I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources
on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the
Seventh Edition:
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html
Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome.
(It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories
directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)
In article by Robertdkeys(a)aol.com:
> Warren... is there a non-broken 4.3BSD-Tahoe set somewhere?
> Bob
As in a bootable 4.3BSD-Tahoe kit? As far as I know, no. The Unix Archive
has a broken copy in 4BSD/Distributions/4.3BSD-Tahoe, indicating that
both usr.tar and src.tar are broken.
It might/should be possible to merge files from the CRSG CD set from Kirk
to recreate these tar files.
Anybody out there have an unbroken Tahoe release?
Warren
So the DLVJ1 has four serial ports. According to the info at
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/hardwar…
they essentially appear as four separate gizmos, with independant CSRs
and vectors. So should I therefore set NKL to 5 (the console plus
these four) and then have appropriate entries for devices 1 through 4
in /etc/dtab? Sounds like it.
My DHV11 seems to work happily, so I already have rediculously more
serial ports than I need.
--
David Evans (NeXTMail/MIME OK) dfevans(a)bbcr.uwaterloo.ca
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer/Synth Junkie http://bbcr.uwaterloo.ca/~dfevans/
University of Waterloo "Default is the value selected by the composer
Ontario, Canada overridden by your command." - Roland TR-707 Manual
The earliest UNIX Programmer's Manual to describe shell
pipelines is the Third Edition, February 1973. It gives a
syntax quite different from the modern one:
com1 > com2 > com3 > outfile
meant what we would now write as
com1 | com2 | com3 > outfile
This original syntax was pretty cumbersome; pretty
obviously it was put in as a quick hack (as were many
things in those early days). Because > and < applied
only to the following word, pipelined commands with
arguments had to be quoted:
who > "grep ken" >/tmp/kenlogins
Even worse, the shell had no inherent way to tell whether
the final word was a file or a program; if the last element
in a pipeline was to write to standard output, you had to
say so explicitly:
who > "grep ken" >
On the other hand the syntax was symmetric: you could
also write
"grep ken" < who <
pipe(II) also debuted in the Third Edition.
By the Fourth Edition (November 1973) there had evidently
been more time to think about the syntax; the modern notation
is shown, except that ^ is allowed as a synonym for |. I have
long guessed that was because in those dark days of the
past, some upper-case-only terminals (remember stty lcase?)
offered no way to type | (and perhaps likewise {}`~) but I don't
really know. Dennis?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
>I've been searching for some reference to the ^ symbol being the same a | in
>Bourne shell. Does anyone remember seeing anything like this? I've searched
>the early manpages to no avail.
Look at
http://www.ba-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/v6/doc/index.html
for the Unix V6 sh(I) man page.
Greetings,
Wolfgang
As Norman said, the earliest notation for
pipes used an extension (or abuse) of the semantics
of > and < .
Warren's memory of what Salus wrote (it's on p. 52-53)
is correct about the introduction of | (though I suspect
that McIlroy (whom Salus quotes) is being kind to me
when he said "he [Ken] couldn't bear to reveal my [Doug's]
ugly syntax." Actually, I was responsible for the
particular < and > syntax as implemented, although the
whole idea came from much earlier on blackboard-only
ideas, and the blackboard was Doug's.
As to the original question: probably the ^ as an alternative
to | (which does seem to be there from the start, i.e. 4th
Edition) did have to do with character-set convenience
on upper-case-only terminals. The TTY driver accepted
\! as an escape for |, but this was somewhat of a pain.
Dennis
> From: "Lange, David" <Extern.David.Lange(a)gedas.com>
> To: "'tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org'" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
> Subject: [TUHS] The ^ = | ?
>
> Greetings,
>
> I've been searching for some reference to the ^ symbol being the same a | in
> Bourne shell. Does anyone remember seeing anything like this? I've searched
> the early manpages to no avail.
It's here in my printed copy of the 6th Edition Unix Programmer's Manual.
Page entitled SH(I)
Section DESCRIPTION
Subsection Command lines. One or more commands separated by '|' or '^'
constitute a chain of filters. . . .
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
clowenst(a)ucsd.edu
Greetings,
I've been searching for some reference to the ^ symbol being the same a | in
Bourne shell. Does anyone remember seeing anything like this? I've searched
the early manpages to no avail.
Regards,
D.
> I've been searching for some reference to the ^ symbol being the same a |
Yes, pre Bourne shell, edition 6 and earlier used ^ for piped. Also chdir
insteads of the shortened 'cd'
I'm trying to run 2.11 BSD on the p11 emulator...
The 2.11 BSD boot image I'm using is 211_on_rl2
(which works on sim, but without network sup-
port).
Before downloading 2.11_rp_unknown.gz that seems
to work for sure with p11 (at least I found enough
posts hinting at that), I would like to know if
anybody has successfully used the 211_on_rl2 distro
to boot 2.11 BSD on p11.
My results so far are p11 boots (after FIGHTING
with p11conf), recognizes the 4 rl and 5 rk disks
and images and gives me a @-prompt.
Telnetting to the defined ports won't do :-(
Any hints anybody?
--
M. Giegerich, mail: migieger(a)vsnl.com, phone: +91.(0)80.5530154
