- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Paul Palmer

Nice article https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-computers-algorithm… Near the end, in the picture labelled "a few notes" you can see the corner of what looks like a calculator. Can anybody identify it?

4 years, 8 months

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Re: [COFF] Calculator

by Paul Palmer

Heres the article https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-computers-algorithm… On Sat, Aug 1, 2020, 10:13 PM Paul Palmer <paul.allan.palmer(a)gmail.com wrote: > From an article on knuth. A corner of an early calculator of his. Can > anyone identify? > > > >

4 years, 8 months

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was: [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation

by Will Senn

On 8/1/20 9:13 AM, Larry McVoy wrote: > My dad wasn't famous, but he had a PhD in physics. He never asked people > to call him Dr McVoy. As we grew up and realized he could be called that > we asked him why not. He said it sounds fancy, the only time he used it > was when he wanted a table at a crowded restaurant (which was very rare, > Madison didn't pay him very well). > > Somehow that stuck with me and I've always been sort of wary of people > who use their title. The people I admire never did. > > Someone on the list said that they thought Dennis wouldn't appreciate > it if we got his PhD official. I couldn't put my finger on it at the > time, but I agreed. And I think it is because the people who are really > great don't need or want the fancy title. I may be over thinking it, > but Dennis does not need the title, it does nothing to make his legacy > better, his legacy is way way more than that title. > > Which is a long ramble to say I agree with Markus. I agree with your dad, completely, it's fancy. I too am uncomfortable with the title. I think it's because I was a street kid and as the saying goes, you can take the kid out of the street, but you can't take the street out of the kid. I work in the academy, so it's prevalent, but I find it pretentious to insist on people calling you doctor. I ask people to just call me Will. It's interesting to watch the reactions. Some folks are glad to, some are fearful to (mostly students), and some outright reject the proposition (mostly those pretentious types). With regards to Dennis and his view on things, I haven't the slightest clue, but if someone were to present him with an honorary degree, it would be their attempt to recognize his exemplary contributions and would not be meant as anything other than highest praise. As someone who loves programming in C, I'm a direct beneficiary of his legacy and would gladly support his being recognized in this manner. I know several people who have been granted honorary doctorates, at least one of who had no prior degree. They accepted and enjoyed telling their close friends about their now having to call them doctor, but otherwise taking it as a compliment and honor and not bothering about the title. Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > I have seen conflicting information in sources dating from the 70s when > the TV-11 and XGP-11 were very much in use. > For several reasons, I believe the TV-11 was the first machine attached > to the 10-11 interface, and the XGP-11 came second. This would lend > some weak support for the theory that the first would be a 11/20 and the > second a 11/10. Yeah, but Clem's note reinforces my vague memory that the XGP-11 was an -11/20. I wish we had a picture of the Knight TV system (the system, not a terminal). It's a extremely significant system - I believe it my have been the first bit-mapped computer display system ever; and thus the prototype, in some sense, for the display of every single personal compupter (including phones) now extant - and so there _ought_ to be a photo of it. But looking online for a while, I can turn up almost nothing about it! (I guess we should do a page about it on the CHWiki...) (Repeat my prior grump about how the AI Lab did all sorts of ground-breaking stuff, because it was just 'tools', and not their main research focus, it's hard to find out about a lot of it, e.g. the inter-ITS network file system.) But if you can find an image, even a low-res picture of that end of the AI Lab machine room, we can tell what model the TV-11 is - early 11's had inteagrated front panels, which are different for every model: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/PDP-11_Models.html so you don't even need to be able to read anything to tell a /20 from a /10. It was in a dual (I think - maybe triple, it's been a looooooong time :-) rack which IIRC was along the side wall (i.e. the short building side) next to the AI KA10 (which was sort of along the long wall, up in the corner). I don't know if the XGP-11 code is still extant (my copy of the ITS filesystem is offline right at the moment), but even if we look at the code, I'm not sure we could tell; there are some _very minor_ programming differences between the /20 and /10 (e.g. V bit on SWAB) - see the table at thd end of the PDP-11 Architecture Handbook - but I'd be aurprised if the code used any. Surely there has to be _some_ picture of the machine room which shows it, even if in the background. > I did bring it up with TK at some point. Try RG, too. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Angelo Papenhoff > Well the TV-11 is a tough question. I originally wrote an 11/05 emulator > because some document said it was an 11/10 (which is the same thing). > But other sources claimed it was an 11/20. Hmmm. My memory was that it was an -11/05-10 (they are identical, except for the paint on the front panel; and I don't recall it in enough detail to say), but perhaps I'm wrong? Or maybe it was an -11/20 early, and then it got replaced with an -11/10? (I have a _very_ vague memory that the XGP's -11 was a /20, bur I wouldn't put much weight on that.) Moon or TK or someone might remember better. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Will pdp 11/04 run unix?

by Lars Brinkhoff

Angelo Papenhoff wrote: > Noel Chiappa wrote: >> If the KE11 is needed to run some application on the -11/04, there >> are KE11-B's (program compatible, but a single hex card) available, >> ISTR. For emulation, something (SIMH?) supports it, since the TV -11 >> on ITS (now running in emulation,I'm pretty sure) uses it. > > Well the TV-11 is a tough question. I originally wrote an 11/05 emulator > because some document said it was an 11/10 (which is the same thing). > But other sources claimed it was an 11/20. To clarify, the emulated TV-11 is *not* in any way based on SIMH. There are more machines to potentially hook up to the 10-11 interface, but I'm quite unsure if SIMH is the right vehicle for those. But this is now clearly out of TUHS territory. CC to coff only.

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Traditional method of dealing with embedded shar files

by Adam Thornton

"You'd be out of your mind to blindly run the shell on some anonymous shar file..." But but but all the cool kids tell you to install their new Javascript framework with: "curl https://rocketviagra.ru/distro/latest.sh | sudo /bin/bash" Get offa my lawn. On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 7:01 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > On Fri, 24 Jul 2020, Random832 wrote: > > > For whatever it's worth, you can do the exact same thing as vi with sed > > in this case: 1,/====/d > > It's been a while since I had to use it, but didn't "unshar" do this sort > of thing, and in a safe manner too? You'd be out of your mind to blindly > run the shell on some anonymous shar file... > > -- Dave >

4 years, 9 months

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Fwd: This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World’s Longest Cave

by Clem Cole

If you'll old enough to remember 'ADVENT' and been around the geeks when it was a craze on the ARPA-net in the late 70s. You might find this article which was in my feed last night: https://onezero.medium.com/the-woman-who-inspired-one-of-the-first-hit-vide… fun. For those that did not, it was the world's first adventure game (no graphics, just solving a series of puzzles while wandering through a cave). It was originally written in Fortran-IV for the PDP-10/20 with a small assembler assist to handle RAD50 for the input. [FYI: MIT'S Haystack observatory is about 2 miles as the crow flies from my house on the top of hill next over, in the town next to mine, Westford. Groton, MA is the town after that]. This article is an interesting read (about 20 mins) with stuff I never knew. I knew a divorced Will Crowthers worked at BBN and wrote the game Adventure for his daughters to play when they visited him. I also knew that he had been a caver and that the cave in the game was modeled after Kentucky's Mammoth Caves. I did not know until a few years ago, [from a friend of my wife's, Madeliene Needles] that at some time they were living in Groton (because Crothers' ex-wife was working at Haystack with Madeliene for a while). As this article tells the story, it was Patricia Crowthers who actually did the mapping work. FWIW: As a fun factoid, today, the Stanford version is one of the tests used by the old DEC and now the Intel Fortran-2018 compiler to verify that the compiler can still compile fixed format FORTRAN-IV and ensure the resulting program still works. And of course, 'packrat Clem;' my own 'advent' map is in my filing cabinet in the basement. Written on the back of '132 column green bar' computer paper of course. Clem For the folks that are interested, more good stuff including a number of versions of the code can be found at: https://rickadams.org/adventure/

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [COFF] BTL Pranks

by John P. Linderman

> Did the non-Unix people also pull pranks like the watertower? Every year when our director, Arun Netravali of center 1135, went on vacation, Scott Knauer, a department head, would pull some kind of stunt. One year he covered the carpeting in Arun's office with green astroturf, so it looked like half of a tennis court. Another year, he recruited many of us to blow up balloons, which he collected in Arun's office by aiming a huge fan in that direction, while we pitched inflated balloons into the corridor. Scott, being Scott, completely topped off the balloons by lifting the ceiling tiles near the office door. I recall walking into Building 3 on the day Arun was scheduled to return and seeing balloons struggling to escape from every open window of his office. Building 3 lacked the large stairwells like the one that housed the Peter face made of magnets. But Scott compensated by projecting Arun's image along a long corridor, and covering it with magnets, so Arun's face was visible on a sidewall as you approached the end of the corridor. I found the playful attitude at the Labs in general as an indicator of out-of-the-box thinking that a research organization thrives on.

4 years, 9 months

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Fwd: The Xerox Information Outlet Commercial - Looking at her future in the 1970s

by Clem Cole

As some of us remember this commercial. Predicting the future. Note that Ethernet is a bus topology at this point. Anyway, Allen Kay recently uploaded a copy of the wonderful and futurist “Xerox Information Outlet TV commercial to YouTube.” A number of us think it aired in the late 70s’, early ‘80s* i.e. *around the time of DEC/Xerox/Intel “Blue Book” definition of Ethernet. I understand the back story on the commercial is this: The PARC guys did the drawing on the wall with a pale blue pencil so the actor would see it, but the camera wouldn’t. All he had to do was trace the lines. Take 1. His delivery was perfect in but his drawing looked like a giant smashed spider. Take 2. Again, a flawless reading. This time his work of art was about 11”x17”. You had to squint to see it. The director yelled, cut! Then he said to the actor, “Come here for a second.” He came forward. “Turn around,” said the director. The actor did an about-face. They both stared at the wall. Like talking to a 4-year old, the director said, “Look...what... you... did.” “Whoops!” said the talent. Take 3. The drawing was great but he flubbed the last. .. ah damn… Take 4. Started out fine. We held our breath. Good...good...good. “...and...Cut!! Perfect!” The director shouted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2WgFpyL2Pk

4 years, 9 months

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