TUHS

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6498 discussions

by Robert Diamond

Just found this program from 1979 of an Explorer Club (aka “The Scouts”) Family Night, which included a talk from Ken Thompson on Computer Chess. There’s a few notable names in there. See PDF at https://drive.google.com/file/d/15fXhkk9KlmJNrhGlFnWuH23XQ09vLG4o/view?usp=…

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] roff(7)

by Douglas McIlroy

> Did roff do all of what troff and nroff did? No way. Ossanna deserves all the praise you give him. Roff extended runoff in various ways: relative numeric operators, e.g. .in +8 tabbing (left, right and centered) underlining tripartite headers and footers arabic and roman page numbering adjustable head and foot margins automatic hyphenation, thanks to Molly Wagner footnotes merge patterns for change marks, column separators, etc. various special requests: .ne, .ti, .tr, .po, .op (odd page) But roff did NOT have conditionals, traps, special characters, environments, or arbitrary motion control. Crucially (and ironically, because I was Mr. Macro), it did not have anything like macros, strings and diversions until after Joe pioneered them in nroff. So there was a gaping disparity: nroff was Turing complete, roff wasn't. Roff merely added features to runoff; nroff leapt into a different universe. ----------------------- The features listed above are in the January 1971 manual for BCPL roff, which is probably the anonymous reference cited in the November 1971 v1 manual. The v1 manual lists Osanna, Ken and Dennis as authors of the Unix implementation. I believe Ossanna is named because he added line-numbering--and maybe more--to entice the patent department to switch to roff. BCPL roff allowed all four arithmetic operators in contexts like .ls *3. Only + and - were allowed in nroff. Eventually both BCPL roff and nroff got number registers (defined by different commands); I don't recall which came first. BCPL roff also got a weak macro facility, definitely after nroff. Doug

3 years, 3 months

struct(1) updating - progress

by Arnold Robbins

Hello All. If anyone is interested in struct, I have completed updating it for modern day systems. Thanks to Jay Logue for invaluable help in completing the work and to Bakul Shah for his interest and support. See https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/struct; I have merged the modernization work into the master branch. The README.md describes what was done in more detail. Doug McIlroy - if you want me to add anything to the README.md, please send it on and I will do so, quoting you as appropriate. Jay Logue and Bakul Shah - if you want me to add anything to the README.md, please let me know (privately). Thanks, Arnold

3 years, 3 months

DEC Format floppy (for formatting disk prior to 4.2BSD install)

by Will Senn

Hi all, Has anybody ever seen a console floppy image anywhere on the internet labeled: /"RX11 VAX DSK LD DEV #1"/ It is referenced in BSD 4 documentation with respect to formatting disks (edited): USING DEC SOFTWARE TO FORMAT Warning: These instructions are for people with 11/780 CPU’s. You should shut down UNIX and halt the machine to do any disk formatting. Formatting an RP06. Load the console floppy labeled, "RX11 VAX DSK LD DEV #1" in the console disk drive, and type the following commands: >>>BOOT DIAGNOSTIC SUPERVISOR. ZZ-ESSAA-X5.0-119 23-JAN-1980 12:44:40.03 DS>ATTACH RH780 SBI RHO 8 5 DS>ATTACH RPO6 RHO DBA0 DS>SELECT DBAO DS>LOAD EVRAC DS>START/SEC:PACKINIT This is for drive 0 on mbaO; use 9 instead of 8 for mbal, etc.

3 years, 3 months

Dot (graphviz) to ascii

by Richard Salz

>From Thomas Ptacek on twitter [1], quoting something on HackerNews [2]: a person wrote a dot-file renderer for ASCII diagrams [3] It seems to be a service; source not available. 1. https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/1483181795441004544?t=DoL8RopOYKBojkmMznSlA… 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29969770 3. https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] BWK talk on early Unix Friday 14 January 2022

by Douglas McIlroy

> I've just watched an interesting presentation given last Friday via > video link to the Linux Conference in Australia: > Brian Kernighan > The early days of Unix at Bell Labs > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E Here's an earlier incarnation of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS-0Vrmok6Y I rather enjoyed seeing it with closed captions in Spanish and speakers turned off. Aided by the slides, I was pretty well able to read the Spanish, which otherwise would have been quite mysterious. Doug

3 years, 3 months

BWK talk on early Unix Friday 14 January 2022

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

I've just watched an interesting presentation given last Friday via video link to the Linux Conference in Australia: Brian Kernighan The early days of Unix at Bell Labs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E 48 minutes While most of the talk subjects are well known to TUHS list members, there are nice things said about various people, and about the value of TUHS. Other talks at the conference may be of interest as well: see the schedule at https://linux.conf.au/schedule/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3 years, 3 months

7th and 8th edition manuals, plus PDP11 processor handbook

by Terry Jones

Any takers for a (free) two-volume 7th Ed manual (1983), or ring-bound 8th Ed (1985), or PDP11 processor handbook (1981)? These would need to be picked up in Lindfield, Sydney, Australia. Condition is fair, but they've been in storage for 35 years so are slightly mouldy, but still perfectly usable. Images at http://jon.es/other/7th-ed.jpg and http://jon.es/other/8th-ed.jpg If you’d like them, let me know in email ASAP please. Regards, Terry Jones

3 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Angelo Papenhoff > to my knowledge no troff version before the C rewrite in v7 Apologies if I missed something, but between this list and COFF there's so much low S/N traffic I skip a lot of it. Having said that, was there ever a troff in assembler? I'd always had the impression that the first one was in C. > The v6 distribution has deleted directory entries for troff source but > not the files themselves. I hope it is not lost. Maybe someone here has > an idea where it could be found? The MIT 'V6+' (I think it's probably basically PWB1) system had troff - i guess it 'fell off the back of a truck', like a lot of other stuff MIT had, such as 'typesetter C', the Portable C Compiler, etc. Theirs was modified to produce output for a Varian (I forget which model, maybe the docs or driver say). nroff on that system seems to have been generated from the troff sources; the assembler nroff sources aren't present. I looked at its n1.c, and compared it to the V7 one: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/n1.c and this one appears to be slightly earlier; e.g. it starts: #include "tdef.h" #include "t.h" #include "tw.h" /* troff1.c consume options, initialization, main loop, input routines, escape function calling */ extern int stdi; and in the argument processing, it has quite a lot fewer. So that one is a "troff version before the C rewrite in .. v7", but it is in C. Is that of any interest? Noel

3 years, 4 months

Brian Kernighan and very early *roff history

by Tom Lyon

Most of y'all are aware of Brian Kernighan's troff involvement. My understanding is that he pretty much took over nroff/troff after Joe Ossana died, and came out with ditroff. But Brian had much earlier involvement with non-UNIX *roff. When he was pursuing his PhD at Princeton, he spent a summer at MIT using CTSS and RUNOFF. When he came back to P'ton, he wrote a ROFF for the IBM 7094, later translated to the IBM 360. Many generations of students, myself included, use the IBM ROFF (batch, not interactive) as a much friendlier alternative to dumb typewriters. I don't know if 360 ROFF spread beyond Princeton, but I wouldn't be surprised. BTW, during my summer at Bell, nroff/troff was one of the few programs I could not port to the Interdata 8/32 - it was just a mess of essentially typeless code. I don't think Joe Ossana got around to it either before he died. -- - Tom

3 years, 4 months

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