Ingo wrote:
> i have been working hard to reduce the number of options of low usefulness
Ah, soothing classical Unix Musik, so rare in the cacophonous Linux era.
Doug
Ray Tomlinson, computer pioneer, was born on this day in 1941. He is
credited with inventing this weird thing called "email" on the ARPAnet, in
particular the "@" sign to designate a remote host (although some jerk --
his name is not important -- is claiming that he was first).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Clem Cole:
On the other hand, we still 'dump core' and use the core files for
debugging. So, while the term 'drum' lost its meaning, 'core file' - might
be considered 'quaint' by todays hacker, it still has meaning.
====
Just as we still speak of dialling and hanging up the phone,
electing Presidents, and other actions long since made obsolete
by changes of technology and culture.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
> From: Warner Losh
> Drum memory stopped being a new thing in the early 70's.
Mid 60's. Fixed-head disks replaced them - same basic concept, same amount of
bits, less physical volume. Those lasted until the late 70's - early PDP-11
Unixes have drivers for the RF11 and RS0x fixed-head disks.
The 'fire-hose' drum on the GE 645 Multics was the last one I've heard
of. Amusing story about it here:
http://www.multicians.org/low-bottle-pressure.html
Although reading it, it may not have been (physically) a drum.
> There never was a drum device, at least a commercial, non-lab
> experiment, for the VAXen. They all swapped to spinning disks by then.
s/spinning/non-fixed-head/.
Noel
Does anyone know if UToronto's MRS database system (from about 1979) has
survived? It was described in:
Robert Hudyma, John Kornatowski, Ivor Ladd. MRS: A microcomputer
database management system. Proceedings of the 1981 ACM SIGSMALL
symposium on Small systems and SIGMOD workshop on Small database
systems, pp 174-180.
Apparently it was distributed to over 50 unix sites. This is the
software which became the MISTRESS and later EMPRESS products.
De
The recent Empress and earlier PC[67]300 conversations have churned my
failing memory to catch up on the CTIX versions I ran throughout the
1980s.
I (sort of) remember 5.x and 6.x as being the releases we faced. The 5.x
ones were derived from SVR1 IIRC. When 6.x arrived, SVR2+ was the order
of the day, but I don't recall much or anything of SVR3 creeping in.
Certainly no RFS or the like. And Convergent wasn't shy about letting
bits of Berkeley code sneak in when that made sense.
I think the UUCP code got a significant update between 5 and 6. Didn't
the 5.x uucico have the "window > 3 == core dump" bug? By 6.x I recall it
grew 'G' protocol (at least).
Any ex-Convergent hacks on the list who can fill in the blanks?
--lyndon
We lost software engineer Dick Hustvedt on this day in 2008, following
severe injuries in a vehicle accident. He contributed much to RSX-11 and
VMS, including the infamous "microfortnight" and the SD730 Fixed Head
Solar Horologue. An obituary of him can be found at
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2008/04/23/dick-hustvedt-the-consumma…
(and it's worth reading).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
We lost Robert Taylor, computer scientist and Internet pioneer, on this
day in 2017. Amongst other things, he helped invent the mouse, pioneered
computer communications leading up to ARPAnet, developed the computer
science lab at Xerox...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Today I reached a minor milestone with my 'Venix restoration project' that
I talked about months ago. I ran a Venix 86 binary (sync) to successful
completion on my FreeBSD/amd64 box (though none of the code should be too
FreeBSD specific).
So, I hacked https://github.com/tkchia/reenigne.git to remove the DOS
loader and emulator and to add a Venix system call loader and emulator, or
at least the start of one. I've also added FP instruction parsing, but it's
100% wrong (it just parses the instructions and does nothing else to decode
or implement them). With this, I'm able to load OMAGIC binaries from the
extant venix 86 distributions and run them. The only one that runs
successfully is sync() since I've not yet implemented argument passing or
any of the other 58 system calls :). NMAGIC should be pretty quick after
this.
This is but a step on the road to getting the Venix compiler running so I
can see how much of the system I can recreate from the v7 and other sources
that are on TUHS.
Not sure who, if anybody, cares about this stuff. I thought people here
might be interested. I've pushed the results to
https://github.com/bsdimp/venix if you care. This program is in the
tools/86sim directory. There's also a doc directory where I document the
Venix 86 ABI, as well as doing a very deep-dive into a disassembled
/bin/sync to discover what I can from it (turns out, it's quite a lot).
So, I thought I'd share this here. Don't know if anybody else is
interested, but you never know until you tell people about stuff...
Warner
I was sure that I'd read a paper on the legal history of Unix. So I did a
Google search for it, and found a link to the PDF. The linked PDF was on
the TUHS website :-)
http://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:theses:gmp_thesis…
I'd better do a backup of my brain, as I've got a few flakey DRAM chips.
Cheers, Warren
