On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote: This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the entire thing after the file got corrupted. Yay MACRO-10

I’ve forgotten but it could have been early on. Having /root as the super users home directory was on later systems. I thought Masscomp did that but I might be thinking Stellar by then. Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.

On Mon, 16 Sep 2019, Larry McVoy wrote: After my similar fsckup, I made /etc root's home directory (it was much easier to recover, and was available at boot time). -- Dave

Btw. This was some I used as a wizards test. You have a working system next to a system that is still running so you have the console and its shell but had the rm -fr / done to it. You have lost all of bin dev etc and lib by the time he hit ^C. So you have some of /usr inc but much of /usr/bin is still there. No compiler or assembler on the broken machine since that was in bin and lib. It’s possible to fix it using the other system to help. Just don’t turn the damaged system off 🍺 Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.

That was exactly the situation I had and I had a tough time so I wrote a little paper about it. Lemme see if I can find it. Yep, found it. It was when I was messing with roff -me. http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/restor.e http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/restor.pdf I was apparently channeling creat(2) because it was too much work for me (or Ken) to add the trailing e. I'm sort of impressed that I wrote that in 1985 because I got to undergrad in 1980, I was an accounting major because my coach in high school was my accounting teacher, you don't disappoint your coach so I did great at accounting, got to college, no coach and accounting was *not* my thing, wandered around for a year or so taking STEM classes, took some Art History and declared that as a major, did that for 2 years (and got really good at it, as in I have corrected errors in a textbook about Greek pottery [1]) only to have my advisor tell me there are no jobs, so I switched to computer science in 1984. Going from nothing to being a sys admin that had to do a full restore in a year or so is kinda neat. But Unix was kinda neat and I was hooked, it's easy to get good when you really like something (ask me about fly fishing :) Doug, I still have the nroff/troff/tlb/eqn/pic (sadly no grap but I wrote my own in pic later) printed out docs that I got from the UW-Madison Computer Science department. I used those to write that little memo. [1] A little rant about art and how hard and how easy it can be. You guys know Picasso? How about Piet Modrian? Most people know both but don't know that they know Piet. They are very similar, Piet painted trees, here is one: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KwU6EePgmxk/T8FixzAZxBI/AAAAAAAAB0s/xUKRQc23MNk/s… Yep, that's a tree. WTF you say? So all great artist start out doing the simple stuff. Picasso, if you go back far enough, did still lifes of a bowl of fruit. Piet did essentially photographs of trees. But then they get weird, they get more abstract. And more abstract. To the point that you look at that link above and you go "how is that a tree? That's not a tree". You need to see their work in chronological order. You see the stuff that looks like a photograph and then it is a little different, a little different, and you get to the end and you go wow, that actually is a tree. It makes no sense if you just look at one after it gets abstract, it makes total sense if you see it order. I had the good fortune to see an exhibit at New Yorks MOMA of Picasso in chronological order. Holy moly did that snap him into focus. So that's a very long way of saying that it was easy for me to be good at Greek pottery because I already knew that if you put someones work in chronological order it would make sense. The correction I did that I'm proud of is to Janson's history of art (which is the benchmark for art history), there was a Greek artist who did a series of pots and Janson had two pots backwards, the earlier one was the later one. Janson was dead but the book carried on and they took my fix. On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:36:40PM -0400, Clem cole wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

Hopkins had a KSR37 in a small office (or perhaps closet) on the second floor. It was also fitted with a modem I built (a Pennywhistle, an absolutely abhorrant design). It had the greek box and we used it for many a nroff term paper or the like. It was also our way of getting on the Arpanet. The university had a “tie line” that let us call the DC metro area so we could get into the Pentagon TIP. However, Mike Muuss also convinced the operator once to place a collect call. “It’s a computer we are calling,” he told her. “If it beeps, it accepts the charges.” (This was perhaps one of the boldest operator hacks until Brian Redman and Peter Langston were screwing around with a phone switch and programmed it to answer the phone: “Bell Communications Research” (long pause) “Yes, Operator! I’ll accept the charges.” After I graduated from JHU, I found an ASR 37 in a surplus sale. I had it for years in my apartment kitchen. Not only did it handle all the nroff ESC-8/ESC-9 stuff and the like without need for an output filter, it had a giant NEWLINE key on the right side and was perhaps the only terminal I ever used that didn’t need the unix NL->CRLF mapping turned on. Amusingly, the thing sat there idle until DSR came up on the modem and then its motors would start. When CD came on a bright green PROCEED light illuminated on the front of it. I used it for years until modems got up to the 9600 baud range and decided a CRT would be nicer than the printing terminal. I gave mine to RS who I think used it to block in someone’s car at one of the nacent long distance data carriers (was either Sprint or MCI).