TUHS October 2017

tuhs@tuhs.org

65 participants
54 discussions

by Warren Toomey

All, behind the scenes we have had Grant Taylor and Tom Ivar Helbekkmo helping us find a solution to the TUHS list DKIM issues. We have been running two separate lists (unmangled and mangled TUHS headers) for a few weeks. It looks like we can now merge them all back together and use the settings on one to avoid (most of) the DKIM problems. So that's what I've done: merged back to a single TUHS mailing list. I've restored the [TUHS] on the Subject line as well. I'll monitor the logs for further bounces. Fingers crossed there won't be any further unsubscriptions from the list due to bounce processing. If there are, I'll manually put you back in. Cheers all & thanks to Grant and Tom. Warren

7 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] /bin/true (was basic tools / Universal Unix)

by Dan Cross

[I tried to send this earlier, but was thwarted by list shenanigans. Apologies if it's a dup.] On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: > My favorite reduction to absurdity was /bin/true. Someone decided we > needed shell commands for true and false. Easy enough to add a script that > said "exit 0" or exit 1" as its only line. > Then someone realized that the "exit 0" in /bin true was superfluous, the > default return was 0. /bin/true turned into an empty, yet executable, file. > > Then the lawyers got involved. We got a version of a packaged UNIX (I > think it was Interactive Systems). Every shell script got twelve lines of > copyright/license boilerplate. Including /bin true. > The file had nothing but useless comment in it. Gerard Holzmann has something on this that I think is great: http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/Code_Inflation.pdf - Dan C. PS: A couple of thoughts. The shell script hack on 7th Edition doesn't work if one tries to 'execl("/bin/true", "true", NULL);'. This is because the behavior of re-interpreting an execution failure as a request to run a script is done by the shell, not exec in the kernel. This implies that one could not directly exec a shell script, but rather must exec the shell and give the path to the script as the first argument. I vaguely recall we had a discussion about the origin of the '#!' syntax and how this was addressed about a year or so ago. I tried to write a teeny-tiny '/bin/true' on my Mac. Dynamically linked, the obvious "int main() { return 0; }" is still a little over 4KB. Most of that is zeros; padding for section alignment and the like. I managed to create a 'statically' linked `true` binary by writing the program in assembler: % cat true.s # /bin/true in x86_64 assembler for Mac OS X .text .globl start start: mov $0x2000001, %rax # BSD system call #1 mov $0, %rdi # Exit status: 0 = 'true' syscall # OS X requires a non-empty data segment. .data zero: .word 0 As I recall, % macOS requires you to have a data section aligned to 4K, even if you don't use it. The resulting binary is a little over 8K; again, mostly zeros. There are parlor tricks people play to get binary sizes down to incredibly small values, but I found the results interesting. Building the obvious C program on a PDP-11 running 7th Edition yields a 136 byte executable, stripped. Still infinitely greater than /bin/true in the limit, but still svelte by modern standards.

7 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS} Running V8 ...

by Doug McIlroy

> How realistic would the experience be to actually running the system > described in the Unix Programming Environment [v8] if it's actually running > BSD 4.1... Thanks for any insights y'all might have on this. This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about. That's also what allowed me to use a giant Cray with no instruction whatsoever. And to do everyday "programmering" on the previously inscrutable Macintosh, thanks to OS X. The advent of non-typewriter input put a damper on Universal Unix. One has to learn something to get started with a novel device. I am impressed, though, by the breadth of Universal Unix that survives behind those disparate facades.

7 years, 2 months

ARPANET Information Brochure (December 1985)

by Michael-John Turner

Hi, It's not 100% on topic, but I thought this December 1985 ARPANET Information Brochure would be of interest to the list: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a164353.pdf Cheers, MJ -- Michael-John Turner * mj(a)mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/

7 years, 2 months

Re: ARPANET Information Brochure (December 1985)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy >>> I was told, by someone that I don't remember, that uwisc was the 11th >>> node on the net. ... If anyone can confirm or deny that I'd love to know. > I dunno. I don't have any axe to grind here. I don't care if they were the first, or the last. You asked "If anyone can confirm or deny that I'd love to know", and all I'm trying to do is _accurately_ answer that. > That 1985 map has uwisc in there I have a large collection of ARPANET maps here: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/arpanet.html and the first one on which UWisc shows up is the October, 1981 geographical map - over ten years since the ARPANet went up (December, 1969 is the earliest map I have there). > I do know that prior to the net there was uucp Which "net" are we talking about here? ARPANET? CSNET? Internet? The UUCP network long post-dated the ARPANET - I think it was started in the late 70's, no? The earliest Internet map I have is from 1982, here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Internet_map_in_Februar… and again UWisc is not on it. (Yes, I know it's on Wikipedia, but I'm the one who uploaded it, so I can verify it.) CSNET I don't know much about, that may have been what the comment referred to. Wikipedia (for what little we can trust it) says "By 1981, three sites were connected: University of Delaware, Princeton University, and Purdue University"; since Lawrence Landweber at UWis was the main driver of CSNET, I doubt it would have been far behind. Noel

7 years, 2 months

Re: ARPANET Information Brochure (December 1985)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Grant Taylor > Does anyone know of a good place to discuss networking history, routing, > email, dns, etc. I'd like to avoid getting too far off topic for TUHS. You could try the "Internet History mailing list": http://www.postel.org/internet-history/ which covers all of networking, including pre-Internet stuff. Noel

7 years, 2 months

Re: ARPANET Information Brochure (December 1985)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > I was told, by someone that I don't remember, that uwisc was the 11th > node on the net. ... If anyone can confirm or deny that I'd love to know. There's a copy of the July '77 revision of the HOSTS.TXT file as an appendix here: http://www.walden-family.com/dave/archive/bbn-tip-man.txt The IMPs are numbered in order of deployment; so UCLA is #1, SRI is #2, Utah is #4, BBN is #5, etc. I don't see Wisconsin in the list at all. Maybe the person meant CSNET? Noel

7 years, 2 months

stty erase '^?' in v7

by Will Senn

Does anyone know why stty won't accept '^?' in v7? It will accept '^h', but then the shell expects ^h to "backspace". I am trying to get the delete key on my mac to do the backing up and it's '^?'. # isn't my favorite since it's used in C programs, but pressing CTRL-h to backup is a pain too. If you've read this far, I have three more questions: 1. How do you escape # in order to write a C program if # is the erase character in the terminal? 2. How do you enter a literal character in the v7 shell (I am used to CTRL-v CTRL-DEL to enter the delete character on other unices)? 3. Is there a way to echo the ascii value of a keypress in v7? Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 2 months

History of Unix symposium - Paris, France, October 19th 2017

by Camille Paloque-Berges

Dear THUS members, An international conference on the history of Unix will be held in Paris, Oct. 19th, at the Conservatoire National des Arts & Métiers. Here is the link to the (bilingual) program : http://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-france-et-a… <http://technique-societe.cnam.fr/medias/fichier/programme-colloque-unix-bil…> There will be audio recordings of the symposium available afterwards - check the program page to know where and when. It will be followed, the next day, by a kick-off meeting of the research project “What is a computer program?”: http://technique-societe.cnam.fr/table-ronde-qu-est-ce-qu-un-programme-info… <http://technique-societe.cnam.fr/table-ronde-qu-est-ce-qu-un-programme-info…> Please note that an active member of this list, Clem Cole, will be giving a much awaited talk! Best, Camille Paloque-Bergès, for the orgazining committee(a THUS lurker !). -- Institutional email address : camille.paloque_berges(a)cnam.fr <mailto:camille.paloque_berges@cnam.fr> *Laboratory for the History of Techno-Sciences (HT2S), Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, 2 rue Conté, 75003 Paris, France *Associate researcher at the Digital Paths cluster of CNRS' Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC)

7 years, 2 months

Running V8 - is a distro runnable directly, or does it need BSD 4.1

by Will Senn

I remember a thread on the mailing list a while back where Warren announced the availability of the V8-V10 source code and being intrigued at the possibility of running it. Then I recently came across a note by dmr referring to V8 and further tweaking my interest: http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2003-June/002195.html Here's what he said: As for the system aspects: K&R 1 (1978) was done on what would soon be 7th edition Unix, on 11/70; K&R 2 (1988) using 9th edition on VAX 8550. Kernighan and Pike's Unix Programming Evironment (1984) used 8th edition on VAX 11/750. About the releases (or pseudo releases) that Norman mentions: actually 8th edition was somewhat real, in that a consistent tape and captured, probably corresponds fairly well with its manual, and was educationally licensed for real, though not in large quantity. 9th and 10th were indeed more conceptual in that we sent stuff to people (e.g. Norman) who asked, but they weren't collected in complete and coherent form. This combined with my tinkering with V7 and working through K&R (1978) got me hankering to go through K&P (1984) on a Vax running V8. Then, I came across this: https://virtuallyfun.com/2017/03/30/research-unix-v8/ and decided to jump in and start running V8. Then it hit me - is it even possible to run a V8 instance (similarly to V5/V6/V7, from tape) or is it as this note says, necessary to run the bits on a 4.1 BSD base? How realistic would the experience be to actually running the system described in the Unix Programming Environment if it's actually running BSD 4.1... Thanks for any insights y'all might have on this. Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 2 months

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TUHS October 2017