TUHS January 2021

tuhs@tuhs.org

76 participants
56 discussions

tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

by ron minnich

At some point I thought NeWS source was released. Is it just another Lost Source or it is out there somewhere? Do I remember right that it was a Gosling effort?

3 years, 10 months

The UNIX Command Language (1976)

by Joachim

Apologies if this has already been linked here. "The UNIX Command Languageis the first-ever paper published on the Unix shell. It was written by Ken Thompson in 1976." https://github.com/susam/tucl Joachim

3 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Origins of globbing

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Cowan > Unfortunately, glob never got its own man page Errr: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/man/man8/glob.8 Not the most comprehensive document, but that plus the source would be complete. Noel

3 years, 10 months

reviving a bit of WWB

by Doug McIlroy

I would like to revive Lorinda Cherry's "parts". Implicit in "revival" is dispelling the hundreds of warnings from gcc -Wpedantic -Wall -Wextra. Has anybody done this already? Doug

3 years, 10 months

GBACA

by Mary Ann Horton

The topic of GBACA (Get Back At Corporate America), the video game for the BLIT/5620, has come up on a Facebook group. Does anyone happen to have any details about it, source code, author, screen shots, ...? Thanks, Mary Ann

3 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by Paul Ruizendaal

> V6, as distributed, had no networking at all. There are two V6 systems with > networking in TUHS: > > https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC <https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC> > https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6 <https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6> > > The first is an 'NCP' Unix (unless unless you have an ARPANet); the second is > a fairly early TCP/IP from BBN (ditto, out of the box; although one could write > an Ethernet driver for it). I’ve also done a port of the BBN VAX stack to V6 (running on a TI990 clone), using a serial PPP interface to connect. Experimental, but may have the OP's interest: https://www.jslite.net/cgi-bin/9995/dir?ci=tip > There's also a fairly nice Internet-capable V6 (well, PWB1, actually) from MIT > which I keep meaning to upload; it includes SMTP, FTP, etc, etc. I also have > visions of porting an ARP I wrote to it, and bringing up an Ethernet driver > for the DEQNA/DELQA, but I've yet to get to any of that. I’d love to have a look at that and compare and contrast the approaches. I’m finding that BBN’s original design, with a separate kernel thread for the network stack, is elegant but difficult to tune: too much priority and it crowds out user processes, too little and the slow PPP line is not kept busy. I think I’m beginning to understand why CSRG (and later also BBN) moved to the interrupt driven structure of 4.2BSD: perhaps it was also difficult to tune for a VAX with ethernet.

3 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > In the bootable images archive, there's the "Unknown V6" RL02 > image. I've tried that on SimH configured as an 11/23+ with 256kB of RAM > and it seems to work fine. Sorry, where's this archive? Somewhere in: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/ I assume? From the description, that might be from the 'Shoppa disks'; didn't realize that was a /23 on those. > I would assume that Ethernet boards are available, but not supported on > V6. V6, as distributed, had no networking at all. There are two V6 systems with networking in TUHS: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6 The first is an 'NCP' Unix (unless unless you have an ARPANet); the second is a fairly early TCP/IP from BBN (ditto, out of the box; although one could write an Ethernet driver for it). There's also a fairly nice Internet-capable V6 (well, PWB1, actually) from MIT which I keep meaning to upload; it includes SMTP, FTP, etc, etc. I also have visions of porting an ARP I wrote to it, and bringing up an Ethernet driver for the DEQNA/DELQA, but I've yet to get to any of that. > it's hard to glean that wisdom from reading the manual. Yeah, DEC manuals went through a phase-change around about the time of the /23. Old DEC manuals are wonderful; stuffed to the gills with deep technical details. Suitable for engineers... Later, they turned into manuals for 'ordinary people' - 'plug cable C1 into plug P1'. Semi-useless; although one can often glean a few useful morsels if you trawl through the entire thing. That's why I've been doing PDP-11 pages on the CHWiki which attempt to cover a lot of technical detail, in a high technical content/size way. If you need something that's not there, let me know, and I'll get to adding it. Noel

3 years, 10 months

reboot(2) system call

by Warner Losh

I've done some research for a friend about when the reboot() system call was added, and how it related to the sync, sync, sync dance. https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/07/when-unix-learned-to-reboot2.html may be of interest. Please do let me know if I've gotten something wrong... Warner

3 years, 10 months

More archeology

by Jon Steinhart

Another stack of old notebooks. I can scan these in if anyone is interested and if they're not available elsewhere. In addition to what's below, I have a fat notebook with the BRL CAD package docs. These are V/W papers from Stanford - Lantz/Cheriton et. al. Multi-process Structuring of User Interface Software Refernce Models, Window Systems, and Concurrency An Experiment in Integrated Multimedia Conferencing An Architecture for Configurable User Interfaces An Empirical Study of Distributed Application Performance Third Generation Graphics for Distributed Systems Virtual Terminal Management In A Multiple Process environment Distributed Process Groups in the V Kernel The Distributed V Kernel and its Performance for Diskless Workstations Effective Use of Large RAM Memories on Diskless Workstations with the V Virtual Memory System Evaluating Hardware Support for Superconcurrency with the V Kernel Fault-tolerant Transaction Management in a Workstation Cluster File Access Performance of Diskless Workstations An Introduction to the V System The Multi-Satellite Star: Structuring Parallel Computations for a Workstation Cluster UIO: A Uniform I/O System Interface for Distributed Systems The V Kernel: A Software Base for Distributed Systems Other random stuff Bitmap Graphics (SIGGRAPH '84 Course Notes, Pike et. al.) A Window Manager with a Moduler User Interface (Whitechapel?) IRIS-4D Superworkstation and Visual Computing IRIS GT Graphics Architecture Position Paper on the Importance and Application of Video Mixing Display Architectures (Jack Grimes) A Data-Flow Manager for an Interactive Programming Environment (Paul Haeberli) Multiple Programs in One UNIX Process (Don Libes - from ;login:) Lightweight Processes for UNIX Implementation and Applications (Jonathan Kepecs) A Capability Based Hierarchic Architecture for UNIX Window Management (R. D. Trammell) MEX - A Window Manager for the IRIS (Rocky Rhodes et. al.) Windows for UNIX at Lucasfilm (Hawley, Leffler) Next-Generation Hardware for Windowed Displays (McGeady) Problems Implementing Window Systems in UNIX (Gettys) Mach: A New Kernel Foundation For UNIX Development (Accetta et. al.) Uwm: A User Interface for X Windows (Ganearz) Programming with Windows on the Major Workstations or Through a Glass Darkly (Daniel, Rogers) PIX, the latest NeWS (Leler) Ace: a syntax-driven C preprocessor Overview (Gosling) Attribute Considerations in Raster Graphics (Bresenham) Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View (Teitelman) W User's Manual (Asente) The WA Beyond Traditional Window Systems (An Overviw of The Workstation Agent (Lantz et. al., draft, marked not to to be redistributed) Performance Measurements of the WA (Islam) STDWIN: A Standard Window System Interface (Rossum) Summary of Current Research (Lantz et. al. at Olivetti) User Interfaces in Window Systems: Architechure and Implementation (Farrell, Schwartz; SIGCHI) Introduction to the GMW Window System (Hagiya) UNIX Window Management Systems Client-Server Interface Specification (Williams et. al., Rutherford Apleton Laboaratory) Curves Made Trivial (Gosling) Smart Code, Stupid Memory: A Fast X Server for a Dumb Color Frame Buffer (McCormack) Jon

3 years, 10 months

[TUHS} Qed vs ed

by M Douglas McIlroy

I used Ken's qed in pre-Unix days. I understand its big departure from the original was regular expressions. Unix ed was the same, with multi-file capability dropped. Evidently the lost function was not much missed, for it it didn't come back when machines got bigger. I remember that fairly early in PDP-11 development ed gained three features: & in the rhs of substitutions plus k and t commands. (I'm not sure about &--that was 50 years ago.). With hindsight it's surprising that a "minimalist" design had m but not t, for m can be built from t but not vice versa. A cheat sheet for multics qed is at h <http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condens…> ttp:// www.bitsavers.org/pdf//honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condensed-gui…. It had two commands I don't remember: sort(!) and transform, which I assume is like y in sed. Doug

3 years, 10 months

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TUHS January 2021