I just discovered that this issue of the Australian UNIX User Group
Newsletter contains summaries of all the talks and sessions from the Usenix
Texas UNIX Users Conference - Summer 1981.
https://vtda.org/pubs/AUUGN/AUUGN-V03.4.pdf
In what I believe was my first public speaking role I presented
"UNIX vs Godzilla -- UNIX in an IBM Environment"
Lots of other familiar names in those notes too.
Hi,
I got interested in UI design and often study some historical aspects of it as I work on software. It’s hard not to notice how fast/usable Text User Interfaces are—ncurses and its siblings are still alive and well. From the ergonomy point of view, not needing a mouse in those interfaces if perfect.
Question: where did TUIs come from originally, and what were their earliest instances?
Many pages state that Vi was the first, but I’ve been looking through some old hardware photos, and things capable of more sophisticated interactions existed before Vi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen
Some terminals with block display:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270
^ ’71. Wiki says Vi showed up in ’76, but I suspect IBM mainframes may have had TUIs before.
Question 2: were there any manuals talking about TUIs? I’m thinking some of those spiffy IBM things mandating certain design.
Thanks,
Adam
A TikTok user was asking the history of the touch(1) command: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTjgSMyAQ/
Unix history repo let me find the first occurrence in V7: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7-Snapshot-D…
But looking at ls source in V6, it’s clear that stat(2) had st_mtime so touch would have been useful earlier. I notice make was added at the same time, which cares significantly about mtime. Was that the impetus?
(Also, wow just writing a single char! Compared to present day impls which give fine grained control to modify mtime & atime, the original seems both indirect for the purpose and delightfully literal.)
--
Joseph Holsten
http://josephholsten.com
mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
tel:+1-360-927-7234
Hello TUHS people!
Someone recently posted a question about your prized UNIX artifacts to
this list, that discussion [1] seems to be about various memorabilia.
What about computers made to run UNIX? Do you have or used to any
interesting historical hardware?
For my part, I have only used UNIX on emulated systems so far but would
like to purchase some hardware. Given that I have little space it would
need to be something small. According to you how does one get into that
specific type of retro computing?
See you around cyberspace,
Vicente
vicente(a)collares.ca
[1] https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-June/032020.html
Hi all,
Do sources exist for a MACRO-11 assembler for UNIX? The only package I
have found is written in MACRO-11 and relies on a provided binary to
regenerate itself; it's on the brl.pdp11 archive on the CSRG DVD.
-Henry
I still have two 19" racks with the main components of the PDP-11/45,
built in 1972, on which we started using UNIX 5th Edition in late summer
1974. Later it ran 6th and 7th Ed. CPU with front panel w. switches and
lamps, RK03 cartridge disk (2.5Mb!), floating point processor board
(serial number 1), several core memory banks among which 8K ones,
DEC-tape, ASR33-TTY, dozens of mini-lightbulbs, not a single LED. Its
hour-meter has clocked 122532: that's 13,97 years.
It is complete but doesn't run. I remember from the days when I
administered it during its productive life that it required .5 day of
maintenance per six weeks, by a qualified service engineer: tuning power
supplies, adjusting the disk head with the help of a special "alignment"
disk cartridge, checking the fans (25+ in just those two racks), etc. etc.
The CPU consists of 17 large PCBs. The combined MTBF of these PCBs was
1.5 years approx. Then the service engineer came with his box with
exchange boards and swapped until the machine was up&running again.
Without a maintenance contract such a board had a 5-figure exchange fee.....
Hendrik-Jan Thomassen
Hello Milo,
On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 13:38:54 -0400
Milo Velimirović <milovelimirovic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> What’s your budget and what’s your level of hardware technical skill? If budget is no concern, there are occasional complete pdp11 or vaxen on eBay. Or, you could get CPU cards and interfaces to piece together a system. If you go that route a Unibone or Qbone is highly recommended for both debugging and filling in hardwar gaps via emulation. Alternatively, there are several FPGA projects to emulate -11s.
Buying a complete PDP-11 or VAX is the dream, but it's not what I'm
aiming for to start. I was thinking of something like a UNIX
workstation. I haven't thought about the possibility of piecing together
a system using various cards. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll have to
look into it.
Budget is a concern for me. So ideally I would like to spend around $500
USD on the actual computer. Is that realistic for the type of computer I
mentioned above?
I'm not hardware savvy, so I would have a limited ability to do repairs
on the electronics. I do know someone who is though, so I might be able
to get some help on this project.
I wish you an excellent week,
Vicente
vicente(a)collares.ca
> From: Vicente Collares
> I'm more interested in its historical signaficance.
If that's your interest, PDP-11's are absolutely _the_ way to go. The PDP-11
is _the_ machine that made UNIX. That choice has good points, and a very bad
point, though.
Good points are that QBUS PDP-11's are pretty easy to find, pretty small
(desktop PC-sized), and not very expensive. They're pretty robust, too - I
have a large stack of PDP-11 QBUS CPUs, and none of them had failed, as of the
last time that I powered them on.
The very bad point is that working mass storage for them is very hard to
find. The controllers are around, but not the drives.
Does anyone know if anyone is making a QBUS mass storage clone? Bridgham and
I were going to produce QBUS RK11/RP11 clone that used SD cards to hold the
bits. We got the prototype working, and it booted UNIX, but then I came down
with COVID and post-COVID myalgic encephalomyelitis, and that was the end of
that.
Noel
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 15:16:08 -0400, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com <mailto:henry.r.bent@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:59, Lawrence Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com <mailto:stewart@serissa.com>> wrote:
>
>> My rare items are only Unix-adjacent. ... I have some boards for a Digital
>> Firefly, a research vax multiprocessor that ran a Modula-2 based OS that
>> would run Ultrix binaries.
>
> That's incredibly cool. Do you know if any of the Firefly machines
> survived? I saw a VAXstation 3540 for sale at some point recently but it
> was well out of my price range; I hope it found a good home.
>
> -Henry
I have a set of Firefly boards (I worked on the Taos operating system for the Firefly). But as far as I can tell, no software survives.
Charles P. Thacker and Lawrence C. Stewart. 1987. Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation. In Proceedings of the second international conference on Architectual support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS II). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1145/36206.36199
Paul McJones and Garret Swart. Evolving the UNIX system interface to support multithreaded programs. Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference, December 1989. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/evolving.pdf Also available as Part I of SRC Research Report 21 (https://mcjones.org/paul/SRC-RR-21.pdf) Part II of which is the Taos Programmer's Manual.
Paul McJones and Andy Hisgen. The Topaz system: Distributed multiprocessor personal computing. Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems. IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Operating Systems, November 1987. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/wwospos.pdf
(Topaz was the name for the Modula-2+ programming environment, which also ran on VAX Ultrix.)
Paul
