> My favorite anecdote that I've read regarding Belle was when Ken
> Thompson took it out of the country for a competition. Someone,
> I'm assuming with customs, asked him if Belle could be
> classified as munitions in any way. He replied, "Only if you
> drop it out the window."
That's not the half of it. Ken had been invited by Botvinnik,
a past world champion, to demonstrate Belle in Russia. Customs
spotted it in baggage and impounded it without Ken's knowledge.
When he arrived empty-handed in Moscow, his hosts abandoned
him to his own devices.
Late that fateful Friday afteroon, customs called Bell Labs
security, which in turn called Ken's department head--me. That
evening I called Bill Baker, the Labs' presi7, at home,
hoping he might use his high-level Washington connections
to spring Belle. No luck. Ken was in the dark about the whole
affair until Joe Condon managed to reach him at his hotel.
Customs kept the machine a month and released it only after the
Labs agreed to pay a modest fine. I believe Ken's remark about
the military potential of Belle was made in reply to a reporter.
Doug
I was wondering, what was the /crp mount point in early UNIX used for?
And what does "crp" mean? Does it mean what I think it does?
It is only mentioned in V3 it seems:
./v4man/manx/unspk.8:unspk lives in /crp/vs (v4/manx means pre-v4)
./v3man/man6/yacc.6:SYNOPSIS /crp/scj/yacc [ <grammar ]
./v3man/man4/rk.4:/dev/rk3 /crp file system
I suppose scj, doug or ken can help out.
aap
Peter Adams, who photographed many Unix folks for his
"Faces of open source" series (http://facesofopensource.com/)
found trinkets from the Unix lab in the Bell Labs archives:
http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/unix-folklore/.
One item is more than a trinket. Belle, built by
Ken Thompson and Joe Condon, won the world computer
chess championship in 1980 and became the first
machine to gain a chess master rating. Physically,
it's about a two-foot cube.
Doug
Spurred by the recent discussion of NIS, NIS+, LDAP et al, I'm curious what
the landscape was like for distributing administrative information in early
Unix networks.
Specifically I'm thinking about things like the Newcastle Connection, etc.
I imagine that PDP-11's connected to the ARPAnet running Unix would (e.g.,
RFC 681 style) would have adapted the HOSTS.TXT format somehow. What about
CHAOS? Newcastle? Datakit?
What was the introduction of DNS into the mix like? I can imagine that that
changed all sorts of assumptions about failure modes and the like.
NIS and playing around with Hesiod are probably the earliest such things I
ever saw, but I know there must have been prior art.
Supposedly field 5 from /etc/passwd is the GECOS username for remote job
entry (or printing)? How did that work?
- Dan C.
> I have a vague intuition right now that the hyphenation decisions
> ...
> should be accessible without having to invoke the output driver.
Would't that require some way to detect a hyphenation event?
Offhand, I can't think of a way to do that.
But if you know in advance what word's hyphenation is in
question, you could switch environments, use the .ll 1u
trick in a diversion, and base your decision on the result.
Doug
UNIX was half a billion (500000000) seconds old on Tue Nov 5 00:53:20
1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch).
-- Andy Tannenbaum
Hmmm... According to my rough calculations, it hit a billion (US) seconds
around 2000.
-- Dave
Does anyone have any experience with YP / NIS / NIS+ / LDAP as a central
directory on Unix?
I'm contemplating playing with them for historical reasons.
As such, I'm wondering what the current evolution is for a pure Unix
environment. Read: No Active Directory. Is there a current central
directory service for Unix (or Linux)? If so, what is it?
I'm guessing it's LDAP combined with Kerberos, but I'm not sure.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
Interesting. /crp was a regular part of the Research world
in the mid-1980s when I joined up. It was nothing special,
just an extra file system for extra junk, which might or might
not be backed up depending on the system.
I had no idea its roots ran so far back in time.
I always thought it was an abbreviation for `crap,' though,
oddly, the conventional pronunciation seemed to be creep.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
A. P. Garcia:
I'd be interested in knowing where a pure unix environment
exists, beyond my imagination and dreams that is.
====
For starters, the computing facility used for teaching
in the Department of Computer Science at the University
of Toronto. Linux workstations throughout our labs; Linux
file servers and other back-ends, except OpenBSD for the
Kerberos KDCs and firewalls.
And yes, we use Kerberos, including Kerberized NFS for
(almost) all exports to lab workstations, which cannot
be made wholly secure against physical breakins by students.
(There's no practical way to prevent that entirely.)
Except we also use traditional UNIX /etc/shadow files
and non-Kerberized NFS for systems that are physically
secure, including the host to which people can ssh from
outside. If you don't type a password when you log in,
you cannot get a Kerberos TGT, so you wouldn't have access
to your home directory were it Kerberized there; and we
aren't willing to (and probably couldn't) forbid use of
.ssh/authorized_keys for users who know how to do that.
Because we need to maintain the password in two places,
and because we create logins automatically in bulk from
course-registration data, we've had to write some of our
own tools. PAM and the ssh GSSAPI support suffice for
logging in, but not for password changes or account
creation and removal.
Someday we will have time to look at LDAP. Meanwhile we
distribute /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files (the latter
mostly blanked out to most systems) via our configuration-
management system, which we need to have to manage many
other files anyway.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
