24 Aug
2018
24 Aug
'18
3:13 p.m.
After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've
begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone
ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never
seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web(a)loomcom.com
24 Aug
24 Aug
3:23 p.m.
I never saw it. I believe the answer is no.
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 24, 2018, at 11:13 AM, Seth Morabito
<web(a)loomcom.com> wrote:
After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've
begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone
ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never
seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web(a)loomcom.com
4:06 p.m.
On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito <web(a)loomcom.com> wrote:
...
I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of
Bell Labs.
I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it. AT&T forced you
to
buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had bought the one we
had a Stellar otherwise).
The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the behavior
of some code/validation testing of RFS *etc*...
The HW as pretty slow/inflexible compared to 68020/68030 which came out
around the same time, so it was just not interesting - *i.e.* 'JAWS' - Just
another work station' and it did not have a display. IIRC, it was a server
and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for that use.
Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed out,
kicked butt
and were cheaper
. The MIPS chip would emerge
with lots of designs,
and for that matter the 040 and the 386 would appear soon their after
, too.
I've always felt that the 3Bx series was an example of fighting the
previous war; other than 3B4000 (which had high reliability but other
issues in practice to use it), there was never anything that made them
special - compared to everyone else.
The only 'successful' product
that I
can
remember that used the WE32100
was the
second version (*a.k.a.* product version) of the Blit (Bart's first version
was 68000 IIRC). Does anyone know of another product? I think I was told
the 5ESS
changed
the SLICs
design
from the original 68000 design to WE32100 but I was no
longer associated with anyone working on it by then, so I don't know.
Dennis once remarked to a couple of us that the WE32100 was an example of
AT&T wanting to make sure it had its own recipe to make processors, but it
was not clear it was worth it. BTW: around the same time both AT&T and HP
were making their own DRAM too. It was common thinking in management at
tech companies - telling folks that they needed to be 'vertically
integrated.' But in the case of both HP and AT&T there internally produced
DRAM chips cost 2-3 times what the merchant market cost; so besides the
investment in the fab (which was huge) it was a pretty expensive insurance
policy.
That said, this was also the end times for the idea of the 'second
source.' Chip manufacturers would be required to license their designs to
some one else (for instance AMD was originally Intel's second source). I
think HP was using a second source license for their memory, but IIRC AT&T
had developed its own because they had higher reliability standards.
4:46 p.m.
On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 12:06:22PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
IIRC, it was a server
and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for that use.
Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed out,
kicked butt and were cheaper
I dunno that they kicked butt, my memory is we were all playing leapfrog.
People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking
about fast it was. I was actually measuring performance of all the
CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
about. SPARC was sort of like that too, it was better but it was
really really rare to have a chip that was 2x faster than its peers,
if that happened it was usually the introduction of one CPU generation
compared to the tail of another CPUs generation.
The only 'successful' product that I can
remember that used the WE32100
was the second version (*a.k.a.* product version) of the Blit (Bart's first version
was 68000 IIRC).
Ah, the BLIT. Pretty sure Wisconsin's CS department had the first generation
(aren't those the ones that caught on fire?). I *loved* those terminals,
so much nicer than a single screen.
BTW, I had Greg Chesson here for a pig roast once, and he brought Bart.
I've got pics somewhere if anyone cares.
--lm
5:54 p.m.
On 8/24/2018 9:46 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist
history, talking
about fast it was. I was actually measuring performance of all the
CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
about.
When the alpha first came out there were 3 implementations, soon
followed by more. I wonder which one you measured.
(You probably don't remember this but you once came to my office
at UCB to talk to my officemate Carl Staelin back when I had
one of the first alphas to be released by DEC.)
Jon
26 Aug
26 Aug
2:22 a.m.
On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 10:54:41AM -0700, Jon Forrest wrote:
On 8/24/2018 9:46 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
2106A 275Mhz
People remember the alpha with a lot of
revisionist history, talking
about fast it was. I was actually measuring performance of all the
CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
about.
When the alpha first came out there were 3 implementations, soon
followed by more. I wonder which one you measured. (You probably don't remember this but you once
came to my office
at UCB to talk to my officemate Carl Staelin back when I had
one of the first alphas to be released by DEC.)
I don't remember a lot of stuff, I'm old. Old enough to get the joke that
when you are 25 and you open the fridge and ask "what am I doing here?"
it is existential question. When you are my age and you open the fridge
and ask the same question it's because you forgot what you wanted.
That said, I do have some memory of going somewhere, but UCB? I thought
Carl was at HP Labs? But I do remember going somewhere.
And all these years later Carl and I are still close friends. It is
a small world.
--lm
27 Aug
27 Aug
3:54 p.m.
Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to
use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the
externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late
1980s. We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told
"eat your own dog food." The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had
potential. Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide
turned in favor of Suns.
On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito
<web(a)loomcom.com
<mailto:web@loomcom.com>> wrote:
...
I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
inside of Bell Labs.
I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it. AT&T forced
you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had
bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).
The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the
behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS /etc/...
The HW as pretty slow/inflexible compared to 68020/68030 which came
out around the same time, so it was just not interesting - /i.e./
'JAWS' - Just another work station' and it did not have a display.
IIRC, it was a server and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for
that use.
Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed
out, kicked butt
and were cheaper
. The MIPS chip would emerge
with lots of designs,
and for that matter the 040 and the 386 would appear soon their after
, too.
I've always felt that the 3Bx series was an example of fighting the
previous war; other than 3B4000 (which had high reliability but other
issues in practice to use it), there was never anything that made them
special - compared to everyone else.
The only 'successful' product
that I
can
rememberthat used the WE32100
was the
second version (/a.k.a./product version) of the Blit (Bart's first
version was 68000 IIRC). Does anyone know of another product? I
think I was told the 5ESS
changed
the SLICs
design
from the original 68000 design to WE32100 but I was no
longer associated with anyone working on it by then, so I don't know.
Dennis once remarked to a couple of us that the WE32100 was an example
of AT&T wanting to make sure it had its own recipe to make processors,
but it was not clear it was worth it. BTW: around the same time both
AT&T and HP were making their own DRAM too. It was common thinking in
management at tech companies - telling folks that they needed to be
'vertically integrated.' But in the case of both HP and AT&T there
internally produced DRAM chips cost 2-3 times what the merchant market
cost; so besides the investment in the fab (which was huge) it was a
pretty expensive insurance policy.
That said, this was also the end times for the idea of the 'second
source.' Chip manufacturers would be required to license their
designs to some one else (for instance AMD was originally Intel's
second source). I think HP was using a second source license for
their memory, but IIRC AT&T had developed its own because they had
higher reliability standards.
5:06 p.m.
On Mon, Aug 27, 2018, at 8:54 AM, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was
considerable pressure to
use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the
externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-
late 1980s. We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were
told "eat your own dog food." The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the
3B2 had potential. Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs
the tide turned in favor of Suns.>
On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito
> <web(a)loomcom.com> wrote:>>>
>> ...
>> I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside
>> of Bell Labs.>> I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used
it. AT&T forced
> you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had
> bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).>> The only time I ever knew anyone
run one, was to check to see the
> behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS *etc*...[...]
Thank you all for your many replies!
I have a soft spot for the 3B2 because I've put so much work into
reverse engineering it and understanding it, but I can absolutely
understand why everyone wanted Suns. The 3B2 was a funny architecture,
and unless it had been a breakout hit right from the start, I can't
imagine a path that would have led to 3B2s taking over the world.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web(a)loomcom.com
5:33 p.m.
below...
On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:04 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote:
It was not so much they we awful IMO, is that
they were nothing special -
too little too late. The 3B20 (the only computer I even knew with a 'pull
starter'), was basically a 1MIP 780 and took the same resources (machine
room, multiple 19" cabinets, etc); when a 68020 based Masscomp, Apollo or
Sun was at 4-5 MIPS and fit under your desk. As I said, fighting the last
war.
The 3B2 got the size and performance more inline, but the SW was still
behind and by them it was arguable if a BLIT over a serial line could
compete with the builtin graphics. For the former, did the 3B2 only run
SRV3 and SRV4? The others ran SVR0-2 which was not even close to BSD. By
SVR3 the OS finally got better. BILT had some great stuff, but I think
the shear volume of programmers using X-Windows, particularly once it ran
on super cheap HW (*i.e.* Wintel based) it was tough.
> Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in favor
> of Suns
Although by the time of its release, the default
system for
SRV4 was Wintel.
Clem
Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was
considerable pressure to use
AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally
developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s. We
all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog
food."
That was always my impression. IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and Kolstad
made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V" I remember somebody (ber
probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were not
amsussed.
The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential.
7:59 p.m.
We (at the Labs outside of 11127) were definitely forced to use the 3B
series, despite its unbelievable lack of documentation (and floating point,
for the 3B20s). Having to eat your own dog food doesn't make it palatable,
it just prevents you from doing something worthwhile, and dislike those who
prepare the menu. I'd be happy to apologize, if the 3Bs had proved their
worth.
On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 1:33 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
below...
On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:04 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote:
It was not so much they we awful IMO, is
that they were nothing special -
too little too late. The 3B20 (the only computer I even knew with a 'pull
starter'), was basically a 1MIP 780 and took the same resources (machine
room, multiple 19" cabinets, etc); when a 68020 based Masscomp, Apollo or
Sun was at 4-5 MIPS and fit under your desk. As I said, fighting the last
war.
The 3B2 got the size and performance more inline, but the SW was still
behind and by them it was arguable if a BLIT over a serial line could
compete with the builtin graphics. For the former, did the 3B2 only run
SRV3 and SRV4? The others ran SVR0-2 which was not even close to BSD. By
SVR3 the OS finally got better. BILT had some great stuff, but I think
the shear volume of programmers using X-Windows, particularly once it ran
on super cheap HW (*i.e.* Wintel based) it was tough.
> Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in
> favor of Suns
Although by the time of its release, the
default system for
SRV4 was Wintel.
Clem
Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was
considerable pressure to use
AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally
developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s. We
all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog
food."
That was always my impression. IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and
Kolstad made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V" I remember somebody
(ber probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were not
amsussed.
The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential.
8:27 p.m.
"John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com> writes:
We (at the Labs outside of 11127) were definitely
forced to use the 3B
series, despite its unbelievable lack of documentation (and floating point,
for the 3B20s). Having to eat your own dog food doesn't make it palatable,
it just prevents you from doing something worthwhile, and dislike those who
prepare the menu. I'd be happy to apologize, if the 3Bs had proved their
worth.
[snip]
I was at 6200 Broad Street in Reynoldsburg in the late 1990s to early
2000s and while the group I was a part of was not forced to use the 3B
series for our product, we did get forced into using GIS [a.k.a. NCR]
systems after NCR was purchased. The OS running on it was some sort of
SVR4, pretty vanilla, if I recall correctly. I just remember it being
buggy. That version of the product was sold to a single domestic US
customer. All of the rest of the domestic customers waited for the
HP-UX port which happened after it was obvious no one wanted the NCR
product. The product that I was a part of was old even at the time,
having been ported to the VAX [SVR3], test ported to SunOS 4.x, Tandem
and the AT&T rebranded variation [SVR3, and SVR4], GIS [SVR4] and HP
[HP-UX, lots of versions]. I have heard since that the product is still
around and runs on Linux at this point.
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
28 Aug
28 Aug
12:24 a.m.
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018, Clem Cole wrote:
That was always my impression. IIRC Mt. Xinu made
a poster (and
Kolstad made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V" I remember somebody
(ber probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were
not amsussed.
I remember seeing a photo of that button. Somewhere (I think) I have a
PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
SparcStation.
Unfortunately the latter part of my career was having to support SysVile
and pretending that I liked it...
-- Dave
12:30 a.m.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
Unfortunately the latter part of my career was having
to support SysVile and
pretending that I liked it...
I don't think anyone really liked it. Maybe Roger Faulkner. And there
are the Joyent crew. Even they, when I told them I had tried it and
wasn't impressed, asked if I had /opt/GNU/bin in my path first? Huh?
Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning to the
compatibilty argument for /usr/bin? SunOS was the system that everyone
used because they wanted to, Solaris was what people used because they
had to.
6:01 a.m.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still
cleaning [sic] to the
compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?
As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there are still plenty
of places where that compatibility is what sells systems.
SunOS was the system that everyone used because they
wanted to, Solaris
was what people used because they had to.
Nicely put!
Arnold
6:11 a.m.
we pretty much bounced a UNISYS library information system on using
',' (comma) as the separator on IPv4 dotted-quads. If there isn't a
dot, how can it be one?
I think the OS I used with a cd command which could walk down, but
walking "up" was a cd to root and a walk down -1 also fell out of
favour.
The only thing I remember doing on the apollo domain workstations was
tuning their sendmail config. nobody ran commands on it, nobody could
reliably compile.
HP and its HP compatibility library. and the really badly written BSD
compatibility layer.
oddly, OSF/1 and RS/6000 AIX both survived. maybe you can have enough
lipstick on a pig. reboot to re-apply bindings. well i *guess* that
works, but gee, was it really so hard to move shared library through
some staging process? and having to boot into a mini OS to do
filesystem repairs. please.
none of these things were fatal but somehow all of these things were.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 4:02 PM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are
still cleaning [sic] to the
compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?
As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there are still plenty
of places where that compatibility is what sells systems.
SunOS was the system that everyone used because
they wanted to, Solaris
was what people used because they had to.
Nicely put!
Arnold
6:42 a.m.
George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
none of these things were fatal but somehow all of
these things were.
This goes back to Clem's argument about economics. The increasing power
and declining cost of Intel HW combined with the _almost_ neglible cost
of Linux combined to kill off almost all the legacy Unixes.
That Linux modelled many things after SunOS also helped.
But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and
Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.
Arnold
1:13 p.m.
On 8/28/2018 2:42 AM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
But I can testify from experience at my last job that
AIX, HP/UX and
Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.
If you haven't tried Solaris 11, at least 11.2 or later, check it out. A
lot of GNU stuff is available, and you can "pkg install" apache, tomcat,
PHP, MYSQL, and a slew of other things that are actually being kept up
to date. The recent PHP 7.1.17 exploit fix was put out in the regular
Solaris 11 SRU a few weeks after it was publicly released. And that was
supposedly after the "mass layoff" of Solaris engineers. I've also
noticed quite a few bug fixes for Solaris internals and device drivers
since then so Oracle is still maintaining Solaris. I think their most
recent support time line puts Solaris support out to 2030 or so.
I've installed and maintain a few Solaris 11.1 (since upgraded to 11.3)
clusters for Oracle databases on Intel (Dell) blades with fiber channel,
and with ZFS they've been rock-solid.
Side note, and I probably already said this a long time ago here, but
back in the early days of Linux kernel 2.6, I complained on one of the
mailing lists about the removal of a way to control the size of the disk
cache, along with the tendency for the kernel to page out applications
in favor of more disk cache. The snobby answer I got back from a
developer was that (paraphrased) "We know better than you about memory
allocation" or some such garbage. I've always turned my nose up at Linux
since then. I figure if that level of arrogance had infested it to that
degree, and an open-source project at that, I wanted no part of it.
Since then, of course, they have made some changes that make it less
likely to do that, but I have a recent Oracle Linux (Redhat) system here
running Oracle eBusiness that is currently 2GB into swap, and has 10G of
disk cache. Swappiness is set to 0, and other tunables were altered that
should have stopped that. That's just plain dumb.
10:39 p.m.
On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
But I can testify from experience at my last job that
AIX, HP/UX and
Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.
Yep, that was my last job too, until I was made redundant at age 58 (ever
tried to find a job at that age, having specialist skills?).
-- Dave
29 Aug
29 Aug
5:25 a.m.
Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
That's exactly what happened to me, at the same age. Fortunately the
market where I live (Israel) is super hot for C++ / Linux developers,
and I landed a job at what so far is a reasonable start-up company.
("Praise the Lord", as they say.)
I hope you've found something.
Arnold
But I can testify from experience at my last job
that AIX, HP/UX and
Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.
Yep, that was my last job too, until I was made redundant at age 58 (ever
tried to find a job at that age, having specialist skills?).
-- Dave
28 Aug
28 Aug
10:33 p.m.
On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Signature material, in fact! I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit
sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems
at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely
BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the
penguins have broken this time).
-- Dave
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
[...]
SunOS was the
system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris
was what people used because they had to.
Nicely put! 
29 Aug
29 Aug
12:36 a.m.
Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:
Signature material, in fact! I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and
had to eat a shit
sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems
at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely
BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the
penguins have broken this time).
So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?
--
Hilsen Harald
12:46 a.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 02:36:47AM +0200, Harald Arnesen wrote:
Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:
MacOS is based on Mach and Mach was a big steaming mess of promises that
were not so much. Easy for me to say, I haven't written a VM system from
scratch and they did, so credit them for that. But I've been in a VM
system that was oh so much easier to read and understand, the SunOS 4.x
VM system done by Joe Moran (mojo(a)sun.com). That guy had crazy skills,
well beyond mine or anyone else I can think of. When he quit the story
is that Bill Joy stopped him in the parking lot and offered him crazy
amounts of money to stay.
So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel. It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
Signature material, in fact! I loved SunOS
4.1.4, and had to eat a shit
sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems
at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely
BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the
penguins have broken this time).
So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?
5:29 a.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.
It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
Just a thought,
Arnold
2:40 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
Sun never open sourced it.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.
It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
Just a thought,
Arnold 
2:41 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
for historical examination.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Sun never open sourced it.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel. It's pretty close to BSD
> and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it
wasn't
multi
processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
Just a thought,
Arnold 
2:44 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
Didn't they un-open Solaris 11?
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:42
Subject: Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?
I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
for historical examination.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Sun never open sourced it.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel. It's pretty close to BSD
> and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
> I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it
wasn't
multi
processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
Just a thought,
Arnold 
2:46 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
They didn't release the sources to Solaris 11. Anything released prior,
though, remains free.
Warner
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:44 AM William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Didn't they un-open Solaris 11?
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:42
Subject: Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?
I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle, I mean; the Solaris
code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
for historical examination.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
Sun never open sourced it.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
> Changed the subject line.
>
> Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel. It's pretty close to BSD
> > and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not
impressed.
> I
wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it
wasn't
multi
processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
Just a thought,
Arnold
2:45 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
The problem is finding some at Oracle that would care and finding a proper
distribution tape to officially release.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:42 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if they would consider doing it now. Oracle,
I mean; the Solaris
code was opened up and an argument could be made that SunOS would be useful
for historical examination.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Sun never open sourced it.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29:15PM -0600, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel. It's pretty close to BSD
> and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not
impressed.
> I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM
back to BSD. Yeah, it
wasn't
multi
processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
Just a thought,
Arnold
2:43 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.
There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
it would be far from a drop-in.
Warner
So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.
It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
2:45 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:43 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Also, a huge difference is that there's *NO* MP support for SunOS.
Solbourne produced OS/MP which was SunOS with fine-grained locking added (I
forget the degree to which it was, but IIRC, there were 'funnels' that used
locks around the different subsystems (so not one big giant lock), not
fine-grained in the sense we use it today. *THAT* source is harder to find
online...
Warner
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.
There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
it would be far from a drop-in.
So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.
It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
2:53 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 08:43:09AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM
<arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are missing. Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
SunOS 4.1 doesn't have 386 support in it. It was removed after SunOS 4.0.
The Sun RoadRunner wasn't really IBM PC compatible. It had a fair number of
incompatible bits included in it. It also had a weird BIOS.
There's a lot that's happened in x86 since then. It's unclear how much
benefit there would be to having the sources. It looks like you'd be much
better off starting with one of the latter-day BSD implementations to do
the port, though significant differences exist with the infrastructure so
it would be far from a drop-in. So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.
It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
1 Sep
1 Sep
11:43 a.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are missing.
Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
which did have problems at first.
I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
or so.
I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
S
--
Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5
1:50 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John Dyson and David Greenman in
the mid-late 90's? And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.
Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore. All three
had exceptional coding skills.
--Andy
would at least let people see what they are
missing. Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
which did have problems at first.
I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about FreeBSD VM in 1994
or so.
I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved their Mach one (which
has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not seen complaints about modern BSD.
2:32 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 7:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Yes. CSRG used Mach VM because it was available, not because it was
awesome. The folks at CSRG approached Sun to have them donate their VM to
BSD, and there were serious talks about doing this until the lawyers got
involved and explained that would require a serious write down on their
quarterly report so that nixed the whole thing.
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are
missing. Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
which did have problems at first.
I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining about
FreeBSD VM in 1994
It used to be downright aweful.
or so.
I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD improved
their Mach one (which
OpenBSD and NetBSD both moved to uvm.
has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not
seen complaints about modern BSD.
Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by John
Dyson and David Greenman in
the mid-late 90's? And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.
Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore. All three
had exceptional coding skills.
With the exception of David, it's not unfortunate at all. Although they
were good for the project's code, they weren't good for the project. They
didn't work well with others and caused much more grief than the code they
contributed. There comes a time when there's just too much drama and the
rest of the code gets much much better when you aren't always fighting
drama :(. It was a tough decision to make when I was on the core team to
show Dillon the door. One not made lightly, nor without a lot of effort to
work through the issues. In the end, though, we had to part ways. Dillon
has done well with DragonFly, however.
In the last 10 years or so there's been a number of people that have
stepped up and replaced them, most notably Allan Cox and Mark Johnston who
have mad coding skills and can play well with others. Though I'm sure I'm
slighting several people by not mentioning them.
Warner
4 Sep
4 Sep
9:39 a.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 7:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
Well, there are certainly as many sides to this story as there are people
involved. Same with NetBSD/OpenBSD split. Let's leave it as that as I
don't believe we have mentioned people on this list so they can't defend
themselves.
--Andy
On Saturday, September 1, 2018, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Yes. CSRG used Mach VM because it was available, not because it was
awesome. The folks at CSRG approached Sun to have them donate their VM to
BSD, and there were serious talks about doing this until the lawyers got
involved and explained that would require a serious write down on their
quarterly report so that nixed the whole thing.
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
would at least let people see what they are
missing. Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
I've vague recollections that these all originally used the VM from Mach
which did have problems at first.
I recall a more knowledgeable friend complaining
about FreeBSD VM in 1994
It used to be downright aweful.
or so.
I think the latter two use UVM and FreeBSD
improved their Mach one (which
OpenBSD and NetBSD both moved to uvm.
has a SunOS kvmish API anyway). I've not
seen complaints about modern BSD.
Wasn't the whole FreeBSD VM rewritten by
John Dyson and David Greenman in
the mid-late 90's? And then further improved by Matthew Dillon.
Unfortunately they are not affiliated with the project anymore. All
three had exceptional coding skills.
With the exception of David, it's not unfortunate at all. Although they
were good for the project's code, they weren't good for the project. They
didn't work well with others and caused much more grief than the code they
contributed. There comes a time when there's just too much drama and the
rest of the code gets much much better when you aren't always fighting
drama :(. It was a tough decision to make when I was on the core team to
show Dillon the door. One not made lightly, nor without a lot of effort to
work through the issues. In the end, though, we had to part ways. Dillon
has done well with DragonFly, however.
1 Sep
1 Sep
3:01 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 12:43:52PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote:
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
I wandered through the FreeBSD VM recently. Perhaps I'm just old and
tired but it looked pretty messy to me. Still Mach based and the
Mach VM system, which came about at about the same time as the SunOS
VM system, doesn't remotely compare. Sun had some exceptional
talent at the time, there was a reason I fought hard to join that
group, I wanted to work with people who were better than me.
would at least let people see what they are
missing. Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
3:20 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 9:01 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 12:43:52PM +0100, Steve Mynott
wrote:
It is still technically mach based, but it's fixed most of the scalability
issues Mach had (and that MacOS still has).
There's much clutter in the VM, and there's areas that could stand to be
rewritten, or to get at least a good cleaning.
The SunOS vm was far superior in its day, and likely is still cleaner than
what's in FreeBSD. But it can't scale like FreeBSD's vm (or NetBSD's
or
even MacOS's) because it hasn't had the same care and feeding for the last
25 years. It's still single threaded and hasn't had the care and feeding to
make it perform well in MP situations. Solbourne spent years hacking it to
make it scale better, but even with 16 processors that was the high end for
them, and they were barely 10x faster than a uniprocessor for many work
loads due, in part, to vm contention limiting scalability. We had 2 8 CPU
machines that could build our software ~20% faster (with netmake) than the
1 16 CPU machine the OS group had, for example... I recall many discussions
with Dave Barak who did the fine-grained work on the 4.0 SunOS kernel
complaining about how many of the clever tricks in different subsystems
that worked great on UP were terrible for MP...
I don't doubt we'd be in an even better place today if we'd started with
the SunOS vm system in 4.4BSD rather than mach. Don't get me wrong. And
I'll not be the first in line to defend its elegance or clarity of design
(in fact, it has many design issues that took a decade to recode to
properly scale, and we're still not done). And lord knows even though I'm
not close to the foremost expert in the vm, I could easily put together an
hour or two talk on how all the areas of the VM that are holding us back.
Yet even with all that, I think that the ugly, warty, co-evolved code we
have in FreeBSD performs better than the SunOS vm code on any objective
benchmark you could have.
Warner
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
I wandered through the FreeBSD VM recently. Perhaps I'm just old and
tired but it looked pretty messy to me. Still Mach based and the
Mach VM system, which came about at about the same time as the SunOS
VM system, doesn't remotely compare. Sun had some exceptional
talent at the time, there was a reason I fought hard to join that
group, I wanted to work with people who were better than me.
would at least let people see what they are
missing. Maybe I have
rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
Everything else seems like a mess to me.
That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
6:24 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
There is a paper on the SunOS 4 VM available at
<https://web.archive.org/web/20000817230720/http://www.sun.com/smcc/solaris-migration/docs/postscript/vm-impl.ps>
(for some reason I always forget the ghostview binary is actually called
gv the rare time I use it!)
Some basic grepping suggests at least some of the tags in the paper were
still in use in Open Solaris at:
<https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/tree/master/usr/src/uts/common/vm>
There is a paper on UVM as well.
<https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/cranor/cranor.pdf>
This says the original 4.4BSD Mach VM suffered from "swap memory leak
deadlock" and claims of its sibling (at least in 1999) that although the
FreeBSD VM is improved that "it still suffers from the object chaining
model it inherited".
The FreeBSD VM was documented before 2013 in
<https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vm-design/article.html>
"Much of the apparent complexity of the FreeBSD design, especially in
the VM/Swap subsystem, is a direct result of having to solve serious
performance issues that occur under various conditions."
--
Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5
6:38 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
All of those papers are here:
http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/
SunOS.nvram.pdf
SunOS.shlib.pdf
SunOS.smoosh.pdf
SunOS.tfs.pdf
SunOS.ufs_clustering.pdf
SunOS.vfs_arch.pdf
SunOS.vm_arch.pdf
SunOS.vm_impl.pdf
If you have pointers to a paper that is Sun related that I don't have
I'd like to see that.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20000817230720/http://www.sun.com/smcc/solaris-migration/docs/postscript/vm-impl.ps>
There is a paper on UVM as well.
<https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/cranor/cranor.pdf>
That's interesting, reading.
29 Aug
29 Aug
11:09 p.m.
New subject: SunOS code?
On 30 Aug 2018, at 00:43, Warner Losh
<imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:29 PM <arnold(a)skeeve.com
<mailto:arnold@skeeve.com>> wrote:
Changed the subject line.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com <mailto:lm@mcvoy.com>> wrote:
I found both 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.1.2) and 4.1.3 (which still has the m68k, sun2, and sun3
bits in it).
It’d be quite fun to walk through Bill & Lynne Jolitz’ Dr Dobbs 386BSD articles but
with one of these as the starting point.
d
So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.
It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD. Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.
The penguin stuff, it's OK. Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.
So, is the SunOS code available in a way that would let people hack
on it? They had ported it to 386 (roadrunner?), so maybe it'd be
possible to revive it and bring it into the 21st century.
The Googles tells me there's a dozen download places.
1:06 a.m.
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Harald Arnesen wrote:
Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac (the latter has mo
serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an equally-dodgy
driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).
And vice-versa; I had to learn how to control DTR etc on a genuine
serial port on the FreeBSD box (I am writing a user-level driver for
a serial device).
As for Penguin/OS (and trying to figure out just which header file uses
which flags, when I'm using low-level Perl I/O), then forget it.
What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.
I had a look at how they (Linux) wrote stty.c, and nearly threw up.
So, yes, that's pretty much my answer...
-- Dave
Signature
material, in fact! I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a
shit sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like
systems at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least
vaguely BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see
what the penguins have broken this time).
So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have? 
3:23 a.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.
I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a
fairly
late innovation. i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's
user interface.
In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
type? :-)
- Ted
4:36 a.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:23:10PM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
type? :-)
This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I remember mistyping
"kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
Warren
4:13 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands. I
remember mistyping
"kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
Last week I typed "crontab -" (missed the "e" for -e) and then
without
realizing what happened Ctrl-C didn't work, typed Ctrl-D. Argh. Lost
around 20 crontabs which were in a directory I didn't backup. Luckily I
had a syslog file with my recent jobs to recreate it, but lost all my
comments and commented-out entries (for over ten years).
10:09 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On 08/29/2018 04:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
My faux pas is usually meaning to type "telinit q" but reaching a bit
too far and accidnetally typing "telinit 1".
*facepalm*
/me starts the (not so) slow walk of shame to the DC.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
10:21 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care Systems around '95 as an IBM Global
Services guy. Ran to the computer room to restart services and Oracle on AIX.
Apologized to the customer. IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis for the fat finger
with recommendations for avoiding the problem in the future.
I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't adjacent.
Management suits not amused. Customer took it as simple accident and dealt with the 5-10
minute outage.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Sent: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 18:09
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands
On 08/29/2018 04:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
My faux pas is usually meaning to type "telinit q" but reaching a bit
too far and accidnetally typing "telinit 1".
*facepalm*
/me starts the (not so) slow walk of shame to the DC.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
11:04 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care
Systems around '95 as an
IBM Global Services guy. Ran to the computer room to restart services
and Oracle on AIX.
@^*% happens.
Anybody that tells you it doesn't happen to them is lying.
Apologized to the customer. IBM demanded a formal
Root Cause Analysis
for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in
the future. I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't
adjacent.
I remember things like that.
I always liked to admit things like that to the customer. I felt that
it fostered trust. More than once I went to a customer that trusted me
and told them that something was not me and they took me at my word,
primarily because of that established trust.
Management suits not amused. Customer took it as
simple accident and
dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.
Nice.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
11:38 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 05:04:48PM -0600, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
Yep, I'm the same way and I think most good to stellar engineers are the
same way. How can you fix your stuff if you are in denial about it being
broken.
And I agree with you Grant, on the trust building. Customers love it
when you are honest.
Apologized to the customer. IBM demanded a formal
Root Cause Analysis for
the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in the
future. I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't
adjacent.
I remember things like that.
I always liked to admit things like that to the customer. I felt that it
fostered trust. More than once I went to a customer that trusted me and
told them that something was not me and they took me at my word, primarily
because of that established trust.
30 Aug
30 Aug
3:59 a.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
The only time I hid something like that was back in my Field Service days.
I smoked a third party data comm board which cost $$$$ while trying to
replace it.
DEC had me do something for one of my customers on a third party hardware
install. I had no docs, training or experience with the board.
Unfortunately, the vendor didn't key a power cable and I flipped the damned
two pin wire blowing the chip top right off the board.
Wasn't sure it was my fault. I stayed with the call until they got another
board and they got the box up and running and I finally figured I was the
cause
of the issue. Didn't volunteer the info since I wasn't sure. Probably
should've taken the hit. When I did the bad thing I took the hit.
One of these was shorting +15v (IIRC) to Init L on the Unibus on an
11/780. Blew the bits off all the boards back to the Unibus termination on
the DW780
and out to the M9302 Unibus terminator.
Spent the next two days rebuilding the box.
I still had a great relationship with the customer for the next 4 years at
the site.
People understand mistakes and will forgive. Lying to a customer to keep
up a corporate image will never be forgotten if you get caught.
I remember stealing HDA's off of brand new RA81's at DEC's Princeton HQ to
get them out to customer sites before failures in the field from the glue
liquification issue.
Customers will stand by a company that puts them first and delivers serious
effort.
Nowadays the outsourced techs are pretty much parts carriers and swappers
with no ability to push company deliveries up and often they act as a
delaying action until the
company can deliver the correct services.
Bill
--
d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 7:05 PM Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:
On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care
Systems around '95 as an
IBM Global Services guy. Ran to the computer room to restart services
and Oracle on AIX.
@^*% happens.
Anybody that tells you it doesn't happen to them is lying.
Apologized to the customer. IBM demanded a
formal Root Cause Analysis
for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in
the future. I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't
adjacent.
I remember things like that.
I always liked to admit things like that to the customer. I felt that
it fostered trust. More than once I went to a customer that trusted me
and told them that something was not me and they took me at my word,
primarily because of that established trust.
Management suits not amused. Customer took it as
simple accident and
dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.
Nice.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
29 Aug
29 Aug
10:31 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On 08/29/2018 03:03 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
<raises hand>
I always type signal names. Life's too short to worry about saving
three characters.
This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands.
I remember mistyping
"kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
-- Dave
11 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On 08/29/2018 04:31 PM, Dan Mick wrote:
I always type signal names. Life's too short to
worry about saving
three characters.
Signal names? I've always used numbers / quit. I don't think I've ever
seen anybody do otherwise.
/me goes to read the man page.
Thank you for the pro tip Dan.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
30 Aug
30 Aug
8:28 a.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
Signal names? I've always used numbers / quit.
I don't think I've ever
seen anybody do otherwise.
I've never used signal names (other than SIGTERM, when it got changed from
14 to 15 for no good reason that I could see; at least it's now the
default signal).
-- Dave
11:06 a.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days when kill didn't take
the names. It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember what
the mnemonics are.
-----Original Message-----
From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org> On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2018 6:04 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands.
I remember mistyping
"kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
-- Dave
11:35 a.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
I remember doing a fresh install of unix on a VAX with another sysadmin. We
had spent a couple hours getting everything ready to go, and he had created
a bunch of temporary directories under /tmp to hold intermediate work. All
started with ".", so, in /tmp, he entered "rm -r .*". Unfortunately,
that
matched .. as well. We knew something had gone very wrong when we got a
"/bin/rm: text busy" message as rm tried to remove itself.
On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:06 AM, <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days
when kill didn't take
the names. It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember
what
the mnemonics are.
-----Original Message-----
From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org> On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2018 6:04 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands
On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
This reminded me of other semi-cryptic commands.
I remember mistyping
"kill -1 1" as "kill -9 1" with the inevitable consequences.
Hands up all those who have *not* done that...
-- Dave
1:24 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:07 AM <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
I use the numbers but I think it stems from the days
when kill didn't take
the names. It's easier for me to remember -1 and -9 than to remember
what
the mnemonics are.
Same here - there first time I saw the mnemonics were in the built-in kill
command in csh. Which was usefule for "kill -cont"
but to this day, since like Ron I grew on fifth/sixth/seventh edition which
used numbers, the ones that I remember and care about are screwed into my
fingers.
I never have an issue with -1 vs -9 with kill, but I do not have great
story about how as a young engineer I wiped out the life's work of visiting
professor because Tektronix had the 0 and 1 keys next to each other on one
of the terminals they made. It was the console of our 11/60 and we had two
RK05's and I fat fingured /dev/r...0 instead of 1. Bad stuff.
Clem
2:31 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
At least in the old days drives had Write Protect switches.
Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on diskette and leaving off Write Protect on
hard disks. Some disks had write protect jumpers on the boards... They should have been
The STANDARD.
Bill
Sent from BlueMail
On Aug 30, 2018, 09:25, at 09:25, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:07 AM
<ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
I use the numbers but I think it stems from the
days when kill didn't
take
the names. It's easier for me to remember
-1 and -9 than to
remember
what
the mnemonics are.
Same here - there first time I saw the mnemonics were in the built-in
kill
command in csh. Which was usefule for "kill -cont"
but to this day, since like Ron I grew on fifth/sixth/seventh edition
which
used numbers, the ones that I remember and care about are screwed into
my
fingers.
I never have an issue with -1 vs -9 with kill, but I do not have great
story about how as a young engineer I wiped out the life's work of
visiting
professor because Tektronix had the 0 and 1 keys next to each other on
one
of the terminals they made. It was the console of our 11/60 and we had
two
RK05's and I fat fingured /dev/r...0 instead of 1. Bad stuff.
Clem
3:01 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
At least in the old days drives had Write Protect
switches.
Not the issue - both disks were RW. I was running as root and ran a
program that lacked a check it shoud have had it (because I was lazy and
never put it in there).
Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on
diskette
You of course realized that was because of field service issues of course.
Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using a twist
in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the jumpers
properly.
and leaving off Write Protect on hard disks. Some
disks had write protect
jumpers on the boards...
Hmmm.. I thought all disks at least had a strap. WD, CDC, Seagate,
Shuggart, Toshiba all supported the strap. The IBM disks I remember did
not also, but I'll take your word for it, it would have been like them to
have removed it to save the connector cost.
They should have been The STANDARD.
Hmmm.. I'm not at home, but I think I have both the ST-412/506 and ESDI
specs in a filing cab somewhere. I thought the standard did defined it.
(Intel blocks 'bitsavers.org' for some reason so I can not look online but
I think http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/seagate/ST412_OEMmanual_Apr82.pdf is
likely to have it in there).
Clem
3:22 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 9:03 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter
<pechter(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Ah yes, the original zeroconfig :)
Warner
Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on
diskette
You of course realized that was because of field service issues of
course. Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using
a twist in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the
jumpers properly.
4:11 p.m.
New subject: Cryptic Unix Commands
Early plug and play.
Would have worked better if they trained the PC techs in how the stuff worked.
Bill
Old ex-tech turned sysadmin
-----Original Message-----
From: Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com>
To: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>
Cc: William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com>om>, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Sent: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 11:22
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands
On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 9:03 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:31 AM William Pechter
<pechter(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Ah yes, the original zeroconfig :)
Warner
Screw IBM for the in cable drive select lines on
diskette
You of course realized that was because of field service issues of
course. Setting all floppies (and later ST-506 disks) on the PC and using
a twist in the cable meant they did not have to ask FS folks to set the
jumpers properly.
29 Aug
29 Aug
5:06 a.m.
On Tuesday, 28 August 2018 at 23:23:10 -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
(along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD. It was in the original
sources imported into FreeBSD. 4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
But options are an issue, notably with GNU software, which has a
completely different lineage. Just look at FreeBSD ls(1) and GNU
ls(1).
What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.
I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a
fairly
late innovation. i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's
user interface.
In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
stty dec < /dev/ttyS0 Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add
an option, when
redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
type? :-)
Creeping featurism!
Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
2:25 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994. (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
1992 at the latest.
Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were unwillingly frog-marched
from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.
- Ted
In BSD 4.3 and
early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
(along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD. It was in the original
sources imported into FreeBSD. 4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
2:41 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg
'groggy' Lehey wrote:
BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994. (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
1992 at the latest.
I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented in Net/2
(1991, though of course the entanglements there have been discussed), but
the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to be absent from the man
page).
Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
In BSD
4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
(along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD. It was in the original
sources imported into FreeBSD. 4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date. teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were
unwillingly frog-marched
from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.
I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
"Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to
Solaris.
- Dan C.
2:50 p.m.
On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
I'm curious who was using AOS, which was
essentially Tahoe+NFS.
I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
2:59 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:50:48AM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
I believe Wisconsin did the NFS stuff for that OS, as I was coming up
to speed I noticed a bunch of IBM work stations and I think they were
running AOS. Wisconsin was quite the hacker school back then, mojo came
from there, so did Rusty and a bunch of the kernel hackers that were a
few years ahead of me.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
I'm curious who was using AOS, which was
essentially Tahoe+NFS.
I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.
3:08 p.m.
On 8/29/18 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:50:48AM -0400, Chet Ramey
wrote:
Yep, they did. I maintained a custom kernel version for quite a long time,
but that computer is not one of the things that came along when we moved.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
I believe Wisconsin did the NFS stuff for that OS, as I was coming up
to speed I noticed a bunch of IBM work stations and I think they were
running AOS. Wisconsin was quite the hacker school back then, mojo came
from there, so did Rusty and a bunch of the kernel hackers that were a
few years ahead of me. I'm curious who was using AOS, which was
essentially Tahoe+NFS.
I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis. 
5:14 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
I'm curious who was using AOS, which was
essentially Tahoe+NFS.
Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
using an assembler :)
Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
Bye, Arno.
11:23 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen(a)ieee.org>
wrote:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross
wrote:
I remember IBM brought a semi-trailer to my university (UCF) showcasing the
RT back in the 80s.
--
Eric Wayte
I'm curious who was using AOS, which was
essentially Tahoe+NFS.
Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
using an assembler :)
Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
Bye, Arno.
30 Aug
30 Aug
3:03 a.m.
Hello!
I remember meeting the RT family of machines during the UNIXEXPO cycle
of events. Also what DEC was up to. It was both the IBM 6151 RT
machines and finally the odd looking design that they turned into. I
still have the mouse pad they gave me of a certain Viking working to
promote them.
I recall that the sales droid at the collection of RT machines was
rather vexed that I simply used the telnet command to walk my way
across the whole series.
I also recall that I was more impressed by the DEC crowd, and was
amused by the SUN efforts. You're right as usual Larry, they were
working too <DELETED> hard to promote themselves.
Kevin I've seen your site before, it is as informative as usual.
As for running AIX in a virtual machine, perhaps I will contact you
off list to discuss that idea, Kevin.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Eric Wayte <ewayte(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen(a)ieee.org>
wrote:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
I remember IBM brought a semi-trailer to my university (UCF) showcasing the
RT back in the 80s.
--
Eric Wayte I'm curious who was using AOS, which was
essentially Tahoe+NFS.
Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
using an assembler :)
Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
Bye, Arno.
29 Aug
29 Aug
5:28 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
"Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to
Solaris.
AOS was used by MIT's Project Athena. DEC and IBM both contributed $5
million/year in staff or equipment, while MIT contributed $2
million/year. So Athena was funded at $12 million for five years,
which was later extended by another 3 years.
Initially the DEC and IBM equipment was running on BSD 4.3/4.3 Tahoe.
DEC later moved us to Ultrix, and IBM to AIX (sigh).
Sun equipment was later added to the mix (purchased and funded by MIT).
- Ted
30 Aug
30 Aug
5:58 a.m.
On Wednesday, 29 August 2018 at 10:41:02 -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o
<tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>>> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
>>> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>>>
>>> stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
>>
>> Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
>> (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD. It was in the original
>> sources imported into FreeBSD. 4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
>> I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
>
> BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994. (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
>
> Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
> 1992 at the latest.
Right, which is why I wrote
I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
In case that wasn't clear, I meant a later date than 4.3BSD.
I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had
`-f` documented
in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
be absent from the man page).
No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:
static char sccsid[] = "(a)(#)stty.c 5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";
And it has the -f flag. This was (just) before the very first version
of Linux. My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
from Net/2. Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.
Greg
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1:14 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:58 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
Net/2 was the basis of 386BSD, which begat the patchkits, which begat
FreeBSD and NetBSD.
One of the problems with early Linux was that they were just a bunch of
guys (and sometimes gals) that had access to these cool unix systems. At
the time, there was quite the lag between release by research / university
and running in a commercial Unix. So in the early 1990s, there were a
bunch of systems based on 4.2BSD, as well as many based on System V, which
lacked the -f flag. At the time, it was at the end of the isolated phase of
Unix, where people just made stuff up in relative isolation and when the
cross pollination effects of USENET and the first Unix converts having had
a decade or so under their belts. The Linux guys weren't old-time Bell Labs
guys that would know the differences in detail between the different
strains, especially the people that were writing one-off utilities, often
to an old, out of date man page, that Linux encouraged to contribute.
Nothing wrong with all that, it was a crazy time trying to recreate things
at a mile a minute. But some details were not faithfully emulated. It's not
surprising: there was always so much to do. So while it existed when they
started, it's unlikely the knowledge had diffused enough for them to know
about it when it came time to code...
Warner
I think that
Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented
in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
be absent from the man page).
No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:
static char sccsid[] = "(a)(#)stty.c 5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";
And it has the -f flag. This was (just) before the very first version
of Linux. My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
from Net/2. Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.
29 Aug
29 Aug
8:43 a.m.
On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty
-f" and "stty -F" is a fairly late
innovation. i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's user
interface.
Yeah, I suppose that's it, but in true GNU style they also have
"--file=/dev/XXX", so why not "-f"?
In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was
maintaining
Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
type? :-)
Ah, but then the shell does the opening, which might not be the mode that
you wanted; I was doing some funky I/O redirection at the time as well.
-- Dave
7:03 a.m.
On 29 Aug 2018, at 03:06, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac
(the latter has mo serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an
equally-dodgy driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).
I’m glad I’m not the only one who has infinite problems with these dongles. I have a
sacred old laptop running OpenBSD precisely to get serial consoles working as a) it has an
RS-232 port and b) the drivers are sane. I have a USB-serial dongle which on Mac, once the
driver is installed, creates a device called /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Serial-SiLo. Took me an
eternity to figure out it was that because the docs had nothing about which device file it
actually created and, well, considering it is a physical cable I had eliminated Bluetooth
to begin with… I confess to looking at the creation date on the device file and then
saying “naah, it cannot be… oh… it is…”
I do miss SunOS too - because of a single user with great powers we had to upgrade a
SparcStation 10 to Solaris back in 1994 and the performance took an instant nosedive. Not
to mention the hours spent getting tools to make it actually work (i.e. 99% of the GNU
project).
Arrigo
28 Aug
28 Aug
1:14 a.m.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
I remember seeing a photo of that button. Somewhere
(I think) I have a
PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
SparcStation.
I made a "Satan Inside" PS file once, along with a "Downgrade to
Solaris"
PS file. Must dig them out ....
Cheers, Warren
5:47 p.m.
On 8/27/18, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
I remember seeing a photo of that button. Somewhere
(I think) I have a
PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
SparcStation.
We stuck an International House of Pancakes "Powered by Pancakes"
sticker on the power supply box of our IBM mainframe.
-Paul W.
26 Aug
26 Aug
8:48 a.m.
I am pretty sure that V8 was the first research system to run on
Vaxen, and I believe that Research used 750 and later 8550s for
their systems. Norman could probably give a defnitive answer.
V7 on the Interdata aside, Plan 9 is when you saw a big push to
a multiplatform system: MIPS, SPARC, 68040 and 386.
Arnold
Seth Morabito <web(a)loomcom.com> wrote:
After the past several years of focusing on 3B2
preservation and
emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was
ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that
would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web(a)loomcom.com
2058
days inactive
2069
days old
76 comments
32 participants
participants (32)
-
Andy Kosela -
Arno Griffioen -
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Arrigo Triulzi -
Arthur Krewat -
Brad Spencer -
Chet Ramey -
Clem Cole -
Dan Cross -
Dan Mick -
Dave Horsfall -
David Arnold -
Eric Wayte -
George Michaelson -
Grant Taylor -
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
Gregg Levine -
Harald Arnesen -
Jeremy C. Reed -
John P. Linderman -
Jon Forrest -
Larry McVoy -
Mary Ann Horton -
Paul Winalski -
ron＠ronnatalie.com -
Seth Morabito -
Steve Mynott -
Theodore Y. Ts'o -
Warner Losh -
Warren Toomey -
William Cheswick -
William Pechter