I was wondering if anyone close to Early Unix and Bell Labs would offer some comments on the
evolution of Unix and the quality of decisions made by AT&T senior managers.
Tom Wolfe did an interesting piece on Fairchild / Silicon Valley,
where he highlights the difference between SV’s management style
and the “East Coast” Management style.
[ Around 2000, “Silicon Valley” changed from being ‘chips & hardware’ to ’software’ & systems ]
[ with chip making, every new generation / technology step resets competition, monopolies can’t be maintained ]
[ Microsoft showed that Software is the opposite. Vendor Lock-in & monopolies are common, even easy for aggressive players ]
Noyce & Moore ran Fairchild Semiconductor, but Fairchild Camera & Instrument was ‘East Coast’
or “Old School” - extracting maximum profit.
It seems to me, an outsider, that AT&T management saw how successful Unix was
and decided they could apply their size, “marketing knowhow” and client lists
to becoming a big player in Software & Hardware.
This appears to be the reason for the 1984 divestiture.
In another decade, they gave up and got out of Unix.
Another decade on, AT&T had one of the Baby Bells, SBC, buy it.
SBC had understood the future growth markets for telephony was “Mobile”
and instead of “Traditional” Telco pricing, “What the market will bear” p[lus requiring Gross Margins over 90%,
SBC adopted more of a Silicon Valley pricing approach - modest Gross Margins
and high “pass through” rates - handing most/all cost reductions onto customers.
If you’re in a Commodity market, passing on cost savings to customers is “Profit Maximising”.
It isn’t because Commodity markets are highly competitive, but Volumes drive profit,
and lower prices stimulate demand / Volumes. [ Price Elasticity of Demand ]
Kenneth Flamm has written a lot on “Pass Through” in Silicon Chip manufacture.
Just to close the loop, Bells Labs, around 1966, hired Fred Terman, ex-Dean of Stanford,
to write a proposal for “Silicon Valley East”.
The AT&T management were fully aware of California and perhaps it was a long term threat.
How could they replicate in New Jersey the powerhouse of innovation that was happening in California?
Many places in many countries looked at this and a few even tried.
Apparently South Korea is the only attempt that did reasonably.
I haven’t included links, but Gordon Bell, known for formulating a law of computer ‘classes’,
did forecast early that MOS/CMOS chips would overtake Bipolar - used by Mainframes - in speed.
It gave a way to use all those transistors on a chip that Moore’s Law would provide,
and with CPU’s in a few, or one, chip, the price of systems would plummet.
He forecast the cutover in 1985 and was right.
The MIPS R2000 blazed past every other chip the year it was released.
And of course, the folk at MIPS understood that building their own O/S, tools, libraries etc
was a fool’s errand - they had Unix experience and ported a version.
By 1991, IBM was almost the Last Man Standing of the original 1970’s “IBM & the BUNCH”,
and their mainframe revenues collapsed. In 1991 and 1992, IBM racked up the largest
corporate losses in US history to the time, then managed to survive.
Linux has, in my mind, proven the original mid-1970’s position of CSRC/1127
that Software has to be ‘cheap’, even ‘free’
- because it’s a Commodity and can be ’substituted’ by others.
=================================
1956 - AT&T / IBM Consent decree: 'no computers, no software’
1974 - CACM article, CSRC/1127 in Software Research, no commercial Software allowed
1984 - AT&T divested, doing commercial Software & Computers
1994 - AT&T Sells Unix
1996 - “Tri-vestiture", Bell Labs sold to Lucent, some staff to AT&T Research.
2005 - SBC buys AT&T, long-lines + 4 baby bells
1985 - MIPS R2000, x2 throughput at same clock speed. Faster than bipolar, CMOS CPU's soon overtook ECL
=================================
Code Critic
John Lions wrote the first, and perhaps only, literary criticism of Unix, sparking one of open source's first legal battles.
Rachel Chalmers
November 30, 1999
https://www.salon.com/test2/1999/11/30/lions_2/
"By the time the seventh edition system came out, the company had begun to worry more about the intellectual property issues and trade secrets and so forth," Ritchie explains.
"There was somewhat of a struggle between us in the research group who saw the benefit in having the system readily available,
and the Unix Support Group ...
Even though in the 1970s Unix was not a commercial proposition,
USG and the lawyers were cautious.
At any rate, we in research lost the argument."
This awkward situation lasted nearly 20 years.
Even as USG became Unix System Laboratories (USL) and was half divested to Novell,
which in turn sold it to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO),
Ritchie never lost hope that the Lions books could see the light of day.
He leaned on company after company.
"This was, after all, 25-plus-year-old material, but when they would ask their lawyers,
they would say that they couldnt see any harm at first glance,
but there was a sort of 'but you never know ...' attitude, and they never got the courage to go ahead," he explains.
Finally, at SCO [ by July 1996 ], Ritchie hit paydirt.
He already knew Mike Tilson, an SCO executive.
With the help of his fellow Unix gurus Peter Salus and Berny Goodheart, Ritchie brought pressure to bear.
"Mike himself drafted a 'grant of permission' letter," says Ritchie,
"'to save the legal people from doing the work!'"
Research, at last, had won.
=================================
Tom Wolfe, Esquire, 1983, on Bob Noyce:
The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce | Esquire | DECEMBER 1983.webarchive
http://classic.esquire.com/the-tinkerings-of-robert-noyce/
=================================
Special Places
IEEE Spectrum Magazine
May 2000
Robert W. Lucky (Bob Lucky)
https://web.archive.org/web/20030308074213/http://www.boblucky.com/reflect/…https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=803583
Why does place matter? Why does it matter where we live and work today when the world is so connected that we're never out of touch with people or information?
The problem is, even if they get da Vinci, it won't work.
There's just something special about Florence, and it doesn't travel.
Just as in this century many places have tried to build their own Silicon Valley.
While there have been some successes in
Boston,
Research Triangle Park, Austin, and
Cambridge in the U.K.,
to name a few significant places, most attempts have paled in comparison to the Bay Area prototype.
In the mid-1960s New Jersey brought in Fred Terman, the Dean at Stanford and architect of Silicon Valley, and commissioned him to start a Silicon Valley East.
[ Terman reited from Stanford in 1965 ]
=================================
--
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
[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.
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
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
Sorry this is very tangential to the list but figured some folks here might have some knowledge just what with our proximity to Western Electric lore by way of UNIX. Still, didn't feel UNIX-y at all so COFF instead of TUHS.
Anywho, spotted something particularly interesting in my rounds of checking for eBay postings: https://www.ebay.com/itm/385635333789?hash=item59c9a8369d:g:8TMAAOSw3kJkblS…
After the link is an auction for a police badge, with the word "Police" on it, but also labeled as "Western Electric, Co.", along with the seal of North Carolina. I did a bit of searching and while I could find plenty of WECo badges labeled security, plant protection, etc. I can't find any others specifically using the word "Police". The latter term has governmental implications that other terms do not, and it's got me kinda curious if there was ever a time WECo or the Bell System at large actually had authority from the government to accredit their own personnel as "police" and not simply as security, guards, etc. and what sort of legal statutes would be involved. I'm not interested in purchasing this either way, but it'd be amusing if this is some facsimile, I don't know that reporting it as such would bubble up through eBay's systems though.
Also given the sensitivity of discussions of law enforcement these days, I'm simply interested in whether there is any accessible documentation or history of WECo and/or Bell's relationship with formal U.S. law enforcement agencies, not any discussion on the propriety of this. If you want to chat philosophy, email me privately, but that sort of public discussion is too sensitive for me to want to wade into in mixed company.
- Matt G.
Useful Shell Scripts Network Connections , Logins and
*Block hacking attempts*
[image: image.png]
#1. See how many remote IPs are connecting to the machine
See how many remote IPs are connecting to the local machine (whether
through ssh or web or ftp ) Use netstat — atn to view the status of all
connections on the machine, — a to view all, -T Display only tcp connection
information, ≤ n Display in numeric format Local Address (the fourth column
is the IP and port information of the machine) Foreign Address (the fifth
column is the IP and port information of the remote host) Use the awk
command to display only the data in column 5, and then display the
information of the IP address in column 1 Sort can be sorted by number
size, and finally use uniq to delete the redundant duplicates and count the
number of duplicates
netstat -atn | awk '{print $5}' | awk '{print $1}' | sort -nr | uniq -c
#2. Detect file consistency in specified directories of two servers
Detect the consistency of files in specified directories on two servers, by
comparing the md5 values of files on two servers to detect consistency
#!/bin/bash
dir=/data/web
b_ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
#Iterate through all the files in the specified directory and use them
as arguments to the md5sum command to get the md5 values of all the
files and write them to the specified file
find $dir -type f|xargs md5sum > /tmp/md5_a.txt
ssh $b_ip "find $dir -type f|xargs md5sum > /tmp/md5_b.txt"
scp $b_ip:/tmp/md5_b.txt /tmp
#Compare file names as traversal objects one by one
for f in `awk '{print 2} /tmp/md5_a.txt'`
do
#The standard is machine a. When machine b does not exist to traverse
the files in the object directly output the non-existent results
if grep -qw "$f" /tmp/md5_b.txt
then
md5_a=`grep -w "$f" /tmp/md5_a.txt|awk '{print 1}'`
md5_b=`grep -w "$f" /tmp/md5_b.txt|awk '{print 1}'`
#Output the result of file changes if the md5 value is inconsistent
when the file exists
if [ $md5_a != $md5_b ]
then
echo "$f changed."
fi
else
echo "$f deleted."
fi
done
#3. Detect network interface card traffic and record it in the log
according to the specified format
Detect the network interface card traffic and record it in the log
according to the specified format, and record it once a minute. The log
format is as follows:
- 2019–08–12 20:40
- ens33 input: 1234bps
- ens33 output: 1235bps
#!/bin/bash
while :
do
LANG=en
logfile=/tmp/`date +%d`.log
#Redirect the output of the following command execution to the logfile log
exec >> $logfile
date +"%F %H:%M"
#The unit of traffic counted by the sar command is kb/s, and the log
format is bps, so it should be *1000*8
sar -n DEV 1 59|grep Average|grep ens33|awk '{print
$2,"\t","input:","\t",$5*1000*8,"bps","\n",$2,"\t","output:","\t",$6*1000*8,"bps"}'
echo "####################"
#Because it takes 59 seconds to execute the sar command, sleep is not required
done
#4. Iptables automatically blocks IPs that visit websites frequentlyBlock
more than 200 IP accesses per minute
- According to Nginx
#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M)
ABNORMAL_IP=$(tail -n5000 access.log |grep $DATE |awk
'{a[$1]++}END{for(i in a)if(a[i]>100)print i}')
#First tail prevents the file from being too large and slow to read,
and the number can be adjusted for the maximum number of visits per
minute. awk cannot filter the log directly because it contains special
characters.
for IP in $ABNORMAL_IP; do
if [ $(iptables -vnL |grep -c "$IP") -eq 0 ]; then
iptables -I INPUT -s $IP -j DROP
fi
done
- Connection established over TCP
#!/bin/bash
ABNORMAL_IP=$(netstat -an |awk '$4~/:80$/ &&
$6~/ESTABLISHED/{gsub(/:[0-9]+/,"",$5);{a[$5]++}}END{for(i in
a)if(a[i]>100)print i}')
#gsub is to remove the colon and port from the fifth column (client IP)
for IP in $ABNORMAL_IP; do
if [ $(iptables -vnL |grep -c "$IP") -eq 0 ]; then
iptables -I INPUT -s $IP -j DROP
fi
done
Block IPs with more than 10 SSH attempts per minute
- Get login status via lastb
#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +"%a %b %e %H:%M") #Day of the week, month, and hour %e
displays 7 for single digits, while %d displays 07
ABNORMAL_IP=$(lastb |grep "$DATE" |awk '{a[$3]++}END{for(i in
a)if(a[i]>10)print i}')
for IP in $ABNORMAL_IP; do
if [ $(iptables -vnL |grep -c "$IP") -eq 0 ]; then
iptables -I INPUT -s $IP -j DROP
fi
done
- Get login status from logs
#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +"%b %d %H")
ABNORMAL_IP="$(tail -n10000 /var/log/auth.log |grep "$DATE" |awk
'/Failed/{a[$(NF-3)]++}END{for(i in a)if(a[i]>5)print i}')"
for IP in $ABNORMAL_IP; do
if [ $(iptables -vnL |grep -c "$IP") -eq 0 ]; then
iptables -A INPUT -s $IP -j DROP
echo "$(date +"%F %T") - iptables -A INPUT -s $IP -j DROP"
>>~/ssh-login-limit.log
fi
done
Might come in handy...
--
End of line
> On May 11, 2023, at 12:38 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
>
> I'm one of the many legacies of the over 50 years of teaching by Dan Siewiorek -- remember in the 1970s there was an infamous band (named after an interesting object BTW).
Ah, so Dan Siewiorek is Steely Dan IV, _not_ from Yokohama. Or perhaps Steely Dan V, from neither Yokohama nor Annandale-on-Hudson.
Adam
On 2023-05-04 10:58, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has been using it for a while.
Not only has he been using it for a while already, but he's also
contributing code and funding the developers of some projects (clients
and relays) with 14 BTC through fiatjaf, Nostr creator.
> I suggest any further chat about Nostr moves to coff(a)tuhs.org.
CC'd.
Cheers.
Ángel
