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tuhs@tuhs.org

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6557 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy {Moving this to COFF, as it's not UNIX-related. I'll have another reply there as well, about the social media point.} > The amazing thing, to me, is I was a CS student in very early 1980's > and I had no idea of the history behind the arpanet. I don't think that was that uncommon; at MIT (slightly earlier, I think - -'74-'77 for me) the undergrad's weren't learning anything about networking there either, then. I think the reason is that there wasn't much to teach - in part because we did not then know much about networking, and in part because it was not yet crystal clear how important it would become (more below on that). There was research going on in the area, but even at MIT one doesn't teach (or didn't then; I don't know about now) on-going research subjects to undergrads. MIT _did_ have, even then, a formal UROP ('undergrad research opportunities') program, which allowed undergrads to be part of research groups - a sheer genius idea - which in some fast-moving fields, like CS, was an inestimable benefit to more forward undergrads in those fields. I joined the CSR group at LCS in '77 because I had some operating system ideas I wanted to work on; I had no idea at that point that they were doing anything with networks. They took me on as the result of the sheerest chance; they had just gotten some money from DARPA to build a LAN, and the interface was going to be built for a UNIBUS PDP-11, and they needed diagnostics, etc written; and they were all Multicians. I, by chance, knew PDP-11 assembler - which none of them did - the MIT CS introductory course at that point taught it. So the deal was that I'd help them with that, and I could use the machine to explore my OS ideas in return. Which never really happened; it fairly became clear to me that data networking was going to have an enormous impact on the world, and at that point it was also technically interesting, so I quickly got sucked into that stuff. (I actually have a written document hiding in a file drawer somewhere from 1978 or so, which makes it plain that that I'm not suffering 20-20 hindsight here, in talking about foreseeing the impact; I should dig it up.) The future impact actually wasn't hard to foresee: looking at what printed books had done to the world, and then telgraphs/telephones, and what computers had already started to do at that point, it was clear that combining them all was going to have an incredible impact (and we're still adapting to it). Learning about networking at the time was tricky. The ARPANET - well, NCP and below - was pretty well documented in a couple of AFIPS papers (linked to at the bottom here: https://gunkies.org/wiki/ARPANET which I have a very vague memory I photocopied at the time out of the bound AFIPS proceedings in the LCS library). The applications were only documented in the RFC's. (Speaking of which, at that level, the difference between the ARPANET and the Internet was not very significant - it was only the internals, invisible to the people who did 'application' protocols, that were completely different. HTTP would probably run just fine on top of NCP, for instance.) Anything past that, the start of the internet work, that, I picked up by i) direct osmosis from other people in CSR who were starting to think about networks - principally Dave Clark and Dave Reed - and then ii) from documents prepared as part of the TCP/IP effort, which were distributed electronically. Which is an interesting point; the ARPANET was a key tool in the internet work. The most important aspect was email; non-stop discussion between the widely separated groups who were part of the project. It also made document distribution really easy (which had also been true of the latter stages of the ARPANET project, with the RFC's). And of course it was also a long-haul network that we used to tie the small internets at all the various sites (BBN, SRI, ISI - and eventually MIT) into the larger Internet. I hate to think about trying to do all that work on internets, and the Internet, without the ARPANE there, as a tool. Noel

1 year

Unix spotted in Mumbai.

by Dan Cross

I thought some may appreciate the linked photo: Unix spotted near Mumbai Central Railway Station, Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India. https://photos.app.goo.gl/acTTsfvYt5suP4wS6 - Dan C.

1 year

Re: Unix spotted in Mumbai.

by Bakul Shah

On Aug 13, 2024, at 6:48 AM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > I thought some may appreciate the linked photo: Unix spotted near Mumbai Central Railway Station, Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India. > https://photos.app.goo.gl/acTTsfvYt5suP4wS6 A lot of shells under that Unix umbrella! Coconut water + its jelly like flesh can be quite refreshing on a hot Mumbai day. Did you try any?

1 year

Re: Berkeley CSRG Building

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Erik E. Fair" > before that, ARPANET was connected NOTE: "ARPANET" is _always_ (**ALWAYS**) used with the definite article ("the"). Don't take my word for it; check out, e.g. A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade https://walden-family.com/bbn/arpanet-completion-report.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA115440.pdf (There are a lot more contemporaneous documents - AFIPS conference papers, etc - if anyone is interested in them.) I was somewhat polite about it _this_ time. Noel

1 year

Other POSIX Candidates?

by segaloco

I'm paraphrasing here but I've read in a few places something to the effect that UNIX was "selected" as the basis on which to build a portable operating system standard, which of course we all know as POSIX. However, I got thinking on the implications of that phrasing, and have to ask, was there actually a "selection" made picking UNIX over some other candidate, or was it pretty much established from the outset of pursuing a standard that UNIX was going to get standardized? Another way to put it would be as a chicken and egg, which came first, desire for a portable base system definition that UNIX happened to fit nicely, or the ongoing need for UNIX standardization finding sponsorship by the working groups, IEEE, etc.? Did any other OS contend for this coveted honor? - Matt G.

1 year

Debate re optimization between Bill Harrison and Steve Johnson at POPL 8

by Dibyendu Majumdar

Hi I am looking for any write-up or recollection about the debate mentioned here: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~reps/popl00/cfd00.html And also mentioned in an interview with Fran Allen (Coders at Work). Many thanks Regards Dibyendu

1 year

SDF Beget's ICM - Interim Computer Museum

by Clem Cole

Please excuse the wide distribution, but I suspect this will have general interest in all of these communities due to the loss of the LCM+Labs. The good folks from SDF.org are trying to create the Interim Computer Museum: https://icm.museum/join.html As Lars pointed out in an earlier message to COFF there is a 1hr presentation on the plans for the ICM. https://toobnix.org/w/ozjGgBQ28iYsLTNbrczPVo FYI: The yearly (Bootstrap) subscription is $36 They need to money to try to keep some of these systems online and available. The good news is that it looks like many of the assets, such as Miss Piggy, the Multics work, the Toads, and others, from the old LCM are going to be headed to a new home. ᐧ

1 year

Interesting history of Bell Labs

by Dan Cross

Steve Bellovin just posted this on Mastodon, I thought it might interest some folks here. It's more about Bell Labs than Unix, but of course Unix, as a product of Bell Labs, is related and is mentioned. - Dan C. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to-recreate-bell

1 year

Question regarding Limbo

by Dibyendu Majumdar

Hi, Apologies for the off topic question. I was curious who wrote the Limbo programing language that is part of Inferno. Regards Dibyendu

1 year

UNIX Roff Manual

by segaloco

Just sharing a copy of the Roff Manual that I had forgotten I scanned a little while back: https://archive.org/details/roff_manual This appears to be the UNIX complement to the S/360 version of the paper backed up by Doug here: https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/roff71/roff71.pdf From the best I could tell, this predates both 1973's V3 and the 1971 S/360 version of the paper, putting it somewhere prior to 1971. For instance, it is missing the .ar, .hx, .ig, .ix, .ni, .nx, .ro, .ta, and .tc requests found in V3. The .ar and .ro, and .ta requests pop up in the S/360 paper, the rest are in the V3 manpage (prior manpages don't list the request summary). If anyone has some authoritative date information I can update the archive description accordingly. Finally, this very well could be missing the last page, the Page offset, Merge patterns, and Envoi sections of Doug's paper are not reflected here, although at the very least, the .mg request is not in this paper so the Merge patterns section probably wasn't there anyway. - Matt G.

1 year, 1 month

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