- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dave Horsfall

In 1752 we switched to the Gregorian calendar, with the peasants revolting (as if they weren't already) because they thought they'd lost 11 days of their lives. What does "cal 9 1752" show on your boxes? -- Dave

3 years, 3 months

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Re: [COFF] What does your "cal" show?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall > What does "cal 9 1752" show on your boxes? Given that the source: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/s1/cal.c has been in C since at least V6, I'd be rather surprised if on other machines it did anything other than what those of us who were paying attention read in the documentation: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/man/man6/cal.6 back then: "Try September 1752." Get off my lawn. Noel PS: Said documentation already notes that it won't work in most counries: "The calendar produced is that for England and her colonies." For more fun with calendates, check out the Japanese Lunar-Solar Calendar: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/prints/calendar.html

3 years, 3 months

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1992 Gates, Dell, Joy, Dyson photo

by Charles H Sauer

Maybe not old enough for this list, but some might enjoy https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/61001c736e3fe79457907f91/F… Caption: TECH TITANS WITH BABY FACES: (From left) At the 1992 PC Forum in Arizona, Bill Gates talks with a 27-year-old Dell and Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, while Prediction Company’s Doyne Farmer chats up influential tech newsletter editor and conference organizer Esther Dyson. ‎ Found in https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/08/03/deal-of-the-century-how… -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

3 years, 4 months

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70s Matlab source

by Wesley Parish

I'm wondering, is it still floating around somewhere? Thanks Wesley Parish

3 years, 4 months

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In these COVID times...

by Dave Horsfall

I wonder how many bods rememeber: "Nothing sucks like a VAX!"? -- Dave

3 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] In these COVID times

by Rudi Blom

That rang a Bell with VAX as IBM-killer :-) Even if it's on an MS site it's still a nice article. https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-computer-industr… Take care and stay healthy, uncle rubl >From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> >To: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org> >Cc: >Bcc: >Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 11:54:44 +1000 (EST) >Subject: [COFF] In these COVID times... >I wonder how many bods rememeber: "Nothing sucks like a VAX!"? > >-- Dave -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

3 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released

by Clem Cole

Thank you, Doug. On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 10:22 PM Douglas McIlroy < douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: > The open source movement was a revival of the old days of SHARE and other > user groups. > Amen, my basic point, although I was also trying to pointing at that these user groups got started b*ecause the vendors gave the sources to their products out.* We SHARED patches and features. DECUS started out the same way. For instance, many/most PDP-10 OS's used the DEC compilers and often even found a way to run TOPS-10 binaries by emulating the UUOs. The IBM/360 world worked pretty much the same way. My own experience was that the compilers (e.g WATFIV-FTNG-ALGOLW-PL/1) and language interpreters (APL-Snolbol) for the TSS and MTS had been 'ported' from the IBM-supplied OS [my own first job was doing just that]. The same story was true for the PDP-8 with DOS-8/TSS-8 and the like. By the time of the PDP-11, while some of the DEC source code was available (such as the Fortran-IV for RT-11/RSX), since it took at PDP-10/BLISS to support it, DEC had it its protection - so moving it/stealing it - would have been harder. By the time of the VAX, DEC was charging a lot of money of SW and it was actually a revenue stream, so they keep a lot more locked up and had started to do the same with PDP-10 world. So, the available/unavailable source issue came when things started to get closed up, which really started with the rise of the SW industry and making revenue with the use of your SW. OEMs and IVSs started to be a lot less willing to reveal what they thought was their 'special sauce.' Some/many end-users started to balk. RMS just took it to a new level - just look at how he reacted to Symbolics being closed source :-) The question that used to come up (and still does not an extent) is how are the engineers and teams of people that developed the SW going to be paid/renumerated for their work? The RMS/GNU answer had been service revenue [and living like a student in a rent-controlled APT in Central Sq]. What has happened for most of the biggest FOSS projects, the salaries are paid for firms like my own that pay developers to work on the SW and most FOSS projects die when the developer/maintainer is unable to continue (if not just gets bored). In fact, [I can not say I personally know this - but have read internal memos that make the claim], Intel pays for more Linux developers and now LLVM developers than any firm. What's interesting is that Intel does not really directly sell its HW product to end-users. We sell to others than use our chips to make their products. We have finally moved to the support model for the compilers (I've personally been fighting that battle for 15 years). So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the *idea *of "Open Source" is really not anything new. While it may be new in their lifetime/experience, it is frankly at minimum a sad, if not outright disingenuous, statement for the people to try to imply otherwise because they are unwilling to look back into history and understand, much less accept it as a fact. Trying to rewrite history is just not pretty to witness. And I am pleased to see that a few folks (like Larry) that have lived a little both times have tried to pass the torch with more complete history. Clem. ᐧ

3 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

by John Cowan

[-TUHS] [+COFF] On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 4:06 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote: On ITS it only ever stored characters as full 36-bit words! So sizeof > char == 1 == sizeof int. This is allowed per the C standard. (Maybe it > was updated somewhere else, I dunno.) > The ZETA-C compiler ran on the Symbolics Lisp Machine and translated C into Zetalisp; since everything was a Lisp object, from the C perspective all elementary types had sizeof == 1 also. The modern Vacietis compiler to Common Lisp uses the same design for its data, though it does not share any code. C pointers are represented by CL closures.

3 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

by Lars Brinkhoff

Moved to the COFF list. > Yes, WAITS is what I was thinking of. As I mentioned in my previous > mail, it feels like the SAIL timesharing systems get mentioned briefly > in a lot of accounts of historical computing, sometimes with mention > that they had some sort of (relatively) advanced video terminals, but > no in-depth descriptions of the actual hardware/software environment. I agree WAITS gets very little attention, particularly in relation to the great number of things pioneered at SAIL. I'm involved making emulators for some of the hardware. SAIL started out with a couple PDP-1 timesharing systems with vector displays from Philco. But that's almost a pre historical era. The PDP-6/10 started with another vector system from III. It could support up to 12 displays, but only ever had 6. A raster display system was added in the early 70s. It must have been one of the very first bitmapped display systems. It came from the Data Disc company and used disk for storage. It was dual ported: the computer could write data, and the displays could read. 64 displays were supported. The III and DD displays used the SAIL keyboard which introduced the META key. The Data Disc displays and SAIL keyboard heavily influenced Tom Knight at MIT to make a similar system for their AI lab PDP-10 running ITS.

3 years, 5 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released

by Michael Kjörling

On 14 Jul 2021 22:21 -0400, from douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu (Douglas McIlroy): > IBM provided source code for the Fortran II compiler. More recently than that, for the original IBM PC anyone could get (I believe) the complete schematics, detailed technical information, and a commented ROM BIOS source code listing just by purchasing their Technical Reference for, what, $50 or thereabouts? It certainly wasn't open source according to the Open Source Definition, but it certainly was _available_ to anyone who wanted a copy. What kind of company does that today, in a similar market segment? -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

3 years, 5 months

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