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
Recent discussions on this list are about the problem getting fonts
for typesetting before there was an industry to provide them. Noted
font designer Chuck Bigelow has written about the subject here:
Notes on typeface protection
TUGboat 7(3) 146--151 October 1986
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb07-3/tb16bigelow.pdf
Other TUGboat papers by him and his design partner, Kris Holmes, might
be of reader interest:
Lucida and {\TeX}: lessons of logic and history
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb15-3/tb44bigelow.pdf
About the DK versions of Lucida
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb36-3/tb114bigelow.pdf
A short history of the Lucida math fonts
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb37-2/tb116bigelow-lucidamath.pdf
Science and history behind the design of Lucida
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb39-3/tb123bigelow-lucida.pdf
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> Do they *really* want something which is just V7 Unix, with nothing else?
> No TCP/IP, no hot-plug USB support? No web browsing?
> Oh, you wanted more than that? Feature bloat! Feature bloat!
> Feature bloat! Shame! Shame! Shame!
% ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc
495 495 7230
% ls /bin|wc
2809 2809 30468
How many of roughly 500 system calls (to say nothing of uncounted
ioctl's) do you think are necessary for writing those few crucial
capabilities that distinguish Linux from v7? There is
undeniably bloat, but only a sliver of it contributes to the
distinctive utility of today's systems.
Or consider this. Unix grew by about 39 system calls in its first
decade, but an average of 40
per decade ever since. Is this accelerated growth more symptomatic of
maturity or of cancer?
Doug
There's so much experience here, I thought someone might know:
"Our goal is to develop an emulator for the Burroughs B6700 system. We
need help to find a complete release of MCP software for the Burroughs
B6700.
If you have old magnetic tapes (magtapes) in any format, or computer
printer listings of software or micro-fiche, micro-film, punched-card
decks for any Burroughs B6000 or Burroughs B7000 systems we would like
to hear from you.
Email nw(a)retroComputingTasmania.com"
Hi all,
On a completely different note... I’ve been delving into typing tutor programs of late. Quite a mishmash of approaches out there. Not at all like what I remember from junior high - The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, kinda stuff. Best of breed may be Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on the gui front, and I hate to admit it, gnu typist, on the console front.
I’m wondering if there are some well considered unix programs, historically, for learning typing? Or did everyone spring into the unix world accomplished typists straight outta school? I did see mention a while back about a TOPS-10 typing tutor, not unix, but in the spirit - surely there's some unix history around typing tutors.
Thanks,
Will
> Or consider this. Unix grew by about 39 system calls in its first
> decade, but an average of 40
> > per decade ever since. Is this accelerated growth more symptomatic of
> maturity or of cancer?
Looks like I need a typing tutor. 39 should be 30. And a math tutor, too. 40
should be 100.
Doug
$ k-2.9t
K 2.9t 2001-02-14 Copyright (C) 1993-2001 Kx Systems
Evaluation. Not for commercial use.
\ for help. \\ to exit.
This is a *linux* x86 binary from almost exactly 20 years ago running on FreeBSD built from last Wednesday’s sources.
$ uname -rom
FreeBSD 13.0-ALPHA3 amd64
Generally compatibility support for previous versions of FreeBSDs has been decent when I have tried. Though the future for x86 support doesn’t look bright.
> On Feb 8, 2021, at 10:56 PM, John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> wrote:
>
> (I'm not up on what the BSD releases are doing.)
This topic is evocative, even though I really have nothing to say about it.
Mike Lesk started, and I believe Brian contributed to, "learn", a program
for interactive tutorials about Unix. It was never pushed very far--almost
certainly not into typing.
But the mention of typing brings to mind the inimitable Fred Grampp--he
who pioneered massive white-hat computer cracking. Fred's exploits justified
the opening sentence I wrote for Bell Labs' first computer-security task
force report, "It is easy and not very risky to pilfer data from Bell
Laboratories computers." Among Fred's many distinctive and endearing
quirks was the fact that he was a confirmed two-finger typist--proof that
typing technique is an insignificant factor in programmer productivity.
I thought this would be an excuse to tell another ftg story, but I
don't want to repeat myself and a search for "Grampp" in the tuhs archives
misses many that have already been told. Have the entries been lost or
is the index defective?
Doug
