TUHS September 2020

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Re: [TUHS] revision history of troff -me macro set?

by saint.snit＠gmail.com

Thanks, everyone, for the very helpful replies. Those links are exactly what I was looking for.

3 years, 7 months

Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?

by Chris Hanson

I have an MVME121 that I’d like to run some stuff on. I’m planning what I’ll need to do to port MINIX 1.5 but since this has a 68451 segmented MMU, I’d like to actually make use of it. Have any historical sources been published for UNIX on the various 68010 + 68451 systems from the early-mid 1980s? I’m curious how they used segmented MMUs. I figure at minimum I could have several segments set up to enforce protections and a stable per-process address space, but it’d be good to have an example. — Chris

3 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Chris Hanson asks about historical sources for Unix on the Motorola 68K processor. >From my bibliography at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/unix.bib I find these Motorola contributions The Dynamics of a Semi-Large Software Project with Specific Reference to a UNIX System Port USENIX Conference Proceedings, Summer, 1984. Salt Lake City, UT pp. 332--342 [I think that I have a printed copy in my campus office, but won't be there for another 10 days or so.] Latent Source Bugs and UNIX System Portability Proceedings: USENIX Association Winter Conference, January 23--25, 1985, Dallas, Texas, USA pp. 125--130 Co-Resident Operating System: UNIX and Real-Time Distributed Processing Fifth Real-Time Software and Operating Systems Workshop Proceedings, May 12--13, 1988. Washington, DC pp 47--53 Co-Resident Operating System: UNIX and Real-Time Distributed Processing [Fifth RTOS... as above] pp. 47--53 A Faster fsck for BSD UNIX Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference: January 30--February 3, 1989, San Diego, California, USA pp. 173--185 Also take a look at the 200 entries in http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/minix.bib I have made attempts to install Debian 10 on the MC68K on QEMU from an ISO image at https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2020-05-30/ Source code is, of course, available, so it could be useful resource in porting Minix to the MC68K. However, while I can get the ISO image to boot, I get grub update failures and when I try run the installer, I get "No PCI buses available", For now, I have given up on that platform until new ideas for workarounds appear. I have similar emulated VMs for ARM64, RISC-V64, PowerPC (big and little endian), and IBM System 390x, all of which run nicely, have up-to-date O/Ses and binary software package repositories, and are used for routine software build testing. My attempts for other VMs for HPPA, Alpha, and SPARC64 CPUs have failed with install or network problems. Debian ISO images are available for IA-64, but QEMU has no support for the Itanium CPU family. We have a single phyical IA-64 system that runs fine, but is currently powered off due to machine-room air-conditioning issues that will be resolved in a couple of months. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3 years, 7 months

Plan 9 published manuals

by Al Kossow

https://www.ebay.com/itm/383710751719 how rare are these? $150 seems like a lot of money to spend on them

3 years, 7 months

revision history of troff -me macro set?

by saint.snit＠gmail.com

Hi, Is there a repository of historical versions of Eric Allman's -me macro set for troff? (For some context: the macro set has been forked to operate with two modern troff implementations: GNU groff and Heirloom troff. According to the header blocks of the respective files, groff's -me macros are forked from version 2.31 of Allman's, and Heirloom's from version 2.14. For help in debugging -me problems in these troff implementations, I'm trying to locate at least these versions of the -me package as they existed before forking. I posted this query on the troff email list, but no one there knew the answer, and one person suggested I ask here.) Thanks for any pointers.

3 years, 7 months

UNESCO call for a study on the future institutional structure for Software Heritage (fwd)

by Robert Brockway

FYI. UNESCO call for a study on the future institutional structure for Software Heritage. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Dear all, I do hope you are all safe, and could take some time off to recharge the batteries that these hectic times have drained quite a bit. Some of you know already Software Heritage (https://www.softwareheritage.org): it is a nonprofit initiative, started by Inria and supported by UNESCO, whose mission is to ensure that software source code, as part of the common heritage of humankind, is preserved over time and made available to all, building, maintaining and developing a universal source code archive, providing persistent identifiers for all software artifacts, and creating the largest shared knowledge base about software artifacts ever built. This is a long term undertaking, and UNESCO has just published a call for advice, via a small feasibility study providing options for establishing the future independent, non profit, multi-stakeholder organization that will host Software Heritage for the long run. As Software Heritage is a shared infrastructure that will support use cases of interest to the members of this list, I take the liberty to bring this call to your attention, and I'd be very grateful if you could also forward it to whomever you believe could be interested in answering. Detailed information on the expected advice and procedures to answer the call is online at: https://careers.unesco.org/job/Paris-Consultant-on-Software-Heritage-CIMID/… The deadline for the answer is September 26th. Thank you for your help Roberto Di Cosmo (roberto(a)dicosmo.org) _______________________________________________ foundations mailing list foundations(a)lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations

3 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] The most surprising Unix programs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Guertin > I teach math in college ... Sometimes, during an exam, a student who > forgot to bring their calculator will ask if they can borrow mine I > always say "sure, but you'll regret it" and hand them the calculator > After wasting one or two minutes, they give it back Maybe I'm being clueless/over-asking, but to me it's appalling that any college student (at least all who have _any_ math requirement at all; not sure how many that is) doesn't know how an RPN calculator works. It's not exactly rocket science, and any reasonably intelligent high-schooler should get it extremely quickly; just tell them it's just a representational thing, number number operator instead of number operator number. I know it's not a key intellectual skill, but it does seem to me to be part of comon intellectual heritage that everyone should know, like musical scales or poetry rhyming. Have you ever considered taking two minutes (literally!) to cover it briefly, just 'someone tried to borrow my RPN calculator, here's the basic idea of how they work'? Noel

3 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Dennis Ritchie's ACM Turing Award lecture paper in Communications of the ACM 27(8) 758--760 (August 1984), doi:10.1145/358198.358207 was reprinted in UNIX Review 3(1) 28, 118--120, 122, (January 1985) [no DOI or URL yet found], and more recently, in Resonance 17(8) 810--816 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0091-y. There are two other UNIX-related papers in that issue of Resonance: Pramod Chandra P. Bhatt UNIX: Genesis and design features Resonance 17(8) 727--747 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0084-x K. Bhaskar C --- Past, present, and future --- A perspective Resonance 17(8) 748--758 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0085-9 I do not have access to that journal's archives from my campus library, so I have not seen the articles. In his paper, Dennis Ritchie referred to another UNIX article that I did manage to track down and record in unix.bib: Donald Arthur Norman The Truth about UNIX Datamation 27(12) 139--150 (November 1981) https://tinyurl.com/yyselmxq The original URL is 200+ characters long, and is a freely-downloadable PDF of a reprint in AUUGN volume IV number I. The PDF file has searchable text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3 years, 7 months

A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Warren Toomey

"Reflections on Software Research" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1283920.1283939?download=true Happy birthday, Dennis! Warren

3 years, 7 months

Whence did "XXX" come about?

by Dave Horsfall

For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more work" or "look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself. Whence did it come about? I think I saw it as early as PWB, but can't be sure. -- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX"

3 years, 8 months

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TUHS September 2020