TUHS February 2020

tuhs@tuhs.org

77 participants
39 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

Unix on Zilog Z8000?

by Jon Forrest

There's been a lot of discussion about early Unix on Intel, National Semi, Motorola, and Sparc processors. I don't recall if Unix ran on the Z8000, and if not, why not. As I remember the Z8000 was going to be the great white hope that would continue Zilog's success with the Z80 into modern times. But, it obviously didn't happen. Why? Jon

4 years, 8 months

First COFF Video Session in ~22 hours

by Warren Toomey

All, I've had a few queries about the proposed video chat sessions, so I'll kick the first one off tomorrow: UTC Brisbane London New York Friday, 28 Feb 2020 at 21:00 Sat 7:00am Fri 9:00pm Fri 4:00 pm I'll only be able to stay for an hour but the chat session should continue when I've gone. URL: https://meet.tuhs.org/COFF Password: unix Cheers, Warren

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Crabs

by Lawrence Stewart

This explains something, I think! Luca Cardelli and Mark Manasse later worked at the Digital Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, which was formed in 1984 after PARC fired Bob Taylor. Mark helped write the window system we used, and at some point a cat appeared, which would sleep until you moved the mouse and then come over to pat at the mouse. My impression was that Luca wrote it, be he was cagy about it. This later evolved into xneko for X Windows. -Larry

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] [COFF] Fwd: Old and Tradition was V9 shell

by Adam Thornton

"I'd go to the local University that teaches Fortran and ask around." Aye, there's the rub. SIUE (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville) still had a COBOL curriculum a decade ago, and they might still. They were fairly forthright in training people to go work at a lot of the stodgier St. Louis enterprises that still had a large COBOL footprint (AB, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Caterpillar, et al). By 2010, though, Express Scripts was trying hard to move away from its ANCHOR (COBOL) system and whatever-it-was-they-had running on VMS, and it sure felt like in the early 2010s STL was mostly Java EE. I would think that FORTRAN is likelier to be passed around as folk wisdom and ancient PIs (uh, Primary Investigators, not the detective kind) thrusting a dog-eared FORTRAN IV manual at their new grad students and snarling "RTFM!" than as actual college courses. That said, if you want to learn FORTRAN and don't mind working from modern FORTRAN back, I really was impressed by https://lfortran.org/ , and the ability to run it in a JupyterLab playground environment is fantastic for quick-turnaround experimentation. Plus Ondřej Čertík <https://ondrejcertik.com/> was fun to talk to and hang out with. On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 8:19 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:40:10AM +0100, Sijmen J. Mulder wrote: > > Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > > > Fortran programmers are formally trained (at least I > > > was, there was a whole semester devoted to this) in accumulated errors. > > > You did a deep dive into how to code stuff so that the error was > reduced > > > each time instead of increased. It has a lot to do with how floating > > > point works, it's not exact like integers are. > > > > I was unaware that there's formal training to be had around this but > > it's something I'd like to learn more about. Any recommendations on > > materials? I don't mind diving into Fortran itself either. > > My training was 35 years ago, I have no idea where to go look for this > stuff now. I googled and didn't find much. I'd go to the local > University that teaches Fortran and ask around. > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF(a)minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff >

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Tech memos from Heinz on MERT and others

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > Heinz Lycklama has shared a binder full of old technical memos with > Clem Cole, who has scanned them in. Thanks to both of them for > preserving these documents. A big thank you to Heinz and Clem for their roles in making this happen! Very interesting material. I live in hope that someday the source will turn up - even a listing would be enough. Noel

4 years, 8 months

Fwd: Unix V0 on SIMH PDP-9

by Warren Toomey

All, I received this interesting e-mail from Michael Thompson: ----- Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 12:50:12 -0500 From: Michael Thompson <michael.99.thompson(a)gmail.com> To: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> Subject: Unix V0 on SIMH PDP-9 I modified the PDP-7 .simh file so it will run on a SIMH PDP-9. (attached) We have a running PDP-9 at the RICM. If I added EAE, (we likely have the necessary parts) and made a disk emulator like the one at the LCM, we could also run UNIX V0 on it. It would be nice to have the disk emulator emulate an RB disk, but that would also require emulating a DMA adapter. I am considering making an FPGA to emulate the memory controller and 32KW of memory. If I did that, I could put the RB and DMA emulation in the same device. -- Michael Thompson ----- End forwarded message ----- set cpu 8k set cpu eae set cpu history=100 show cpu # set up SIMH devices: # UNIX character translations (CR to NL, ESC to ALTMODE): set tti unix # RB09 fixed head disk: set rb ena att rb image.fs # enable TELNET in GRAPHICS-2 keyboard/display(!!) #set g2in ena #att -U g2in 12345 # disable hardware UNIX-7 doesn't know about: set lpt disa set drm disa set dt disa set mt disa set rf disa set ttix disa set ttox disa # show device settings: show dev # load and run the paper tape bootstrap # (loads system from disk) load boot.rim 010000 go Cheers, Warren

4 years, 8 months

Crabs

by Warren Toomey

Just saw this in a tweet by Charlie Stross: How AT&T's Bell Labs became infected with crabs (in 1985): http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Crabs.pdf Cheers, Warren

4 years, 8 months

Tech memos from Heinz on MERT and others

by Warren Toomey

All, Heinz Lycklama has shared a binder full of old technical memos with Clem Cole, who has scanned them in. Thanks to both of them for preserving these documents. I've just put them at: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TechReports/Heinz_Tech_Memos/ Here's a list of the documents: A_Minicomputer_Satellite_Processor_System.pdf A_Virtual_Memory_Mini-Computer_System_516-TSS.pdf MM-71-1383-3_Performance_Simulation_and_Measurement_of_a_Virtual_Memory_Multi-progamming_System_for_a_Small_Computer_19710120.pdf MM-72-1353-16_Bus_Interface_in_a_Single_Bus_Multi-processor_Environment_19720920.pdf Office_Communication_Research_in_Lab_135_19770208.pdf TM-74-1352-1_Implementstion_of_Large_Contiguous_Files_and_Asynchronous_IO_in_UNIX_19740104.pdf TM-74-1352-7_Plotting_Facilities_for_Mini-Computer_Systems_19740614.pdf TM-75-1352-2_Emulation_of_UNIX_on_Peripheral_Processors_19750109.pdf TM-75-1352-3_GLANCE_Terminals_on_UNIX_Time-Sharing_19750303.pdf TM-75-1352-4_A_Structured_Operating_System_for_a_PDP-11.45_19750506.pdf TM-75-1352-7_MERT_A_Multi-Environment_Real-Time_Operating_System_19751118.pdf TM-77-1352-1_The_MINI-UNIX_19770103.pdf TM-78-3114-1_UNIX_on_a_Microprocessor_19780322.pdf TM-78-3114-2_A_Minicomputer_Satellite_Processor_System_19780322.pdf TM-78-3114-3_The_MERT_Operating_System_19780422.pdf TM-78-3114-4_The_MERT-UNIX_Supervisor_19780420.pdf TM-78-3114-5_File_System_Structures_for_Real-Time_Applications_19780420.pdf The_MERT_Operating_System.pdf UNIX_on_a_Microprocessor_19780322.pdf Cheers, Warren

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

by Doug McIlroy

> one of the things I wanted to do in my retirement was convert > all the stuff that is in debian back from info to man(7) *all* the stuff? Please don't do that literally. The garrulity quotient of info pages dwarfs even that of the most excessive modern man pages. But I appplaud the intent to assure man pages are complete. Doug

4 years, 8 months

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TUHS February 2020