TUHS September 2019

tuhs@tuhs.org

74 participants
45 discussions

by Warner Losh

I'm looking for complete compies of UNIX NEWS volumes 1-7. 8 and newer are available on the USENIX site, or on archive.org, but older ones are not. A few excerpts are published in newer login issues, but nothing complete. Reading the AUUGN issues, especially the early ones, are quite enlightening and help one judge the relative merits of later accounts with better contemporary context. I was hoping to get the same from UNIX NEWS (later login) and any other news letters that may exist from the time (I think I spotted references to one from the UK in AUUGN). It's really quite enlightening. Warner

5 years, 2 months

multi-booting four *nix plus 3 Win editions plus OS/2 on 1992 Dell 486D/50

by Charles H Sauer

tl;dr multibooting a 1992 Dell 486D/50 WFW3.11+Win95+Win2K+DellSVR4+NEXTSTEP+RedHat5.2+OS/2 3.0+OpenBSD2.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgKjSXI7HOI (Maybe it should be tl;dw — didn’t watch — the video is long.) This post is intended to both be more accessible summary and provide details that are not in the video. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/09/26/koko-welcome-to-eight-jura… Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

5 years, 2 months

Recovered!!! The Georgia Tech Software Tools Subystem for Prime Computers

by Arnold Robbins

Hello All. Believed lost in the mists of time for over 30 years, the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Prime Computers, along with the Georgia Tech C Compiler for Prime Computers, have been recovered! The source code and documentation (and binary files) are available in a Github repo: https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/gt-swt. The README.md there provides some brief history and credits with respect to the recovery, and w.r.t. the subsystem and C compilers themselves. Credit to Scott Lee for making and keeping the tapes and driving the recovery process, and to Dennis Boone and yours truly for contributing financially. I set up the repo. For anyone who used and/or contributed to this software, we hope you'll enjoy this trip down memory lane. Feel free to forward this note to interested parties. Enjoy, Arnold Robbins (On behalf of the swt recovery team. :-)

5 years, 2 months

congratulations to Warner on a great talk

by Eric Allman

Warner's talk just finished --- it was excellent. Those of you who didn't see it live might well want to see the recording when it comes out. eric

5 years, 2 months

Revived! The 10 Edition spell program!

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hello All. I have revived the 10th edition spell(1) program, allowing it to compile and run on "modern" systems. See https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/v10spell ; the README.md gives an overview of what was done. Enjoy! Arnold

5 years, 2 months

8bc -- a B compiler for the PDP-8

by Robert Clausecker

Greetings! As a project for our university's seminar on the PDP-8 I wrote a compiler for the B language targeting it. It's a bit rough around the edges and the runtime code needs some work (division and remainder are missing), but it does compile B code correctly, generating acceptable code (for my taste, though the function call sequence could be better). I hope some of you enjoy this compiler for an important historical language for an important historical computer (makes me wonder why the two weren't married before). https://github.com/fuzxxl/8bc Yours, Robert Clausecker -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments

5 years, 2 months

My talk today 2019-09-20 at UTC 1230

by Warner Losh

https://2019.eurobsdcon.org/livestream-soria-moria/ Has a live stream. My talk is at 1230 UTC or just under 2 hours. There will be a recording I think that I'll be able to share with you in a day or three. Warner

5 years, 3 months

OpenSolaris Git ?

by Alexander Voropay

Hi! Is there a public OpenSolaris Git/CVS/SVN ? The openloaris.org site is down. AFIK the first sources set (not complete) was published around June 2005. The latest available sources were b135 March 2010 (available at TUHS) https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135 It would be interesting to see an evolution of "pure" SysV R4. -- -=AV=-

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff

by Norman Wilson

Larry McVoy: If you have something like perl that needs a zillion sub pages, info makes sense. For just a man page, info is horrible. ===== This pokes me in one of my longest-standing complaints: Manual entries, as printed by man and once upon a time in the Programmers' Manual Volume 1, should be concise references. They are not a place for tutorials or long-winded descriptions or even long lists of hundreds of options (let alone descriptions of why the developer thinks this is the neatest thing since sliced bread and what bread he had in his sandwiches that day). For many programs, one or two pages of concise reference is all the documentation that's needed; no one needs a ten-page tutorial on how to use cat or rm or ls, for example. But some programs really do deserve a longer treatment, either a tutorial or an extended reference with more detail or both. Those belong in separate documents, and are why the Programmers' Manual had a second volume. Nowadays people think nothing of writing 68-page-long manual entries (real example from something I'm working with right now) that are long, chatty lists of options or configuration-file directives with tutorial information interspersed. The result makes the developer feel good--look at all the documentation I've written!!--but it's useless for someone trying to figure out how to write a configuration file for the first time, and not so great even for someone trying to edit an existing one. Even the Research system didn't always get this right; some manual entries ran on and on and on when what was really needed was a concise list of something and a longer accompanying document. (The Tenth Edition manual was much better about that, mostly because of all the work Doug put in. I doubt there has ever been a better editor for technical text than Doug.) But it's far worse now in most systems, because there's rarely any editor at all; the manuals are just an accreted clump. And that's a shame, though I have no suggestions on how to fix it. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff

by Norman Wilson

Clem Cole: Exactly!!!! That's what Eric did when he wrote more(ucb) - he *added to Unix*. The funny part was that USG thought more(ucb) was a good idea and then wrote their own, pg(att); which was just as arrogant as the info behavior from the Gnu folks!!! ====== And others wrote their own too, of course. The one I know best is p(1), written by Rob Pike in the late 1970s at the University of Toronto. I encountered at Caltech on the system Rob had set up before leaving for Bell Labs (and which I cared for and hacked on for the next four years before following him). By the time I reached BTL it was a normal part of the Research system; I believe it's in all of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Edition manuals. p is interesting because it's so much lighter-weight, and because it has rather a different interior design: Rather than doing termcappy things, p just prints 22 lines (or the number specified in an option), then doesn't print the newline after the 22nd line. Hit return and it will print the next 22 lines, and so on. The resulting text just flows up the glass-tty screen without any fuss, cbreak, or anything. (I believe the first version predated V7 and therefore cbreak.) Why 22 lines instead of 24, the common height of glass ttys back then? Partly because that means you keep a line or two of context when advancing pages, making reading simpler. But also because in those days, a standard page destined for a printer (e.g. from pr or nroff, and therefore from man) was 66 lines long. 22 evenly divides 66, so man something | p never gives you a screen spanning pages. p was able to back up: type - (and return) instead of just return, and it reprints the previous 22-line page; -- (return) the 22 lines before that; and so on. This was implemented in an interesting and clever way: a wrapper around the standard I/O library which kept a circular buffer of some fixed number of characters (8KiB in early versions, I think), and a new call that, in effect, backed up the file pointer by one character and returned the character just backed over. That made it easy to back over the previous N lines: just make that call until you've seen N newlines, then discard the newline you've just backed over, and you're at the beginning the first line you want to reprint. As I vaguely recall, more was able to back up, but only when reading from a real file, not a pipeline. p could do (limited but sufficient) backup from a pipeline too. As a creature of its pre-window-system era, you could also type !command when p paused as well. I remember being quite interested in that wrapper as a possible library for use in other things, though I never found a use for it. I also remember a wonderful Elements-of-Programming-Style adventure with Rob's code. I discovered it had a bug under some specific case when read returned less than a full bufferful. I read the code carefully and couldn't see what was wrong. So I wrote my own replacement for the problematic subroutine from scratch, tested it carefully in corner cases, then with listings of Rob's code and mine side-by-side walked through each with the problem case and found the bug. I still carry my own version of p (rewritten from scratch mainly to make it more portable--Rob's code was old enough to be too clever in some details) wherever I go; ironically, even back to U of T where I have been on and off for the past 30 years. more and less and pg and the like are certainly useful programs; for various reasons they're not to my taste, but I don't scorn them. But I can't help being particular fond of p because it taught me a few things about programming too. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 3 months

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TUHS September 2019