> From: Paul Ruizendaal
>> the headers say they date from 1974-75.
> Wow, that's great! That means that you have the initial version.
The file write dates are May 1979, so that's the latest it can be. There is
one folder called 'DTI' which contains an email message from someone at DTI to
someone at SRI which is dated "10 Apr 1979" so that seems to indicate that
that's indeed when they are from.
(The message says that the folder contains the source for DTI's IMP-11A
driver, which is different from UIll's, although they both descend from the
same original version.)
> Possibly it is V5 not V6
Nope, definitely V6 here.
> All my leads for the 1975 version of this code base came up dry and I
> feared it lost.
I could have sworn that I'd seen _listings_ of the code in a UIllinois
document about NCP Unix that I had found (and downloaded) on the Internet, but
I can't find them here now. I did look again and found:
"A Network Unix System for the Arpanet", by Karl C. Kelley, Richard Balocca,
and Jody Kravitz
but it doesn't contain any sources.
> it may contain the first version of 'mbufs'
It might - the code is conditionalized for "UCBUFMOD" all over the place.
> Yes, a 'history' file seems to have been common practice at BBN. The
> kernel would have had many modifications:
> - the 'ports' extension from Rand
Yes.
> - the 'await' extension by Jack Haverty
Yup.
> - an 1822-driver
Yes (also by Haverty) - although IMP11-A drivers are all over the place, there
are two different ones in the NCP Unix alone.
> - possibly, an Autodin II network driver
Didn't see one.
> - possibly, shared memory extensions
Yes, there are two module in 'ken', map_page.c and set_lcba.c (I was unable to
work out what 'LCBA' stood for) which seem to do something with mapping.
> It might even have some NCP code in it
Yes, there's an 'ncpkernel' directory.
> There seem to have been two versions of the BBN modified kernel. One was
> done for systems without separate I/D with stuff heavily trimmed
Yes, there's a 'SMALL' preprocessor flag which conditionally removes some
stuff.
> The other may have extended the V6 kernel to run in separate I and D
> spaces
That capability was present in stock V6.
Noel
> From: Clem Cole
> Steve Ward's guys writing Trix hacked together a compiler, assembler and
> the like.
All of which I have the source for - just looked through it.
> If memory serves me, tjt wrote the assembler
I have the NROFF source for the "A68 Assembler Reference", and it's by James
L. Gula and Thomas J. Teixeira. It says that "A68 is an edit of the MICAL
assembler also written by Mike [Patrick].".
> Jack Test did much of the compiler and again IIRC that was based on PCC.
I dunno, I'm not familiar with PCC, so I can't say. It definitely looks very
different from the Ritchie C compiler.
Noel
> From: Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl>
>> I have this distinct memory of Dave Clark mentioning the Liza Martin
>> TCP/IP for Unix in one of the meeting report publihed as IENs
> It may be mentioned in this report:
> http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/rfc/csr-rfc-228.pdf
Yeah, I had run across that in my search for any remnants of the Martin
stuff.
> Would you know if any of its source code survived?
As I had mentioned, I had found some old dump tapes, and had one of them read;
it had some bad spots, but we've just (this morning) succeeding in having a
look as to what's there, and I _think_ all of the source is OK (including the
kernel code, as well as applications like server Telnet and FTP). No SCCS or
anything like that, so it's a bit hit or miss doing history - the file write
dates were preserved, but of course a lot of them would have been edited over
time to fix bugs, add features, etc.
The tape appears to contains a _lot_ of other historic material, and it's
going to take a while to sort it all out; it includes a Version 6 with NCP
from NOSC/SRI, some Unix from BBN; a BCPL compiler; a 'bind' for .rel format
files (produced by MACRO-11 and probably BCPL) written in BCPL; programs to
convert from .rel to a.out and back; an early verion of Montgomery EMACS;
another Unix from 'TMI' (whoever that might be); another UNIX that's somehow
associated with TRIX; someone's early kernel overlay stuff; an early 68K C
compiler, and also an early 8080 C compiler - just a ton of stuff (that's just
a few items that grabbed my eye as I scrolled by).
Algol, alas, appears not to be there (we probably didn't add it, because of
space reasons). The copy of LISP on this tape seem to be damaged; I do have 3
other tapes, and between them, I hope we'll be able to retrieve it.
Noel
> From: Nick Downing
> This is a wonderful find
Yes, I was _very_ happy to find those tapes in my basement; up till that, I
was almost sure all those bits were gone forever.
Thanks to Chuck Guzis, whose old data recovery service made this possible - he
actually read the tape.
> is it possible for you to read the other tapes also?
Alas, they're all of the same system. So the most we're going to get is the
files that are missing on this one due to bad spots on the tape.
Noel
> some Unix from BBN
This one is from 1979, it includes Mike Wingfield's TCP. The 'Trix UNIX' is a
port to the 68K, probably started with something V7ish (I see "setjmp.h" in
there). Bits of the Montgomery EMACS appear to date from 1981, but the main
source files seem to be from 1984. I also have the source to 'vsh' (Visual
Shell), whatever that is.
Noel
Just stumbled over another early TCP/IP for Unix:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/3Com/3Com_UNET_Nov80.pdf
It would seem to be a design similar to that of Holmgren's (NCP-based) Network Unix (basic packet processing in the kernel, connection management in a user space daemon). In time and in concept it would sit in between the Wingfield ('79, all user space) and the Gurwitz ('81, all kernel) implementations.
I think it was distributed initially as a mod versus V7 and later as a mod versus 2BSD.
Would anybody here know of surviving source of this implementation?
Thanks,
Paul
The recent discussion of Solaris made me think - what was the first Unix to
have centralized package management as part of the OS? I know that IRIX
had it, I think from the beginning (possibly even for the GL2 releases) but
I imagine there was probably something before that.
-Henry
guess it is the beginning of the end of Solaris and the Sparc CPU:
'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was
planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with major
layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others
speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired
with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the
Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its
demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for
the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a
future.
The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12— has
apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap.
Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version is
apparently the only update planned for the operating system through
2021.
With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has
been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it
attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed
bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown
significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community revolt.
Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated
expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version
of the software platform. '
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confir…
--
Kay Parker
kayparker(a)mailite.com
--
http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be
Now that we have quite a few ex-Bell Labs staff on the list, and several
other luminaries, and with the Unix 50th anniversary not far off, perhaps
it is time to form a working group to help lobby to get 8th, 9th and 10th
Editions released.
I'm after volunteers to help. People who can actually move this forward.
Let me know if and how you can help out.
Thanks, Warren