Did svr2 have anything similar to modern behavior when handling the
delete/backspace key where the character is deleted from the input and
rubbed out? The default, like in v6/v7 for erase and kill is # and @. I
can live with this, if I can't get it to do the rubout, because at least
you can see the # in the input, but if I can figure out how to get it to
rubout the last character, I'd map erase to DEL, which I believe to be
^U (but since it's invisible, it's confusing when it doesn't rubout).
Will
All,
Are there any bootable media available for any SVR 2 systems available
online? Or are they all under IP lock and key? If so, what's the closest
system that is available to get a feel for that variety of OS?
Happy holidays, folks.
Will
Hi all, I received an e-mail looking for the ksh-88 source code. A quick
search for it on-line doesn't reveal it. Does anybody have a copy?
Cheers, Warren
Original e-mail:
I recently built a PiDP11 and have been enjoying going back in time
to 2.11BSD.. I was at UC Davis in the the early 1980's and we had
a few PDP-11/70's running 2.8/2.9 BSD. Back then we reached out to
David Korn and he sent us the source for KSH -- this would have been
in 1985ish if I remember, and we compiled it for 2.9 & 4.1BSD, Xenix,
and some other variants that used K&R C. It may have been what was
later called ksh88. I wish I still had the files from then..
I was wondering if you might know if there's an older version like this
or one that's been ported for 2.11BSD?
Many thanks,
Joe
Hey Warren,
First and foremost; Thank you so much for maintaining this mailing list, and for including me within the subscribers list. I find myself intrigued by some of the topics that transfer over to the “COFF” mailing list. Could you include me on that mailing list as well?
Peace.
Thomas Paulsen:
bash is clearly more advanced. ksh is retro computing.
====
Shell wars are, in the end, no more interesting than editor wars.
I use bash on Linux systems because it's the least-poorly
supported of the Bourne-family shells, besides which bash
is there by default. Ksh isn't.
I use ksh on OpenBSD systems because it's the least-poorly
supported of the Bourne-family shells, besides which kh
is there by default. Bash isn't.
I don't actually care for most of the extra crap in either
of those shells. I don't want my shell to do line editing
or auto-completion, and I find the csh-derived history
mechanisms more annoying than useful so I turn them off
too. To my mind, the Research 10/e sh had it about right,
including the simple way functions were exported and the
whatis built-in that told you whether something was a
variable or a shell function or an external executable,
and printed the first two in forms easily edited on the
screen and re-used.
Terminal programs that don't let you easily edit input
or output from the screen and re-send it, and programs
that abet them by spouting gratuitous ANSI control
sequences: now THAT's what I call retro-computing.
Probably further discussion of any of this belongs in
COFF.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
John Cowan:
Unfortunately, approximately nobody except you has access to
[the 10/e sh] man page. Can you post or email it?
===
I am happy to remind you that you're a few years out of date:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/man/man1/sh.1
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
So a number of Unix luminaries were photographed as part of the "Faces of
Open Source" project. I have to admit, the photos themselves are quite
good: https://www.facesofopensource.com/collect/
It seems that the photographer is now selling NFTs based on those photos,
which is...a thing.
- Dan C.
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
> Does anyone remember, was this a real life bug back in 6th edition
The 'V6' at MIT (actually, PWB1) never had an issue, but then again,
its TTY driver (here:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/mit/dmr/tty.c
if anyone wants to see it) was heavily re-written. But from the below,
it's almost certainlynothing to do with the TTY code...
> From: Dave Plonka
> one experiment we did was to redirection the bas(1)ic program's output
> to a file and what we found was that (a) characters would still
> sometimes be lost
Good test.
If you all want to chase this down (I can lend V6 expertise, if needed), I'd
say the first step is to work out whether it's the application, or the
system, losing the characters. To do that, I'd put a little bit of code in
write() to store a copy of data sent through that in a circular buffer, along
with tagging it with the writing process, etc.
Once you figure out where it's getting lost, then you can move on to
how/why.
> From: Clem Cole
> First Sixth Edition does not have support for either the 11/23
Yeah, but it's super-trivial to add /23 support to V6:
http://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_UNIX_V6_on_an_-11/23
The only places where change is needed (no LKS register, no switch register,
and support for more than 256KB of main memory - and that one one can get by
without), it's hard to see how they could cause this problem.
> One other thought, I'm pretty sure that Noel's V6+ system from MIT can
> support a 23
No, we never ran than on a /23 BITD (no need, no mass storage); and I have
yet to bring the V6+ system up (although I have all the bits, and intend to,
at some point, to get its TCP/IP running). I've been using stock (well,
hacked a bit, in a number of ways - e.g. 8-bit serial line output) V6.
Noel
I am making some slow progress on the topic of Tom Reiser’s 32V with virtual memory.
Two more names popped up of folks who worked with his virtual memory code base at Bell Labs / USG in the early 80’s: Robert (Bob) Baron and Jim McCormick. Bob Barron was later working on Mach at CMU.
If anybody on this list has contact suggestions for these two folks, please send a private message.
Paul
> While doing some end of year retrocomputing revisiting, I thought some
> of you might enjoy this - there is hope for the next generation(s)! ;)
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zyng5Ob-e8 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zyng5Ob-e8>
Thanks for that video link!
I noticed the bit at the end about V6 and the occasional dropped character and that this was not a serial line issue. I have the same issue in my V6 port to the TI-990 and always assumed that it was a bug I introduced myself when hacking the tty driver.
Does anyone remember, was this a real life bug back in 6th edition back in the 1970’s? Maybe only showing at higher baud rates?
Paul
