I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources
on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the
Seventh Edition:
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html
Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome.
(It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories
directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)
> On Dec 31, 2016, at 8:58 AM, tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
>
> From: Michael Kjörling <michael(a)kjorling.se>
> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Historic Linux versions not on kernel.org
> Message-ID: <20161231111339.GK576(a)yeono.kjorling.se>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> I might be colored by the fact that I'm running Linux myself, but I'd
> say that those are almost certainly worth preserving somehow,
> somewhere. Linux and OS X are the Unix-like systems people are most
> likely to come in contact with these days
MacOS X is a certified Unix (tm) OS. Not Unix-Like.
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm
It has been so since 10.0. Since 10.5 (Leopard) it has been so noted on the above Open Group page. The Open Group only lists the most recent release however.
The Tech Brief for 10.7 (http://images.apple.com/media/us/osx/2012/docs/OSX_for_UNIX_Users_TB_July20…) also notes the compliance.
David
The 'oldest' I have is a set of SCO UNIX 3.2V4.0 and V4.2
Mail me if you're interested
Cheers,
rudi
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2017 16:55:25 -0800
> From: Cory Smelosky <b4(a)gewt.net>
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Subject: [TUHS] SCO OpenDesktop 386 2.0.0
> Message-ID:
> <1488070525.154368.892915216.18B7F7A4(a)webmail.messagingengine.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hey,
>
> Does anyone have any of the floppies for OpenDesktop 2.0.0? Mine got
> damaged in a dehumidifier failure before they got to California. The
> only survivor was of all things...the QIC-24 tape (which I have read
> fine)
>
> sco-tape> tar tf file0 | more
> ./tmp/_lbl/prd=odtps/typ=u386/rel=2.0.0a/vol=1
>
> Anyone know a good starting point for attempting to install it in to a
> VM? ;)
> --
> Cory Smelosky
> b4(a)gewt.net
Hi!
Some of the stories on here reminded me of the fact that there's also likely
a whole boat-load of UNIX ports/variants in the past that were never released
to customers or outside certain companies.
Not talking about UNIX versions that have become obsolete or which have
vanished by now like IRIX or the original Apple A/UX (now *that* was an
interesting oddball though..) and such, but the ones that either died or
failed or got cancelled during the product development process or were never
intended to be released to the outside ar all.
Personally I came across one during some UNIX consultancy work at Commodore
during the time that they were working on bringing out an SVR4 release for the
Amiga (which they actually sold for some time)
Side-note.. Interestingly enough according to my contacts at that time inside
CBM it was based on the much cheaper to license 3B2 SVR4 codebase and not the
M68k codebase which explained some of the oddities and lack of M68k ABI
compliance of the Amiga SVR4 release..
However..
It turned out that they had been running an SVRIII port on much older Amiga
2000's with 68020 cards for some of their internal corporate networking and
email, UUCP, etc. and was called 'AMIX' internally. But as far as I know it
was never released to the public or external customers.
It was a fairly 'plain jane' SVRIII port with little specific 'Amiga' hardware
bits supported but otherwise quite complete and pretty stable.
Worked quite well in the 4MB DRAM available on these cards. The later SVR4
didn't fare so well.. Paged itself to death unless you had 8 or even (gasp!)
16MB.
It was known 'outside' that something like this existed as the boot ROM's on
the 68020 card had an 'AMIX' option but outside CBM few people really knew
much about it.
It may have been used at the University of Lowell as they developed a TI34010
based card that may already have had some support in this release.
Still..
This does make me wonder.. Does anyone else know of these kinds of special
'snowflake' UNIX versions that never got out at various companies/insitutes?
(and can talk about it without violating a whole stack of NDA's ;) )
No special reason.. Just idle curiosity :)
Likely all these are gone forever anyway as prototypes and small run production
devices and related software tends to get destroyed when companies go bust or
get aquired.
Bye, Arno.
> From: Dave Horsfall
> Another acronym is Esc Meta Alt Ctl Shift...
Good one!
And there was a pretty funny fake Exxx error code - I think it was
"EMACS - Editor too big"?
I was never happy with the size of EMACS, and it had nothing to do with the
amount of memory resources used. That big a binary implies a very large amount
of source, and the more lines of code, the more places for bugs... And it
makes it harder to understand, for someone working on it (to make a
change/improvement).
Noel
As Corey said, administrative computers in switching centers
ran Unix, but the call-processing machines ran an unrelated
operating system. The Unix lab did influence that operating
system. Bob Morris instigated, and Joe Condon, Lee McMahon,
Ken Thompson and others built TPC (the phone company), a switching
system controlled by a PDP-11. This system actually ran the
phones in CS Research for several years. ESS5 adopted some
of TPC's architecture, though none of its code.
Doug
Dave Horsfall:
And if my failing memory
serves me correctly, [Henry Spencer] wrote C-News in conjunction with Geoff Collier, as
B-News was starting to show its age and limitations.
====
Your failing memory is correct, except that his name is spelt
Collyer, not Collier.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Hi,
On the subject of Troff, this package seems to have disappeared:
flo—A Language for Typesetting Flowcharts
Anthony P. Wolfman and Daniel M. Berry
Computer Science, Technion, Haifa 32000, ISRAEL
1989
The paper about it is available but the code has gone.
Anyone have an archive of it?
-Steve