Normally I wouldn't cross the beams like this but a comment thread John
Nagle posted on this HN story is well written and for me was a great read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630457
On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 3:55 PM, Ken Thompson <kenbob(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 1:45 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> > On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 11:53 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > After Multics, I ran interference to keep our once-burned higher management from frowning too much on further operating-system research.
> > >
> > > Doug
> >
> > This alone is an all-too-valuable skill that contributes to the cultural success of countless projects. Great ideas can too often die on the vine when the upper echelons have quite different opinions of where time and effort should be placed, and I am glad that in my own career I likewise work with understanding immediate supervisors and business analysts that go to bat for our needs and concerns. The importance of a supportive workplace culture in which work is genuinely valued and defended cannot be understated.
> >
> > - Matt G.
>
> unix was written in c, c was written in b, b was written in tmg,and doug wrote tmg. it is all his fault.
>
>
Ken, your modesty is showing :)
I feel the same way about big things I'm working on in my day job. No matter how much folks try to laud me as our architect, nothing I did would exist without what my supervisor years and years ago handed me to start with before he moved on to greener pastures. Invention will always be a group effort, I'm just so glad this particular group effort (re: UNIX) has and continues to have the impact that it does.
A former manager (and respected colleague) would often say "I'm rubber, you're glue, what you bounce off me sticks to you." and it took me a little bit to appreciate what I thought he meant, but even longer to realize that saying encompassed the good as well.
- Matt G.
P.S. Hey Dave, I Bcc'd you, discussions with folks here often remind me of your good advice and management. Hope you're well, would love to hear from you if you see this!
Just to bring it full circle, after a bit of discussion it looks like what Henry is working with is the initial System V release for PDP-11/70, not some fabled PDP-11 SVR2, so the documentation I linked as well as some material on squoze.net concerning System V in SimH all apply directly. Subject adjusted accordingly.
- Matt G.
On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:55 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 at 16:51, segaloco <segaloco(a)protonmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:16 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user.
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks!
>>>
>>> -Henry
>>
>> First off I didn't know SVR2 made it to the PDP-11, I thought they cut it off after the initial System V release, is what you have AT&T or some derivative version?
>>
>> Second, this is the setup instructions for DEC processors for the initial release of System V which included the PDP-11/70: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-administrators-guide-5-0/04%20Setti…
>>
>> Additionally, here is the Operator's Guide which details bootstrapping the system among other things: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-operators-guide-release-5-0/mode/2up
>>
>> While not SVR2, hopefully the differences are minimal enough that you can use those. Good luck!
>>
>> Also regarding finding more documentation, sadly AT&T stripped out the /usr/doc materials with System V, so these critical pieces of documentation actually can't be found in a typical system distribution, rather, you had to get the paper copies. I'm not aware of any discovery of TROFF sources for any of this stuff past System III, I do have it on my long-term list to eventually synthesize copies of said documents from available scans so they can be more easily diff'd, but my current focus is much, much earlier.
>
> Thank you, this is a wonderful starting point. I often forget that sometimes archive.org will have documentation that is not duplicated in other sources, so this is a welcome reminder. I'll read through all of this and report back.
>
> -Henry
Hello all,
I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get
booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to
proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user.
The root dump boots on a simulated 11/70 with an RP06:
--
sim> boot rp
#0=unixgdtm
UNIX/sysV: unixgdtm
real mem = 3145728 bytes
avail mem = 3068864 bytes
INIT: SINGLE USER MODE
--
I'm mostly a BSD person but I'm familiar enough with some later SysV
systems. That being said, the initialization procedure here is completely
foreign to me. I have cpio files for the entire system and I know in
theory how to extract them, but I'm stuck at the basics of creating /usr,
setting up /etc and the like. I have a fully extracted filesystem from the
cpio files that I can browse but I can't find enough information in the
manpages. I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like
on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of
the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling
in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed.
Thanks!
-Henry
> When Rudd, Doug, Ken, Dennis, *et al* start to develop UNIX
Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I was not one of those
who "start[ed] to develop it".
Doug
> From: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu>
> Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I was not one of
> those who "start[ed] to develop it".
http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/pipes/
Dennis wrote that "UNIX is a very conservative system. Only a handful of its
ideas are genuinely new." (And quite right he was, too!) Among the ones that
are new, pipes, although less important now than they used to be, were a major
part of the constellation of things that drove its adoption, early on. And I
can't see how pushing pipes was not "developing UNIX"! I'm afraid you'll just
have to live with it! :-)
Noel
Hi All,
I was wondering, what were the best early sources of information for
regexes and why did folks need to know them to use unix? In my recent
explorations, I have needed to have a better understanding of them, so
I'm digging in... awk's my most recent thing and it's deeply associated
with them, so here we are. I went to the bookshelf to find something
appropriate and as usual, I've traced to primary sources to some extent.
I started with Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl, and I won't
knock it (it's one of the bestsellers in our field), but it's much to
long for my personal taste and it's not quite as systematic as I would
like (the author himself notes that his interests are less technical
than authors preceding him on the subject). So, back to the shelves...
Bourne's, The Unix Environment, and Kernighan & Pike's, The Unix
Programming Evironment both talk about them in the context of grep, ed,
sed, and awk. Going further back, the Unix Programmer's Manual v7 - ed,
grep, sed, awk...
After digging around it seems like folks needed regexes for ed, grep,
sed and awk... and any other utility that leveraged the wonderful nature
of these handy expressions. Fine. Where did folks go learn them? Was
there a particularly good (succinct and accurate) source of information
that folks kept handy? I'm imagining (based on what I've seen) that
someone might cut out the ed discussion or the grep pages of the manual
and tape them to their monitors, but maybe I'm stooopid and they didn't
need no stinkin' memory device for regexes - surely they're intuitive
enough that even a simpleton could pick them up after seeing a few
examples... but if that were really the case, Friedl's book would have
been a flop and it wasn't :). So seriously, if you remember that far
back - what was the definitive source of your regex knowledge and what
were the first motivators for learning them?
Thanks,
Will
I hope everyone's having a lovely tail end of whichever season is gracing your
hemisphere. Had some surprise snow this morning up in the NW corner of the US,
hoping it bodes well for a mild summer.
I'm curious, is anyone aware of any attempts to revise John Lions's UNIX
Commentary for versions beyond the Sixth Edition? Having finished my
disassembly of the classic video game Dragon Quest this past year, I'm now doing
some planning for a similar work and have considered practicing the art a little
by doing some diffing of V6 and V7 and feeling out the process by putting down
some revisions, that way I've got some of the flow and kinks worked out before I
start on my own "Commentary on Dragon Quest" manuscript. I'd hate to double up
on something someone else has already done though, so if V7 for instance has
gotten this treatment, then perhaps focusing on PWB or the CB-UNIX kernel would
minimize the potential rehashing.
Also if anyone has any thoughts, suggestions, etc. from their own experiences
working up very detailed source-level documentation of a large software product,
I'd certainly be interested, as I know this is going to turn into quite the
sprawling undertaking once I really get going, especially if I try and work in
the differences between the Japanese and U.S. releases (of which there are many.)
- Matt G.
> From: Bakul Shah
> Use of "flag" for this purpose seems strange. "option" makes more sense.
People on this list seem to forget that there were computers before UNIX.
The _syntax_ of "-f" probably predates any UNIX; Multics used it extensively.
See the "Introduction to Multics", MAC-TR-123, January 1974 (a little after
UNIX V1, but I expect I could probably track it back further in time, if I
cared to put in the effort); pg. 3-24.
Interestingly, I looked though the CTSS manual, and CTSS did not seem to use
this syntax for flag arguments: see, e.g., the SAVE command (section AH.3.03).
The _name_ "flag" came in early on UNIX. (Multics called them "arguments";
see above, pg. 3-27, top line.) We can see this happen - see:
http://squoze.net/UNIX/v1man/man1/du
which calls the "-a" and "-s" "arguments"; but in:
http://squoze.net/UNIX/v1man/man1/ld
"-s", "-u", etc are called "flag arguments".
Long enough ago that certainty about the etymology/rationale is probably now
lost.
Noel
Hello,
A great article on the floppy disk.
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-floppy-disk
--
Boyd Gerber <gerberb(a)zenez.com> 801 849-0213
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