Got some exciting stuff in the mail today, and for once it isn't going to amount to sitting in front of a scanner for hours:
https://archive.org/details/5ess-switch-dk5e-cd-1999-05
After the link is the April/May 1999 issue of the 5ESS-Switch DK5E-CD, a collection of documents and schematics concerning the 5ESS-2000 variant of the 5ESS switch, as supported at the time by Lucent-Bell Labs. Of particular UNIX interest is the following:
https://ia601200.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/12/items/5ess-swi…
This is the November 1998 issue of the 5ESS-2000 Switch UNIX RTR Operating System Reference Manual (235-700-200, Issue 7.00). From the text it appears to be a descendant of the standard UNIX literature, although it only contains the intro, basic info, section 1, as well as a section on administration as well as an EMACS paper. It alludes to a more complete manual although I have not located that in this document collection (granted I'm busy on a work thing right now, just taking the time to upload and spread the word ATM.)
There's probably plenty of other relevant stuff in there, plus plenty of content regarding the 5ESS and 3B20D generally. These CDs were included with a paper binder of installation and identification info. The binder appears to be largely for training programs and I have yet to verify whether its contents are included in these CDs or the two supplement each other. Either way, this should present plenty of leads on more potential sources of 5ESS, 3B20D, and maybe UNIX RTR stuff. Unfortunately the discs only seem to contain documents, there wasn't the holy grail of a snapshot of UNIX RTR in there that I was kinda hoping might be bumping around. Thus the hunt for 3B20 UNIX continues...
- Matt G.
P.S. This is a bit more modern than what I've been dealing with generally, hopefully given the current state of 5ESS and Nokia-Bell Labs seeming to be winding things down, that means this isn't a problem to have put up. I just urge caution on any use of this stuff that even remotely smells of commercial activities, but I probably don't have to tell anyone that. Just covering my bases.
[TUHS bcc, moved to COFF]
On Thursday, January 4th, 2024 at 10:26 AM, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote:
> For whatever reason, intel makes it difficult to impossible to remove
> the ME in later generations.
Part of me wonders if the general computing industry is starting to cheat off of the smartphone sector's homework, this phenomenon where whole critical components of a hardware device you literally own are still heavily controlled and provisioned by the vendor unless you do a whole bunch of tinkering to break through their stuff and "root" your device. That I can fully pay for and own a "computer" and I am not granted full root control over that device is one of the key things that keeps "smart" devices besides my work issued mobile at arms length.
For me this smells of the same stuff, they've gotten outside of the lane of *essential to function* design decisions and instead have now put in a "feature" that you are only guaranteed to opt out of by purchasing an entirely different product. In other words, the only guaranteed recourse if a CPU has something like this going on is to not use that CPU, rather than as the device owner having leeway to do what you want. Depends on the vendor really, some give more control than others, but IMO there is only one level of control you give to someone who has bought and paid for a complete device: unlimited. Anything else suggests they do not own the device, it is a permanently leased product that just stops requiring payments after a while, but if I don't get the keys, I don't consider myself to own it, I'm just borrowing it, kinda like how the Bell System used to own your telephone no matter how many decades it had been sitting on your desk.
My two cents, much of this can also be said of BIOS, UEFI, anything else that gets between you and the CPUs reset vector. Is it a nice option to have some vendor provided blob to do your DRAM training, possibly transition out of real mode, enumerate devices, whatever. Absolutely, but it's nice as an *option* that can be turned off should I want to study and commit to doing those things myself. I fear we are approaching an age where the only way you get reset vector is by breadboarding your own thing. I get wanting to protect users from say bricking the most basic firmware on a board, but if I want to risk that, I should be completely free to do so on a device I've fully paid for. For me the key point of contention is choice and consent. I'm fine having this as a selectable option. I'm not fine with it becoming an endemic "requirement." Are we there yet? Can't say, I don't run anything serious on x86-family stuff, not that ARM and RISC-V don't also have weird stuff like this going on. SBI and all that are their own wonderful kettle of fish.
BTW sorry that's pretty rambly, the lack of intimate user control over especially smart devices these days is one of the pillars of my gripes with modern tech. Only time will tell how this plays out. Unfortunately the general public just isn't educated enough (by design, not their own fault) on their rights to really get a big push on a societal scale to change this. People just want I push button I get Netflix, they'll happily throw all their rights in the garbage over bread and circuses....but that ain't new...
- Matt G.
Hi,
I've found myself wondering about partitions inside of BSD disk labels.
Specifically, when and where was the convention that "a" is root, "b" is
swap, etc?
I also understand the "c" partition to be the entire disk, unless it
isn't, at which point it's the entire slice (BIOS / MBR partition)
containing the BSD disklabel and "d" is the entire disk.
I also found something last night that indicated that OpenBSD uses disk
labels somewhat differently than FreeBSD.
Aside: This is one of the dangers of wondering how something curious
came to be and why it came to be when working on 10-15 year old FreeBSD
systems.
--
Grant. . . .
[TUHS as Bcc]
I just saw sad news from Bertrand Meyer. Apparently, Niklaus Wirth
passed away on the 1st. :-(
I think it's fair to say that it is nearly impossible to overstate his
influence on modern programming.
- Dan C.
Disk sections (I don't think anyone in Research called them
partitions--certainly the Research manuals didn't) were
originally defined in the device driver, not by data on the
disk. In those days, system management included recompiling
stuff, including the OS kernel, and it was not unusual for
sites to edit hp.c or whatnot to adjust things to local
preference.
There was nothing magic about the mapping between device
names and minor device numbers either; the system came with
certain conventions on the original tape, but it was not
at all uncommon to change them.
By the time I arrived at the first Unix site I ever helped
run, in a physics group at Caltech, we already used a different
naming convention: a BSD-like ddNs, where dd was a driver
name, N the physical drive unit number, s a section letter.
I don't know whether that was borrowed from BSD (it must have
started during the 3BSD era, since I started there in mid-1980
and 4BSD appears to have been released late in that year).
Looking at my archival copy of that much-locally-hacked
source tree, I see that we later moved the definitions of
all the disk-section tables to a single file compiled at
system-configuration time (we used a USG-like scheme that
compiled most of the system into libraries, rather than
compiling every file separately for each target system a
la V7 and BSD). That simplified handling our somewhat-
complicated disk topology: all but system disks were connected
through System Industries 9400 disk controllers, which were
a neat design (each controller could interface to as many as
four hosts and four disks) but in practice were not always
reliable. On one hand, we arranged for one disk to be used
in parts by our main time-sharing VAX and a subsidiary PDP-11/45,
making the 11/45 cheaper to keep around; on the other, the
main VAX had two paths to each of its disks, through different
SI controllers, so when an SI controller conked out we could
run without it until the service guys fixed it. (Each disk
was dual-ported, as was common in the SMD world, hence
connected to two controllers.)
Reliability took rather more work in those days.
A different data point: by the time I moved from California
to New Jersey and joined 1127, Research was also using a
different naming scheme for disk sections. By then the
internal naming convention was e.g. ra17 for physical unit
1, section 7; by further convention 7 (the highest-numbered
section). At some point a little later we added an ioctl
to set the starting block and size of a particular section
on a particular drive, but we never went to having the OS
itself try to find a label and trust its contents (something
that still makes the 1980s part of me feel a little creepy,
though 21st century me has come to terms with it).
Norman Wilson
Certified old fart
Toronto ON
In S.S. Pirzada's 1988 paper[1], page 35, section 3.3.2, he writes:
"Some operating telephone companies and the switching control center system (SCCS) group in Holmdel, NJ decided to use UNIX to collect maintenance data from their switches and for administration purposes. Other departments also started building applications on top of UNIX, some part of turnkey systems licensed by Western Electric (WECo)."
This is describing the situation before the establishment of USG in September 1973. I'm curious, does anyone recall what some of these pre-USG WECo "turnkey systems" were?
The things that come to mind when I think of that phrase don't come about for several years, such as the 5ESS and other work surrounding Bellmac stuff. The SCCS UNIX connection describes what becomes CB-UNIX if I understand the situation correctly, but that stays a bit afield from the more conventional pool that is dipped into for WECo needs. Switching and UNIX all kinda come back together with DMERT on 1A/3B-API and 5ESS, but again that's late 70s R&D, early 80s deployment, not this time period, leaving me terribly curious what WECo would've been bundling UNIX with and shipping out to telcos. The famous early use of UNIX in the Bell System is typography, and WECo did have involvement with Teletype equipment, so perhaps something along those lines?
If it helps set the scene, a binder I recently picked up from ~1972 describing Western Electric test sets distributed to telcos describes the following additional classes of such documents:
Shop Services - Special non-standard products
Public Telephones - System standard public telephone equipment
Data Communications - Teletypewriter and Data Sets
Subscriber Products - System standard PBX's, station equipment and special services
Non-Subscriber Products - Microwave, cable, power equipment, etc.
Non-Bell Equipment Index - Non-Bell System manufactured communication equipment
Unfortunately haven't seen any of the other binders yet but I've been keeping an eye out, one or another might describe something WECo was shipping around that had some UNIX up in it. Nothing in this binder seems computer-y enough to run an operating system, just lots of gauges, dials, and probes. Luckily it is quite clear what data test sets are designed for 103-data set maintenance so I have fodder for seeking Dataphone tools...
Anywho, happy soon to be new year folks, I'm excited to see what turns up next year!
- Matt G.
[1] - https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/7942/1/Shamim_Sharfuddin_Pi…
Hi. I am trying to compile cron for the 3b2-400 and 3b2-700
and am apparently missing required libraries. The reason is
on the 3b2-400 after boot up it complains there is corruption
in the crontab for every user lp, sysadm, root and so on.
# make cron
cc -O cron.c -o cron
undefined first referenced
symbol in file
el_add cron.o
el_delete cron.o
el_empty cron.o
el_first cron.o
el_init cron.o
xmalloc cron.o
el_remove cron.o
num cron.o
days_in_mon cron.o
days_btwn cron.o
ld fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to cron
*** Error code 13
Stop.
Does anyone have these libraries? Thanks.
--
WWL 📚
As I messed with making a custom cron in the late 80s,
remembered the the el_ functions are for event list processing.
But you didn't specify the source of your source, by the hardware
it needs to be of System V heritage. And a lot of that source is hard
to offically come by due to licensing. Good way to view old SVR4 is
to look at OpenIndiana, Illumos, or OpenSolaris code bases that you can
find. You're in luck, as TUHS has a copy, see -- https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/cron/elm.c
Look at the Makefile for the other files you need to compile into it too.
-Brian
KenUnix wrote:
> Hi. I am trying to compile cron for the 3b2-400 and 3b2-700
> and am apparently missing required libraries. The reason is
> on the 3b2-400 after boot up it complains there is corruption
> in the crontab for every user lp, sysadm, root and so on.
>
> # make cron
> cc -O cron.c -o cron
> undefined first referenced
> symbol in file
> el_add cron.o
> el_delete cron.o
> el_empty cron.o
> el_first cron.o
> el_init cron.o
> xmalloc cron.o
> el_remove cron.o
> num cron.o
> days_in_mon cron.o
> days_btwn cron.o
> ld fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to cron
> *** Error code 13
>
> Stop.
Good time of day folks, I often ponder on people's attachments to pixels on the screen that come about by clicking *this* icon and typing in a box surrounded by blue and with an icon in position <xyz> vs pixels on the screen that come about instead by opening that application that is a black border with a little paper airplane button in the bottom right vs....etc.
To make it more clear, I find myself often confused at people treating email different from SMS different from social media DMs different from forum posts different from some other mechanism that like literally all the others is pixels arranged into glyphs on a screen conveying an approximation of human speech. This difference among these different ways to send said pixels to people has eluded me all my life despite working with technology since I was a tot.
What this has me curious on is if in the early days of UNIX there were attempts at suggesting which provided communication mechanisms were appropriate for what. For instance something that smells of:
It is appropriate to use mail(1) to send a review of a piece of work vs it is appropriate to use write(1) to ask Jim if he wants to take a lunch break before the big meeting. Did this matter to people back then like it seems to now? To me it's just pixels on a screen that are there when I look at them and aren't when I don't.
Truth be told I am hoping to learn something from this because I only do a couple email lists and web forums, my social life generally does not involve SMS, phone calls, nor social media. Where it has become tedious is someone I meet who seems to want to communicate over pixels on screens is then put off when I provide them an email address, usually asking instead if I have a Facebook or whatever the kids are calling Twitters today. The few times I've tried to explain email will be me transmitting you communication as pixel glyphs on a screen just like anything else would be me transmitting you communication as pixel glyphs on the screen, this doesn't diffuse their concerns any, they then just think there is something wrong with me for comparing words as pixels on a screen to words as pixels on a screen. Granted, I've probably avoided plenty of vapid people this way, but it feels like it's becoming more and more expected that "these pixels on the screen in *this* program are only for this and those pixels on the screen in *that* program are only for that".
Is this a recent phenomenon? Has communication over electronic means always had these arbitrary limitations hoisted on it by the humans that use it? Or did people not give a hoot what you sent over what program and actually cared more about the words you're saying than the word you typed at a terminal to then be able to transmit words? I doubt what I learn is going to royally change my approach to allowing technology in my irl social life, but it would be nice to at least have more mental ammo when someone asks to be friends online and then gives me mad sideeye when I go "sure here's my email address!"
- Matt G.
