU has to be set up to do that. E.g. in V6, in: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/sys/conf/m40.s there is the following code: / initialize io segment mov $IO,(r0)+ mov $77406,(r1)+ / rw 4k to set the I/O page in kernel address space to point to the I/O page on the bus. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Pete Turnbull > The SRUNL signal that was mentioned isn't likely to cause a problem That was just a guess on my part as to the exact cause. It is definite, though, that Q22 memory won't work with an LSI-11/2 (M7270); I just tried it. I didn't touch any of the other boards; just swapped the LSI-11/2 for a KDF11-A (M8186), everything worked fine; put the LSI-11/2 back, dead again. I'll try an LSI-11 (M7264) tomorrow, make sure it's the same; it and the LSI-11/2 are similar enough that it should, but it'd be good to confirm it. Then back to trying to work out why Mini-Unix is so fragile for me. Has anyone else ever worked with Mini-Unix, and if so, any tips? Noel

4 years, 9 months

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SH script formatting

by David Barto

In a brief discussion with a coworker today the question of formatting shell scripts came up. I believed that in the past the preferred format (if there ever were any such thing) was if [ test ] then statements else statements fi I can find nothing specific to back this up. More appropriate for COFF maybe would be a discussion of what format is better if [ test ]; then statements else statements fi or the above. No intention to start any kind of flame war about which is better, just want to see if there is any historical option for one over the other. David

4 years, 9 months

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SH script formatting

by Norman Wilson

if test; then stuff and if test then stuff are functionally equivalent. I wouldn't say one or the other `is preferred.' I use the former because I think it's a little more readable because more compact. But it's really a matter of style, like whether you write if (test) { (multi-statement block) or if (test) { (multi-statement block) I have a stronger opinion about those who use overly- cryptic constructions like test && { shell commands } because it means exactly the same thing as if test; then shell commands but is more obscure to read. But again it's a question of style, not of dogma. As an aside, I think one excuse that is sometimes used for that sort of construct is when it's test || { commands } because Bourne's original shell had no not operator. For a long time after shell functions appeared, I would add this function to any of my shell scripts that needed it: not() { if "$@"; then return 1 else return 0 } so I could say if not test; then commands fi Modern Bourne-shell descendants have a built-in ! operator: if ! test; then commands fi I'm not keen on most of what has been stuffed into bash and ksh and the like, but ! is a real improvement. I believe POSIX mandates it, and I think they're right. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 9 months

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Unix History with Brian Kernighan

by Angus Robinson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9upVbGSBFo Kind Regards, Angus Robinson

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > I also have a DEC 256KB board, but I doubt I could use it on the > '03. Yes, DEC 256KB boards are what's called Q22, and those don't seem to work with LSI-11's; not even CPU ODT works. I just tried a 256KB MSV11-L with an LSI-11, and it definitely doesn't work; the MSV11-P is definitely a Q22 board, and so probably also won't work. What the Q22 means is that early in the lifetime of the QBUS, it only had 18 address line - so-called Q18. (Technially the LII-11 used only 16 address lines, so it's actually Q16.) DEC latter snarfed some of the 'unused' pins, and made them QDAL18-21. So boards that use those pins for QDAL18-21 are 'Q22' boards. My theory on what the problem is is that the LSI-11 uses some of those pins for other things - I think the 'run' light, IIRC. So that confuses Q22 memory. If one tries to use one with an LSI-11, the machine is totally dead - not even ODT. It doesn't do any harm, though; unplug the Q22 memory, and plug in a Q18 card like an MSV11-D, and it'll be fine. If you need memory for the LSI-11, MSV11-D boards are pretty common on eBait, for not much. They tend to be flaky, though; sometimes they come back to life if you leave them sit for a bit after you plug them in. > I believe the [memory] board is non-DEC. Well, if it's Q22 it won't work either. Both that and the DEC board should work in the /23, though. (If you have the part number on the memory chips, a little arithmetic should give you the board size. 256K and up are generallly Q22; if you have a manual for that card it might say.) I'm still working with Mini-Unix; it's very fragile. When I got it running, the first thing I tried to do was changle the line editing characters (since my normal ones are burned into ROM). Alas, in stock V6, DEL is hard-wired to be 'interrupt process', so I can't just 'stty [mumble]', I have to rebuild the kernel to change that. Not a problem, necessarily - but I edited tty.h and said 'cc -c tty.c', and it crashed and re-started - and roached the disk. So I'm still trying to make progress. I might have mis-configured the simulator, I'll see. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

by Doug McIlroy

> Turing save us from 1-complement machines! Users of Whirlwind II were warned about the quirks of -0. We were not warned, though, about integer divide with remainder 0. The result of dividing 6 by 3, for example, was binary 1.111111... - a valid answer when carried to infinity. Unfortunately, the "fractional" part was dropped. Most people used Whirlwind for floating-point computation, and blithely dismissed printed answers like 1.999999 as "roundoff errors". Doug

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> So that confuses Q22 memory. If one tries to use one with an LSI-11, > the machine is totally dead - not even ODT. Oh, that's another LSI-11 'feature' (only discovered after someone sent in a help request on CCalk for a dead LSI-11): if there's no working memory at 0, ODT won't start/run. So if the Q22 memory is confused, the whole machine is dead. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > I have two RLV-12/RL02 emulator boards I had made from Peter Schranz's > design (5volts.ch). They take an SD card Ah, you're all set, then - doubly so, in fact. Not only do you have reliable mass storage, but you should be able to put the Unix filesystem on an SD card, to get the bits into the machine. I'm not familiar with that board, but it sounds pretty good; QBUS<->SD. I don't know how that board uses the SD card, in terms of where it keeps the RL02 image, but if you can find that out, SD<->USB3 adaptors are cheap and plentiful, and it shouldn't be too hard to load the disk image into it using one of them. (For the QSIC, I found a 'dd' for Winsdoze and used that to write the disk image onto the SD card.) > I don't have any PROMs other than what would be on the '03 or '23+ > boards now. Not a problem: if you hook up the -11's console to another computer, you can download a bootstrap into it over the serial line, using the -11's ODT. (There's a page here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_an_LSI-11_from_Unix_V6 which talks briefly about how to do that. Things like PDP11GUI can do it too, I think.) I don't use an RK bootstrap in ROM to boot from the emulated RK11 on the QSIC; I just load in a short RK bootstrap. I don't know of one lying around for the RL11, but one would be trivial to whip up. Speaking of booting, I have Mini-Uix booting under an -11/05 simulator (Ersatz-11); I used the RK image from here: http://www.tavi.co.uk/unixhistory/mini-unix/munixrks.zip and it just started right up. So that's the big hurdle; been busy with other stuff, but I'll work on getting it to boot on an '03 'soon'. You probably want to do the same; having it running under a simulator will make it easy to build new OS images, e.g. for a system with RL02's. Build the new system, name it 'rlmx', copy the simulator disk image into the SD card, and away you go. Oh, I recently realized how to make a bit more room on an -11/03: most DEC small QBUS memory cards allow you to use half the 'I/O page' for memory, if you need it. I.e. instead of having 56KB of memory, and 8 KB of address space for device registers (a lot more than is really needed), the memory can be configured to be 60KB of memory. It can be a bit of a hassle to use it; to have more room for the OS (for more drivers, or disk buffers, or whatever), some pieces of Mini-Unix need to be recompiled, to move up the address where user processes are loaded. Larger user processes are the same thing; they aren't automatically enabled when there's more memory, you have to change a config file, recompile some things, and build a new system. What kind of memory card(s) do you have for the -11/03? Noel

4 years, 9 months

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How accurate are those AUUGN scans?

by Dave Horsfall

When someone mentioned that they'd ported V6 to the 11/23, I recalled that I did the same thing (well, V6 + the bits of AUSAM that I liked + the bits of V7 that I could shoe-horn in), and went looking for the article that I could've sworn I'd published, using "pdfgrep 23 AUUGN*" in my TUHS mirror. And yes, I recall some hardware peculiarity which had to be worked around, but I've forgotten the details (which is why I went looking). I didn't find it (is there an index of articles anywhere?), but I did find some peculiar typos, and I was wondering whether they were a result of Google's (destructive) scanning, or were in the originals. Here's a quick sample: AUUGN-V04.5.pdf: tailored for smaller. PDP11s (such as the 11/23 or 11/34) in an A period after "smaller". AUUGN-V04.6.pdf: Unfortunately. the clever Code comes unstuck as the LSI-II/23 doesn't’t The phrase "Unfortunately. the clever Code" looks wrong. AUUGN-V04.6.pdf:LSI-II/23 was changing the value of r! if the V-bit gets set. It seemed "r!" should be "r1" (a possible typo, as they are the same key).. AUUGN-V04.6.pdf: bio23 (662 2668) Elec. Eng., UNSW, This is a weirdie; "bio23" (one of my clients) was never a part of Elec Eng (they were their own school), so I suspect a mistake here; it's possible, however, that they were in the same building. AUUGN-V04.6.pdf: PDP 11/23 + FPU. RK05, RL02, DRIIb I believe that "DR11b" should be "DR11B". AUUGN-V05.1.pdf: PDP 11/23 - System III (Ausam)., 256k, 2xR102, 16 lines AUSAM under System III, on a mere 11/23? I very much doubt it... Also, "R102" should probably be "RL02". AUUGN-V05.1.pdf: PDP 11/23, Q bus + qniverter, RK05, Pertec dual RK05, DEC dual cassette, I suspect that "qniverter" was a typo on the part of the author. As a bit of a Unix historian it would be a shame if those AUUGN scans were less than accurate; I no longer have my hard copies (lost in a house move), so perhaps someone could check their copies? Thanks. -- Dave

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] One's complement (was: reviving a bit of WWB)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > I'm pretty sure PDP-10 wasn't 1's compliment / was 2's compliment.. Just to confirm, I pulled out my PDP-10 Hardware Reference Manual; Vol I - CPU (EK-10/20-HR-001), and it does indeed say (pg. 1-12): "The fixed-point arithmetic instructions use 2's complement representations to do binary arithmetic." Selah. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Cowan > if you are not messing with the kernel or drivers, I find apout to be > delightful. Pretty much all of what little I do with V6 anymore is kernel hacking! :-) Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > On my physical '03 I have twin Sykes floppy drives. I note that in the > LSX archives there is a Sykes driver, so I can adapt that I guess. Yes, here: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/sys/sykfd.c It looks like it should be a straight drop-in, to run it on Mini-Unix. Not sure if your controller is the exact same model, though? Is there any documentation on yours? (I haven't done any searching.) If you want to boot from it, you'll need to write a bootstrap for it; I poked around, but didn't see one. (Not sure how they booted machines with one, back in the day; maybe it wasn't the only drive, and they booted off something else.) You can probably modify the RX one: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/src/rxboot.s https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/src/rxboot2.s Note that this is a 2-stage bootstrap, apparently as a result of the small hardware block size on the RX. And of course there's still the issue of 'how to get bits onto it'. Can floppies for it be written on some other kind of machine? If so, someone on the Classic Computers list: http://www.classiccmp.org/mailman/listinfo/cctalk may be able to help you write those, or an RL02 pack. You should start by getting some experience building V6 OS loads (Mini-Unix will be _very_ similar); use a simulator. I have a lengthy tutorial here: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html It's in terms of Ersatz-11, which I prefer because it has that nice DOS device, which makes it easy to get files into the Unix (so I can use my normal editor on the host machine). However, I gather most people prefer SIMH; there is a tutorial here: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_Unix_v6_in_SIMH (I didn't write it; I know nothing of SIMH) for that option. How do people using SIMH get files into a Unix running on one? Larry Allen just wrote a PDP-11 simulator in Rust, and he's thinking about adding a paper-tape reader (connectable to a file), so that if he installs the stock V6 PTR driver, he can just do 'cat /dev/ptr > myfile'; sort of like how VM/370 used the virtual card reader. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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V6 networking (Was: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal > I'd love to have a look at that and compare and contrast the > approaches. OK; the system is somewhat disorganized, and stuff is in directories here, there and everywhere in it (much is in the home dirs of some of the people who worked on some pieces), so it will take me a fair amount of work to curate it all into an accessible form, but I have put _some_ of it up here: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/net/ If you want to slurp up the whole thing: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/net/net.tar I should explain that the kernel only contains inbound de-multiplexing, and not much else; the TCP is in the user process, allong with the application. (Great for V6 on a small machine...) There is most of what documentation I could find in the 'doc' folder. There were at least two different TCP's in use on that system - maybe three. I have currently only included one (gotta do some more work to get the rest; for Server Telnet, and User/Server FTP), along with a couple of appplications which use it: SMTP, Finger, and User Telnet. The kernel code is mostly there, but there are some minor dribs and drabs of changes/additions elsewhere in the kernetl which I'll have to sort out in the future. The main thing that's not there is the Pronet driver; not very useful! There's also an ICMP paemon (and 'ping'), IIRC, but that's something else I'll have to find. Any questions, or stuff you'd really like to see, let me know. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Apple Quadra to good home

by Rich Morin

We've had three prospects respond (who knew???), so unless they all drop out, I think we're set. -r > A while back, there was some discussion of A/UX. We have an Apple Quadra which was able to boot and run A/UX a few decades ago. If someone wants to pay for shipping from the San Francisco Bay Area, this charming little machine could be theirs. Please respond off-list, to avoid annoying the neighbors... > > -r > > P.S. We're packing and moving, so a prompt response is critical.

4 years, 9 months

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Apple Quadra to good home

by Rich Morin

A while back, there was some discussion of A/UX. We have an Apple Quadra which was able to boot and run A/UX a few decades ago. If someone wants to pay for shipping from the San Francisco Bay Area, this charming little machine could be theirs. Please respond off-list, to avoid annoying the neighbors... -r P.S. We're packing and moving, so a prompt response is critical.

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> Would also be great if supported RL02 drives. ;) _Support_ for RL02's will not be a problem (but there are probably some issues - see below). I have an RL11 driver for V6, which will be easy to include in a system build. There is also a RL V6 boostrap (which lives in block 0 - it loads the OS from a V6 filesystem); how to load it off the RL pack on actual hardware, I'm not sure; do you have some PROM device that has an RL bootstrap in it? Or do you have some other drive which is going to be your boot device? If not, how are you going to get the bits onto an RL pack? This was a bit of an issue for Fritz Muelller with his -11/45 (with an RK05 drive); he finally wound up having to load it over a serial line, which took several hours. He used something called PDP11GUI, and you're in luck, that does support RL02's. Also, I'm not sure if you've had any experience with an old removable-pack drive. If not, you have to be very careful with them; if you have a head crash, the heads are now unobtainium, so a head crash will turn the drive into junk. (Which is a big part of why Dave Bridgham and I are doing to QSIC RK11 emulator...) The packs need to be absolutely clean; a number of people have experience with them, you should probably qget some lessons from them before trying to use it. > I'd imagine the V6 TTY driver would support boards with multiple serial > ports. Guess that's what's needed for multi user access. The TTY code in V6 consists of two levels of driver. The bottom layer is a driver which is specific to the particular type of card one's using; DL-11, DZ-11, etc. If the card supports multiple lines, that driver will too. Then there's a layer above that, tty.c, which the low-level driver uses to interace to the OS; the user talks to that. That layer is multi-line. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Foust > Mark Riordan has a copy and some docs... > http://www.60bits.net/msu/mycomp/terak/termedia.htm Alas, the only thing online there is a list of which floppies he had, not any actual content (other than one document). I've sent him an email (at the address given on that site), we'll see if I get a reply. He might not have a way to read those floppies... If not, no biggie; in asking I more wanted to make sure I wasn't wasting my time, I don't really need him to come through. Having done the /40->/23 move, I'm sure the /05->/03 move won't present any major problems. BTW, looking around for a copy of a document he mentioned, I found this: http://www.tavi.co.uk/unixhistory/mini-unix.html so between them and the stuff at TUHS, I think we have everything we'd need. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Origin of Charlie Root

by Jan Schaumann

Hello, Perhaps this has been discussed here before, but I couldn't find a definitive answer as to the origin of "Charlie Root". https://www.geeklan.co.uk/?p=2457 includes links to some of the /etc/passwd files from 4.1cBSD, 4.2BSD, and 2.9BSD, where we see root changing from being "The Man" to "Charlie &". Speculations on the internet about Charlie Root the baseball player are easy enough to find, but no confirmation or official origin story. So I thought I'd ask here: who can (authoritatively) shed light on how we ended up with Charlie Root? -Jan

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by John Foust

I wrote: >There was one for the Terak (an 11/03) in May 1979 but I've never found a copy. I take it back... Mark Riordan has a copy and some docs... http://www.60bits.net/msu/mycomp/terak/termedia.htm - John

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> If you want multiple users on an -11/03, Mini-Unix would be an option; > zit doesn't support the -11/03 'out of the box', but looking at it, it > shouldn't be too hard. (Heinz mentioned that it had been done before.) On thinking about it, I might do the -11/03 port of Mini-Unix for the hack value; it looks like it should be a quick project (a couple of hours, much of which would be getting Mini-Unix set up; I'd use a simulator, my QBUS RK11 emulator is broken at the moment). I think it should mostly just be some fairly straight-forward changes to mch.s; I think all the C code would be fine. (Unless there's an 'PS->integ' or something hiding somewhere.) Also a few odds and ends, like a software console switch register (been there, done that). That would make the full power of Mini-Unix available to people with -11/03's; those are still fairly common, and reasonably cheap. (Unlike -11/05's.) It's a considerably more capable system than LSX: e.g. the tty driver is the full V6 one, and supports an arbitrary number of devices. So my question is: had anyone else already done this (I don't want to waste time replicating already-done work)? Also, would anyone have a use for it if I did it? If so, I'll put it up on a Web page when I'm done. (No, I _don't_ use Guthub, and have zero interest in learning how. I'd rather spend my remaining un-comitted neurons improving my ability to read feudal Japanese.) Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

by norman＠oclsc.org

Doug McIlroy: To put it more strongly. this is not a legal C source file. char *s = NULL; But this is. char *s = 0; Clem Cole: 67)The macro NULL is defined in <stddef.h> (and other headers) as a null pointer constant; see 7.19. ==== $ cat null.c char *s = NULL; $ cat zero.c char *s = 0; $ zero.c is a legal C program. null.c is not. Create files exactly as shown and compile them if you don't believe me. Prepend `#include <stddef.h>' (or <stdlib.h> or <stdio.h>) to null.c and it becomes legal, but I think that's Doug's point: you need an include file. Personally I prefer to use NULL instead of 0 when spelling out a null pointer, because I think it's clearer: if ((buf = malloc(SIZE)) == NULL) error("dammit andrew"); though I am willing to omit it when there's no confusion about = vs ==: if (*p) dammit(*p, "andrew"); But that's just a question of style, and Doug's is fine too. The language does not require the compiler to pre-define NULL or to recognize it as a keyword; you have to include an appropriate standard header file. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (not 0N nor NULLN)

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley <pdr0663(a)icloud.com> >> the tty driver: >> >> https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/sys/tv.c >> >> only supports a single line. > The second serial port would not be to support another user, but to > communicate with peripherals. Ah. Well, AIX will still have an issue (above). Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by Henry Bent

You're welcome. Other theoretical alternatives are one of the later 2.9BSD patches, though I have had no success getting those to run on anything, and maybe BRL UNIX from the CSRG DVD? I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has tried to get BRL UNIX running. -Henry On Mon, 21 Sep 2020 at 19:36, Paul Riley <pdr0663(a)icloud.com> wrote: > Thanks Henry, that’s an interesting alternative. > > I’m trying to get a photo of the drive label. > > Paul > > Sent from my iPhone > > On 22 Sep 2020, at 7:28 am, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Fri, 18 Sep 2020 at 23:24, Paul Riley <paul(a)rileyriot.com> wrote: > >> >> Team, >> >> I’ve read thru the FAQ and other sources regarding compatibility of >> Research and other flavours on the PDP-11. I have two physical machines, an >> 11/03 and an 11/23+. I’m choosing which version to use on each machine. >> >> Is LSX the only option on the 11/03, or could I run V6 or Mini-Unix with >> more RAM? >> >> From the FAQ, it says V7 would support 11/23 with kernel recompilation, I >> assume includes 11/23+. I see 2.11BSD would also run on a ‘23 (and + I >> guess) with 1MB or more of RAM, so that would be preferred. I suppose 2.11 >> would be preferable. >> >> I also have found another 11/23+ system from a seller here in China. >> There’s the system, and a VT100, and a hard drive I can’t identify. Here’s >> a photo, does anyone know what it is? I may bid for it... >> >> Paul >> >> *Paul Riley* >> > > Ultrix 3.1 should support the 11/23+, which would give you memory support > up to 4MB as well as support for TCP/IP if you have a DEQNA. I don't think > 2.11BSD will run on anything without split I/D which the 23 does not have. > > Without a closer view of the label I doubt that anyone could give you a > definite identification of that hard drive. > > -Henry > >

4 years, 9 months

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Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by Paul Riley

Team, I’ve read thru the FAQ and other sources regarding compatibility of Research and other flavours on the PDP-11. I have two physical machines, an 11/03 and an 11/23+. I’m choosing which version to use on each machine. Is LSX the only option on the 11/03, or could I run V6 or Mini-Unix with more RAM? >From the FAQ, it says V7 would support 11/23 with kernel recompilation, I assume includes 11/23+. I see 2.11BSD would also run on a ‘23 (and + I guess) with 1MB or more of RAM, so that would be preferred. I suppose 2.11 would be preferable. I also have found another 11/23+ system from a seller here in China. There’s the system, and a VT100, and a hard drive I can’t identify. Here’s a photo, does anyone know what it is? I may bid for it... Paul *Paul Riley*

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > Using LSX on the 11/03... Will LSX handle cards with multiple serial > ports? Ah, I just read this carefully; LSX only supports a single user at a time, so there's no use to multiple serial lines? (But see below.) (I thought Heinz' reply message to this referred to Mini-Unix, which does suppport multiple users, but on reading it again I see it does not.) If you want multiple users on an -11/03, Mini-Unix would be an option; it doesn't support the -11/03 'out of the box', but looking at it, it shouldn't be too hard. (Heinz mentioned that it had been done before.) Change all cases of 'mov xx, PS' in mch.s: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Mini-Unix/usr/sys/mxsys/mch.s to 'MTPS xx' (PS access needs a special instructtion in the /03); that might be all you need to do. (Installing a KEV11-A, so you can avoid using the instruction emulation package for EIS instructions would be nice, but apparently isn't required.) If Mini-Unix supports multiple users, it ought to be possible to do the same with LSX. (I'm not sure what the rationale was for making LSX single-user: perhaps the RX was too slow; perhaps there was no need in their use case; etc.) But it would probably be more work than going the Mini-Unix route; e.g. to start with, init only supports a single user: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/src/init.c and the tty driver: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/sys/tv.c only supports a single line. One could cross-port the needed 'stuff' from Mini-Unix, but it'd probably be easier to do the Mini-Unix -11/03 conversion. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Heinz Lycklama > The DLV-11 supported only one serial port in 1975. Other DEC interface > devices may have been added to the Qbus after the mid 1970's. The DLV11-J: http://gunkies.org/wiki/DLV11-J_asynchronous_serial_line_interface is basically 4 DLV11's rolled into a single dual-width card; that's definitely an option for Mini-Unix (which apparently supports up to 4 simultaneous users). They are program compatible with the DHV11, so the driver should 'just work'. The boards are readily available on eBait; 'glitchworks' (of this parish) sells replacement cables (quite good, I have several). Another option for serial lines on QBUS machines are DZ11 and DH11 versions for QBUS. (The DZ11 is interrupt-per-character on output; the DH11 is DMA on output.) There are two generations of each: the DZV11 (quad-width) and DZQ11 (dual-width), and DHV11 (quad) and DHQ11 (dual). I think they are pretty much program compatible with their UNIBUS brethren, and should be easy to get running. The boards are easy to find on eBait, the breakout panels are somewhat rarer (although there sre some DH ohes up at the moment). Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> They are program compatible with the DHV11 Argh; typo. 'DLV11'. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

by norman＠oclsc.org

Brantley Coile: The fact that a pointer of zero generates a hardware trap is not defined in the language, whereas a 0 is is defined to be a null pointer. ===== The language doesn't require that dereferencing a null pointer cause a trap, either. There's no way to guarantee that behaviour in all environments unless every pointer dereference must include instructions to check for the null-pointer value, because C can run in environments in which any pointer value might be a valid address. On modern machines it's conventional for the null-pointer value in C, what you get when you assign 0 to a pointer, to be all-zeroes; and for operating systems to arrange that that address is unmapped. But that wasn't always so (on the PDP-7 there was no memory map; on the PDP-11 once memory-mapping was added, address space was too dear to throw away an eighth of it just to block null-pointer dereferencing), and it may still not be (consider a C program on an embedded system running without a memory map). It's good that modern systems usually whap you in the head if you deference a null pointer, but it's not required, and those who rely on it are as foolish as those who used to rely on the accident that the byte at address 0 on early VAX UNIX was a zero. Norman Wilson p&p6 and f(

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> Thanks so much for your reply. That's what we're here for... :-) > I have an 11/23+ does that make a difference? No. The KDF11-B of the 23+: http://gunkies.org/wiki/KDF11-B_CPU is the same CPU as all the other KDF11 CPUs; it just has a couple of extra peripherals on the board (2 asyn serial lines, and some PROMs, IIRC). > From the manual it seems to have an MMU Like all KDF11 CPUs, it has a socket for an MMU chip, but the chip may or may not be there (I don't know if it was standard on the 23+; and in any event, it may have been pulled - the CPU will work without it). The main CPU is a DIP carrier which holds two chips; the optional KTF11-A MMU has one (see the image, above); the optional KEF11-A FPU is also a carrier with two chips. (The KDF11-B can also hold the large 6-chip carrier of the optional KEF11-B CIS chip - a rara avid indeed, if you'relucky enough to have it.) If yours doesn't have the MMU chip, you're probably SOL; those are very rare. KEF11-A FPU chips are avilable on eBay for modest amounts. > I'm not sure if it's split I/D. None of the KDF11 CPUs support splite I/D. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Unix on DEC AlphaServer 4000

by Rudi Blom

You're a bit harsh on the developers but I think in most cases it was the marketing/finance part of companies which decided on such mundane matters as licensing. My 2-1/2 cents. Cheers, uncle rubl >Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2020 12:42:39 -0700 >From: John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> >To: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> >Cc: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe(a)math.utah.edu>, tuhs > <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> >Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix on DEC AlphaServer 4000 >Message-ID: <32401.1600544559(a)hop.toad.com> ... snip ... >License managers now count as DRM, under the Digital Millennium >Copyright Act (though no such laws had been passed when the license >managers were first created). So: is it worth breaking the law in many >countries, to maintain a historical curiosity? >Personally, I would throw DRM-encrusted software, and the hardware that >is dependent on it, into the dustbin of history. Its creators had fair. >warning that they were making their products unusable after they stopped >caring to maintain them. They didn't care about their place in history, >nor about their users. They did it anyway, for short-term profit and to >harass those people foolish enough to be their customers. Their memes >should not be passed to future generations. As Sir Walter Scott >suggested in another context, they "doubly dying, shall go down, to the. >vile dust, from whence [they] sprung, unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung". John

4 years, 9 months

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Unix on DEC AlphaServer 4000

by Paul Riley

I have an opportunity to buy a DEC AlphaServer. Is there a version of Unix which will run on this? Paul *Paul Riley*

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] revision history of troff -me macro set?

by saint.snit＠gmail.com

Thanks, everyone, for the very helpful replies. Those links are exactly what I was looking for.

4 years, 9 months

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Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?

by Chris Hanson

I have an MVME121 that I’d like to run some stuff on. I’m planning what I’ll need to do to port MINIX 1.5 but since this has a 68451 segmented MMU, I’d like to actually make use of it. Have any historical sources been published for UNIX on the various 68010 + 68451 systems from the early-mid 1980s? I’m curious how they used segmented MMUs. I figure at minimum I could have several segments set up to enforce protections and a stable per-process address space, but it’d be good to have an example. — Chris

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Chris Hanson asks about historical sources for Unix on the Motorola 68K processor. >From my bibliography at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/unix.bib I find these Motorola contributions The Dynamics of a Semi-Large Software Project with Specific Reference to a UNIX System Port USENIX Conference Proceedings, Summer, 1984. Salt Lake City, UT pp. 332--342 [I think that I have a printed copy in my campus office, but won't be there for another 10 days or so.] Latent Source Bugs and UNIX System Portability Proceedings: USENIX Association Winter Conference, January 23--25, 1985, Dallas, Texas, USA pp. 125--130 Co-Resident Operating System: UNIX and Real-Time Distributed Processing Fifth Real-Time Software and Operating Systems Workshop Proceedings, May 12--13, 1988. Washington, DC pp 47--53 Co-Resident Operating System: UNIX and Real-Time Distributed Processing [Fifth RTOS... as above] pp. 47--53 A Faster fsck for BSD UNIX Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference: January 30--February 3, 1989, San Diego, California, USA pp. 173--185 Also take a look at the 200 entries in http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/minix.bib I have made attempts to install Debian 10 on the MC68K on QEMU from an ISO image at https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2020-05-30/ Source code is, of course, available, so it could be useful resource in porting Minix to the MC68K. However, while I can get the ISO image to boot, I get grub update failures and when I try run the installer, I get "No PCI buses available", For now, I have given up on that platform until new ideas for workarounds appear. I have similar emulated VMs for ARM64, RISC-V64, PowerPC (big and little endian), and IBM System 390x, all of which run nicely, have up-to-date O/Ses and binary software package repositories, and are used for routine software build testing. My attempts for other VMs for HPPA, Alpha, and SPARC64 CPUs have failed with install or network problems. Debian ISO images are available for IA-64, but QEMU has no support for the Itanium CPU family. We have a single phyical IA-64 system that runs fine, but is currently powered off due to machine-room air-conditioning issues that will be resolved in a couple of months. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4 years, 9 months

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Plan 9 published manuals

by Al Kossow

https://www.ebay.com/itm/383710751719 how rare are these? $150 seems like a lot of money to spend on them

4 years, 9 months

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revision history of troff -me macro set?

by saint.snit＠gmail.com

Hi, Is there a repository of historical versions of Eric Allman's -me macro set for troff? (For some context: the macro set has been forked to operate with two modern troff implementations: GNU groff and Heirloom troff. According to the header blocks of the respective files, groff's -me macros are forked from version 2.31 of Allman's, and Heirloom's from version 2.14. For help in debugging -me problems in these troff implementations, I'm trying to locate at least these versions of the -me package as they existed before forking. I posted this query on the troff email list, but no one there knew the answer, and one person suggested I ask here.) Thanks for any pointers.

4 years, 9 months

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UNESCO call for a study on the future institutional structure for Software Heritage (fwd)

by Robert Brockway

FYI. UNESCO call for a study on the future institutional structure for Software Heritage. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Dear all, I do hope you are all safe, and could take some time off to recharge the batteries that these hectic times have drained quite a bit. Some of you know already Software Heritage (https://www.softwareheritage.org) it is a nonprofit initiative, started by Inria and supported by UNESCO, whose mission is to ensure that software source code, as part of the common heritage of humankind, is preserved over time and made available to all, building, maintaining and developing a universal source code archive, providing persistent identifiers for all software artifacts, and creating the largest shared knowledge base about software artifacts ever built. This is a long term undertaking, and UNESCO has just published a call for advice, via a small feasibility study providing options for establishing the future independent, non profit, multi-stakeholder organization that will host Software Heritage for the long run. As Software Heritage is a shared infrastructure that will support use cases of interest to the members of this list, I take the liberty to bring this call to your attention, and I'd be very grateful if you could also forward it to whomever you believe could be interested in answering. Detailed information on the expected advice and procedures to answer the call is online at: https://careers.unesco.org/job/Paris-Consultant-on-Software-Heritage-CIMID/… The deadline for the answer is September 26th. Thank you for your help Roberto Di Cosmo (roberto(a)dicosmo.org) _______________________________________________ foundations mailing list foundations(a)lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] The most surprising Unix programs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Guertin > I teach math in college ... Sometimes, during an exam, a student who > forgot to bring their calculator will ask if they can borrow mine I > always say "sure, but you'll regret it" and hand them the calculator > After wasting one or two minutes, they give it back Maybe I'm being clueless/over-asking, but to me it's appalling that any college student (at least all who have _any_ math requirement at all; not sure how many that is) doesn't know how an RPN calculator works. It's not exactly rocket science, and any reasonably intelligent high-schooler should get it extremely quickly; just tell them it's just a representational thing, number number operator instead of number operator number. I know it's not a key intellectual skill, but it does seem to me to be part of comon intellectual heritage that everyone should know, like musical scales or poetry rhyming. Have you ever considered taking two minutes (literally!) to cover it briefly, just 'someone tried to borrow my RPN calculator, here's the basic idea of how they work'? Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [TUHS] A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Dennis Ritchie's ACM Turing Award lecture paper in Communications of the ACM 27(8) 758--760 (August 1984), doi:10.1145/358198.358207 was reprinted in UNIX Review 3(1) 28, 118--120, 122, (January 1985) [no DOI or URL yet found], and more recently, in Resonance 17(8) 810--816 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0091-y. There are two other UNIX-related papers in that issue of Resonance: Pramod Chandra P. Bhatt UNIX: Genesis and design features Resonance 17(8) 727--747 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0084-x K. Bhaskar C --- Past, present, and future --- A perspective Resonance 17(8) 748--758 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0085-9 I do not have access to that journal's archives from my campus library, so I have not seen the articles. In his paper, Dennis Ritchie referred to another UNIX article that I did manage to track down and record in unix.bib: Donald Arthur Norman The Truth about UNIX Datamation 27(12) 139--150 (November 1981) https://tinyurl.com/yyselmxq The original URL is 200+ characters long, and is a freely-downloadable PDF of a reprint in AUUGN volume IV number I. The PDF file has searchable text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4 years, 9 months

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A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Warren Toomey

"Reflections on Software Research" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1283920.1283939?download=true Happy birthday, Dennis! Warren

4 years, 10 months

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Whence did "XXX" come about?

by Dave Horsfall

For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more work" or "look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself. Whence did it come about? I think I saw it as early as PWB, but can't be sure. -- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX"

4 years, 10 months

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Archeology Today - 516-TSS notebooks unearthed in old Wyse terminal box

by Jon Steinhart

Score! I'm not planning to scan all of these in unless someone really cares and has a better scanner than I do. I'm going to prioritize the following: 516-10, -11, -18 Ring Formats 516-12 Specifications for the Node Modem Interface 516-22 A Repeater for the Node Modem 516-28 I/O Ring Device Codes 516-36 Node Modem Interface for Computer Terminals 516-72 Node Test 516-73 Node I/O Software 516-57 Format for the 516 Node - TIU Spider Interface 516-67 Node Format for PDP-11 Jon

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] H.J. Lu Bootable Root & Base System disks

by norman＠oclsc.org

In my humble-but-correct opinion*, Linux and its origins fit into the general topic of UNIX history just as well as those of Research UNIX or BSD or SVr4.2.2.2.2.2.2.2 or SunOS or IRIX or Ultrix or Tru64-compaqted-HPSauce or whatever. It all stems from the same roots, despite the protestations of purists from all sides. Warren gets final say, of course, but to encourage him I will say: Ploooogie! Norman Wilson Toronto ON * One of Peter Weinberger's sayings that I still enjoy overusing.

4 years, 10 months

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Unix tools to aid in the production of Internet RFCs?

by Dan Cross

Honestly, I'm not quite sure if this is a TUHS, COFF, or IH question. But since my background with respect to such things is largely Unix centric, I thought I'd ask in that context, hence asking on TUHS. I assume some of the regulars on this list have authored RFCs (of the IETF etc variety). The RFC format seems fairly well fixed: table of contents, fixed number of lines per page, page numbers and dates in the footer, and so forth. The format is sufficiently complex that it seems like some tooling could be usefully employed to aid in producing these documents. So I'm curious: what tools did people use to produce those documents? Perhaps `nroff` with custom macros or something? - Dan C.

4 years, 10 months

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Quick video: what's the oldest BSD distro

by Warner Losh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww60o940kEk You may be surprised :) Warner P.S. Hope this is relevant enough to share here. Also, if I botched anything I've not yet mentioned in the comments, please let me know...

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] bare m4 (was BTL summmer employees)

by Doug McIlroy

A modestly corrected and improved version of my bare-m4 program, which quickly builds from nothing to arithmetic on binary numbers using no builtins other than `define'. is posted at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/barem4.txt. (.txt because browsers balk at .m4) Doug

4 years, 10 months

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early BIND

by Tony Finch

Another question at the intersection of the Internet-History and TUHS lists... I was wondering about the early history of BIND. I started off wondering about the relative ages of JEEVES (the original PDP10 DNS server) and BIND. Judging by the dates on RFCs 881 - 883, the DARPA contract commissioning BIND, and the Berkeley tech reports, it seems there wasn't much time when the DNS was without BIND. But I was struck by the resolver API set out on page 8 of Berkeley tech report UCB/CSD-84-182: it looks nothing like the familiar API that ended up in 4.3BSD. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1984/5957.html https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/src/lib/libc/net/n… So I'm wondering if there's anything out there recording the history between the 1984 tech reports and the 4.3BSD release in 1986. (It's also noteworthy that early BIND supported incremental DNS updates and zone transfers, which didn't reappear in standard form until RFC 2136 (1997) and RFC 1995 (1996)...) Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ public services of the highest quality

4 years, 10 months

1
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Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by Paul Ruizendaal

Doug, “In fact Dennis's compiler did not use AID instructions for that purpose.” Whilst local variables are indeed accessed as an offset from the base pointer, I’m not sure that the above statement is correct. In the V6 compiler (-sp) was certainly used to push arguments to the stack, and when the register allocation overflowed, the interim results were pushed to the stack as well with (-sp). See c10.c, the case CALL in rcexpr(), the function comarg() and sptab (which is right at the end of table.s) Links: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/c/c10.c https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/c/table.s For interim result pushing/popping I refer to the FS and SS macro’s. Dennis discusses these in his “A tour of the C compiler” paper. https://www.jslite.net/cgi-bin/9995/doc/tip/doc/old-ctour.pdf Of course this is all implementational detail, not a core design aspect - as Richard Miller showed in his port to the Interdata architecture (including a port of the Ritchie C compiler). Maybe the sentence should have read: "In fact Dennis's compiler did not rely on having AID instructions for that purpose." Paul @Warren: at moments like these I really like having the line highlight feature that we discussed before Summer.

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Cowan > That's always true on the PDP-11 and Vax ... because the processor > architecture (which has pre-increment and post-decrement instructions, > but not their counterparts) After Doug's message, I carefull re-read this, and I'm not sure it's correct? The PDP-11 has pre-decrement and post-increment, not the other way around (as above) - unless I'm misunderstanding what you meant by those terms? That's why: *p++ = 0; turns (if p is in R2) into CLR (R2)+ R2 is used, and then incremented after it has been used. Noel

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by Doug McIlroy

> That's always true on the PDP-11 and Vax, no matter what the OS, > because the processor architecture (which has pre-increment and > post-decrement instructions, but not their counterparts) makes > anything but a downward-growing stack unmanageable. I hadn't heard this urban legend before. A stack is certainly manageable without auto-increment/decrement (AID) instructions. In fact Dennis's compiler did not use AID instructions for that purpose. AID instructions are nice for a LIFO stack, in which a stacked item disappears as soon as it's used--as do intermediate results in expression evaluation. But when the stack contains local variables that are accessed multiple times, the accesses are offset from the stack pointer. If AID instructions set the pointer, then the offset of a particular local varies throughout the code. The compiler can cope with that (I once wrote a compiler that did so), but a debugger will have a devil of a time doing a backtrace when the offset of the return address in each stack frame depends on the location counter. AID instructions are fine for sequentially accessing arrays, and in principle Ken's ++ and -- operators can exploit them. Yet idiomatic C typically wants post-increment and pre-decrement instructions--the opposite of what DEC offered. Examples: char a[N], b[N]; char *ap = a; char *bp = b; int i; for(i=0; i<N; i++) *ap++ = *bp++; int a[N], b[N]; int i = N; while(--i >= 0) a[i] = b[i]; Doug

4 years, 10 months

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Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by Dibyendu Majumdar

Hi, I have a project to revive the C compiler from V7/V10. I wanted to check if anyone here knows about the memory management in the compiler (c0 only for now). I am trying to migrate the memory management to malloc/free but I am struggling to understand exactly how memory is being managed. Thanks and Regards Dibyendu

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by Steve Simon

I am fairly sure the interdata port from Wollongong used the v6 c compiler, and this lived on in the “official” v7 port from perkin elmer, it still used the v6 compiler. i remember the pain of the global namespace for structure members. -Steve

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] bare m4 (was BTL summmer employees)

by Doug McIlroy

> >> Even high-school employees could make lasting contributions. I am > >> indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer > >> assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative > >> memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses. > > > Can you give some examples of what this looked like? > See attached for an answer to Arnold's question Doug

4 years, 10 months

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BTL pranks [was AT&T Research]

by Doug McIlroy

> Did the non-Unix people also pull pranks like the watertower? One of my favorites was by John Kelly, a Texas original, who refused the department-head perk of a rug so he could stamp his cigarettes out on the vinyl floor. John came from Visual and Acoustics Research, where digital signal processing pressed the frontiers of computing. Among his publications was the completely synthetic recording of "Daisy, Daisy" released circa 1963. Kelly electrified the computer center with a blockbuster prank a year or two before that. As was typical of many machine rooms, a loudspeaker hooked to the low-order bit of the accumulator played gentle white noise in the background. The noise would turn into a shriek when the computer got into a tight loop, calling the operators to put the program out of its misery. Out of the blue one day, the loudspeaker called for help more articulately: "Help, I'm caught in a loop. Help, I'm caught in a loop. ..." it intoned in a slow Texas drawl. News of the talking computer spread instantly and folks croweded into the machine room to marvel before the operators freed the poor prisoner. Doug

4 years, 10 months

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Style command source available?

by Richard Salz

Is the style command (and perhaps other DWB programs) legally available anywhere? Replies to me will be summarized for the list. :) tnx.

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by norman＠oclsc.org

Dan Cross: I'll confess I haven't looked _that_ closely, but I rather imagine that the V10 compiler is a descendant of PCC rather than Dennis's V6/V7 PDP-11 compiler. ==== Correct. From 8/e to the end of official Research UNIX, cc was pcc2 with a few research-specific hacks. As Dan says, lcc was there too, but not used a lot. I'm not sure which version of lcc it was; probably it was already out-of-date. In my private half-backed 10/e descendant system, which runs only on MicroVAXes in my basement, cc is an lcc descendant instead. I took the lcc on which the book was based and re-ported it to the VAX to get an ISO- compliant C compiler, and made small changes to libc and /usr/include to afford ISO-C compliance there too. The hardest but most-interesting part was optimizing. lcc does a lot of optimization work by itself, and initially I'd hoped to dispense with a separate c2 pass entirely, but that turns out not to be feasible on machines like the VAX or the PDP-11: internally lcc separates something like c = *p++; into two operations c = *p; p++; and makes two distinct calls to the code generator. To sew them back together from cvtbl (p),c incl p to cvtbl (p)+,c requires external help; lcc just can't see that what it thinks of as two distinct expressions can be combined. It's more than 15 years since I last looked at any of this stuff, but I vaguely remember that lcc has its own interesting (but ISO/POSIX-compatible) memory-allocation setup. It allows several nested contexts' worth of allocation, freeing an inner context when there's no longer any need for it. For example, once the compiler has finished with a function and has no further need for its local symbols, it frees the associated memory. See the lcc book for details. Read the book anyway; it's the one case I know of in which the authors followed strict Literate Programming rules and made a big success of it. Not only is the compiler well- documented, but the result is a wonderful tour through the construction and design decisions of a large program that does real work. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dibyendu Majumdar > the C compiler from V7/V10. I wanted to check if anyone here knows > about the memory management in the compiler (c0 only for now). I am > trying to migrate the memory management to malloc/free but I am > struggling to understand exactly how memory is being managed. Well, I don't know much about the V7 compiler; the V6 one, which I have looked at, doesn't (except for the optimizer, C2) use allocated memory at all. The V7 compiler seems to use sbrk() (the system call to manage the location of the end of a process' data space), and manage the additional data space 'manually'; it does not seem to use a true generic heap. See gblock() in c01.c: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/c/c01.c which seems to use two static variables (curbase and coremax) to manage that additional memory: p = curbase; if ((curbase =+ n) >= coremax) { if (sbrk(1024) == -1) { error("Out of space"); exit(1); } coremax =+ 1024; } return(p); My guess is that there's no 'free' at all; each C source file is processed by a new invocation of C0, and the old 'heap' is thrown away when the process exits when it gets to the EOF. Noel

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry > It's possible the concept existed in some other OS but I'm not aware of > it. It's pretty old. Both TENEX and ITS had the ability to map file pages into a process' address space. Not sure if anything else of that vintage had it (not sure what other systems back then _had_ paging, other than Atlas; those two both had custom KA10 homebrew hardware mods to support paging). Of course, there's always Multics... (sorry, Ken :-). Noel

4 years, 10 months

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bsdcan talk

by Andrew Hume

fyi warner, in your talk, you referred to Alex Fraser at bell labs. he was my first director, and always went by “sandy”. i asked my wife (who was a secretary at the time) and she said he was occasionally referred to as Alex. certainly, every time i saw anything written by him or references to a talk by him always used “sandy”. andrew

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 55, Issue 9

by Will Senn

> > Message: 6 > Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 16:51:27 -0600 > From: Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> > To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> > Subject: [TUHS] My BSDcan talk > Message-ID: > <CANCZdfpq8tiDYe2iVeFh1h0VMDK+4B=kXuGSJ3iNmtjbzHQT6Q(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > OK. Must be off my game... I forgot to tell people about my BSDcan talk > earlier today. It was streamed live, and will be online in a week or > three... > > It's another similar to the last two. I've uploaded a version to youtube > until the conference has theirs ready. It's a private link, but should work > for anybody that has it. Now that I've given my talk it's cool to share > more widely... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRq8xEvFS_g > > The link at the end is wrong. https://github.com/bsdimp/bsdcan2020-demos is > the proper link. > > Please let me know what you think. > > Warner > Just saw your BSDcan talk. Great stuff, so much progress in the last five years. Just wanna say thanks. When I started looking into ancient systems, it was hard finding anything coherent on the historical side beyond manuals and this list (thankful to Warren & co for the list). Your talk is packed with interesting information and really pulls together the recent pieces. Great job, Warner.

4 years, 10 months

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BSTJ archives

by Kirk McKusick

I needed to look up something in the Bell System Technical Journal (Wikipedia didn't have it) and discovered that the old Alcatel-Lucent site that used to host a free archive of BSTJ no longer seems extant. (No surprise, the Web is nothing if not ephemeral.) After a bit of Googling, I did find that the archives are now residing at <https://archive.org/details/bstj-archives> and found what I was looking for there. Hope others find this link useful. At least until it too "sublimaates". Kirk McKusick

4 years, 10 months

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CR delay for VT05

by Richard Tobin

Looking at the 6th edition man page tty(2), I see Carriage-return delay type 1 lasts about .08 seconds and is suitable for the Terminet 300. Delay type 2 lasts about .16 seconds and is suitable for the VT05 and the TI 700. Delay type 3 is unimplemented and is 0. New-line delay type 1 is dependent on the current column and is tuned for Teletype model 37's. Type 2 is useful for the VT05 and is about .10 seconds. Type 3 is unimplemented and is 0. Why would the VT05 (a VDU) need a delay for carriage return? I can just about imagine that it might need one for linefeed if it shifted the characters in memory. -- Richard -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] [simh] 2bsd tarball

by Johnny Billquist

On 2020-07-29 15:17, Paul Koning wrote: > > >> On Jul 29, 2020, at 5:50 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt(a)softjar.se> wrote: >> >> Just a small comment. Whoever it was that thought DECtape was a tape was making a serious mistake. DECtapes are very different from magtapes. >> >> Johnny > > Depends on what you're focusing on. Most tapes are not random-write. DECtape and EL-X1 tape are exceptional in that respect. But tapes, DECtape include, have access time proportional to delta block number (and that time is large) unlike disks. > > From the point of view of I/O semantics, the first point is significant and the second one not so much. True. But seek times are in the end only relevant as an aspect of the speed of the thing, nothing else. However, seek times on DECtape aren't really comparable to magtape either. Because DECtape deals with absolute block numbers. So you can always, no matter where you are, find out where you are, and how far you will need to move to get to the correct block. With magtapes, this is pretty much impossible. You'll have to rewind, and then start seeking. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

4 years, 11 months

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2bsd tarball

by Will Senn

OK, I was able to locate 2bsd.tar.gz and spencer_2bsd.tar.gz in the archive. Neither is an installation tape. It appears that they are just tarballs of their respective systems (there are very minor differences between the two). In the TAPE file in the tarball, it talks about reading the tar program off of the tape using: dd if=/dev/mt0 bs=1b skip=1 of=tar Well, tar is definitely not located at that address, which implies that the tarball isn't a distro tape. This note in the archive used to read: ... The remaining gzipped tar files are other 2BSD distributions supplied by Keith Bostic, except for spencer_2bsd.tar.gz which came from Henry Spencer. They do not contain installation tape images. The 2.9BSD-Patch directory contains patches to 2.9BSD dated August 85, and again supplied by Keith Bostic. ... now it reads: ... 2.11BSD 2.11BSD-pl195.tar is a copy of 2.11BSD at patch level 195, supplied by Tom Ivar Helbekkmo. spencer_2bsd.tar.gz is a version of 2BSD which came from Henry Spencer. ... I recall having to do something with cont.a files, which are not present on these images. So, my questions is, does anyone know of or have an actual 2bsd tape/tape image? Thanks, Will Here's where I found the tarballs: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/ -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 11 months

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in memoriam - Bill English, mouse co-creator

by Will Senn

All, About a week ago, Bill English passed away. He was a Xerox guy, who along with Douglas Engelbart of "Mother of all demos" fame, created our beloved mouse: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53638033 I remember, back in the mid-1980's being part of a focus group evaluating Microsoft's mouse. Wow, time flies. -Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] BTL summer employees

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > I haven't investigated it thoroughly, but I do see a file .DOVR.;.SPOOL > 8 written in C by Eliot Moss. > ... > When sending to the DOVER, the spooler waits until Spruce is > free before sending another file. Ah, so there was a spooler on the ITS machine as well; I didn't know/remember that. I checked on CSR, and it did use TFTP to send it to the Alto spooler: HOST MIT-SPOOLER, LCS 2/200,SERVER,TFTPSP,ALTO,[SPOOLER] I vaguely recall the Dover being named 'Spruce', but that name wasn't in the host table... I have this vague memory that 'MIT-Spooler' was the Alto which prove the Dover, but now that I think about it, it might have been another one (which ran only TFTP->EFTP spooler software). IIRC the Dover as a pain to run, it required a very high bit rate, and the software to massage it was very tense; so it may have made sense to do the TFTP->EFTP (I'm pretty sure the vanilla Dover spoke EFTP, but maybe I'm wrong, and it used the PUP stream protocol) in another machine. It'd be interesting to look at the Dover spooler on ITS, and see if/how one got to the CHAOS network from C - and if so, how it identified the protocol translating box. Noel

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] 211bsd kermit working

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > $c > 0177520: ~signal(016,01) from ~sysinit+034 > 0177542: ~sysinit() from ~main+010 > 0177560: _main() from start+0104 > If this means it got signal 16... or 1 from the sysinit call (called > from main) I'm not sure that interpretation is correct. I think that trace shows signal() being called from sysinit(). On V6, signal() was a system call which one could use to set the handlers for signals (or set them to be ignored, or back to the default action). In. 2.11 it seems to be a shim layer which provides the same interface, but uses the Berserkly signal system interface underneath: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/include/signal.h https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/man/cat3/signal.0 So maybe the old binary for kermit is still trying to use the (perhaps now-removed) signal system call? Noel

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] BTL summer employees

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > the Dover printer spooler was written using Snyder's C compiler I'm not sure if that's correct. I don't remember with crystal clarity all the details of how we got files to the Dover, but here's what I recall (take with 1/2 a grain of salt, my memory may have dropped some bits). To start with, there were different paths from the CHAOS and TCP/IP worlds. IIRC, there was a spooler on the Alto which ran the Dover, and the two worlds had separate paths to get to it. >From the CHAOS world, there was a protocol translation which ran on whatever machine had the AI Lab's 3Mbit Ethernet interface - probably MIT-AI's CHAOS-11? If you look at the Macro-11 code from that, you should see it - IIRC it translated (on the fly) from CHAOS to EFTP, the PUP prototocol which the spooler ran 'natively'. >From the IP world, IIRC, Dave Clark had adapted his Alto TCP/IP stack (written in BCPL) to run in the spooler alongside the PUP software; it included a TFTP server, and people ran TFTP from TCP/IP machines to talk to it. (IP access to the 3Mbit Ethernet was via another UNIBUS Ethernet interface which was plugged into an IP router which I had written. The initial revision was in Macro-11; a massive kludge which used hairy macrology to produce N^2 discrete code paths, one for every pair of interfaces on the machine. Later that was junked, and replaced with the 'C Gateway' code.) I can, if people are interested, look on the MIT-CSR machine dump I have to see how it (a TCP/IP machine) printed on the Dover, to confirm that it used TFTP. I don't recall a role for any PDP-10 C code, though. I don't think there was a spooler anywhere except on the Dover's Alto. Where did that bit about the PDP-10 spooler in C come from, may I enquire? Was it a CMU thing, or something like that? Noel

4 years, 11 months

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BTL summer employees

by Doug McIlroy

> My unscientific survey of summer students was that they either came > from scouts, or were people working on advanced degrees in college. Not all high-school summer employees were scouts (or scout equivalents - kids who had logins on BTL Unix machines). I think in particular of Steve Johnson and Stu Feldman, who eventually became valued permanent employees. The labs also hired undergrad summer employees. I was one. Even high-school employees could make lasting contributions. I am indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses. Doug

4 years, 11 months

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211bsd kermit working

by Will Senn

I'm running 211bsd pl 431 in SimH on FreeBSD. I've got networking working on a tap interface both inbound and outbound. I still have a few issues hanging around that are bugging me, but I'll eventually get to them. One that is of concern at the moment is kermit. It is in the system under /usr/new/kermit. When I call it, I get: kermit Bad system call - core dumped I don't see core anywhere and if I did, I'd need to figure out what to do with it anyway (mabye adb), but I'm wondering if anyone's used kermit successfully who is on pl 431 or knows what's going on? Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 11 months

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Regular Expressions

by Will Senn

I've always been intrigued with regexes. When I was first exposed to them, I was mystified and lost in the greediness of matches. Now, I use them regularly, but still have trouble using them. I think it is because I don't really understand how they work. My question for y'all has to do with early unix. I have a copy of Thompson, K. (1968). Regular expression search algorithm. Communications of the ACM, 11(6), 419-422. It is interesting as an example of Thompson's thinking about regexes. In this paper, he presents a non-backtracking, efficient, algorithm for converting a regex into an IBM 7094 (whatever that is) program that can be run against text input that generates matches. It's cool. It got me to thinking maybe the way to understand the unix regex lies in a careful investigation into how it is implemented (original thought, right?). So, here I am again to ask your indulgence as the latecomer wannabe unix apprentice. My thought is that ed is where it begins and might be a good starting point, but I'm not sure - what say y'all? I also have a copy of the O'Reilly Mastering Regular Expressions book, but that's not really the kind of thing I'm talking about. My question is more basic than how to use regexes practically. I would like to understand them at a parsing level/state change level (not sure that's the correct way to say it, but I'm really new to this kind of lingo). When I'm done with my stepping through the source, I want to be able to reason that this is why that search matched that text and not this text and why the search was greedy, or not greedy because of this logic here... If my question above isn't focused or on topic enough, here's an alternative set to ruminate on and hopefully discuss: 1. What's the provenance of regex in unix (when did it appear, in what form, etc)? 2. What are the 'best' implementations throughout unix (keep it pre 1980s)? 3. What are some of the milestones along the way (major changes, forks, disagreements)? 4. Where, in the source, or in a paper, would you point someone to wanting to better understand the mechanics of regex? Thanks! Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Regular Expressions

by Doug McIlroy

> 1. What's the provenance of regex in unix (when did it appear, in what form, etc)? > 2. What are the 'best' implementations throughout unix (keep it pre1980s)? > 3. What are some of the milestones along the way (major changes, forks, disagreements)? The editor ed was in Unix from day 1. For the necessarily tiny implementation, Ken discarded various features from the ancestral qed. Among the casualties was alternation in regular expressions. It has never fully returned. Ken's original paper described a method for simulating all paths of a nondeterministic finite automaton in parallel, although he didn't describe it in these exact terms. This meant he had to keep track of up to n possible states, where n is the number of terminal symbols in the regular expression. "Computing Reviews" published a scathing critique of the paper: everyone knows a deterministic automaton can recognize regular expressions with one state transition per input character; what a waste of time to have to keep track of multiple states! What the review missed was that the size of the DFA can be exponential in n. For one-shot use, as in an editor, it can take far longer to construct the DFA than to run it. This lesson came home with a vengeance when Al Aho wrote egrep, which implemented full regular expressions as DFA's. I happened to be writing calendar(1) at the same time, and used egrep to search calendar files for dates in rather free formats for today and all days through the next working day. Here's an example (egrep interprets newline as "|"): (^|[ (,;])(([Aa]ug[^ ]* *|(08|8)/)0*1)([^0123456789]|$) (^|[ (,;])((\* *)0*1)([^0123456789]|$) (^|[ (,;])(([Aa]ug[^ ]* *|(08|8)/)0*2)([^0123456789]|$) (^|[ (,;])((\* *)0*2)([^0123456789]|$) (^|[ (,;])(([Aa]ug[^ ]* *|(08|8)/)0*3)([^0123456789]|$) (^|[ (,;])((\* *)0*3)([^0123456789]|$) Much to Al's chagrin, this regular expression took the better part of a minute to compile into a DFA, which would then run in microseconds. The trouble was that the DFA was enormously bigger than the input--only a tiny fraction of the machine's states would be visited; the rest were useless. That led him to the brilliant idea of constructing the machine on the fly, creating only the states that were pertinent to the input at hand. That innovation made the DFA again competitive with an NFA. Doug

4 years, 11 months

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Unix and SW Releases (was V7 et al from Will)

by Clem Cole

This topic is still primarily UNIX but is getting near the edge of COFF, so I'll CC there if people want to follow up. As I mentioned to Will, during the time Research was doing the work/put out their 'editions', the 'releases' were a bit more ephemeral - really a set of bits (binary and hopefully matching source, but maybe not always) that become a point in time. With 4th (and I think 5th) Editions it was a state of disk pack when the bits were copies, but by 6th edition, as Noel points out, there was a 'master tape' that the first site at an institution received upon executing of a signed license, so the people at each institution (MIT, Purdue, CMU, Harvard) passed those bits around inside. But what is more, is what Noel pointed out, we all passed source code and binaries between each other, so DNA was fairly mixed up [sorry Larry - it really was 'Open Source' between the licensees]. Sadly, it means some things that actually were sourced at one location and one system, is credited sometimes credited from some other place the >>wide<< release was in USG or BSD [think Jim Kulp's Job control, which ended up in the kernel and csh(1) as part in 4BSD, our recent discussions on the list about more/pg/less, the different networking changes from all of MIT/UofI/Rand, Goble's FS fixes to make the thing more crash resilient, the early Harvard ar changes - *a.k.a.* newar(1) which became ar(1), CMU fsck, e*tc*.]. Eventually, the AT&T Unix Support Group (USG) was stood up in Summit, as I understand it, originally for the Operating Companies as they wanted to use UNIX (but not for the licenses, originally). Steve Johnson moved from Research over there and can tell you many more of the specifics. Eventually (*i.e.* post-Judge Green), distribution to the world moved from MH's Research and the Patent Licensing teams to USG and AT&T North Carolina business folks. That said, when the distribution of UNIX moved to USG in Summit, things started to a bit more formal. But there were still differences inside, as we have tried to unravel. PWB/TS and eventually System x. FWIW, BSD went through the same thing. The first BSD's are really the binary state of the world on the Cory 11/70, later 'Ernie.' By the time CSRG gets stood up because their official job (like USG) is to support Unix for DARPA, Sam and company are acting a bit more like traditional SW firms with alpha/beta releases and a more formal build process. Note that 2.X never really went through that, so we are all witnessing the wonderful efforts to try to rebuild early 2.X BSD, and see that the ephemeral nature of the bits has become more obvious. As a side story ... the fact is that even for professional SW houses, it was not as pure as it should be. To be honest, knowing the players and processes involved, I highly doubt DEC could rebuild early editions of VMS, particularly since the 'source control' system was a physical flag in Cutler's office. The fact is that the problem of which bits were used to make what other bits was widespread enough throughout the industry that in the mid-late 80s when Masscomp won the bid to build the system that Nasa used to control the space shuttle post-Challenger, a clause of the contract was that we have put an archive of the bits running on the build machine ('Yeti'), a copy of the prints and even microcode/PAL versions so that Ford Aerospace (the prime contractor) could rebuild the exact system we used to build the binaries for them if we went bankrupt. I actually, had a duplicate of that Yeti as my home system ('Xorn') in my basement when I made some money for a couple of years as a contract/on-call person for them every time the shuttle flew. Anyway - the point is that documentation and actual bits being 100% in sync is nothing new. Companies work hard to try to keep it together, but different projects work at different speeds. In fact, the 'train release' model is what is usually what people fall into. You schedule a release of some piece of SW and anything that goes with it, has to be on the train or it must wait for the next one. So developers and marketing people in firms argue what gets to be the 'engine' [hint often its HW releases which are a terrible idea, but that's a topic for COFF].

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Debugging help sought

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > 8 I think was the limit. IIRC, you could use longer names than that (in C), but external references only used the first 7 (in C - C symbols had a leading '_' tacked on; I used to know why), 8 (in assembler). > Could that cause this error? Seems unlikely - see below. > The error comes from lookloc. This is called for external type > relocations. It searches the local symbol table for something that > matches the relocation entry. This error happens when it can't find > it... Someone who actually looked at the source: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/ld.c instead of just guessing. Give that man a star! I spent a while looking at the code, trying to figure out i) how it works, and ii) what's going wrong with that message, but I don't have a definitive answer. The code is not super well commented, so one has to actually understand what it's doing! :-) It seems to my initial perusal that it maintains two symbol tables, one for globals (which accumulates as each file is processed), and one for locals (which is discarded/reset for each file). As Werner mentioned, the message appears when a local symbol referenced in the relocation information in the current file can't be found (in the local symbol table). It's not, I think, simply due to too many local symbols in an input file - there seems to be a check for that as it's reading the input file symbol table: if (lp >= &local[NSYMPR]) error(1, "Local symbol overflow"); *lp++ = symno; *lp++ = sp; although of course there could be a bug which breaks this check. It seems to me that this is an 'impossible' error, one which can only happen due to i) a bug in the loader (a fencepost error, or something), or ii) an error in the input a.out file. I don't want to spend more time on it, since I'm not sure if you've managed to bypass the problem. If not, let me know, and we'll track it down. (This may involve you addding some printf's so we have more info about the details.) Noel

4 years, 11 months

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Debugging help sought

by Adam Thornton

I finally munged lbforth.c (https://gist.github.com/lbruder/10007431) into compiling cleanly on mostly-stock v7 with the system compiler (lbforth itself does fine on 211BSD, but it needs a little help to build in a real K&R environment). Which would be nice, except that when it gets to the linker.... $ cc -o 4th forth.c ld:forth.o: Local symbol botch WTF? How do I begin to debug this? Adam

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] v7, adb, and fcreat

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > it finally clicked that it is just one (of many) bit buckets out there > with the moniker v6. ... I am coming from a world where OS version > floppy/cd/dvd images are copies of a single master ... These tape things > could be snapshots of the systems they originate from at very different > times and with different software/sources etc. Well, sort of. Do remember that everyone with V6 had to have a license, which at that point you could _only_ get from Western Electric. So every _institution_ (which is not the same as every _machine_) had had to have had dealings with them. However, once your institution was 'in the club', stuff just got passed around. E.g. the BBN V6 system with TCP/IP: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6 I got that by driving over to BBN, and talking to Jack Haverty, and he gave us a tape (or maybe a pack, I don't recall exactly). But we had a V6 license, so we could do that. But my particular machine, it worked just the way you described: we got our V6 from the other V6 machine in the Tech Sq building (RTS/DSSR), including not only Bell post-V6 'leakage' like adb, but their local hacks (e.g. their TTY driver, and the ttymod() system call to get to its extended features; the ability to suspend selected applications; yadda, yadda). We never saw a V6 tape. Noel

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] v7, adb, and fcreat

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > I don't think adb was in v6, where the fcreat function and buf struct > are used... Were Maranzano and Bourne using some kind of hybrid 6+ system? In addition to the point about skew between the released and internal development, it's worth remembering just how long it was between the V6 and V7 releases, and how much ground was covered technically during that period. A lot of that stuff leaked out: we've talked about the upgraded 'Typesetter C' (and compilers), which a lot of people had, and the V6+ system at MIT (partially sort of PWB1) had both 'adb' and the stdio library. The latter also made its way to lots of places; in my 'improved V6 page': http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/ImprovingV6.html it talks about finding the standard I/O stuff in several later V6 repositories, including a UNSW tape. But it and typsetter C, also on the Shoppa pack, were clearly quite widespread. Noel

4 years, 11 months

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v7, adb, and fcreat

by Will Senn

I've done research on this, but I'm confused and would appreciate some help to understand what's going on. In the 7th edition manual, vol 2, there's an ADB tutorial (pp. 323-336). In the tutorial, the authors, Maranzano and Bourne, walk the reader through a debugging session. The first example is predicated on a buffer overflow bug and the code includes: struct buf { int fildes; int nleft; char *nextp; char buff[512]; }bb; struct buf *obuf; ... if((fcreat(argv[1],obuf)) < 0){ ... Well, this isn't v7 code. As discussed in the v7 manual vol 1 (p. VII): Standard I/O. The old fopen, getc, putc complex and the old –lp package are both dead, and even getchar has changed. All have been replaced by the clean, highly efficient, stdio(3) package. The first things to know are that getchar(3) returns the integer EOF (–1), which is not a possible byte value, on end of file, that 518-byte buffers are out, and that there is a defined FILE data type. The buffers are out, fcreat is gone, etc. So, what's up with this? I don't think adb was in v6, where the fcreat function and buf struct are used... Were Maranzano and Bourne using some kind of hybrid 6+ system? Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 11 months

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2.11BSD Status Update

by Warner Losh

OK. I'm plowing through a lot of issues with the putative 2.11BSD reconstructions I've done to date. I keep finding things dated too new to be right. And it turns out that a few patches "snuck in" when the patch 80 catch up was done. I've outlined the ones I've found so far at https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/08/missing-211bsd-patches.html but I'm sure there's at least one more. There was much ambiguity over /usr/new and /usr/local that lead to some of these, but others look like they were in the master tree, but never formally published that have all the hallmarks of legit bug fixes... I've also detailed the issues in going backwards. 2.11BSDpl195 had a different .o format than 2.11BSDpl0. And to make matters worse, its assembler couldn't assemble the assembler from the initial release, so I had to get creative (using apout, thanks to all who contributed to that!). I've also blogged about how to walk back a binary change when the old programs no longer build on the new system. I think I got lucky that it was possible at all :). https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/08/bootstrapping-211bsd-no-patches-from.ht… has the blow by blow. There are a lot of steps to building even a normal system... Let alone walking through the minefield of errors that you need to do when stepping back... And neither of these even begin to get into the issues with the build system itself requiring workarounds for that... But anyway, I keep making "ur2.11BSD" tapes, installing them and fixing the issues I find... While much information was destroyed in the process, there's a surprising amount of redundancy that one can use to 'test' putative tapes. Warner P.S. ur2.11BSD is from urFOO in linguisting, meaning the original FOO that's been lost and which some amount of reconstruction / speculation is offered about it. Still looking for a good name for the reconstructed 2.11BSD release....

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Regular Expressions

by Rudi Blom

Probably same as others do, when I'm implementing some 'trace' messages in a new program or one just 'under investigation' I try to make sure the message has a nice format to be able to process a few megabyte of logfile easily. Cheers, uncle rubl

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation

by norman＠oclsc.org

John Gilmore: Yes -- but [Bell Labs'] administration was anything but egalitarian or meritocratic. I know someone who had immense trouble getting inside the door at the Labs because "all" he had was a bachelor's degree. Let their character be judged by how they treated a stranger. Sign me proud to have succeeded in life with no degrees at all, ==== That was where local management came in. I have no degrees at all. I haven't been nearly as successful in many ways as John, but I was recruited and hired by 1127. That I had no degree meant I was initially hired as a `special technical assistant' rather than a `member of technical staff,' but my department head and director and executive director (the last was the legendary Vic Vyssotsky) worked tirelessly on my behalf, without my pushing them at all, to get me upgraded, and succeeded after I'd been there about a year. It was only later that I realized just how much work they'd done on my behalf. The upgrade gave me a big raise in pay, but I was young enough and nerdy enough not to notice. Within the 1127 culture there was no perceptible difference; it was very much an egalitarian culture. I felt respected as an equal from the start (really from the day and a half I spent interviewing there). Not every part of the Labs, let alone AT&T, was like that, especially outside of the Research area. I didn't realize it initially but that was one of the ways I benefited from the success of UNIX (that 1127's and 112's management could push past such bureaucratic barriers). After all, Ken never had more than an MS. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 11 months

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Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation

by Kirk McKusick

The Computer History Museum has an interesting blog post about Dennis Ritchie's lost dissertation: https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies-lost-dissertat… Interesting fact is that Dennis never received his PhD because he failed to provide a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library. Kirk McKusick

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's dissertation

by Doug McIlroy

> The use of honorifics was subtly discouraged at the Labs. I never saw a policy statement, but nobody I knew used "Dr" (except those in the medical department) With the sole exception of the president's office, secretaries were instructed not to say "Dr so-and-so's office" when they picked up an unanswered phone call. (When that happened you could be sure that the party you were calling was genuinely unavailable. Part of the AT&T ethos--now abandoned--was that everybody, right up to the president, answered their own phones.) Doug

4 years, 11 months

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vi in v7

by Will Senn

On another front. I know I've asked this before in v6, and possibly related to v7, but I can't find the notes anywhere. vi doesn't come with v7. So, has anybody put it on v7 in simh? I saw a thread sometime back where vi on v7 wasn't the main topic, where Warren? I think it was, said he'd done it and it was "easy." I don't suppose there are any notes laying around telling how this might be accomplished? I do see vi in 2bsd.tar, I don't suppose there is a 'how to install 2bsd on v7" note around either? Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 11 months

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BSDI git repo?

by Steve Mynott

Is there full bsdi git repo anywhere? I've vague recollections parts were merged into FreeBSD in the early 2000s so I assume it was open sourced? There is a tarball of bsdi 2 on venus wetware but that's the best I can do with searching. -- Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com> cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Regular Expressions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > I don't really understand how they work. > ... > maybe the way to understand the unix regex lies in a careful > investigation into how it is implemented I'm not sure what I did, but it wasn't the latter, since I have no idea how they are done! I just mentally break the regex search string up into substrings (I use them most in Epsilon, which has syntax to do substrings of search strings, which helps a lot); past that, I think it's just using them and getting used to them. > an IBM 7094 (whatever that is) IBM's last 36-bit scientific mainframe before the System/360's. CTSS (which DMR held out as the ancestor of Unix) ran on 7094's. Noel

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation

by Doug McIlroy

> "My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to > be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural > languages better than functional ones." > > Amen to that. Me too, I tried functional languages and my head hurt. C > seems so natural to me. Dennis made quite a generalization from a sample of one--Lisp, the only functional language that existed when he was in grad school. I'm sure he'd agree today that functional languages shine for spplications rooted in algebraic domains. I immodestly point to www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/powser.html, which has nothing to do with Unix, but certainly would have appealed to Dennis. Doug

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Angelo Papenhoff > I believe 11/20 UNIX also needs the EAE. Some applications might have used it (the story about the KS11 bug with the KW11-A confirms they did use it on that machine), but I found no trace of use of it in a quick scan of the entire Version 1 source (the one which is extant). Also, the first file in the OS source: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/u0.s lists the addresses of all device registers, and the KE11-A isn't there. If the KE11 is needed to run some application on the -11/04, there are KE11-B's (program compatible, but a single hex card) available, ISTR. For emulation, something (SIMH?) supports it, since the TV -11 on ITS (now running in emulation,I'm pretty sure) uses it. Noel

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > can I run Unix on a PDP 11/04? No, it doesn't have memory management, so not any of the well-known 'stock' versions (V5/V6/etc). Two choices, though: - If you get the V1 that ran on an -11/20 (which is mostly compatible with the /04 and /05), it should run on an /04. (Not sure what you'd use for mass storage, on a physical /04, though.) I'm not sure when they dropped the /20 - I think V4 n(at the latest)? But V2 and V3 are lost. - There's a 'Unix' for the LSI-11, and with minor changes (the LSI-11 isn't 100% compatible with other MMU-less 11's, but the changes are minor, e.g. MOS, written in MACRO-11, was conditionalized to run on both the LSI-11 and the -11/20) it should run on an /04. Noel

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > And if you could find a KS-11 MMU that Ken and Dennis had for the 11/20 > ... we can't even find documentation about it (Ken's surviving code is > the best doc we have). Where is that code? The Version 1 at TUHS appears to pre-date it. It would be great to have a look at it, we might be able to partially document the KS11 using it. (Ken had only vague memories of the KS11.) > From: Ronald Natalie > There's always MiniUnix. Ah; I didn't realize that was something different from LSX (the LSI-11 system). Noel

4 years, 11 months

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Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by Will Senn

The question is can I run Unix on a PDP 11/04? I've dug around and it's unclear to me, so I'm asking y'all. Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 11 months

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v7 tar and 2bsd.tar

by Will Senn

I'm trying to get 2bsd.tar extracted into v7. Does anyone have any recollection how to do this. Here's what I'm seeing: in simh: simh> att tm0 -V -F TAR 2bsd.tar Tape Image '2bsd.tar' scanned as TAR format. contains 4935680 bytes of tape data (482 records, 1 tapemarks) c and in v7: tar xv0 tar: bin/ - cannot create directory checksum error # ls bin What gives - it says it can't create the dir, but it does, it's there... Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Troff to ps

by Doug McIlroy

> There was quite some communication between Peter Nilson (npn, known > for picasso) and bwk. In the interest of accuracy npn's full name is Nils-Peter Nelson. He honchoed the Bell Labs Cray and originated <string.h>. Doug

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Troff to ps (Will Senn)

by Steve Simon

Hi folks, I used thack to typeset my dissertation on v7 circa 1988. It converts C/A/T codes to postscript. i have no idea if it will cope with eqn or pic but it was enough for nicely formatted text as i remember. this is the patch/bugfix with a link to the original package. https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.sources.misc/1989-July/001073.html -Steve

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Troff to ps

by norman＠oclsc.org

Nemu Nusquam: When was dpost born? ===== CSTR 97, A Typesetter-Independent TROFF by Brian W Kernighan was issued in 1981 and revised the next year. So that's the earliest possible date. I vaguely remember the existence of Postscript support in general, including at least one Apple Laserwriter kicking around somewhere, starting at some point during my time at 1127 in the latter 1980s. There was even a Postscript display engine that ran on 5620 terminals under mux, though it wasn't normally used for troff previewing because the troff-specific proofer was faster (mainly, I think, it didn't send nearly as much data down the serial line to the terminal). My personal snapshot of V10, and the TUHS archive copy, include dpost; see src/cmd/postscript/dpost. Everything in the postscript directory came from USG, who had packaged everything troff into a separately-licensed Documenter's Workbench package. That may have made us exclude it from the officially-distributed V8 tape and V9 snapshots. In any case, the only V9 snapshot I know of offhand (which is in Warren's archive) has no dpost. Both my copy of V10 and the TUHS copy show dpost's source files with dates in 1991, but it was certainly there earlier if I used it in New Jersey (I left in mid-1990). Dpost is documented in man8/postscript.8; my copy of that file is dated October 1989. Digging around in documents available on the web, I found a bundle of DWB 2.0 docs: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/Documentors_Workbench_1989/UNIX_Syste… It's a scanned-image PDF so I can't search it by machine, but it includes such things as listings of the source-code directory and manifests of various binary distributions, and dpost doesn't appear anywhere I can see. As the URL implies, the docs seem to be dated 1989. So maybe dpost wasn't part of the product until DWB 3.0; but maybe we in Research got an early copy of the postscript stuff (I think bwk was in regular communication with the USG-troff folks), perhaps in 1989. I confess I've lost track of the original question that spawned this thread, but if it is whether dpost is easily back-ported to PDP-11 UNIX, I don't think that's likely without a good bit of work. It would very likely require a post-1980-type C compiler, since it was written in the late 1980s. It might or might not fit on a PDP-11; I don't remember whether USG's system still officially ran there by the late 1980s. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] V6 Console IO

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > I'm struggling however with how C processes the IO. It seems that when I > type at the console, my typing is immediately echoed to my terminal > window. ... nothing appears on the terminal until I press enter, when > the system displays the whole line of input ... How > can I suppress the original C/Unix echo, and get my output to appear > immediately? This is not a C issue; it's the Unix I/O system (and specifically, terminal I/O). Normally, Unix terminal input is done line-at-a-time: i.e. the read() call to the OS (whether for 1 character, or a large number) doesn't return until an enire line has been typed, and [Retrurn] has been hit; then the entire line is available. While it's being buffered by the OS, echoing is done, and rubout processing is also performed. One can suppress all this; there's a mode call 'raw' (the normal mode is sometime labelled 'cooked') which suppresses all that, and just gives one the characters actually typed, as they are typed. The stty() system call can be used to turn this on. See the V6 tty(IV) manual entry for more. stty() is in stty(II). Noel

4 years, 11 months

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TUHS