- COFF - www.tuhs.org

Re: [TUHS] Re: SDF Beget's ICM - Interim Computer Museum

by Lars Brinkhoff

I think this is off topic for TUHS and more appropriate for COFF. Gregg Levine wrote: > Pardon me for asking Clem, but would you mind naming the survivors? I > have an idea what these Toads are, and of course what Multics happened > to be, but that's it. We don't know exactly yet, but according to the video, there's a VAX 7000 and a DEC-2020. The TOAD computers are XKL's PDP-10 remake; there's also another one called SC-40. Stephen also mentions Multics tapes were rescued. Maybe the best way to see what is there right now, is to dial into "ssh menu(a)sdf.org" [-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-] -+- SDF Vintage Systems REMOTE ACCESS -+- [-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-] [a] multics Multics MR12.8 Honeywell 6180 [b] toad-2 TOPS-20 7(110131)-1 XKL TOAD-2 [c] twenex TOPS-20 7(63327)-6 XKL TOAD-2 [d] sc40 TOPS-20 7(21733) SC Group SC40 [e] lc ITS ver 1648 PDP-10 KS10 [f] ka1050 TOPS-10 6.03a sim KA10 1050 [g] kl2065 TOPS-10 7.04 sim KL10 2065 [h] rosenkrantz OpenVMS 7.3 VAX 7000-640 [i] tss8 TSS/8 PDP-8/e [j] ibm4361 VM/SP5 Hercules 4361 [k] ibm7094 CTSS i7094 [l] cdc6500 NOS 1.3 DTCyber CDC-6500 [z] bitzone NetBSD BBS AMD64 [1] Proceed to the UNIX Systems sub-menu [2] Information about Vintage Systems at SDF.ORG And the Unix section: [a] misspiggy UNIX v7 PDP-11/70 [c] lcm3b2 UNIX SVR3.2.3 AT&T 3B2/1000-70 [d] guildenstern BSD 4.3 simh MicroVAX 3900 [e] snake BSD 2.11 PDP-11/84 [f] hkypux HP/UX 10.20 HP9000/715 [g] truly TRU64 5.0 DEC Alpha 500au [h] three SunOS 4.1.1 Sun-3/160 [i] indy IRIX 6.5 SGI Indy R5000 [j] ultra Ultrix 4.5 simh MicroVAX 3900

11 months

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SDF Beget's ICM - Interim Computer Museum

by Clem Cole

Please excuse the wide distribution, but I suspect this will have general interest in all of these communities due to the loss of the LCM+Labs. The good folks from SDF.org are trying to create the Interim Computer Museum: https://icm.museum/join.html As Lars pointed out in an earlier message to COFF there is a 1hr presentation on the plans for the ICM. https://toobnix.org/w/ozjGgBQ28iYsLTNbrczPVo FYI: The yearly (Bootstrap) subscription is $36 They need to money to try to keep some of these systems online and available. The good news is that it looks like many of the assets, such as Miss Piggy, the Multics work, the Toads, and others, from the old LCM are going to be headed to a new home. ᐧ

11 months

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Commodity hardware for paper terminal experience

by Sijmen J. Mulder

Hi all, Some time ago I dived into ed and tried programming with it a bit. It was an interesting experience but I feel like the scrolling visual terminal can't properly emulate the paper terminal. You can't do rip out a printout and put it next to you, scribble on it, etc. I'd like to try replicating the experience more closely but I'm not interested in acquiring collector's items or complex mechanical hardware. There don't seem to be contemporary equivalents of the TI Silent 700 so I've been looking at are standalone printing devices to combine with a keyboard. But the best I can find is line printing, which is unsuitable for input. Any suggestions? Sijmen

11 months, 1 week

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Re: [TUHS] Re: UNIX Roff Manual

by John R Levine

> Yeah, I wasn't specific enough. > The ownership of the model 67 changed to the State of NJ, but it was > operated and present at Princeton, until replaced by a 370/158, which in > turn changed owners back to Princeton in 75. > > What OS did you use on the 67? On the /67 I used TSS with a free account they gave me for being in a local computer club. On the /91 I mostly used the free stuff but one summer in the early 70s I had a job speeding up an Ecom professor's Fortran model. Compiling it with Fortran H rather than G, and adjusting an assembler routine that managed an external file not to open and close the file on every call helped a lot. Paul Hilfinger had a long career at UC Berkeley and is easy to find if you want to ask him if he has any of his old papers. R's, John > > On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 6:58 PM John Levine <johnl(a)taugh.com> wrote: > >> It appears that Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com> said: >>> -=-=-=-=-=- >>> >>> Jonathan - awesome! >>> Some Princeton timing: the 360/67 arrived in 1967, but was replaced in the >>> summer of 1969 by the 360/91. >> >> No, the /67 and /91 were there at the same time. I used them both in high >> school. >> I graduated in 1971 so that must have been 1969 to 71, and when I left I'm >> pretty >> sure both were still there. >> >> R's, >> John >> >> >>> BWK must've got started on the 7094 that preceded the 67, but since it was >>> FORTRAN the port wasn't hard. >>> Now I wonder what Paul Hilfinger did and whether it was still FORTRAN. >>> >>> I graduated in 1978, ROFF usage was still going strong! >>> >>> On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 5:42 PM Jonathan Gray <jsg(a)jsg.id.au> wrote: >>> >>>> On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 09:45:57PM +0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote: >>>>> On Wednesday, July 17th, 2024 at 1:51 PM, segaloco < >>>> segaloco(a)protonmail.com> wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> Just sharing a copy of the Roff Manual that I had forgotten I >> scanned a little while back: >>>>>> >>>>>> https://archive.org/details/roff_manual

11 months, 2 weeks

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Re: ancient macros, machine code translation,as mental architecture models

by Douglas McIlroy

In 1959, when Doug Eastwood and I, at the suggestion of George Mealy, set out to add macro capability to SAP (Share assembly program), the word "macro"--short for "macroinstruction"--was in the air, though none of us had ever seen a macroprocessor. We were particularly aware that GE had a macro-capable assembler. I still don't know where or when the term was coined. Does anybody know? We never considered anything but recursive expansion, where macro definitions can contain macro calls; thus the TX-0 model comes as quite a surprise. We kept a modest stack of the state of each active macro expansion. We certainly did not foresee that within a few years some applications would need a 70-level stack! General stack-based programming was not common practice (and the term "stack" did not yet exist). This caused disaster the first time we wrote a macro that generated a macro definition, because a data-packing subroutine with remembered state, which was used during both definition and expansion, was not reentrant. To overcome the bug we had in effect to introduce another small stack to keep the two uses out of each other's way. Luckily there were no more collisions between expansion and definition. Moreover, this stack needed to hold only one suspended state because expansion could trigger definition but not vice versa. Interestingly, the problem in the previous paragraph is still with us 65 years later in many programming languages. To handle it gracefully, one needs coroutines or higher-order functions. Doug

11 months, 2 weeks

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The inexorable passage of time

by Adam Thornton

I was idly leafing through Padlipsky's _Elements Of Network Style_ the other day, and on page 72, he was imagining a future in which a cigar-box sized PDP-10 would be exchanging data with a breadbox-sized S/370. And here we are, only 40 years later, and 3 of my PDP-10s and my S/370 are all running on the same cigarette-pack sized machine, which cost something like $75 ($25 in 1984 dollars). Adam

11 months, 3 weeks

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Re: machine code translation,as mental architecture models

by Douglas McIlroy

> the DEC PDP-1 MACRO assembler manual says that a macro call > is expanded by copying the *sequence of 'storage words' and > advancing the current location (.) for each word copied* > I am quite surprised. I am, too. It seems that expansion is not recursive. And that it can only allocate storage word by word, not in larger blocks. Doug

11 months, 3 weeks

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Re: machine code translation,as mental architecture models

by Douglas McIlroy

> Well, doesn't it depend on whether VAX MACRO kept the macros as > high-level entities when translating them, or if it processed macros in > the familiar way into instructions that sat at the same level as > hand-written ‘assembler’. I don't think this thread has made that clear > so far. The Multics case that I cited was definitely in the latter category. There was no "translator". Effectively there were just two different macro packages applied to the same source file. In more detail, there were very similar assemblers for the original IBM machines and the new GE machines. Since they didn't have "include" facilities, there were actually two source files that differed only in their macro definitions. The act of translation was to supply the latter set of definitions--a notably larger set than the former (which may well have been empty). Doug

11 months, 3 weeks

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Re: [TUHS] Re: machine code translation,as mental architecture models

by Dan Cross

On Wed, Jul 10, 2024 at 9:54 PM John R Levine <johnl(a)taugh.com> wrote: > On Wed, 10 Jul 2024, Dan Cross wrote: > > It's not clear to me why you suggest with such evident authority that > > Knuth was referring only to serialized instruction emulation and not > > something like JIT'ed code; true, he doesn't specify one way or the > > other, but I find it specious to conclude that that implies the > > technique wasn't already in use, or at least known. > > The code on pages 205 to 211 shows an instruction by instruction > interpreter. I assume Knuth knew about JIT compiling since Lisp systems > had been doing it since the 1960s, but that's not what this section of the > book is about. Sure. But we're trying to date the topic here; my point is that JITing was well known, and simulation was similarly well known; we know when work on those books started; it doesn't seem that odd to me that combining the two would be known around that time as well. > One of the later volumes of TAOCP was supposed to be about > compiling, but it seems unlikely he'll have time to write it. Yes; volumes 5, 6 and 7 are to cover parsing, languages, and compilers (more or less respectively). Sadly, I suspect you are right that it's unlikely he will have time to write them. > >> We've been discussing batch or JIT translation of code which gives > >> much better performance without a lot of hardware help. > > > > JIT'd performance of binary transliteration is certainly going to be > > _better_ than strict emulation, but it is unlikely to be _as good_ as > > native code. > > Well, sure, except in odd cases like the Vax compiler and reoptimizer > someone mentioned a few messages back. I think the point about the VAX compiler is that it's an actual compiler and that the VAX MACRO-32 _language_ is treated as a "high level" programming language, rather than as a macro assembly language. That's not doing binary->binary translation, that's doing source->binary compilation. It's just that, in this case, the source language happens to look like assembler for an obsolete computer. - Dan C.

11 months, 3 weeks

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Re: [TUHS] Re: history of machine code translation,as mental architecture models

by Dan Cross

On Sat, Jul 13, 2024 at 1:35 PM John R Levine <johnl(a)taugh.com> wrote: > On Sat, 13 Jul 2024, Dan Cross wrote: > > Honeywell was doing it with their "Liberator" software on the > > Honeywell 200 computer in, at least, 1966: > > https://bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/series200/charlie_gibbs/012_Series_200_… > > (See the section on, "Conversion Compatibility."). Given that that > > document was published in February of 1966, it stands to reason work > > started on that earlier, in at least 1965 if not before ... > > Good thought. Now that you mention it, I recall that there were a lot of > Autocoder to X translators, where X was anything from another machine > to Cobol. Of course I can't find any of them now but they must have been > around the same time. > > R's, > John > > PS: For you young folks, Autocoder was the IBM 1401 assembler. There were > other Autocoders but that was by far the most popular because the 1401 was > the most popular computer of the late 1950s. Oops, it appears that I inadvertently forgot to Cc: COFF in my earlier reply to John. Mea culpa. For context, here's my complete earlier message; the TL;DR is that Honeywell was doing binary translation from the 1401 to the H-200 sometime in 1965 or earlier; possibly as early as 1963, according to some sources. -->BEGIN<-- Honeywell was doing it with their "Liberator" software on the Honeywell 200 computer in, at least, 1966: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/series200/charlie_gibbs/012_Series_200_… (See the section on, "Conversion Compatibility."). Given that that document was published in February of 1966, it stands to reason work started on that earlier, in at least 1965 if not before (how much earlier is unclear). According to Wikipedia, that machine was introduced in late 1963; it's unclear whether the Liberator software was released at the same time, however. Ease of translation of IBM 1401 instructions appears to have been a design goal. At least some sources suggest that Liberator shipped with the H-200 in 1963 (https://ibm-1401.info/1401-Competition.html#UsingLib) It seemed like what Doug was describing earlier was still source->binary translation, using some clever macro packages. -->END<-- - Dan C.

11 months, 3 weeks

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Re: system implementation languages e.g. BLISS (was: mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?)

by Aron Insinga

(Let me try sending this again, now that I'm a member of the list.) Another example of operator-typing in BLISS, of more use in a kernel than floating point, is in the relational operators. For example, GTR (greater-than) for signed comparison, GTRU for unsigned comparison, and GTRA for address comparison (where the number of bits in an address is less than the number of bits in a machine word), etc. for the other 5 relations. On 7/9/24 13:18, Paul Winalski wrote: > expression-1<offset-expr, size-expr, padding-expr> > [...] padding-expr controls the value used to pad the high order > bits: if even, zero-padded, if odd, one-padded. > > I always wondered how this would work on the IBM S/360/370 > architecture. It is big-endian and bit 0 of a machine word is the > most significant bit, not the least significant as in DEC's architectures. Offset and Size taken as numbers of bits in a value (machine word), not bit numbers, works just fine for any architecture. The PDP-10 and other DEC architectures before the PDP-11 were word-addressed with bit 0 at the high-order end. The optional 3rd parameter is actually 0 for unsigned (zero) extension and 1 for signed (highest order bit in the extracted field) extension. I don't think signed extension is widely used, but it depends on the data structure you're using. When verifying that, I found something I did not remember, that in BLISS-16 and -32 (and I would guess also -64), but not -36 (the word-addressed PDP-10), one could declare 8-bit signed and unsigned data: OWN X: BYTE SIGNED, Y: BYTE; So the concepts of 'type' in BLISS, at least regarding data size and representation, can get a little complicated (not to be confused with COMPLEX :-) ). -------- An aside re: bit twiddling from CMU and hardware description languages: Note that the ISP/ISPL/ISPS machine description language(s) from books by Gordon Bell et al. used the following syntax for a bit or a bit field of a register: REG<BIT_NR> REG<HIGH_BIT_NR:LOW_BIT_NR> REG<BIT_NR,BIT_NR,...> (',...' is meta syntax.) Sign extension was handled by a unary operator because the data were all bit vectors, instead of values as in BLISS, so the width (in bits) of an expression was known. The DECSIM logic simulator inherited this syntax. Brackets were used for memory addresses, so you might have M[0]<0:2> for the first 4 bits of the first word in memory. I still find it the most clear syntax, but then it is what I used for many years. (Sorry, VHDL and Verilog, although you won due to the idea back in the day that internally-developed VLSI CAD software was to be kept internal.) - Aron

11 months, 3 weeks

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Re: [TUHS] Re: machine code translation,as mental architecture models

by Dan Cross

[TUHS to Bcc:, +COFF] On Wed, Jul 10, 2024 at 5:26 PM John Levine <johnl(a)taugh.com> wrote: > It appears that Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> said: > > > From: Dan Cross > > > > > These techniques are rather old, and I think go back much further than > > > we're suggesting. Knuth mentions nested translations in TAOCP .. > > > suggesting the technique was well-known as early as the mid-1960s. > > Knuth was talking about simulating one machine on another, interpreting > one instruction at a time. As he notes, the performance is generally awful, > although IBM did microcode emulation of many of their second generation > machines on S/360 which all (for business reasons) ran faster than the > real machines. Unsurprisingly, you couldn't emulate a 7094 on anything > smaller than a 360/65. It's not clear to me why you suggest with such evident authority that Knuth was referring only to serialized instruction emulation and not something like JIT'ed code; true, he doesn't specify one way or the other, but I find it specious to conclude that that implies the technique wasn't already in use, or at least known. But certainly by then JIT'ing techniques for "interpreted" programming languages were known; it doesn't seem like a great leap to extend that to binary translation. Of course, that's speculation on my part, and I could certainly be wrong. > We've been discussing batch or JIT translation of code which gives > much better performance without a lot of hardware help. JIT'd performance of binary transliteration is certainly going to be _better_ than strict emulation, but it is unlikely to be _as good_ as native code. Indeed, this is still an active area of research; e.g., luajit; https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-10-04-ssra/ (disclaimer: Matt's a colleague of mine), etc. - Dan C.

11 months, 3 weeks

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Re: [TUHS] Re: machine code translation,as mental architecture models

by segaloco

On Wednesday, July 10th, 2024 at 4:00 PM, John Levine <johnl(a)taugh.com> wrote: > It appears that Al Kossow aek(a)bitsavers.org said: > > > On 7/10/24 1:53 PM, Dan Cross wrote: > > > > > The idea of writing simulators for machines clearly dates to before > > > (or near) the beginning of TAOCP. > > > Sure, but the topic of interest here is compiling machine code from one > machine to another. You know like Rosetta does for x86 code running on > my Macbook (obUnix: whose OS is descended from FreeBSD and Mach and does > all the Posix stuff) which has an M2 ARM chip. > > We know that someone did it in 1967 from 709x to GE 635, which I agree > was quite a trick since really the only thing the two machines had in > common was a 36 bit word size. I was wondering if anyone did machine > code translation as opposed to instruction at a time simulation before that. > Attempting once again to COFF this thread as I am quite interested in the discussion of this sort of emulation/simulation matter outside of the confines of UNIX history as well. To add to the discussion, while not satisfying the question of "where did this sort of thing begin", the 3B20 was another machine that provided some means of emulating another architecture via microcode, although what I know about this is limited to discussions about emulating earlier ESS machines to support existing telecom switching programs. I've yet to find any literature suggesting this was ever used to emulate other general-purpose computers such as IBM, DEC, etc. but likewise no suggestion that it *couldn't* be used this way. - Matt G.

11 months, 3 weeks

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Reminder: use the right list

by Warren Toomey

All, just a friendly reminder to use the TUHS mailing list for topics related to Unix, and to switch over to the COFF mailing list when the topic drifts away from Unix. I think a couple of the current threads ought to move over to the COFF list. Thanks! Warren

11 months, 3 weeks

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Data types in operating systems

by Paul Winalski

I don't know of any OSes that use floating point. But the IBM operating systems for S/360/370 did use packed decimal instructions in a few places. This was an issue for the System/360 model 44. The model 44 was essentially a model 40 but with the (much faster) model 65's floating point hardware. It was intended as a reduced-cost high-performance technical computing machine for small research outfits. To keep the cost down, the model 44 lacked the packed decimal arithmetic instructions, which of course are not needed in HPTC. But that meant that off-the-shelf OS/360 would not run on the 44. It had its own OS called PS/44. IIRC VAX/VMS ran into similar issues when the microVAX architecture was adopted. To save on chip real estate, microVAX did not implement packed decimal, the complicated character string instructions, H-floating point, and some other exotica (such as CRC) in hardware. They were emulated by the OS. For performance reasons it behooved one to avoid those data types and instructions on later VAXen. I once traced a severe performance problem to a subroutine where there were only a few instructions that weren't generating emulator faults. The culprit was the oddball conversion semantics of PL/I, which caused what should have been D-float arithmetic to be done in 15-digit packed decimal. Once I fixed that the program ran 100 times faster. -Paul W.

11 months, 4 weeks

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Re: [TUHS] Re: mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by Paul Winalski

On Mon, Jul 8, 2024 at 9:04 PM Aron Insinga <aki(a)insinga.com> wrote: > I found it sad, but the newest versions of the BLISS compilers do not > support using it as an expression language. The section bridging pp > 978-979 (as published) of Brender's history is: > > "The expression language characteristic was often highly touted in the > early years of BLISS. While there is a certain conceptual elegance that > results, in practice this characteristic is not exploited much. > The most common applications use the if-then-else expression, for > example, in something like the maximum calculation illustrated in Figure 5. > Very occasionally there is some analogous use of a case expression. > Examples using loops (taking advantage of the value of leave), however, > tend not to work well on human factors grounds: the value computed tends to > be visually lost in the surrounding control constructs and too far removed > from where it will be used; an explicit assignment to a temporary variable > often seems to work better. > On balance, the expression characteristic of BLISS was not terribly > important." > > Ron Brender is correct. All of the software development groups at DEC had programming style guidelines and most of those frowned on the use of BLISS as an expression language. The issue is maintainability of the code. As Brender says, a human factors issue. > Another thing that I always liked (but is still there) is the ease of > accessing bit fields with V<FOO_OFFSET, FOO_SIZE> which was descended from > BLISS-10's use of the PDP-10 byte pointers. [Add a dot before V to get an > rvalue.] (Well, there was this logic simulator which really packed data > into bit fields of blocks representing gates, events, etc....) > > Indeed. BLISS is the best bit-banging language around. The field reference construct is a lot more straightforward than the and/or bit masks in most languages. In full the construct is: expression-1<offset-expr, size-expr, padding-expr> expression-1 is a BLISS value from which the bits are to be extracted. offset-expr is start of the field to be extracted (bit 0 being the low bit of the value) and size-expr is the number of bits to be extracted. The value of the whole mess is a BLISS value with the extracted field in the low-order bits. padding-expr controls the value used to pad the high order bits: if even, zero-padded, if odd, one-padded. I always wondered how this would work on the IBM S/360/370 architecture. It is big-endian and bit 0 of a machine word is the most significant bit, not the least significant as in DEC's architectures. -Paul W.

11 months, 4 weeks

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Re: [TUHS] Re: mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by Paul Winalski

[redirecting this to COFF] On Mon, Jul 8, 2024 at 5:40 PM Aron Insinga <aki(a)insinga.com> wrote: > > When DEC chose an implementation language, they knew about C but it had > not yet escaped from Bell Labs. PL/I was considered, but there were > questions of whether or not it would be suitable for a minicomputer. On > the other hand, by choosing BLISS, DEC could start with the BLISS-11 > cross compiler running on the PDP-10, which is described in > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_an_Optimizing_Compiler > BLISS-11 > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_an_Optimizing_CompilerBLISS-11> > and DEC's Common BLISS had changes necessitated by different > word lengths and architectures, including different routine linkages > such as INTERRUPT, access to machine-specific operations such as INSQTI, > and multiple-precision floating point operations using builtin functions > which used the addresses of data instead of the values. > > In order to port VMS to new architectures, DEC/HP/VSI retargeted and > ported the BLISS compilers to new architectures. > > There have in general been two approaches to achieving language portability (machine independence). One of them is to provide only abstract data types and operations on them and to completely hide the machine implementation. PL/I and especially Ada use this approach. BLISS does the exact opposite. It takes the least common denominator. All machine architectures have machine words and ways to pick them apart. BLISS has only one data type--the word. It provides a few simple arithmetic and logical operations and also syntax for operating on contiguous sets of bits within a word. More complicated things such as floating point are done by what look like routine calls but are actually implemented in the compiler. BLISS is also a true, full-blown expression language. Statement constructs such as if/then/else have a value and can be used in expressions. In C terminology, everything in BLISS is a lvalue. A semicolon terminates an expression and throws its value away. BLISS is also unusual in that it has an explicit fetch operator, the dot (.). The assignment expression (=) has the semantics "evaluate the expression to the right of the equal sign and then store that value in the location specified by the expression to the left of the equal sign". Supposing that a and b are identifiers for memory locations, the expression: a = b; means "place b (the address of a memory location) at the location given by a (also a memory location)". This is the equivalent of: a = &b; in C. To get C's version of "a = b;" in BLISS you need an explicit fetch operator: a = .b; Forgetting to use the fetch operator is probably the most frequent error made by new BLISS programmers familiar with more conventional languages. DEC used four dialects of BLISS as their primary software development language: BLISS-16, BLISS-32, BLISS-36, and BLISS-64 the numbers indicating the BLISS word size in bits. BLISS-16 targeted the PDP-11 and BLISS-36 the PDP-10. DEC did implementations of BLISS-32 for VAX, MIPS, and x86. BLISS-64 was targeted to both Alpha and Itanium. VSI may have a version of BLISS-64 that generates x86-64 code. -Paul W.

11 months, 4 weeks

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Dan Murphy [Tenex Designer] Quote

by Clem Cole

I moved this to COFF since it's a TWENEX topic. Chet Ramsey pointed folks at a wonderful set of memories from Dan Murphy WRT to the development of TENEX and later become TOPS-20. But one comment caught me as particularly wise and should be understood and digested by all: *"... a complex, complicated design for some facility in a software or hardware product is usually not an indication of great skill and maturity on the part of the designer. Rather, it is typically evidence of lack of maturity, lack of insight, lack of understanding of the costs of complexity, and failure to see the problem in its larger context."* ᐧ

12 months

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Thank you all for your civility

by Warren Toomey

All, recently I saw on Bruce Schneier "Cryptogram" blog that he has had to change the moderation policy due to toxic comments: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/new-blog-moderation-policy.h… So I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your civility and respect for others on the TUHS and COFF lists. The recent systemd and make discussions have highlighted significant differences between people's experiences and opinions. Nonetheless, apart from a few pointed comments, the discussions have been polite and informative. These lists have been in use for decades now and, thankfully, I've only had to unsubscribe a handful of people for offensive behaviour. That's a testament to the calibre of people who are on the lists. Cheers and thank you again, Warren P.S. I'm a happy Devuan (non-systemd) user for many years now.

1 year

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cmake (was: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix) philosophy' The Register

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Moved to COFF. Mercifully this really has nothing to do with Unix] On Wednesday, 19 June 2024 at 22:09:11 -0700, Luther Johnson wrote: > On 06/19/2024 10:01 PM, Scot Jenkins via TUHS wrote: >> "Greg A. Woods" <woods(a)robohack.ca> wrote: >> >>> I will not ever allow cmake to run, or even exist, on the machines I >>> control... >> >> How do you deal with software that only builds with cmake (or meson, >> scons, ... whatever the developer decided to use as the build tool)? >> What alternatives exist short of reimplementing the build process in >> a standard makefile by hand, which is obviously very time consuming, >> error prone, and will probably break the next time you want to update >> a given package? >> >> If there is some great alternative, I would like to know about it. > > I just avoid tools that build with CMake altogether, I look for > alternative tools. The tool has already told me, what I can expect from > a continued relationship, by its use of CMake ... That's fine if you have the choice. I use Hugin (https://hugin.sourceforge.io/) a panorama stitcher, and the authors have made the decision to use cmake. I don't see any useful alternative to to Hugin, so I'm stuck with cmake. 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.php

1 year

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Supervisor mode on ye olde PDP-11

by Dave Horsfall

Sort of between kernel and user mode, Unix [zillion trademarks etc] never used it. but did RSX-11? I used the latter long enough to hate it until Edition 5 arrived at UNSW, and I still remember being blown away by the fact that there was nothing privileged about the Shell :-) -- Dave

1 year

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Unix Philosophy + Networks == Plan 9 [ LONG ]

by sjenkin＠canb.auug.org.au

This report [link at end ] about a security issue with VMware Vsphere, stemming from the design/ architecture, resonated with me and the recent TUHS “Unix Philosophy” thread. Many of the criticisms of Unix relate to not understanding it’s purpose and design criteria: A platform on which to develop (other) Software. Which implies ‘running, profiling, testing & debugging’ that code. Complaining that Unix tools/utilities are terse and arcane for non-developers & testers, needing a steep Learning Curve, is the same as complaining a large truck doesn’t accelerate or corner like a sports car. Plan 9, by the same core team twenty years later, addresses the same problems with modern hardware & graphics, including with Networking. The system they developed in 1990 would’ve been proof against both vSphere attacks because of its security-by-design: No ‘root’ user, hence no ’sudo’ and no complex, heavyweight RPC protocol with security flaws, instead the simple, lightweight & secure 9P protocol. It seems Eric Raymond’s exposition on the “Unix Philosophy” is the basis of much of the current understanding / view. In the ESR & other works cited on Wikipedia, I see a lot about “Userland” approaches, nothing about the Kernel, Security by Design and innovations like ’shells’, ‘pipes’ and the many novel standard tools, which is being able to Reuse standard tools and ’stand on the shoulders of giants’ [ versus constantly Reinventing the Wheel, poorly ] ESR was always outside CSRC and from his resume, not involved with Unix until 1983 at best. He’s certainly been a mover & shaker in the Linux and associated (GNU led) Open Source community. <http://catb.org/~esr/resume.html> ESR baldly states "The Unix philosophy is not a formal design method”, which isn’t strictly untrue, but highly misleading IMHO. Nor is the self-description by members of CSRC as having “good taste” a full and enlightening description of their process. There’s not a general appreciation, even in Research & Academic circles, that “Software is Performance Discipline”, in the same way as Surgery, Rocketry, Aviation, Music, Art and physical disciplines (dance, gymnastics, even rock climbing) are “Performance” based. It requires both Theory and Practice. If an educator hasn’t worked on at least one 1M LOC system, how can they teach “Programming in the Large”, the central problem of Software Engineering? [ an aside: the problem “golang” addressed was improving Software Engineering, not simply a language & coding. ] There’s a second factor common to all high-performance disciplines, why flying has become cheaper, safer and faster since the first jet & crashes in 1950’s: - good professionals deliberately improve, by learning from mistakes & failures and (perhaps) adopting better practices, - great professionals don’t just ‘improve’, they actively examine how & why they created Errors, Faults & Failures and detect / remove root causes. The CSRC folk used to hate Corporate attempts at Soft Skills courses, calling them “Charm School”. CSRC's deliberate and systematic learning, adaption and improvement wasn’t accidental or incidental, it was the same conscious approach used by Fairchild in its early days, the reason it quickly became the leader in Silicon devices, highly profitable, highly valued. Noyce & Moore, and I posit CSRC too, applied the Scientific Method to themselves and their practices, not just what their research field. IMO, this is what made CSRC unique - they were active Practitioners, developing high-quality, highly-performant code, as well as being astute Researchers, providing quantifiably better solutions with measurable improvements, not prototypes or partial demonstrators. Gerard Holtzman’s 1127 Alumni page shows the breadth & depth of talent that worked at CSRC. The group was unusually productive and influential. [ though I’ve not seen a ‘collected works’ ] <http://spinroot.com/gerard/1127_alumni.html> CSRC/1127 had a very strong culture and a very deliberate, structured ‘process’ that naturally led to a world-changing product in 1974 from only ~30 man-years of effort, a minor effort in Software Projects. perfective “iterative design”, rigorous testing, code quality via a variation of pair-programming, collaborative design with group consultation / discussion and above all “performant” code - based first on ‘correct’ and ’secure’, backed by Doug McIlroy’s insistence on good documentation for everything. [ It’s worth noting that in the original paper on the “Waterfall” development process, it isn’t "Once & Done”, its specifically “do it twice”, ] [ the Shewhart Cycle, promoted by Deming, Plan - Do - Check - Act, was well known in Engineering circles, known to be very Effective ] Unix - the kernel & device drivers, the filesystem, the shell, libraries, userland and standard tools - weren’t done in hurry between 1969 & 1974’s CACM article. It was written and rewritten many times - far more than the ‘versions’, derived from the numbering of the manuals, might suggest. Ken’s comment on one of his most productive days, “throwing away 1,000 lines of code”, demonstrates this dynamic environment dominated by trials, redesign and rewriting - backed by embedded ‘instrumentation’ (profiling). Ken has also commented he had to deliberately forget all his code at one point (maybe after 1974 or 77). He was able to remember every line of code he’d written, in every file & program. I doubt that was an innate skill, even if so, it would’ve improved by deliberate practice, just as in learning to play a musical instrument. There’s a lot of research in Memory & Recall, all of which documents ‘astonishing’ performance by ‘ordinary’ people, with a only little tuition and deliberate practice. CSRC had a scientific approach to software design and coding, unlike any I’ve seen in commercial practice, academic research or promoted “Methodologies”. There’s a casual comment by Dennis in “Evolution of Unix”, 1979, about rewriting the kernel, improving its organisation and adding multiprogramming. By one person in months.. A documented, incontestable level of productivity, 100x-1000x programmers practising mainstream “methodologies”. Surely that performance alone would’ve been worthy of intensive study as the workforce & marketplace implications are profound. <https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf> Perhaps the most important watershed occurred during 1973, when the operating system kernel was rewritten in C. … The success of this effort convinced us that C was useful as a nearly universal tool for systems programming, instead of just a toy for simple applications. The CSRC software evolution methodology is summed by perfectly in Baba Brinkman’s Evolution Rap: "Performance, Feedback, Revision” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTXVo0euMe4> Website: <https://bababrinkman.com/> ABC Science Show, 2009, 54 min audio, no transcript This is the performance Baba gave at the Darwin Festival in Cambridge England, July 2009. <https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/scienceshow/the-rap-guide-to-evoluti…> Ken also commented that they divided up the work coding, seemingly informally but in a disciplined way, so that there was only ever one time they created the same file. [ "mis-coordination of work”, Turing Award speech ] To prove they had well defined coding / naming standards and followed them, the two 20-line files were identical… ——————— There’s a few things with the “Unix Philosophy” that are critical and not included in the commentaries I’ve read or seen quoted: - The Unix kernel was ‘conservative’, not inventive or novel. It deliberately used only known, proven solutions, with a focus on small, correct, performant. “Just Worked”, not “Worked, Just”. Swapping was used, while Virtual Memory not implemented because they didn’t know of a definitive solution. They avoided the “Second System Effect” - showing how clever they were - working as professional engineers producing a robust, reliable, secure system. - Along with Unix (kernel, fsys, userland), CSRC developed a high-performance high-quality Software Development culture and methodology, The two are inseparable, IMO. - Professionals do not, can not, write non-trivial code in a “One and Done” manner. Professional quality code takes time and always evolves. It takes significant iterative improvement, including redesign, to develop large systems, with sufficient security, reliability, maintainability and performance. [ Despite 60 years of failed “Big Bang” projects using “One & Done”, Enterprises persist with this idioticy, wasting billions every year ] - Unix was developed to provide CSRC with a great environment for their own work. It never attempted to be more, but has been applied ‘everywhere’. Using this platform, members of the team developed a whole slew of important and useful tools, now taken as a given in Software Development: editors, type settings, ‘diff’ and Version Control, profile, debug, … This includes the computer Language Tools, now core to every language & system. - Collaboration and Sharing, both ways, was central to the Unix Philosophy developed at CSRC. Both within the team, within Bell Labs and other Unix installations, notably USENIX & UCB and it’s ARPA-IPTO funded CSRG. The world of Software and Code Development is clearly in two Eras, “Before Unix” and “After”. Part of this is “Open Source”, not just shared source targeted for a single platform & environment, but source code mechanically ported to new platforms. This was predicated on the original CSRC / Bell Labs attitude of Sharing the Source… Source was shared in & out, directly against the stance of the Legal Dept, intent on tightly controlling all Intellectual Property with a view of extracting “revenue streams” from clients. Later events proved CSRC’s “Source Code Sharing” was far more powerful and profitable than a Walled Garden approach, endlessly reinvesting the wheel & competing, not cooperating with others. Senior Management and the old school lawyers arguably overestimated their marketing & product capability and wildly underestimated the evolution of computing and failed to understand completely the PC era, with Bill Gates admonisment, “You guys don’t get it, it’s all about Volume”. In 1974, Unix was described publicly in CACM. In 1977, USG then later Unix System Labs was formed to work on and sell Unix commercially, locking day the I.P., with no free source code. In 1984, AT&T ‘de-merged’, keeping Bell Labs, USL and Western Digital - all the hardware and software to “Rule the World” and beat IBM. In 1994, AT&T gave up being the new IBM and sold its hardware and software divisions. In 2004, AT&T was bought by one of its spinoff’s, SBC (Southern Bell), who’d understood Mobile Telephony (passing on to customers savings from new technology), merged and rebranded themselves as “A&T”. The “Unix Wars” of the 1990’s, where vendors bought AT&T licenses, confusing “Point of Difference” with “Different & Incompatible”. They attempted Vendor lock-in, a monopoly tactic to create captive markets that could be gouged. This failed for two reasons, IMO: - the software (even binaries) and tools were all portable, the barriers to exit were low. - Unix wasn’t the only competitor Microsoft used C to write Windows NT and Intel-based hardware to undercut Unix Servers & Workstations by 10x. Bill Gates understood ‘Volume’ and the combined AT&T and Unix vendors didn’t. ================ VMware by Broadcom warns of two critical vCenter flaws, plus a nasty sudo bug <https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/vmware_criticial_vcenter_flaws/> VMware's security bulletin describes both of the flaws as "heap-overflow vulnerabilities in the implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol” … DCE/RPC (Distributed Computing Environment/Remote Procedure Calls) is a means of calling a procedure on a remote machine as if it were a local machine – just the ticket when managing virtual machines. ================ CHM, 2019 <https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-earliest-unix-code-an-anniversary-sour…> As Ritchie would later explain: “What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied from remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.” ================ Ken Thompson, 1984 Turing Award paper Reflections on Trusting Trust To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software. That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty. In the ten years that we have worked together, I can recall only one case of mis-coordination of work. On that occasion, I discovered that we both had written the same 20-line assembly language program. I compared the sources and was astounded to find that they matched character-for-character. The result of our work together has been far greater than the work that we each contributed. ================ The Art of Unix Programming by ESR <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/index.html> Basics of the Unix Philosophy <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html> ================ Wiki ESR <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond> Unix Philosophy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy> ================ -- 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

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Lynn Conway, RIP

by Dan Cross

There seems to be some confusion, but I've heard enough sources now that I believe it to be confirmed. Notably, faculty at UMich EECS have shared that it was passed to them internally. RIP Lynn Conway, architect of the VLSI revolution and long-time transgender activist. She apparently died from heart failure; she was 86. http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/wordPressNEW/2024/06/11/lynn-conway-january-2… - Dan C.

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PiDP-10 — The MagPi magazine

by Dave Horsfall

Could interest a few OFs here... I've used the -8 and of course the -11, but not the -10 so I may as well start now. -- Dave ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: A fellow geek To: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> Subject: PiDP-10 — The MagPi magazine RasPi is now masquerading as a PDP-10… https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/pidp-10

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NYTimes.com: C. Gordon Bell, Creator of a Personal Computer Prototype, Dies at 89

by Clem Cole

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. C. Gordon Bell, Creator of a Personal Computer Prototype, Dies at 89 It cost $18,000 when it was introduced in 1965, but it bridged the world between room-size mainframes and the modern desktop. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-dead.html?unloc… ᐧ

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