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Re: (TUHS -> COFF?) [TUHS] Re: Clever code

by Michael Kjörling

On 14 Dec 2022 06:54 -0500, from brad(a)anduin.eldar.org (Brad Spencer): > [...] but you needed to know 6809 or 68000 assembly to create anything > new for the OS itself, Wasn't that the norm at the time, though? As I recall one of the things that really set UNIX apart from other operating systems up until about the early 1990s was precisely how machine-independent it was by virtue of (with the exception of the early versions) having been written in something other than assembler. -- ✍ Michael Kjörling 🏡 https://michael.kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

2 years, 8 months

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Re: Clever code

by Warren Toomey

I think we might move the discussion on memory technologies, CPU architectures etc. to COFF 😁 Thanks, Warren

2 years, 8 months

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RIP Fred Brooks

by Peter Jeremy

Since I haven't seen it mentioned here: According to various sources, Fred Brooks passed away on 17th November - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks -- Peter Jeremy

2 years, 9 months

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Re: DevOps/SRE [was Re: [TUHS] Re: LOC [was Re: Re: Re.: Princeton's "Unix: An Oral History": who was in the team in "The Attic"?]

by Michael Parson

(Moving to COFF, probably drifted enough from UNIX history) On 2022-11-09 03:01, steve jenkin wrote: >> On 9 Nov 2022, at 19:41, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> To tie this back to TUHS a little bit...when did being a "sysadmin" >> become a thing unto itself? And is it just me, or has that largely >> been superceded by SRE (which I think of as what one used to, >> perhaps, call a "system programmer") and DevOps, which feels like a >> more traditional Unix-y kind of thing? >> >> - Dan C. > > In The Beginning, We were All Programmers… <snip> I got started in this field in the mid '90s, just as the Internet started moving from mostly EDU & military to the start of dial-up ISPs. My first job was at a small community college/satellite campus of UTexas where me and my co-worker set up the first website for a UTexas satellite campus. I'd played with VMS and SunOS, Linux was brand new and was something we could install on a system we built out of spare parts from the closet. At the time, my job title was "Assistant Systems Manager," where my main job was to add/remove users from the VMS system, reset stuck terminal lines, clean out the print queue, etc. Linux was very much a toy and the Linux system we installed was a playground. It was mostly myself, a few others on the team, and a few CS students that wanted to use something that looked more like Unix than VMS. > SRE roles & as a discipline has developed, alongside DevOps, into > managing & fault finding in large clusters of physical and virtual > machines. My next several years were spent dot-com hopping, as a sysadmin. Mostly in IT shops where we kept the systems that company used online and working. The mail server(s), web-servers, ftp sites, database servers, NFS/CIFS, etc. My job-title for most of my jobs through the mid '00s was (senior) sysadmin. I then spent 8 years as a senior product support "engineer" at IBM (I was CAG/SWAT, for anyone that's familiar with IBM/Rational's job roles), during which time I started seeing the rise of what they eventually started calling DevOps in the early 2010s. As the web grew bigger and bigger, and the concept of Software as a Service and so-called "Cloud" services (AWS, Azure, etc.) became more and more of a thing, the job of keeping the systems that ran those services started splitting off of IT and into their own teams. They took what they learned in IT, tried to codify some "best practices" around monitoring, automation and tooling, started using more shrink-wrapped stuff like ansible/chef/saltstack instead of home-grown stuff we (re)wrote with each job, etc, started forcing ourselves to be part of the dev/test/deploy cycle of the products we were supporting, etc, and someone branded the new work-flow as 'DevOps'. I've glossed over the dev side of that a bit, as they also got more and better build tools, IDEs, and for better or worse, all things git. My current day-job is being a DevOps manager. I started here 8 years ago on the DevOps team and was promoted to manager 4 years ago. > Never done it myself, but it’d seem the potential for screw-ups is > now infinite and unlimited in time :) Yup, the potential for pushing a bad config or big of code to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of systems with the click of mouse or a single command line has never been higher, but only if the dev/test cycle failed to find the error (or wasn't properly followed) before someone decided to deploy. The guys on my team are supposed to have tested their stuff in their environments before even committing it to the repo, then it spends some time in the QA/test lab before it gets pushed to production. They're not even supposed to commit directly to the main repo, it should be done as a pull-request and someone else at least does an eye-ball review to look for obvious mistakes, which should have been caught by the originator, if they were doing proper testing in their dev environment first. Our basic tooling is github enterprise for source and saltstack is our config management/automation framework. Their work-flow is supposed to basically be: 1 pull latest copy of main repo 2 branch a working set 3 make their changes 4 use something like vagrant to spin up test VMs to test their changes (some people use docker instead of vagrant/virtualbox) 5 loop over 3-4 until it works 6 commit their changes to their branch 7 pull-request to main a. someone else on the team does an eyeball code-review b. other team member performs the merge 8 cherry-pick changes to the next release branch if changes need to go in the next release, PR those picks to the release branches, same process as above for merges. 9 push changes to the test env (test env is running on the next release branch) 10 when QA clears the release, we push to prod on release day. The developers that actually write the software offering have similar workflows for their stuff, except they have a build-system involved to compile & pkg stuff up & put the packages into the package repo which get deployed to test (and eventually prod) with saltstack rules. Our SRE is mostly concerned with making sure the monitoring of everything is up to snuff and the playbooks for acting on alerts is up-to-date and the on-call person can follow it. We have a meeting every other week to go over the alerts & playbooks to make sure that we're keeping things up to date there. He doesn't manage the systems at all, he just makes sure all the moving pieces are properly monitored and we know how to deal with the problems as they come up. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ

2 years, 9 months

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How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World?

by Stuff Received

New book from PUP (that I have not read): "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World Torie Bosch, Ed. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208480/you-are-not-expec… Anyone here know anything about it? N.

2 years, 9 months

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Will someone update the 386BSD Wikipedia page for me?

by Grant Taylor

Hi, Will someone update the 386BSD Wikipedia page for me? Wikipedia doesn't like my IPv6 address at home nor my VPS and I've given up trying to find a way to make the edit myself without breaking IPv6 on my network. The second paragraph of the history page states the following: "The porting process with code was extensively documented in an 18-part series written by Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz in Dr. Dobb's Journal beginning in January 1991." There are only 17 parts to the series. My authoritative source is the DDJ DVD available on The Internet Archive. There are 17 articles, month's listed below. In case my ability to find the article sis called into question, the Tracing BSD System Calls article from DDJ March 1998 states the following in the fourth paragraph. "(see the DDJ series "Porting UNIX to the 386," by William and Lynne Jolitz, January-November 1991 and February-July 1992)" 01 - 91-Jan - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: A PRACTICAL APPROACH - Designing the software specification 02 - 91-Feb - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THREE INITIAL PC UTILITIES - Getting to the hardware 03 - 91-Mar - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE STANDALONE SYSTEM - Creating a protected-mode standalone C programming environment 04 - 91-Apr - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386 LANGUAGE TOOLS CROSS SUPPORT - Developing the initial utilities 05 - 91-May - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386 THE INITIAL ROOT FILESYSTEM - Completing the toolset 06 - 91-Jun - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386 RESEARCH & THE COMMERCIAL SECTOR - Where does BSD fit in? 07 - 91-Jul - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: A STRIPPED-DOWN KERNEL - Onto the initial utilities 08 - 91-Aug - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE BASIC KERNEL - Overview and initialization 09 - 91-Sep - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE BASIC KERNEL - Multiprogramming and Multitasking, Part One 10 - 91-Oct - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE BASIC KERNEL - Multiprogramming and Multitasking, Part II 11 - 91-Nov - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: THE BASIC KERNEL - Device autoconfiguration 12 - 92-Feb - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: DEVICE DRIVERS - Drivers for the basic kernel 13 - 92-Mar - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386 DEVICE DRIVERS - Entering, exiting, and masking processor interrupts 14 - 92-Apr - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386 DEVICE DRIVERS - Getting into and out of interrupt routines 15 - 92-May - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: MISSING PIECES, PART 1 - Completing the 386BSD kernel 16 - 92-Jun - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386 MISSING PIECES II - Completing the 386BSD kernel 17 - 92-Jul - PORTING UNIX TO THE 386 THE FINAL STEP - Running light with 386BSD -- Grant. . . . unix || die

2 years, 11 months

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Re: [TUHS] Re: The MGR window system and the Macintosh

by Dave Horsfall

[ Moved to COFF ] On Thu, 4 Aug 2022, Dan Cross wrote: [...] > It wasn't particularly notable, or at least didn't leave much of an > impression; it presented a pretty "standard" (and primitive!) > graphical experience. I believe it was monochrome, with amber > on black. It also ran on the Applix 1616, an Aussie designed and built 68000 system; it was pretty much ahead of its time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applix_1616 -- Dave

3 years

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Re: [TUHS] Re: The MGR window system and the Macintosh

by Clem Cole

This thread needs to move to COFF to continue - although my own story is 1/2 about BSD and the VAX. On Thu, Aug 4, 2022 at 10:15 PM Al Kossow <aek(a)bitsavers.org> wrote: > On 8/4/22 5:37 PM, Andrew Newman wrote: > > > There's a bunch of AED documentation online, including this... > > > > http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/aed/brochures/AED_767_Brochure_Jun82.pdf < > http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/aed/brochures/AED_767_Brochure_Jun82.pdf> > > I worked at AED before going to Apple, to stay sort of window related, the > last project I worked on at AED was > a VME and Qbus board set that was a complete color X terminal. > I had to chuckle when I read that. In the fall of '82 (I think), we got a Smalltalk VM from PARC at UCB. Dave Unger, Ken Keller, and I - plus some other folks in Patterson's systems seminar who's names I have since forgotten, wrote a VM in C for the VAX/BSD. We used an AED512 and Keller's graphics library from his thesis running over a 19.2 serial link as the output. About a month after we had it running, a couple of us got to visit PARC, and Peter Deutch showed us Smalltalk running on a Dorado. He ran his hand with the mouse across the screen opening and closing a bunch of windows randomly. We started laughing and Peter asked us what was so funny. We told him what he did would have taken at least 5 minutes to redisplay on BSD/VAX version. Clem ᐧ

3 years

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Re: [TUHS] SNOBOL and RATSNO

by Dave Horsfall

I did get SPITBOL to work past its expiry date on OS/360 :-) It was dubbed as the "Superzap of the year" by one of my CompSci lecturers (Dr. G.McMahon, UNSW). The first couple of time-bombs were easy to find, but not so the rest (long story). Probably belongs over on COFF now... -- Dave

3 years

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Awk, not Kaw?

by Stuff Received

As I was (re)reading Bentley's "More Programming Pearls", I saw the following in Sect. 2.6, Further Reading: "Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger designed and built the original Awk language in 1977. (Whatever you do, don't permute the initials of their last names!)" The exclamation mark seems to indicate a background story. Anyone know it? N.

3 years

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