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6557 discussions

Re: Typesetter C Compiler and Troff (Re: Re: v6 Unix Documents)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: > I was able to rebuild both the UNSW and the native PWB compiler on PWB > 1.0, but not to backport either to vanilla v6. Any idea what the problem was? I'm curious, because we ran a version of the Typesetter compiler on the MIT systems, which ran an enhanced V6. Noel

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?

by Douglas McIlroy

Rich's remark about file types reminded me of an ancient non-Unix story that I sent to Coff. Doug

8 months, 3 weeks

The History of the BSD Daemon

by Jan Schaumann

Marshall Kirk McKusick gave a talk on the history of the BSD Daemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDaD-CEzzg "This video tells the history of the BSD Daemon. It starts with the first renditions in the 1970s of the daemons that help UNIX systems provide services to users. These early daemons were the inspiration for the well-known daemon created by John Lasseter in the early 1980s that became synonymous with BSD as they adorned the covers of the first three editions of `The Design and Implementation of the BSD Operating System' textbooks. The talk will also highlight many of the shirt designs that featured the BSD Daemon."

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: v6 Unix Documents

by Jonathan Gray

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 01:23:23AM -0400, Dan Plassche wrote: > > On Sat, 19 Oct 2024, Jonathan Gray wrote: > > > PWB was an early external distribution with troff. > > > > Documents for the PWB/UNIX Time-Sharing System > > https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Bits:30007124 > > https://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/PWB_UNIX/ > > > > NROFF/TROFF User's Manual > > October 11, 1976 > > datamuseum.dk, pp 325-357 > > bitsavers, pp 217-249 > > > > Addendum to the NROFF/TROFF User's Manual > > May 1977 > > datamuseum.dk, p 358 > > bitsavers, p 250 > > > > fonts described in: > > Administrative Advice for PWB/UNIX > > 23. PHOTOTYPESETTING EQUIPMENT AND SUPPLIES > > datamuseum.dk, p 647 > > Thank you Jonathan. I was previously not sure where to place the > PWB documentation in the timeline but a clearer picture is > emerging. > > Based on the v6 "NROFF User's Manual" revised in 1974 and > published in 1975, I can now see that the PWB documentation with > the "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual" from 1976-77 has most of the > content that later appears in v7. The major change immediately > beforehand was the rewrite of troff into C.[1] Some clear > differences are the combination of nroff and troff manpages and > the addition of troff specific features like the special fonts > into the user's manual. > > [1]. Apparently in 1976: > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/unix_program_description-tr… "It was rewritten in C around 1975" Kernighan in CSTR 97, A Typesetter-independent TROFF I've seen references to "Documents for Use with the Phototypesetter (Version 7)" which was likely distributed with the licensed phototypesetter tape in 1977. What may have been the manual distributed with that tape is also close to v7. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Interdata732/usr/source/troff/doc https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Other/Interdata/ tuhs Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz usr/source/formatters/troff/doc/

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: Canonical Historic Approach to iconv(1)

by Rudi Blom

The "man 1 iconv" page on both HP-UX 11i 11.23 (Aug 2003) and 11.31 (Feb 2007) remark that iconv was developed by HP. Cheers, uncle rubl -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

9 months

Canonical Historic Approach to iconv(1)

by segaloco

So a project I'm working on recently includes a need to store UTF-8 Japanese kana text in source files for readability, but then process those source files through tools only guaranteed to support single-byte code points, with something mapping the UTF-8 code points to single-byte points in the destination execution environment. After a bit of futzing, I've landed on the definition of iconv(1) provided by the Single UNIX Specification to push this character mapping concern to the tip of my pipelines. It is working well thus far and insulates the utilities down-pipe from needing multi-byte support (I'm looking at you Apple). I started thumbing through my old manuals and noted that iconv(1) is not a historic utility, rather, SUS picked it up from HP-UX along the way. Was there any older utility or set of practices for converting files between character encodings besides the ASCII/EBCDIC stuff in dd(1)? As I understand it, iconv(1) is just recognizing sequences of bytes, mapping them to a symbolic name, then emitting them in the complementary series of bytes assigned to that symbolic name in a second charmap file. This sounds like a simple filter operation that could be done in a few other ways. I'm curious if any particular approach was relatively ubiquitous, or if this was an exercise largely left to the individual and so solutions were wide and varied? My tool chain doesn't need to work on historic UNIX, but it would be cool to understand how to make it work on the least common denominator. - Matt G.

9 months

Proposed release goal: [PATCH] [pic] Add support for arbitrary polygons

by Douglas McIlroy

A worthy objective, but it should not be released without user documentation. Where can one see that? Doug

9 months

Re: Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

by Douglas McIlroy

>>> malloc(0) isn't undefined behaviour but implementation defined. >> >> In modern C there is no difference between those two concepts. > Can you explain more about your view There certainly is a difference, but in this case the practical implications are the same: avoid malloc(0). malloc(0) lies at the high end of a range of severity of concerns about implementation-definedness. At the low end are things like the size of ints, which only affects applications that may confront very large numbers. In the middle is the default signedness of chars, which generally may be mitigated by explicit type declarations. For the size of ints, C offers guardrails like INT_MAX. There is no test to discern what an error return from malloc(0) means. Is there any other C construct that implementation-definedness renders useless? Doug

9 months

Looking for historical vi sources

by Anton Shepelev

Hello, all. Have you an idea where one could find the sources of the various versions of the ex/vi editor, besides those archived at TUHS: 1BSD/ex-1.1 2.11BSD/src/ucb/ex 2.9BSD/usr/src/ucb/ex/ex2 2.9BSD/usr/src/ucb/ex/ex3 2BSD/src/ex 3BSD/usr/src/cmd/ex 4.1cBSD/usr/src/ucb/ex 4.2BSD/usr/src/ucb/ex 4.3BSD-Reno/src/usr.bin/ex 4.3BSD-Tahoe/usr/src/ucb 4.3BSD-UWisc/src/ucb/ex 4.3BSD/usr/src/ucb/ex 4.4BSD/usr/src/usr.bin/ex 4BSD/usr/src/cmd/ex OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/vi There include vv. 1.1, 2.13, 3.2, 3.6, and many variants of 3.7. Has anything else been preserved to your knowledge?

9 months, 1 week

RIP Darl McBride former CEO of SCO

by Will Senn

It happened in September, apparently, but is only now making the rounds. Darl McBride, known for taking everybody and his brother to court over stolen code, has passed away. https://fossforce.com/2024/11/once-linuxs-biggest-enemy-darl-mcbride-dies-a… I actually remember liking SCO back in the day, before the company leadership went dark-side. These days, we get to play with ancient unix cuz of their license. What a topsy turvy world. Is there a concise summary of the SCO suits and fallout out there? I've seen a lot on the AT&T side of things, but other than having lived through it, I've not seen much on what eventually happened and why it all sort of just dissappeared. Will

9 months, 2 weeks

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