COFF January 2023

coff@tuhs.org

16 participants
17 discussions

Re: Microware's OS-9 (was: [TUHS] Clever code)

by Brad Spencer

"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> writes: [migrating to COFF] [snip] >> In that time frame there was a number of microkernel designs. One >> that has not been mentioned was OS-9 for the 6809/68000 processor. I >> used it pretty extensively. OS-9 was very unix like from the userland >> POV, when you consider something like V5 unix, however it didn't share >> any of the same command names, just many of the same concepts. > > This is emphatically true. I used this system as a kid on a 64KiB > machine, and I don't remember even a mention of Unix in the doorstop of > a manual by Dale Puckett and Peter Dibble (who gave you something like 6 > chapters of architectural background before introducing the shell > prompt). Maybe they did mention Unix , but since it had no meaning to > me at the time, it didn't sink in. I think it is also possible they > avoided any names that they thought might draw legal ire from AT&T. That is more or less me too... However, in later years when I was familiar with Unix I looked at some of the OS-9 books and the block diagrams in the books about the OS-9 OS could have described early Unix pretty well. >> It was close enough that if you had the C compiler, a very basic K&R >> compiler, you could get some of the unix command to compile without >> too much trouble. > > Years later I went to college, landed on Sun IPC workstations, and > quickly recognized OS-9's "T/S Edit" as a vi clone, and its "T/S Word" > as a version of nroff. There was also a "T/S Spell" product but I don't > recall it clearly enough to venture whether it was a clone of ispell. Ya, I think I even had a patch that turned T/S Edit into a much closer vi clone. But, I think by then I had another vi clone already on hand. One of the other things I did with OS-9/6809 was worked on UUCP. I didn't write the original OS-9 UUCP code, but I did modify it quite a bit and had it talking UUCP g protocol to UUnet via a phone line. I did write a 'rn' Usenet news reader clone and was pulling down a few news groups as well as email every day. In the last days of that system, I also logged into the system via a serial port complete with Username and password prompts. This was all on a Color Computer 3 with 512K. [snip] >> and nothing like Mach or even Minix. > > With the source of all three available, a technical paper analyzing and > contrasting them would be a worthwhile thing to have. (It's unclear to > me if even a historical version of QNX is available for study.) The source to OS-9/6809 would have been released by Microware a long time ago had it not been for a particular person in the user community. Got mucked up. I fell out of following it after the BSD Unixs became available. >> It was also very much positioned to real time OS needs of the time and >> was not really marketed generally and unless you happened to have a >> Color Computer from Radio Shack > > Lucky me! How I yearned for a 128KiB Color Computer 3 so I could > upgrade to OS-9 Level 2 and the windowing system. (512KiB was > preferred, but there had been a spike in RAM prices right about the time > the machine was released. Not that greater market success would have > kept Tandy from under-promoting and eventually killing the machine.[1]) Level II was nice. It was able to use bank switching and would allow a set of random 8k memory blocks out of the 128k or 512k present in the CC3 system to be mapped into the 6809 64k address space. The Color Computer didn't support memory protection, so no paging or any real process protection, but this banking allowed for a lot of possibilities. I know that there was other OS-9 systems around that ran Level II but I don't really know how they managed memory. I would suspect it to be simular to the CC3, but that is just a guess on my part. [snip] > Regards, > Branden > > [1] Here's a story you may have to sit down for from Frank Durda IV (now > deceased) about how the same company knifed their m68k-based > line--which ran XENIX--in the gut repeatedly. It's hard to find > this story via Web search so I've made a Facebook post > temporarily(?) public. I'd simply include it, but it's pretty long. > > https://www.facebook.com/g.branden.robinson/posts/pfbid0F8MrvauQ6KPQ1tytme9… > > [2] https://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/21/os9.suit.idg/index.html > [3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_ios_name_to_apple… > [4] https://sourceforge.net/projects/nitros9/ -- Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

1 year, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Interview question

by Adam Thornton

> On Jan 2, 2023, at 1:36 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > > The /bin/sh stuff made me think of an interview question I had for engineers, > that a surprisingly few could pass: > > "Tell me about something you wrote that was entirely you, the docs, the > tests, the source, the installer, everything. It doesn't have to be a > big thing, but it has to have been successfully used by at least 10 > people who had no contact with you (other than to say thanks)." > > Most people fail this. I think the people who pass might look > positively on the v7 sh stuff. But who knows? Huh. That is a surprisingly tricky question, depending on how you want to construe "entirely you". v1 of https://atariage.com/software_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=2023 (before Thomas Jentzsch optimized the display engine) was ... stuff I did, but obviously neither the idea nor the execution was all that original, since I used Greg Troutman's Dark Mage source, which in turn was derived from Stellar Track. There's a certain very large text adventure I once did, which I would certainly not bring up at a real job interview since it's riotously pornographic, but it is 200,000 words of source text, got surprisingly good reviews from many people (Emily Short loved it; Jimmy Maher hated it), and I put it all together myself, but the whole thing is a hodgepodge of T.S. Eliot and The Aeneid and then a few dozen other smaller sources, all tossed in a blender. Not going to directly link it but it's not hard to find with a little Googling. The arrangement is original, sure, but its charm--such as it is--may be that it is in some ways a love letter to early D&D and its "what if Gandalf and Conan teamed up to fight Cthulhu" sort of ethos. (Jimmy Maher found the intertextuality very dense and unappetizing, whereas Emily Short really enjoyed the playfulness.) There's https://github.com/athornton/uCA which fits the criteria but really is a very small wrapper around OpenSSL to automate SAN generation, which is a huge PITA with plain old OpenSSL. Now, of course, you wouldn't bother with this, you'd just use Let's Encrypt, but that wasn't a thing yet. Such as it is it's all me but it is entirely useless without a functional OpenSSL under it. I'm not sure that ten other people ever used https://github.com/athornton/nerdle-solver because there may have been fewer than ten people other than me that found Nerdle all that fascinating. It was fun talking with that community and finding out that the other solver I'm aware of was completely lexical, rather than actually doing the math. But again: it's a thing that makes no sense without someone else having invented Nerdle first. Or there's https://github.com/athornton/tmenu; probably also not actually used by ten other people, but it's the front-end of https://mvsevm.fsf.net (which certainly has been enjoyed by...uh...let's go with "at least a dozen" people). It's original work, insofar as it goes, but it (like uCA) is really just glue between other things: a web server front end, a Javascript terminal emulator, and telnet/tn3270 clients. Which of these, if any, do you count?

1 year, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Re: Command Line Editing in the Terminal Driver (Was: A few comments on porting the Bourne shell)

by Adam Thornton

(moving to COFF) On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 9:55 AM Marshall Conover <marzhall.o(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Along these lines but not quite, Jupyter Notebooks have stood out to me as > another approach to this concept, with behavior I'd like to see implemented > in a shell. > > Well, you know, if you're OK with bash: https://github.com/takluyver/bash_kernel Or zsh: https://pypi.org/project/zsh-jupyter-kernel/ One of the big things I do is work on the Notebook Aspect of the Rubin Science Platform. Each JupyterLab notebook session is tied to a "kernel" which is a specific language-and-extension environment. At the Rubin Observatory, we support a Python 3.10 environment with our processing pipeline included. Although JupyterLab itself is capable of doing other languages (notably Julia and R, which are the other two from which the name "Jupyter" came), many others have been adapted to the notebook environment (including at least the two shells above). And while researchers are welcome to write their own code and work with raw images, we work under the presumption that almost everyone is going to use the software tools the Rubin Observatory provides to work with the data it collects, because writing your own data processing pipeline from scratch is a pretty monumental project. Most astronomers are perfectly happy with what we provide, which is Python plus our processing pipelines, which are all Python from the scientist-facing perspective (much of the pipeline code is implemented in C++ for speed, but it then gets Python bindings, so unless you're actually working very deep down in the image processing code, it's Python as far as you're concerned). However, a certain class of astronomers still loves their FORTRAN. This class, unfortunately, tends to be the older ones, which means the ones who have societal stature, tenure, can relatively easily get big grants, and wield a lot of power within their institutions. I know that it is *possible* to run gfortran as a Jupyter kernel. I've seen it done. I was impressed. Fortunately, no one with the power to make it stick has demanded we provide a kernel like that. The initial provision of the service wouldn't be the problem. It's that the support would be a nightmare. No one on my team is great at FORTRAN; I'm probably the closest to fluent, and I'm not very, and I really don't enjoy working in FORTRAN, and because FORTRAN really doesn't lend itself easily to the kind of Python REPL exploration that notebooks are all about, and because someone who loves FORTRAN and hates Python probably has a very different concept of what good software engineering practices look like than I do, trying to support someone working in a notebook environment in a FORTRAN kernel would very likely be exquisitely painful. And fortunately, since there are not FORTRAN bindings to the C++ classes providing the core algorithms, much less FORTRAN bindings to the Python implementations (because all the things that don't particularly need to be fast are just written in Python in the first place), a gfortran kernel wouldn't be nearly as useful as our Python-plus-our-tools. Now, sure, if we had paying customers who were willing to throw enough money at us to make it worth the pain and both bring a FORTRAN implementation to feature-parity with the reference environment and make a gfortran kernel available, then we would do it. But I get paid a salary that is not directly tied to my support burden, and I get to spend a lot more of my time working on fun things and providing features for astronomers who are not mired in 1978 if I can avoid spending my time supporting huge time sinks that aren't in widespread use. We are scoped to provide Python. We are not scoped to provide FORTRAN. We are not making money off of sales: we're employed to provide stable infrastructure services so the scientists using our platform and observatory can get their research done. And thus far we've been successful in saying "hey, we've got finite resources, we're not swimming in spare cycles, no, we can't support [ x for x in things-someone-wants-but-are-not-in-the-documented-scope ]". (To be fair, this has more often been things like additional visualization libraries than whole new languages, but the principle is the same.) We have a process for proposing items for inclusion, and it's not at all rare that we add them, but it's generally a considered decision about how generally useful the proposed item will be for the project as a whole and how much time it's likely to consume to support. So this gave me a little satori about why I think POSIX.2 is a perfectly reasonable spec to support and why I'm not wild about making all my shell scripts instead compatible with the subset of v7 sh that works (almost) everywhere. It's not all that much more work up front, but odds are that a customer that wants to run new software, but who can't guarantee a POSIX /bin/sh, will be a much more costly customer to support than one who can, just as someone who wants a notebook environment but insists on FORTRAN in it is very likely going to be much harder to support than someone who's happy with the Python environment we already supply. Adam

1 year, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Re: A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

by Dan Cross

[Apologies for resending; I messed up and used the old Minnie address for COFF in the Cc] On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 1:36 PM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 1:13 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > > Maybe this should go to COFF but Adam I fear you are falling into a tap that is easy to fall into - old == unused > > > > One of my favorite stores in the computer restoration community is from 5-10 years ago and the LCM+L in Seatle was restoring their CDC-6000 that they got From Purdue. Core memory is difficult to get, so they made a card and physical module that could plug into their system that is both electrically and mechanically equivalent using modern semiconductors. A few weeks later they announced that they had the system running and had built this module. They got approached by the USAF asking if they could get a copy of the design. Seems, there was still a least one CDC-6600 running a particular critical application somewhere. > > > > This is similar to the PDP-11s and Vaxen that are supposed to be still in the hydroelectric grid [a few years ago the was an ad for an RSX and VMS programmer to go to Canada running in the Boston newspapers - I know someone that did a small amount of consulting on that one]. > > One of my favorite stories along these lines is the train signalling > system in Melbourne, running on a "PDP-11". I quote PDP-11 because > that is now virtualized: > https://www.equicon.de/images/Virtualisierung/LegacyTrainControlSystemStabi… > > Indeed older systems show up in surprising places. I was once on the > bridge of a US Naval vessel in the late '00s and saw a SPARCstaton 20 > running Solaris (with the CDE login screen). I don't recall what it > was doing, but it was a tad surprising. > > I do worry about legacy systems in critical situations, but then, I've > been in a firefight when the damned tactical computer with the satcomm > link rebooted and we didn't have VHF comms with the battlespace owner. > That was not particularly fun. > > - Dan C.

1 year, 11 months

GCC boostrapper? Sort of a continuation of "a few comments..."

by Adam Thornton

So, all the shell-portability talk on TUHS reminds me of something I believe I saw back in the 90s, and then failed to find a few years ago when I went looking. But my Google-fu is not great, so maybe I just didn't look in the right place. I was trying to port Frotz to TOPS-20, because I wanted to run the Infocom games on TOPS-20 on an emulated PDP-10. (The only further causality to the chain was a warning in the Frotz sources that it assumed 8-bit bytes and if you wanted to try to port it to a 36-bit environment, good luck; this is the difference between "stuff I do fo fun" and "stuff that needs a business justification".) I had a K&R C compiler available, but the sources were all ANSI C. I had remembered that deprotoize had been part of an early GCC, and I did manage to find deprotoize sources, buried, I think, in some dusty piece of the Apple toolchain. But I also have a vague memory that GCC at some point probably in the mid-to-late 1990s came with something that was halfway between autoconf and Perl's bootstrapper. I *think* it was a bunch of shell scripts that could put together a minimal C subset compiler, which then could be used to build the rest of GCC. I'm pretty sure it was released as a reaction to the unbundling of C compilers when Unix vendors realized that was a thing they could do. I could not find that thing at all. Did I hallucinate it? It seems like it would have been an immensely useful tool at the time. I ended up writing my own very half-assed deprotoizer and symbol mangler (only the first six characters of the function name were significant, because that's how the TOPS-20 linker works, and I don't know that I could have gotten past that even with an ANSI compiler without having to do significant toolchain work) which got me over the hump, but I have remained curious whether there really was that nifty GCC bootstrapper or whether I made that up. Adam

1 year, 11 months

Re: Porting the SysIII kernel: boot, config & device drivers

by Ralph Corderoy

Hi Branden, > Paul Ruizendaal wrote: > > That was my immediate pain point in doing the D1 SoC port. > > Unfortunately, the manufacturer only released the DRAM init code as > > compiler ‘-S’ output and the 1,400 page datasheet does not discuss > > its registers. Maybe this is a-typical, as I heard in the above > > keynote that NXP provides 8,000 page datasheets with their SoC’s. ... > I don't think it's atypical. I was pretty annoyed trying to use the > data sheet to program a simple timer chip on the ODROID-C2 ... > OS nerds don't generally handle procurement themselves. Instead, > purchasing managers do, and those people don't have to face the pain. ... > Data sheets are only as good as they need to be to move the product, > which means they don't need to be good at all, since the people who > pay for them look only at the advertised feature list and the price. I think it comes down to the background of the chip designer. I've always found NXP very good: their documentation of a chip is extensive; it doesn't rely on referring to external source code; and they're responsive when I've found the occasional error, both confirming the correction and committing to its future publication. On the other hand, TI left a bad taste. The documentation isn't good and they rely on a forum to mop up all the problems but it's pot luck which staffer answers and perennial problems can easily be found by a forum search, never with a satisfactory answer. My guess is Allwinner, maker of Paul's D1 SoC, has a language barrier and a very fast-moving market to dissuade them from putting too much effort into documentation. Many simpler chips from China, e.g. a JPEG encoder, come with a couple of pages listing features and some C written by a chip designer or copied from a rival. In my experience, chip selection is done by technical people, not procurement. It's too complex a task, even just choosing from those of one supplier like NXP, as there is often a compromise to make which affects the rest of the board design. That's where FPGAs have an allure, but unfortunately not in low-power designs. -- Cheers, Ralph.

1 year, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Porting the SysIII kernel: boot, config & device drivers

by Adam Thornton

> On Dec 31, 2022, at 6:40 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > > All true except for the Forth choice. It's as bad, maybe worse, as > choosing Tcl for your language. I've written a ton of Tcl but I > need the Tk GUI part so I put up with Tcl to get it. I'd never > push Tcl as a language that other people had to use. Same thing > with Forth. > > I dunno what I'd pick, Perl in the old days, Python now (not that > I care for Python but everyone can program it). Just pick something > that is trivial for someone to pick up. (Moved to COFF) I rather like FORTH. Its chief virtues are that it is both tiny and extensible. It was developed as a telescope control language, as I recall, and in highly constrained environments gives you a great deal of expressivity for a teeny tiny bit of interpreter code. I adored my HP 28S and still do: that was Peak Calculator, and its UI is basically a FORTH interpreter (which also, of course, functions just fine as an RPN calculator if you don't want to bother with flow control constructs). But I also make the slightly more controversial claim that FORTH is just LISP stood up on end. These days I think the right choice for those sorts of applications would be Micropython. Yes, a full-on Python interpreter is heavyweight, but Micropython gives you a lot of functionality in (comparatively) little space. It runs fine on a $4 Pi Pico, for instance, which has IIRC 256KB RAM. And if you find yourself missing TCL, there's always Powershell, which is like what would happen if bash and TCL had a really ugly baby that just wouldn't shut up. The amazing thing is that access to all the system DLLs makes it *almost* worth putting up with Powershell. Adam

1 year, 11 months

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