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.)
----- Forwarded message from meljmel-unix(a)yahoo.com -----
Warren,
Thanks for your help. To my amazement in one day I received
8 requests for the documents you posted on the TUHS mailing
list for me. If you think it's appropriate you can post that
everything has been claimed. I will be mailing the Unix TMs
and other papers to Robert Swierczek <rmswierczek(a)gmail.com>
who said he will scan any one-of-a-kind items and make them
available to you and TUHS. The manuals/books will be going
to someone else who very much wanted them.
Mel
----- End forwarded message -----
Hi all, I've just heard that the Usenix board of directors do not want
to explicitly celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unix.
It's been suggested that we, the TUHS members, both lobby the board and
also offer our assistance to help organisation such a celebration.
Who, on the list, would put their hands up to help organising something
that coincided with the 2019 Usenix ATC in July 2019?
I'd like to get the bare bones of an organising team, then approach the
Usenix board, offer our help and ask them to support us.
What do you think? 11 months to go.
Thanks, Warren
P.S. Nokia Bell Labs are also going to organise something, possibly a month
earlier but I have no solid details yet.
Hi,
The earliest I've found to be in the FHS from '94. Are there any earlier
examples of a home directory being at /home instead of /usr/$(user)? Are
there any current Unix systems that don't use /home by default (except
OSX)? Does anybody here do it intentionally? Also, what was the
rationale of moving the directory to /home?
Thanks!
--
caóc
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:07 AM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 28 August 2018 at 23:23:10 -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> ....
>
>
> Creeping featurism!
>
No, I think its really is that many programmers that touch different
applications felt the need to pee on the code to feel that they left their
scent. 😘
Seriously, IMO the problem is you can never know what someone else really
values, so be careful at what you change. Pike's 'cat -v' dissertation
b*tched at UCB for the some of the same issues. Somewhere there is a
proper middle ground ( I think of as having good taste elegance). BSD nor
Linux was no more 'perfect' that 6th or 7th edition. Truth is a much as I
pine for the elegance, I don't want to run either of the later as my
day-2-day system in today's world and I >>loved<< running them when they
were what I had.
Rob has a real point and many of the changes really *are gratuitous* and
there *are better ways of doing* many things than adding a switch to old
command and reusing it because you can. I also think the complaint of just
adding 'crap' because you could started with BSD but the cause wasn't that
people were bad -- there was address space relief over the PDP-11 and often
added a new switch/new functionality was easy to do, instead of creating a
whole new solution just deidcated to that problen only. FWIW: sendmail is
my best example (useful tool that it was - there were/are much more elegant
solutions - sendmail should have been 'headerwriter' and smtpd should have
been a seperate program).
Dueling switches and functionality (dec vs -f bs -F) I fear is sometimes
ignorance of the past. I fear there is some sort of belief we need to shed
the past because someone feeld the it gets in the way of the future (I'll
pick on my on son here - who things 2-3 years is 'old' and its time to
throw things away). Truth is sometimes it might. But I would rather
inject a stronger strain into the mix and let the users decide and for good
or bad, BSD did that to the original (v6/v7) and now Linux is doing/has
done it to much of BSD.
The compaint is the 'throwing the baby out with the bath water' behavior
that seems to often follow (see systemd issues on other mailing lists);
*i.e*. did you really gain something for this huge disruption. To me when
something really new/a great innovation comes that should be celebrated.
BSD gave us VM and a number of 'useful' new utilities, and eventually an
networking API (al biet not everyone liked it, sockets was good enough,
solved the problems and became a standard that allowed us to move on).
Mach (while Larry may not like the VM implementation), moved the bar for
the kernel's handling of memory a huge amount and almost won the uK war
(which IMO was a too bad). BTW: other kernels would do nice VM's too, but
Mach was generally available (open source if you will and really was the
system the moived it forward).
That said, I give the Linux folks great credit for the addition of modules
was huge and it took BSD and the other UNIX systems a few years really pick
up that idea in the same way (yes Solaris, Tru64 and eventually HPUX etc..
had something too but again - my comment about being generally available
applies).
So here is the issue, how to do move the ball forward? BSD, then Linux,
became the 'stronger strain' and pushed out the old version. The problem
is the ROMs in my fingers (like Dave) never got reprogrammed so some of the
'new' becomes annoying. Will I learned to like systemd? We shall see...
Clem
Somewhat off topic, for which apologies beforehand.
I’m looking for source code of Plan9’s first edition. A quick search on Google came up dry.
Would that source be publicly available? Or were the licensing restrictions such that it only exists in non-public archives?
Warren wrote:
> I would like to do some work on how the content changed over time.
> The result would be, for me, an interesting paper to read but somehow
> I think the readership base would be limited :-)
"Critical editions", as they are known in literary circles,
garner wide respect if not wide readership. Go for it.
Incidentally the earliest diff programs I know about date
from about 1969. One was by Steve Johnson, specifically
for comparing comdecks--compressed assembler source. The
other arose in service of critical editions.
Doug
All, I just got an e-mail from a TUHS member who would like to lay their
hands on a copy of the original Unix SOSP paper:
Anyway, I am trying to get my hands on the original 1972/73 paper on The
UNIX TIME-SHARING SYSTEM that was published at the SOSP ‘73 Proceedings
of the fourth ACM symposium on operating system principles.
I do have the 1974 and 1978 reprint papers. But, I really want the
1972/73 original. I see it in the ACM digital library, but the full
text PDF prints only the abstract.
Does anybody have a scan of the original SOSP paper?
I'd also like a copy of the 1974 reprint in CACM.
Thanks, Warren
Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> comments on the use of "home
directory" on Thu, 27 Sep 2018 19:14:19 -0400 (EDT):
>> I _did_ find "home directory" in the ITS documentation; the oldest doc file I
>> found it in was dated 5/25/79. If ITS was the source, not sure how it spread -
>> maybe via EMACS?
I looked in my own TECO code (> 12K lines), and found "home directory"
in two files with internal date headers from 1983.
I scanned my archive of TOPS-20 emacs source code and found these
uses:
% grep -i 'home dire' *
babyl.info:operating system; this file resides in the user's "home directory" and
conv.info:stands for the user's home directory. If neither file exists, the
emacs.info:Home Directory Your home directory is the one on which your mail and
emacs.info: may be the same as your home directory's name.
emacs.mss:@Index{Home Directory}@Index{User Name}
emacs.mss:it should be called @ITS{<home directory>;<user name> EVARS instead of EMACS.}
emacs.mss:@Index{Home Directory}
emacs.mss:EMACS into the file @ITS[<home directory>;TS ESAVE](a)Twenex[ESAVE.EXE]
Binary file mkdump.info matches
teco.archiv:*) FS U HSNAMEnd FS U MAILllow you to get a user's home directory
teco.archiv:* FS HSNAME$ is the user's home directory, as a numeric sixbit word.
teco.archiv:On old versions of ITS that don't have home directories, it is the
teco.archiv:same as FS MSNAME$. The home directory is (presumably) where such things
teco.archiv: B) People whose home directory is a shared directory
tecord.info: If you @EJ a file TS FOO on your home directory, then FOO^K
tecord.info:FS HSNAME s the user's home directory. The home directory
tecord.ref:FS HSNAME user's home directory
tecord.ref:FS U HSNAME used to determine a user's home directory
Here are the file dates:
% grep -l -i 'home dire' * | xargs ls -log
-rw-r--r-- 1 51376 Jun 5 1981 babyl.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 81689 Oct 16 1981 conv.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 466772 Dec 28 1981 emacs.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 412673 Oct 16 1981 emacs.mss
-rw-r--r-- 1 12570 May 24 1982 mkdump.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 121865 Oct 16 1981 teco.archiv
-rw-r--r-- 1 225207 Oct 16 1981 tecord.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 16407 Dec 28 1981 tecord.ref
In another directory named emacs-162, there were 18 files containing
"home directory"; the oldest is dated 6-Mar-1980.
However, when I dug into teco.archiv, I found that the match occurred
in a change log block that begins
TECO 699:
RMS 10/14/77 Many changes
...
ITS only:
Thus, 14-Oct-1977 is the earliest date that I can find for "home
directory", credited to Richard Stallman.
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> My memory is that the term "home directory" predates /home - perhaps on
> other OS's such as TOPS-20, but I don't have time to research that.
Well, I looked at the "Introduction to MIT-XX" (a TOPS-20 machine), and it
also used the terms "logged-in directory" (home dir) and "connected directory"
(current dir).
I couldn't find any use of 'home' in the V6 documentation.
I _did_ find "home directory" in the ITS documentation; the oldest doc file I
found it in was dated 5/25/79. If ITS was the source, not sure how it spread -
maybe via EMACS?
Noel
