- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Charles H Sauer (he/him)

https://boingboing.net/2025/03/10/make-your-own-virtual-punchcard.html [50 years ago today I started working at IBM Yorktown. My boxes of punchcards from graduate work at UT-Austin were enroute with the movers from Austin, to be fed into VM-370 after they arrived. I wish I had kept those boxes as souvenirs.] Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/mas.to: CharlesHSauer

5 months, 1 week

5
4
0 0

Kids these days....

by norman＠oclsc.org

Remind them that ed (pronounced e d) is the standard editor.

6 months, 1 week

12
12
0 0

Re: Kids these days.... External

by Douglas McIlroy

Besides the first day I sat at the PDP-7 console, one of the biggest Unix thrills came when when I logged in remotely to the new Cray at Bell Labs. Here was a monster machine with a manual I had never seen, and I was able to compile and run a program on it at the first try. God bless sh, ed, cc, and a.out. Doug

6 months, 1 week

1
0
0 0

Kids these days....

by Dan Cross

File under "What a Drag it is Getting Old".... My kids have now reached the age where they have started to mock me. Not only must I contend with the fact that I'm not cool anymore (if, indeed, I ever really was) but I also realize that I have no idea what the slang they're using means. None whatsoever; it's all unintelligible gibberish to me. They clearly revel in my ignorance. But I have found a way to get even: I have started spelling out commands verbally, punctuated with random words, and … [View More]

6 months, 1 week

1
0
0 0

Source for a vaguely Bourne-like shell, no signals

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, this is a pretty weird question to ask. I've been extending the RISC-V version of xv6 to have a decent libc and some userland programs: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/xv6-riscv-fuzix There's a minimalist shell and my own 'wish' shell; neither have any scripting capability. Also, as it stands there are no signals implemented. I'd love a Bourne-ish shell to write shell scripts, but I've had a hard time finding one that I can snip out the signal handling code. If you have any suggestions,… [View More]

7 months

1
1
0 0

Re: [TUHS] "Webster's Second on the Head of a Pin"?

by sjenkin＠canb.auug.org.au

Not dissimilar work at AT&T Research ~2000 - compressing fixed-length records, better than gzip, +30% for similar compute time. ‘pzip’ - Adam Bushman & Glen Fowler <https://web.archive.org/web/20041019142227/http://www.research.att.com/~gsf…> Later work by others, building on ‘pzip’ ,claims ‘100x’. > On 30 Dec 2024, at 00:44, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > I can supply a copy if no one else has beaten me to it. > > Ron … [View More]

7 months, 3 weeks

1
0
0 0

DEC computer Christmas carols

by Paul Winalski

The PDP-10 had an alarm bell that could be rung under program control. When the TOPS-10 operating system crashed, it displayed a numeric code on the console indicating the reason for the crash. This was called a "stopcode" and is the equivalent of a Unix panic. It also rang the alarm bell. DDT (Dynamic Debugging Tool) was the primary debugger for TOPS-10. PPN (Project-Programmer Number) was used for system security. Each user account was assigned by number to a Project, and within that … [View More]

8 months, 1 week

1
0
0 0

Re: [TUHS] After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?

by Douglas McIlroy

Apropos of file types, which Rich Salz commends Unix for discarding. Early in Multics development, I and others visited various influential time-sharing systems in search of good ideas. I tried each one on a simple model of software updating, in particular of remaking a compiler. In every instance I could not make my program work without expert help to get past file-type barriers. My model was based on a trivial Fortran program that copied input to output until an input line with END in … [View More]

8 months, 2 weeks

1
0
0 0

AI and spin locks

by Warren Toomey

I was just trying to find out if there was a way of uploading the TUHS mailing list as a corpus of text into a LLM so that I could ask questions based on the knowledge contained therein. I'm not having much luck yet. Anyway, while messing around with things I asked a simple question and got this answer: What is a spin lock? A spin lock, also known as a spinning lock or spinning lock mechanism, is a type of mechanical locking device used to secure and protect sensitive electronic … [View More]

8 months, 3 weeks

9
11
0 0

[TUHS] Re: Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

by Douglas McIlroy

> Curiously, Robert Martin's in the acknowledgements for K&R > (I forget which edition). I guess he read an early draft? I didn't find Robert Martin in the long list of acknowledgements in the preface to the second edition. But any such acknowledgement would certainly be to Bob Martin, a savvy Bell Labs executive whose advice was always welcome. He is acknowledged in Aho and Ullman's "Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling", but not in the Dragon Book. I have never seen a … [View More]

8 months, 3 weeks

2
1
0 0

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

COFF