Has anyone written down the story of Prime Time Freeware or archived the various distributions? Is there even a complete listing of what they distributed?
I’ve imaged my own stuff (PTF AI 1-1, PTF SDK for UnixWare 1-1, PTF Tools & Toys for UnixWare 1-1) but I’d really like to find the original PTF 1-1 and things like it.
— Chris
Thank you for banner! I used the data, abliet modified, 40 years ago
in 1981, for a banner program as well, on an IBM 1130 (manufactured 1972)
so it could print on an 1132 line printer. The floor would vibrate
when it printed those banners. I used "X" as the printed char as the
1132 did not have the # char. But those banners looked great!
I wrote it in FORTRAN IV. On punched cards. I did this because
from 1980-1982 I only had access to UNIX on Monday evenings from
7PM-9PM, using a DEC LA120 terminal, it was slow and never had
enough ink on the ribbon.
I had only 8K of core memory with only EBCIDIC uppercase so there
were lots of compromises and cleverness needed -
- read in a 16-bit integer as a packed two 8-bit numbers
- limit the banner output to only A-Za-z0-9 !?#@'*+,-.=
- unpack the char data into buffer and then process it.
- fix the "U" charater data
- find the run-lenght ecnodings that could be consoldated to save space
(seeing those made me think it had to have been generated data)
The program still survives here - http://ibm1130.cuzuco.com/
(with sample output runs)
Also since I had to type all those numbers onto punch cards
with a 029 keypunch, to speed things up I coded my own free-form
atoi() equivalent in FORTRAN, reading cards, then packed two numbers into
a integer, then punch out those numbers along with card ID numbers in columns
73-80 on the 1442. This was many weeks of keypunching, checking,
fixing and re-keypunching.
That code is here http://ibm1130.cuzuco.com/ipack.html
When done the deck was around 8" or so. It took well over a
minute to read in the data cards, after complition.
Again thanks! Many hundreds of banners for many people were printed
by this, around 2 to 3 a week, until July 1982, when that IBM
was replaced by a Prime system. I still have many found memeories of
that 1130.
-Brian
Mary Ann Horton (mah at mhorton.net) wrote:
> We had vtroff at Berkeley around 1980, on the big Versatec wet plotter,
> 4 pages wide. We got really good at cutting up the pages on the output.
>
> It used the Hershey font. It was horrible. Mangled somehow, lots of
> parts of glyphs missing. I called it the "Horse Shit" font.
>
> I took it as my mission to clean it up. I wrote "fed" to edit it, dot by
> dot, on the graphical HP 2648 terminal at Berkeley. I got all the fonts
> reasonably cleaned up, but it was laborious.
>
> I still hated Hershey. It was my dream to get real C/A/T output at the
> largest 36 point size, and scan it in to create a decent set of Times
> fonts. I finally got the C/A/T output years later at Bell Labs, but
> there were no scanners available to me at the time. Then True Type came
> along and it was moot.
>
> I did stumble onto one nice rendition of Times Roman in one point size,
> from Stanford, I think. I used it to write banner(6).
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?
Apparently they are getting 68040 levels of performance with a Pi... and
that interpreted. Going with JIT it's way higher.
-----Original Message-----
From: Gregg Levine [SMTP:gregg.drwho8@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2021 10:30 AM
To: Jason Stevens; The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode
An amazing idea.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 7:51 PM Jason Stevens
<jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
>
> You might find this interesting
>
> https://twitter.com/i/status/1320767372853190659
> <https://twitter.com/i/status/1320767372853190659>
>
> It's a pi (arm) running Musashi a 68000 core, but using voltage
buffers it's
> plugged into the 68000 socket of an Amiga!
>
> You can find more info on their github:
>
> https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm
> <https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm>
>
> Maybe we are at the point where numerous cheap CPU's can eliminate
FPGA's?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Parson [SMTP:mparson@bl.org]
> Sent: Friday, February 05, 2021 10:43 PM
> To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode
>
> On 2021-02-04 16:47, Henry Bent wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 4, 2021, 17:40 Adam Thornton
<athornton(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> I'm probably Stockholm Syndrommed about 6502. It's
what I grew
> up on,
> >> and
> >> I still like it a great deal. Admittedly
register-starved (well,
>
> >> unless
> >> you consider the zero page a whole page of registers),
> but...simple,
> >> easy
> >> to fit in your head, kinda wonderful.
> >>
> >> I'd love a 64-bit 6502-alike (but I'd probably give it
more than
> three
> >> registers). I mean given how little silicon (or how
few FPGA
> gates) a
> >> reasonable version of that would take, might as well
include
> 65C02 and
> >> 65816 cores in there too with some sort of
mode-switching
> instruction.
> >> Wouldn't a 6502ish with 64-bit wordsize and a 64-bit
address bus
> be
> >> fun?
> >> Throw in an onboard MMU and FPU too, I suppose, and
then you
> could
> >> have a
> >> real system on it.
> >>
> >>
> > Sounds like a perfect project for an FPGA. If there's
already a
> 6502
> > implementation out there, converting to 64 bit should be
fairly
> easy.
>
> There are FPGA implementations of the 6502 out there. If
you've not
> seen
> it, check out the MiSTer[0] project, FPGA implementations
of a LOT
> of
> computers, going back as far as the EDSAC, PDP-1, a LOT of
8, 16,
> and 32
> bit systems from the 70s and 80s along with gaming
consoles from the
> 70s
> and 80s.
>
> Keeping this semi-TUHS related, one guy[1] has even
implemented a
> Sparc 32m[2] (I think maybe an SS10), which boots SunOS 4,
5, Linux,
> NetBSD, and even the Sparc version of NeXTSTEP, but it's
not part of
> the
> "official" MiSTer bits (yet?).
>
> --
> Michael Parson
> Pflugerville, TX
> KF5LGQ
>
> [0] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
> [1] https://temlib.org/site/
> [2] https://temlib.org/pub/mister/SS/
You might find this interesting
https://twitter.com/i/status/1320767372853190659
<https://twitter.com/i/status/1320767372853190659>
It's a pi (arm) running Musashi a 68000 core, but using voltage buffers it's
plugged into the 68000 socket of an Amiga!
You can find more info on their github:
https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm
<https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm>
Maybe we are at the point where numerous cheap CPU's can eliminate FPGA's?
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Parson [SMTP:mparson@bl.org]
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2021 10:43 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode
On 2021-02-04 16:47, Henry Bent wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2021, 17:40 Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>> I'm probably Stockholm Syndrommed about 6502. It's what I grew
up on,
>> and
>> I still like it a great deal. Admittedly register-starved (well,
>> unless
>> you consider the zero page a whole page of registers),
but...simple,
>> easy
>> to fit in your head, kinda wonderful.
>>
>> I'd love a 64-bit 6502-alike (but I'd probably give it more than
three
>> registers). I mean given how little silicon (or how few FPGA
gates) a
>> reasonable version of that would take, might as well include
65C02 and
>> 65816 cores in there too with some sort of mode-switching
instruction.
>> Wouldn't a 6502ish with 64-bit wordsize and a 64-bit address bus
be
>> fun?
>> Throw in an onboard MMU and FPU too, I suppose, and then you
could
>> have a
>> real system on it.
>>
>>
> Sounds like a perfect project for an FPGA. If there's already a
6502
> implementation out there, converting to 64 bit should be fairly
easy.
There are FPGA implementations of the 6502 out there. If you've not
seen
it, check out the MiSTer[0] project, FPGA implementations of a LOT
of
computers, going back as far as the EDSAC, PDP-1, a LOT of 8, 16,
and 32
bit systems from the 70s and 80s along with gaming consoles from the
70s
and 80s.
Keeping this semi-TUHS related, one guy[1] has even implemented a
Sparc 32m[2] (I think maybe an SS10), which boots SunOS 4, 5, Linux,
NetBSD, and even the Sparc version of NeXTSTEP, but it's not part of
the
"official" MiSTer bits (yet?).
--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ
[0] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
[1] https://temlib.org/site/
[2] https://temlib.org/pub/mister/SS/
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
Recent discussions on this list are about the problem getting fonts
for typesetting before there was an industry to provide them. Noted
font designer Chuck Bigelow has written about the subject here:
Notes on typeface protection
TUGboat 7(3) 146--151 October 1986
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb07-3/tb16bigelow.pdf
Other TUGboat papers by him and his design partner, Kris Holmes, might
be of reader interest:
Lucida and {\TeX}: lessons of logic and history
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb15-3/tb44bigelow.pdf
About the DK versions of Lucida
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb36-3/tb114bigelow.pdf
A short history of the Lucida math fonts
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb37-2/tb116bigelow-lucidamath.pdf
Science and history behind the design of Lucida
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb39-3/tb123bigelow-lucida.pdf
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Do they *really* want something which is just V7 Unix, with nothing else?
> No TCP/IP, no hot-plug USB support? No web browsing?
> Oh, you wanted more than that? Feature bloat! Feature bloat!
> Feature bloat! Shame! Shame! Shame!
% ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc
495 495 7230
% ls /bin|wc
2809 2809 30468
How many of roughly 500 system calls (to say nothing of uncounted
ioctl's) do you think are necessary for writing those few crucial
capabilities that distinguish Linux from v7? There is
undeniably bloat, but only a sliver of it contributes to the
distinctive utility of today's systems.
Or consider this. Unix grew by about 39 system calls in its first
decade, but an average of 40
per decade ever since. Is this accelerated growth more symptomatic of
maturity or of cancer?
Doug
There's so much experience here, I thought someone might know:
"Our goal is to develop an emulator for the Burroughs B6700 system. We
need help to find a complete release of MCP software for the Burroughs
B6700.
If you have old magnetic tapes (magtapes) in any format, or computer
printer listings of software or micro-fiche, micro-film, punched-card
decks for any Burroughs B6000 or Burroughs B7000 systems we would like
to hear from you.
Email nw(a)retroComputingTasmania.com"
Hi all,
On a completely different note... I’ve been delving into typing tutor programs of late. Quite a mishmash of approaches out there. Not at all like what I remember from junior high - The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, kinda stuff. Best of breed may be Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on the gui front, and I hate to admit it, gnu typist, on the console front.
I’m wondering if there are some well considered unix programs, historically, for learning typing? Or did everyone spring into the unix world accomplished typists straight outta school? I did see mention a while back about a TOPS-10 typing tutor, not unix, but in the spirit - surely there's some unix history around typing tutors.
Thanks,
Will
