TUHS July 2019

tuhs@tuhs.org

58 participants
31 discussions

by Deborah Scherrer

Many, many thanks to Clem Cole for arranging the 50th Unix Anniversary celebration in Seattle last Wednesday. It was wonderful to see old friends again. Most of these folks are still out in the world sharing their brilliance in various computing facilities. Lots of very special people still doing wonderful work! Thanks, Clem, for the chance to meet up with them again! Deborah

5 years, 11 months

Another pioneer gone

by John P. Linderman

Fernando Corbato died last Friday. http://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-professor-emeritus-fernando-corby-corbato-comp…

5 years, 11 months

VMS / Unix and old CSRG paper

by Paul Ruizendaal

As the last week had a discussion on this list about various VMS+Unix projects from that era, maybe it is a good time to ask the below question again: For a while I have been searching for a 1982 tech report from CSRG: "TR/4 (Proposals for the Enhancement of Unix on the Vax)" This report later evolved into TR/5, the 4.2BSD manual, but I’m specifically looking for TR/4. The only reference that I have for TR/4 is contained in a 1982 discussion about VMS vs. Unix: https://tech-insider.org/vms/research/1982/0111.html (seek for message 5854 from Bill Mitchell). Clutching at straws here, but maybe a copy survived in a box with VMS+Unix materials. Wbr, Paul

5 years, 11 months

Turing to be on 50-pound note

by John P. Linderman

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/business/alan-turing-50-pound-note.html?…

5 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Thanks for Virtuallyfun! (was Re: Happy birthday, 386BSD!)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Adam Thornton > something designed for single-threaded composible text-filtering > operations is now running almost all of the world's multithreaded > user-facing graphical applications, but that's the vagaries of history > for you. It's a perfect example of my aphorism, "The hallmark of truly great architecture is not how well it does the things it was designed to do, but how well it does things it was never expected to handle." Noel

5 years, 11 months

Floppy to modern files for Usenet maps

by Mary Ann Horton Gmail

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

5 years, 11 months

Looking for email archives...

by Warner Losh

... of the pdp7 unix restoration activities. I could find the old unix72 ones at tuhs, but not the unix v0 archives. Can someone point me in the right direction? A google search or 4 has turned up nothing. Has it been archived somewhere? Warner

5 years, 11 months

CSRG Archive! (and Mach fun)

by Jason Stevens

Well I checked out Kirk’s site, and found out that he has a DVD to go along with the old 4 disc CD-ROM sets: In the 20 years since the release of the CSRG CD-ROM Set (1998-2018) I have continued collecting old software which I have put together in two historic collections. The first is various historic UNIX distributions not from Berkeley. The second is programs and other operating systems that shipped on or influenced BSD. The distribution is contained on a single DVD that contains all the original content from the original 4-CD-ROM distribution, these two collections of historic software, and a copy of John Baldwin's conversion of the SCCS database contained on the original disk4 to a Subversion repository. Unlike most write-once technology which remains readable for less than ten years, this DVD is written using M-Disc technology which should last for centuries. The price for the DVD is $149.00. I know the $150 USD may sound pricy but the historic2 archive does contain a couple additional copies of Mach! And a bunch of other stuff in there as well, it’s gigabytes of stuff to go through.

5 years, 11 months

RIP Fernando Corbató

by Dan Cross

Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multics mailing list. Fernando Corbató has passed away at 93. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/fernando-corbato-dead.html Clem organized the wonderful Unix 50 event at the LCM two days ago, where we saw a working 6180 front panel on display (backed by a virtual DPS-8m running Multics!). This is our heritage and our history, let us not forget where we came from. - Dan C.

5 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)

by ron＠ronnatalie.com

Interactive Systems. Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in many a year. Heinz Lycklama went there. The did a couple of things, a straight UNIX port to various things (PDP-11, 386) and also there “UNIX running under VMS” product. They also had their own version of the Rand Editor called “INed” that was happiest on this hacked version of a Perkin Elmer terminal. Early versions were PWB UNIX based if I recall. My first job out of college was working with IS Unix on an 11/70 playing configuration management (essentially all the PWB stuff). I also hacked the line printer spooler and the .mm macro package to do classification markings (this was a part of a government contract). A few years later I was given the job of porting Interactive Systems UNIX that was already running on an i386 (an Intel 310 system which had a Multibus I) to an Intel Multibus II box. Intel had already ported it once, but nobody seemed to be able to find the source code. So with a fresh set of the source code for the old system from IS, I proceeded to reverse engineer/port the code to the Message Passing Coprocessor. (Intel was not real forthcoming for documentation for that either). Eventually, I got it to work (the Multibus II really was a pleasant bus and worked well with UNIX). I went on to write drivers for a 9-track tape drive (which sat in my living room for a long time), a Matrox multibus II framebuffer (OK, that had problems), and a SCSI host adapter that was talking to this kludge device that captured digital data from a FLIR on uMatic cassettes (but that’s a different story).

5 years, 11 months

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TUHS July 2019