> ;login: is alive and well.
For a few years Usenix even published a refereed technical
journal, "Computing Systems", quite different in tone from
;login: It had some nice content. Does anyone know why
it folded?
Doug
Dan Cross:
... there were a few "journal" type
magazines that also specialized in Unix-y things (e.g., ";login:" from
USENIX; still published, I believe) ...
======
;login: is alive and well. So is USENIX. It's no longer
the UNIX user's group it started as many decades ago; the
focus has broadened to advanced computing and systems
research, though the descendants of UNIX are still prominent
in those areas.
For an old-fashioned programmer/systems hack/systems generalist
like me, it's still quite a worthwhile journal and a worthwhile
organization. They've even been known to have a talk or two
about resurrecting old versions of UNIX.
I'm just off to the federation of medium-sized conferences
and workshops that has grown out of the former USENIX
Annual Technical Conference. I'm looking forward to it.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Hi, all!
I've read recently published link to byte article and got an idea....
Was there a magazine related to UNIX systems in 70s-80s?
I had so much fun reading that Byte issue, even ads (especially ads!)
It is so fun...
Phil Garcia wrote:
I've always wondered about something
else, though: Were the original Unix authors annoyed when they learned that
some irascible young upstart named Richard Stallman was determined to make
a free Unix clone? Was he a gadfly, or just some kook you decided to
ignore? The fathers of Unix have been strangely silent on this topic for
many years. Maybe nobody's ever asked?
Gnu was always taken as a compliment. And of course the Unix clone
was pie in the sky until Linus came along. I wonder about the power
relationship underlying "GNU/Linux", as rms modestly styles it.
There are certain differences in taste between Unix and Gnu, vide
emacs and texinfo. (I grit my teeth every time a man page tells me,
"The full documentation for ___ is maintained as a Texinfo file.")
But all disagreement is swept away before the fact that the old
familiar environment is everywhere, from Cray to Apple, with rms
a very important contributor.
Doug
Does anyone have that running on anything? If so, I'd like a copy of the
lint libraries, probably /usr/lib/ll* or something like that.
It's not well known but I spent a pile of time creating lint libraries for
pure BSD, System V, etc, so you could lint your code against a target and
know if you let some non-standard stuff creep in.
I suppose I could fire up a Sun3 emulator like this and find them:
http://www.abiyo.net/retrocomputing/installingsunos411tosun3emulatedintme08…
If someone has a SunOS 4.1.1 box on the net and can give me a login (non-root)
that would be appreciated.
Thanks,
--lm
I noted just as I sent my previous posting with two references to
fuzz-test papers that the abstract of the second mentions two earlier
ones.
I've just tracked them down, and added them to various bibliographies.
Here are short references to them:
Fuzz Revisited: A Re-examination of the Reliability of UNIX
Utilities and Services
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/techreports/1995/TR1268.pdf
An Empirical Study of the Robustness of MacOS Applications
Using Random Testing
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1228291.1228308
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> Ken and Dennis and the other guys behind
> the earliest UNIX code were smart guys and good programmers,
> but they were far from perfect; and back in those days we
> were all a lot sloppier.
The observation that exploits may be able to parlay
mundane bugs into security holes was not a commonplace
back then--even in the Unix room. So input buffers were
often made "bigger than ever will be needed" and left
that way on the understanding that crashes are tolerable
on outlandish data. In an idle moment one day, Dennis fed
a huge line of input to most everything in /bin. To the
surprise of nobody, including Dennis, lots of programs
crashed. We WERE surprised a few years later, when a journal
published this fact as a research result. Does anybody
remember who published that deep new insight and/or where?
Doug
> From: norman(a)oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)
> SP&E published a paper by Don Knuth discussing all the many bugs found
> in TeX, including some statistical analysis.
> From: John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org>
> "The Errors of TeX" was an excellent article.
Thanks for the pointer; it sounds like a great paper, but alas the only
copies I could fine online were behind paywalls.
> From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>
> btw. there is a v6 version of fsck floating around.
Yes, we had it at MIT.
> I'm wonder if I can find a readable copy.
As I've mentioned, I have this goal of putting the MIT Unix (the kernel was
basically PWB1, with a host of new applications) sources online.
I have recently discovered (in my basement!) two sets of full dump tapes
(1/2" magtape) of what I think are the whole filesystem, so if I can find a
way to get them read, we'll have the V6 fsck - and much more besides (such
as a TCP/IP for V6). So I think you may soon get your wish!
Noel
> From: "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com>
> The variable in question was a global static, 'ino' (the current inode
> number),
> Static is a much overloaded word in C, it's just a global variable.
Sorry; I was using 'static' in the general CS sense, not C-specific!
> in the version 7 version of icheck .. they appear to have fixed it.
Actually, they seem to have got all three bugs I saw (including the one I
hadn't actually experienced yet, which would cause a segmentation violation).
> From: Tim Newsham <tim.newsham(a)gmail.com>
> There are bugs to be found .. Here are some more (security related, as
> thats my inclination):
> ...
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/unix-jun72/2008-May/000126.html
Fascinating mailing list! Thanks for the pointer.
Noel
