John Linderman:
Every "divestiture" had an adverse effect on critical mass. The split
between AT&T and Bellcore was a big hurt.
The split between AT&T and Lucent was another. When I joined the Labs in
1973, it was an honor to work there.
====
Maybe I'm blinded because I wasn't there earlier, but
to me, joining Bell Labs in 1984, just after the original
divestiture that split off Bellcore, was still an honour.
There were certainly good people I never had a chance to
work with because they went to Bellcore, but in 1127 at
least, morale was good, management stayed out of our way
and encouraged researchers to work on whatever interested
them, and a lot of good work was done even if that group
was no longer the source of All UNIX Truth. (In fact I
think we missed the boat on some things by being too
inwardly-focussed, TCP/IP in particular, but divestiture
didn't cause that.)
It seemed to me that the rot didn't really begin to show
until around 1990, the time I left (though not for that
reason; this is hindsight). Upper management were
visibly shifting focus from encouraging researchers to
do what they did best to treating researchers as a source
of new products to be marketed. The urge to break the
company up further seems to me to have been a symptom,
not a cause; the cause was a general corporate shift
toward short-term profits rather than AT&T's traditional
long-term view. AT&T was far from alone in making this
mistake, and research in the US has suffered greatly all
over as a result.
I remember visiting a couple of years after I left, and
chatting with my former department head. He said 1127
was having trouble convincing new researchers to join up
because they'd heard (correctly) that the physics and
chemistry research groups were being cut back, and feared
computing science would have its own reckoning soon enough.
In fact the corporate direction of the time was to cut
back on the physical sciences and push to expand software
research and development, but I don't blame the new
researchers for being concerned (nor did my ex-DH), and
in the long term they turned out to be more right than
wrong.
Nothing lasts forever, but the classic Bell Labs lasted
a long time. We have nothing like it now. I don't think
we'll have anything like it any time soon. That's sad.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Preferring fewer emails, but not wanting to miss out on topics
that had not occurred to me, I would continue to subscribe
to the digest and not switch to a topic-filtering option.
Doug
On 7/6/20 7:30 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> People (not just Clem), when you change the topic, can you please
> modify the Subject: to match? I'm not overly interested in uucp,
> but editors are a completely different matter. I'm sure I'm not the
> only one, so many interested parties will miss these replies.
I see this type of change happen — in my not so humble opinion — /way/
/too/ /often/.
So, I'm wondering if people are interested in configuring TUHS and / or
COFF mailing list (Mailman) with topics. That way people could
subscribe to the topics that they are interested in and not receive
copies of topics they aren't interested in.
I'm assuming that TUHS and COFF are still on Mailman mailing lists and
that Warren would be amicable to such.
To clarify, it would still be the same mailing list(s) as they exist
today. They would just have the to be utilized option of picking
interesting topics. Where topics would be based on keywords in the
message body.
I'm just trying to gauge people's interest in this idea.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
Dave Horsfall:
A boss of mine insisted that we all learned "ed", because one day it might
be the only editor available to you after a crash; he was right...
====
Besides which, as The Blessed Manual said in every
Research edition:
ed is the standard text editor.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(typing this in Toronto qed)
John Cowan:
Very much +1. Part of the trouble is that Gmail and similar clients don't
routinely show you the Subject: line to make it easy to edit it; you have
to take affirmative action when you want to change the subject matter.
====
Perhaps we should take a leaf from 1980s Rob Pike, and
just automatically change every message to be
Subject: The content of this message
(There is an actual story behind that, but I'll leave it
to Rob to tell.)
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
When googling for File System Switch or Virtual File System most sources mention Sun NFS and SysVr3 as the earliest implementations. Some sources mention 8th Edition.
I did a (short) search on FSS/VFS in earlier, non-Unix OS’s (Tenex, Multics, CTSS, etc.), but none of those seem to have had a comparable concept.
Does anybody recall prior art (prior to 1984) in this area?
Paul
All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you have
an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well?
Thanks, Warren
----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi(a)malbolge.net> -----
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200
From: Michael Siegel <msi(a)malbolge.net>
To: wkt(a)tuhs.org
Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager
Hi there,
I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated.
The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the
System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the
historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1]
I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux
package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging
utility.”[2]
I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it
into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of
the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004
Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get
the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely
available.
Any ideas on how to proceed?
Best
Michael
[1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix))
but I've also found other sites stating the same.
[2]
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-ut…
[3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html
----- End forwarded message -----
Could someone point me to some information about s editor?
Googling didn't help
On Fri, Jul 3, 2020, 9:00 PM <tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
> Send TUHS mailing list submissions to
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>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of TUHS digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. v7 uucp debugging help requested (Adam Thornton)
> 2. Re: v7 uucp debugging help requested (Clem Cole)
> 3. Re: v7 uucp debugging help requested (Grant Taylor)
> 4. Re: v7 uucp debugging help requested (John Cowan)
> 5. Re: v7 uucp debugging help requested (Clem Cole)
> 6. Re: v7 uucp debugging help requested (Clem Cole)
> 7. Re: v7 uucp debugging help requested (Norman Wilson)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2020 13:52:42 -0700
> From: Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com>
> To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
> Subject: [TUHS] v7 uucp debugging help requested
> Message-ID:
> <CAP2nic3UNxqi-obHwB5H+Ee+x5MKsd=eBrwhVbX+Ao3AgVPx=
> g(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> (if this is better suited for COFF, that'd be fine too)
>
> I've been trying to set up UUCP on my V7 system and its raspberry Pi host.
> This plus the "s" editor (already working) are really all that's needed to
> make this something pretty close to a daily driver, if all I wanted to do
> was write text files (which in some sense is all my job _is_, but to be
> fair I get a much more immediate feedback loop in my current environment).
>
> I was following
>
> https://github.com/jwbrase/pdp11-tools/blob/master/howtos/V7%20UUCP%20Insta…
> more or less--I had already rebuilt v7 with the DZ terminal driver and was
> using it for interactive sessions (albeit, before I started trying to get
> UUCP running, with 7-bit line discipline--but I've since changed that).
>
> I have 16 DZ lines, I've set them to 8-bit mode. They're working fine,
> because I can use them for terminal sessions.
>
> I've built UUCP, set a node name, and set it up on the pi.
>
> I can execute uucico to send files, and it, frustratingly, almost works.
>
> >From the Pi side, I see (with uulog):
>
> uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:11:34.97 23106) Calling system v7 (port TCP)
> uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:11:42.25 23106) Login successful
> uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:11:44.44 23106) Handshake successful (protocol
> 'g' sending packet/window 64/3 receiving 64/7)
> uucico v7 adam (2020-07-03 08:11:51.61 23106) Sending
> /home/adam/git/simh/sim_scsi.h (6780 bytes)
> uucico v7 adam (2020-07-03 08:16:21.79 23106) ERROR: Timed out waiting for
> packet
> uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:16:21.80 23106) Protocol 'g' packets: sent 86,
> resent 6, received 1
> uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:16:21.80 23106) Errors: header 2, checksum 0,
> order 0, remote rejects 0
> uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:16:22.51 23106) Call complete (283 seconds 5440
> bytes 19 bps)
>
> So it's clearly logging in, and if I telnet in directly, the v7 end is
> starting uucico as expected:
>
> login: pi-uucp
> Password:
> Shere
>
> uulog -x on the v7 side has no output, and nothing ever appears in the
> spool directory, which I suspect is a direct result of the timeout waiting
> for packet.
>
> So my question is, what else do I do to debug this? Clearly the pi (Taylor
> UUCP) side is expecting something else--maybe an acknowledgement?--from the
> v7 side to let it know the transmission was successful.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Adam
>
Grant Taylor:
I'm a little surprised that you're trying to use the 'g' protocol to
talk to v7. I thought the 'g' protocol came out later for TCP over
Ethernet connections. As such I wonder if UUCP on v7 supports the 'g'
protocol.
=====
You're mis-remembering. g was the original protocol,
intended for use over possibly-noisy serial lines (e.g.
modems on POTS). It does error checking of various
sorts with retransmission. I believe it is named g
after the protocol's original designer, Greg Chesson.
Later protocols meant to work over reliable, error-
checked links like a TCP/IP circuit were t and e.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
