Hello UNIX veterans.
So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating
System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the
asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know
exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose.
I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I
am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost
spartan.
The chapter titles are:
1. Introduction
2. vi: A Text Editor
3. ed
4. mail
5. Communicating with Other Sites
6. bc: A Calculator
7. The Shell
8. The C-Shell
9. Using the Visual Shell
And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port
based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words
"Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.
Granted, this Xenix version is derived from System V Release 2, and I think
it was for the Intel 286 (not yet ported to the i386), but hey it's 1988
already and the Internet is supposed to be thriving on UNIX in the Pacific
Coast, or so the lore says. I see now that it probably was only in the
Berkely family that the Internet was going on...
In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere
users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like
WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from
those years.
I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it
could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and the
Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version,
from a user's point of view.
I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free
software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of":
email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video
player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these
days.
--
Josh Good
> When you're the phone company, calls are free
Not so. But the culture prioritized phone use in a way
that's been completely forgotten. High execs would
answer their own phones when they were at their
desks. "Your call is very important to us. Please wait
for the first available representative" would have been
anathema.
One of my few managerial decrees in the Unix lab was
to give a year's notice that "research" would stop
forwarding Usenet traffic, not because of phones, but
because uucp was becoming a burden on our computer.
Doug
Connectivity evolved rapidly in the early 1980s. In 1980 I served on the
board of CSNet, which connected have-not CS departments (including Bell
Labs) via dialup and X.25 links onto the periphery of the magic circle
of Arpanet.
By 1982 it was not extraordinary that I could via international email arrange
all aspects of a trip to visit lively universities of the AUUG.
OK. So, I've been trying to decide (for the last time, I swear) whether
to use tabs or spaces in my code... I did a quick pulse-check on the
state of argument and it appears to be alive and well in 2021. My
question for y'all is, was there a preference in the very early days or
not? I saw an article talking about the 20 year feud, but that's not my
recollection. In 1994, nobody agreed on this, but I'm sure it predates
my entree into the field. I'm thinking the history of entab and detab
are somehow related, but I've been wrong on these sorts of thoughts
before. What say you?
Will
Amazing coincidences. A week prior I was researching Topper Toys
looking for their old factory ("largest toy factory in the world")
As there was litte on it's location and it lead me to find out
in 1961 it took over the old Singer Factory in Elizabeth, NJ.
So looking up the Singer factory led me to "Elizabeth,
New Jersey, Then and Now" by Robert J. Baptista
https://ia801304.us.archive.org/11/items/ElizabethNewJerseyThenAndNowSecond…
Which had no information on Topper, but had had this paragraph in it's Singer
section on page 28 --
Boys earned money "rushing the growler" at lunchtime at the Singer plant.
German workers lowered their covered beer pails, called growlers, on ropes
to the boys waiting below. They earned a nickel by filling them with beer
at Grampp's saloon on Trumbull St. One of these boys was Thomas Dunn who
later became a long term Mayor. In the early 1920s Frederick Grampp went
into the hardware business at the corner of Elizabeth Ave. and Reid St.
When I read it I thought funny, as I know the name Fred Grampp. But beleived
just a coincidenental same name. After reading the biography post, I went back
to the book as it turns out that Fred Grampp is your Fred Grampps's
grandfather. You can find more his family and the hardware store and
Grampp himself on pages 163-164, and 212.
-Brian
Wow this is nothing short of GREAT!
I always wanted to tackle this but it was out of my reach as I barely got
anything from this lineage to build to anything.
Most excellent!
-----Original Message-----
From: MOCHIDA Shuji
To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Sent: 3/6/21 10:42 AM
Subject: [TUHS] 4.4BSD sparc, pmax binary recently compiled
I compiled 4.4BSD to get pmax and sparc binary, from CSRG Archive
CD-ROM #4
source code.
http://www.netside.co.jp/~mochid/comp/bsd44-build/
pmax:
- Works on GXemul DECstaion(PMAX) emulation.
- I used binutils 2.6 and gcc 2.7.2.3 taken from Gnu ftp site,
as 4.4BSD src does not contain pmax support part in as, ld,
gcc and gdb.
- Lack of GDB. I got rid of compile errors of gdb 4.16, but that
does not work yet.
- gcc included can not deal c++ static constructor. So,
contrib/groff
can not be compiled. Instead, it uses old/{nroff,troff,eqn,tbl..}.
sparc:
- Works on sun4c. I use on SPARCstation 2, real hardware.
TME sun4c emulation can boot to single user, but it locks up in
middle of /etc/rc.
CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4's source code (just after Lite2 release) seems
have differences from CSRG's binary distributions before (2 times),
e.g. mount systemcall is not compatible.
I used NetBSD 1.0/sparc, NetBSD 1.1/pmax for 1st (slightly) cross
compiling. NetBSD 1.0/sparc boots and works well on TME emulator.
SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris7 works too, but this 4.4BSD binary doesn't..
-mochid
As I remember it, the Facilities folks were so upset about
someone painting stuff on Their Water Tower that a complaint
went to Vic Vyssotsky, then Executive Director of Division
112 (one step up from Sandy Fraser, who was Director of 1127).
The story was that Vic and/or Sandy told them that there were
60 people in the research centre and no way to tell who did it.
Word was then quietly passed to certain people--Vic and Sandy
in fact knew exactly who--that things were getting out of hand,
please lay off the Peter-face pranking for a while.
I tried to start a rumour that Vic did the painting, but it
never took off. I hope Vic at least heard it. He'd have
enjoyed the rumour, surely laughed at the prank while knowing
he'd have to calm things down, and 20 years earlier might well
have been involved in something like that.
It was Vic who, on learning I was a cyclist, urged me to try
cycling on the newly-constructed but not yet open segment of
interstate highway that ran behind the Labs. He apparently
had done so and found it lots of fun. Alas, I never did.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
BBN’s TCP implementation contained something akin to the hosts file, called hostmap there:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP/doc
I have not looked at the code for a while, but if I remember correctly the BBN kernel code also read in this file (pre-processed into a binary form) to build its internal routing table.
I do not recall having seen an equivalent file with UoI's NCP Unix in any of the surviving docs or sources - but that does not exclude a library having existed to do lookups in a local copy the SRI-NIC host file. In fact there is some evidence for that in the 2.9 BSD source.
The only surviving copy of the 4.1a (network) source code that I know is in the back-port of this code to 2.8/2.9 BSD. This code includes #ifdef’ed code for accessing the SRI-NIC online host table via NCP:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/local
This source also contains tools to convert the SRI-NIC data into - inter alia - a hosts file:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/man/man8/htable.8https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/man/man8/gettable…
It would seem that the modern host.txt on Unix evolved late ’81 (BBN code) to early ’82 (4.1a BSD). Possibly NCP Unix has prior work.
Paul
Hi,
I'm not sure where this message best fits; TUHS, COFF, or Internet
History, so please forgive me if this list is not the best location.
I'm discussing the hosts file with someone and was wondering if there's
any historical documentation around it's format and what should and
should not be entered in the file.
I've read the current man page on Gentoo Linux, but suspect that it's
far from authoritative. I'm hoping that someone can point me to
something more authoritative to the hosts file's format, guidelines
around entering data, and how it's supposed to function.
A couple of sticking points in the other discussion revolve around how
many entries a host is supposed to have in the hosts file and any
ramifications for having a host appear as an alias on multiple lines /
entries. To whit, how correct / incorrect is the following:
192.0.2.1 host.example.net host
127.0.0.1 localhost host.example.net host
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
In the Seventh Edition manual, a joke was added to
the entry for kill(1). It appears in every following
Research manual, but seems to have been discarded
by all modern descendants.
I guess the prejudice against humour in the manual
is extreme these days.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
