TUHS

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PDP 11/23 running UNIX version 6 at VCF Midwest!

by Dave Plonka

Hi folks! While doing some end of year retrocomputing revisiting, I thought some of you might enjoy this - there is hope for the next generation(s)! ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zyng5Ob-e8 In this video I share my personal pick for "best" demo at VCF Midwest: Gavin's PDP 11/23 running UNIX Version 6! We write and run a simple BASIC program in Ken Thompson's bas(1), finding some quirks with this (currently) entirely floppy-based system, possible having to do with a glitch in disk I/O. (We discovered bas(1) uses a temporary file as backing store.) Filmed at the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest: VCF Midwest 16, September 11, 2021 http://vcfmw.org/ Here's the source code to the simple program we wrote; you can also run it on modern machines if you install a Research UNIX version using SimH (pdp-11 simulator). 5 goto 30 10 for col = 1 arg(1) 12 prompt " " 14 next 20 print "Welcome to VCF Midwest!" 25 return 30 for x = 0 55 40 10(x) 50 next 60 for x = _56 _1 70 10(_x) 80 next -- dave(a)plonka.us http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/

3 years, 5 months

efl(1) anyone?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi TUHS folks! After having reincarnated ratfor, I am wondering about Stuart Feldman's efl (extended fortran language). It was a real compiler that let you define structs, and generated more or less readable Fortran code. I have the impression that it was pretty cool, but that it just didn't catch on. So: - Did anyone here ever use it personally? - Is my impression that it didn't catch on correct? Or am I ignorant? Thoughts etc. welcome. :-) Thanks, Arnold

3 years, 5 months

Belated Introduction

by Alexander Jacocks

Spurred on by Bryan, I thought I should properly introduce myself: I am a fairly young Unix devotee, having gotten my start with System V on a Wang word processing system (believe it or not, they made one!), at my mother’s office, in the late 1980s. My first personal system, which ran SLS Linux, came about in 1992. I am a member of the Vintage Computing Federation, and have given talks and made exhibits on Unix history at VCF’s museum, in Wall, New Jersey. I have also had the pleasure to show Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson, who are two of my computing heroes, my exhibit on the origins of BSD Unix on the Intel 386. I learned C from Brian’s book, as probably did many others here. I have spent my entire professional career supporting Unix, in some form or another. I started with SunOS at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, and moved on to Solaris, HP-UX, SCO, and finally Linux. I worked for AT&T, in Virginia, in the early 2000s, but there were few vestiges of Unix present, other than some 3b1 and 3b2 monitors and keyboards. I current work for Red Hat, in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, as a principal sales engineer, where I spend most of my time teaching and presenting at conferences, both in person and virtual. Thank you to everyone here who created the tools that have enabled my career and love of computing! - Alexander Jacocks

3 years, 5 months

New Member

by Bryan St. Amour

Hello! I have just joined this mailing list recently, and figured I would give an introduction to myself. My first encounter with Unix took place in 2006 when I started my undergraduate studies in Computer Science. The main servers all ran Solaris, and we accessed them via thin clients. Eventually I wanted a similar feeling operating system for my personal computer, so that I could do my assignments without having to always log into the school servers, and so I came across Linux. I hopped around for a while, but eventually settled with Slackware for my personal computers. Nowadays I run a mixture of Linux and BSD operating systems for various purposes. Unfortunately my day job has me writing desktop software for Windows (no fun there :(), so I'm thankful to have found a group of people with similar computing interests as myself, and I look forward to chatting with you all! Regards, Bryan St. Amour

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] [COFF] Book Recommendation

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

OK, this is my last _civil_ request to stop email-bombing both lists with trafic. In the future, I will say publicly _exactly_ what I think - and if screens still had phosphor, it would probably peel it off. I can see that there are cases when one might validly want to post to both lists - e.g. when starting a new discusson. However, one of the two should _always_ be BCC'd, so that simple use of reply won't generate a copy to both. I would suggest that one might say something like 'this discussion is probably best continued on the <foo> list' - which could be seeded by BCCing the _other_. Thank you. Noel

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation

by Douglas McIlroy

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/fission.pdf Duncan Mak wrote > Haskell's powerful higher-level functions > make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large > code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional > programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for > improved readability. > I went looking for this paper by Jeremy Gibbons here: https://dblp.org/pid/53/1090.html but didn't find anything resembling it. What's the name of the paper?

3 years, 5 months

UNIX/AT&T patent licensing

by Warren Toomey

All, I got this e-mail forwarded on from John Fox via Eric S. Raymond. Cheers, Warren Hi Eric, I think you might find this interesting. I have a 2001 copy of your book. I dog-eared page 9 twenty years ago because of this section: It spread very rapidly with AT&T, in spite of the lack of any formal support program for it. By 1980 it had spread to a large number of university and research computing sites, and thousands of hackers considered it home. Regarding the "spread", I believe one of the contributing factors was AT&T's decision to give the source code away to universities. And in doing so, unwittingly provided the fertile soil for open source development. I happen to know the man who made that decision. He was my father-in-law. He died Tuesday. He had no idea what UNIX was, and had no idea what his decision helped to create. Funny when things we do have such a major impact without us even knowing. That was certainly true in this case. Anyway, I thought you'd be interested to know. His name is John (Jack) H. Bolt. He was 95. PS, before making the decision, he called Ken Olson at DEC to see if he'd be interested in buying it, lock, stock, and barrel. Jack's opening offer was $250k. Olson wasn't interested. And on that, Jack's decision was made. John Fox

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation

by Douglas McIlroy

>> The former notation C(B(A)) became A->B->C. This was PL/I's gift to C. > You seem to have a gift for notation. That's rare. Curious what you think of APL? I take credit as a go-between, not as an inventor. Ken Knowlton introduced the notation ABC in BEFLIX, a pixel-based animation language. Ken didn't need an operator because identifiers were single letters. I showed Ken's scheme to Bud Lawson, the originator of PL/I's pointer facility. Bud liked it and came up with the vivid -> notation to accommodate longer identifiers. If I had a real gift of notation I would have come up with the pipe symbol. In my original notation ls|wc was written ls>wc>. Ken Thompson invented | a couple of months later. That was so influential that recently, in a paper that had nothing to do with Unix, I saw | referred to as the "pipe character"! APL is a fascinating invention, but can be so compact as to be inscrutable. (I confess not to have practiced APL enough to become fluent.) In the same vein, Haskell's powerful higher-level functions make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for improved readability. Human impatience balks at tarrying over a saying that puts so much in a small space. Yet it helps once you learn it. Try reading transcripts of medieval Arabic algebra carried out in words rather than symbols. Iverson's hardware descriptions in APL are another case where symbology pays off. Doug

3 years, 5 months

Ratfor revived!

by Arnold Robbins

Hi All. Mainly for fun (sic), I decided to revive the Ratfor (Rational Fortran) preprocessor. Please see: https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/ratfor I started with the V6 code, then added the V7, V8 and V10 versions on top of it. Each one has its own branch so that you can look at the original code, if you wish. The man page and the paper from the V7 manual are also included. Starting with the Tenth Edition version, I set about to modernize the code and get it to compile and run on a modern-day system. (ANSI style declarations and function headers, modern include files, use of getopt, and most importantly, correct use of Yacc yyval and yylval variables.) You will need Berkely Yacc installed as byacc in order to build it. I have only touch-tested it, but so far it seems OK. 'make' runs in like 2 seconds, really quick. On my Ubuntu Linux systems, it compiles with no warnings. I hope to eventually add a test suite also, if I can steal some time. Before anyone asks, no, I don't think anybody today has any real use for it. This was simply "for fun", and because Ratfor has a soft spot in my heart. "Software Tools" was, for me, the most influential programming book that I ever read. I don't think there's a better book to convey the "zen" of Unix. Thanks, Arnold

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Encoding an ISA: Random Logic vs. Control Stores

by Douglas McIlroy

My take on defining random logic random logic : hardware :: spaghetti code : software Doug

3 years, 5 months

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