- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

Moving to COFF to avoid the wrath of wkt. On Friday, 7 February 2020 at 18:54:33 -0500, Richard Salz wrote: > BDS C stood for Brain-Damaged Software, it was the work of one guy (Leor > Zolman). I think it was used to build the Mark of the Unicorn stuff > (MINCE, Mince is not complete emacs, and Scribble, a scribe clone). Correct. That's how I came in contact with it (and Emacs, for that matter). Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

5 years, 4 months

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Confused managers (was finger usage (was: pronouncing *nix formulas (was: screen editors)))

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

On Saturday, 8 February 2020 at 9:37:22 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Fri, 7 Feb 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> But over the years I've been surprised how many people have been fooled. > > I'm sure that we've all pulled pranks like that. My favourite was piping > the output of "man" (a shell script on that system) through "Valley Girl" > (where each "!" was followed e.g. by "Gag me with a spoon!" etc). > > Well, $BOSS came into the office after a "heavy" night, and did something > like "man uucp", not quite figuring out what was wrong; I was summoned > shortly afterwards, as I was the only possible culprit... That brings back another recollection, not Unix-related. In about 1978 I was getting fed up with the lack of clear text error messages from Tandem's Guardian operating system. A typical message might be FILE SYSTEM ERROR 011 Yes, Tandem didn't use leading 0 to indicate octal. This basically meant ENOENT, but it was all that the end user saw. By chance I had been hacking in the binaries and found ways to catch such messages and put them through a function which converted them into clear text messages. For reasons that no longer make sense to me, I stored the texts in an external file, which required a program to update it. Early one morning I was playing around with this, and for the fun of it I changed the text for error 11 from "File not found" to "Please enter FUP PURGE ! *" (effectively rm -f *). I was still giggling about this when the project manager came to me and said "Mr. Lehey, I think I've done something silly". Thank God for backups! We were in a big IBM shop, and the operators religiously ran a backup every night. Nothing lost. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] How much Fortran?

by Dave Horsfall

On Fri, 7 Feb 2020, Rudi Blom wrote: >>> Regarding Nasa's Tidbinbilla Tracking station, someone suggested to me >>> they might >>have had MODCOMPs >> >> Dunno about Tidbinbilla, but Parkes ("The Dish") has a roomful of Linux >> boxen; I didn't >have time to enquire further. > > The questions was > > "Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station > during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the details." > > Maybe MODCOMP, but at THAT time for sure no Linux. I didn't say there was.... Where did you get that idea? -- Dave

5 years, 4 months

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(no subject)

by Rudi Blom

>From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> >To: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org> >Cc: >Bcc: >Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2020 07:04:43 +1100 (EST) >Subject: Re: [COFF] How much Fortran? >On Thu, 6 Feb 2020, Rudi Blom wrote: > >>Regarding Nasa's Tidbinbilla Tracking station, someone suggested to me they might >>have had MODCOMPs > >Dunno about Tidbinbilla, but Parkes ("The Dish") has a roomful of Linux boxen; I didn't >have time to enquire further. >-- Dave The questions was "Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the details." Maybe MODCOMP, but at THAT time for sure no Linux. Cheers

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] How much Fortran?

by Rudi Blom

Regarding Nasa's Tidbinbilla Tracking station, someone suggested to me they might have had MODCOMPs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODCOMP Cheers, uncle rubl =========== From: Wesley Parish <wobblygong(a)gmail.com> To: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org> Cc: Bcc: Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2020 14:25:25 +1300 Subject: Re: [COFF] How much Fortran? My thoughts exactly. I was once lucky enough to visit the NASA's Tidbinbilla Tracking Station in the ACT just a few miles out of Canberra c. 1976 or 77, and they had some sizeable minicomputers in their computer room. (How many I don't know.) I imagine they would've been used to record the transmissions on tape and do some preliminary processing, before sending the tapes to NASA HQ in the States for storage and further analysis. I think what NASA did with their early probes would've made Real Programmers (TM) sit up and gasp. :) Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the details. Wesley Parish

5 years, 4 months

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How much Fortran?

by Arthur Krewat

So, given the membership here, I wonder, does anyone have the inside scoop? How much Fortran was used ? https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/01/31/1837209/nasa-is-trying-to-save-…

5 years, 4 months

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The MOO problem and set-uid

by Dave Horsfall

I recall reading in an old manpage that the (patented) set-uid bit was to solved the MOO problem. I've searched around, but cannot find anything relevant. Anyone know? -- Dave

5 years, 4 months

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Huffman - What did he do when he wasn't coding?

by John P. Linderman

I despair of getting an attachment through. Let's hope a link survives. https://www.dropbox.com/s/2lfmrkp34j9z68n/Huffman.jpg?dl=0 The NYC Math Museum (MoMath) had/has an origami exhibit. Seems David Huffman was interested in origami as well as compression.

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Unix quix

by Peter Jeremy

=> coff since it's non-Unix On 2020-Jan-22 13:42:44 -0500, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: >Pretty interesting machine, if you study its instruction set, BTW; with no >stack, subroutines are 'interesting'. "no stack" was fairly standard amongst early computers. Note the the IBM S/360 doesn't have a stack.. The usual approach to subroutines was to use some boilerplate as part of the "call" or function prologue that stashed a return address in a known location (storing it in the word before the function entry or patching the "return" branch were common aproaches). Of course this made recursion "hard" (re-entrancy typically wasn't an issue) and Fortran and Cobol (at least of that vintage) normally don't support recursion for that reason. -- Peter Jeremy

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Unix on Zilog Z8000?

by Clem Cole

Moving to COFF On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 12:53 PM Jon Forrest <nobozo(a)gmail.com> wrote: > As I remember the Z8000 was going to be the great white hope that > would continue Zilog's success with the Z80 into modern times. > But, it obviously didn't happen. > > Why? > A really good question. I will offer my opinion as someone that lived through the times. The two contemporary chips of that time were the Intel 8086 and Z8000. Certainly, between those two, the Zilog chip was a better chip from a software standpoint. The funny part was that Moto had been pushing the 6809 against those two. The story of the IBM/PC and Moto is infamous. Remember the 68K is a skunkworks project and is not something they were talking about it. Why IBM picked 8086/8088 over Z8000 I do not know. I'm >>guessing<< total system cost and maybe vendor preference. The tea, that developed the PC had been using the 8085 for another project, so the jump of vendors to Zilog would have been more difficult (Moto and IBM corporate had been tight for years, MECL was designed by Moto for IBM for the System 360). I do know they picked Intel over the 6809, even though they had the X-series device in Yorktown (just like we had it at Tektronix) and had wanted to use what would become the 68000. In the end, other than Forest's scheme, none of them could do VM without a lot of help. If I had not known about the X-series chip (or had been given a couple of them), I think Roger and I would have used the Z8000 for Magnolia. But I know Roger and I liked it better; as did most of our peeps in Tek Labs at the time. IIRC Our thinking was that Z8000 has an "almost" good enough instruction set, but since many of the processors's addressing modes are missing on some/most of the instructions, it makes writing a compiler more difficult (Bill Wulf used to describe this as an 'irregular' instruction set). And even though the address space was large, you still had to contend with a non-linear segmented address scheme. So I think once the 68000 came on the scene for real, it had the advantage if the best instructions set (all instructions worked as expected, was symmetric) and looked pretty darned near a PDP-11. The large linear address was a huge win and even though it was built as a 16-bit chip internally (i.e. 16-bit barrel shifter and needing 2 ticks for all 32-bit ops), all the registers were defined as 32-bits wide. I think we saw it as becoming a full 32-bit device the soonest and with the least issues.

5 years, 4 months

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