TUHS November 2017

tuhs@tuhs.org

82 participants
124 discussions

by Nigel Williams

I stumbled into a reddit post on Unix with the claim about early Unices only being accessed via printing terminals, and it suggested a question to me as to the first “glass teletype” or CRT terminal to be used with Unix. Given the DEC-centric nature of early Unix I would guess perhaps a VT05 or VT52 but I’m keen to know if anyone from those early years recollects what happened and when regarding Unix terminal access alternatives aside from the venerable 33KSR or 33ASR.

7 years

A man easter-egg (gimme gimme gimme)

by Edouard KLEIN

Hi all, An easter-egg in the version of man that is installed on the most popular Linux distros has recently been discovered after being there for 6 years: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gi… It is for example discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747313 It makes man print 'gimme gimme gimme' if called at "Half past twelve", as in the ABBA song. I check on BSD, but man seems to be a shell script on FreeBSD, so it's immune from the easter egg: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/usr.bin/man/man.sh Do you have any UNIX easter-egg stories ? Putting some in, or discovering one... Was this kind of humor tolerated in the professional settings where UNIX first circulated, or was it frowned upon ?

7 years

Re: [TUHS] A man easter-egg (gimme gimme gimme)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ron Natalie" > After making a stink about it, Proteon removed (or just changed) the > password. We added a 'disable field service password' option to the configuration (for those who wanted to keep FS out), changed the password (since the old one was blown), and stored the new one in encrypted form - hence the message! :-) Noel

7 years

OT: XPL compiler available

by Arnold Robbins

Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!adore2!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!nerds-end From: Shoefoot <shoefoot(a)gmail.com> Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Announcing the initial release of an XPL Compiler Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 09:25:43 -0800 (PST) Organization: Compilers Central Sender: news(a)iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers(a)iecc.com Message-ID: <17-11-001(a)comp.compilers> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="19370"; mail-complaints-to="abuse(a)iecc.com" Keywords: history, translator Posted-Date: 21 Nov 2017 14:37:00 EST X-submission-address: compilers(a)iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request(a)iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com Xref: feeder.eternal-september.org comp.compilers:3921 Announcing the initial release of the XPL to C source translator. The XPL language is a dialect of PL/I created by McKeeman, Horning and Wortman and documented in their book "A Compiler Generator" published in 1970. XPL is a procedural language with structured program flow. The language supports integer arithmetic and logical operations. XPL supports dynamic string variables and powerful character string manipulation features. The compiler and the runtime are written in C. The compiler generates C source so anyone with a working C compiler can compile and execute code written in XPL. XPL and the BNF analyzer were the cutting edge of compiler technology 50 years ago. This release includes both the compiler and the BNF analyzer written in the late 60s. You can download the source here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpl-compiler

7 years

Re: [TUHS] A man easter-egg (gimme gimme gimme)

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 9:11 AM, <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote: > > > Ian Zimmerman <itz(a)very.loosely.org> wrote: > > > > > On 2017-11-22 01:48, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > > > > > > > Try: > > > > > > > > gawk --nostalgia > > > > > > ~$ gawk --nostalgia > > > awk: bailing out near line 1 > > > Aborted > > > > > > Maybe it still needs a program? > > > > No, that was the joke. Early Unix awk used to say exactly that > > message, on almost any problem, often followed by a core dump. > > > > (I never claimed the easter egg was non-lame.) > > > > There were T-Shirts of this at early conferences as well. Showed a picture > of a vaguely puffin-like bird baling of an airplane made up of what looked > like ascii characters {}()|/... Google is unable find one though, so my > memory may be rusty here... > > Warner I have such a shirt. Maybe I can scan it. :-) Arnold

7 years

Re: [TUHS] APPLIX-L EPROM programmers

by Dave Horsfall

On Thu, 23 Nov 2017, Matthew Geier wrote: > There is a brake computer for the centre bogie and a microprocessor in > the auxillary converter too. Centre bogie? How does that work on curves? Or is it part of the coupler? -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years

UNIX on S/370

by Nemo

Recent commentary on porting led me to read the article on porting UNIX to S/370 (https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/otherports/ibm.pdf) to support 5ESS development because the existing PDP11s were being overwhelmed. I confess to not having this read this before and find it interesting. Any recollections from anyone on the matter. And whatever happened to it? N.

7 years

Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from

by Doug McIlroy

`quotes' > rules used ... to create British spelling from an American > English database often leave a lot to be desired. Among the BUGS listed for spell(1) in v7 was "Britsh spelling was done by an American". Nevertheless, at least one British expat thanked me for spell -b. He had been using the original "spell", and ignoring its reports of British "misspellings". But, he said, long exposure to American writing had infected his writing. Spell -b was a blessing, for revealed where his usage wobbled between traditions.

7 years

Re: [TUHS] Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from `quotes\'

by Doug McIlroy

> I am curious if anyone on the list remembers much > about the development of the first spell checkers in Unix? Yes, intimately. They had no relationship to the PDP 10. The first one was a fantastic tour de force by Bob Morris, called "typo". Aside from the file "eign" of the very most common English words, it had no vocabulary. Instead it evaluated the likelihood that any particular word came from a source with the same letter-trigram frequencies as the document as a whole. The words were then printed in increasing order of likelihood. Typos tended to come early in the list. Typo, introduced in v3, was very popular until Steve Johnson wrote "spell", a remarkably short shell script that (efficiciently) looks up a document's words in the wordlist of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which we had on line. The only "real" coding he did was to write a simple affix-stripping program to make it possible to look up plurals, past tenses, etc. If memory serves, Steve's program is described in Kernighan and Pike. It appeared in v5. Steve's program was good, but the dictionary isn't an ideal source for real text, which abounds in proper names and terms of art. It also has a lot of rare words that don't pull their weight in a spell checker, and some attractive nuisances, especially obscure short words from Scots, botany, etc, which are more likely to arise in everyday text as typos than by intent. Given the basic success of Steve's program, I undertook to make a more useful spelling list, along with more vigorous affix stripping (and a stop list to avert associated traps, e.g. "presenation" = pre+senate+ion"). That has been described in Bentley's "Programming Pearls" and in http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/spell.pdf. Morris's program and mine labored under space constraints, so have some pretty ingenious coding tricks. In fact Morris has a patent on the way he counted frequencies of the 26^3 trigrams in 26^3 byes, even though the counts could exceed 256. I did some heroic (and probabilistic) encoding to squeeze a 30,000 word dictionary into a 64K data space." Doug

7 years

Re: [TUHS] Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > I see the man page for it in v6, but no executable. The MIT V6+ system had it. They probably took it out of the distro because it was useless without the dictionary, which they didn't have the rights to distribute. Here's the source: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/spell.c http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/spell1.c http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/spell2.c http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/spell3.c Noel

7 years

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TUHS November 2017