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
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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
[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 für den Schriftsatzâ) before sending my
previous message, but I couldn't find anything useful.
Greg
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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
>
[ Moving to COFF (if your MUA respects "Reply-To:") ]
On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:
> But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and
> asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur.
You've never experienced the joy of having your code suddenly working when
inserting printf() statements? Oh dear; time to break out GDB...
-- Dave
[Following clemc's example and moving to COFF]
On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:19:24 -0800, Chris Torek wrote:
>> I'm lazy.
>
> I am too, but I still use a big screen: I just fit a lot of smaller
> windows in it.
Agreed. There's a second issue here: for reading text, 70 to 80 n
widths is optimal. For reading computer output, it should be much
wider. I've compromised by fitting two 120 character wide xterms on
my monitors, left and right. I still display only 70-80 characters
for text.
> I'd like to have a literal wall screen, especially if I'm in an
> interior, windowless (as in physical glass windows) room, so that
> part of the wall could be a "window" showing a view "outside" (real
> time, or the ocean, or whatever) and other parts of the wall could
> be the text I'm working on/with, etc.
The issue there is perspective. I could do that (modulo cost) in my
office, but I'd have a horizontal angle of about 90°, and that's
uncomfortable.
> (But I'll make do with these 27" 4k displays. :-) )
Yes, that's about the widest I find comfortable, and it took me a
while to adapt.
Greg
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I'd be curious to hear from the folks a few years older than I (I started
in the later 60s with the GE-635), but my own experiences of having lived
through some of it, I personally think it was more to do with all of the
systems of the time switching from cards to the Model 28 and later the 33
then Unix or AT&T. Unix was just one of the systems that we used at the
time of the transition from cards. But the other timesharing systems of
those days began to transition to the tty's requirements.
On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 12:27 PM Stephen Clark <sclark46(a)earthlink.net>
wrote:
> On 11/6/20 12:13 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
> > I’m going to chime in on pro-80-columns here, because with the text a
> comfortable size to read (although this is getting less true as my eyes
> age), I can read an entire 80-column line without having to sweep my eyes
> back and forth.
> >
> > I can’t, and never could, do that at 132.
> >
> > As a consequence, I read much, much faster with 80-column-ish text
> blocks.
> >
> > I also think there is something to the “UNIX is verbal” and “UNIX nerds
> tend to be polyglots often with a surprising amount of liberal arts
> background of one kind or another,” argument. That may, however, merely be
> confirmation bias.
> >
> > Adam
> May have had to do with the first terminal commonly used with UNIX.
>
> The Model 33 printed on 8.5-inch (220 mm) wide paper, supplied on
> continuous
> 5-inch (130 mm) diameter rolls and fed via friction (instead of, e.g.,
> tractor
> feed). It printed at a fixed 10 characters per inch, and supported
> 74-character
> lines,[13] although 72 characters is often commonly stated.
>
>
Hey all, I was browsing my small corner of the fediverse, when I came
across a post that said:
> @pastelpunkbandit@hellsite.site
> i wonder if people from the 70s would make fun of us for still using vi
It got me wondering -- what /was/ the view of the future of computing,
by people working deeply with the systems of the time? I know that
people worked on what they felt was the future -- and returned bearing
the gifts of Smalltalk. Prolog, etc ad nausem. Surely there was the
expectation that things would be improved, but what form did those
expectations take?
Incidentally, if there /were/ jokes about people using $program in the
future -- I think that would be of interest too :)
Thanks!
--
"Too enough never much is!"
Just watched this the other day.
The original story is from 1958 written by Isaac Asimov, the short
movie was made in 1978
All the Troubles of the World
https://youtu.be/svIXTDeZzDg
Nothing to do with UNIX, but a reminder that occasionally long thought
lost manuals still pop-up.
"Researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what’s
considered the world’s oldest surviving (digital) computer after its
long-lost user manual was unearthed. The Z4, which was built in 1945,
runs on tape, takes up most of a room and needs several people to
operate it. The machine now takes residence at the Deutsches Museum in
Munich, but it hasn’t been used in quite some time."
https://www.engadget.com/oldest-computer-manual-zuse-z4-161214346.html
I finally got around to tidying up a little shell tool I wrote that turns a network interface you specify into a bridge, and then creates some tap devices with owning user and group you specify and attaches them to that bridge.
This gets around having to run emulated older systems under sudo if you want networking to work.
It’s mostly intended for the PiDP-11/simh, but it also works fine with klh10 and TOPS-20.
Maybe it will be useful to someone else.
https://github.com/athornton/brnet <https://github.com/athornton/brnet>
Adam
Moving to COFF
On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 7:56 PM John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote:
> Rereading that made me wonder: if someone retargeted an old compiler (pcc,
> say) to produce i386 code,
>
I thought SVR3's was PCC (maybe PCC2). But I thought I remember that is
had a i386 code. Certainly by SVR4 time.
IIRC, the time frame of SVR3's front end would have been original ANSI
(i.e. White Book V2).
> how much faster would it run than a VAX?
>
In the time frame of the SVR3 (mid/late 80s), the Intel processors was
faster than the 1MIP (780 circa 1977) in raw computes. The issue was
always I/O. Most PC did not have the same amount of I/O HW that much
earlier Vaxen.
> I see that there is a pcc derivative at <http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/>, but
> supposedly it has been heavily rewritten for C99 compliance and other
> things.
>
And my point is that by the time of C99, it was a different language than
the early 1970s when Dennis created fit or the original PDP-11/20 he and
Ken used for the first UNIX kernel and tools implementations.
"When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often
think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a
worldwide crowd." dmr
In the early 1970s, when computing capabilities were tiny, tiny, tiny
compared to even a cell phone today, and those resources were typically
time-shared across multiple users, queueing network models became a
primary tool to analyze and improve system performance. Queueing models
had been studied for years before regarding communication systems and
other systems, but networks of queues seemed especially apropos for
understanding time-sharing systems.
Computer Systems Performance Modeling, which Professor K.M. Chandy and I
wrote in 1978-9, previously published by Pearson Education, Inc. is now
out of print. We are making PDF copies of lightly edited versions
available under a Creative Commons license.
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2020/08/25/computer-systems-performan…
Ed MacNair and I published two books based on The Research Queueing
Package, RESQ: Simulation of Computer Communication Systems and Elements
of Practical Performance Modeling. Those books, previously published by
Pearson Education, Inc. are now out of print. We are making PDF copies
of lightly edited versions available under a Creative Commons license.
Though we have written two prior articles about RESQ history, those did
not cover subsequent development, so another recap seems appropriate
now. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2020/08/25/remembering-resq/
(Mainstream Videoconferencing: A Developer’s Guide to Distance
Multimedia, which Joe Duran and I wrote from 1994-96, became available
again in 2008:
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/02/14/mainstream-videoconferenci…)
--
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(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?”
On Friday, 21 August 2020 at 17:23:11 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
>
> It was Schopenhauer who definetely said
>
> Neminem laede, imo omnes, quantum potes, juva!
How about that, I even understood that. But for the fun of it I put
it through Google Translate, and the result is worth showing:
Truth injures no one, nay more, all, as much as you are able to:
strengthen the faint!
Of course, if you drop the !, it changes to:
Truth injures no one, nay more, all, as much as you can, help the
How I love syntax-independent translation!
Greg
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Noel Chiappa writes:
> > From: Larry
> > It's possible the concept existed in some other OS but I'm not
> > aware of it.
>
> It's pretty old. Both TENEX and ITS had the ability to map file pages
> into a process' address space.
I have a date for when this feature was announced for ITS. The previous
.CBLK UUO could not access files.
RMS 09/30/73 10:13:28 JOBS! BE FIRST IN YOUR TREE TO INSERT A DISK FILE PAGE!
SEE .INFO.;CORBLK ORDER FOR DETAILS.
(This is now redirected to COFF.)
In related news: A rather complete full dump of the MIT-AI PDP-10 from
1971 has been found. It includes full source code and documentation for
the system, including ITS version 671, DDT, TECO, MIDAS, (MAC)LISP,
CHESS (MacHack), MUDDLE, LOGO, MACSYMA, etc.
--> COFF
Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
mmap() / $CRETVA
> The VMS image activator (runtime loader in Unix-speak) used these
> primitives to load program images into virtual memory. More than one
> process can map the same region of a file. This is how sharing of
> read-only program segments such as .text is implemented.
>
> I think Burroughs OSes had this concept even before VMS.
Did MULTICS work the same way?
The Manchester / Ferranti Atlas had virtual memory in 1962 but I don't
know how much they used it for multiprogramming (and by implication shared
text segments) - it didn't do timesharing until later, but AIUI virtual
memory helped it to have an exceptionally good job throughput for the
time. Perhaps their motivation was more to do with having a good shared
implementation of overlays and paged IO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store
Tony.
--
f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
reject all prejudice and discrimination based upon race, colour,
religion, age, disability, gender, or sexual orientation
moving to COFF ...
Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de> wrote:
> >I'm sure everyone here knows this, but the Cray 1 (I think, the one
> that had what looked like a circular bench seat around the bottom) was
> designed like that because the clock was at the center and the clock
> signal went to all the boards and was right because all the clock lines
> to the boards were the same length.<
>
> you mean that? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Cray-1-deutsches-museum…
I found the Cray 1M site planning reference manual very interesting -
here's a summary with links to the actual documents
http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2012/06/15/they-called-it-big-iron-for-…
Tony.
--
f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
Ardnamurchan Point to Cape Wrath: North or northeast 3 to 5, becoming variable
2 at times. Slight or moderate, becoming smooth or slight between Barra and
Canna. Fog patches. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor.
(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.
[Moved to COFF]
On Monday, 10 August 2020 at 9:53:14 +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Interesting; I was taught it was "Chebychev", which as second ranking
> doesn't even come close to "Chebyshev"...
>
> Possibly a cultural thing; I went to an Australian university (UNSW).
I don't think so, more like coincidence. I first came across the name
as "Chebyshev" at the CSIRO in Melbourne. But the difference in
spelling could be attributed to the person doing the transliteration:
"ch" in French corresponds in sound to "sh" in English.
Greg
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> From: Will Senn
> So, where's a good place to pester folks for help in 211BSD, v6, v7 when
> it's less along the historical interest line and more along the help I
> can't get this or that working line?
> ...
> The question may be 211bsd, but the same type of questions often
> arise for the research unixes as well. Any suggestions about where to
> throw these kinds of vintage unix tech support questions?
I'd just say TUHS. Your questions would me more on-topic than 1/3 of the posts.
Noel
So, where's a good place to pester folks for help in 211BSD, v6, v7 when
it's less along the historical interest line and more along the help I
can't get this or that working line?
As an example, I'm having some challenges with the networking in 211,
right now. I finally (after on again off again attempts over 2 years)
gotten both a vanilla 211BSD p195 system to be accessible via telnet on
my local lan and am able to ping out to the internet, if I so choose,
and Andru Luvisi's 211BSD p495 doing networking as well. Thanks to
Andru's notes and Warner Losh's blog. In both cases, everything just
"works"... well most things work :). In the 195 system, I don't seem to
be able to get hostname set correctly:
Assuming NETWORKING system ...
sparks: bad value
add net default: gateway 192.168.2.1
Whereas on the 495 system, it sets fine...
Assuming NETWORKING system ...
add host sparks: gateway localhost
add net default: gateway 192.168.2.1
and on the 195 system, name resolution doesn't seem to function, whereas
it does on the 495 system.
On neither of the systems do I know how to display the routes (no
netstat and route doesn't seem to have a display mode).
Anyhow, I'm not really asking the question here (feel free to answer it
though, if you feel so inclined), but it's the kind of question that I
sit on not knowing where to ask it. I know that I often tread the
knife's edge between interesting and annoying on some of my questions in
TUHS and SIMH because of my lack of knowledge around these systems, but
I really enjoy working in them when they work and have found that
everything I learn interacting with these ancient systems significantly
enhances my skills in the modern realm at least with regards to
FreeBSD/Linux and Mac. Whereas, on the other hand, most of what I know
about the modern systems doesn't really have an easily accessible analog
in ancient unix. Take the question above, to view the route table in
freebsd - it's just netstat -r, easypeasy, what the heck it might be in
211bsd is a complete mystery. Grepping the manual turns up nothing that
I recognize, which is more often the case than I'd like to admit.
The question may be 211bsd, but the same type of questions often arise
for the research unixes as well. Any suggestions about where to throw
these kinds of vintage unix tech support questions?
Regards,
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
This topic is still primarily UNIX but is getting near the edge of COFF, so
I'll CC there if people want to follow up.
As I mentioned to Will, during the time Research was doing the work/put out
their 'editions', the 'releases' were a bit more ephemeral - really a set
of bits (binary and hopefully matching source, but maybe not always)
that become a point in time. With 4th (and I think 5th) Editions it was a
state of disk pack when the bits were copies, but by 6th edition, as Noel
points out, there was a 'master tape' that the first site at an
institution received upon executing of a signed license, so the people at
each institution (MIT, Purdue, CMU, Harvard) passed those bits around
inside.
But what is more, is what Noel pointed out, we all passed source code and
binaries between each other, so DNA was fairly mixed up [sorry Larry - it
really was 'Open Source' between the licensees]. Sadly, it means some
things that actually were sourced at one location and one system, is
credited sometimes credited from some other place the >>wide<< release was
in USG or BSD [think Jim Kulp's Job control, which ended up in the kernel
and csh(1) as part in 4BSD, our recent discussions on the list about
more/pg/less, the different networking changes from all of MIT/UofI/Rand,
Goble's FS fixes to make the thing more crash resilient, the early Harvard
ar changes - *a.k.a.* newar(1) which became ar(1), CMU fsck, e*tc*.].
Eventually, the AT&T Unix Support Group (USG) was stood up in Summit, as I
understand it, originally for the Operating Companies as they wanted to use
UNIX (but not for the licenses, originally). Steve Johnson moved from
Research over there and can tell you many more of the specifics.
Eventually (*i.e.* post-Judge Green), distribution to the world moved from
MH's Research and the Patent Licensing teams to USG and AT&T North Carolina
business folks.
That said, when the distribution of UNIX moved to USG in Summit, things started
to a bit more formal. But there were still differences inside, as we have
tried to unravel. PWB/TS and eventually System x. FWIW, BSD went
through the same thing. The first BSD's are really the binary state of the
world on the Cory 11/70, later 'Ernie.' By the time CSRG gets stood
up because their official job (like USG) is to support Unix for DARPA, Sam
and company are acting a bit more like traditional SW firms with alpha/beta
releases and a more formal build process. Note that 2.X never really
went through that, so we are all witnessing the wonderful efforts to try to
rebuild early 2.X BSD, and see that the ephemeral nature of the bits has
become more obvious.
As a side story ... the fact is that even for professional SW houses, it
was not as pure as it should be. To be honest, knowing the players and
processes involved, I highly doubt DEC could rebuild early editions of VMS,
particularly since the 'source control' system was a physical flag in
Cutler's office.
The fact is that the problem of which bits were used to make what other
bits was widespread enough throughout the industry that in the mid-late 80s
when Masscomp won the bid to build the system that Nasa used to control the
space shuttle post-Challenger, a clause of the contract was that we have
put an archive of the bits running on the build machine ('Yeti'), a copy of
the prints and even microcode/PAL versions so that Ford Aerospace (the
prime contractor) could rebuild the exact system we used to build the
binaries for them if we went bankrupt. I actually, had a duplicate of that
Yeti as my home system ('Xorn') in my basement when I made some money for a
couple of years as a contract/on-call person for them every time the
shuttle flew.
Anyway - the point is that documentation and actual bits being 100% in sync
is nothing new. Companies work hard to try to keep it together, but
different projects work at different speeds. In fact, the 'train release'
model is what is usually what people fall into. You schedule a release of
some piece of SW and anything that goes with it, has to be on the train or
it must wait for the next one. So developers and marketing people in firms
argue what gets to be the 'engine' [hint often its HW releases which are a
terrible idea, but that's a topic for COFF].