April 2023 - COFF - www.tuhs.org

Re: [TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

by Dan Cross

[TUHS to Bcc] On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes > > I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing > System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller > story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf Interesting. This is now being discussed on the Multicians list (which had a DTSS emulator! Done for use by SIPB). Warren Montgomery discussed communication files under DTSS for precisely this kind of thing; apparently he had a chess program he may have run under them. Barry Margolin responded that he wrote a multiuser chat program using them on the DTSS system at Grumman. Margolin suggests a modern Unix-ish analogue may be pseudo-ttys, which came up here earlier (I responded pointing to your wonderful note linked above). > > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish > > So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to > be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were > complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had > had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9. > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to > have met the same fate. I wonder if there was an analogy to multiplexed files, which I admit to knowing very little about. A cursory glance at mpx(2) on 7th Edition at least suggests some surface similarities. - Dan C.

8 months, 3 weeks

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Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways

by Dan Cross

I don't know if a thousand users ever logged in there at one time, but they do tend to have a lot of simultaneous logins. On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 6:16 PM Peter Pentchev <roam(a)ringlet.net> wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 02:52:43PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > > [bumping to COFF] > > > > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to thinking: > [snip] > > > The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed systems continues. > > > The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or sideways? > > > > About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior > > on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like, > > "wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the > > ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to > > the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was > > because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one > > time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that. > [snip] > > For that matter, a > > thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With > > telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive. > > sdf.org (formerly sdf.lonestar.org) comes to mind... > > G'luck, > Peter > > -- > Peter Pentchev roam(a)ringlet.net roam(a)debian.org pp(a)storpool.com > PGP key: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc > Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13

8 months, 4 weeks

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Requesting thoughts on extended regular expressions in grep.

by Grant Taylor

Hi, I'd like some thoughts ~> input on extended regular expressions used with grep, specifically GNU grep -e / egrep. What are the pros / cons to creating extended regular expressions like the following: ^\w{3} vs: ^(Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec) Or: [ :[:digit:]]{11} vs: ( 1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| 8| 9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24|25|26|27|28|29|30|31) (0|1|2)[[:digit:]]:(0|1|2|3|4|5)[[:digit:]]:(0|1|2|3|4|5)[[:digit:]] I'm currently eliding the 61st (60) second, the 32nd day, and dealing with February having fewer days for simplicity. For matching patterns like the following in log files? Mar 2 03:23:38 I'm working on organically training logcheck to match known good log entries. So I'm *DEEP* in the bowels of extended regular expressions (GNU egrep) that runs over all logs hourly. As such, I'm interested in making sure that my REs are both efficient and accurate or at least not WILDLY badly structured. The pedantic part of me wants to avoid wildcard type matches (\w), even if they are bounded (\w{3}), unless it truly is for unpredictable text. I'd appreciate any feedback and recommendations from people who have been using and / or optimizing (extended) regular expressions for longer than I have been using them. Thank you for your time and input. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

9 months, 3 weeks

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IBM OS ANSI Standard COBOL May 15, 1974 Update Docs

by segaloco

I've just today received a COBOL manual I ordered to find quite the nice surprise. The manual itself is: "IBM OS Full American National Standard COBOL". It is listed as File No. S360-24, Order No. GC28-6396-4. On the back of the first page this is noted as the "Fifth Edition (September 1973)" and that the current edition "is a reprint of GC28-6396-3, incorporating changes released in TNL GN28-1002." Copyright year chain ends at 1972. However, in addition to this manual are three addenda: The first is a memo from Tim S. "Systems Analyst", addressed to and cc'd to a few folks, providing an up-to-date listing (as of March 12*, 1976) of IBM System Reference Library materials. The attachment includes, among other things, documents for S/360, S/370, OS/360, BOS/360, OS/VS, and programming and diagnostic utilities. Each reference includes a volume number and an "SRL", the definition I couldn't find, but presumably just a catalog number of some kind. The second is a scan of a 31 page, hand-written document titled "COBOL Compiler Release 2.2" providing information on the "March 11, 1979, Release 2.2 of the COBOL compiler...IBM's implementation of the ANSI 1974 Standard for COBOL. The previous Release 1.1 implemented the 1968 ANSI Standard." The document goes on to detail numerous changes between these revisions. Lastly is a Technical Newsletter bearing the same File and Order numbers as the full manual, but with a date of May 15, 1974 and newsletter number of GN28-1048. This page bears a copyright chain out to 1974 and is simply a set of replacement pages for the manual, as was common at the time. The text indicates that all changes are denoted with a vertical bar printed to the left of the change, so this essentially is a diff between the Fifth Edition manual above and...wait for it..."Fourth Edition (May 1972); Fifth Edition (September 1973)". Strangely the copyright notice on the back still indicates the same edition, but adds reference back to the Fourth Edition as well. Strange, one of life's little mysteries? In any case, the copyright chain here is only out to 1973. Never sure how much that means at any given instant. In any case, I couldn't find any evidence in the manual-proper of previous such updates being applied, in other words, no vertical bars spotted flipping through the pages at least. Both the replacement pages and the catalog are still stapled together, and the manual-proper still contains the pages (that I spot checked) slated for replacement. It seems the original was even bound itself at one point, indicated by the ghost of a glued spine still lingering on the end of the pages, but both the replacement pages and manual itself also have 3-hole punches and are bound in an Acco binder. If the manual had a true cover, it's long gone. Figured I'd share some of those details in case anything in this is in want of further illumination. For the record, the Sixth and Seventh editions of this same document appear to be on archive.org. I haven't plumbed their depths searching for evidence of aforementioned diff pages, they're probably just scans of complete published copies. So all of this for me at least begs the question, is there any sort of equivalent to TROFF sources for documents from the Big Blue? Truth be told, I only ordered this to have a paper COBOL reference on hand, if one should ever need such a thing. If there are such document sources, I'd happily add "patching" them to produce a restoration of this to my studies. At the very least the two smaller addenda will get a scan here pretty soon. - Matt G. P.S. While my main focus is Bell UNIX documentation, I do peek around for stuff like this time to time, but I'm much less inclined to spring for something without some functional value to me. That said, I'm looking for documents all the time, so if anyone has any tips on stuff that isn't well preserved in the public record that I should add to my searches time to time, I'm happy to keep an eye out. I'm coming to quite enjoy finding things and getting them on the record.

1 year

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Re: [TUHS] CWRU Univac artifacs

by Lars Brinkhoff

Apologies, this was meant to go to another mailing list. I also posted to COFF, so send any follow-ups there. John Cowan wrote: > I attended CRWU in 1975-76 and programmed the 1108 (abs, alphabetic, arccos, > arcsin, arctan) with punch cards so I am definitely interested if the > material is still available. Thank you, I'll fill you in on the details.

1 year

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Unix on a 3B2-700 won't boot

by KenUnix

*Unix on a 3B2-700 won't boot* I have been going round and round getting it to boot and am at the point where it might be the sd630.img disk image. It keeps hanging in "DIAGNOSTICS". I have reloaded all the files to no avail. Does anyone have a *known working copy* of *sd630.img* they could share as a gzip ? Other sims work fine like 3b2-400, Interdata-32 and PDP-11. Ken -- WWL 📚

1 year

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CWRU Univac artifacs

by Lars Brinkhoff

Hello, I received word from someone who went to Case Wester Reserve Univsersity, and is willing to send early 1970s ephemera to someone interested in going through it. The description is: "I've go stuff from my course work done on our Univac 1108/ChiOS system, program listing, cpu code cards, etc." Any takers? Best regards, Lars Brinkhoff

1 year

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3b2/400 inbound connectivity

by KenUnix

I have a 3b2/400 emulator running Unix V r3 fine, but I have two questions. Unix is set up with IP 10.0.2.15 I can telnet off it great *but* can not telnet into it. Is there a step I am missing? In the sim ini file I have set: set NI enabled attach NI nat: Someone suggested: attach nat:tcp=2323:10.0.2.15:23,tcp=2121:10.0.2.15:21 but that did not work. This is what I get at boot time: NAT args: NAT network setup: gateway =10.0.2.2/24(255.255.255.0) DNS =10.0.2.3 dhcp_start =10.0.2.15 Protocol[State] FD Source Address Port Dest. Address Port RecvQ SendQ /home/ken/MYSIMS/System-V-r3/boot.ini-51> attach NI nat: %SIM-INFO: Eth: opened OS device nat: Thanks, Ken -- WWL 📚

1 year

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Fwd: [TUHS] Re: Warning: April Fools

by John Cowan

I sent this to coff, but it bounced. Trying again. [-tuhs] [+coff] On Sun, Apr 2, 2023 at 3:39 AM Noel Hunt <noel.hunt(a)gmail.com> wrote: Charles li reis, nostre emperesdre magnes, Set anz totz pleinz ad ested in > Espagnes. > > A translation would be most helpful. It looks like a mixture > of Spanish and Mediaevel French...ah, it is the La Chanson de > Roland. > Yes, it's Old French, and means "Charles the king, our great emperor[*] / Seven full years has been in Spain." You pronounce it pretty much like Spanish, except for the "z" which is pronounced "ts". [*] Old French had two noun cases, nominative and oblique (a combination of the Latin genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative). In 99% of modern French nouns, only the oblique survives. In particular, "emperesdre" is the old nominative of "empereor"; it survives today in the name "L[']empriere". A dozen nouns picked up different semantics in the nominative and both survived: sire/seigneur, prêtre/Provoire (proper name), copain/compagnon, pâtre/pasteur, chantre/chanteur , maire/majeur, gars/garçon, and (most surprising) on/homme. In a few nouns, only the nominative survives: soeur, peintre, traître (English traitor is from the oblique), and the names Charles, Georges, James (now in English only), Hugues, Marie, and Eve. >

1 year

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Re: [TUHS] Warning: April Fools

by steve jenkin

[ Please post follow-ups to COFF ] Ron, Thanks for the history, enjoyed very much. Quite relevant to Early Unix, intertwined with VAxen, IP stack from UCB, NSF-net & fakery. The earliest documented Trojan, Unix or not, would be Ken’s login/cc hack in his “Reflections on Trust” paper. It was 1986 when Clifford Stoll tracked a KGB recruit who broke into MILNET, then the first “honeynet” by Stoll. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll#Career> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)> 1986 was also the first known PC virus according to Kaspersky. <https://www.kaspersky.com.au/resource-center/threats/a-brief-history-of-com… “Brain (boot) , the first PC virus, began infecting 5.2" floppy disks in 1986.” 2nd November 1988, the Morris worm escaped from a lab, & overloaded the Internet for a week. Causing CERT to be formed in November 1988 in response. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERT_Coordination_Center> The SANS Institute was formed the next year, 1989, creating structured training & security materials. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SANS_Institute> This structured, co-ordinated response, led by technical folk, not NatSec/ Intelligence/ Criminal investigation bodies, created CVE’s, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, as a way to identify & name unique attacks & vectors, track them and make vendors aware, forcing publicity & responses. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures> <https://cve.mitre.org> The Internet eventually became a significant theatre of Crime & Espionage, Commercial & National Security. Mandiant was formed in 2004 to identify, track and find sources of APT’s, Advanced Persistent Threats. In 2010, they described APT’s tracked in their “M-trends” newsletter. in Feb 2013, Mandiant publicly described “APT1” and the military unit & location they believed ran it. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandiant> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat> <https://www.lawfareblog.com/mandiant-report-apt1> <https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/mandiant-exposes-apt1-chinas-cyber-…> ============= > On 2 Apr 2023, at 02:34, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: > > Once again, I must dredge up this post from 1991…. ============= For future reference, Kremvax lives! [ datestamp in email header ] iMac1:steve$ host kremvax.demos.su kremvax.demos.su has address 194.87.0.20 kremvax.demos.su mail is handled by 100 relay2.demos.su. kremvax.demos.su mail is handled by 50 relay1.demos.su. iMac1:steve$ ping -c2 kremvax.demos.su PING kremvax.demos.su (194.87.0.20): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 194.87.0.20: icmp_seq=0 ttl=46 time=336.127 ms 64 bytes from 194.87.0.20: icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=335.823 ms --- kremvax.demos.su ping statistics --- 2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 335.823/335.975/336.127/0.152 ms ============= -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

1 year

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COFF April 2023