TUHS February 2021

tuhs@tuhs.org

98 participants
55 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

by M Douglas McIlroy

> 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? Looks like I need a typing tutor. 39 should be 30. And a math tutor, too. 40 should be 100. Doug

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

by Bakul Shah

$ k-2.9t K 2.9t 2001-02-14 Copyright (C) 1993-2001 Kx Systems Evaluation. Not for commercial use. \ for help. \\ to exit. This is a *linux* x86 binary from almost exactly 20 years ago running on FreeBSD built from last Wednesday’s sources. $ uname -rom FreeBSD 13.0-ALPHA3 amd64 Generally compatibility support for previous versions of FreeBSDs has been decent when I have tried. Though the future for x86 support doesn’t look bright. > On Feb 8, 2021, at 10:56 PM, John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> wrote: > > (I'm not up on what the BSD releases are doing.)

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} Typing Tutor [and tuhs archive]

by M Douglas McIlroy

This topic is evocative, even though I really have nothing to say about it. Mike Lesk started, and I believe Brian contributed to, "learn", a program for interactive tutorials about Unix. It was never pushed very far--almost certainly not into typing. But the mention of typing brings to mind the inimitable Fred Grampp--he who pioneered massive white-hat computer cracking. Fred's exploits justified the opening sentence I wrote for Bell Labs' first computer-security task force report, "It is easy and not very risky to pilfer data from Bell Laboratories computers." Among Fred's many distinctive and endearing quirks was the fact that he was a confirmed two-finger typist--proof that typing technique is an insignificant factor in programmer productivity. I thought this would be an excuse to tell another ftg story, but I don't want to repeat myself and a search for "Grampp" in the tuhs archives misses many that have already been told. Have the entries been lost or is the index defective? Doug

4 years, 2 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

4 years, 2 months

Tiny VT100 running 2.11BSD

by Mary Ann Horton

This is fun to watch! https://hackaday.com/2021/01/18/a-miniature-vt102-running-a-miniature-pdp11/ Mary Ann

4 years, 2 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

4 years, 2 months

2^n-bit operands (Was reviving a bit of WWB)

by M Douglas McIlroy

> Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on 8-bit bytes? I give the credit to the IBM Stretch, aka 7030, and the Harvest attachment they made for NSA. For autocorrelation on bit streams--a fundamental need in codebreaking--the hardware was bit-addressable. But that was overkill for other supercomputing needs, so there was coarse-grained addressability too. Address conversion among various operand sizes made power of two a natural, lest address conversion entail division. The Stretch project also coined the felicitous word "byte" for the operand size suitable for character sets of the era. With the 360 series, IBM fully committed to multiple operand sizes. DEC followed suit and C naturalized the idea into programmers' working vocabulary. The power-of-2 word length had the side effect of making the smallest reasonable size for floating-point be 32 bits. Someone on the Apollo project once noted that the 36-bit word on previous IBM equipment was just adequate for planning moon orbits; they'd have had to use double-precision if the 700-series machines had been 32-bit. And double-precision took 10 times as long. That observation turned out to be prescient: double has become the norm. Doug

4 years, 2 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

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] for now [COFF] to follow up - why a byte is 8-bits

by Clem Cole

I will ask Warren's indulgence here - as this probably should be continued in COFF, which I have CC'ed but since was asked in TUHS I will answer On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 6:28 AM Peter Jeremy via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: > I'm not sure that 16 (or any other 2^n) bits is that obvious up front. > Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on > 8-bit bytes? > Well, 'standardizing' is a little strong. Check out my QUORA answer: How many bits are there in a byte <https://www.quora.com/How-many-bits-are-there-in-a-byte/answer/Clem-Cole> and What is a bit? Why are 8 bits considered as 1 byte? Why not 7 bit or 9 bit? <https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-bit-Why-are-8-bits-considered-as-1-byte-Why…> for my details but the 8-bit part of the tail is here (cribbed from those posts): The Industry followed IBM with the S/360.The story of why a byte is 8- bits for the S/360 is one of my favorites since the number of bits in a byte is defined for each computer architecture. Simply put, Fred Brooks (who lead the IBM System 360 project) overruled the chief hardware designer, Gene Amdahl, and told him to make things power of two to make it easier on the SW writers. Amdahl famously thought it was a waste of hardware, but Brooks had the final authority. My friend Russ Robeleon, who was the lead HW guy on the 360/50 and later the ASP (*a.k.a.* project X) who was in the room as it were, tells his yarn this way: You need to remember that the 360 was designed to be IBM's first *ASCII machine*, (not EBCDIC as it ended up - a different story)[1] Amdahl was planning for a word size to be 24-bits and the byte size to be 7-bits for cost reasons. Fred kept throwing him out of his office and told him not to come back “until a byte and word are powers of two, as we just don’t know how to program it otherwise.” Brooks would eventually relent on the original pointer on the Systems 360 became 24-bits, as long as it was stored in a 32-bit “word”.[2] As a result, (and to answer your original question) a byte first widely became 8-bit with the IBM’s Systems 360. It should be noted, that it still took some time before an 8-bit byte occurred more widely and in almost all systems as we see it today. Many systems like the DEC PDP-6/10 systems used 5, 7-bit bytes packed into a 36-bit word (with a single bit leftover) for a long time. I believe that the real widespread use of the 8-bit byte did not really occur until the rise of the minis such as the PDP-11 and the DG Nova in the late 1960s/early 1970s and eventually the mid-1970s’ microprocessors such as 8080/Z80/6502. Clem [1] While IBM did lead the effort to create ASCII, and System 360 actually supported ASCII in hardware, but because the software was so late, IBM marketing decided not the switch from BCD and instead used EBCDIC (their own code). Most IBM software was released using that code for the System 360/370 over the years. It was not until IBM released their Series 1 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Series/1>minicomputer in the late 1970s that IBM finally supported an ASCII-based system as the natural code for the software, although it had a lot of support for EBCDIC as they were selling them to interface to their ‘Mainframe’ products. [2] Gordon Bell would later observe that those two choices (32-bit word and 8-bit byte) were what made the IBM System 360 architecture last in the market, as neither would have been ‘fixable’ later.

4 years, 2 months

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Greg A. Woods > There's a "v6net" directory in this repository. > ... > I wonder if it is from either of the two ports you mention. No; the NOSC system is an NCP system, not TCP; and this one has mbufs (which the BBN v6 one did not have), so it's _probably_ a Berkleyism of some sort (or did the BBN VAX code have mbuf's too; I don't recall - yes, it did: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP see bbnnet/mbuf.c). It might also be totally new code which just chose to re-use that meme. I don't have time to look closely to see if I see any obvious descent. > Too many broken half-baked MUAs seem to still be widely used. I'm one of the offendors! Hey, this is a vintage computing list, so what's the problem with vintage mail readers? :-) Noel PS: I'm just about done collecting up the MIT PWB1 TCP system; I only have the Server FTP left to go. (Alas, it was a joint project between a student and a staffer, who left just at the end, so half the source in one's personal area, and the other half's in the other's. So I have to find all the pieces, and put them in the system's source area.) Once that's done, I'll get it to WKT to add to the repositoey. (Getting it to _actually run_ will take a while, and will happen later: I have to write a device driver for it, the code uses a rare, long-extinct board.)

4 years, 2 months

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TUHS February 2021