TUHS December 2017

tuhs@tuhs.org

82 participants
93 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

Heh, my V6 machine thinks (via 'date') that today is _Monday_, December 12th. Oddly enough, 'cal 17 2017' on it produces the right thing. Guess the date code is probably missing the '400 year' exception. Noel

7 years, 8 months

shell PS1/PS2 which survive cut-paste

by George Michaelson

I tried a long time ago to set PS1 and PS2 to character sequences which would permit cut-paste to work. I failed, but I didn't try very hard. The choice of "# " and "> " interests me. Because roots prompt of "hash" has a side effect of making a cut-paste over it a comment in most shells. But.. it predates being *able* to cut-paste so it has to be a side-effect, not a design choice. "> " is more dangerous in cut-paste. Which again feels like a side-effect both by anachronistic time … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Date madness

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold > One would think that SIMH I'm using Ersatz-11... > into the simulated computer's time of day clock. What Time of Day clock? We're talking PDP-11's here! :-) The very last DEC models of the -11 (/93-94) had a ToY clock; I'm pretty sure none of their others did. And of course V6 long pre-dated the /93-94. Noel

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Date madness

by Doug McIlroy

>>> Flipping it to unsigned int was the quickest way out to kick the can until Sun Feb 6 06:28:15 2106. If you have source it’s incredibly trivial to change, and nothing changes size wise. >> >> Easy, but perhaps unwise. The sign bit is a potential escape hatch for >> times, just as it is for characters in UTF-8. > > I'm not sure what you're suggesting - UTF-8 works because it's a variable length encoding - a variable length timestamp might be interesting as … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > It would be nice to have section in TUHS of any early clones that could > be collected. The Unix Tree does have a section for "Unix Clones", and it has Coherent, Xinu, Minix and some early Linuxes. Another one that's missing (although in a different category) is Ultrix-32.> Noel

7 years, 8 months

Partition table rationales?

by Random832

Is there any information on the rationales behind the sizes and positions of the hardcoded partitions in the rp/hp drivers in V6? There are odd gaps of unused space between ones that appear to be intended to be used together (I think I have some pieces of the puzzle worked out below, but not all). For the rp driver, only rp[01] uses the whole disk - rp2 and rp3 are 9200 blocks. The hp partitions looked more complicated, but it looks like the manpage is wrong about where partition 2 starts - … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Date madness

by Doug McIlroy

> Flipping it to unsigned int was the quickest way out to kick the can until Sun Feb 6 06:28:15 2106. If you have source it’s incredibly trivial to change, and nothing changes size wise. Easy, but perhaps unwise. The sign bit is a potential escape hatch for times, just as it is for characters in UTF-8. Doug

7 years, 8 months

Difference in purpose of /var/spool vs /var/lib

by Grant Taylor

Can anyone enlighten me on the effective difference in the use of /var/spool vs /var/lib? It's my understanding that spools are for files that are in transit. Effectively like packages moving through a shipping depo or people waiting in line. I.e. they come in, they hang around for a while, and then they leave. I'm of the opinion that files in /var/lib should stick around longer and are not nearly as dynamic (if at all, save for code updates). As sure as I type this, I can't think of a … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Date madness

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Tom Ivar Helbekkmo > My /83s have them, but I'm not so sure it's a feature of the CPU board: > there's this thought nagging in the back of my head that the ToY thing > actually sits in the front panel module with the various buttons on it. /83 documentation seems to be very thin on the ground, alas. It's definitely not the CPU; the KDJ11-B CPU (of the /83) manual (EK-KDJ1B-UG-001) makes no mention of it; and in the PDP-11/94E System User and Maintenance Guide (… [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Other history lists...

by Grant Taylor

Does anyone know of any other similar history discussion mailing lists / newsgroups to discuss things like Mainframes or (Open)VMS? I have some questions as I try to broaden my horizons, but I don't think they fit in the TUHS context. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

7 years, 8 months

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TUHS December 2017