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Butler Lampson's 1973 Xerox PARC memo "Why Alto?"

by steve jenkin

What struck me reading this is the estimated price (~$10K) to build an Alto, elsewhere I’ve seen $12K and 80 built in the first run. [ a note elsewhere says $4,000 on 128KB of RAM. 4k-bit or 16-kbit chips? unsure ] I believe the first "PDP-11” bought by 127 at Bell Labs was ~$65k fully configured (Doug M could confirm or not), although the disk drive took some time to come. Later, that model was called PDP-11/20. Why the price difference? PARC was doing DIY - it’s parts only, not a commercial production run with wages, space, tooling & R+D costs and marketing/sales to be amortised, with a 80%+ Gross Margin required, as per DEC. Why didn’t Bell Labs build their own “Personal Computer” like PARC? They had the need, the vision, the knowledge & expertise. I’d suggest three reasons: - The Consent Decree. AT&T couldn’t get into the Computer Market, only able to build computers for internal use. They didn’t need GUI PC’s to run telephone exchanges. - Bell Labs management: they’d been burned by MULTICS and, rightly, refused the CSRC a PDP-10 in 1969. - Nobody ’needed’ to save money building another DIY low-performance device. A home-grown supercomputer maybe :) It’s an accident of history that PARC could’ve, but didn’t, port Unix to the Alto in 1974. By V7 in 1978, my guess it was too late because both sides had locked in ‘commercial’ positions and for PARC to rewrite code wasn’t justified: “If it ain’t Broke”… Porting Unix before 1974 was possible: PARC are sure to have had close contact with UC Berkeley and the hardware/software groups there. Then 10 years later both Apple and Microsoft re-invent Graphical computing using commodity VLSI cpu’s. Which was exactly the technology innovation path planned by Alan Kay in 1970: build today what’ll be cheap hardware in 10 years and figure out how to use it. Ironic that in 1994 there was the big Apple v Microsoft lawsuit over GUI’s & who owned what I.P. Xerox woke up up midway through and filed their own infringement suit, and lost. [ dismissed because approx they'd waited too long ] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp.> ============== PDF: <http://bwl-website.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/38a-WhyAlto/Acrobat.p…> Other formats: <http://bwl-website.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/38a-WhyAlto/Abstract.…> ============== -- 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

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Butler Lampson's 1973 Xerox PARC memo "Why Alto?"

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: steve jenkin > What struck me reading this is the estimated price (~$10K) to build an > .. [ a note elsewhere says $4,000 on 128KB of RAM. 4k-bit or 16-kbit > chips? unsure ] 16K (4116) - at least, in the Alto II I have images of. Maxc used 1103's (1K), but they were a few years before the Alto. > I believe the first "PDP-11" bought by 127 at Bell Labs was ~$65k fully > configured I got out my August 1971 -11/20 price sheet, and that sounds about right. The machine had "24K bytes of core memory .. and a disk with 1K blocks (512K bytes ... a single .5 MB disk .. every few hours' work by the typists meant pushing out more information onto DECtape, because of the very small disk." ("The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System"): 11,450 Basic machine CPU + 8KB memory 6,000 16KB memory (maybe 7,000, if MM11-F) 4,000 TC11 DECtape controller 4,700 TU56 DECtape transport 5,000 RF11 controller 9,000 RS11 drive 3,900 PC11 paper tape ------- 44,050 (Although Bell probably got a discount?) The machine later had an RK03: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/u0.s but that wasn't there initially (they are 2.4MB, larger than the stated disk); it cost 5,900 (RK11 controller) + 9,000 (RK03 drive). Also, no signs of the KE11-A in the V1 code (1,900 when it eventually appeared). The machine had extra serial lines (on DC11's), but they weren't much; 750 per line. > Why the price difference? Memory was part of it. The -11/20 used core; $9,000 for the memory alone. Also, the machine was a generation older, the first DEC machine built out of IC's - all SSI. (It wasn't micro-coded; rather, a state machine. Cheap PROM and SRAM didn't exist yet.) Noel

1 year, 5 months

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Bell System and the Video Game Industry?

by segaloco

So this evening I've been tinkering with a WECo 2500 I've been using for playing with telecom stuff, admiring the quality of the DTMF module, and it got me thinking, gee, this same craftsmanship would make for some very nice arcade buttons, which then further had me pondering on the breadth of the Bell System's capabilities and the unique needs of the video game industry in the early 80s. In many respects, the combination of Western Electric and Bell Laboratories could've been a hotbed of video game console and software development, what with WECo's capability to produce hardware such as coin slots, buttons, wiring harnesses for all sorts of equipment, etc. and then of course the software prowess of the Labs. Was there to anyone here's knowledge any serious consideration of this market by Bell? The famous story of UNIX's origins includes Space Travel, and from the very first manual, games of various kinds have accompanied UNIX wherever it goes. It seems that out of most companies, the Bell System would've been very well poised, what with their own CPU architecture and other fab operations, manufacturing and distribution chains, and so on. There's a looooot of R&D that companies such as Atari and Nintendo had to engage in that the Bell System had years if not decades of expertise in. Would anti-trust stuff have come into play in that regard? Bell couldn't compete in the computer market, and I suppose it would depend on the legal definitions applicable to video game hardware and software at the time. In any case, undercurrent here is the 2500 is a fine telephone, if the same minds behind some of this WECo hardware had gone into video gaming, I wonder how different things would've turned out. - Matt G.

1 year, 5 months

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Advice sought: what to eventually do with my 1977 Lions Commentary?

by steve jenkin

I’ve no intention of selling these items and am definitely NOT disposing of them yet. No ‘offers’ please. In 1977, I took John’s “Operating Systems” course, and was one of 60-80 students who bought the first print run of the Commentary. I’m looking for suggestions of what to do with these three items pictured, some ideas of what to put in my will or donate before I go. Warren doesn’t need Yet Another Copy, he has some better copies already :) They aren’t in pristine condition and I made notes in both books, in pencil at least. The cover of the red book has slightly deteriorated. steve j PS: if the image is stripped by the list, a copy at: <http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin/SteveJ_Lions-Commentary.jpg> -- 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

1 year, 5 months

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IBM SLT Module Identity?

by segaloco

Hello, today I have received an IBM binder from 1974 pertaining to IBM Skylab activities as well as a small IBM SLT, single wide, with four modules on it. Two of the modules are labeled: 361456 IBM WF 1 03S 215 And the other two are: 361453 IBM 22 1-009 415 From what I could find online, there is a close SLT card with 4 of the 361453's instead of 2, but that doesn't help much. That board is listed as 00211 in the reference this info is from[1]. Faintly on the connector I can make out: 00008 A 0 204 YM It is very, very faint in places though so that may not be correct. The specific little blocks on the board appear to show up on others, so nothing unheard of, although I wouldn't know where to start on identifying what this does precisely, all I can find are cursory references in a few places to the numbers on the chips re: SLT modules. - Matt G. [1] - https://ibm-slt-reference.fandom.com/wiki/SLT_Board_List (why is this a fandom.com wiki...) P.S. If you or a loved one are in possession of IBM mainframe hardware that would benefit from this SLT board, happy to send it to you, I probably won't do much with it unless I can figure out the pinout and do weird things over GPIO pins from one of my single boards.

1 year, 5 months

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A slack clone in 5 lines of bash

by Edouard Klein

Dear Old Farts, I've written a chat system that relies at its core on UNIX's permission system. All the explanations are here: https://the-dam.org/docs/explanations/suc.html I thought it would be of interest to the list as it has one foot in the past (using system primitives from the 70's for access control) and one foot in the future: (optionally) using GNU Guix's declarative configuration to create the necessary users, groups, and files. I know most of you have used (and some maybe still do) talk et al. This system is even simpler, just a forever loop: while /usr/bin/true do read -r line || exit 0 # EOF /usr/bin/echo "$(/usr/bin/date --iso-8601=seconds)"\ "$(printf "%-9s" "$(/usr/bin/id --user --name --real)")" \ "$line" >> /var/lib/suc/"$1" done I'd be happy to hear any comments or to welcome you on the Dam, where we test this stuff. Cheers ! Edouard.

1 year, 5 months

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Re: Esix SVR4

by William Corcoran

Hi Emanuel, I believe I may have the install disks for ESIX, SVR4. It actually was distributed in this beautiful box with over 100 5.25” floppy disks. As things progressed, ESIX was distributed on a streaming tape cartridge. That was so much faster than swapping floppy disks for the install. The nice thing about the ESIX SVR4 was the documentation. It was essentially the AT&T SVR4 books with a white ESIX cover slapped on it. If you want to copy the disks and make them accessible to our UNIX community, let me know. Since it’s part of my collection I would ask that you return them to me. Send me an email directly if you’re interested and I will see if I can locate them for you. Bill Corcoran > On Jun 11, 2023, at 8:47 AM, emanuel stiebler <emu(a)e-bbes.com> wrote: > Hi, > anybody still has the install media for that? > We used it in the office long ago, but I lost the install disk in my last moving :( > > THANKS!

1 year, 5 months

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Shell script advice: using 'dd' to write multiple media

by steve jenkin

Apropos the ESIX SVR4 distro on floppies or streaming tape mentioned by Bill Corcoran <https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/coff@tuhs.org/message/WEJQQCJ…> In the mid 1980’s I worked for a small Australian outfit that did “Unix”. One of the things we did was distributing software, which required writing to many media. There was a very clever script that broke the distribution into many parts, if needed, to suit the size of the distribution media. [ tape, 3.5” floppy, 2.5” floppy, etc ] Over the years I’ve tried to recreate a version and not succeeded :( There was a ‘create the distro’ step of the pipeline which gathered the input, followed by a loop that used ‘dd’ to block the stream into media-sized parts. I’ve never figured out how to use ‘dd’ so it returns after a single block is written doesn’t close the input, killing the pipeline, or cause the rest of the data to be discarded. The script let our admin staff reliably create distros on whatever media was requested. Any suggestions or hints? I’m thinking this is obvious, but in the man pages i’ve read, not found an answer. It could be modern versions of ‘dd’ don’t have this behaviour. cheers steve -- 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

1 year, 5 months

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Marketplaces for Vintage Tech Books, Etc.?

by segaloco

Good afternoon folks, I just wanted to ask if anyone is aware of online marketplaces I should be looking at in my constant scouring for historical documentation materials? Presently I've got a policy of checking eBay and Biblio pretty regularly for UNIX material, occasionally searching for a few other odds and ends subject-wise, but I'm starting to wonder if there are other avenues flying under my radar where folks might be more likely to be selling for instance 70s and 80s UNIX manuals, paper copies of old standards, hardware docs from IBM and DEC, etc. If you have any suggestions, especially those that don't require me to setup yet another account to keep track of, I'd surely appreciate it. Also consider this my way of saying if you have something to sell, I'll gladly consider it, although I am being pretty selective on matters of historical/research significance that are currently obscure, so sorry if I won't buy your twelfth copy of KnR C, even if it is signed! - Matt G.

1 year, 5 months

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WECo/Bell Branded Computer Hardware

by segaloco

Hello, I've got a question I'm puzzling on that someone here may have some info on. Are there any known lists/promo material/price sheets from between 80-83 regarding WECo computing hardware such as the 3B20D and 3B20S? More broadly, is it documented at all what hardware models made it out before the removal of the Bell logo and transition from WECo to AT&T ownership of the 3B and related technologies? Aside from the cover illustration of a 3B20S on the UNIX 4.1 manual and having seen a MAC-Tutor on eBay once, I can't say I've seen any other WECo branded computation hardware with Bell logos. The only photos I can find of a 3B20D are a later AT&T branded issue. Any leads? Would it have just been BellMAC stuff and 3B20 systems before the change in logo? Based on the manual I recently received, the 3B5 may have also made it out during the WECo period but after dropping the Bell logo, somewhere between the consent degree being produced and the completion of divesting WECo. - Matt G. P.S. In the bigger picture, I'm slowly starting to aggregate info together on Bell/WECo's computer hardware activities tangential to but distinct from UNIX developments. Stuff like the 3B computers, BellMAC stuff, etc. If there's already a community/resources in this focused area I'd happily divert those efforts to a more focused collective.

1 year, 6 months

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