November 2020 - COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dan Cross

He announced it on Twitter. I'm sure we all wish him well and a speedy recovery. Note, his tweet says that he is recovering. https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1244636584508604417?s=20

3 years, 7 months

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On the rise and fall of Gopher

by Michael Kjörling

The EFF just published an article on the rise and fall of Gopher on their Deeplinks blog. "Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperabil… I thought it might be of interest to people here. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

3 years, 7 months

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In memorium: Ada Lovelace

by Dave Horsfall

The world's first computer programmer (and a mathematician, when that was deemed unseemly for a mere woman), we lost her in 1852 from uterine cancer. -- Dave

4 years

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DDP-516 hardware (was: 516-TSS Documents)

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Redirecting to COFF] On Monday, 23 November 2020 at 8:42:34 -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote: >> On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 12:28 PM Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs(a)netbsd.org> wrote: > >> The Honeywell DDP-516 was the computer (running specialized software >> written by Bolt, Bernanek & Newman (BBN)) which was the initial model of >> the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMP). > > The IMPs had a lot of custom interface hardware; sui generis serial > interlocked host interfaces (so-called 1822), and also the high-speed modem > interfaces. I think there was also a watchdog time, IIRC (this is all from > memory, but the ARPANET papers from JCC cover it all). I worked with a DDP-516 at DFVLR 46 years ago. My understanding was that the standard equipment included two different channel interfaces. One, the DMC (Direct Multiplexer Control, I think) proved to be just what I needed for my program, a relatively simple tape copy program. The input tape was analogue, unbuffered, and couldn't be stopped, so it was imperative to accept all data as it came in from the ADC. But the program didn't work. According to the docco, the DMC should have reset when the transfer was complete (maybe depending on configuration parameters), but it didn't. We called in Honeywell support, who scratched their heads and went away, only to come back later and say that it couldn't be fixed. I worked around the problem in software by continually checking the transfer count and restarting when the count reached 0. So the program worked, but I was left wondering whether this was a design problem or a support failure. Has anybody else worked with this feature? 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

4 years

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Building OS from source in the olden days

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, and I can't find one! Can anybody help? 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

4 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Peter Jeremy

On 2020-Nov-06 10:07:21 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: >Will, I do still the same thing, but the reason for 72 for email being that >way is still card-based. In FORTRAN the first column defines if the card >is new (a blank), a comment (a capital C), no zero a 'continuation' of the >last card. But column 73-80 were 'special' and used to store sequence #s >(this was handy when you dropped your card deck, card sorters could put it >back into canonical order). Since no-one has mentioned it, the reason why Fortran and Cobol ignore columns 73-80 goes back to the IBM 711 card reader - which could read any (but usually configured for the first) 72 columns into pairs of 36-bit words in an IBM 701. -- Peter Jeremy

4 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 16:52:58 -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > If 4.3BSD is old enough, the System Administrator's Manual (e.g. > http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/isi/bsd/490197C_Unix_4.3BS…) > section 4.2 _et seq_. > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 4:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for >> a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, >> and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > How olden days do you mean? Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was thinking commercial systems of the 1960s and 1970s, not any form of Unix. 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

4 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Clem Cole

Moving to COFF. below. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 10:40 AM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Clem, > > It figures. I should have known there was a reason for the shorter lines > other than display. Conventions are sticky and there appears to be a > generation gap. I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors > used 2... who knows why? :). > You never use a real typewriter. Double-space allows you to edit (physically) the document if need be. This was how I did everything before I had easy computer access. I went to college with an electric typewriter and all my papers were done on it in the fall of my freshman year (until I got access to UNIX). I did have an CS account for the PDP-10 and they had the XGP, but using it for something like your papers was somewhat frowned upon. However, the UNIX boxes we often bought 'daisy wheel' typewriters that had RS-232C interfaces. Using nroff, I could then do my papers and run it off in the admin's desk at night. Clem

4 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Coff, etc] On Saturday, 7 November 2020 at 0:29:01 +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in > <20201106225422.GD99027(a)eureka.lemis.com>: >> On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote: >>> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, >>> we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- >>> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than >>> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get >>> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. >> >> FWIW, this is the US convention. Other countries have different >> conventions. My Ausinfo style manual states >> >> There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the >> end of a sentence. >> >> I believe that this also holds for Germany. I'm not sure that the UK >> didn't have different rules again. > > Yes, the DUDEN of Germany says for typewriters that the punctuation > characters period, comma, semicolon, colon, question- and > exclamation mark are added without separating whitespace. The next > word follows after a space ("Leerschritt", "void step"). Thanks for the confirmation. Where did you find that? I checked the yellow Duden (âRichtlinien fÃ¼r den Schriftsatzâ) before sending my previous message, but I couldn't find anything useful. 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

4 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Clem Cole

Exactly -- just re-read Will's question. 2 spaces after punctuation is a fix-size typeface solution to the 1.5 typographer layout. I was referring to why typed papers were traditionally double spaced between the lines. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 11:02 AM Chris Torek <torek(a)elf.torek.net> wrote: > >I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors > >used 2... who knows why? :). > > Typewriters. > > In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, > we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- > sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than > the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get > stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. Note that this is > all in the variable-pitch font world. > > Since typewriters are fixed-pitch, the way to emulate the > 1.5-space-wide gap is to expand it to 2. > > Chris >

4 years, 1 month

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COFF November 2020