- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dave Horsfall

In 1990 a certain Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir) published a proposal for the World Wide Web (often confused with the Internet by newbies). -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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In Memoriam: Jay W. Forrester, happy birthday Gene Amdahl, and LSD

by Dave Horsfall

Weird day... Computer architect Gene Amdahl was born in on this day in 1922; he had a hand in the IBM 704 and the System/360, founded Amdahl Corporation (maker of /360 clones), and devised Amdahl's Law in relation to parallel processing. But we lost Jay W. Forrester in 2016; another computer pioneer, he invented core memory (remember that, with its destructive read cycle?). Oh, and LSD was first synthesised in 1938 by Dr. Hofmann of Sandoz Labs, Switzerland; it had nothing to do with Berkeley and BSD, man... -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Happy birthday, computer mouse!

by Dave Horsfall

On this day in 1970 computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart was awarded the patent for the computer mouse. It was a fugly thing: just a squarish box with two wheels underneath it mounted at right-angles and a button. Ergonomic it wasn't... -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6? (fwd)

by Dave Horsfall

Meant to go to the list... -- Dave ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 07:23:19 +1100 (EST) From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> To: Paul Winalski Subject: Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6? On Thu, 14 Nov 2019, Paul Winalski wrote: > I used to think that "Emacs" stood for > "escape-meta-alt-control-shift". :-) It's too finger-busy with all > that alt, escape, and meta stuff for my taste. Hey, that's a bit old :-) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 17:28:41 +0000 From: Benjamin Huntsman To: "tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix taste (Re: terminal - just for fun) >> EMACS - eight megs and constantly swapping :) >I like my own version: "Enough Memory? A Concept Strange!" I thought it stood for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift :) I thought I came up with it independently, but obviously it was in the back of my mind. -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6?

by Clem Cole

Moving to a COFF On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 4:16 AM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de> wrote: > 'T'was before my time, but the legend has it that the original BLISS-10 bootstrap > compiler was a set of TECO macros that Chuck Geschke (Adobe's > founder) wrote.' > Really? TECO = Tape Editor and Corrector TECO started as that for PDP-1 or maybe TX-1 (at MIT I believe). But over time, TECO became the primary text editor on the PDP-10's for many, many people in the ARPA community. I learned it as my second, PDP-10 text editor (I learned a line editor, who's name I forget, that was similar to the IBM's editor when I got my first PDP-10 account, but quickly moved to TECO). FWIW: The original EMACS was a set of TECO macros. The historical truth is that besides being the primary text editor, it was so rich in function that TECO became for the PDP-10 what Jon Bentley describes as a 'little language' and was used for all sorts of small hacks. The later Unix world created other tools, be it sed, later awk, and the like. But for the PDP-10 world, TECO very much that low level engine that a lot of people used. When BLISS was written, CMU did not have UNIX (and thus nor any of the UNIX tools - as I had a small hand in making UNIX happen @ CMU in the early 1970s). But when I arrived, the two PDP-10's (CMU-A and CMU-B) reigned supreme as primary CS (and EE) systems, along with the CMU hacked version of IBM's TSS running on the 360 for everyone else (and where I got my first real programming job), plus CMU's own TSS/8 on couple of PDP-8s that were scattered about. FWIW: Chuck used the PDP-10's for his work as a grad student. He also is famous for being the first PhD to produce his thesis on a 'laser printer', the CMU XGP (it was not a laser as today, it was modified FAX machine made by Xerox). The fun story is that CMU's administration would not accept his thesis originally because the library wanted the 'originals' to put in the archives. It took 6-9 months for his thesis advisor (Bill Wulf) to convince the library, that they had the originals. Anyway, the use of TECO in such a manner was very much the way things were done in those days, so the legend is very much possible.

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6?

by Lars Brinkhoff

I suggest continuing this on COFF. Thomas Paulsen wrote: > I have a account on a remote twenex PDP10. There is a editor named > emacs. This is a very archaic piece of software. It doesn't know any > teco commands no matter how I tried. I'm pretty sure that this is > teco-emacs. Yes, it should be TECO Emacs. Normal use of Emacs rarely needs TECO commands. To get a TECO minibuffer type Meta-Altmode (Esc Esc). You should get a small window at the top of the terminal in which you can enter TECO commands. Execute them with double altmode as you would in any TECO. > I draw my own conclusions from these observations which are far away > from all these myths. I try to stay with the facts. I actually use TECO Emacs almost daily, and I have built it from sources. Some other information is based on email conversations among those who wrote Emacs.

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Peter Jeremy

On 2019-Nov-12 17:49:46 -0500, Arthur Krewat <krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote: >On 11/12/2019 5:41 PM, Robert Clausecker wrote: >> Oh please no. One of the things we've hopefully all learned from Pascal >> is that length-prefixed strings suck because you can't perform anything >> useful without copying the entire string. Keep in mind that C doesn't have a "string" type. The use of a NUL terminated char array is purely convention. There's nothing to stop someone using a length-prefixed array (though there's virtually no standard library support for that). >> Rob Pike and friends showed >> how to get strings and vectors right in the Go language where you have a >> builtin slice type which is essentially a structure >> >> struct slice(type) { >> type *data; >> size_t len, cap; >> }; That approach would have incurred a 12-byte overhead for each string or vector on a PDP-11 - that would have been a substantial disincentive on a memory-constrained system. >And none of that stops some programmer from doing slice.cap=255 - or is >it read-only? ;) Slices and strings are built-in types in Go. They can be modelled as the above structure but that is an implementation detail. It is possible to reduce the capacity of a slice (but not a string) but attempting to increase it will result in a runtime exception ("panic" in Go speak). -- Peter Jeremy

5 years, 5 months

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Happy birthday, Per Brinch Hansen!

by Dave Horsfall

Computer scientist Per Brinch Hansen was born on this day in 1938; he was known for his work on "monitors" (now known as operating systems), concurrent programming, parallel processing, etc. -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Dave Horsfall

(Narrowly diverted in time to COFF from TUHS when I saw Warren's email, so I hope Warner is on it.) On Tue, 12 Nov 2019, Warner Losh wrote: > POSIX can't even recognize that leap seconds exist :( There's a movement afoot to abolish leap seconds because they are "inconvenient" or something; that will upset the astronomers and other people who care about the exact time. > All is not lost, though; use strncpy() instead of strcpy() etc. > > strncpy has two issues. First, it doesn't guarantee NUL termination. > Second, it always writes N bytes. It's for a fixed width data field, not > a variable length string whose buffer size is known. strlcpy is much > better, but still has some issues... Yeah, I knew about the NUL termination (or lack of it) - I didn't think to mention it. When I use it, I copy n-1 bytes and plant the NUL in there myself (depending on how I'm using it). And I wasn't aware of strlcpy() - thanks. Too many functions to keep track of these days.... Trivia: curious to see how Australia's "talking clock" (long gone in favour of NTP, alas) handled the leap second, I recorded it (it puts a gap before the last beep). It can be heard (and seen!) over on www.horsfall.org/leapsecond.webm . And yes, that old long-haired hippie is me... -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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In memoriam: Gene Amdahl

by Dave Horsfall

We lost computer architect Gene Amdahl on this day in 2015; responsible for "Amdahl's Law" (referring to parallel computing), he had a hand in the IBM-704, the System/360, and founded Amdahl Corporation (a clone of the 360/370 series). -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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In memorium: Douglas Rain

by Dave Horsfall

We lost him on this day in 2018; he was the voice of the rogue computer HAL on "2001" (hence the tenuous computer connection). -- Dave, who can't do that

5 years, 5 months

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Happy Birthday, Donald Michie and Robert Fano!

by Dave Horsfall

Donald Michie, a computer scientist, was born in 1923; he was famous for his work in AI, and also worked at Bletchley Park on the "Tunny" cipher. And Robert Fano, computer scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, was born on this day in 1917. He worked with Claude Shannon on Information Theory, was involved in the development of time-sharing computers, and was Founding Director of Project Mac, which became MIT's AI Lab. -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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Manipulating time_t values (was: Unix half-billion years old 1985)

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Moved to COFF] On Monday, 4 November 2019 at 16:59:22 -0500, John P. Linderman wrote: > I wrote a near-trivial "timestamp" command to make it easier to do time > arithmetic > > TZ=udt timestamp > 119 11 04 21 50 06 18204 1572904206 Mon Nov 4 21:50:06 2019 > TZ=udt timestamp 0 > 70 01 01 00 00 00 0 0 Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 > ... FreeBSD has this functionality in date(1): TZ=UTC date -r 500000000 Tue 5 Nov 1985 00:53:20 UTC TZ=UTC date -r 1500000000 Fri 14 Jul 2017 02:40:00 UTC Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Happy birthday Morris worm

by Michael Kjörling

On 4 Nov 2019 15:27 -0500, from crossd(a)gmail.com (Dan Cross): > On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 1:58 PM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote: >> I am surprised no one mentioned *The Shockwave Rider *by John Brunner, >> published in 1975. Excerpt: > > In the 1983 movie "Wargames", at the very end as the staff at NORAD > desperately try and disable the rogue artificial intelligence hell-bent on > starting World War III, at one point they make a suggestion to send a > "tapeworm" into the system", but it's judged too risky. In the 1984 movie _2010_, it seems using a tapeworm was more of a standard, if unusual, procedure for solving a very different problem. Copying from <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact#Dialogue> > Dr. Chandra: I've erased all of HAL's memory from the moment the > trouble started. > > Dr. Vasili Orlov: The 9000 series uses holographic memories, so > chronological erasures would not work. > > Dr. Chandra: I made a tapeworm. > > Dr. Walter Curnow: You made a what? > > Dr. Chandra: It's a program that's fed into a system that will hunt > down and destroy any desired memories. > > Dr. Floyd: Wait... do you know why HAL did what he did? > > Dr. Chandra: Yes. It wasn't his fault. I also suggest to migrate this part of the discussion to COFF as it has very little to do with UNIX history per se. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

5 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by Rudi Blom

>From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> >To: Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> >Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org>, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>, >The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> >Bcc: >Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2019 14:55:19 -0700 >Subject: Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm! >+1. Well said Dan. > >We all have made and will make mistakes in the future. It was an error and we all learned >from it. It’s not helpful to continue to hark back on it. Of course after having had my monthly Windows update session I really wonder if we learned from it. Cheers, uncle rubl

5 years, 6 months

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Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by Dave Horsfall

The infamous Morris Worm was released in 1988; making use of known vulnerabilities in Sendmail/finger/RSH (and weak passwords), it took out a metric shitload of SUN-3s and 4BSD Vaxen (the author claimed that it was accidental, but the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first). A temporary "condom" was discovered by Rich Kulawiec with "mkdir /tmp/sh". Another fix was to move the C compiler elsewhere. -- Dave

5 years, 6 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by Dave Horsfall

On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Steve Nickolas wrote: > 86-DOS actually did use ":" as a prompt character. This was changed for > IBM's release, for some clone releases, and for MS-DOS 2.0. The best I've ever seen was RT-11's "." - talk about minimalist... Actually this thread probably belongs on COFF by now. -- Dave

5 years, 6 months

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Re: [COFF] Comparative promptology

by Arthur Krewat

Sorry, sent a picture along with this, but it got rejected because it was too big ;) > On 10/28/2019 3:10 PM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: >> I was bound to happen. List all the prompts! >> "*" seems popular on PDP-10s. > > Que? The only PDP-10 prompt that matters is "." > > The other less-desired (by me) is @ > > art k.

5 years, 6 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code

by Peter Jeremy

[Redirecting to COFF] On 2019-Oct-20 00:02:56 +0530, Abhinav Rajagopalan <abhinavrajagopalan(a)gmail.com> wrote: >Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish >gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral >equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines >such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated >on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. My 1st edition Wilkes, Wheeler, Gill[1] documents that, by 1951, EDSAC[2] had a floating-point library that supported addition, subtraction and multiplication (no division) of numbers with 23-27 bits of precision and a range of 1e-63 to 1e63. EDSAC was much less powerful than a PDP-7. Writing a floating-point library is not that difficult, though getting the rounding correct for all the edge cases is tricky. Actually using floating-point and avoiding the pitfalls can be harder - see (eg) https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html (though https://floating-point-gui.de/ may be more approachable). [1] https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC -- Peter Jeremy

5 years, 6 months

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Linux & UNIX Humble Bundle of ebooks

by Michael Kjörling

Here's something I think some people here just might be interested in. Humble Bundle is offering (for another just over a week; until 2019-10-21 18:00 -11:00) a "Linux & UNIX" ebook bundle from O'Reilly, consisting of: (at USD 1.00 or more) - Classic Shell Scripting, 1st Edition - Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition - Introducing Regular Expressions, 1st Edition - grep Pocket Reference, 1st Edition - Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition - Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition (at USD 8.00 or more, all the above _plus_) - Learning the bash Shell, 3rd Edition - Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition - Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition - sed & awk, 2nd Edition (at USD 15.00 or more, all the above _plus_) - bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition - Linux System Programming, 2nd Edition - Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition - Effective awk Programming, 4th Edition - Linux Pocket Guide, 3rd Edition All in .mobi, .pdf and .epub formats, free of DRM. Some of the proceeds from this offering go to Code for America. No affiliation; just a happy customer. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

5 years, 6 months

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subscribe

by Jacob Ritorto

5 years, 6 months

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[was TUHS] Pr1me and GT-SWT

by Clem Cole

At the risk of this drifting, it probably should move over to the COFF mailing list, which I have CC'ed. I'll do this one last one here so people not yet on COFF that want to follow up can see it. On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 2:27 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote: > It was bizarre and ugly. The only thing that made it anywhere > near usable were the Software Tools. > Amen... (more in a minute) > > There's a reason Prime died pretty quickly once Unix started to > spread. The architecture also was strange; the characters used > mark parity (8th bit always on). > Yeah, it was an interesting box. Fast and cost-effective for its time and an excellent Fortran system which why they did as well as they did. > > My 2 cents. > > Arnold > You probably know this but you folks had a huge influence on the Pr1mates. So much so when Bill P, Paul L, and Michael S. left Pr1me to create Apollo, the used your version of the SWT as their first command system for Aegis (*a.k.a.* DOMAIN OS). They did not quite get it that they needed a real UNIX, so they roped tjt and myself from Masscomp went we all formed Belmont (*a.k.a.* Stellar in a later renaming). But they did recognize it was useful and people wanted to use that style of interface, not something dreamed up specific to that machine. I remember trying to explain to Bill the difference - he's a vision guy, but primarily a hardware type, although one of the most amazing people I have ever known. IMO: Leach never really understood the Unix ideas of being simple (which is one of the reasons why Windows has that forsaken registry sin from Aegis, he brought it with him from Apollo to MSFT). I used to argue with him about it in the 1980s (he hated/thought ASCII text files were terrible and he should control everything in some framework or privileged API).

5 years, 7 months

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Stallman resigns under pressure from CSAIL and FSF.

by Dan Cross

Richard Stallman, known colloquially as 'RMS', has resigned from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Free Software Foundation, after making comments defending Jeffrey Epstein, the late sexual predator. Those comments sparked wide-spread outrage across the MIT community and beyond. https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#16_September_2019_(Resignat… https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns - Dan C.

5 years, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] Stallman resigns under pressure from CSAIL and FSF.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > If it really was just about his views, his views have been consistent > for a long time and MIT didn't care. The outrage over Epstein is so un-balanced I have a strong desire to vomit. Not that I have any feeling at all that Epstein didn't deserve what he got. My disgust is that Roman Polanksi, who did exactly the same thing to a 13-year old, was defended and lionized by a long list of entertainment world figures after his arrest in Switzerland - many of whom are now falling all over themselves to condemn Epstein. If and when the mob howling over Epstein takes out after Polanki in the exact same manner, then I'll take them seriously. Until then, they're a bunch of virtue-signalling cretins. Noel

5 years, 7 months

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Eternal September

by Dave Horsfall

'Twas back in 1993 when AOL joined USENET (I don't have an exact date) and the joint was never the same since... Me too! These days, of course, it's been taken over by the spammer scum. -- Dave

5 years, 8 months

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