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.)
Hunting around through my ancient stuff today, I ran across a 5.25"
floppy drive labeled as having old Usenet maps. These may have
historical interest.
First off, I don't recognize the handwriting on the disk. It's not mine.
Does anyone recognize it? (pic attached)
I dug out my AT&T 6300 (XT clone) from the garage and booted it up. The
floppy reads just fine. It has files with .MAP extension, which are
ASCII Usenet maps from 1980 to 1984, and some .BBM files which are ASCII
Usenet backbone maps up to 1987.
There is also a file whose extension is .GRF from 1983 which claims to
be a graphical Usenet map. Does anyone have any idea what GRF is or
what this map might be? I recall Brian Reid having a plotter-based
Usenet geographic map in 84 or 85.
I'd like to copy these files off for posterity. They read on DOS just
fine. Is there a current best practice for copying off files? I would
have guessed I'd need a to use the serial port, but my old PC has DOS
2.11 (not much serial copying software on it) and I don't have anything
live with a serial port anymore. And it might not help with the GRF file.
I took some photos of the screen with the earliest maps (the ones that
fit on one screen.) So it's an option to type things in, at least for
the early ASCII ones.
Thanks,
Mary Ann
Does anyone know whether CMU’s local Mach sources have been preserved?
I’m not just talking about MK84.default.tar.Z and so on, I’m talking about all the bits of Mach that were used on cluster systems on campus, prior to the switch to vendor UNIX.
I know at least one person who had complete MacMach sources for the last version, but threw out the backup discs with the sources in the process of moving. So I know they exist.
If nothing else, CMU did provide other sites their UX source package (eg UX42), which was the BSD single server environment. So I know that has to be out there, somewhere.
— Chris
Sent from my iPhone
All, a while back Debbie Scherrer mailed me a copy of a
"Software Tools Users Group" archive, and I've been sitting on my
hands and forgetting to add it to the Unix Archive. It's now here:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Software_Tools/STUG_Archive/
The mirrors should pick it up soon. I've gzipped most of it as I'm getting
a bit tight on space.
Thanks to Debbie for the copy and to her and Clem for reminding me to
pull my finger out :)
Cheers, Warren
It's interesting that this comment about ptrace was written
as early as 1980.
Ron Minnich's reference to Plan 9 /proc misses the mark, though.
By the time Plan 9 was written, System V already had /proc; see
https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/usenix_winter91_faulkner.pdf
And as the authors say, the idea actually dates back to Tom Killian's
/proc in Research UNIX. I don't know when Tom's code first went
live, but I first heard about it by seeing it in action on my first
visit to Bell Labs in early 1984, and it was described in public in
a talk at the Summer 1984 USENIX conference in Salt Lake City.
I cannot quickly find an online copy of the corresponding paper;
pointers appreciated. (Is there at least an online index of BTL
CSTRs? The big search engine run by the place that still has
some 1127 old-timers can't find that either.)
As for ptrace itself, I heartily agree that /proc made it obsolete.
So did everyone else in 1127 when I was there, but nobody wanted
to update adb and sdb, which were big messes inside. So I did,
attempting a substantial internal makeover of adb to ease making
versions for different systems and even cross-versions, but just
a quick hack for sdb.
Once I'd done that and shipped the new adb and sdb binaries to
all our machines, I removed the ptrace call from the kernel.
It happened that in the Eighth (or was it Ninth by then? I'd
have to dig out notes to find out) Edition manual, ptrace(2)
was on two facing pages. To celebrate, I glued said pages
together in the UNIX Room's copy of the manual.
Would it were so easy to take out the trash today.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
The paper I am thinking of (gee, I wish I could remember any other details
about it...) was *very* detailed and specific, and was hardware-specific
to either the PDP-11 or VAX. It would not at all be applicable to Linux
or any kind of modern OS.
I am wondering if it is something in the Leffler et al book, I'll have to
go back and review that. I'll have to find my copy of it first...
--Pat.
A few bods have asked to see this, so... Actually, "extracted" would be
better description than "redacted", but it's too late now; I could rename
it and put in a CGI-redirect, but I'm too busy at the moment.
-----
A redacted copy of my complaint to T$.
www.horsfall.org/Telstra-comp-redact.rtf (yes, RTF; it was written on a
Mac).
Utterly inexcusable... Please share etc :-)
-- Dave
Ptrace was short-lived at Research, appearing in 6th through 8th editions.
/proc was introduced in the 8th. Norman axed it in the 9th.
Norman wrote:
nobody wanted
to update adb and sdb, which were big messes inside. So I did
...
Once I'd done that and shipped the new adb and sdb binaries to
all our machines, I removed the ptrace call from the kernel.
doug
