TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6501 discussions

Re: [TUHS] The most surprising Unix programs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Guertin > I teach math in college ... Sometimes, during an exam, a student who > forgot to bring their calculator will ask if they can borrow mine I > always say "sure, but you'll regret it" and hand them the calculator > After wasting one or two minutes, they give it back Maybe I'm being clueless/over-asking, but to me it's appalling that any college student (at least all who have _any_ math requirement at all; not sure how many that is) doesn't know how an RPN calculator works. It's not exactly rocket science, and any reasonably intelligent high-schooler should get it extremely quickly; just tell them it's just a representational thing, number number operator instead of number operator number. I know it's not a key intellectual skill, but it does seem to me to be part of comon intellectual heritage that everyone should know, like musical scales or poetry rhyming. Have you ever considered taking two minutes (literally!) to cover it briefly, just 'someone tried to borrow my RPN calculator, here's the basic idea of how they work'? Noel

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Dennis Ritchie's ACM Turing Award lecture paper in Communications of the ACM 27(8) 758--760 (August 1984), doi:10.1145/358198.358207 was reprinted in UNIX Review 3(1) 28, 118--120, 122, (January 1985) [no DOI or URL yet found], and more recently, in Resonance 17(8) 810--816 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0091-y. There are two other UNIX-related papers in that issue of Resonance: Pramod Chandra P. Bhatt UNIX: Genesis and design features Resonance 17(8) 727--747 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0084-x K. Bhaskar C --- Past, present, and future --- A perspective Resonance 17(8) 748--758 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0085-9 I do not have access to that journal's archives from my campus library, so I have not seen the articles. In his paper, Dennis Ritchie referred to another UNIX article that I did manage to track down and record in unix.bib: Donald Arthur Norman The Truth about UNIX Datamation 27(12) 139--150 (November 1981) https://tinyurl.com/yyselmxq The original URL is 200+ characters long, and is a freely-downloadable PDF of a reprint in AUUGN volume IV number I. The PDF file has searchable text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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, 8 months

A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Warren Toomey

"Reflections on Software Research" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1283920.1283939?download=true Happy birthday, Dennis! Warren

4 years, 8 months

Whence did "XXX" come about?

by Dave Horsfall

For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more work" or "look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself. Whence did it come about? I think I saw it as early as PWB, but can't be sure. -- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX"

4 years, 8 months

Archeology Today - 516-TSS notebooks unearthed in old Wyse terminal box

by Jon Steinhart

Score! I'm not planning to scan all of these in unless someone really cares and has a better scanner than I do. I'm going to prioritize the following: 516-10, -11, -18 Ring Formats 516-12 Specifications for the Node Modem Interface 516-22 A Repeater for the Node Modem 516-28 I/O Ring Device Codes 516-36 Node Modem Interface for Computer Terminals 516-72 Node Test 516-73 Node I/O Software 516-57 Format for the 516 Node - TIU Spider Interface 516-67 Node Format for PDP-11 Jon

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] H.J. Lu Bootable Root & Base System disks

by norman＠oclsc.org

In my humble-but-correct opinion*, Linux and its origins fit into the general topic of UNIX history just as well as those of Research UNIX or BSD or SVr4.2.2.2.2.2.2.2 or SunOS or IRIX or Ultrix or Tru64-compaqted-HPSauce or whatever. It all stems from the same roots, despite the protestations of purists from all sides. Warren gets final say, of course, but to encourage him I will say: Ploooogie! Norman Wilson Toronto ON * One of Peter Weinberger's sayings that I still enjoy overusing.

4 years, 8 months

Unix tools to aid in the production of Internet RFCs?

by Dan Cross

Honestly, I'm not quite sure if this is a TUHS, COFF, or IH question. But since my background with respect to such things is largely Unix centric, I thought I'd ask in that context, hence asking on TUHS. I assume some of the regulars on this list have authored RFCs (of the IETF etc variety). The RFC format seems fairly well fixed: table of contents, fixed number of lines per page, page numbers and dates in the footer, and so forth. The format is sufficiently complex that it seems like some tooling could be usefully employed to aid in producing these documents. So I'm curious: what tools did people use to produce those documents? Perhaps `nroff` with custom macros or something? - Dan C.

4 years, 8 months

Quick video: what's the oldest BSD distro

by Warner Losh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww60o940kEk You may be surprised :) Warner P.S. Hope this is relevant enough to share here. Also, if I botched anything I've not yet mentioned in the comments, please let me know...

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] bare m4 (was BTL summmer employees)

by Doug McIlroy

A modestly corrected and improved version of my bare-m4 program, which quickly builds from nothing to arithmetic on binary numbers using no builtins other than `define'. is posted at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/barem4.txt. (.txt because browsers balk at .m4) Doug

4 years, 8 months

early BIND

by Tony Finch

Another question at the intersection of the Internet-History and TUHS lists... I was wondering about the early history of BIND. I started off wondering about the relative ages of JEEVES (the original PDP10 DNS server) and BIND. Judging by the dates on RFCs 881 - 883, the DARPA contract commissioning BIND, and the Berkeley tech reports, it seems there wasn't much time when the DNS was without BIND. But I was struck by the resolver API set out on page 8 of Berkeley tech report UCB/CSD-84-182: it looks nothing like the familiar API that ended up in 4.3BSD. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1984/5957.html https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/src/lib/libc/net/n… So I'm wondering if there's anything out there recording the history between the 1984 tech reports and the 4.3BSD release in 1986. (It's also noteworthy that early BIND supported incremental DNS updates and zone transfers, which didn't reappear in standard form until RFC 2136 (1997) and RFC 1995 (1996)...) Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ public services of the highest quality

4 years, 8 months

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