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Re: [TUHS] Re: Origins of the SGS (System Generation Software) and COFF (Common Object File Format)

by Lars Brinkhoff

Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> writes: > @scj - any enlightenment -- your team in USG must have been part of all > that. SMTP supports @-mention now? ;-)

2 years, 4 months

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Re: Help needed with some old VAX Machines (moved from TUHS)

by segaloco

COFF transfer, TUHS Bcc'd to know where this thread went. Between the two if you're not doing UNIX-specific things but just trying to resurrect/restore these, COFF will probably be the better place for further discussion. @OP if you're not a member of COFF already, you should be able to reach out to Warren Toomey regarding subscription. If you're feeling particularly adventurous, NetBSD still supports VAX in some manner: http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/vax/ YMMV, but I've had some success with NetBSD on some pretty oddball stuff. As the old saying goes, "Of course it runs NetBSD". You might be able to find some old VMS stuff for them as well, but I wouldn't know where to point you other than bitsavers. There's some other archival site out there with a bunch of old DEC stuff but I can never seem to find it when I search for it, only by accident. Best of luck! - Matt G. ------- Original Message ------- On Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023 at 10:08 AM, jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > > From: Maciej Jan Broniarz > > > > Our local Hackroom acquired some VAX Station machines. > > > Exactly what sort of VAXstations? There are several different kinds; one: > > http://gunkies.org/wiki/VAXstation_100 > > doesn't even include a VAX; it's just a branding deal from DEC Marketing. > Start with finding out exactly which kind(s) of VAXstation you have. > > Noel

2 years, 4 months

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Music!

by Mike Markowski

This is far afield even for COFF, so apologies up front. Machines and OSes we fondly remember get older day by day. But many labs I worked in during undergrad & grad years and then in the workforce always had a radio going, and music never seems to age. When I hear Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" or Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes," it's RSTS/E on a PDP11/70 as a teen, my first exposure to computers. Kraftwerk and Big Audio Dynamite mean Unix with Mike Muuss at Ballistic Research Lab in the early 90s. I had PX (military Post Exchange) privileges which Mike used to the fullest to buy fantastic lab speakers. The old ENIAC room, our work space, had thick walls. :-) I wonder if particular music transports any others back to computing days of old. The current lab I'm in receives exactly 1 radio station from a local high school and streaming is blocked. Not sure that any new musical memories will be formed for my ever nearer days of retirement! Musically yours, Mike Markowski

2 years, 4 months

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Re: [TUHS] Re: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)

by Lars Brinkhoff

Jonathan Gray wrote: >> Any chance this DOS supdup software is still around? > > https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/pcip-1985.pdf > http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/MIT/pc-ip/ Great, thanks! It's a bit sad to read in supdup.mss "Unfortunately, very few machines have TCP/Supdup servers. The only servers known to us are on Mit-MC and Su-AI, and 4.2 Unix machines running a server we distribute." At this point, three old ITS machines had recently fallen over, one after the other, and MC was the only one left standing. But not long after, four new ones would appear. One of which is still up and running!

2 years, 4 months

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Re: [TUHS] Re: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)

by Lars Brinkhoff

s/TUHS/COFF/ Theodore Ts'o wrote: > The only I saw were PC/AT's (that is, the ones with the '286 CPU) that > ran DOS and which were essentially used only to telnet to the Vax > 750's (or supdup to the MIT AI / LCS lab machines, but most > undergraduates didn't have access to those computers Any chance this DOS supdup software is still around? Was it part of PC/TCP? I searched around and found this: https://windowsbulletin.com/files/exe/ftp-software-inc/pc-tcp

2 years, 4 months

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Re: [TUHS] Re: history of community help for unix users everywhere

by Dan Cross

[TUHS to Bcc: and +COFF] On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 3:50 PM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: > [snip] > The community aspect of open source was there in spades as well, with people helping other people and sharing fixes. But it was complicated by restrictive license agreements and somewhat (imho) overzealous protection of 'rights' at times that hampered things and would have echos in later open source licenses and attitudes that would develop in response. Even though the term 'open source' wasn't coined until 1998, the open source ethos were present in many of the early computer users groups, not least the unix ones. Don't forget SHARE! Honestly, I think the IBM mainframe community doesn't get its due. There was actually a lot of good stuff there. > USENET amplified it, plus let in the unwashed masses who also had useful contributions (in addition to a lot of noise)... then things got really crowded with noise when AOL went live... And I'm sure there's a number of other BBS and/or compuserve communities I'm giving short-shrift here because I wasn't part of them in real time. The phenomenon of "September" being the time when all the new undergrads got their accounts and discovered USENET and the shenanigans that ensued was well-known. Eternal September when AOL got connected was a serious body blow. As for BBSes...I'd go so far as to say that the BBS people were the AOL people before the AOL people were the AOL people. A takeaway from both was that communities with established norms but no way beside social pressure to enforce them have a hard time scaling. USENET worked when the user population was small and mostly amenable to a set of shared goals centered around information exchange (nevermind the Jim Flemings and other well-known cranks of the world). But integrating someone into the fold took effort both on the community's part as well as the user; when it wasn't obvious that intrinsic motivation was required, or hordes of users just weren't interested, it didn't work very well. I think this is something we see over and over again with social networks. - Dan C.

2 years, 4 months

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VAX/VMS 4.4 Source Listing?

by segaloco

Good morning all, I was wondering if anyone in this group was aware of any known preservation of VAX/VMS 4.4 source code? Just saw this on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/195582389147?hash=item2d899e6b9b:g:neYAAOSwmQJj3EkH I certainly don't have the equipment for this in my arsenal, but at the same time, if this represents long-lost source code, I'd happy try and nab it and then get it to someone who can do the restoration work from this. Thoughts? - Matt G.

2 years, 4 months

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Re: [TUHS] Re: Proper use of TUHS (was Re: Typesetter C compiler)

by Tomasz Rola

On Fri, Feb 03, 2023 at 06:36:34AM +0000, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > Dan Cross wrote: > > So, the question becomes: what _is_ that forum, if such a thing > > exists at all? > > Some options: > > - Cctalk email list. (cc-ed to coff, of coffse...) I use to hang out on IBM-MAIN mailing list, too. While they are, mostly, dealing with modern mainframes and current problems, they also occasionally mention old story or two. Actually, since mainframe is such a living fossil thing, the whole talk sometimes feels as if it was about something upgraded continuously from the 1960-ties. Most of it is uncomprehensible to me (never had proper mainframe training, or unproper one, and they deal with stuff in unique way, have their own acronyms for things, there are some intro books but there is not enough time*energy), but also a bit educating - a bit today, a bit next week etc. > - ClassicCMP Discord. > - Retrocomputingforum.com. > - Various Facebook groups. Web stuff, requiring Javascript to work, ugh, ugh-oh. Mostly, it boils down to the fact that one cannot easily curl the text from those other places (AFAICT). So it is hard to awk this text into mbox format and read it comfortably. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com **

2 years, 4 months

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converting lousy scans of pdfs into something more useable

by Will Senn

All, I thought I would post something here that wasn't DOA over on tuhs and see if it would fly here instead. I have been treating coff as the destination for the place where off-topic tuhs posts go to die, but after the latest thread bemoaning a place to go for topics tangential to unix, I thought I'd actually start a coff thread! Here goes... I read a tremendous number of documents from the web, or at least read parts of them - to the tune of maybe 50 or so a week. It is appalling to me in this era that we can't get better at scanning. Be that as it may, the needle doesn't seem to have moved appreciably in the last decade or so and it's a little sad. Sure, if folks print to pdf, it's great. But, if they scan a doc, not so great, even today. Rather than worry about the scanning aspects, I am more interested in what to do with those scans. Can they be handled in such a way as to give them new life? Unlike the scanning side of things, I have found quite a bit of movement in the area of being able to work with the pdfs and I'd really like to get way better at it. If I get a bad scanned pdf, if I can make it legible on screen, legible on print, and searchable, I'm golden. Sadly, that's way harder than it sounds, or, in my opinion, than it should be. I recently put together a workflow that is tenable, if time consuming. If your interested in the details, I've shared them: https://decuser.github.io/pdfs/2023/02/01/pdf-cleanup-workflow.html In the note, I leverage a lot of great tools that have significantly improved over the years to the point where they do a great job at what they do. But, there's lots of room for improvement. Particularly in the area of image tweaking around color and highlights and such. The note is mac-centric in that I use a mac, otherwise, all of the tools work on modern *nix and with a little abstract thought, windows too. In my world, here's what happens: * find a really interesting topic and along the way, collect pdfs to read * open the pdf and find it salient, but not so readable, with sad printability, and no or broken OCR * I begin the process of making the pdf better with the aforementioned goals aforethought The process in a nutshell: 1. Extract the images to individual tiffs (so many tools can't work with multi-image tiffs) * pdfimages from poppler works great for this 2. Adjust the color (it seems impossible to do this without a batch capable gui app) * I use Photoscape X for this - just click batch and make adjustments to all of the images using the same settings 3. Resize the images - most pdfs have super wonky sizes * I use convert from imagemagick for this and I compress the tiffs while I'm converting them 4. Recombine the images into a multi-tiff image * I use tiffcp from libtiff for this 5. OCR the reworked image set * I use tesseract for this - It's gotten so much better it's ridiculous This process results in a pdf that meets the objectives. It's not horribly difficult to do and it's not horribly time consuming. It represents many, many attempts to figure out this thorny problem. I'd really like to get away from needing Photoscape X, though. Then I could entirely automate the workflow in bash... The problem is that the image adjustments are the most critical - image extraction, resize, compression, recombining images, ocr (I still can't believe it), and outputting a pdf are now taken care of by command line tools that work well. I wouldn't mind using a gui to figure out some color setting (Grayscale, Black and White, or Color) and increase/decrease values for shadows and highlights if those could then be mapped to command line arguments of a tool that could apply them, though. Cuz, then the workflow could be, extract a good representative page as image, open it, figure out the color settings, and then use those settings with toolY as part of the scripted workflow. Here are the objectives for easy reference: 1. The PDF needs to be readable on a decent monitor (zooming in doesn't distort the readability, pixelation that is systematic is ok, but not preferred). Yes, I know it's got a degree of subjectivity, but blobby, bleeding text is out of scope! 2. The PDF needs to print with a minimum of artifact (weird shadows, bleeding and blob are out). It needs to be easy to read. 3. The PDF needs to be searchable with good accuracy (generally, bad scans have no ocr, or ocr that doesn't work). Size is a consideration, but depends greatly on the value of the work. My own calculus goes like this - if it's modern work, it should be way under 30mbs. If it's print to pdf, it should be way under 10mb (remember when you thought you'd never use 10mb of space... for all of your files and the os). If it is significant and rare, less than 150mbs can work. Obviously, this is totally subjective, your calculus is probably quite different. The reason this isn't posted over in pdf.scans.discussion is that even if there were such a place, it'd be filled with super technical gibberish about color depth and the perils of gamma radiation or somesuch. We, as folks interested in preserving the past have a more pragmatic need for a workable solution that is attainable to mortals. So, with that as a bit of background, let me ask what I asked previously in a different wayon tuhs, here in coff - what's your experience with using sad pdfs? Do you just live with them as they are, or do you try to fix them and how, or do you use a workflow and get good results? Later, Will

2 years, 4 months

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Re: move to COFF Re: [TUHS] Re: Proper use of TUHS (was Re: Typesetter C compiler)

by Will Senn

Oh, and of course I would cc the old address! Reply on the correct COFF address <coff(a)tuhs.org> Sheesh. On 2/3/23 11:26 AM, Will Senn wrote: > We're in COFF territory again. I am enjoying the conversation, but > let's self monitor. Perhaps, a workflow for this is that when we drift > off into non-unix history discussion, we cc: COFF and tell folks to > continue there? As a test I cced it on this email, don't reply all to > this list. Just let's talk about it over in coff. If you aren't on > coff join it. > > If you aren't sure or think most folks on the list want to discuss it. > Post it on COFF, if you don't get any traction, reference the COFF > thread and tease it in TUHS. > > This isn't at all a gripe - I heart all of our discussions, but I > agree that it's hard to keep it history related here with no outlet > for tangential discussion - so, let's put coff to good use and try it > for those related, but not quite discussions. > > Remember, don't reply to TUHS on this email :)! > > - will > > On 2/3/23 11:11 AM, Steve Nickolas wrote: >> On Fri, 3 Feb 2023, Larry McVoy wrote: >> >>> Some things will never go away, like keep your fingers off of my L1 >>> cache lines. I think it's mostly lost because of huge memories, but >>> one of the things I love about early Unix is how small everything was. >>> Most people don't care, but if you want to go really fast, there is no >>> replacement for small. >>> >>> Personally, I'm fine with some amount of "list about new systems where >>> we can ask about history because that helps us build those new >>> systems". >>> Might be just me, I love systems discussions. >> >> I find a lot of my own stuff is like this - kindasorta fits and >> kindasorta doesn't for similar reasons. >> >> (Since a lot of what I've been doing lately is creating a >> SysV-flavored rewrite of Unix from my own perspective as a >> 40-something who actually got most of my experience coding for >> 16-bits and MS-DOS, and speaks fluent but non-native C. I'm sure it >> comes out in my coding style.) >> >> -uso. >

2 years, 4 months

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