TUHS November 2017

tuhs@tuhs.org

82 participants
124 discussions

by Leah Neukirchen

Hi, I found this paper by bwk referenced in the Unix manpages, in v4 as: TROFF Made Trivial (unpublished), in v5 as: TROFF Made Trivial (internal memorandom), also in the v6 "Unix Reading List", but not anymore in v7. Anyone have a copy or a scan? -- Leah Neukirchen <leah(a)vuxu.org> http://leah.zone

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] UNIX on S/370

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > So tape I can see being more weird, but isn't raw disk just "don't put > it in buffer cache"? One machines/controllers which are capable of it, with raw devices DMA happens directly into the buffers in the process (which obviously has to be resident while the I/O is happening). Noel

7 years, 1 month

DEC Born 60 years ago

by Clem Cole

Cute article from a few days ago in the Telegram about DEC with some since pics that I thought I would pass on to this group. http://www.telegram.com/news/20171118/digital-equipment-born-60-years-ago-i…

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Determining what was on a tape back in the day

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > I don't quite no how to investigate this other than to pore through the > pdp11/40 instruction manual. One of these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Digital-pdp-Programming-Card-8-Pages/142565890514 is useful; it has a list of all the opcodes in numerical order; something none of the CPU manuals have, to my recollection. Usually there are a flock of these "pdp11 Programming Cards" on eBait, but I only see this one at the moment. If you do any amount of work with PDP-11 binary, you'll soon find yourself recognizing the common instructions. E.g. MOV is 01msmr (octal), where 'm' is a mode specifier, and s and r are source and destination register numbers. (That's why PDP-11 people are big on octal; the instructions are easy to read in octal.) More here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11_architecture#Operands So 0127xx is a move of an immediate operand. >> You don't need to mount it on DECTape drive - it's just blocks. Mount >> it as an RK05 image, or a magtape, or whatever. > I thought disk (RK05) and tape (magtape) blocks were different... Well, you need to differentiate between DECtape and magtape - very different beasts. DECtape on a PDP-11 _only_ supports 256 word (i.e. 512 byte) blocks, the same as most disks. (Floppies are an exception when it comes to disks - sort of. The hardware supports 128/256 byte sectors, but the usual driver - not in V6 or V7 - invisibly makes them look like 512-byte blocks.) Magtapes are complicated, and I don't remember all the details of how Unix handles them, but the _hardware_ is prepared to write very long 'blocks', and there are also separate 'file marks' which the hardware can write, and notice. But a magtape written in 512-byte blocks, with no file marks, can be treated like a disk; that's what the V6 distribution tapes look like: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_UNIX_Sixth_Edition#Installation_tape_con… and IIRC 'tp' format magtape tapes are written the same way, hardware-wise (so they look just like DECtapes). Noel

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Some resources for V6/PDP/SIMH newbs like me

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > (e) UNIX assembler uses the characters $ and "*" where the DEC > assemblers use "#" and "@" respectively. Amusing: the "UNIX Assembler Reference Manual" says: The syntax of the address forms is identical to that in DEC assemblers, except that "*" has been substituted for "@" and "$" for "#"; the UNIX typing conventions make "@" and "#" rather inconvenient. What's amusing is that in almost 40 years, it had never dawned on me that _that_ was why they'd made the @->*, etc change! "Duhhhh" indeed! Interesting side note: the UNIX erase/kill characters are described as being the same as Multics', but since Bell pulled out of the Multics project fairly early, I wonder if they'd used it long enough to get '@' and '#' hardwired into their fingers. So I recently has the thought 'Multics was a follow-on to CTSS, maybe CTSS used the same characters, and that's how they got burned in'. So I looked in the "CTSS Programmer's Guide" (2nd edition), and no, according to it (pg. AC.2.02), the erase and kill characters on CTSS were '"' and '?'. So, so much for that theory! > (l) The names "_edata" and "_end" are loader pseudo variables which > define the size of the data segment, and the data segment plus the bss > segment respectively. That one threw me, too, when I first started looking at the kernel! I don't recall if I found documentation about it, or just worked it out: it is in the UPM, although not in ld(1) like one might expect (at least, not in the V6 UPM; although in V7: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/man/man1/ld.1 it is there), but in end(3): http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/man/man3/end.3 Noel

7 years, 1 month

redirection wildness in v7

by Will Senn

Why does the first of these incantations not present text, but the second does (word is a file)? Neither errors out. $ <word | sed 20q $ <word sed 20q Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] UNIX on S/370

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> > IIRC Tom Lyons started a 370 port at Princeton and finished it at > Amdahl. But I think that was using VM Maybe this is my lack of knowledge of VM showing, but how did having VM help you over running on the bare hardware? Noel

7 years, 1 month

First permanent ARPAnet link

by Dave Horsfall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Kleinrock#ARPANET ``The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute.'' And thus from little acorns... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Some resources for V6/PDP/SIMH newbs like me

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > he is addressing an aspect that was not addressed in either of the > manual's entries and is very helpful for making the translation between > PDP-11 Macro Assembler and unix as. I'm curious - what aspect was that? Noel

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Some resources for V6/PDP/SIMH newbs like me

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> > To bone up on assembly language, Lions's commentary is exceptionally > helpful in explaining assembly as it is implemented in V6. The manual > itself is really thin Err, which manual are you referring to there? Not the "UNIX Assembler Reference Manual": http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/doc/as/as I would assume, but the 'as(I)' page in the UPM? Noel

7 years, 1 month

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TUHS November 2017