July 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

2 years, 4 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?”

2 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Monitoring by loudspeaker (was: BTL pranks)

by Michael Kjörling

(This should probably be on COFF because I don't think this has much to do with UNIX.) On 11 Jul 2020 22:22 -0400, from doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy): > a loudspeaker hooked to the low-order bit of the accumulator played > gentle white noise in the background. The noise would turn into a > shriek when the computer got into a tight loop, How did that work? I can see how tying the low-order bit of the accumulator to a loudspeaker would generate white noise as the computer is doing work; but I fail to see how doing so would even somewhat reliably generate a shrieking sound when the computer is in a tight loop. Please, enlighten me. :-) -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

3 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] 2bsd tarball -> pdtar, with a side of uuslave

by Nemo

(Sent to COFF as too far afield for a subthread) On 29/07/2020, John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> wrote (in part): [...] > There was another chapter to the "tar wars" after UNIX and after POSIX. First, thank you for the chapter. #6-) > I put the pdtar code into the public domain, so it could be widely used. > This produced a variety of support headaches. [...] This eventually led me to > understand more of the value in using the GNU General Public License. As everyone knows, a lot of Usenet source was released into the public domain. I have been told, time and again, by IP lawyers never to release s/w unencumbered. Without an appropriate encumbrance, the author may be liable for any damage caused by said s/w -- as insane as that sounds. (I was told that there is even case law but I cannot remember what.) So your support woes could have been worse. N.

3 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > I have seen conflicting information in sources dating from the 70s when > the TV-11 and XGP-11 were very much in use. > For several reasons, I believe the TV-11 was the first machine attached > to the 10-11 interface, and the XGP-11 came second. This would lend > some weak support for the theory that the first would be a 11/20 and the > second a 11/10. Yeah, but Clem's note reinforces my vague memory that the XGP-11 was an -11/20. I wish we had a picture of the Knight TV system (the system, not a terminal). It's a extremely significant system - I believe it my have been the first bit-mapped computer display system ever; and thus the prototype, in some sense, for the display of every single personal compupter (including phones) now extant - and so there _ought_ to be a photo of it. But looking online for a while, I can turn up almost nothing about it! (I guess we should do a page about it on the CHWiki...) (Repeat my prior grump about how the AI Lab did all sorts of ground-breaking stuff, because it was just 'tools', and not their main research focus, it's hard to find out about a lot of it, e.g. the inter-ITS network file system.) But if you can find an image, even a low-res picture of that end of the AI Lab machine room, we can tell what model the TV-11 is - early 11's had inteagrated front panels, which are different for every model: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/PDP-11_Models.html so you don't even need to be able to read anything to tell a /20 from a /10. It was in a dual (I think - maybe triple, it's been a looooooong time :-) rack which IIRC was along the side wall (i.e. the short building side) next to the AI KA10 (which was sort of along the long wall, up in the corner). I don't know if the XGP-11 code is still extant (my copy of the ITS filesystem is offline right at the moment), but even if we look at the code, I'm not sure we could tell; there are some _very minor_ programming differences between the /20 and /10 (e.g. V bit on SWAB) - see the table at thd end of the PDP-11 Architecture Handbook - but I'd be aurprised if the code used any. Surely there has to be _some_ picture of the machine room which shows it, even if in the background. > I did bring it up with TK at some point. Try RG, too. Noel

3 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Angelo Papenhoff > Well the TV-11 is a tough question. I originally wrote an 11/05 emulator > because some document said it was an 11/10 (which is the same thing). > But other sources claimed it was an 11/20. Hmmm. My memory was that it was an -11/05-10 (they are identical, except for the paint on the front panel; and I don't recall it in enough detail to say), but perhaps I'm wrong? Or maybe it was an -11/20 early, and then it got replaced with an -11/10? (I have a _very_ vague memory that the XGP's -11 was a /20, bur I wouldn't put much weight on that.) Moon or TK or someone might remember better. Noel

3 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by Lars Brinkhoff

Angelo Papenhoff wrote: > Noel Chiappa wrote: >> If the KE11 is needed to run some application on the -11/04, there >> are KE11-B's (program compatible, but a single hex card) available, >> ISTR. For emulation, something (SIMH?) supports it, since the TV -11 >> on ITS (now running in emulation,I'm pretty sure) uses it. > > Well the TV-11 is a tough question. I originally wrote an 11/05 emulator > because some document said it was an 11/10 (which is the same thing). > But other sources claimed it was an 11/20. To clarify, the emulated TV-11 is *not* in any way based on SIMH. There are more machines to potentially hook up to the 10-11 interface, but I'm quite unsure if SIMH is the right vehicle for those. But this is now clearly out of TUHS territory. CC to coff only.

3 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Traditional method of dealing with embedded shar files

by Adam Thornton

"You'd be out of your mind to blindly run the shell on some anonymous shar file..." But but but all the cool kids tell you to install their new Javascript framework with: "curl https://rocketviagra.ru/distro/latest.sh | sudo /bin/bash" Get offa my lawn. On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 7:01 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > On Fri, 24 Jul 2020, Random832 wrote: > > > For whatever it's worth, you can do the exact same thing as vi with sed > > in this case: 1,/====/d > > It's been a while since I had to use it, but didn't "unshar" do this sort > of thing, and in a safe manner too? You'd be out of your mind to blindly > run the shell on some anonymous shar file... > > -- Dave >

3 years, 2 months

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Fwd: This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World’s Longest Cave

by Clem Cole

If you'll old enough to remember 'ADVENT' and been around the geeks when it was a craze on the ARPA-net in the late 70s. You might find this article which was in my feed last night: https://onezero.medium.com/the-woman-who-inspired-one-of-the-first-hit-vide… fun. For those that did not, it was the world's first adventure game (no graphics, just solving a series of puzzles while wandering through a cave). It was originally written in Fortran-IV for the PDP-10/20 with a small assembler assist to handle RAD50 for the input. [FYI: MIT'S Haystack observatory is about 2 miles as the crow flies from my house on the top of hill next over, in the town next to mine, Westford. Groton, MA is the town after that]. This article is an interesting read (about 20 mins) with stuff I never knew. I knew a divorced Will Crowthers worked at BBN and wrote the game Adventure for his daughters to play when they visited him. I also knew that he had been a caver and that the cave in the game was modeled after Kentucky's Mammoth Caves. I did not know until a few years ago, [from a friend of my wife's, Madeliene Needles] that at some time they were living in Groton (because Crothers' ex-wife was working at Haystack with Madeliene for a while). As this article tells the story, it was Patricia Crowthers who actually did the mapping work. FWIW: As a fun factoid, today, the Stanford version is one of the tests used by the old DEC and now the Intel Fortran-2018 compiler to verify that the compiler can still compile fixed format FORTRAN-IV and ensure the resulting program still works. And of course, 'packrat Clem;' my own 'advent' map is in my filing cabinet in the basement. Written on the back of '132 column green bar' computer paper of course. Clem For the folks that are interested, more good stuff including a number of versions of the code can be found at: https://rickadams.org/adventure/

3 years, 2 months

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Re: [COFF] BTL Pranks

by John P. Linderman

> Did the non-Unix people also pull pranks like the watertower? Every year when our director, Arun Netravali of center 1135, went on vacation, Scott Knauer, a department head, would pull some kind of stunt. One year he covered the carpeting in Arun's office with green astroturf, so it looked like half of a tennis court. Another year, he recruited many of us to blow up balloons, which he collected in Arun's office by aiming a huge fan in that direction, while we pitched inflated balloons into the corridor. Scott, being Scott, completely topped off the balloons by lifting the ceiling tiles near the office door. I recall walking into Building 3 on the day Arun was scheduled to return and seeing balloons struggling to escape from every open window of his office. Building 3 lacked the large stairwells like the one that housed the Peter face made of magnets. But Scott compensated by projecting Arun's image along a long corridor, and covering it with magnets, so Arun's face was visible on a sidewall as you approached the end of the corridor. I found the playful attitude at the Labs in general as an indicator of out-of-the-box thinking that a research organization thrives on.

3 years, 2 months

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COFF July 2020