TL; DR. I'm trying to find the best possible home for some dead trees.
I have about a foot-high stack of manilla folders containing "early Unix papers". They have been boxed up for a few decades, but appear to be in perfect condition. I inherited this collection from Jim Joyce, who taught the first Unix course at UC Berkeley and went on to run a series of ventures in Unix-related bookselling, instruction, publishing, etc.
The collection has been boxed up for a few decades, but appears to be in perfect condition. I don't think it has much financial value, but I suspect that some of the papers may have historical significance. Indeed, some of them may not be available in any other form, so they definitely should be scanned in and republished.
I also have a variety of newer materials, including full sets of BSD manuals, SunExpert and Unix Review issues, along with a lot of books and course handouts and maybe a SUGtape or two. I'd like to donate these materials to an institution that will take care of them, make them available to interested parties, etc. Here are some suggested recipients:
- The Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA, USA)
- The Internet Archive (San Francisco, CA, USA)
- The Living Computers Museum (Seattle, WA, USA)
- The UC Berkeley Library (Berkeley, CA, USA)
- The Unix Heritage Association (Australia?)
- The USENIX Association (Berkeley, CA, USA)
According to Warren Toomey, TUHS probably isn't the best possibility. The Good News about most of the others is that I can get materials to them in the back of my car. However, I may be overlooking some better possibility, so I am following Warren's suggestion and asking here. I'm open to any suggestions that have a convincing rationale.
Now, open for suggestions (ducks)...
-r
I just found out about TUHS today; I plan to skim the archives RSN to get some context. Meanwhile, this note is a somewhat long-winded introduction, followed by a (non-monetary) sales pitch. I think some of the introduction may be interesting and/or relevant to the pitch, but YMMV...
Introduction
In 1970, I was introduced to programming by a cabal of social science professors at SF State College. They had set up a lab space with a few IBM 2741 (I/O Selectric) terminals, connected by dedicated lines to Stanford's Wylbur system. I managed to wangle a spot as a student assistant and never looked back. I also played a tiny bit with a PDP-12 in a bio lab and ran one (1) program on SFSC's "production system", an IBM 1620 Mark II (yep; it's a computer...).
While a student, I actually got paid to work with a CDC 3150, a DEC PDP-15, and (once) on an IBM 360/30. After that, I had some Real Jobs: assembler on a Varian 620i and a PDP-11, COBOL on an IBM mainframe, Fortran on assorted CDC and assorted DEC machines, etc.
By the late 80's, my personal computers were a pair of aging LSI-11's, running RT-11. At work (Naval Research Lab, in DC), I was mostly using TOPS-10 and Vax/VMS. I wanted to upgrade my home system and knew that I wanted all the cool stuff: a bit-mapped screen, multiprocessing, virtual memory, etc.
There was no way I could afford to buy this sort of setup from DEC, but my friend Jim Joyce had been telling me about Unix for a few years, so I attended the Boston USENIX in 1982 (sharing a cheap hotel room with Dick Karpinski :-) and wandered around looking at the workstation offerings. I made a bet on Sun (buying stock would have been far more lucrative, but also more risky and less fun) and ended up buying Sun #285 from John Gage.
At one point, John was wandering around Sun, asking for a slogan that Sun could use on a conference button to indicate how they differed from the competition. I suggested "The Joy of Unix", which he immediately adopted. This decision wasn't totally appreciated by some USENIX attendees from Murray Hill, who printed up (using troff, one presumes) and wore individualized paper badges proclaiming themselves as "The <whatever> of Unix". Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... (bows)
IIRC, I received my Sun-1 late in a week (of course :-), but managed to set it up with fairly little pain. I got some help on the weekend from someone named Bill, who happened to be in the office on the weekend ... seemed quite competent ... I ran for a position on the Sun User Group board, saying that I would try to protect the interests of the "smaller" users. I think I was able to do some good in that position, not least because I was able to get John Gilmore and the Sun lawyers to agree on a legal notice, edit some SUGtapes, etc.
Later on, I morphed this effort into Prime Time Freeware, which produced book/CD collections of what is now called Open Source software. Back when there were trade magazines, I also wrote a few hundred articles for Unix Review, SunExpert, etc. Of course, I continue to play (happily) with computers...
Perkify
If you waded through all of that introduction, you'll have figured out that I'm a big fan of making libre software more available, usable, etc. This actually leads into Perkify, one of my current projects. Perkify is (at heart) a blind-friendly virtual machine, based on Ubuntu, Vagrant, and VirtualBox. As you might expect, it has a strong emphasis on text-based programs, which Unix (and Linux) have in large quantities.
However, Perkify's charter has expanded quite a bit. At some point, I realized that (within limits) there was very little point to worrying about how big the Vagrant "box" became. After all, a couple of dozen GB of storage is no longer an issue, and having a big VM on the disk (or even running) doesn't slow anything down. So, the current distro weighs in at about 10 GB and 4,000 or so APT packages (mostly brought in as dependencies or recommendations). Think of it as "a well-equipped workshop, just down the hall". For details, see:
- http://pa.cfcl.com/item?key=Areas/Content/Overviews/Perkify_Intro/main.toml
- http://pa.cfcl.com/item?key=Areas/Content/Overviews/Perkify_Index/main.toml
Sales Pitch
I note that assorted folks on this list are trying to dig up copies of Ken's Space Travel program. Amusingly, I was making the same search just the other day. However, finding software that can be made to run on Ubuntu is only part of the challenge I face; I also need to come up APT (or whatever) packages that Just Work when I add them to the distribution.
So, here's the pitch. Help me (and others) to create packages for use in Perkify and other Debian-derived distros. The result will be software that has reliable repos, distribution, etc. It may also help the code to live on after you and I are no longer able (or simply interested enough) to keep it going.
-r
Greetings,
I've so far been unable to locate a copy of munix. This is John Hawley's
dual PDP-11/50 version of Unix he wrote for his PHd Thesis in June 1975 at
the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.
I don't suppose that any known copies of this exist? To date, my searches
have turned up goose-eggs.
Hawley's paper can be found here https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/20959
Warner
P.S. I'm doing another early history talk at FOSDEM in a couple of weeks.
So if you're in the audience, no spoilers please :)
Hello,
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/spacetravel.html says:
> Later we fixed Space Travel so it would run under (PDP-7) Unix instead
> of standalone, and did also a very faithful copy of the Spacewar game
I have a file with ".TITLE PDP-9/GRAPHIC II VERSION OF SPACEWAR". (I
hope it will go public soon.) It seems to be a standalone program, and
it's written in something close to MACRO-9 syntax. I'm guessing the
Bell Labs version would have been written using the Unix assembler.
Best regards,
Lars Brinkhoff
The Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) is the modern standard for
object files in Unix and Unix-like OSes (e.g., Linux), and even for
OpenVMS. LInux, AIX and probably other implementations of ELF have a
feature in the runtime loader called symbol preemption. When loading
a shared library, the runtime loader examines the library's symbol
table. If there is a global symbol with default visibility, and a
value for that symbol has already been loaded, all references to the
symbol in the library being loaded are rebound to the existing
definition. The existing value thus preempts the definition in the
library.
I'm curious about the history of symbol preemption. It does not exist
in other implementations of shared libraries, such as IBM OS/370 and
its descendants, OpenVMS, and Microsoft Windows NT. ELF apparently
was designed in the mid-1990s. I have found a copy of the System V
Application Binary Interface from April 2001 that describes symbol
preemption in the section on the ELF symbol table.
When was symbol preemption when loading shared objects first
implemented in Unix? Are there versions of Unix that don't do symbol
preemption?
-Paul W.
Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> writes:
>markus schnalke <meillo at marmaro.de> writes:
>> [2015-11-09 08:58] Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
>>> things like "cut" and "paste", whose exact provenance
>>> I can't recall.
>>
>> Thanks for reminding me that I wanted to share my portrait of
>> cut(1) with you. (I sent some questions to this list, a few
>> months ago, remember?) Now, here it is:
>>
>> http://marmaro.de/docs/freiesmagazin/cut/cut.en.pdf
>
>Did you happen to find out what GWRL stands for, in the the comments at
>the top of early versions of cut.c and paste.c?
>
>/* cut : cut and paste columns of a table (projection of a relation) (GWRL) */
>/* Release 1.5; handles single backspaces as produced by nroff */
>/* paste: concatenate corresponding lines of each file in parallel. Release 1.4 (GWRL) */
>/* (-s option: serial concatenation like old (127's) paste command */
>
>For that matter, what's the "old (127's) paste command" it refers to?
I know this thread is almost 5 years old, I came across it searching for
something else But as no one could answer these questions back then, I can.
GWRL stands for Gottfried W. R. Luderer, the author of cut(1) and paste(1),
probably around 1978. Those came either from PWB or USG, as he worked with,
or for, Berkley Tague. Thus they made their way into AT&T commercial UNIX,
first into System III and the into System V, and that's why they are missing
from early BSD releases as they didn't get into Research UNIX until the
8th Edition. Also "127" was the internal department number for the Computer
Science Research group at Bell Labs where UNIX originated
Dr. Luderer co-authored this paper in the orginal 1978 BSTJ on UNIX --
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Papers/BSTJ/bstj57-6-2201.pdf
I knew Dr. Luderer and he was even kind enough to arrange for me stay with his
relatives for a few days in Braunschweig, West Germany (correct county name for
the time) on my first trip to Europe many decades ago. But haven't had contact nor
even thought of him forever until I saw his initials. I also briefly worked for Berk
when he was the department head for 45263 in Whippany Bell Labs before moving to
Murray Hill.
And doing a quick search for him, it looks like he wrote and autobiograhy, which I
am now going to have to purchase
http://www.lulu.com/shop/gottfried-luderer/go-west-young-german/paperback/p…
-Brian
Hi All:
   I looking for the source code to the Maitre'd load balancer. It is
used to run jobs on lightly used machines. It was developed by Brian
Berhard at Berkeley's Computer Systems Support Group. I have the
technical report for it (dated 17-dec-1985). But haven't run across the
tarball.
thanks
-ron
All, I've had a few subscribers argue that the type checking
thread was still Unix-related, so feel free to keep posting
here in TUHS. But if it does drift away to non-Unix areas,
please pass it over to COFF.
Thanks & apologies for being too trigger-happy!
Cheers, Warren
>> After scrolling through the command list, I wondered how
>> long it was and asked to have it counted. Easy, I thought,
>> just pass it to a wc-like program. But "just pass it" and
>> "wc-like" were not givens as they are in Unix culture.
>> It took several minutes for the gurus to do it--without
>> leaving emacs, if I remember right.
> This is kind of illustrative of the '60s acid trip that
> perpetuates in programming "Everything's a string maaaaan".
> The output is seen as truth because the representation is
> for some reason too hard to get at or too hard to cascade
> through the system.
How did strings get into the discussion? Warner showed how
emacs could be expected to do the job--and more efficiently
than the Unix way, at that: (list-length (command-list-fn)).
The surprise was that this wasn't readily available.
Back then, in fact, you couldn't ask sh for its command
list. help|wc couldn't be done because help wasn't there.
Emacs had a different problem. It had a universal internal
interface--lists rather than strings--yet did not have
a way to cause this particular list to "cascade through
the system". (print(command-list-fn)) was provided, while
(command-list-fn) was hidden.
Doug
