On 10 March 2017 at 03:04, Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs(a)netbsd.org> wrote:
> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Environment_Real-Time
I'd love to get ahold of a copy of PDP-11 MERT (which surely holds no
significant trade secrets by now) to play with, since it seems like a very
historic, and possibly influential (given what was published about it in the
BSTJ, and elsewhere), but so far I have not been able to find it.
I had a lead to one of the authors (who's now in a very different line of
work), but so far I have yet to find the time to try and run that one down,
to see if anything came of it.
If anyone knows of such, please let me know!
Noel
> Back in the day plain ASCII wasn't really secure, either.
No need to use the past tense. I had a need to assess how much
damage one could do if allowed to feed arbitrary text into xterm.
I came away sobered.
Do not--ever--use a mail agent which will plumb unfiltered text
through to an xterm. nmh, for one:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?36056
Andy
> From: Dan Cross
> why did you consider it such a step forward? I'm really curious about
> the reasoning from folks involved with such things at the time.
This was N layers up from my zone of responsibility when I was on the IESG
(which was the internetwork layer), and I don't recall any discussion about it
on the IESG (although if you really care, there might be minutes - I don't
recall when IESG minutes started, though, perhaps this was before that). That
lack of any memory may be nothing more than a sign of my fading memory, but it
could mean it wasn't a very contentious topic.
FWIW, here's my current analysis of the issues; I doubt my analysis then
would have been substantially different.
The fundamental thing that email does is send something - originally a
section of text - from party A to party B in a way that requires no previous
setup or interaction: party B can be anyone in the entire universe of
entities which support that service. MIME is an extension of this model to
carry other types of data: images, etc.
There is a very good analogy to the pre-existing real-world mail system: that
too allows one to send things to anyone without prior special arrangement, and
it supports not only transferring text, but also sending more than that -
physical objects. This pre-existing system argues that this model of operation
is i) useful, and ii) issues raised by it have probably mostly been worked
through.
So the extension of email to carry more than just text seems like a very
plausible extension.
For the 'average' user, the ability to include images in email is a huge
improvement over any alternative. Any kind of 'pull' model (in which the
receiver has to do something to retrieve the data later from some sort of
server) requires access to such a server on the part of the sender; use of a
'push' model (in which data is sent in the same way as text, as part of a
single transfer) is clearly better.
Security issues raised by sending binary data through email are a separate
question, but I note that those issues will mostly still exist no matter how
the binary data is transferred. (E.g. the binary might contain a virus no
matter whether it's transferred via SMTP or FTP.) The ability of email to send
to anyone does raise issues in this context, but this margin is not big enough
to fully explore them.
I also do get a little uncomfortable when email is used instead of a file
transfer system, for very large files, etc, etc. The thing is that the email
system was not designed to transfer really huge objects (although the size
allowed has been going up over time). The store-and-forward model of the
email system is not really ideal for huge objects, etc, etc.
But having said all that, the extension of the email model to send content
other than pure text - images, etc - still seems like a good idea to me.
Noel
All, there might be a flurry of e-mails as the uucp/news stuff gets
set up. I think we should move the actual setup messages off-list and
keep TUHS for anecdotes & questions about the old systems. Sound OK?
If so, I can set up another list.
I noticed that seismo is not as well connected (historically) as decvax,
so I've turned seismo into decvax, and I now have three systems on three
physically different boxes:
munnari ----------- decvax ---------- inhp4
at home simh.tuhs.orgminnie.tuhs.org
behind NAT 5000 5000
I'm happy to pass either decvax or inhp4 onto someone if someone
else really wants one of them.
Cheers, Warren
> 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
On 2017 Mar 9, 21:26, Josh Good wrote:
>
> And by the way, the two user limit in the "Personal Edition" of UnixWare
> 2.1 seems to be real:
>
> $ telnet 172.27.101.128
> Trying 172.27.101.128...
> Connected to 172.27.101.128.
> Escape character is '^]'.
>
>
> UnixWare 2.1 (gollum1) (pts/2)
>
> login: jgood
> Password:
> UnixWare 2.1
> gollum1
> Copyright 1996 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. All Rights
> Reserved.
> Copyright 1984-1995 Novell, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
> Copyright 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corp. All Rights Reserved.
> U.S. Pat. No. 5,349,642
> Last login: Tue Mar 9 20:57:05 1999 on pts000
> telnetd: set_id() failed: Too many users
> .
> Connection closed by foreign host.
>
>
> This thing was released in 1996. Obviously, with this limitation it could
> not hold a candle to the emerging Linux tsunammi full of free source code.
On the subject of Linux displacing UnixWare on the PC architecture in the
mid-90's, I've found this most illuminating Usenet thread from 1994, whose
participants include Alan Cox, Theo Tso, and some Novell Product Managers:
http://tech-insider.org/linux/research/1994/1025.html
And what came after that, as they say, is history.
--
Josh Good
Hi all, as part of my effort to recreate part of a simulated Usenet,
I'm trying to bring up uucp, then mail, then C-news on 4.2BSD boxes.
I've got a hardwired serial port between them, and I can see a basic
uucp conversation when I do this:
munnari.oz# /usr/lib/uucp/uucico -r1 -sseismo -x7
uucp seismo (3/6-8:04-132) DEBUG (ENABLED)
. . .
uucp seismo (3/6-8:04-132) SUCCEEDED (call to seismo )
imsg >\015\012\020<
Shere\000imsg >\020<
ROK\000msg-ROK
Rmtname seismo, Role MASTER, Ifn - 5, Loginuser - uucp
. . .
I tried e-mail to seismo!wkt and wkt(a)seismo.UUCP but it's been deferred.
I now need some help with the sendmail config. I did play around with
sendmail.cf/mc way back, but it never involved uucp so I'm stuck.
Anybody want to help (and dust out those cobwebs at the same time)?
Thanks, Warren
OK, Geoff Collyer has built the C-News binaries for the 4.2 emulated
systems. They are temporarily at http://minnie.tuhs.org/Y5/Cnews/
Does someone want to try and get them up and running on an emulated system?
Also, I've build a 4.3BSD version of the emulated uucp systems. It's a
separate branch at https://github.com/DoctorWkt/4bsd-uucp. You can get it
by doing:
git clone https://github.com/DoctorWkt/4bsd-uucp.git \
--branch 4.3BSD --single-branch
Once it's solid enough I will make this the default branch, but I'll
leave the 4.2BSD branch there as well.
Thanks Geoff!
Warren
