TUHS April 2020

tuhs@tuhs.org

60 participants
48 discussions

by Warner Losh

So in the archives we have tapes from 1977, 1980-83 and 1987-89. So I thought I'd ask if there's other tapes that aren't in the archive... google can't even find the tapes we have in our archive, let alone others... Warner

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Plan 9 from outer space ?

by Doug McIlroy

I'll keep it going. rc was a startup script from very early times in Unix, shortened, as Ken was wont to do, from runcom, the nearest thing CTSS had to a shell--it could run up to six prespecified commands in background. The name runcom came to be applied to the scripts as well as to their interpreter. Doug ------------------------------------- It wasn't my intention. -rob On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 11:12 AM Ken Thompson <ken(a)google.com> wrote: > > rob, > you shouldn't have shut down this discussion.

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Plan 9 from outer space ?

by Rob Pike

It wasn't my intention. -rob On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 11:12 AM Ken Thompson <ken(a)google.com> wrote: > > rob, > you shouldn't have shut down this discussion. > > > On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 3:27 PM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> As it says there, >> >> The hermeneutics of naming yields few insights. Things are named usually because the name is nice (sam), or there is some private reference hard to decode (8½), or in honour (perhaps backhanded) of another system (mothra), or an indication of expectation (Plan 9, acme), or just because (acid). None of the names tell you anything helpful. >> >> Despite the lack of information, those who guess at reasons for naming generate volumes of apocrypha. The real reason is usually, ``because''. >> >> -rob >> >> >> >> On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 3:50 AM Royce Williams <royce(a)techsolvency.com> wrote: >>> >>> On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 9:45 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 11:24 AM Pierre DAVID <pdagog(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 06:20:18PM +0100, Richard Tobin wrote: >>>>> >> There is a widespred anecdote that "Plan 9" name comes from the >>>>> >> movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space". >>>>> > >>>>> >Given that the full name is "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" I don't think >>>>> >there's much doubt about it. >>>>> > >>>>> >>>>> Yes, but is there anything besides the name? >>>> >>>> >>>> Plan 9 is the worst movie ever. And was for many years listed as the worst movie ever, including the formative years of plan 9. >>>> >>>> A professor(?) at CU once told me, though I don't know if I buy it, that plan 9 was Unix Plan B at first. There was a description that it was the worst system ever (except for all the others) in a knod to Churchill (supposedly based on his comment about Democracy). And from there it was a quick jump to Plan 9 from Bell Labs as all these themes flowed together in a mish-mash of creative naming... With a different name, it could break with Unix in interesting ways... >>>> >>>> I have no clue if this is true, and I'm no longer in contact with the professor that told me this since it was mid to late 90s, and I'm honestly having trouble recalling his name. It wasn't a 'big name' like Evi, but I think it was someone at CU I had a beer with (which means it could have been a grad student to post-doc as well, it was 25 years ago and beer was involved). It makes a great story, but I don't know if it's anything more than that. I put it out there because I know Rob or Ken is likely to correct something that's this detailed and specific if it's really wrong :) >>> >>> >>> See also: >>> >>> http://9p.io/wiki/plan9/lfaq/index.html#GENERAL_INFORMATION >>> >>> Royce

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Plan 9 from outer space ?

by Richard Tobin

> There is a widespred anecdote that "Plan 9" name comes from the > movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space". Given that the full name is "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" I don't think there's much doubt about it. -- Richard -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

4 years, 8 months

Plan 9 from outer space ?

by Pierre DAVID

There is a widespred anecdote that "Plan 9" name comes from the movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space". Since I didn't find anything more than a reference to this anecdote (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs for example), I forced myself to watch the movie until the end (what a pain!). Guess what? I couldn't find the link between the film and the beloved OS. I'm sure there are people here who know more. Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge with us. Pierre

4 years, 8 months

"7th Edition UNIX TM Summary" => "â7th Edition UNIX â Summaryâ => â€œ7th Edition UNIX â€” Summaryâ€

by Don Hopkins

I love how in a discussion of how difficult it was to publish a book on Unix with the correct punctuation characters 42 years ago, we still can’t even quote the title of the book in a discussion about Unix without the punctuation characters degrading and mutating each round trip. Worse truly is better! ;) -Don

4 years, 8 months

Early Datakit - Summary of findings

by Paul Ruizendaal

I’ve posted a summary of my Datakit notes here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1p6HD5-NSAYKfiXL6GUxfYZgGoesqG6Sp (available for a limited time) Hopefully, these notes are helpful for anyone trying to figure out Datakit networking in Eighth Edition. At the user level, access is organised through the ‘dkdial’ and ‘dkmgr’ routines: http://man.cat-v.org/unix_8th/3/dkmgr http://man.cat-v.org/unix_8th/3/tdkdial The IP networking is handled in the same pattern: http://man.cat-v.org/unix_8th/3/tcp http://man.cat-v.org/unix_8th/3/udp The ipc set of library routines that unify these lower level routines into a single API will only appear in 9th Edition (a year later).

4 years, 8 months

4.2BSD Steering committee

by Paul Ruizendaal

According to “20 years of BSD”, there was a steering committee to inform the development of what would eventually be 4.2BSD Unix. The committee had the following members: Duane Adams and Bob Baker: DARPA Bob Fabry, Bill Joy, Sam Leffler: CSRG Dennis Ritchie: Bell Labs Alan Nemeth, Rob Gurwitz: BBN Dan Lynch: ISI Keith Lantz: Stanford Rick Rashid: CMU Bert Halstead: MIT Jerry Popek: UCLA I’m intrigued by the composition and the rationale for each member. Some of it is obvious, some of it is not. According to “20 years of BSD” what DARPA wanted was: "In particular, the new system was expected to include a faster file system that would raise throughput to the speed of available disk technology, support processes with multi-gigabyte address space requirements, provide flexible interprocess communication facilities that allow researchers to do work in distributed systems, and would integrate networking support so that machines running the new system could easily participate in the ARPAnet." As I understand Duane Adams was the contract manager and Bob Baker a DARPA vice-president. The CSRG crowd are also clear, they were going to do the work. Then it becomes less clear. I can certainly see the logic of asking dmr to provide his guidance, also in view of Bell Labs expertise in working with large scale communication systems. I can also see the logic of having the BBN and ISI folk there, representing the Arpanet community and doing the work on the new TCP/IP protocol stack. I’m not sure about the four others. They seem to be one each for 4 main computer science schools in the US at the time. Rashid and Popek had moreover recently completed distributed systems (Aleph and LOCUS). Halstead seems to have been working on messaging systems at the time. I’m not sure what Lantz’ spike was at the time. All in all, a strong focus on distributed systems and messaging. No people with apparent links to virtual memory research or disk access research. Other than dmr, no research people from industry. For example, nobody from Xerox Parc. Nobody from IBM, HP, DEC, DG, etc. Any and all recollections about the committee and its composition welcome.

4 years, 8 months

First book on Unix for general readership

by markus schnalke

Hoi, found on Wikipedia: As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger and The UNIX System, the second book on the UNIX system, intended for a general readership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_R._Bourne Thus I now wonder what the first book on Unix, intended for a general readership was. Bourne's book was published 1983. (``The UNIX Programming Environment'' was published 1984.) Was it Banahan and Rutter's ``UNIX -- the Book''? It says 1982. Could anyone share some background on that one? (The authors were from Bradford University.) I only have the German translation by Axel T. Schreiner, dated 1984. Haven't read the English original, but Schreiner's version definitely is worth to read (if you speak German). He added lots of footnotes, and it becomes apparent that he knows the system better than the authors. ;-) I'd like to get an understanding of the books in relation to each other. How does the Banahan/Rutter book fit into the picture? Why didn't Bell Labs write a user's book earlier? Were Bourne's and Kernighan/Pike's books reactions to it? meillo

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] First book on Unix for general readership

by Doug McIlroy

> OK, I've dug out my copies. They have perforated, 3-hole punched pages ... > I can't find any obvious typesetting errors. That sets my mind at rest after three decades. What I saw back in the day was littered with @ signs, and was not punched for a ring binder. Thanks for checking. Doug

4 years, 8 months

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TUHS April 2020