Mark Seiden writes:
> the display updating code, as i recall, had a skull and crossbones on it
> i remember there was a bit of a kerfuffle when richard stallman introduced
> that code into gnu emacs
This is true. Gosling Emacs from 1984 and GNU Emacs 13 from 1985 both
have the skull and crossbones comment.
I see in many places the 1973 Symposium on Operating System Principles mentioned
as one of the earliest if not the earliest discussion of UNIX in the public eye.
This would be around the time of the Fourth Edition and the rewrite of the
system for the PDP-11/45 in C.
Well, I recently picked up Aho and Ullman's The Theory of Parsing, Translation,
and Compiling. The very last sentence of the preface in Volume 1 reads:
> The use of UNIX, an operating system for the PDP-11 computer designed by
> Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson, expedited the preparation of certain
> parts of this manuscript.
Given that this text was published in 1972, would this have been a completely
esoteric reference to the general target audience of these books or was
knowledge of UNIX already well circulated in the computing community by then?
What other sorts of notoriety/publicity did UNIX get out in the general public
prior to its presentation in 1973 and subsequent publication of the paper in
CACM?
- Matt G.
So System V shops had to hold a license with AT&T to modify and redistribute
code based on UNIX System V and they would then license directly with their
customers correct? This being distinct from the way licensing with BSD was
concerned in that you had to pursue the license with AT&T to then use BSD. That
is my current understanding anyway that I base this question on.
So IBM, DEC, Sun, HP, Microsoft, etc. approach AT&T, got a source license, and
started producing their System V value adds out there in the world. In this
present day and age, for those still shipping genuine System V derivatives, what
does this licensing landscape actually look like? Do the players still in the
game still refer to whatever license they started with back in the 80s, did they
renew up until say SVR4 when folks stopped drinking from the USL well, or are
there still ongoing licenses that the remaining vendors have to renew to
distribute their software?
Where I'm going with this is just another angle on the whole "who owns System V"
question which comes up in my mind all the time. Knowing the specific legal
entities involved in the most recent licensing documentation would certainly
factor into understanding the landscape a little better.
To boil that down to a specific example, once upon a time, Sun held a license
with AT&T to use, modify, and redistribute UNIX System V. At the present
moment, Oracle is the distributor of Solaris. If there is a piece of licensing
paperwork sitting in a filing cabinet at Oracle somewhere, who would that
paperwork say is the original licensor of the product? Would that even matter
in this year of 2025?
- Matt G.
Hi all,
I see that there has been quite a bit of activity in the last few weeks
with 2.11BSD, resulting in the release of a number of patches. Is there
any sort of announcement list that one could subscribe to in order to be
notified of when these patch releases occur? Would it make sense to post
patch announcements to the TUHS or SIMH lists? TUHS seems somewhat natural
since one of the patch distribution methods is through their archive,
though I am open to thoughts that anyone else has about this. I only
happened to be aware of the patches because I have the "History of the
Berkeley Software Distribution" page on my Wikipedia watchlist and someone
has been very diligent about updating the 2.11BSD patch status there.
-Henry
> "The requirement that awk add a trailing <newline> to the program argument
> text is to simplify the grammar, making it match a text file in form."
This should no more be a *requirement* for awk than globbing should have
been a requirement for MS-DOS apps. A widespread principle deserves a
widespread answer. If it is a requirement on awk, then for interoperability
it should be made a requirement on all programs that handle text files,
especially editors.
The way to do that, of course, would be to redefine text file to allow a
non-newline as the last character. Ugh.
Not warning perpetuates travesties like "awk END{print NR}' " giving a different
answer than "wc -l".
I agree that awk does the kind thing by supplying the final newline. But
it should recognize that this is non-standard behavior and warn in the
interest of discouraging the proliferation of garbage.
Postel's so-called "robustness principle" is in play here. "Be conservative
in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" would better read,
"Send conservatively; receive amply but grudgingly".
Doug
Re: newlines at the end of files.
I hesitate to ask this in such exalted company, but isn’t it a question of whether the newline is (or should be) a line terminator, or a statement separator?
-Steve
>> info groff gives semantics for including nonempty files that don't end
>> with newline. Such files violate the Posix definition of text file.
>>
>> Although groff is certainly justified in providing semantics for
>> non-Posix text, I suggest that it should warn when it does so.
> That's true but I'm hesitant to put groff in the business of wagging its
> finger at users feeding it non-strictly-conforming text files when doing
> so doesn't cause it any problems.
Causing groff problems is an odd criterion. The fact that groff will paste
files together unless the first happens to end in a newline is a sign of
groff 's internals, not of the underlying problem.
A newline missing at the end of a file is typically a symptom of either the
incaution of some other program (perhaps an editor) or of a file having
been unexpectedly truncated (as by a program abort). The latter cause
is common enough to justify warning always, not just about cases that
are inconvenient to groff.
Groff is what it is, but if the treatment of absent final newlines were up
for grabs, I'd argue for the more common solution: in all cases insert
a newline and warn.
Doug
The March 2025 issue of an IEEE journal has published Marc Rochkind's
article on SCCS. TUHS list members discussed a draft version of the
article last fall. Here is its BibTeX entry:
@String{j-IEEE-TRANS-SOFTW-ENG = "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering"}
@Article{Rochkind:2025:RSC,
author = "Marc J. Rochkind",
title = "A Retrospective on the {Source Code Control System}",
journal = j-IEEE-TRANS-SOFTW-ENG,
volume = "51",
number = "3",
pages = "695--699",
month = mar,
year = "2025",
CODEN = "IESEDJ",
DOI = "https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2024.3524947",
ISSN = "0098-5589 (print), 1939-3520 (electronic)",
ISSN-L = "0098-5589",
bibdate = "Tue Mar 25 08:57:56 2025",
bibsource = "https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ieeetranssoftweng2020.bib",
acknowledgement = ack-nhfb,
ajournal = "IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng.",
fjournal = "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering",
journal-URL = "https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=32",
keywords = "Codes; Control systems; CSSC; Mainframes; Merging;
Programming; SCCS; Software; software configuration
management; Software development management; software
engineering; Software engineering; software
reliability; Software reliability; software tools;
Source coding; source control management; version
control systems",
}
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