TUHS July 2018

tuhs@tuhs.org

31 participants
24 discussions

by Lyndon Nerenberg

I'm not sure if I should ask this, but here goes ... Have any of you had the misfortune of dealing with that wonder that was the 3B4000? --lyndon

6 years, 11 months

A New Mail List for TUHS chat

by Warren Toomey

All, I've removed the moderation on the TUHS list. Given that you would like to chat about non-TUHS stuff, I've made a new list: coff(a)tuhs.org E-mail me if you want to subscribe. I'll be in the road until the weekend but I will process requests daily. Cheers! Warren

6 years, 11 months

Rivers, the ragged right, and BCPL roff (was: Spooky action at a distance in line adjustment...sometimes)

by Doug McIlroy

> I was poking around on the Unix v7 man page archive the other day, and > discovered to my delight that BCPL roff's request list was documented > there. Yes, it's the same spec, though reimplementated; there was no BCPL compiler for the PDP-11. > Unfortunately, it was marked up in...BCPL roff embedded within > a man page, which hopelessly confused groff. I edited the v7 manual and I believe I proofread every man page. How could I have overlooked the misbehavior of the .li request*, which was even then not in the reference manual's list of n/troff requests? On closer examination, .li does appear in a condensed alphabetical list of requests--and it appears in the source. But if Joe never described it, it's no surprise that groff dropped it. It is totally unnecessary--a bit of special pleading rendered obsolete by Joe's elegant invention of \&. doug * .li causes the next line to be read literally, even if it begins with a dot.

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Any Good dmr Anecdotes?

by Norman Wilson

Greg Lehey: No, that was Peter Weinberger, as dmr confirmed. There's quite a story behind what happened to the stencil. I'll let Warren tell it, but if you want to cheat, check http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-oct2002.php#17 ==== There are many stories behind the use and abuse of Peter's face. The canonical source is http://spinroot.com/pico/pjw.html spinroot.com belongs to Gerard Holzman, who was involved with many creative uses of digitized photography during my time at the Labs. (Also much work on software reliability, which he now pursues at JPL.) The org chart with every face replaced by Peter's was on the wall of the UNIX Room when I first visited 1127 in February 1984. I suspect it appeared not long after Peter became a department head, but I don't know just when that was. Peter didn't really take the alleged glory of being a department head all that seriously, just the responsibilities. One of the official glories was that Department Heads were supposed to get carpet in their offices, atop the standard linoleum tiles. Peter didn't want it, and (as he told me the story later) had to argue with Facilities a lot not to get it. Somehow this resulted in a trophy: a small square of carpet stuck to the wall outside his office. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 11 months

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TUHS July 2018