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Re: when did v8 or later get networking?

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2023 03:17:25 +0000 > From: segaloco > >>>> TCP/IP, not datakit > > > All of the files that have timestamps at the top list 83/07/29, except ip_input.c which has 83/08/16 instead. The V8 version has _device (device driver) and _ld (line discipline) components that the 4.1cBSD code does not have. Many other files have analogs between the two. The byte ordering subroutines have been copied into a file, goo.s, from their home in 4.1cBSD in the C library (/usr/src/lib/libc/net/misc). When this work originated someone else would need to answer, [...] As far as I can tell the history of this code line goes back to 1977, when Jack Haverty at BBN wrote a TCP/IP library (porting earlier work written in PDP-11 assembler) for a slightly modified 6th Edition Unix. Fighting with 64KB core limits, throughput was horrific and he concluded that a bigger PDP-11 was needed. Mike Wingfield then did a re-implementation in C for a PDP-11/70. This worked in early 1979 and is arguably the first Unix TCP/IP stack that can still interoperate with current IPv4. However, it was still mostly a proof of concept user mode design (it was funded as a test vehicle for the later abandoned Autodin-II fork of TCP). BBN then got a contract to write a kernel mode TCP/IP stack for 4BSD (“VAX TCP” in the old BBN doc’s). This work was performed by Rob Gurwitz under supervision of Jack Haverty. This stack - although all new code - still showed its heritage: it was designed as a loosely bound kernel process providing the NCP-Unix API. Some sources seem to imply that it was developed first as a user mode process and once working in that context changed into a kernel process / thread. Beta releases were available in 1981. It worked (and interoperates with modern IPv4), but in my experiments a few years back it turned out that it is difficult to get the scheduling for this kernel process right at higher system loads. Bill Joy of CSRG concluded that the BBN stack did not perform according to his expectations. Note that CSRG was focused on usage over (thick) ethernet links, and BBN was focused on usage over Arpanet and other wide-area networks (with much lower bandwidth, and higher latency and error rates). He then in 1982 rewrote the stack to match the CSRG environment, changing the design to use software interrupts instead of a kernel thread and optimising the code (e.g. checksumming and fast code paths). It was a matter of debate how new the code was, with the extremes being that it was written from scratch using the spec versus it being mostly copied. Looking at it with a nearly 50 year distance, it seems in between: small bits of surviving SCCS suggest CSRG starting with parts of BBN code followed by rapid, massive modification; the end result is quite different but retained the ‘mbuf’ core data structure and a BBN bug (off-by-one for OOB TCP segments). The shift from the NCP-Unix API to sockets is separate from this and was planned. CSRG had the contract to develop a new API for facilitating distributed systems with Unix and this gelled into the sockets interface. The first prototypes for this were done in 1981. Nearly all of the above source is available in the TUHS online Unix Tree (Wingfield, VAX-TCP and two early versions from CSRG - one in 2.9BSD and one in 4.1cBSD).

1 year, 9 months

Hundreds of HP-UX Manuals (Auction Links)

by segaloco

Good morning folks, just sharing some eBay sales I spotted that are just not in the cards for me, both in terms of expense and I just don't have the bandwidth to focus on other UNIX lines right now. That said, someone is selling a very, very large collection of HP-UX documents: https://www.ebay.com/itm/285425883705 https://www.ebay.com/itm/285425882004 As mentioned, quite pricy, and bulky too. However, if anyone knows anyone with a particular eye for HP-UX history, this may interest them. No idea what is and isn't preserved there, non-Bell-and-UCB stuff hasn't been on my radar hardly at all other than acknowledging it exists. Tangential but I do appreciate the consistency in their documentation appearance. I see HP-UX stuff pop up time to time and the cover motif is identical to the documents they published with analytical equipment like gas chromatographs before spinning that unit off into Agilent. - Matt G.

1 year, 9 months

V8 Streams // was Re: when did v8 or later get networking?

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com > Thu Aug 10 12:45:54 AEST 2023 > wrote: > > Yea, I thought it was 4.1bsd + later tcp code but with a STREAMS instead of > Socket interface... Please see this old TUHS post for some more background in DMR’s own words: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2019-August/018325.html On the topic of DMR Streams, I’m increasingly intrigued by its design: recently I’ve been deep diving into classic USB to better understand this class of devices and how to drive them (https://gitlab.com/pnru/usb_host) It would seem to me that Streams would have been a neat way to organise the USB driver stack in a v8 context. Note that an USB analog did exist in 1982: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex-Bus Sometimes I wonder what combining v8 streams with v8 virtual directories (i.e. like Killian’s /proc) could have looked like. Having the streams network stack (or usb stack) exposed as virtual directories would have been quite powerful.

1 year, 9 months

when did v8 or later get networking?

by lm＠mcvoy.com

TCP/IP, not datakit.

1 year, 9 months

Re: v8 /etc/motd

by Steve Simon

probably local, but i do remember: “Error 17. press control + backslash + underscore + exclamation mark to continue; or any other key to reboot.”

1 year, 9 months

v8 /etc/motd

by ron minnich

Sorry if this has been asked before, but: "Welcome to Eighth Edition Unix. You may be sure that it is suitably protected by ironclad licences, contractual agreements, living wills, and trade secret laws of every sort. A trolley car is certain to grow in your stomach if you violate the conditions under which you got this tape. Consult your lawyer in case of any doubt. If doubt persists, consult our lawyers. Please commit this message to memory. If this is a hardcopy terminal, tear off the paper and affix it to your machine. Otherwise take a photo of your screen. Then delete /etc/motd. Thank you for choosing Eighth Edition Unix. Have a nice day." was this one person or a group effort. It's wonderful.

1 year, 9 months

March 17, 1988 Bill Joy @ IBM Yorktown VHS discovered thanks to 512 byte C compiler

by Charles H Sauer (he/him)

At 1:46:50, Bill says "AIX is a good thing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmC5yoE_7PY backstory on how https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html led to this rediscovery at https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2023/08/07/koko-keeping-warm/ Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

1 year, 9 months

Re: Help with a Unix-ish project?

by steve jenkin

six years later… A note for the list: Warren (in. IMHO, a stroke of genius) changed the Repo from xv6-minix to xv6-freebsd. <https://github.com/DoctorWkt/xv6-freebsd> -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

1 year, 9 months

Re: python

by norman＠oclsc.org

At the risk of releasing more heat than light (so if you feel compelled to flame by this message, please reply just to me or to COFF, not to TUHS): The fussing here over Python reminds me very much of Unix in the 1980s. Specifically wars over editors, and over BSD vs System V vs Research systems, and over classic vs ISO C, and over embracing vendor-specific features (CSRG and USG counting as vendors as well as Digital, SGI, Sun, et al) vs sticking to the common core. And more generally whether any of the fussing is worth it, and whether adding stuff to Unix is progress or just pointless complication. Speaking as an old fart who no longer gets excited about this stuff except where it directly intersects something I want to do, I have concluded that nobody is entirely right and nobody is entirely wrong. Fancy new features that are there just to be fancy are usually a bad idea, especially when they just copy something from one system to a completely different one, but sometimes they actually add something. Sometimes something brand new is a useful addition, especially when its supplier takes the time and thought to fit cleanly into the existing ecosystem, but sometimes it turns out to be a dead end. Personal taste counts, but never as much as those of us brandishing it like to think. To take Python as an example: I started using it about fifteen years ago, mostly out of curiousity. It grew on me, and these days I use it a lot. It's the nearest thing to an object- oriented language that I have ever found to be usable (but I never used the original Smalltalk and suspect I'd have liked that too). It's not what I'd use to write an OS, nor to do any sort of performance-limited program, but computers and storage are so fast these days that that rarely matters to me. Using white space to denote blocks took a little getting used to, but only a little; no more than getting used to typing if ...: instead of if (...). The lack of a C-style for loop occasionally bothers me, but iterating over lists and sets handles most of the cases that matter, and is far less cumbersome. It's a higher-level language than C, which means it gets in the way of some things but makes a lot of other things easier. It turns out the latter is more significant than the former for the things I do with it. The claim that Python doesn't have printf (at least since ca. 2.5, when I started using it) is just wrong: print 'pick %d pecks of %s' % (n, fruit) is just a different spelling of printf("pick %d pecks of %s\n", n, fruit) except that sprintf is no longer a special case (and snprintf becomes completely needless). I like the modern print(f'pick {n} pecks of {fruit}') even better; f strings are what pushed me from Python 2 to Python 3. I really like the way modules work in Python, except the dumbass ways you're expected to distribute a program that is broken into modules of its own. As a low-level hacker I came up with my own way to do that (assembling them all into a single Python source file in which each module is placed as a string, evaled and inserted into the module table, and then the starting point called at the end; all using documented, stable interfaces, though they changed from 2 to 3; program actually written as a collection of individual source files, with a tool of my own--written in Python, of course--to create the single file which I can then install where I need it). I have for some years had my own hand-crafted idiosyncratic program for reading mail. (As someone I know once said, everybody writes a mailer; it's simple and easy and makes them feel important. But in this case I was doing it just for myself and for the fun of it.) The first edition was written 20 years ago in C. I rewrote it about a decade ago in Python. It works fine; can now easily deal with on-disk or IMAP4 or POP3 mailboxes, thanks both to modules as a concept and to convenient library modules to do the hard work; and updating in the several different work and home environments where I use it no longer requires recompiling (and the source code need no longer worry about the quirks of different compilers and libraries); I just copy the single executable source-code file to the different places it needs to run. For me, Python fits into the space between shell scripts and awk on one hand, and C on the other, overlapping some of the space of each. But personal taste is relevant too. I didn't know whether I'd like Python until I'd tried it for a few real programs (and even then it took a couple of years before I felt like I'd really figured out out to use it). Just as I recall, about 45 years ago, moving from TECO (in which I had been quite expert) to ed and later the U of T qed and quickly feeling that ed was better in nearly every way; a year or so later, trying vi for a week and giving up in disgust because it just didn't fit my idea of how screen editors should work; falling in love with jim and later sam (though not exclusively, I still use ed/qed daily) because they got the screen part just right even if their command languages weren't quite such a good match for me. And I have never cottoned on to Perl for, I suspect, the same reason I'd be really unhappy to go back to TECO. Tastes evolve. I bet there's a lot of stuff I did in the 1980s that I'd do differently could I have another go at it. The important thing is to try new stuff. I haven't tried Go or Rust yet, and I should. If you haven't given Python or Perl a good look, you should. Sometimes new tools are useless or cumbersome, sometimes they are no better than what you've got now, but sometimes they make things easier. You won't know until you try. Here endeth today's sermon from the messy office, which I ought to be cleaning up, but preaching is more fun. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 year, 9 months

Early Unix and Keyboard Skills

by steve jenkin

I’m re-reading Brian Kernighan’s book on Early Unix (‘Unix: A History & Memoir’) and he mentions the (on disk) documentation that came with Unix - something that made it stand out, even for some decades. Doug McIlroy has commented on v2-v3 (1972-73?) being an extremely productive year for Ken & Dennis. But as well, they wrote papers and man pages, probably more. I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of the CSRC - doesn’t anyone know? There’s at least one Internet meme that highly productive coders necessarily have good keyboard skills, which leads to also producing documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often happens commercially. Underlying this is something I once caught as a random comment: The commonality of skills between Writing & Coding. Does anyone has any good refs for this crossover? Is it a real effect or a biased view. That great programmers are also “good writers”: takes time & focus, clarity of vision, deliberate intent and many revisions, chopping away the cruft that’s isn’t “the thing” and “polishing”, not rushing it out the door. Ken is famous for his brevity and succinct statements. Not sure if that’s a personal preference, a mastered skill or “economy in everything”. steve j ========= A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986 M.D. McIlroy <https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf> <https://archive.org/details/a_research_unix_reader/page/n13/mode/2up> pg 10 3.4. Languages CC (v2 page 52) V2 saw a burst of languages: a new TMG, a B that worked in both core-resident and software-paged versions, the completion of Fortran IV (Thompson and Ritchie), and Ritchie's first C, conceived as B with data types. In that furiously productive year Thompson and Ritchie together wrote and debugged about 100,000 lines of production code. ========= Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret Wednesday, September 10, 2008 <http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret…> It's just simple arithmetic. If you spend more time hammering out code, then in order to keep up, you need to spend less time doing something else. But when it comes to programming, there are only so many things you can sacrifice! You can cut down on your documentation. You can cut down on commenting your code. You can cut down on email conversations and participation in online discussions, preferring group discussions and hallway conversations. And... well, that's about it. So guess what non-touch-typists sacrifice? All of it, man. They sacrifice all of it. Touch typists can spot an illtyperate programmer from a mile away. They don't even have to be in the same room. For starters, non-typists are almost invisible. They don't leave a footprint in our online community. ========= -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

1 year, 9 months

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