TUHS January 2019

tuhs@tuhs.org

67 participants
52 discussions

by norman＠nose.cita.utoronto.ca

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.)

2 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Old Unix manuals, TMs, etc

by Warren Toomey

----- 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 -----

5 years, 5 months

Wanted: AT&T System V Release 3.2.{1,2,3} Source Code

by Seth J. Morabito

[Cross-posted from the 3B2 mailing list] Hi folks, I'm in search of source code for AT&T's System V Release 3.2.1, 3.2.2, and/or 3.2.3 for the 3B2. Does this exist? Has anyone ever seen it? Note that I'm not looking for the System V Release 3.2 Source Code Provision for the 3B2 /310 and /400 -- I already have that. It was absolutely invaluable when I was writing my 3B2/400 emulator. The reason I'm so keen on getting access is that I have ROM images from a 3B2/1000, and I'd like to add support for it to my 3B2 emulator. The system board memory map seems a bit different than the /300, /310, and /400. These max out at SVR 3.2. I can't imagine trying to add 3B2/1000 support without the 3.2.x source code. I imagine there's some tape image somewhere that's a delta of files that take you from 3.2 to 3.2.1, 3.2.2 or 3.2.3? -Seth -- Seth Morabito Poulsbo, WA, USA web(a)loomcom.com

5 years, 9 months

DEC and Dave Cutler (was Re: The John Snow's of the UNIX family)

by Paul Winalski

On 1/16/19, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote: > I’ve heard and personally seen a lot of technical arrogance and > incompetence out of the Masshole area. Was DEC inflicted? In > “Showstopper” Cutler fled to the west coast to get away from this kind of > thing. > Having worked at DEC from February 1980 until after the Compaq takeover, I would say that DEC may have exhibited technical arrogance from time to time, but certainly never technical incompetence. DEC's downfall was a total lack of skill at marketing. Ken Olsen believed firmly in a "build it and they will come" philosophy. Contrast this with AT&T's brilliant "Unix - consider it a standard" ad campaign. DEC also suffered from organizational paralysis. KO believed in decisions by consensus. This is fine if you can reach a consensus, but if you can't it leads to perpetually revisiting decisions and to obstructionist behavior. There was a saying in DEC engineering that any decision worth making was worth making 10 times. As opposed to the "lead, follow, or get out of the way" philosophy at Sun. Or Intel's concept of disagree and commit. DEC did move towards a "designated responsible individual" approach where a single person got to make the ultimate decision, but the old consensus approach never really died. Dave Cutler was the epitome of arrogance. On the technical side, he got away with it because his way (which he considered to be the only way) was usually at least good enough for Version 1, if not the best design. Cutler excelled in getting V1 of something out the door. He never stayed around for V2 of anything. He had a tendency to leave messes behind him. A Cutler product reminded me of the intro to "The Peabodys" segment of Rocky & Bullwinkle. A big elaborate procession, followed by someone cleaning up the mess with a broom. Cutler believed in a "my way or the highway" approach to software design. His move to the west coast was to place himself far enough away that those who wanted to revisit all his decisions would have a tough time doing so. On the personal side, he went out of his way to be nasty to people, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread. Although he was admired technically, nobody liked him. -Paul W.

5 years, 9 months

Archeology: AberMUD, BCPL, ec.

by Richard Salz

Some folks are trying to figure out how to get AberMud source online and working; see https://twitter.com/larsbrinkhoff/status/1056823314272960512 Sample code at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/larsbrinkhoff/abermud/master/abermud1/tex…

5 years, 9 months

qed-archive - please reclone

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. I had a bad commit message in the qed-archive I mentioned here a few weeks ago. I fixed it with a 'git push --force' (even though that's not recommended) since I expect it to be a read-only archive going forward, and I wanted it to be right. In short, if you cloned it, please remove your copy and reclone. Thanks! Arnold

5 years, 9 months

Knuth and Unix

by Dave Horsfall

Time for a new thread :-) As today is Knuth's birthday (posted over in COFF), I was wondering (in the cesspool that is my mind) how much of Unix would have been influenced by Knuth? We have qsort() of course (which Hoare actually wrote, based on one of Knuth's algorithms), but I'm guessing that Ken and Dennis would have been familiar with his work? Or am I spreading fake news again? :-) Look, I love being corrected if I make a mistake on a technical mailing list, so fire at will if need be... -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] V6 networking & alarm syscall

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Where did you find the BBN TCP/IP stack? Easiest place to find it is the TUHS Unix Tree page: https://www.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP Several tapes of it survived in the CSRG archives, currently held by the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. A late version of the tcp/ip routines survived at the Stanford SAIL archives, currently online here: https://www.saildart.org/[IP,SYS]/ (mixed in with sources for WAITS). A much evolved version is in the BSD SCCS history: https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/tree/master/sys/deprecated/bbnnet Note that the location ‘deprecated’ is where the code ended up. Back in 1985 it would have been in the normal build path, but SCCS does not preserve that. Paul

5 years, 10 months

Extra Two CDs in CSRG CD-ROM Set

by Warren Toomey

All, I just found out in the past few days that Kirk McKusick has added another two CDs in his set of CSRG Archives CD-ROM set. Some details of these CDs can be found here: https://www.mckusick.com/csrg/index.html I've purchased the two additional CDs, and I've put a file listing and set of checksums for all files on all six CDs here: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/CSRG_CDs/ Cheers, Warren

5 years, 10 months

The John Snow's of the UNIX family

by alan＠alanlee.org

I've been on a Data General Aviion restoration binge lately and re-familiarizing myself with DG/UX. In my case 5.4R3.1 running on a MC88100 based AV/300 and MC88110 dual core AV/5500. The more I experience, the more I am impressed. There are a few things about the system that seem impressive. - Despite coming from a System V core, there is a lot of BSD influx - especially on the networking side. This is a personal taste issue as other ports have tried to mix the best of both worlds. But after a prior month-long Sun/Solaris restoration binge of similar era hardware (Super/Hyper/Ultra SPARC) and software (SunOS 4 through Solaris 9), DG/UX is a welcome and refreshing change! Especially out of the box. - It has a system of file security that seems unique for that era - at least in my experience - of explicit and implicit directory tags with inheritance. There is even a high security extended version of the OS. - It has a built-in logical volume manager supporting multiple virtual to physical disk mappings, striping, mirroring, and even archiving - something several entire sub-industries were created for in other ports. I am guessing this contributed to EMC's purchase of Data General for the Clariion disk storage product lines. - It leveraged open-source tools early. The default m88k compiler installed with the system is GNU C 2.xx. - It was among the earliest of operating systems to support NUMA aware affinity on MP versions of the MC88110. (IRIX, Solaris, BSD, Linux, and Windows support all came much later). - Many others. It does have it's quirks. However I get the overall impression the folks working at DG were on their game and were a leader in the industry in many areas. It is unfortunate a) the fate of the Motorola 88K was tied to Data General's place in the UNIX world, and b) by the time they migrated to IA86, enterprise business was more interested in Microsoft NT & SQL server or Linux than an expensive vendor's UNIX port. That being said, I don't see DG/UX mentioned much in UNIX history. In fact, I am researching an exhibit I'm putting together for the Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 7.0, and DG/UX isn't mentioned on any of the 'UNIX Family Tree' diagrams I can find so far. It doesn't even make Wikipedia's 'UNIX Variants' page. It's own Wikipedia page is also rather sparse. Like John Snow in season 1, there is a junk of missing and plot impacting history here - centered around the people involved. To a lesser degree, IRIX is also a red-headed step-child. It's omitted from half the lists I can find. It just seems the importance, even if it's an importance by being the 'first' rather than # of users, of these ports are pretty significant. Just curious of others' thoughts. And I wondering if anyone has first-hand knowledge of Data General's efforts or knows of others that can illuminate the shadows of what I'm discovering is a pretty exciting corner of the UNIX world. Thanks, -Alan H.

5 years, 10 months

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TUHS January 2019