I've done research on this, but I'm confused and would appreciate some
help to understand what's going on. In the 7th edition manual, vol 2,
there's an ADB tutorial (pp. 323-336). In the tutorial, the authors,
Maranzano and Bourne, walk the reader through a debugging session. The
first example is predicated on a buffer overflow bug and the code includes:
struct buf {
int fildes;
int nleft;
char *nextp; char buff[512]; }bb;
struct buf *obuf;
...
if((fcreat(argv[1],obuf)) < 0){
...
Well, this isn't v7 code. As discussed in the v7 manual vol 1 (p. VII):
Standard I/O. The old fopen, getc, putc complex and the old –lp package
are both dead, and even getchar has changed. All have been replaced by
the clean, highly efficient, stdio(3) package. The first things to know
are that getchar(3) returns the integer EOF (–1), which is not a
possible byte value, on end of file, that 518-byte buffers are out, and
that there is a defined FILE data type.
The buffers are out, fcreat is gone, etc. So, what's up with this? I
don't think adb was in v6, where the fcreat function and buf struct are
used... Were Maranzano and Bourne using some kind of hybrid 6+ system?
Thanks,
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
OK. I'm plowing through a lot of issues with the putative 2.11BSD
reconstructions I've done to date. I keep finding things dated too new to
be right.
And it turns out that a few patches "snuck in" when the patch 80 catch up
was done. I've outlined the ones I've found so far at
https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/08/missing-211bsd-patches.html but I'm
sure there's at least one more. There was much ambiguity over /usr/new and
/usr/local that lead to some of these, but others look like they were in
the master tree, but never formally published that have all the hallmarks
of legit bug fixes...
I've also detailed the issues in going backwards. 2.11BSDpl195 had a
different .o format than 2.11BSDpl0. And to make matters worse, its
assembler couldn't assemble the assembler from the initial release, so I
had to get creative (using apout, thanks to all who contributed to that!).
I've also blogged about how to walk back a binary change when the old
programs no longer build on the new system. I think I got lucky that it was
possible at all :).
https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/08/bootstrapping-211bsd-no-patches-from.ht…
has the blow by blow. There are a lot of steps to building even a normal
system... Let alone walking through the minefield of errors that you need
to do when stepping back...
And neither of these even begin to get into the issues with the build
system itself requiring workarounds for that...
But anyway, I keep making "ur2.11BSD" tapes, installing them and fixing the
issues I find... While much information was destroyed in the process,
there's a surprising amount of redundancy that one can use to 'test'
putative tapes.
Warner
P.S. ur2.11BSD is from urFOO in linguisting, meaning the original FOO
that's been lost and which some amount of reconstruction / speculation is
offered about it. Still looking for a good name for the reconstructed
2.11BSD release....
Probably same as others do, when I'm implementing some 'trace'
messages in a new program or one just 'under investigation' I try to
make sure the message has a nice format to be able to process a few
megabyte of logfile easily.
Cheers,
uncle rubl
John Gilmore:
Yes -- but [Bell Labs'] administration was anything but egalitarian or
meritocratic. I know someone who had immense trouble getting inside the
door at the Labs because "all" he had was a bachelor's degree. Let
their character be judged by how they treated a stranger.
Sign me proud to have succeeded in life with no degrees at all,
====
That was where local management came in.
I have no degrees at all. I haven't been nearly as
successful in many ways as John, but I was recruited
and hired by 1127. That I had no degree meant I was
initially hired as a `special technical assistant'
rather than a `member of technical staff,' but my
department head and director and executive director
(the last was the legendary Vic Vyssotsky) worked
tirelessly on my behalf, without my pushing them at
all, to get me upgraded, and succeeded after I'd been
there about a year. It was only later that I realized
just how much work they'd done on my behalf.
The upgrade gave me a big raise in pay, but I was
young enough and nerdy enough not to notice.
Within the 1127 culture there was no perceptible
difference; it was very much an egalitarian culture.
I felt respected as an equal from the start (really
from the day and a half I spent interviewing there).
Not every part of the Labs, let alone AT&T, was like
that, especially outside of the Research area. I
didn't realize it initially but that was one of the
ways I benefited from the success of UNIX (that 1127's
and 112's management could push past such bureaucratic
barriers).
After all, Ken never had more than an MS.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
The Computer History Museum has an interesting blog post about
Dennis Ritchie's lost dissertation:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies-lost-dissertat…
Interesting fact is that Dennis never received his PhD because he failed
to provide a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library.
Kirk McKusick
> The use of honorifics was subtly discouraged at the Labs. I never saw a
policy statement, but nobody I knew used "Dr" (except those in the medical
department)
With the sole exception of the president's office, secretaries were
instructed not to say "Dr so-and-so's office" when they picked up an
unanswered phone call. (When that happened you could be sure that
the party you were calling was genuinely unavailable. Part of the
AT&T ethos--now abandoned--was that everybody, right up to the
president, answered their own phones.)
Doug
On another front. I know I've asked this before in v6, and possibly
related to v7, but I can't find the notes anywhere. vi doesn't come with
v7. So, has anybody put it on v7 in simh? I saw a thread sometime back
where vi on v7 wasn't the main topic, where Warren? I think it was, said
he'd done it and it was "easy." I don't suppose there are any notes
laying around telling how this might be accomplished?
I do see vi in 2bsd.tar, I don't suppose there is a 'how to install
2bsd on v7" note around either?
Thanks,
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
Is there full bsdi git repo anywhere?
I've vague recollections parts were merged into FreeBSD in the early
2000s so I assume it was open sourced?
There is a tarball of bsdi 2 on venus wetware but that's the best I
can do with searching.
--
Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5
> From: Will Senn
> I don't really understand how they work.
> ...
> maybe the way to understand the unix regex lies in a careful
> investigation into how it is implemented
I'm not sure what I did, but it wasn't the latter, since I have no idea how
they are done!
I just mentally break the regex search string up into substrings (I use them
most in Epsilon, which has syntax to do substrings of search strings, which
helps a lot); past that, I think it's just using them and getting used to
them.
> an IBM 7094 (whatever that is)
IBM's last 36-bit scientific mainframe before the System/360's. CTSS (which
DMR held out as the ancestor of Unix) ran on 7094's.
Noel
> "My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to
> be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural
> languages better than functional ones."
>
> Amen to that. Me too, I tried functional languages and my head hurt. C
> seems so natural to me.
Dennis made quite a generalization from a sample of one--Lisp,
the only functional language that existed when he was in grad
school. I'm sure he'd agree today that functional languages
shine for spplications rooted in algebraic domains. I
immodestly point to www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/powser.html,
which has nothing to do with Unix, but certainly would have
appealed to Dennis.
Doug
