- COFF - www.tuhs.org

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, 8 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, 8 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, 8 months

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subscribe

by Jacob Ritorto

5 years, 8 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, 9 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, 9 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, 9 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, 10 months

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Happy birthday, John Mauchly!

by Dave Horsfall

We gained computer pioneer John Mauchly on this day in 1907; he was best known as the co-inventor of ENIAC, one of the world's first computers. -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

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Minsky and Epstein

by John P. Linderman

Two names I never expected to appear in one article. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/business/media/mit-jeffrey-epstein.html?…> Very sad, whether true or not. I knew Minsky in the way students know their professors. He was on my thesis committee. I liked and admired him.

5 years, 10 months

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Happy birthday, Marvin Minsky!

by Dave Horsfall

We gained Marvin Minsky on this day in 1927; he was an AI researcher, computer scientist, invented neural networks etc, and is now thought to be cryogenically preserved. -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

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Happy birthday, WWW!

by Dave Horsfall

In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee outlined plans for something he called the "world wide web". -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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Harvard Mk I

by Dave Horsfall

Dedicated on this day in 1944, it was conceived by Dr. Howard Aiken; the Wikipedia entry for it has a fascinating history, and it's a wonder that it worked at all! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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In Memoriam: Edsger Dijkstra, and happy birthday Jon Postel!

by Dave Horsfall

We lost computer pioneer Edsger Dijkstra in 2002; he gave us ALGOL, structured programming, semaphores, and ranted against the GOTO statement (much to the distress of the Fortranites and their spaghetti coding). Oh, and a certain Prof. Goto used to complain that everybody wanted to eliminate him :-) However, we gained Jon Postel in 1943; with umpteen RFCs to his name, he could pretty much be described as the Father of the Internet (but note that he edited most of the RFCs, not authored them, but deserves credit all the same). -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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In memoriam: Per Brinch Hansen

by Dave Horsfall

We lost him in 2007; he was known for working with monitors and concurrent programming etc, and authored "Operating System Principles" and "The Architecture of Concurrent Programs". -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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Happy birthday, Jay W. Forrester and 386BSD!

by Dave Horsfall

A computer pioneer, he is credited with the invention of core memory; fascinating stuff, when you realise that a "read" involves a couple of write cycles :-) Sense windings, etc... And 386BSD was released on this day in 1992, when William and Lynne Jolitz started the Open Source movement; well, that's what my notes say, and corrections are welcome (I know that Gilmore likes to take credit for just about everything). -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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In Memoriam: Robert Fano

by Dave Horsfall

We lost him in 2016, and he used to work at MIT; unfortunately that's all the details that I have for him (apart from being born 11/11/17). -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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Re: [COFF] In Memoriam: Robert Fano

by Rudi Blom

Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano (11 November 1917 – 13 July 2016) was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fano Robert Fano, computing pioneer and founder of CSAIL, dies at 98 Professor emeritus helped launch field of information theory and developed early time-sharing computers. http://news.mit.edu/2016/robert-fano-obituary-0715

5 years, 11 months

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RIP Fernando Corbató

by Dan Cross

Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multics mailing list. Fernando Corbató has passed away at 93. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/fernando-corbato-dead.html Clem organized the wonderful Unix 50 event at the LCM two days ago, where we saw a working 6180 front panel on display (backed by a virtual DPS-8m running Multics!). This is our heritage and our history, let us not forget where we came from. - Dan C.

5 years, 11 months

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Why I've been quiet for a while...

by Dave Horsfall

A combination of both an extended back-hoe fade and me accidentally blocking Minnie :-( (This is also a test to see if I'm still on COFF, as it's a fairly quiet list.) -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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DEC PDP-x Disks pre 1970

by Warner Losh

Greetings, I'm looking for a list of all hard disk drives that DEC supported prior to ~1970 or so as part of some research I'm doing for my talk this fall in Lillehammer. so far, I've only found one listed in a pdp-9 brochure (the RB09 listed in the PDP-9 handbook). Are there others? I've seen a reference to an RA01, but have seen no details on it. It appears that Rx## is the pattern to look for in that era. Alternatively, if someone can articulate the XX## naming scheme of the time, that would be great. I've seen Dx## for different communications modules, for example, but don't know if I can generalize. Warner

5 years, 12 months

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Re: [COFF] Disk Technology was [Simh] Which PDP-11 to choose

by Clem Cole

We really should take this off-list if you want to continue the discussion as it has little to do with simh and more history (so I'm CCing the TUHS COFF list. I'll include simh for now, but if you reply please kill the simh part). An Eagle or Eagle-II was a whole lot lighter (and physically smaller) than an RP06 or RP07 (or an RM series drive for that matter). It is interesting to hear you had problems with the Eagles. They were generally considered the best/most reliable of the day. The SI controller on the Vax was less so, although many of us in the UNIX community used them. FWIW: I was accused of jinxing the 19" SMD Ampex drive by Masscomp's field service team. The story is we could never make the Ampex drives work reliably at UCB (they were cheaper in bytes/$ than the Eagles at the time). When I was being recruited to Masscomp as I was leaving UCB, they were trying to use Ampex as their high-end SMD drive with the Xylogic 440 controller, but had not (yet) had a failure. [Xylogic, like Masscomp, was ex-DEC folks]. Anyway, I had mentioned @ UCB we had given up on the Ampex drive on our Vaxen, and within 2 weeks of my starting to work darned near all of them that Masscomp owned had failed. PC (Paul Cantrell), tjt and I did eventually make them work but only after we got Xylogic to redesign the 440 to be the 450 controllers and PC spend hours with the microcode team on the error recovery logic. Funny, the 450/Eagle combination (and later Xylogic 472 tape) became the de rigor in the UNIX community. BTW: if Mark and the simh team is to ever to create a solid Sun/Masscomp/Apollo simulator, they will need to emulate the Xylogic controller family. One more thing for the forever growing list of things I'd like to do when I retire, but I think I still have the engineering specs for them and PC and tjt are still to be found ;-) On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 9:19 AM Tim Wilkinson <tjw(a)twsoft.co.uk> wrote: > Back in 85 have had applications to purchase a 785 – 780-750-730 then 725 > rejected, we were fortunately given a 750 by a sister company who were > upgrading to a 785, but they took their disks. So we had to buy for > ourselves. > > > > To keep the bean counter happy we went for a System Industries controller > and 4 super Eagles. > > > > But back then there was a problem with the eagles and all 4 had to be > swapped out 4 times. > > > > Carrying them up stairs to the computer room was not fun. The platter size > may have been reduced. But the weight!!! > > > > Tim > > *From:* Simh [mailto:simh-bounces@trailing-edge.com] *On Behalf Of *Clem > Cole > *Sent:* 01 July 2019 14:08 > *To:* Patrick Finnegan <pat(a)computer-refuge.org> > *Cc:* SIMH <simh(a)trailing-edge.com> > *Subject:* Re: [Simh] Which PDP-11 to choose > > > > I can not say why it followed that naming convention, but it did. The > drives of that day were referred to as 19" technology since that's how they > mounted. FWIW: Most manufacturers at the time used the same platter > size as the original IBM 1311 (which as you pointed out was 14"), but not > everyone, for instance, the Fujitsu Eagle used 10.5-inch platter. FWIW: > I answered a bunch of this in: > https://www.quora.com/How-do-hard-drives-get-smaller-and-smaller-in-size-bi… > > > > > On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 8:52 AM Patrick Finnegan <pat(a)computer-refuge.org> > wrote: > > > > > > On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 7:32 AM Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > > 19” form factor for the disks drive fir the space in the 19” relay rack. > You’re right the platters themselves were smaller. The disks were referred > too by the mechanical FF. 19, 8, 5.25 etc. > > > > But, 8" hard drives have 8" platters, and 5.25" hard drives have 5.25" > platters. The casing on a the 5.25" drive in front of me is almost 6" wide. > > > > Pat > > > > <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campai…> Virus-free. > www.avast.com > <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campai…> > <#m_1729574511750107707_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2> >

5 years, 12 months

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Happy Birthday, Maurice Wilkes!

by Dave Horsfall

(More of a test to see if I'm still subscribed; a long story - see TUHS for more details.) Sir Maurice Wilkes FRS FREng was born on this day in 1913; he was involved with EDSAC, microprogramming, etc. Now, if I'm still subscribed then this will appear; if it has gone post-only for me (as TUHS has) then it won't come back to me, and if I'm no longer subscribed then it should bounce with an URL... -- Dave

6 years

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Re: [COFF] Happy Birthday, Maurice Wilkes!

by Rudi Blom

>Now, if I'm still subscribed then this will appear; if it has gone post-only for me (as TUHS >has) then it won't come back to me, and if I'm no longer subscribed then it should bounce >with an URL... Maybe its a matter of electronic delay. Like with old tube televisions, a good bang on top and all works again ... mostly :-) Cheers, uncle rubl

6 years

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Life under the Sun

by Nemo Nusquam

I just finished reading "Life under the Sun" by David Yen, a 296-page collection of anecdotes in historical order covering his 20y at Sun. An amusing, and sometimes sad, read. Here are two: (1) During the Serengeti project, Sunsoft lost the only person who knew FORTH and they waited two months to find someone to modify the OBF. (2) Google's purchasing dep't rejected their engineers' purchase requisitions for T1 machines because they were single-sourced, despite running their search s/w six times faster than comparably priced Intel boxes. N.

6 years, 2 months

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