TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

61 participants
6531 discussions

by Richard Salz

Humor is kind of screed-like and may be dated, but some here might find it a fun read. (Disclaimer: I wrote the chapter on Usenet.)

3 years, 1 month

[tuhs] Go programming language

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

List readers may enjoy a new article about the history of the Go programming language published today: Russ Cox, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ian Lance Taylor, and Ken Thompson The Go programming language and environment Comm. ACM 65(5) 70--78 May 2022 https://doi.org/10.1145/3488716 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488716 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3 years, 1 month

First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

by Andrew Warkentin

What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was actually the first.

3 years, 1 month

Document management in Unix, back in the day?

by Will Senn

Today I bit the bullet and dropped my many articles and electronic documents related to my technical explorations into Zotero. I was tired of constantly having to remember where the documents were located and I wanted to be able to curate them better (I tried git for a while, back when, but I'm not a fan of non-text data in my repos, and it wasn't really much better than the base file system approach). I've been using Zotero for years now, for academic works, but not for technical works unrelated to my research. I realized the man-years of effort to clean up the entries that I had created in about 30-40 seconds of exciting drag and drop, just about the time I deleted them from their original locations. I think the work will pay off in due time, but we'll see. Then I thought, surely, I'm not the first person to have had this problem... it occurred to me that y'all must have faced this very problem, a few years in, back in the late 70's, early 80's. That is, document management. What did you do, variously, considering both text and non-text? Will

3 years, 1 month

FTP service is not happy

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, 1 month

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, 1 month

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, 1 month

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, 1 month

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, 1 month

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, 1 month

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