In all that's been written about the Research Unix players,
Fred Grampp has gotten far less coverage than he deserves.
I hope to rectify that with this post, most of which was
written soon after his death.
Doug
During Fred's long career at Bell Laboratories, his coworkers
were delighted to work with him, primarily because of his
innovative and often surprising ways of attacking problems.
Fred's unique approach was by no means limited to work-related
matters. Fred arranged an annual canoe-camping trip on the
Delaware River replete with nearly professional grade fireworks.
He also arranged a number of trips to New York City (referred
to as culture nights) which included, among other things,
trips to the planetarium and visits to various tea rooms.
To his friends at Bell Labs, Fred Grampp was a true original. He
knew the urban community of small, scrabbling business
as well as the pampered life of industrial research in the
country's greatest industrial research lab. And he brought
the best of each to his approach to work.
In his father's hardware store, Fred learned on the front line
what "customer-oriented" meant--a far cry from the hypothetical
nonsense on the subject put forth by flacks in a modern PR
department, or by CEO Bob Allen thinking big thoughts on the
golf course.
Fred ran the computing facilities for the Computer Science
Research Center. He had his finger on the pulse of the machinery
at all hours of day and night. He and his colleague Ed Sitar
rose early to pat the hardware and assure that everything was
in order just as had been done at the hardware store. The rest
of us, who kept more nerdish hours, could count on everything
running.
Packed with equipment, the machine room depended on
air conditioning. Fred saw this as a threat to dependable
service. As a backup, he had big galvanized barn fans installed
in several windows--incongruous, but utterly practical. And
they saw actual use on at least one occasion.
Fred cooked up ingenious software to sniff the computers'
health and sound alarms in his office and even by his bed when
something was amiss. When a user found something wrong and
popped into Fred's office to report the trouble, more often
than not he'd find Fred already working on it.
With his street smarts, Fred was ahead of the game when
computer intrusion began to become a problem in the 1970s.
He was a real white-hat marshall, who could read the the bad
guys' minds and head them off at the pass. With Bob Morris,
Fred wrote a paper to alert system administrators to the kinds
of lapse of vigilance that leave them open to attack; the paper
is still read as a classic. Other sage advice was put forth
by Fred in collaboration with G. R. Emlin, who would become an
important adjunct member of the lab, as several TUHS posts attest.
Quietly he developed a suite of programs that probed a
computer's defenses--fortunately before the bad guys really
got geared up to do the same. That work led to the creation
of a whole department that used Fred's methods to assess and
repair the security of thousands of computers around Bell Labs.
Fred's avocations of flying and lock-picking lent spice to
life in the Labs. He was a central figure of the "computer
science airforce" that organized forays to see fall colors,
or to witness an eclipse. He joined Ken Thompson, who also
flew in the department air force, on a trip to Russia to fly
a MIG-29. Ken tells the story at cs.bell-labs.com/ken/mig.html.
Fred's passion for opera was communicated to many. It was
he who put the Met schedule on line for us colleagues long
before the Met discovered the World Wide Web. He'd press new
recordings on us to whet our appetites. He'd recount, or take
us to, rehearsals and backstage visits, and furnish us with
librettos. When CDs appeared on the scene, Fred undertook to
build a systematic collection of opera recordings, which grew
to over two hundred works. They regularly played quietly in the
background of his office. To Fred the opera was an essential
part of life, not just an expensive night on the town.
Fred's down-to-earth approach lightened life at Bell Labs. When
workmen were boarding up windows to protect them from some major
construction--and incidentally to prevent us from enjoying the
spectacle of ironworkers outside. Fred posted a little sign
in his window to the effect that if the plywood happened to
get left off, a case of Bud might appear on the sill. For the
next year, we had a close-up view of the action.
Fred, a graduate of Stevens Institute, began his career in
the computer center, under the leadership of George Baldwin,
perhaps the most affable and civic-minded mathematician I have
ever met. At the end of one trying day, George wandered into
Fred's office, leaned back in the visitor chair, and said,
"I sure could use a cold one about now." Fred opened his window
and retrieved a Bud that was cooling on the sill.
Fred lived his whole life in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At one
point he decided that for exercise he could get to the Labs by
train to Scotch Plains and bike from there up to Bell Labs--no
mean feat, for the labs sat atop the second range of the
Watchung Mountains, two steep climbs away from Scotch Plains.
He invested in a folding bike for the purpose. Some days
into the new routine a conductor called him out for bringing
a bicycle onto the train. Fred had looked forward to this
moment. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a timetable
and pointed to the fine print: bicycles were prohibited with
the exception of folding bikes.
Originally dated October 25, 2000. Lightly edited and three
paragraphs added February 22, 2021.
Rob Pike:
I don't believe the water tower was a one-person job.
====
I agree. Even if GR Emlin helped, I bet two live people
were involved in painting.
I'm quite sure more than that participated in making the
stencil.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
PS: I have never been on a water tower.
On Mar 11, 2021, at 10:08 AM, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 10:40 AM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote:
>> From https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?hosts(5)
>> For each host a single line should be present with the following information:
>> Internet address
>> official host name
>> aliases
>> HISTORY
>> The hosts file format appeared in 4.2BSD.
>
> While this is true wrt the history of FreeBSD/Unix, I'm almost positive that BSD didn't invent it. I'm pretty sure it was picked up from the existing host file that was published by sri-nic.arpa before DNS.
A different and more verbose format. See RFCs 810 & 952. Possibly because it had to serve more purposes?
> Warner
>
>>> On Mar 11, 2021, at 9:14 AM, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
>>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> COFF mailing list
>> COFF(a)minnie.tuhs.org
>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
In 1972, while in high school, I went to an Intel seminar on the 8008.
There I met a Bell Labs scientist who gave me a sample 8008 and invited
me for a visit at some NJ Bell Labs facility. That group had a
timesharing system of some kind, but it was not Unix. I was also given a
Bell Labs speech synthesis kit after meeting one of the speech
scientists who happened to be in on the same Saturday. I have searched
my attic but can't find further details. Would any of you alumni recall
what this other timesharing system might have been?
Dan
Hello everyone,
I'm Wojciech Adam Koszek and I'm a new member here. After a short stint with Red Hat 6.0 and Slackware Linux around 2000-2001 (I think it was Slackware 7.0 or 7.1) my journey with UNIX started with FreeBSD 4.5. I fell in love with BSD and through Warner Losh, Robert Watson, and folks from a Polish UNIX scene, I became hooked. I ended up working with FreeBSD for the following 15 years or so.
Anyway: the volume of the UNIX literature back then in Poland was scarce, yet through a small bookstore and a friendly salesman I got myself a "UNIX Network Programming Volume 1" at a huge discount, and read it back-to-back.
Looking back, his books had a huge impact on my life (I had all his books, and read everything line by line, with a slight exception of TCP/IP illustrated vol 2, which I used as a reference), and while Stevens's website sheds some light on what he did, I often wonder what is the story behind how his books came to be. It doesn't help he appeared a very private person--never have I seen a photo of him anywhere.
What was the reception of his books in the US?
Did you know him? Do you know any more details about what he did after 1990?
Thanks and take care,
Wojciech Adam Koszek
Following my success in getting 6th Edition UNIX running on a KDF11-B,
with support for the MSCP disk controller, I was looking for ways to get
as new a tool chain as possible onto it, with full source code (as I'd
been using the tool chain from UNSW, for which the source is missing).
Well, it turns out that there's an even newer one in PWB, and there are
complete source and binary PWB distributions in the TUHS archive!
I now have PWB/UNIX 1.0 running, and completely rebuilt from its own
sources, on one of my physical /23+ boxes (and, of course, in simh).
It's connected to my main (NetBSD) system using UUCP over a serial line.
Oh, and it runs the University Ingres RDBMS. :)
The write-up (and download) is at https://www.hamartun.priv.no/pwb.html
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay
Here is a link to the 1897 bill of the Indiana State Legislature
that legislated a new value for $\pi$:
https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/ias/article/view/4753/4589
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> The reason to use tab was file size for one
This is urban legend. The percentage of 512-byte blocks that
tabs would save was never significant.
(I agree that tabs and--especially--newlines can significantly
compress fixed-field formats from punched-card tradition, but
on the tiny Unix systems where tab conventions were
established, big tabular files were very rare.)
Tabs were a convenience for typists. Of course the tty driver
could have replaced them with spaces, but that would have
foreclosed important usage such as tab-separated fields and
run-time-adjustable tab stops tab-separated fields.
(I have run into latter-day trouble with selecting a space-substituted tab
from a screen, only to discover that I was copying or searching for spaces
instead of the tab.. That's not an intrinsic problem, though. Editors like sam
handle it without fuss.)
Doug
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
> From: John Floren
> Can anyone on the list point me to either an existing archive where
> these exist
The canonical repository for historic documentation online is BitSavers.
It has an almost-complete set of DEC stuff (both manuals and prints. QBUS
devices are at:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/qbus/
QBUS CPU's will be in the relevant model directory, e.g.:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/1123/
and disk drives are in:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/disc/
I haven't checked your list, but I suspect most of them are there; I think the
ADV11-A prints are missing, though. You can either send the originals to Al
Kossow, or scan them for him; but check with him first, to make sure he doen't
already have them, just hasn't got around to posting them yet.
There's another site which indexes DEC online documentation:
https://manx-docs.org/
There are a very few things which aren't in Bitsavers, and can be found there.
> KFD11-A cpu
I assume that's a typo for 'KDF11-A'?
Noel
