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
On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 9:27 AM, <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
> I think the Berkeley guys had an underground
> pipeline to Bell labs and some stuff got out that way. :-)
>
It was not underground at all. Tools packaged in BSD came from all over
the community. style and diction were released into the wild by
themselves before the were packaged into an AT&T USG UNIX or Research UNIX
release. It got them personally directly and had them installed at
Tektronix soon after first publishing and a talk about them at USENIX (IIRC
that was the Boulder conference in the "Black Hole" movie theatre.
Since I had a minor stake in it (as my first C program) fsck is another
good example of the path to UCB . Ted started the predecessor program
when he was at UMich (with Bill Joy). He did his OYOC year and later a
full PhD at CMU. He was one of my lab partners in his OYOC year. fsck
was a we know it now was done during that time ( and I helped him a bit).
He was bring the sources back and forth from Summit to CMU (at the time in
an RK05 or sometimes a bootable DOS tape image of one - I may still have
one of these). I believe he gave a copy of the sources very early to wnj
-- which is how it ended up in 4.1BSD. I don't think it was in the
original 3.0 or 4.0 packages as it was not in V5, V6 or V7 either. I
believe it was released in PWB 2.0 - not sure and Minnie does not seem to
have them.
I'm pretty the SCCS and cpio sources came through one of the PWB releases
(1 or 2) that UCB got from AT&T.
Clem
In late 2010, I released decade-specific bibliographies of the Bell
System Technical Journal (BSTJ) at
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1920.bib
...
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj2010.bib
(change .bib to .html for versions with live hyperlinks).
I get weekly status reports for the hundreds of bibliographies in the
archives to which the bstj*.bib files belong, and until recently, I'd
been puzzling about the apparent cessation of publication of the Bell
Labs Technical Journal (its current name) in March 2014.
I now understand why: according to the Wiley Web site for the journal,
ownership and the archives have been transferred to IEEE, effective
with volume 19 (2014).
The bstj2010.bib file has accordingly been updated today with coverage
of (so far, only four) articles published by IEEE in volume 19. [The
first of those is a 50-year retrospective on the discovery of the
Cosmic Microware Background that provided some of the first solid
evidence for the Big Bang theory of the origin and evolution of the
universe, and led to the award of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics to
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. The article also includes a timeline
of important Bell Labs developments, and Unix is listed there.]
Older list readers may remember that a lot of the early research
publications about Unix appeared in the BSTJ issues, so this journal
should have considerable interest for TUHS list users, and the move of
the archives from Wiley to IEEE may make the back issues somewhat more
accessible outside those academic environments that have library
subscriptions for Wiley journals in electronic form.
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The disappearance of some troff-related documents that had
been on line at Bell Labs was recently reported on this
list. That turns out to have been a bureaucratic snafu.
Plan 9 and v7 are back now. It is hoped that CSTRs will
follow.
Doug
It seems that nroff had the ability to show underlined text very early
on, possibly as early as v3 according to the v3 manual.
I haven't managed to get this to work right under simh but I was
thinking maybe there's a way to do it. It needs an 'underline font'
but the mechanism of how this worked in the old days is a bit of
mystery to me. The output device would have to have the ability to
either display or print underlined text. Maybe someone can remember
which terminal devices supported this in the old days which worked
"out of the box" in the v5,v6 era.
Maybe there was the ability to use overstrike characters on the teletype?
In bash I can use:
echo -e "\e[4munderline\e[0m"
Shouldn't be too hard to hack up something that works in emulated v5.
Mark
> It seems that nroff had the ability to show underlined text very early
Pre-Unix roff had the .ul request. Thus I expect (but haven't checked)
that it was in Unix roff. It would be very surprising if nroff, which was
intended to be more capable that roff, didn't have some underlining
facility right from the start.
Doug
Unix was what the authors wanted for a productive computing environment,
not a bag of everything they thought somebody somewhere might want.
One objective, perhaps subliminal originally, was to make program
behavior easy to reason about. Thus pipes were accepted into research
Unix, but more general (and unruly) IPC mechanisms such as messages
and events never were.
The infrastructure had to be asynchronous. The whole point was to
surmount that difficult model and keep everyday programming simple.
User visibility of asynchrony was held to a minimum: fork(), signal(),
wait(). Signal() was there first and foremost to support SIGKILL; it
did not purport to provide a sound basis for asynchronous IPC.
The complexity of sigaction() is evidence that asynchrony remains
untamed 40 years on.
Doug
Hi All.
Here is BWK's contribution.
| Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 17:28:21 -0400 (EDT)
| From: Brian Kernighan <bwk(a)cs.princeton.edu>
| To: arnold(a)skeeve.com
| Subject: Re: please get out your flash light...
|
| Some answers interpolated, but lots remain mysteries...
|
| On Thu, 24 Sep 2015, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
|
| > Hi. Can you shed some light?
| >
| >> From: Diomidis Spinellis <dds(a)aueb.gr>
| >> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
| >> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 12:27:03 +0300
| >> Subject: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
| >>
| >> I found out that the book "Life with Unix" by Don Libes and Sandy
| >> Ressler has a seven page listing of Unix notables, and I'm using that to
| >> fill gaps in the contributors of the Unix history repository [1,2].
| >> Working through the list, the following questions came up.
| >>
| >> - Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction. But diction.c first appears
| >> in 4BSD and 2.10BSD. Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley?
|
| Nina Macdonald, maybe? Lorinda worked with people in that group.
|
| >> - Is Chuck Haley listed in the book as the author of tar the same as
| >> Charles B. Haley who co-authored V7 usr/doc/{regen,security,setup}? He
| >> appears to have worked both at Bell labs (tar, usr/doc/*) and at
| >> Berkeley (ex, Pascal). Is this correct?
|
| I think so.
|
| >> - Andrew Koenig is credited with varargs. This is a four-line header
| >> file in V7. Did he actually write it?
| >>
| >> - Ted Dolotta is credited with the mm macros, but the document "Typing
| >> Documents with MM is written by by D. W. Smith and E. M. Piskorik. Did
| >> its authors only write the documentation? Did Ted Dolotta also write
| >> mmcheck?
|
| I don't think Ted wrote -mm; he might have been the manager of that
| group? Ask him: ted(a)dolotta.org
|
| >> Also, I'm missing the login identifiers for the following people. If
| >> anyone remembers them, please send me a note.
| >>
| >> Bell Labs, PWB, USG, USDL:
|
| ark
|
| >> Andrew Koenig
| >> Charles B. Haley
| >> Dick Haight
|
| Maybe rhaight, but don't quote me. Last address I have is from
| long ago: rhaight(a)jedi.accn.org
|
| >> Greg Chesson
|
| Can't remember whether it was grc or greg
|
| >> Herb Gellis
| >> Mark Rochkind
|
| You probably mean Marc J Rochkind. I think it was mmr, but
| ask him: rochkind(a)basepath.com
|
| >> Ted Dolotta
| >>
| >> BSD:
| >> Bill Reeves
| >> Charles B. Haley
| >> Colin L. Mc Master
| >> Chris Van Wyk
|
| Was Chris ever part of BSD? He was at Stanford, then Bell Labs,
| where he was cvw.
|
| >> Douglas Lanam
| >> David Willcox
| >> Eric Schienbrood
| >> Earl T. Cohen
| >> Herb Gellis
| >> Ivan Maltz
| >> Juan Porcar
| >> Len Edmondson
| >> Mark Rochkind
|
| See above
|
| >> Mike Tilson
| >> Olivier Roubine
| >> Peter Honeyman
|
| honey (remember honeydanber?
|
| >> R. Dowell
| >> Ross Harvey
| >> Robert Toxen
| >> Tom Duff
|
| td
|
| >> Ted Dolotta
| >> T. J. Kowalski
|
| frodo
|
| >> Finally, I've summarized all contributions allocated through file path
| >> regular expressions [3] into two tables ordered by author [4]. (The
| >> summary is auto-generated by taking the last significant part of each
| >> path regex.) If you want, please have a look at them and point out
| >> omissions and mistakes.
| >>
| >> I will try to commit all responses I receive with appropriate credit to
| >> the repository. (You can also submit a GitHub pull-request, if you prefer.)
| >>
| >> [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
| >> [2]
| >> http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.pdf
| >> [3]
| >> https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/author-path
| >> [4] http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr/~dds/contributions.pdf
| >>
| >> Diomidis
| >> _______________________________________________
| >> TUHS mailing list
| >> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org
| >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
