TUHS

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6532 discussions

Re: Paragraphs formatted differently depending on previous ones

by G. Branden Robinson

[looping TUHS back in since I'm correcting a message I sent there] Hi Dave, At 2025-05-06T08:36:55-0500, Dave Kemper wrote: > On Fri, May 2, 2025 at 7:35 PM G. Branden Robinson > <g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > I guess another way of saying this is that, as I conceive it, a line > > that is "adequately full" contributes to the page's uniformity of > > grayness by definition. > > For an example of less-than-ideal results if this is _not_ considered > the case (groff's behavior before this change), see > http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?60673#comment0 (the initial report that > precipitated the commit Doug is commenting on). Yes. In my reply to Doug I incorrectly characterized the resolution of this bug as a "2023" change of mine, but I actually landed the change in 2021. It simply took until 2023 to appear in a released _groff_. To make this message more TUHS-o-riffic, let's observe that input using DWB 3.3 troff and Heirloom Doctools troff (descended from Solaris troff, descended from DWB 2.0 troff [I think]), and both of which descend from Kernighan's device-independent troff circa 1980. $ DWBHOME=. ./bin/nroff groff-60673.roff | cat -s While the example in bug 57836's original report is somewhat contrived and a bit of an edge case in real life, there turns out to be a more innate bug in grotty's balancing algorithm. As mentioned before (and easily observable), when grotty adds spaces to a line in the process of justifying it, the algorithm it utilizes adds spaces from opposite ends of each line. But when it adds this space, it does not take into account lines with no adjustment at all required. Therefore if space only need be added to every other line of the text, all the space ends up being added to the same end of the line, degrading the uniform grayness of the output, as can be seen in this example. There is one fairly simple way to address this: grotty shouldn't "count" lines that don't need to be adjusted; instead, it should apply the alternation pattern only to those lines that do need adjustment. $ ./bin/nroff groff-60673.roff | cat -s While the example in bug 57836's original report is somewhat contrived and a bit of an edge case in real life, there turns out to be a more innate bug in grotty's balancing algorithm. As mentioned before (and easily observable), when grotty adds spaces to a line in the process of justifying it, the algorithm it utilizes adds spaces from opposite ends of each line. But when it adds this space, it does not take into account lines with no adjustment at all required. Therefore if space only need be added to every other line of the text, all the space ends up being added to the same end of the line, degrading the uniform grayness of the output, as can be seen in this example. There is one fairly simple way to address this: grotty shouldn't "count" lines that don't need to be adjusted; instead, it should apply the alternation pattern only to those lines that do need adjustment. They are the same, and differ from groff 1.22.4 and earlier only in that they adjust spaces starting from the right end of the line instead of the left. At the risk of tooting our own horn, here's how groff 1.23.0+ handles the same input. $ ~/groff-1.23.0/bin/nroff groff-60673.roff | cat -s While the example in bug 57836’s original report is somewhat contrived and a bit of an edge case in real life, there turns out to be a more innate bug in grotty’s balancing algorithm. As mentioned before (and easily observable), when grotty adds spaces to a line in the process of justifying it, the algorithm it utilizes adds spaces from opposite ends of each line. But when it adds this space, it does not take into account lines with no adjustment at all required. Therefore if space only need be added to every other line of the text, all the space ends up being added to the same end of the line, degrading the uniform grayness of the output, as can be seen in this example. There is one fairly simple way to address this: grotty shouldn’t "count" lines that don’t need to be adjusted; instead, it should apply the alternation pattern only to those lines that do need adjustment. Three observations: 1. One can find the input at Dave's URL above. 2. The input disables inter-sentence spacing. 3. The adjustment algorithm is a property not of grotty(1) (the output driver), but of GNU troff itself. Regards, Branden

1 month, 3 weeks

Off topic: Books on Unix security?

by norman＠oclsc.org

Aharon Robbins: So, before I just refer to them as "classics", can anyone recommend more recent books? Feel free to answer in private. === `Unix security' is not the most-specific of terms. Can you give more context? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 month, 3 weeks

Re: Any Interdata war stories?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Yes, that was one of the RTS compilers for the NU machine. John Romkey > may have done it, as he was the primary person behind PCIP I decided to poke around in the 'MIT-CSR' dump, since that was the machine the PC/IP project started on, to see what I could find. Hoo boy! What an adventure! In the PC/IP area, I found a 'c86' directory - but it was almost empty. It did have a shell file, 'grab', which contained: tftp -g $1 xx "PS:<Wayne>$1" and a 'graball' file which called 'grab' for the list of compiler source files. ('xx' was MIT-XX, the TOPS-20 main time-sharing machint of LCS.) So I did a Web search for Wayne Gramlich (with whom I hadn't communicated in many decades), and he popped right up. (Amazing thing, this Internet thingy. Who'd have ever thought, back in the day, that it would turn into what it did? Well, probably John Brunner, whom I (sadly) never met, who was there before any of us.) I took a chance, and called his number, and he was there, and we had a long chat. He absolutely didn't do it, although he wrote the loader the project used ('l68', the source for which I did find.) He's virtually certain Romkey didn't (which would have been my guess too; Romkey was like a sophmore when the project started). His best (_very_ faded) memory was that they started off with a commercial compiler. (But see below.) That leaves several mysteries. 1) Why would a commercial compiler not come with a linker? 2) Why did people who wanted to work with the PC/IP source need a Bell license? I did some more poking, and the list of files for the 86 compiler, from 'graball': trees.c optim.c pftn.c code.c local.c scan.c xdefs.c table.c reader.c local2.c order.c match.c allo.c comm1.c manifest mfile1 common macdefs mfile2 mac2defs matched the file names from 'pcc', as given in "A Tour Through the Portable C Compiler": https://maibriz.de/unix/ultrix/_root/porttour.pdf (in section "The Source Files"). So whether the 86 compiler was done at MIT (by someone in RTS), or at a company, it was definitely a 'pcc' descendant. (Possibly adding to the confusion, we had some other C compilers for various ISA's in that project [building networking software for various micro-computers], including an 8080 C compiler from Whitesmiths, Ltd, which I have also found. It's possible that Wayne's vague memory of a commercial compiler is of that one?) I really should reach out to Romkey and Bridgham, to see what they remember. Later today. Whether the main motivation for keeping the compiler source on XX was i) because disk space was short on CSR (we had only a hand-me-down pair of CalComp Model 215 drives - capacity 58 Mbytes per drive!); ii) to prevent version skew; or iii) because it was a commercial compiler, and we had to protect the source (e.g. we didn't have the source to the 8080 compiler, only the object modules), I have no idea. > Anyway the MIT RTS folks made hardware and PCC back ends for the 68K, > Z8000 and 8086. I believe that each had separate assemblers, tjt who > sometimes reads this list might know more, as he wrote the 68K assembler. There is an 'a86' directory on CSR, but it too is empty, except for a 'grab' command file. That contains only: tftp -g $1 xx "PS:<novick>$1" I have no memory of who 'novick' might have been. A Web search for 'novick mit lcs' didn' turn anything up. (I wonder if it might have been Carol Novitsky; she was in our group at LCS, and I have a vague memory of her being associated with the networking software for micro-computers project.) Anyway, it probably doesn't matter; the c86 'grab' referred to Wayne, but he didn't write c86; 'novick' might not have written a86. Something else to ask Romkey and Bridgham about. Noel

1 month, 4 weeks

Re: Paragraphs formatted differently depending on previous ones

by Douglas McIlroy

Branden, > The relevant function fits on one screen, if your terminal window is at > least 36 lines high. :) (Much of it is given over to comments.) > https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/src/roff/troff/env.cpp?id=… Actually there's still another function, spread_space that contains the inner R-L and L-R loops. The whole thing has become astonishingly complicated compared to what I remember as a few (carefully crafted) lines of code in the early roff. I admire your intrepid forays into the groff woods, of which this part must be among the less murky. Doug

1 month, 4 weeks

Surviving System V/VME Artifacts?

by segaloco

So part of Western Electric/AT&Ts developer support for the WE32x00 CPU line was the WE321SB VME-bus single-board computer. The official operating system for this was UNIX System V/VME. This version is referenced in several document catalogues and literature surrounding this VME module. I was curious if anyone on list happens to know of any surviving System V/VME artifacts floating around out there. All I've been able to find are references to the system in other WE32x00 and UNIX documentation. Thanks for any info! - Matt G.

2 months

Any Interdata war stories?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

> From: Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com> > > I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the > Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling. I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared into the dustbin of history. And Unix on it apparently never got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the TUHS archives. Was the Interdata system in use at Bell Labs for actual work once the port was complete? ISTR there was a meeting with Interdata about changes in the architecture that Bell Labs wanted, that Interdata didn't want to make. What was the full story? Any other info would be welcome. Thanks, Arnold

2 months

Re: Any Interdata war stories?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold Robbins > CCI made the Tahoe that 4.4 ran on, but I'm guessing it's a different > architecture than the Interdata? I think so. Almost all documentation on the Tahoe has been lost in the mists of time (if ANYONE retains ANY hardcopies of ANY hardware documentation for the Tahoe, PLEASE let me know), but I recently managed to work out a bit about it from the instruction decoding/printing routines in the debuggers from 4.3 BSD Tahoe: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Power_6/32 and it seems to be fairly different from the Interdata: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/interdata/32bit/29-365R01_32BitRefMan_Jun74.pdf Also, 'CCI' is 'Computer Consoles Incorporated', not "Concurrent Computer Corp". Noel

2 months

Re: V7 ls and dot files?

by Douglas McIlroy

http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_origin_of_dot_filename.html says > I'm not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite .. was there from the beginning. The v1 man page directory(v) says, > By convention, the first two entries in each directory are for "." and "..". Doug

2 months

Re: Any Interdata war stories?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rich Salz > The PC/IP software from MIT included a port of the "Portable C > Compiler" to generate 8086-era code. It ran on a Unix machine and built > binaries that you downloaded to the PC. ... So you need an ATT source > license to get the full PCIP dev kit. That makes sense. The 'MIT license' (about which Jerry Saltzer did a note for the October-December 2020 issue of the 'IEEE Annals of the History of Computing', available here: https://www.mit.edu/~Saltzer/publications/MITLicense.pdf and which mentions that it was initially done for the MIT PC/IP code) only applied to the MIT-written applications, not a 'derived work' (to use the intellectual property law 'term of art') based on Bell code. Noel

2 months

Searching for game history

by Brian "Beej" Hall

Hi everyone, I'm here with a Unix/Bell Labs history question at the suggestion of BWK. I have a bit of a computing mystery on my hands... _Conquest_ is an old game that apparently came to life in Bell Labs, but no one seems to know anything more about it, including who the author is. The instructions for the game[1] contain the following text at the bottom: Amiga port by Bob Shimbo, orginal author unknown. This game started life on a UNIX system at Bell Labs. It was ported to CP/M 80 by a Scott Kamin. The manual was thrown together in an afternoon. (Typos and corrections welcome). You can reach me through Compuserve (UID 70260,231) or TBBS of colorado (303)-693-4735. The LHA archive for the Amiga was packaged in 1986. I did get in touch with Bob Shimbo, but he writes: You can imagine how long ago I did that port given I referenced my Compuserve account. I don't recall where I found the code originally. Sorry. We've been through 3 house moves since then and I don't know where any references might have gotten to. Scott Kamin--I found a reference to someone by his name in the CP/M world in the 80s in New Jersey. (Internet Archive has lots of old computer magazine scans and his name showed up in the classified ads.) And a search turned up a snail mail address for someone in the right age range living a few miles from the business listed in the ad. A Hail Mary snail mail got no reply. Does any of it ring a bell, by any chance? I've begun the work of getting it to run on modern systems[2], and it would be great to be able to include more history in the man page. Cheers, -Beej [1] https://github.com/beejjorgensen/conquest/blob/master/instructions.txt [2] https://github.com/beejjorgensen/conquest/ -- Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall beej(a)beej.us https://beej.us/

2 months

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