TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

38 participants
6498 discussions

New Version of Installing and Using Research Unix Version 7 in the SimH PDP-11/45 and 11/70 Emulators Available

by Will Senn

All, I've completed a new version of my "Installing and Using Research Unix Version 7 in the SimH PDP-11/45 and 11/70 Emulators" tutorial/document (wow, that's a mouthful). I'm calling it Version 2.0 - It is a completely reorganized, updated, and edited version of the document. The blog post announcement is on the blog: https://decuser.blogspot.com/ and the pdf is on google drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gDBxULlpLwezH-1RO_3ou_W7trElgSgT/view?usp=… The new doc covers building a working v7 instance from tape files that will run on the SimH emulator. First, the reader is led through the restoration of a pristine v7 instance from tape to disk. Next, the reader is led through adding a regular user, making the system multi-user. Then, the reader is shown how to make the system multi-session cable allowing multiple simultaneous sessions. Finally, the system is put to use with hello world, DMR style, and the learn system is enabled. It also includes a hyperlinked table of contents. My hope is that the new version will be more useful than the prior version, as well as more accurate. I really appreciate the input and feedback y'all have given me over the intervening years. Regards, Will

3 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] roff(7) [ and other related stuff ]

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Cowan > Why use C syntax? What was wrong with Fortran, Lisp, or Cobol syntax, > extended to do what you wanted? Why do all hammers look basically the same? Because there's an 'ideal hammer', and over time hammer design has asymtoted toward that 'ideal hammer' design. One can't just keep improving the design indefinitely - diminishing returns set in. So I suspect there is, to some degree, a Platonic 'ideal syntax' for a 'classic block-structured' programming language, and to me, C came pretty close to it. I except LISP from that assessment, because LISP is built around a fundamentally different model of how computations/algorithms are organized, and C and LISP aren't directly comparable. But that realization points to a deeper bug with the 'Platonic ideal language' concept above, which is that languages are fundamentally, albeit at a very deep conceptual level, tied to the basic concept of the computing hardware they are to run on. C/COBOL/FORTRAN/etc are all for von Neumann-like (in a broad sense) computing engines - a single thread of computation, which happens sequentially. But we've pushed that paradigm about as far as it can go, we're into diminishing returns territory on that one. The future, starting with the hardware, will be very different - and will need quite different languages. (Go, from what little I know of it, is a baby step in this direction - it is intended to make it easy to use multiple simultaneous loci of execution, making use of the mutiple cores that are common now.) I suspect we'll be shifting to radically different paradigms, 50 years from now - massively parallel computing meshes (think Connection Machines on steroids - or the human brain), and those will use fundamentally different computing paradigms, and programming languages for them, which in turn will need very different syntax. Noel

3 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] roff(7) [ and other related stuff ]

by Douglas McIlroy

> Lisp, _that's_ elegant. The machine shines through Lisp even more brightly than it does through C. Lisp attains incredible power from a tiny base: car, cdr, cons, cond, T, F, null, lambda, def, exuding elegance that survives even in a raging sea of parentheses. For Lisp-friendly applications nowadays, I prefer Haskell, which is much further away from the machine. Haskell code approaches--and sometimes surpasses--the cleanliness of good mathematical notation. For string processing, I remember Snobol 3 with great fondness. But for everyday work with arrays and numbers, C is the workhorse. Still, I wish that C would evaluate comma expressions in parallel rather than in series, as in (a,b) = (b,a). Doug

3 years, 4 months

v7 /etc/ttys and /usr/adm/wtmp shenanigans

by Will Senn

I enabled user accounting on my v7 instance and I noticed it "growing without bound" and while this is noted as a possibility in the ac(1) man page, I was pretty sure the original authors didn't mean 30k a second. I scratched my head and thought for a while and then started experimenting to see what the heck was going on. I removed /usr/adm/wtmp (which I had created to enable accounting in the first place) and the little red disk write arrow on my mac went away, but not the little green disk read arrow... hmm. Something was keeping my v7 instance very busy reading disk, that was for sure. I went through a few (dozens) more tests and experiments, reread a bunch of man pages, Ritchie's v7 install note, and thought some more and here's what I came up with... If you modify your system to add dci lines and you enable some ttys in /etc/ttys and you enable user accounting. Then, the next time you boot into a kernel that doesn't have dci support, init or some other process will try and fail to read the enabled ttys, log something in /usr/adm/wtmp, if it exists, and then loop (very quickly), over and over and over. If you aren't paying attention, this will hardly be noticeable on modern hardware running simh, but I'm guessing this would have been disastrous, back in the day. The simple solution is to boot w/dci enabled when you have ttys enabled, and only boot w/o dci enabled when you have disabled the ttys. I'm guessing that this wasn't really ever an issue, back in the day, as folks prolly didn't just yank their dci's and reboot a different kernel? But, such are the joys of simulation. Anyhow, if this doesn't sound like a very likely or reasonable analysis of what was happening, I'd appreciate your letting me know, or if you've experienced something like it before, it'd be great to know that I'm not alone in this silliness. Will

3 years, 4 months

learn command in v7

by Will Senn

I'm pretty sure that I asked about learn ages back, but I couldn't find any reference to it in the archives. So, I thought I would close the possibly imaginary loop on it. Cuz, I figured it out, and it may prove useful to others or with my track record, even myself in the future :). Learn works fine in v7. It just needs to be properly installed. The command is there already, so you may not need to follow all of the steps below, but it doesn't hurt: I did this as root, but it could possibly be done as another user, I'm not sure. cd /usr/src/cmd/learn make make lessons make play; make log That's it. make will complain about missing files that it tries to delete, but these can be safely ignored, since make then creates them anyway. Here's the result run as a normal user: $ learn These are the available courses - files editor morefiles macros eqn C If you want more information about the courses, or if you have never used 'learn' before, type 'return'; otherwise type the name of the course you want, followed by 'return'. macros If you were in the middle of this subject and want to start where you left off, type the last lesson number the computer printed. To start at the beginning, just hit return. This script deals with the use of the "-ms" macro package to produce Bell Laboratories style documents. Before trying it, you should be familiar with the editor. To test that, please enter the file typed below, exactly as is, into file "decl". Then type "ready". .PP When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. $ ed decl ?decl a .PP When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. . w 410 q $ ready Good. Lesson 1.1a (1) When you have some document typed in "-ms" style, you run it off on your terminal by saying: nroff -ms file where "file" is the name of the file it is on. For example, the file "decl" in this directory is in a suitable format for running off this way. Do so. Then type "ready". $ Interrupt. Want to go on? n Bye. $ Pretty slick, really, once you realize that the $ prompt isn't really your shell, it's a shell within learn. Also, there's no learn manpage although there is a document in vol2 of the programmer's manual that describes the program. I couldn't figure out the canonical way to exit, so I just CTRL-DELETE on my mac, which I figure it CTRL-BREAK (^C?). That seems to work. Oh, and according to /usr/src/cmd/learn/README, if you have any trouble: Please report problems, bad lessons, etc., to Brian Kernighan, MH 6021, 2C-518, or Mike Lesk, MH 6377, 2C-572. Thanks. Enjoy, and happy New Year, folks! Will

3 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] v7 software

by Douglas McIlroy

> Joy’s original 2BSD tape will give you UCB Pascal. While I agree with Kernighan that Pascal is not my favorite programming language, UCB Pascal is my favorite compiler because of its spectacularly good syntax diagnostics. The diagnostics are automatically generated, so they have a completely consistent style and never go down rabbit holes trying to explain an error. The UCB trick is to report the exact spot where LR parsing chokes and suggest a canonical alternate token that allows progress. This simple strategy is startlingly effective; the compiler taught me Pascal in an evening. It occurred to me that Pascal would be a suitable language in which to express a certain algorithm. Having skimmed the Pascal report a year or more earlier, I knew it was a pretty typical language, so I grabbed a sample program from somewhere and plowed ahead. I made mistake after mistake, but every diagnostic was instantly suggestive. By the end of the session I had a polished working program. In due time it was accepted for publication. Doug

3 years, 4 months

v7 software

by Will Senn

I'm tooling around doing my annual dive into operating systems ancient and not-so-ancient and I've gotten back around to v7 because it has a working f77 in baseline. The 3b2 has f77 as an installable package but it crashes and burns with read statements like: read *,var - in both sysvr2 and sysvr3. After consulting with the fortran expert, I'm gonna chalk it up to "man there's a lot of backstory to these seemingly simple issues" and just work with v7... in full disclosure f77 also seems to work fine on 211bsd, but that's too new for today's dive :). Anyhow, I ran through my install notes from back in 2017 and did a few updates on them to update urls (would everyone just go ahead and move to https already?), fix some clunky examples, fix some typos, and update to a more recent host environment (although some would argue that Mojave is out of date - just give me a drop in replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro X (a 32 bit app) that doesn't phone home every 5 minutes and I'll move to Monterey). Version 1.7 of the doc is posted on the blog: https://decuser.blogspot.com/ Anyway, now I'm ready to add stuff to my shiny new v7 instance and document the additions. So, on to the question of the hour... I did some looking around and couldn't easily locate any v7 software archives for additional software that will run on v7 (not the distros, which are adequately hosted in the Unix Archive). Stuff like pascal, fortran iv, fortran 90, basic, lisp and the ilk. Do y'all know of any good caches? Later, Will

3 years, 4 months

v7 bas - "Ken Thompson's BASIC"

by Will Senn

So, I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't really make sense of the bas command in v7. In sysv2, it works and is similar enough to modern dialects that I was able to get a simple example working, but with v7, the best I was able to do was use it interactively, as a calculator. Then I went looking for v7 videos on youtube and came across this Dr. Dave's Diversions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZUMNZTUJos In it Dr. Dave demos a few simple versions of 99 bottles of beer in v7. Wow! I wondered how he'd glommed the inner workings of bas - did he read a book, just know it naturally, phone a friend, or what? Well, as it turned out, he... wait for it... read the bas(1) man page! Wha?! Ridiculous. So, I pulled out my v7 phone book and read the bas(1) man page and sure enough, it was all there... how '_' is used for negation, how those arcane for loops work, arrays?!, function calls?!, etc and so on, all in 3 short pages. So, two observations: 1. Those man pages from back in the day - wow. So terse, yet so well written. With a little help from a friend (thanks, Dr Dave), they're really all you need, sometimes. 2. Those early apps - wow. So obscure these days, but so ahead of their time, too (thanks, Ken for making Dec 2021 interesting by doing what you did back in the early 70's). And a question (you knew it was coming): Besides the bas(1) page, is there anything else written on Ken's basic out there in the wild? Oh, and a bonus question, draw and erase from v5 appear to still be around in v7, but not documented in the man page. Did it work and has anyone written a Tektronix 611 emulator that works with v7? Thanks, Will

3 years, 4 months

moving directories in svr2

by Will Senn

I'm a little flummoxed in trying to move some directories around in svr2. Shouldn't the following work? mkdir a mkdir b mv a b I get the following error: mv: b exists I tried many of the possible variants including: mv a b/ mv: b/ exists mv a b/a mv: directory rename only cd b mv ../a . mv: . exists mv ../a ./ mv: ./ exists mv ../a ./a mv: directory rename only If moving directories into existing directories wasn't allowed in those days, 1) how were directories managed? and 2) when did moving directories into directories become a thing?

3 years, 4 months

BSD 2.11 documentation

by Will Senn

Are there any extant 2.11 manuals other than the online manual and various install and configure PDFs, available for download? Also, am I understanding correctly that 2.11 is 2.10 plus some 4.3 backports and a ton of patches? If there aren’t any 2.11 specific docs, what would be the closest of what is available? Will Sent from my iPhone

3 years, 4 months

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

TUHS