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.)
Hi,
I successfully made SIMH VAX-11/780 emulator run 32V, 3BSD and 4.0BSD.
Details are on my web site (thogh rather tarse):
http://zazie.tom-yam.or.jp/starunix/
Enjoy!
Naoki Hamada
nao(a)tom-yam.or.jp
> The wikipedia description
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_(phototypesetter)>
> seems pretty accurate although I have never seen the beast myself.
I can confirm the wikipedia description. At Bell Labs, however, we
did not use paper tape input. As soon as the machine arrived, Joe
Ossanna bypassed the tape reader so the C/A/T could be driven
directly from the PDP-11. The manufacturer was astonished.
The only operational difficulty we had was with the separate
developer. If you didn't hand feed the end of the paper perfectly
straight into that machine, the paper would tear. Joe Condon
fixed that by arranging for the canister to sit on rollers so
it could give when the paper pulled sideways.
The first technical paper that came off the C/A/T drew a query
from the journal editor, who'd never seen a phototypeset
manuscript before: had it been published elsewhere?
Doug
> Didn't the BSTJ get phototypeset on your typesetter??
Not that I know of. But Charlie Brown's office did use it.
Brown, the CEO of AT&T, did not like wearing reading glasses
when he made a speech, so his speechwriters produced the
text in large type. Once they were into document preparation
they began to use our machine for other things. When I
discovered that confidential minutes of AT&T board meetings
were in our file system, I told them the facts of life
about computer security, especially at the center of the
UUCP universe, and persuaded the executive suite to get
its own machine.
Doug
the one at WH was directly connected to a vax 11/780, no paper tape either.
so that now finally explains why /dev/cat was write only, it was substituted
for a paper tape reader. it was always a curiosity that you could write
to it, yet never read it (i.e. get a status). a "cat /dev/cat" would
get you a "cat: cannot open /dev/cat" while a "cat /some/file > /dev/cat"
would succeed, but act like you used /dev/null instead
(as /some/file was not valid phototypeseter input)
> From: Doug McIlroy
>
> > The wikipedia description
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_(phototypesetter)>
> > seems pretty accurate although I have never seen the beast myself.
>
> I can confirm the wikipedia description. At Bell Labs, however, we
> did not use paper tape input. As soon as the machine arrived, Joe
> Ossanna bypassed the tape reader so the C/A/T could be driven
> directly from the PDP-11. The manufacturer was astonished.
>
> The only operational difficulty we had was with the separate
> developer. If you didn't hand feed the end of the paper perfectly
> straight into that machine, the paper would tear. Joe Condon
> fixed that by arranging for the canister to sit on rollers so
> it could give when the paper pulled sideways.
>
> The first technical paper that came off the C/A/T drew a query
> from the journal editor, who'd never seen a phototypeset
> manuscript before: had it been published elsewhere?
>
> Doug
>
Look at United States Patent 4074285
http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US4074285.pdf
Figure 1 is identical to the machine I ran at Whippany Bell Labs
in the early to mid 80s. It was about 4 1/2 feet tall
Figure 4 is the font wheel (seen as 16 in Fig 1) there were 4 distinct
sectors, each with a different font. One with Times Roman, one with
Times Roman Bold, one with Times Roman Italic and the last was the
symbol fonts (math, greek chars, left hand (\lh right hand \(rh etc. and
this one was made specifically for the Labs as it had a Bell Logo \(bs on it)
The paper was a roll of photo paper, glossy on the text side, rough on
the reverse, it was thick. It would end up going into the cassette
(20 in Fig 1) and would need to be developed. Not shown in the patent
figures was the developing and drying apparatus. At the end of
a job the exposed paper was in the cassette you'd remove
it from the typesetter and put into a device with rollers that would pull
it out and run it thru developer and fixer liquid chemicals. Exiting
that it would go into a dryer drum.
After it was completly dry, as it was still a continuous roll, you
would need to cut all the pages apart by hand (that is why there was
the cut mark macro (.CM) is -ms so you could tell where to cut)
As it came from a roll, no pages ever layed completely flat.
The checmical baths were nasty smelling and it gummed up the rollers.
You'd needed to regularly take the developer roller and gear guts into
the janitor's closet and scrub it with a toothbrush in the slop sink
under running water.
By the second half of the 80s it was replaced by QMS PostScript
laser printers.
> From: "Jacob Goense" <dugo(a)xs4all.nl>
> All, I'm looking for images of the cat device as mentioned several
> times in the 7th edition manual, see e.g. TROFF(1)and CAT(4).
>
> From what I gathered during my digs is that it should look like a
> GSI 8400, but that didn't help. Anyone here who can help me find out
> what these machines looked like? A picture would be the best, but
> information on what to look for in images of unnamed typesetters will
> do as well.
>
> /Jacob
>
>
All, I'm looking for images of the cat device as mentioned several
times in the 7th edition manual, see e.g. TROFF(1)and CAT(4).
>From what I gathered during my digs is that it should look like a
GSI 8400, but that didn't help. Anyone here who can help me find out
what these machines looked like? A picture would be the best, but
information on what to look for in images of unnamed typesetters will
do as well.
/Jacob
Hi all.
This may be of some interest. From a friend at Utah:
> Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 16:06:25 -0700 (MST)
> Subject: [it-professionals] computer history: Arpanet IMPs resurrected
>
> The simh list about simulators for early computers recently carried
> traffic about an effort to reconstruct and resurrect the Arpanet
> Interface Message Processors (IMPs), which were the network boxes that
> connected hosts on the early Arpanet, which later became the Internet.
>
> There is a draft of a paper about the work here:
>
> The ARPANET IMP Program: Retrospective and Resurrection
> http://walden-family.com/bbn/imp-code.pdf
>
> Utah was one of the original gang-of-five hosts on the Arpanet, and we
> received IMP number 4. Utah is mentioned twice in the article, and
> also appears in the map in Figure 3 on page 14.
>
> One amusing remark in the article (bottom of page 7) has to do with
> the fail-safe design of the IMPs:
>
> In addition ``reliability code'' was developed to allow a
> Pluribus IMP to keep functioning as a packet switch in the
> face of various bits of its hardware failing, such as a
> processor or memory [Katsuki78, Walden11 pp. 534-538]. This
> was so successful there was no simple off switch for the
> machine; a program had to be run to shut parts of the machine
> down faster than the machine could ``fix itself'' and keep
> running.
>
> As happened with early Unix releases, machine-readable code for the
> IMPs was lost, but fortunately, some old listings that turned up
> recently allowed its laborious reconstruction, verification, assembly,
> and simulation.
Arnold
