TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

37 participants
6497 discussions

by Gregg Levine

Hello! As this service is being phased out, I am trying to download the relevant (well relevant to me) bits from it. And as it happens I found that the clients I use are triggering an interesting problem. This is from ncftp on Linux ncftp> open minnie.tuhs.org Server hungup immediately after connect. Stop connecting frequently Sleeping 20 seconds... And I first saw it using FileZilla, I promptly scaled it back from multiple connections for downloads, to one and only one, but it repeated. To put it simply, what am I doing wrong here? ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

3 years

Re: [TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?

by Douglas McIlroy

The main FJCC 1964 papar, by Vyssotsky, Corbato, and Graham, spelled Multics with an initial cap. By contrast, Ken transcribed the aural pun as UNIX. The lawyers did their best to keep it that way after most of us had decided it looks better as a proper noun. As I recall, there was an acronymic reading of Multics, but it wasn't taken seriously enough to drag the word into all caps. Nobody proposed an acronymic reading of UNIX. So both words defy the convention of rendering acronyms in upper-case. Doug

3 years

Re: [TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dan Cross > In Kernighan's Unix memoir, on page 9, he touches briefly on the > typography of "Unix": > "(Multics was originally spelled MULTICS ..." > Here, he is talking about interning at MIT in 1966. bwk would certainly > know better than me, but I can find no historical reference to this > "MULTICS" spelling; is anyone familiar with that? I looked at my early Multics stuff, and it's "Multics" almost everywhere: - "GE-645 System Manual", GE, 1968 - "The Multics Virtual Memory", GE, 1970 - "Introduction to Multics", MIT MAC TR-123, 1973 However, in my "A New Remote-Access Man-Machine System", on the title papge it says "Reprints of the MULTICS system presented at the" [FJCC, 1965]. No clue as to who printed it, or when - and all the FJCC papers themselves use "Multics". I have yet to ask Jerry Saltzer, but I suspect that if it ever was 'MULTICS', it was at a _very_ early stage, and was formally changed even before the FJCC papers (which were themselves very early). BTW, ISTR hearing that it was 'Unix' originally, and the 'UNIX' spelling was adopted at the insistence of Bell lawyers. So I went looking for an early (i.e. PDP-7 era) scanned document, to see what it was then, and all I could find was: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZ… which seems to be from just after the PDP-7 -> PDP-11/20 transition, and it uses 'UNIX'. Would the Bell lawyers have already been involved at that stage? Noel

3 years

Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?

by Dan Cross

This is tangentially related to Unix, and came up randomly at work yesterday. In Kernighan's Unix memoir, on page 9, he touches briefly on the typography of "Unix": "(Multics was originally spelled MULTICS, but the lower-case version is less visually jarring; as with UNIX versus Unix and some other all-caps words, I’ll use the nicer-looking form even though it’s not historically accurate.)" Here, he is talking about interning at MIT in 1966. bwk would certainly know better than me, but I can find no historical reference to this "MULTICS" spelling; is anyone familiar with that? The earliest reference I can find (the 1965 paper from the FJCC: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1463891.1463912) uses the more "Multics" styling, but it may have been typeset later. Alternatively, could someone send me Brian's email address? - Dan C.

3 years

Re: [TUHS] Armando plate

by Clem Cole

I did not realize Shannon must have had it first. Armando had it on his Nisson and he passed it to John Hall (Maddog) when he moved. Somewhere I have a picture of Armando’s car and my then Black Jetta with the MA plate together. On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 9:53 PM Tom Lyon <pugs(a)ieee.org> wrote: > Bill Shannon had the actual NH UNIX plates.Upgraded to VMUNIX for > California. > > On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 6:03 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > >> Ultrix plates were much later. The original Unix plates were there for a >> few years. >> >> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 8:58 PM Kenneth Goodwin < >> kennethgoodwin56(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> As I recall, The UNIX plates were the first in the series and >>> distributed at a USENIX conference AT THE DEC booth The next year, they >>> came out with the ULTRIX plates. >>> >>> On Tue, May 10, 2022, 8:54 PM Steve Bourne <srb(a)acm.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Armando also responsible for the UNIX "live free or die" plates. I >>>> still have a few. >>>> >>>> Steve >>>> >>> -- >> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual >> > > > -- > - Tom > -- Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

3 years

Re: [TUHS] {TUHS] Interesting Commentary on Unix from Multicians

by Douglas McIlroy

> Single Level Storage is an awesome concept and removes so many ugly > hacks from algorithms that otherwise have to process data in files. This was Vic Vyssotsky's signature contribution to Multics, though in typical Vyssotsky fashion he never sought personal credit for it. Other awesome Vyssotsky inventions: BLODI (block diagram), the first data-flow language, for sample-data systems. Parallel flow analysis (later reinvented and published by John Cocke). Vic installed this in Fortran to produce diagnostics such as, "If the third branch of IF statement 15 is ever taken, then variable E will be used before being set". Darwin, the original game of predation and self-reproduction among programs. Corewars.org keeps a descendant version going 60 years later. A minimum-spanning-tree algorithm quite different from the well-known methods due to his colleagues Bob Prim and Joe Kruskal, again unpublished. Not long ago on TUHS, Andrew Hume told how Vic found the same isolated bug in dc by mathematically generating hard cases that Andrew stumbled on by accident, As you may infer, Vic is one of my personal computing heroes. Doug

3 years

Armando plate

by Steve Bourne

Armando also responsible for the UNIX "live free or die" plates. I still have a few. Steve

3 years

conventions around zero padding in ip4

by ron minnich

I first learned in the 80s that 127.1 meant 127.0.0.1. I always assumed zero padding was defined in a standard *somewhere*, but am finding out maybe not. I talked to the IP OG, and he tells me that padding was not in any standard. [side note: it's weird and wonderful to still have so many people "present at the creation" of computing as we know it still around, and to find they are so willing to answer naive questions!] Padding is a standard in ip6, possibly because the addresses are so long. :: is your friend. IP4 padding came up recently: the ip command interprets 10.2 as 10.2.0.0, whereas most things (golang libraries, ping, ...) interpret it as 10.0.0.2. The latter interpretation accords with what I learned 40y ago. But, I find myself wondering: where was the first use of the IP4 zero padding convention?

3 years

TUHS web server has changed

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I've just changed the DNS CNAME record of www.tuhs.org from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) to newmin.tuhs.org (50.116.15.146). Minnie is running Ubuntu 18.04LTS and is getting a bit long in the tooth. Newmin is running 22.04LTS. So far I've got the web service up and running on newmin. Doing the e-mail migration will be fun :-) Let me know if you spot anything wrong with the new web server. I've also set up oldwww.tuhs.org which points at minnie, so you can still get to things on the old server. Cheers, Warren

3 years

Re: [TUHS] conventions around zero padding in ip4

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> There were other ways of specifying a IP address numerically, initially; I decided to set the Way-Back Machine to as close to 0 as I could get, and looked to see what the Terminal Interface Unit: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Terminal_Interface_Unit whose source I recently recovered, did. This is an interesting implementation, because it was definitely one of the first 4 TCP implementations done (before any UNIX ones); likely one of the first two, along with the TENEX one. (Actually, they both likely originally predate the split of TCP and IP into separate protocols, although this version post-dates that split.) The manual: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/mos/docs/tiunv1.lpt (in "B. TELNET Commands") and the source: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/mos/tiu/telnet-1.mac disagree on how the user gave addresses in numeric form in an 'open' command; both agree that it was '@O <rest>,<net>,<socket>', but the manual claims that 'rest' "may be specified symbolically, or numerically in decimal", but the code shows that '#xxx' could also be used, to give it in hex. (Although if hex were used, the number could be a max of 16 bits; decimal alloweded up to 42 bits.) > From: Michael Kjörling > Looks like [A/B/C addresses] happened in 1978 or thereabouts? > https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien46.txt No; it post-dates the IEN era; "Assigned Numbers" of September 1981 (RFC-790) is the first mention I could find of it. (That Dave Clark IEN is talking about what later became 'IP subnets' - which ironically long pre-date A/B/C - see IEN-82, February 1979.) The Internet Protocol spec of September 1981 (RFC-791) also has A/B/C; my memory is that this change was _not_ discussed in the INWG, Postel just sprung it on us in these two RFCs. I suspect what happened is that Jon (as keeper of the network numbers) realized that there was an increasing demand for network numbers, and 256 would only last so long, so he sprung into action and did the A/B/C thing. (If this topic is of more interest, it should get moved to the 'internet-history' list, it's off-topic here.) Interestingly, RFC-790 says: "One notation for internet host addresses commonly used divides the 32-bit address into four 8-bit fields and specifies the value of each field as a decimal number with the fields separated by periods." Note the "one notation", implying that it wasn't any kind of standard at that point. Noel

3 years

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