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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
Good afternoon everyone. I've been thinking about the color/contrast landscape of computing today and have a bit of a nebulous quandary that I wonder if anyone would have some insight on.
So terminals, they started as typewriters with extra steps, a white piece of paper on a reel being stamped with dark ink to provide feedback from the machine. When video terminals hit the market, the display was a black screen with white, orange, green, or whatever other color of phosphor they bothered to smear on the surface of the tube. Presumably this display style was chosen as on a CRT, you're only lighting phosphor where there is actually an image, unlike the LCD screens of today. So there was a complete contrast shift from dark letters on white paper to light letters on an otherwise unlit pane of glass.
Step forward to graphical systems and windows on the Alto? Light background with dark text.
Windows on the Macintosh? Light background with dark text.
Windows on MS Windows? Light backgrounds with dark text.
Default HTML rendering in browsers? Light backgrounds with dark text.
Fast forward to today, and it seems that dark themes are all the rage, light characters on an otherwise dark background. This would've made so much sense during the CRT era as every part of the screen representing a black pixel is getting no drawing, but when CRTs were king, the predominant visual style was dark on light, like a piece of paper, rather than light on dark, like a video terminal. Now in the day and age of LCDs, where every pixel is on regardless, now we're finally flipping the script and putting light characters on dark backgrounds, long after any hardware benefit (that I'm aware of) would be attained by minimizing the amount of "lit surface" on the screen.
Anyone know if this has all been coincidental or if the decision for graphical user interfaces and such to predominantly use white/light colors for backgrounds was a relatively intentional measure around the industry? Or is it really just that that's how Xerox's system looked and it was all domino effect after that? At the end of the day I'm really just finding myself puzzling why computing jumped into the minimalism seen on terminal screens, keeping from driving CRTs super hard but then when GUIs first started appearing, they didn't just organically align with what was the most efficient for a CRT. I recognize this is based largely in subjective views of how something should look too, so not really expecting a "Person XYZ authoritatively decided on <date> that GUI elements shall overwhelmingly only be dark on light", just some thoughts on how we got going down this path with color schemes in computing. Thanks all!
- Matt G.
Apologies to TUHS - other than please don't think Fortran did not impact
UNIX and its peers. We owe that community our jobs, and for creating the
market in that we all would build systems and eventually improve.
Note: I'm CCing COFF - you want to continue this...
On Mon, Jun 12, 2023 at 5:39 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> It's an ill wind that blows a Fortran runtime using the same convention.
>
Be careful there, weedhopper ... Fortran gave a lot to computing
(including UNIX) and frankly still does. I did not write have too much
Fortran as a professional (mostly early in my career), but I did spent 50+
years ensuring that the results of the Fortran compiler ran >>really well<<
on the systems I built. As a former collegiate of Paul W and I once said,
"*Any computer executive that does not take Fortran seriously will not have
their job very long.* It pays our salary."
It's still the #1 language for science [its also not the same language my
Father learned in the late 50s/early 60s, much less the one I learned 15
years later - check out: In what type of work is the Fortran Programming
Language most used today
<https://www.quora.com/In-what-type-of-work-is-the-Fortran-programming-langu…>
, Is Fortran still alive
<https://www.quora.com/Is-Fortran-still-alive/answer/Clem-Cole>, Is Fortran
obsolete <https://www.quora.com/Is-Fortran-obsolete/answer/Clem-Cole>
FWIW: These days, the Intel Fortran compiler (and eventually the LLVM one,
which Intel is the primary developer), calls the C/C++ common runtime for
support. Most libraries are written in C, C++, (or assembler in some very
special cases) - so now it's C that keeps Fortran alive. But "in the
beginning" it was all about Fortran because that paid the bills then and
still does today.
ᐧ
