TUHS

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6515 discussions

by Larry McVoy

Ken's story got me thinking about stuff I would still like to learn and his comment about "when I got to Bell Labs"... made me wonder how did Ken, Dennis, Brian, Joe and the rest of the crew make their way to Bell Labs? When I was just starting out, Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the time (not that Sun was the same as Bell Labs but it was sort of the center of the Unix universe in my mind). So I wanted to go there and had to work at it a bit but I got there. Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that? If you were a geek was that the place to go? I was born in '62 so I don't have any memory of how well known the Labs were back then. So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems - people end up there? --lm

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] DEC compilers (was Happy birthday, John Backus!)

by Norman Wilson

Lars Brinkhoff: There was also NIL, for VMS. Was it ever finished? ==== If so, is there a pointer to it? Norman Wilson Toronto On

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Toby Thain > He made amends by being early to recognise that problem, and propose > solutions, in his 1977 ACM Turing Award lecture Actually, I'd consider a far bigger amend to be his work on Algol 60 (he was one of the main contributors), which Hoare so memorably described as "a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors". AFAICT, although Algol 60 itself is no longer used, basically _every_ modern programming language (other than wierd, parallel ones, etc) is heavily descended from Algol 60 (e.g. C, via CPL). As for FORTRAN, it's worth recalling that it was originally for the IBM 704, which was their very _first_ commercial computer with core memory! And not a lot of it - early 704's came with a massive 4KW of main memory! So the compiler had to be squeezed into _very_ small space - and it reportedly did an excellent job of emitting efficient code (at a time when a lot of people thought that couldn't be done, and so were hostile to the concept of writing program in HLL). And the compiler had to be written entirely in assembler, to boot... Which brings up an interesting query - I wonder when/what the last compiler written in assembler was? I gather these days compilers for new machines are always bootstrapped as cross-compilers (an X compiler for the Y machine is written in X, run through the X compiler for the [existing] Z machine, and then run though itself, on the Z machine, to produce binary of itself for the Y machine). Noel

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Tandem NSK implementation language (was: Happy birthday, John Backus!)

by Paul McJones

> On Dec 4, 2018, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: > > The original Tandem OS (called Guardian at the time) was written in Tandem's TAL (Transaction Application Language, amongst other productions), a vague evolution of HP's SPL that looked more like Algol, starting in about 1974. That is also the earliest I know of an operating system being implemented entirely in a high level language. Most likely the earliest operating system written in a high-level language was the one for the Burroughs B5000 (early 1960s), written in a dialect of Algol 60. Others: Multics, written in PL/1 (starting in mid 1960s), the operating system for the Berkeley Computer Corporation’s BCC-500, written in BCC SPL (system programming language) (late 1960s), OS6 by Stoy and Strachey, written in BCPL (early 1970s), Xerox Alto OS, written in BCPL (about 1974).

6 years, 5 months

ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by Dave Horsfall

The ARPAnet reached four nodes on this day in 1969 (anyone know their names?); at least one "history" site reckoned the third node was connected in 1977 (and I'm still waiting for a reply to my correction). Well, I can believe that perhaps there were only three left by then... Hmmm... According to my notes, the nodes were UCSB, UCLA, SRI, and Utah. -- Dave

6 years, 5 months

In Memoriam: John Lions

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Dr. John Lions of this day in 1998; he was one of my Comp Sci lecturers (yes, I helped him write The Book, and yes, you'll find my name in the back). -- Dave

6 years, 5 months

Happy birthday, John Backus!

by Dave Horsfall

As every computer programmer should know, John Backus was emitted in 1924; he gave us the BNF syntax (he is the "B"), but he also gave us that FORTRAN obscenity... Yeah, it was a nice language at the time; the engineers loved it, but tthe computer scientists hated it (have you ever tried to debug a FORTRAN program that somebody else wrote?). Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any syntax; it is completely ad-hoc. -- Dave

6 years, 5 months

> there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any syntax

by Doug McIlroy

I did just that. The National Bureau of Standards picked it up in NBS Handbook 131, "Using ANS FORTRAN" (1980). It is expressed in the same formalism that Burroughs used for Algol. Doug

6 years, 5 months

The (un)importance of roff

by Doug McIlroy

Thhis is a cross-posting from the groff mailing list, where it was speculated that without roff there might be no Unix. Old hands will be familiar with the story. > Without roff, Unix might well have disappeared. The patent department and the AT&T president's office are the only in-house examples I know where Unix was adopted because of *roff. The important adoptions, which led Berk Tague to found a separate Unix Support Group, were mainstream telephone applications and PWB, a Unix-based IDE. The first telephone application happened in the field. An engineer in Charlotte, NC, heard of this cheap easily programmed system and proposed to use it to automate the scheduling and dispatch of maintenance on the floor of a wire center. Ken visited to help get them started. The first Bell Labs telephone application was automating the analysis of central-office trouble reports. These had been voluminous stacks of punched cards that reported every anomaly detected in huge electromechanical switches. The Unix application captured the data on line and identfied systematic failures in real time. The patent adoption was a direct result of Joe Ossanna's salesmaship. Other early adopters were self-motivated, but the generous support lent by Ken, Joe, and others was certainly a tipping force that helped turn isolated events into a self-sustaining movement. Doug

6 years, 5 months

man-page style

by Doug McIlroy

Regardless of standards considerations, if there's any advice that needs to be hammered into man authors, it's to be concise and accurate, but not pedantic. As Will Strunk commanded, "Omit needless words." The most needless words of all are promotional. No man page should utter words like "powerful", "extraordinarily versatile", "user-friendly", or "has a wide range of options". As another instance of the rule, it would be better to recommend short subtitles than to help make them long by recommending quotes. If anything is said about limited-length macros, it would best be under BUGS. As editor for v7-v10, I would not offer v7 as a canonical model. It owed its use of boldface in SYNOPIS to the limited number of fonts (Typically R,F,I,S) that could be on our typesetter at the same time. For v9 we were able to follow Kernighan and adopt a distinct literals font (L, which happened to be Courier but could have been identified with bold had we wished). I still think this is the best choice. As for options, v7 is a very poor model. It has many pages that describe options in line, just as v1 had done for its few options (called flags pre-v7). By v10 all options were displayed in a list format. For nagging reasons of verbal continuity, the options displays were prefaced by *needless words* like, "The following options are recognized". A simple OPTIONS heading would be better. Unfortunately, an OPTIONS heading would intrude between the basic description and less important details that follow the options. (I don't agree that it would come too closely after DESCRIPTION; a majority of man pages already have even shorter sections.) OPTIONS could be moved to the end of DESCRIPTION. However, options may well be the biggest reason for quick peeks at man pages; they should be easy to spot. It has reasonably been suggested that OPTIONS should be a .SS subsection. That might be followed by .SS DETAILS. Doug

6 years, 6 months

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