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
Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
It does not resemble the familiar layout of the numbered
editions. Besides the usual overview of kernel and shell,
it describes system calls and some commands, in a layout
unrelated to the familiar man-page style. Detailed
reference/tutorial manuals for as, roff, db and ed
are included as appendices.
The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX contains a numer
of features very seldom offered even by larger systems"
appears on page 1.
A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?
Doug
On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 08:55:23PM -0800, Paul McJones wrote:
> Thanks very much for making the original and the OCR-enhanced versions
> of Doug’s scan of the “UnixEditionZero” document available
> on tuhs.org. I notice that even with Nelson’s enhanced version,
> the file size is still large for a scanned text document, apparently
> because it was originally scanned in RGB mode, 24 bits/pixel. The
> attached version is 2.5MB, and to my eye is identical looks identical
> to UnixEditionZero-OCR.pdf.
Paul, I've added your version into the same directory. Thanks!
Warren
Hi all,
In v2 no5 AUUGN Jun-Jul 1980, Andy Tanenbaum announced the availability of a Portable Pascal Compiler for the then proposed ISO standard. A tape was made for v6, v7, and non-unix platforms. Does anyone know if there is a tape image around that has the distro?
On a related note, has anyone successfully installed 1BSD on a v6 install running in SImH? 1BSD has the Berkeley Pascal Instructional system on it.
Regards,
Will
Sent from my iPhone
I'm too tired to dig for the exact words in the ISO standard,
but I had the impression that the official C rule these days
is that the effect of writing on a string literal is undefined.
So it's legal for an implementation to make strings read-only,
or to point several references to "What's the recipe today, Jim"
to one copy of the stripng in memory, and even to point uses of
"Jim" to the tail of the same string. Or both.
It is also legal for every string literal to reside in its own
memory and to be writable, but since the effect is undefined,
code that relies on that is on thin ice, especially if meant to
be portable code.
I have used, and even fixed (unrelated) bugs in, a compiler
that merged identical strings. I forget whether it also looked
for suffix matches. Whether the strings went in read-only
memory was up to the code generator (of course); in the new
back-end I wrote for it, I made them so. This turned up quite a
few fumbles in very-old UNIX code that assumed unique, writable
string literals, especially those that called mktemp(3). To my
mind that just meant the programs needed to be fixed to match
current standards (just as many old programs needed fixes to
compile without error in ISO C), so I fixed them.
I didn't (and still don't) like Joy's heavy-handed hack, but I
see his point, and think it's just fine for the language rules
to allow the compiler to do it hacklessly.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
I've gotten sucked into an embedded system project and they are running out of
memory. I have a vague memory of some sort of tool that I think Bill Joy
wrote (or maybe he told me about it) that would do some magic processing of
all the string constants and somehow it de-dupped the space.
Though now that I'm typing this that doesn't seem possible. Does this ring
a bell with anyone? I'm sure it was for the PDP 11 port.
Thanks,
--lm
Thanks, Doug and Warren, for the new files at
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/
At the TUHS mirror at my site, you can find an additional file
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Distributions/r…ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Distributions/re…
that is less than half the size, and is (somewhat) searchable, thanks
to Adobe Acrobat Pro 11 OCR conversion. Please include that in the
TUHS master archive, even renaming it to the original file, if you
wish.
I like the beginning of "Section 2. Hardware", where Dennis wrote:
>> ...
>> The PDP-11 on which UNIX is implemented is a 16-bit 12K computer,
>> and UNIX occupies 8K words. More than half of this space, however, is
>> utilized for a variable number of disk buffers; with some loss of
>> speed the number of buffers could be cut significantly.
>> ...
How much more powerful early Unix was compared to CP/M and MS-DOS, in
a small fraction of their memory space!
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> Woe betide the user if any string was changed at run time...
That was then. Now it would be OK to do so for const data.
(Unless the tool chain has discarded const indications.)
Doug
