From [1]:
The X11 Conservancy Project (X11CP) pulls together the disparate set of programs which were being written between the very late 80s, and early 90s -- usually for Unix and Linux.
…snip…
As the Internet expanded and Linux distributions became established, certain FTP sites were largely used to host some of the more established programs, as well as those found in the LSM.
…snip…
But the early dawn of free software, especially around applications written for X11, using Motif and XT and other widget libraries has now mostly been consigned to obscurity.
With X11 itself now under threat of no longer being developed in favour of Wayland, these applications are going to be harder to run and be discovered.
Hence, the X11CP is designed to be a central place for hosting the sources of these applications, and to showcase their unique history and properties. In keeping this software active, it will help keep an important historical point alive.
[1] https://x11cp.org/
— Michelangelo
> From: Phil Budne
> The cover page has:
> ...
> Upper right corner:
> PA-1C300-01
> Section 1
> Issue 1, January 1976
> AT&TCo SPCS
I have a very similar manual; I got it a long time ago, and no longer recall
how I came by it. Minor difference: mine is for PD-1C301-01, and at the
bottom of the page, it says "ISSUE 1 1/30/76", followed by a prominent trade
secret notice.
TUHS has a copy of this version, here:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/unix_program_description_ja…
The README file in that directory:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/README
speculates that "this is PWB/1.0" but admits "this has not yet been
confirmed". It's not PWB1, it's stock V6. If you look at the writeup of
sys1$exec(), on pg. 39 of the PDF, you'll see it describing how arguments are
copied into a disk buffer; that right there is the tip-off. In PWB1 (whose
source we do have):
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1/sys/sys/os/sys1.c
you'll see that PWB1 accumulates the arguments in a chunk of swap space.
V6 _does_ use a disk buffer for this:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/sys/ken/sys1.c
So this is for V6.
Noel
The October 1984 BSTJ article by Felton, Miller and Milner
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/otherports/ibm.pdf
Describes an AT&T port of UNIX to System/370 using TSS/370
underpinnings as the "Resident System Supervisor" and used as the 5ESS
switching system development environment.
I also found mention at http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x09
chapter 9 of http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ with footnote 96:
Ian Johnstone, who had been the tutor at University of New
South Wales working with Professor John Lions, was one of the
researchers invited to Bell Labs. He managed the completion at
AT&T Bell Labs of the port of Unix to the IBM 370 computer. See
"Unix on Big Iron" by Ian Johnstone and Steve Rosenthal, UNIX
Review, October, 1984, p. 26. Johnstone also led the group that did
the port to the AT&T 2B20A multiprocessor system.
I found
https://ia902801.us.archive.org/3/items/Unix_Review_1984_Oct.pdf/Unix_Revie…
"BIG UNIX: The Whys and Wherefores" (pdf p.24), which only offers rationale.
Also:
"IBM's own involvement in Unix can be dated to 1979, when it
assisted Bell Labs in doing its own Unix port to the 370 (to
be used as a build host for the 5ESS switch's software). In
the process, IBM made modifications to the TSS/370 hypervisor
to better support Unix.[12]"
at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX#cite_ref-att-s370-unix_12-0
Is there any other surviving documentation about the system?
Any recall of what branch of AT&T UNIX it was based on?
Thanks!
Phil
> From: Bakul Shah
> There is a further para:
> Reducing external memory fragmentation to zero by utilizing the VAX-
> 11/780 memory mapping hardware for scatter loading is high on the list
> of things to do in the second implementation pass.
I'm curious as to exactly what is meant by "external memory"? They must mean
memory on the Synchronous Backplane Interconnect:
http://gunkies.org/wiki/Synchronous_Backplane_Interconnect
I.e. what most of us would call 'main memory'.
If this code didn't even allocate main memory by pages, instead of in
process-size blocks, it sounds like it's much like 32V (or is it 32V that's
being discussed; I thought this thread had moved on to the Reiser demand
paging version - my apologies it I've gotten lost).
Also, this note:
http://gunkies.org/wiki/Talk:CB-UNIX
from Dale DeJager (which he kindly gave me permission to post) gives a fair
amount of detail on the relationship between the Research and CB/UNIX
versions, with a brief mention of USG - precisely the era, and relationships,
that are so poorly documented. Interestingly, he indicates that the early
versions of what later became CB/UNIX used something in the V1/V3 range (V4
was the first one in C), so it dates back earlier than most people apparently
assume.
If anyone else has any first-hand notes (i.e.from people who were there at the
time), about the relationship between all the early systems, for which the
author has given permiosssion to post it, please send it to me and I will
add it to the appropriate article on the CHWiki.
Probably the most needed is more about the roots of USG; Dale has filled in
CB/UNIX, and the roots of PWB are covered fairly well in the BSTJ article
on it:
https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-2177
at least, for PWB1. Anything that covers the later PWBs would likewise be
gratefully receied.
I suppose I should also write up the relationships of the later UNIXen - 32V
and its descendants too - any material sent to me about them will be most
gratefully received. (If anyone want a CHWiki account, to write it up
themselves, please let me know).
Noel
Good evening folks. I'm starting a new thread to pass along info as I scan materials from the 3B20S manual that I picked up. I figured it'd be easier to trickle out the bits folks ask me for first and then continue to scan the rest, that way anyone looking to sink their teeth into something specific can be sated first.
With that, the first scan (and frankly one of my favorite things about this manual) is the cover itself: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UNIX4.1UsersManualCover.png
Someone had mentioned the idea of making this into a poster and I gotta say, I'd gladly put one up. The image definitely would need some cleanup for that, I just scanned it like it came, haven't tried to clean up any of the wear of time yet. Sadly, the back cover isn't emblazoned with a big Bell logo like the 3.0 and 5.0 (Bell variant) manuals, so scanning that would be a boring white piece of cardstock.
Anywho, the next round which may come later this evening or sometime this weekend is going to be various *ROFF-related documents, so documents like troff(1), mm(5), etc.
- Matt G.
> From: Bakul Shah
> Is there a publicly available description of Reiser's VM system? I
> found "A Unix operating system for the DEC VAX 11/780 Computer" by
> London & Reiser which includes a long paragraph on VM (included below)
That para is basically all about the VAX paging hardware; it doesn't say
anything about how that (any :-) Unix actually uses it.
Noel
Good morning all. I've been doing some historical research on the UUCP cu utility this morning and have come across a little discrepancy between the various UNIX streams I was wondering if someone could illuminate.
So cu as of V7 supported the ~$ escape, a means of calling a local procedure and emitting stdout over the TTY line to the remote machine, all fine and good for packaging a character stream to emit. However, what I'm not finding in that age of documentation is any means of requesting std*in* from the TTY line as input to a local procedure (in essence running a text filter or handshake-driven protocols over cu). The context in which I'm researching this is integrating cu into my bare-metal SBC programming using XMODEM so I can rest a little easier my process is based on tools I'll probably find in most places.
So old fashioned Mike Lesk-era cu only seems to do stdout redirect, but no stdin. I did some further digging and it looks like different UUCP implementations cracked this nut with different escapes, with BSD eventually going with ~C and Taylor UUCP opting for ~+. Checking the current illumos manual pages (for a SVR4-ish example) doesn't turn up any command for this. This is indicative of there never being an agreed-upon mechanism for doing this, although I could see this being a very useful mechanism.
What I'm curious about is if the lack of a bi-directional redirect in early cu is reflective of a lack of need for that sort of functionality at the time or that matters such as that were handled through a different mechanism. One thought I did have is that there wasn't file locking at the time (right?) and so theoretically nothing would prevent one from using a cu session on one terminal to send interactive commands and then a second using fd redirects in the shell to run filters/protocols separately of the interactive stream.
- Matt G.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/usenix/USENIX_1986_Winter_Technical_Conference_Pr…
Here is the URL
(All I did was search for ‘“Unix on big iron” usenix proceedings’)
On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 4:59 PM James Frew <frew(a)ucsb.edu> wrote:
> Hello Marc,
>
> Where did you find the 1986 USENIX proceedings?
>
> Reason I'm asking is, I have a pile of pre-1991 USENIX proceedings that I
> haven't found online, and I'm planning to get them scanned. It would be
> great if I didn't have to go the trouble :-)
>
> Thanks,
> /James Frew
> On 2022-12-19 13:36, Marc Donner wrote:
>
>
> There was a track of USENIX 1986 called "UNIX on Big Iron." Peter Capek
> of IBM was the chair and Gene Miya and Jim Lipkis rounded out the program
> committee. The proceedings are available.
>
> --
=====
nygeek.netmindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
> To what extent were the Unix folks at Bell Labs already familiar with DEC systems before the PDP-7?
Some awareness, but no hands-on experience,
> was any thought given to trying to get a 360 system?
Very serious thought. However, virtual memory was a non-negotiable
desideratum, to which Gene Amdahl was implacably opposed because
demand paging would devastate hardware performance. Soon after GE got
the nod, IBM revealed Gerrit Blaauw's skunk-works project, the 360/67,
but by then the die had been cast. Michigan bought one and built a
nice time-sharing system that was running well before Multics.
Doug
I think this cited quote from
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/ is urban legend.
Why do C strings [have a terminating NUl]? It’s because the PDP-7
microprocessor, on which UNIX and the C programming language were
invented, had an ASCIZ string type. ASCIZ meant “ASCII with a Z (zero)
at the end.”
This assertion seems unlikely since neither C nor the library string
functions existed on the PDP-7. In fact the "terminating character" of
a string in the PDP-7 language B was the pair '*e'. A string was a
sequence of words, packed two characters per word. For odd-length
strings half of the final one-character word was effectively
NUL-padded as described below.
One might trace null termination to the original (1965) proposal for
ASCII, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/363831.363839. There the only
role specifically suggested for NUL is to "serve to accomplish time
fill or media fill." With character-addressable hardware (not the
PDP-7), it is only a small step from using NUL as terminal padding to
the convention of null termination in all cases.
Ken would probably know for sure whether there's any truth in the
attribution to ASCIZ.
Doug
