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6557 discussions

by norman＠oclsc.org

I have a number of old Unix artifacts that I value. If I had to pick one (or one set) top one, it would be the complete set of Research Unix manuals, 1/e through 10/e. Other contenders include the AT&T-branded copy of the Lions commentary (with deathstar on the cover), a signed copy of The Unix Programming Environment, several unix-branded plastic containers (not to do with the OS, but bought from a Korean supermarket a few blocks from where I've lived for 30 years), and a plastic-slide Spin Out puzzle from Binary Arts (later ThinkFun but not part of IBM), an educational puzzle/game company founded in the 1980s by Bill Ritchie (Dennis's brother) and his wife Andrea Barthello. (I remember a prototype Spin Out, hand-made of wood, spending some time in the Unix Room.) But far more than any of that, I prize the memories and friendships I've had with fellow Unix people over the decades, particularly (but not exclusively) from my six years as sysadmin-hack in 1127. I'm very disappointed that I won't be at the last-ever USENIX Technical Conference in Boston in a few weeks. A show-and-tell there of prized artifacts sounds like a great idea. I hope those who do make it bring plenty of artifacts and memories to share. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

2 months, 2 weeks

Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

by Douglas McIlroy

A complete set of manuals,v1-v10. The 8-volume History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System--not really a Unix artifact but an impressive memento of the Bell Labs experience. Unix rates several pages in it. A mock license plate, generously given to me by Jon Hall. A polyomino puzzle that I solved with the help of Gerard Halzmann's Spin model-checker. The opportunity for such an "abuse of tools" illuminates Unix and CSRC as a productive meeting place for disparate disciplines, occupations, and pastimes. Doug

2 months, 2 weeks

No Further LLM messages on TUHS

by Warren Toomey

All, the LLM conversation is no longer Unix-related. Please take it to COFF if you wish to continue it. Thanks, Warren

2 months, 3 weeks

Re: On the unreliability of LLM-based search results (was: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum)

by norman＠oclsc.org

G. Branden Robinson: That's why I think Norman has sussed it out accurately. LLMs are fantastic bullshit generators in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense,[1] wherein utterances are undertaken neither to enlighten nor to deceive, but to construct a simulacrum of plausible discourse. BSing is a close cousin to filibustering, where even plausibility is discarded, often for the sake of running out a clock or impeding achievement of consensus. ==== That's exactly what I had in mind. I think I had read Frankfurt's book before I first started calling LLMs bullshit generators, but I can't remember for sure. I don't plan to ask ChatGPT (which still, at least sometimes, credits me with far greater contributions to Unix than I have actually made). Here's an interesting paper I stumbled across last week which presents the case better than I could: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 To link this back to actual Unix history (or something much nearer that), I realized that `bullshit generator' was a reasonable summary of what LLMs do after also realizing that an LLM is pretty much just a much-fancier and better-automated descendant of Mark V Shaney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney Norman Wilson Toronto ON

2 months, 3 weeks

Re: 1972 UNIX V2 "Beta" Resurrected

by Thalia Archibald

Yufeng Gao wrote: > The s1 tape is a UNIX INIT DECtape containing the kernel, while s2 includes > most of the distribution files. [https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-February/031420.html] Hello Yufeng, Do you have more details on the format of the s1 tape? I want to reproduce your work. The s2 tape is in the tap format, which was easy to decode, and I assumed that s1 was similar, just with its file headers on an earlier tape. I’ve been able to fairly accurately segment s1 into files by observing that blocks duplicate the tail of the previous block when they are not a full 512 bytes. I’ve written a tool for this and have segmented all the text files and some of the binaries, but I’m floundering on the rest. What you say seems to suggest that s1 actually does have file metadata. Thalia

2 months, 3 weeks

Open source "code" for books typeset in troff

by Adam Koszek

Hello, troff.org <http://troff.org/> maintains a nice list of UNIX/networking books typed in troff: https://troff.org/pubs.html#advctt https://troff.org/books.html#strong There’s one book that’s been released out of the publisher’s copyright, transcribed, and the source is available: https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing Are there any other other long text/books that have the source code available? The only thing that I can think or are the manuals present in source trees of the current BSD systems. Thanks, Adam

2 months, 3 weeks

Several QD-600A Tapes from Bell Labs Circa Early 90s

by segaloco

Hello everyone, I'm just putting feelers out for a potential data recovery project that may have some UNIX history nuggets hiding somewhere. I just closed on this auction: https://www.ebay.com/itm/267254963191 After the link is an action for a set of 17 Sony QD-600A tapes featuring various backups from at least one machine named Zeus. The listing indicates they were property of a former Western Electric engineer. At least one tape has a label indicating a full /usr backup. My hope is that something downstream of the BTL internal version of System V might be living amongst these tapes, but either way I was wondering if anyone here with access to the correct tape drive would be willing to assist with ripping these tapes? I can also start hunting down a drive but figured I'd ask around first. I'm not currently spotting a drive on eBay but have a few other places I can ask around. Thanks for any input! - Matt G.

2 months, 3 weeks

Re: Demise of AT&T

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Steve Jenkin > An unanswered question about Silicon Valley is: > Why did it happen in California and not be successfully cloned > elsewhere? One good attempt at answering this is in "Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970", by Christophe Lecuyer; it's also a very good history of the early Silicon Valley (before the mid-1960's). Most of it's available online, at Google: https://books.google.com/books?id=5TgKinNy5p8C I have neither the time nor energy to comment in detail on your very detailed post, but I think Lecuyer would mostly agree with your points. > It wasn't just AT&T, IBM & DEC that got run over by commodity DRAM & > CPU's, it was the entire Minicomputer Industry, effectively extinct by > 1995. Same thing for the work-station industry (with Sun being merely the most notable example). I have a tiny bit of second-hand personal knowldge in this area; my wife works for NASA, as a structural engineer, and they run a lot of large computerized mathematical models. In the 70's, they were using CDC 7600's; they moved along through various things as technology changed (IIRC, at one point they had SGI machines). These days, they seem to mostly be using high-end personal computers for this. Some specialized uses (various forms of CAD) I guess still use things that look like work-stations, but I expect they are stock personal computers with special I/O (very large displays, etc). So I guess now there are just supercomputers (themselves mostly built out of large numbers of commodity CPUs), and laptops. Well, there is also cloud computing, which is huge, but that also just uses lots of commodity CPUs. Noel

2 months, 3 weeks

Is there a way to mirror Stevens' kohala.com ?

by Adam Koszek

Hi I recently noticed that some references from Richard Stevens’ website aren’t working: https://www.kohala.com/ - many links are broken, including links to the resources that worked before. I found some sub-directory there that appears to have copies of referenced files: http://www.kohala.com/start/ I’d be willing to chip in some $ to extend his domain + server to just work, in case anybody here knows the right people. I also wondered whether we could mirror his site on TUHS? Thanks, Adam

2 months, 4 weeks

Re: Is there a way to mirror Stevens' kohala.com ?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Adam Koszek > Try to access his: > Stevens, W. R. 1989. "Heuristics for Disk Drive Positioning in > 4.3BSD," Computing Systems, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 251-274 (Summer). I'm getting the exact same error you are, so it's nothing specific to your side. There is another copy of that paper here: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1989/sum_stevens.pdf though. (Multiple copies of things are _somewhat_ common.) Noel

2 months, 4 weeks

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