[TUHS] earliest Unix roff

Bakul Shah bakul at bitblocks.com
Tue Sep 17 11:57:24 AEST 2019


On Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:17:52 -0700 Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> > On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> > >One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
> > >and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
> > >my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
> > >things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
> > >paper
> > >on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
> > >and picked up my highliter...
> > 
> > This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost th
> e
> > 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.
>
> I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
> a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
> I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
> Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
> cd something
> and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
> Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
> This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

I may have mentioned restoring root directory using peek/poke
commands of a primitive boot loader.  Right before Comdex
(fall 1981) someone accidentally wiped out the root dir.  IIRC
we had just two systems that actually worked. The other person
was copying the floppy to the second system when something
went wrong.  The backup didn't work. And this was a Comdex
special filesystem (with demos for the show painstakingly put
together and no time to recreate it all from scratch). I
happened to remember inode & block numbers of the first few
things so I fixed up the root dir enough for the system to
come up & run fsck. Luckily very little was lost and we were
able to repair the demos and run them at Comdex!


More information about the TUHS mailing list