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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by Dave Horsfall

On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Steve Nickolas wrote: > 86-DOS actually did use ":" as a prompt character. This was changed for > IBM's release, for some clone releases, and for MS-DOS 2.0. The best I've ever seen was RT-11's "." - talk about minimalist... Actually this thread probably belongs on COFF by now. -- Dave

5 years, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] Comparative promptology

by Arthur Krewat

Sorry, sent a picture along with this, but it got rejected because it was too big ;) > On 10/28/2019 3:10 PM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: >> I was bound to happen. List all the prompts! >> "*" seems popular on PDP-10s. > > Que? The only PDP-10 prompt that matters is "." > > The other less-desired (by me) is @ > > art k.

5 years, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code

by Peter Jeremy

[Redirecting to COFF] On 2019-Oct-20 00:02:56 +0530, Abhinav Rajagopalan <abhinavrajagopalan(a)gmail.com> wrote: >Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish >gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral >equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines >such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated >on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. My 1st edition Wilkes, Wheeler, Gill[1] documents that, by 1951, EDSAC[2] had a floating-point library that supported addition, subtraction and multiplication (no division) of numbers with 23-27 bits of precision and a range of 1e-63 to 1e63. EDSAC was much less powerful than a PDP-7. Writing a floating-point library is not that difficult, though getting the rounding correct for all the edge cases is tricky. Actually using floating-point and avoiding the pitfalls can be harder - see (eg) https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html (though https://floating-point-gui.de/ may be more approachable). [1] https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC -- Peter Jeremy

5 years, 7 months

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Linux & UNIX Humble Bundle of ebooks

by Michael Kjörling

Here's something I think some people here just might be interested in. Humble Bundle is offering (for another just over a week; until 2019-10-21 18:00 -11:00) a "Linux & UNIX" ebook bundle from O'Reilly, consisting of: (at USD 1.00 or more) - Classic Shell Scripting, 1st Edition - Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition - Introducing Regular Expressions, 1st Edition - grep Pocket Reference, 1st Edition - Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition - Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition (at USD 8.00 or more, all the above _plus_) - Learning the bash Shell, 3rd Edition - Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition - Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition - sed & awk, 2nd Edition (at USD 15.00 or more, all the above _plus_) - bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition - Linux System Programming, 2nd Edition - Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition - Effective awk Programming, 4th Edition - Linux Pocket Guide, 3rd Edition All in .mobi, .pdf and .epub formats, free of DRM. Some of the proceeds from this offering go to Code for America. No affiliation; just a happy customer. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

5 years, 8 months

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subscribe

by Jacob Ritorto

5 years, 8 months

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[was TUHS] Pr1me and GT-SWT

by Clem Cole

At the risk of this drifting, it probably should move over to the COFF mailing list, which I have CC'ed. I'll do this one last one here so people not yet on COFF that want to follow up can see it. On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 2:27 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote: > It was bizarre and ugly. The only thing that made it anywhere > near usable were the Software Tools. > Amen... (more in a minute) > > There's a reason Prime died pretty quickly once Unix started to > spread. The architecture also was strange; the characters used > mark parity (8th bit always on). > Yeah, it was an interesting box. Fast and cost-effective for its time and an excellent Fortran system which why they did as well as they did. > > My 2 cents. > > Arnold > You probably know this but you folks had a huge influence on the Pr1mates. So much so when Bill P, Paul L, and Michael S. left Pr1me to create Apollo, the used your version of the SWT as their first command system for Aegis (*a.k.a.* DOMAIN OS). They did not quite get it that they needed a real UNIX, so they roped tjt and myself from Masscomp went we all formed Belmont (*a.k.a.* Stellar in a later renaming). But they did recognize it was useful and people wanted to use that style of interface, not something dreamed up specific to that machine. I remember trying to explain to Bill the difference - he's a vision guy, but primarily a hardware type, although one of the most amazing people I have ever known. IMO: Leach never really understood the Unix ideas of being simple (which is one of the reasons why Windows has that forsaken registry sin from Aegis, he brought it with him from Apollo to MSFT). I used to argue with him about it in the 1980s (he hated/thought ASCII text files were terrible and he should control everything in some framework or privileged API).

5 years, 8 months

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Stallman resigns under pressure from CSAIL and FSF.

by Dan Cross

Richard Stallman, known colloquially as 'RMS', has resigned from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Free Software Foundation, after making comments defending Jeffrey Epstein, the late sexual predator. Those comments sparked wide-spread outrage across the MIT community and beyond. https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#16_September_2019_(Resignat… https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns - Dan C.

5 years, 8 months

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Re: [COFF] Stallman resigns under pressure from CSAIL and FSF.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > If it really was just about his views, his views have been consistent > for a long time and MIT didn't care. The outrage over Epstein is so un-balanced I have a strong desire to vomit. Not that I have any feeling at all that Epstein didn't deserve what he got. My disgust is that Roman Polanksi, who did exactly the same thing to a 13-year old, was defended and lionized by a long list of entertainment world figures after his arrest in Switzerland - many of whom are now falling all over themselves to condemn Epstein. If and when the mob howling over Epstein takes out after Polanki in the exact same manner, then I'll take them seriously. Until then, they're a bunch of virtue-signalling cretins. Noel

5 years, 8 months

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Eternal September

by Dave Horsfall

'Twas back in 1993 when AOL joined USENET (I don't have an exact date) and the joint was never the same since... Me too! These days, of course, it's been taken over by the spammer scum. -- Dave

5 years, 9 months

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Happy birthday, John Mauchly!

by Dave Horsfall

We gained computer pioneer John Mauchly on this day in 1907; he was best known as the co-inventor of ENIAC, one of the world's first computers. -- Dave

5 years, 9 months

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