TUHS December 2017

tuhs@tuhs.org

82 participants
93 discussions

Re: [TUHS] What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > an altruistic person trying to make things better. They aren't all bad. I would echo that. During my time on the IESG, I'd say the vast majority of the people in the IETF really did want to make things better for everyone. Of course, that statement covers a vast range of subtle variations, from people who had nothing at all to gain personally, and thus really were pushing what they thought was best; through people who did stand to gain, but truly thought that what they were advocating was in everyone's interest; etc. But the people who I felt were deliberately and knowingly putting their own interests before the community's, i.e. recommending something they knew to be harmful because it was good for them - they were very rare. My recollection is now somewhat dim (too much was happening, at too high a pace) of the details of those later days (well, 'later' only in that they were considerably later than the very early days :-), but my sense is that people like that didn't last long in the community; I have the distinct impression that people figured them out, and as an eventual result, they tended to fade from the scene. The IETF culture was not welcoming to that kind of thinking. I dunno, maybe I'm just being naive (and I would certainly welcome correction if I'm wrong), but that's how I saw it. Noel

7 years

Misguided standsads (was What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?)

by Doug McIlroy

> Standards committees are not filled with altruistic folks working to > make something great. Not only in big ways, such as to sway the market. An example from Posix is the undefined meaning of malloc(0). As I understand it, just one committee member held out for malloc(0) to be an optional error, thus confounding a harmless corner case with a fatal error. This nit has burdened conscientious programmers ever since, all so one company's easily fixable variant could be grandfathered into compliance. Doug

7 years

Early Xenix source code (was: What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?)

by Paul Ruizendaal

> They might actually. Gates isn’t in charge, and there has been a major effort to being Linux compatibility into the Windows 10 kernel. I agree that they might. Once there was strong commercial logic to disown their Unix history; that commercial logic may have reversed in the last decade. > The biggest issue will be the never ending tangle of licenses, if they had other stuff integrated into there. Let’s analyse that bit: - They could pick the Nokia solution, i.e. to simply make an undertaking not to sue and thus avoid taking a position on Unix ownership etc. - It would seem that Xenix 2 (no apparent version 1?) was more or less V7 and for internal use only (lacking a binary redistribution license, as Clem pointed out). Very little chance of 3rd party source code in there, but also of little interest for the historical record. - The first real ports occur with Xenix 2.x in 1981-83. This would appear to have been based on System III with the PDP-11, Z8000, 68000 and 8086 as targets. Considering the size of MS at the time and how busy they were with IBM and DOS I don’t think they would have had much time to do more than a basic port: they contracted out much of the work to SCO, a two man shop at the time. It would seem that MS owned the IP with SCO being a contractor & part-owned subsidiary. - This Altos manual https://web.archive.org/web/20170222131722/http://www.tenox.net/docs/xenix/… actually says that Xenix 2.x was still based on V7 and would seem to be a vanilla port, i.e. unlikely to include other stuff than V7, some 2BSD and of course MS' own stuff. - The next release, Xenix 3.0 in 83-84, still appears to be SysIII based and would remain easy from that perspective. However, given two years of polishing it may have picked up bits and pieces from the outside and the tool chains probably started to include MS’ own compilers, it would be harder to figure out what could be released. However, looking at this highly interesting leaflet http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IBM-Seminar-Proceedi… it would seem that it is still all SysIII, BSD and Microsoft code. In my opinion the real hurdle is finding a retired MS VP who’s interested in knocking on doors and making the case for this public relations move. Paul PS: There is scope for confusion over version numbers. It would seem that MS never directly sold Xenix, only via OEM’s. For example, IBM PC Xenix 1.0 would appear to be the same as MS Xenix 3.0

7 years

standard types

by Larry McVoy

I have my own types.h that I carry around that has stuff like typedef unsigned char u8; typedef unsigned short u16; typedef unsigned int u32; typedef unsigned long long u64; typedef signed char i8; typedef signed short i16; typedef signed int i32; typedef signed long long i64; and I wonder why the original Unix authors didn't make something similar? Instead we have uint64_t and I don't see the added value of more chars. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

7 years

Re: [TUHS] THANK YOU for flavors! (fwd)

by Dave Horsfall

On Thu, 7 Dec 2017, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: >> On Thu, 7 Dec 2017 11:01:51 +1100 (EST), Dave Horsfall wrote: > > Since we're being pedantic, note that this should be AEDT. EST is > ambiguous, but in general refers to the east coast of the USA. That appears to be how Alpine formats it (I certainly didn't write it)... If it can be overridden then naturally I'm all ears. >>> Serious question: is "FLAVOUR" accepted as an alias, or does the rest >>> of the world have to put up with American spelling? > > Think of it as a keyword. No national origin necessary. Fair enough, I suppose. > We really have better things to think of. Indeed; in the meantime I see you finally fixed your DNS... Yes, I 4xx mail from servers with an improper chain, in the hope that they'll eventually notice (it catches a lot of spammers). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years

Re: [TUHS] Dash options

by Steffen Nurpmeso

Hello. ||On Wednesday, 29 November 2017 at 20:16:43 +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: ||> Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: ||>> On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 21:51:13 -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote: ||>>> Does anybody know the history of dash options? Were they ||>>> a UNIX thing or did UNIX borrow them from something earlier? ||>> ||>> If you mean specificall the dash, I can't help much. But there were ||>> similar ideas elsewhere. UNIVAC EXEC-8 (for the 1108, late 1960s) had ||>> options that followed the command with a comma, like: ||>> ||>> @RUN,G GOPU,STANDARD,STANDARD ||>> @ADD,PL ASGDMS . ASSIGNIERT DATENBASIS ||> ||> "WEIßT DATENBASIS ZU" or "ZUWEISUNG DATENBASIS" ... ||>> @ASG,A PF. . PF IST PROGRAMM-FILE MIT GOPU ||> ||> "PF IST PROGRAMM-DATEI MIT GOPU" or so. ... I have apologised for this brusque and rude tone in private. Unfortunately Greg Lehey was the one who took up that thread. Puh; he is also right correcting my statements, it should have been "Weist Datenbasis zu" and "PF ist Programmdatei mit GOPU" instead of what i falsely claimed. |The question that should have been asked with mild interest and |very kind should have been "Why has German been used to comment |this code?" at first, i am afraid to realize. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

7 years

Re: [TUHS] [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index

by Doug McIlroy

Ralph, > > On unjustified text, fmt (which uses an algorithm purported to be like > > Knuth-Plass) > > I wonder if that accounts for modern, coreutils 8.28-1, fmt's weirdness > that I've seen for a while but never got around to investigating? > > $ yes x | fmt | awk '{print length, $0}' | uniq -c | sed 5q You threw it something of a curve ball--an infinite paragraph. At some point I suppose it chokes, and tries its best to make a semiparagraph of equal-length lines. (Since the real paragraph is not yet complete, it would be wrong to make the last line of the semiparagraph short.) Equilibrating apparently led to the split between 69- and 71-letter lines. Whether the alternation of 11 of one and 16 of the other is an infinite pattern or a subpattern is not clear. It could be part of a continued-fraction approximation, related to the staircse appearance of a bitmap "straight line". Doug

7 years

What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by Rudi Blom

Regarding Theodore Bashkow I found a reference in this article http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.53.880&rep=rep1&ty… "[Jain 90a], N. Jain, M. Schwartz and T. R. Bashkov, "Transport Protocol Processing at GBPS Rates.", Computer Communications Review, Vol. 20 (4), 1990, pp. 188-199." No idea if this 'bashkov' is the 'bashkow' in the 'what's missing' discussion. Cheers, rudi

7 years

What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by Warren Toomey

All, it's time to nudge the conversation away from debugging 2017 OOM issues and the pre-UNIX history of the Arpanet. We've been able to recover quite a deal of UNIX artifacts in the past two decades, but what artifacts (in your opinion) are still out there that we should try and unearth? Remember that the 50th anniversary is coming up in 2019. Here's my list: - more PDP-7 source code: the shell, the rest of the utilities - more 1st Edition source code: the rest of the utilities - ditto the missing bits of 3rd, 4th and 5th Editions - the Phil Foglio artwork that became a Usenix t-shirt (Armando, any ideas?) - more details on who was Ted Bashkow, and the story behind his (+ others?) analysis of the 1st Edition kernel at http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v1/PreliminaryUni… - a firm date on the day that Ken added pipes to the kernel :) What else should be we looking for? What physical artifacts (drawings, artwork etc.) have we missed that should be sought after? Cheers, Warren

7 years

Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem

by Doug McIlroy

> Was this [v7 addenda] put out by the Labs? It is definitely Research code from the Labs. How it

7 years

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TUHS December 2017