TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6501 discussions

by M Douglas McIlroy

> I had been debating leaving Usenix for several years already; > the move to soft copy ;login: clinched it for me. I have been a loyal nonmember of ACM ever since the CACM was converted from a journal to a magazine. Usenix didn't strike quite such a decisive blow when it abandoned Computing Systems. ;login: remains as a Cheshire grin. It remains to be seen whether I'll continue to scan it in its non-tactile form. Doug

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference

by Jason Stevens

There is some information and demos of the early 8086/80286 Xenix, including the IBM rebranded PC Xenix 1.0 on pcjs.org https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/unix/ibm/xenix/1.0/ And if you have a modern enough browser you can run them from the browser as well! It's amazing that CPU's are fast enough to run interpreted emulation that is faster than the old machines of the day. -----Original Message----- From: Clem Cole To: M Douglas McIlroy Cc: TUHS main list Sent: 4/7/21 1:09 AM Subject: Re: [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference Doug -- IIRC IBM private-labeled a Microsoft put out a version of Xenix, although I think it required an PC/AT (286) <https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aY2xlbWNAY2NjLmNvbQ%3D%3D&type= zerocontent&guid=6f435ae6-0f2c-4fbd-bfe2-adcbf3edac32> ? On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 11:36 AM M Douglas McIlroy < m.douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu <mailto:m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> > wrote: > I wonder. IBM introduced the IBM PC in August of 1981. > That was years after a non-memory managed version of > Unix was created by Heinze Lycklama, LSX. Is anyone > on this list familiar with Bell Labs management thoughts > on selling IBM on LSX rather than "dos"? IBM famously failed to buy the well-established CP/M in 1980. (CP/M had been introduced in 1974, before the advent of the LSI-11 on which LSX ran.) By then IBM had settled on Basic and Intel. I do not believe they ever considered Unix and DEC, nor that AT&T considered selling to IBM. (AT&T had--fortunately--long since been rebuffed in an attempt to sell to DEC.) Doug

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] My favorite Usenix papers

by Norman Wilson

Rich Salz: > > Honeyman: "Pathalias, or the care and feeding of relative addresses" Dave Horsfall: > Are you sure that peter honeyman wrote "Pathalias" and not "pathalias"? > He seemed to have an aversion to using his shift key. Dan Cross: He actually wrote it as, "PATHALIAS _or_ The Care and Feeding of Relative Addresses". Plenty of shift to go around. :-) ==== Peter probably had a graduate student hold the caps key for him. Norman Wilson Toronto ON Used to honey bitching

4 years, 1 month

My favorite Usenix papers

by Richard Salz

Honeyman: "Pathalias, or the care and feeding of relative addresses" Ousterhout: "Why aren't operating systems getting faster as fast as hardware"

4 years, 1 month

Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference]

by norman＠oclsc.org

Arnold: But for several years now I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the research nature of most of the articles. Very few of them are actually useful (or even interesting) to me in a day-to-day sense. === I guess it depends on your interests, and also on what you look at. I've got way behind in reading ;login:, but have been regularly attending conferences: the Annual Technical Conference (ATC) and some workshops (HotStorage, HotCloud) that are usually co-located; LISA. I still find plenty to interest me, both in talks and in the hallway tracks, though LISA has been drying up over the years (and it's clear that USENIX know that too and are working on whether it should just be subsumed into the already-burgeoning SREcons). As I say, interests differ, but I've learned plenty of new things about OS and networking design and implementation tradeoffs, security at many levels, file systems, and storage devices. Thanks to COVID, USENIX-sponsored conferences have all been online for the past year and are expected to stay so through the end of 2021. For obvious reasons that greatly reduces the expenses of the conferences, so the registration fees are about 10% of normal. Thanks to that, I've been able to sample conferences I've never had time or money to travel to, like Security and FAST (file systems and storage). It's been well worth my time and money even though the money comes out of my own pocket. UNIX history is not part of the mainstream USENIX world these days, alas--I was disappointed that there was no official 50th- birthday party two years ago in Seattle (though the not-officially- sponsored one at LCM organized by Clem and others was a fine time, and USENIX had no objection to hosting announcements of it). I should point out that the only time I've met Our Esteemed Leader and Listrunner in person was at a USENIX conference, where he held a session to show off his reconstructed very-early PDP-11 UNIX from the tape Dennis found under the floor of the UNIX Room. I too would like to see the organization harbour some less-formal meetings or publications. The way to make that happen would be to run for the Board and to actively sponsor such stuff (with care about who is selected for the real work to avoid the problems Ted describes). Maybe that's a good idea, or maybe it's better to let the Linux and BSD worlds do their own thing. Either way I think what USENIX does is worth while. I've been a member for 40 years this year, and although it's not the same organization as it was in the early 1980s, neither is it the same world it lives in. I still think they do worth while work and I am proud to continue to support them, even though I'm not a published academic researcher, just an old-style systems hack and sysadmin from the ancient days when those were inseparable. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 1 month

Data structures in Unix editors

by David C. Brock

All of the great discussion on this list about editors has made me curious about the data structures used in the various Unix editors. I found a great discussion of this for sam in Rob Pike’s publication “The Text Editor sam.” I’d like to read similar discussions of the data structures for ed, em, ex/vi. If anyone has suggestions of references, they would be very welcome! Similarly, if there are any pointers to references on some other data structures in editors like TECO, QED and E, I’d welcome them as well. All the best, David ........... David C. Brock Director and Curator Software History Center Computer History Museum computerhistory.org/softwarehistory<http://computerhistory.org/softwarehistory> Email: dbrock(a)computerhistory.org Twitter: @dcbrock Skype: dcbrock 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94943 (650) 810-1010 main (650) 810-1886 direct Pronouns: he, him, his

4 years, 1 month

30th Anniversary of most epic netnews post

by Ron Natalie

>From spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU Thu Apr 4 23:11:22 1991 Path: ai-lab!mintaka!mit-eddie!wuarchive!usc!apple!amdahl!walldrug!moscvax!perdue!spaf From: spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford) Newsgroups: news.announce.important,news.admin Subject: Warning: April Fools Time again (forged messages on the loose!) Message-ID: <4-1-1991(a)medusa.cs.purdue.edu> Date: 1 Apr 91 00:00:00 GMT Expires: 1 May 91 00:00:00 GMT Followup-To: news.admin Organization: Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ. Lines: 25 Approved: spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU Xref: ai-lab news.announce.important:19 news.admin:8235 Warning: April 1 is rapidly approaching, and with it comes a USENET tradition. On April Fools day comes a series of forged, tongue-in-cheek messages, either from non-existent sites or using the name of a Well Known USENET person. In general, these messages are harmless and meant as a joke, and people who respond to these messages without thinking, either by flaming or otherwise responding, generally end up looking rather silly when the forgery is exposed. So, for the few weeks, if you see a message that seems completely out of line or is otherwise unusual, think twice before posting a followup or responding to it; it's very likely a forgery. There are a few ways of checking to see if a message is a forgery. These aren't foolproof, but since most forgery posters want people to figure it out, they will allow you to track down the vast majority of forgeries: o Russian computers. For historic reasons most forged messages have as part of their Path: a non-existent (we think!) russian computer, either kremvax or moscvax. Other possibilities are nsacyber or wobegon. Please note, however, that walldrug is a real site and isn't a forgery. o Posted dates. Almost invariably, the date of the posting is forged to be April 1. o Funky Message-ID. Subtle hints are often lodged into the Message-Id, as that field is more or less an unparsed text string and can contain random information. Common values include pi, the phone number of the red phone in the white house, and the name of the forger's parrot. o subtle mispellings. Look for subtle misspellings of the host names in the Path: field when a message is forged in the name of a Big Name USENET person. This is done so that the person being forged actually gets a chance to see the message and wonder when he actually posted it. Forged messages, of course, are not to be condoned. But they happen, and it's important for people on the net not to over-react. They happen at this time every year, and the forger generally gets their kick from watching the novice users take the posting seriously and try to flame their tails off. If we can keep a level head and not react to these postings, they'll taper off rather quickly and we can return to the normal state of affairs: chaos. Thanks for your support. Gene Spafford, Net.God (and probably tired of seeing this message)

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Data structures in Unix editors

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: David C. Brock > I'd like to read similar discussions of the data structures for ed, em, > ex/vi. ... Similarly, if there are any pointers to references on some > other data structures in editors like TECO, QED and E, I'd welcome them > as well. I don't have any discussions I can point you at, but I do have source - for two things which are somewhat older than most of the ones you mention (ex/vi/etc). The first is a TECO from the fourth floor V6 machine (DSSR/RTS) at Tech Sq at MIT: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/teco There's some rudimentary documentation in there, in teco.doc, but don't expect too much. You'll have to rely on the source, which is in MACRO-11 - but it seems to be reasonably well commented. This actually predates V6; it was originally written for an MIT OS called DELPHI, which ran on an -11/45 which was the main EECS undergrad machine. At some point (probably post the Unix port), it was modified to have '^R mode', which was a WYSIWYG display mode a lot like the one in the ITS TECO in which EMACS was first written. I have also put up the Montgomery Emacs for Unix: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/emacs This is the version we were running on the 5th floor MIT V6 machine (CSR), which by that point have absorbed a few V7isms (e.g. some ioctl() stuff). So don't expect to be able to compile and run it, without a fair amount of work. (I vaguely recall that it needs I+D space, so maybe not on a /23 at all.) But at least the source is in C, so you can read it. I don't think there's an un-modified version online (i.e. the original Montgomery source), alas. Noel

4 years, 1 month

[tuhs] ACM Turing Award for 2020: Unix roots

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

This just came in: ACM has named Alfred Vaino Aho and Jeffrey David Ullman recipients of the 2020 ACM A. M. Turing Award https://awards.acm.org/about/2020-turing for fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists. Most of us probably have several of their books on the shelf; I certainly do! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Remember the ed thread?

by John Cowan

I missed the fact that Posix and Linux ed support s/foo/bar/3 (as opposed to s3/foo/bar); ex does not, unfortunately. We need a Great Unification of Line Editors.

4 years, 1 month

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TUHS