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
Knowing Dave and his long history with Unix, I suspect it was simply a typo. Just like vi commands are now hardwired into my fingers, I guess K&R is imprinted on his fingers.
Cheers, Warren
On 28 June 2014 17:12:14 AEST, Armando Stettner <aps(a)ieee.org> wrote:
>K&R usually refers to Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, writers of
>the (I think) first book on C. If there were two people to acknowledge
>for getting it right, it would be Ken and Dennis.
>
> aps
>
>
>Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
>> Subject: [TUHS] 40 years of Unix CACM Article
>> Date: June 28, 2014 at 12:02:06 AM PDT
>> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org
>>
>> Just in from an early Unix devotee.
>> Warren
>>
>> From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
>> Sent: 28 June 2014 16:14:18 AEST
>> To: Auug Talk <talk(a)lists.auug.org.au>
>> Subject: [AUUG-Talk]: 40 years of Unix
>>
>> Next month sees the 40th anniversary of the article "The Unix
>Timesharing
>> System" published in Communications of the ACM; I was at UNSW at the
>time,
>> and we bought the first tape for subsequent distribution.
>>
>> At the time its only competitor was RSTS-11, and to a lesser extent
>> RSX-11D and RSX-11M (all DEC systems). It saw CP/M vanish, MS-DOS
>come
>> and go, NT tried to challenge it, and even Windows hasn't beaten it.
>>
>> It spawned Linux, which Billy Gates regarded as a serious threat
>("any box
>> running Linux is not running Windows") and even tried a smear
>campaign
>> against it.
>>
>> Unix was a design that "just worked" because K&R simply got it right,
>
>> right from the start.
>>
>> It'll never go away.
>>
>> -- Dave
>>
>> Applix 1616 mailing list
>> Applix-L(a)object-craft.com.au
>> https://www.object-craft.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/applix-l
>>
>> Talk - The AUUG discussion list.
>> Talk(a)lists.auug.org.au
>> https://lists.auug.org.au/listinfo/talk
>>
>> --
>> Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my
>brevity._______________________________________________
>> TUHS mailing list
>> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org
>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
Just in from an early Unix devotee.
Warren
-------- Original Message --------
From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
Sent: 28 June 2014 16:14:18 AEST
To: Auug Talk <talk(a)lists.auug.org.au>
Subject: [AUUG-Talk]: 40 years of Unix
Next month sees the 40th anniversary of the article "The Unix Timesharing
System" published in Communications of the ACM; I was at UNSW at the time,
and we bought the first tape for subsequent distribution.
At the time its only competitor was RSTS-11, and to a lesser extent
RSX-11D and RSX-11M (all DEC systems). It saw CP/M vanish, MS-DOS come
and go, NT tried to challenge it, and even Windows hasn't beaten it.
It spawned Linux, which Billy Gates regarded as a serious threat ("any box
running Linux is not running Windows") and even tried a smear campaign
against it.
Unix was a design that "just worked" because K&R simply got it right,
right from the start.
It'll never go away.
-- Dave
_______________________________________________
Applix 1616 mailing list
Applix-L(a)object-craft.com.au
https://www.object-craft.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/applix-l
_______________________________________________
Talk - The AUUG discussion list.
Talk(a)lists.auug.org.au
https://lists.auug.org.au/listinfo/talk
--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
> Ahh! I wonder if they'll be making images and PDFs available?
If you want to check, my contact has been:
William Harnack <wharnack(a)computerhistory.org>
Doug
> > Have Xinu media to go with it? It's something I've been trying to track down. ;)
>
> Have you asked Doug? I've copied him
I just donated my extra copy of Xinu tapes and floppies to the computer museum
(along with first editions of the books).
> (Hey Doug, you should be on this list, all the long time unix nerds seem to be
> here, lots of fun with memory lane).
I'd be happy to join.
Doug
They pitched a PDP-10 for a similar reason--hardware to build a
bigger Unix on. When a small pot of end-of-year money appeared,
they took a PDP-11 instead--serendipitously, because university
folks started proving this elegant system on cheap hardware
in many projects in small labs, which they never could have
done had the system existed on a PDP-10 mainframe. While
upper management did not directly cause Unix to be built,
their decisions to abandon Multics and not to buy a PDP-10
were notable causes for its creation and spread.
Doug
> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:43:51 -0700
> From: iking(a)killthewabbit.org
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org,Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped
> Message-ID: <ef723f8a-52b6-4810-be59-1837c75b1da3.maildroid@localhost>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Interesting - what's your source? It was also my understanding they used the -7 'because it was there' but that they had pitched for a PDP-10, which had TOPS-10. - Ian
>
> Sent from my android device.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Sent: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 4:06 AM
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped
>
>
> > It's always been a bit of a mystery to me why Thompson and Ritchie decided they needed to write a new executive - UNICS - rather than use DECsys.
>
> It was the other way around. They had conceived a clean, simple, yet
> powerful, operating system and needed a machine to build it on. A
> cast-off PDP-7 happened to be at hand.
>
> Doug
> From: "A. P. Garcia" <a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com>
> that's like asking george martin for his source regarding a beatles
> song...
Reminds me of the person on Wikipedia who tried to argue with me about the
'History of the Internet' article... :-)
> From: John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org>
>> scj(a)yaccman.com scripsit:
>> a Dec repair person who ran "preventive maintenance" on our disc that
>> wiped out the file system! His excuse was that Dec didn't support
>> "permanent storage" on the disc at the time...
> Next time, mount a scratch monkey.
It was probably a fixed-head disk (RS11 or RS04); can't exactly stick a
different pack in! :-) Probably the DEC OS's only used it for swapping or
something, since they were both relatively small - 512KB.
(Speaking of RS11's: the first PDP-11 I used - an 11/20 running RSTS - had a
grand total disk storage of _one_ RS11!)
And speaking of putting file systems on them: I recently wrote this command
for V6 called 'si' which allowed me (among many other interesting things) to
watch the contents of the disk buffer(s). It turns out that even with other
packs mounted, the buffer is almost always completely full of blocks from the
root device; it makes plain the value of having the root on a _really_
fast disk.
I don't know if that usage pattern is because /bin is there, or because pipes
get created on the root, or what. When I get up the energy I'll move /bin to
another drive (yeah, yeah, I know - good way to lose and create a systen that
won't boot, so I'll actually make a _copy_ of /bin and mount it _over_ the
original /bin - probably a host of interesting errors there, e.g. if a process
has the old /bin as its current dir), and see what the cache contents look
like then.
Noel
For reconstructing Unix history on a single repository [1], I'd need to
represent the branches, merges, and chronological sequence of the late
BSD releases (after 4.3). However, I've found on the internet some
conflicting and simplistic information, so I'd welcome your input on how
to straighten things up.
First, consider this widely reproduced BSD family tree [2]. It has
4.4BSD-Encumbered derive from a line that includes Net/1, which was
freely redistributable. Wouldn't it be clearer to create two branches,
one with distributions free of AT&T code (4.3 BSD Net/1, 4.3 BSD Net/2,
4.4 BSD Lite1, 4.4 BSD Lite2) and one with full distributions (4.4 BSD,
...)? On which side would Tahoe and Reno stand?
Also, the same tree [2] shows 4.4 BSD having as its ancestor 4.3 BSD
Net/2, whereas another tree depicted on Wikipedia [3] has shows 4.4 BSD
and 4.3 BSD Net/2 having as their ancestor 4.3 BSD Reno. What's the
correct genealogy?
Finally, I have a conflict with release dates. Wikipedia gives the
following dates for Tahoe and Net/1 [4]:
4.3 BSD Tahoe June 1988
4.3 BSD Net/1 June 1989
However, looking at time-stamp of the newest files available under the
corresponding directories in the CSRG CD-ROMs [5] I find the opposite order:
cd2/net.1/sendmail/src/util.c 1989-01-01 12:15:58
cd2/4.3tahoe/usr/src/sys/tahoevba/vx.c 1989-05-23 13:47:43
What's the actual time sequence, and what's the corresponding genealogy?
[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
[2]
http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/share/misc/bsd-family-t…
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
[5] https://www.mckusick.com/csrg/
Many thanks,
Diomidis Spinellis
PS Thank you all for the help you've provided so far.
Interesting - what's your source? It was also my understanding they
used the -7 'because it was there' but that they had pitched for a
PDP-10, which had TOPS-10.
======
I think Doug's source is in the class `personal observation.'
He was there at the time; Ken and Dennis's department head, if
I've got it right.
Remember that Bell Labs had just disengaged itself from the
Multics project. The interest in a new OS sprang partly
from the desire to have a comfortable multi-user system
now that Multics was no longer available. That's why the
DEC operating systems of the time, which were (as I understand
it) simple single-user monitors, didn't fill the bill.
The character of the players matters too: remember that
Ken is the guy who one night sat down to write a Fortran
compiler because real systems have Fortran, and ended up
inventing B instead.
I've read that there was indeed a pitch to buy a PDP-10; that
there was some complicated plan to lower the effective cost;
and that upper management (not Doug) turned it down because
`Bell Labs doesn't do business that way.' I think I got that
from Dennis's retrospective paper, published in the 1984
all-UNIX issue of the Bell Labs Techical Journal, a must-read
(along with the late-1970s all-UNIX issue of BSTJ) for anyone
on this list.
