> From: Doug McIlroy
> doing legwork for Multics I ran the following experiment on a lot of
> then-current time-sharing systems.
Fascinating; you don't happen to remember the ones you tried, do you?
Also, when you say "legwork for Multics", was this something done during
the planning stages (so, say '64-'65), or later on?
Noel
I wrote a UNIX shell based on Python the other night in case anyone's
interested: https://github.com/terrycojones/daudin Apologies for a modern
instead of an historic subject...
Terry
FYI. I sent this to one of the lead DOC people from the old days to see if she knew. Here is her answer.
Begin forwarded message:
> From: "Janet Egan"
> Date: October 11, 2019 at 7:53:16 PM EDT
> To: "'Clem Cole'"
> Subject: RE: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC
>
> Hi Clem,
>
> Hmm, I don’t remember whether the style guide addressed that. In the docs for RSX-11M and such I always wrote it “PDP-11”, that is upper case with the dash. I do remember the logo on the machine as always lower case with no dash. The PDP-8 had the same style logo. And you’re right about seeing the lower case on the cover of the handbooks. I have never seen the lower case with the dash or the upper case without it. I don’t think I still have my copy of the style guide. Maybe I’ll take a look around my archives for it.
>
> What a fun question to be thinking about .
> Janet
>
>
> From: Clem Cole
> Sent: Friday, October 11, 2019 9:47 AM
> To: Janet Egan
> Subject: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC
>
> Janet,
> I'm part of The Unix Historical Society (TUHS) mailing list and a topic came up that I thought you might be able to shed some light on. The observation was that 'DEC seemed to have a schizophrenic attitude to wrt to use of upper and lower case WRT to the PDP-11 brand,' i.e. sometimes using "PDP-11" and sometimes "pdp11" (but I note rarely if ever PDP11 or pdp-11) . For instance, the logo on the system itself was all lower: PDP-11/40 but DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; but when used on the places like the cover could be either e.g. the "pdp11 peripherals handbook" to transcribe the cover exactly but it uses upper case "PDP-11" several times on pg 1-1 and the same on the binding. But I could not find examples of pdp-11 or PDP11, i.e. if all lower it was with the dash or all upper without.
>
> Do you remember if there were rules or guidelines and if so what they might have been?
>
> Thanks,
> Clem
I was reminded of this by Larry's comment:
> I miss Brian on this list. I've interacted with him over the years, the
> one I remember the most was I was trying to do an awk like interface to a
> key/value "database".
Recently I've had to deal with a lot of data in CSV
(comma-separated-value) format. Awk is *almost* prefect for this, but
of course doesn't handle the quoting of fields that contain commas.
One can usually work around it by finding a character that doesn't
occur in the data and converting the CSV file to use that as the
separator, but it's not ideal.
Awk's input could easily be modified to handle CSV files, but output
would be a bit more difficult, because you don't specify field
boundaries explicitly on output. One possibility would be a printf()
format specifier that takes a field and quotes it appropriately.
-- Richard
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> From: Arnold Skeeve
> K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read.
I learned C from "Programming in C - A Tutorial", by Brian Kernighan, which
for some reason seemed to have fallen into desuetude from V7 on (at least,
that was the impression I got). Which was a pity, it was one of the best
documents I ever read - a breeze to read through, and clear as crystal.
Noel
Not sure I had an "aha erlebnis" with UNIX. I'd done some testing on a
Philips PTS6000 with T.O.S. All assembler code with debugging syslod
the most fun (breakpointing code which moves itself in memory). Then I
was a user on VAX 11/730, 11/750 with Ultrix which was a bit of a step
down. The VAXes run VMS during the week and only in weekends we could
place our disk pack and boot Ultrix. Funny feeling to go home when
colleagues arrive in the morning.
Later "Propriety UNIX" versions based on System III, 7, V. No source.
Still had shells, command line, scripts, a bit of programming in C if
all else fails (or is too slow). Never liked Windows. In that sense
maybe more an 'aha windows' moment to quickly forget :-)
Cheers,
uncle rubl
