- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Adam Thornton

> On Dec 9, 2019, at 5:30 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > Moo and hunt-the-wumpus got quite a lot of play > both in the lab and at home. Wump was an instant > hit with my son who was 4 or 5 years old at the > time. > > Amusingly, I speculated on how to generate degree-3 > graphs for wump, but obviously not very deeply. It > was only much later that I realized the graph > always had the same topology--a dodecahedron. You know, maybe we’ve been looking at this wrong the whole time (I blame Yob). Maybe the caves aren’t the vertices of a dodecahedron. Maybe they’re the faces of an icosahedron. Adam

5 years

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Happy birthday, Ada Lovelace and JFO!

by Dave Horsfall

Bit hard to classify this one; separate posts since COFF was created? Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron), was born on this day in 1815; arguably the world's first computer programmer and a highly independent woman, she saw the potential in Charles Babbage's new-fangled invention. J.F.Ossanna was given unto us on this day in 1928; a prolific programmer, he not only had a hand in developing Unix but also gave us the ROFF series. Who'ld've thought that two computer greats would share the same birthday? -- Dave

5 years

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Re: [COFF] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff >> PARC's MAXC appears in the mid-1970s. > Maybe this is a good time to ask if anyone knows whether any of those > diverse systems has software preserved? Specifically, the > implementation of the NCP and 1822 Host-to-IMP protocols? Both MAXC's were PDP-10 re-implementations, and ran TENEX. So the basic system is still around, not sure if they had any interesting local hacks (well, probably PUP support; MIT tried to put it in MIT-XX, so it may still exist on thats backup tapes). > From: Rob Gingell gingell at computer.org > A collection of maps of the ARPAnet over time is available from the > Computer History Museum Interesting; I also have a large collection of maps: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpanet.html#Maps all with hi-res versions (click on the thumbnails). Some of the ones at the CHM I don't have, but the coverage time-wise is similar. I also have a modest collection of hosts.txt files, ranging from Jul-77 to Apr-94. > I've forgotten at this point whether the assignments were documented in > RFCs or other assigned numbers documents from the Network Information Center The first 'Assigned numbers' RFC was #739, from November 1977. It never contained host addresses. There were a very few early RFC's which contained host adresses (#226, #229, #236), but pretty quickly host addresses were done via the hosts.txt file, distributed from the NIC. (Given the churn rate, using RFC's didn't make sense.) Early RFCs about this are #606 and #627. There were a bunch of RFC's that reported on 'host status' (e.g. how their software was doing), but their goal was different. PS: A number of people are leaving out the definite article before 'ARPANET'; this seems to be popular these days (especially in the UK it seems, not sure why), but it is incorrect. Also, the correct spelling is all capitals (check e.g. through old RFCs). Until of course the AP gets their hands on it (I'm breathlessly awaiting their announcement that the U.S. President's reference is to be referred to as the 'white house'). Noel

5 years

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ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by Dave Horsfall

The ARPAnet reached four nodes on this day in 1969 (anyone know their names?); at least one "history" site reckoned the third node was connected in 1977 (and I'm still waiting for a reply to my correction). Well, I can believe that perhaps there were only three left by then... Hmmm... According to my notes, the nodes were UCSB, UCLA, SRI, and Utah. -- Dave

5 years

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Happy birthday, John Backus!

by Dave Horsfall

As every computer programmer should know, John Backus was emitted in 1924; he gave us the BNF syntax, but the sod also gave us that FORTRAN obscenity... Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any syntax; it is completely ad-hoc. -- Dave

5 years

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Re: [COFF] Xinu

by Warren Toomey

Wesley wrote: > I would second that. His Xinu book was one of the two that helped > demystify operating systems for me. > Wesley Parish I've moved this over to COFF as it's only tangentially related to Unix. As a undergraduate I found Doug Comer's Xinu book in the library. At the time, I was learning C but I only had an Apple ][+ clone which didn't have a C compiler. Therefore (obviously), I hand-recoded Xinu in assembly, built a 555 timer circuit, connected it to the IRQ line on the 6502 and got Xinu up and running (with a shell, with my own ls, with redirection etc.) on my Apple ][+ clone: ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/pub/apple2/apple2xinu.tar.gz Yes, crazy I know. Cheers, Warren

5 years

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In memoriam: Maurice Wilkes

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Sir Maurice Wilkes FRS FREng on this day in 2010; he was known for his work on EDSAC, microprogramming, etc. -- Dave

5 years

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further off topic w.r.t. Unix - NTBACKUP [was Re: Someone wants to use an exabyte

by Charles H Sauer

[clearly not Unix related, so posting to COFF] On 11/27/2019 1:31 PM, John Foust wrote: > The tougher task was trying to find contemporary tools that could process the data stream from an old NTBACKUP, especially a stream with corruption from missing chunks, as I wasn't in the mood to try to rebuild an NT machine with SCSI to let NTBACKUP deal with the drive directly, and I think it would probably fail harder on direct drive errors. If I recall correctly, the XP Pro* version of NTBACKUP is compatible with, and an improvement over, the NT4 version in dealing with tapes and will also deal with file images of tapes. I will probably remember a lot better soon, because I want to look for some files that I thought I had archived on disk but seem to have lost. If I have them, they're on DDS-2 or DDS-3. Again, IIRC, SCSI is not hard to deal with with XP. An old Dell, with Dell XP install CD, should be relatively easy to setup with various Adaptec cards. I don't know about other brands w.r.t. license keys. I plan to use a Dell Dimension 8300 that I used to look at some Dell UNIX DDS-2 cartridges. It dual boots Fedora & XP, but I still need to verify that XP doesn't need anything more for the HP DAT drive I have, and dig out cartridges that might have what I want. My recollection is the NT4 required tape drive specific drivers but that XP does not. Lastly, again IIRC, Microsoft removed and/or broke NTBACKUP when Vista came out. CHS *XP Home didn't have NTBACKUP, but the Pro binary works on Home. -- 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

5 years

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In memoriam: Ada Lovelace

by Dave Horsfall

Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, was lost to us in 1852 from uterine cancer. Regarded as the first computer programmer and a mathematical prodigy (when such things were unseemly for a mere woman), she was the daughter of Lord Byron, and a friend of Charles Babbage. -- Dave

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EDSAC replica switched on

by Dave Horsfall

A replica of EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was switched on at Bletchley Park on this day in 2014; EDSAC was the first practical general purpose stored program electronic computer (and how's that for hair-splitting?). -- Dave

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