TUHS April 2021

tuhs@tuhs.org

74 participants
42 discussions

by norman＠oclsc.org

Dan Cross: I seem to recall that LCC was also used, at least on 10th Ed. Am I imagining things, or was that real? === Some of the earliest work on lcc was done in 1127; Chris Fraser worked for the Labs for some years, Dave Hanson collaborated from his appointment at Princeton. I believe there was a /usr/bin/lcc. Some programs used it, either because they needed some part of the ISO syntax (pcc2 was pre-ISO) or just because. I don't think that version of lcc used Reiser's c2 optimizer; it generated reasonably good code by itself, including emitting auto-increment/decrement instructions. Later versions of lcc (such as that I later adopted as cc in my personal V10 world) couldn't do that any more, so I had to keep c2, and in fact to modify it to turn addl3 a,b,(p) mova 4(p),p into addl3 a,b,(p)+ (or maybe it was addl2 $4,p, I forget) But that's another story which I'll tell only if asked, and nothing to do with the original question.

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] pcc in 8th edition

by norman＠oclsc.org

I was waiting to see whether Steve Johnson would speak up, because I'm not much of an expert; but yes, the VAX C compiler in V8/V9/V10 is pcc2. I think there are a few Research-specific hacks to add additional stab info for pi(9.1) and on request insert basic-block profiling for lcomp(1), but nothing major. Maybe we did some hacking on c2 as well. I know I did a lot of c2 cleanup later in my personal hacking in Toronto, but I don't think I did much if any in New Jersey. But that's independent of the compiler (modulo, I think, some of my later fixes discovered by using c2 with a different compiler). Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 1 month

pcc in 8th edition

by Paul Ruizendaal

Sometimes one thing leads to another. Following the recent mention of some retro-brew 68K single board systems, I decided to build a CB030 board (in progress). I figure it is a rough proxy for a 1980 VAX and would allow for some experimentation with the 32V / SysIII / 8th edition code. My first thought was to use the M68K compiler that is included with the bit sources (see THUS Archive for this), as I had used that before to explore some of the Blit source. That compiler is LP32, not ILP32 - which may be a source of trouble. Just changing the SZINT parameter yielded some issues, so I started looking at the PCC source. This source does not have a “table.c” in the well known format as described in the “A tour of the portable C compiler” paper. Instead it uses a file “stin” which appears to be in a more compact format and is translated into a “table.c” file by a new pre-processor ("sty.y”). Then looking at the VAX compilers for 8th and 10th edition, these to use this “stin” file. All the other m68K compilers (based on pcc) that I found appear to derive from the V7/32V/SysIII lineage, not from the 8th edition lineage. A quick google did not yield much background or documentation on the STY format. Anybody on this list that can shed some light on the history of the STY table and on how to use it? Any surviving reports or memos that would be useful? Many thanks in advance Paul

4 years, 1 month

FTAG: AlphaServer DS15, Sun T5140, Sun Blade 10, HP Proliant DL380 G7, VT220 [London, UK]

by Andrew Luke Nesbit

Hello all again, With a heavy heart I need to find a new home for the following beautiful hardware: - AlphaServer DS15 server - Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 1U rack server - Sun Blade 10 mini tower - HP Proliant DL380 G7 2U rack server - DEC VT220 with screen, keyboard, and various adapter cables Please note that the Sun T5140 and HP DL380 are deep (700mm for purposes of installation in a rack). I'm starting a new job next week and intend to focus on that and my family. I've stopped working on various projects and I am vacating my studio workshop, so I have a lot of things to give away or sell. The above items are all FREE FOR COLLECTION ONLY (a car will be fine to transport the above items). I am located in London, UK. Post code is N15 4QL (Seven Sisters and Tottenham Hale) in Haringey, London. Kind regards, Andrew

4 years, 1 month

First C compiler outside Bell Labs?

by Lars Brinkhoff

Hello, Which was the first C compiler written outside Bell Labs? I have a candidate in mind. Alan Snyder interned at Bell Labs in 1973. Later at MIT, we wrote a C compiler for the PDP-10. This would have been 1974-1975.

4 years, 1 month

SUN (Stanford University Network) was PC Unix

by Paul Ruizendaal

> On 09/04/2021 11:12, emanuel stiebler wrote: > You're comparing a z80 SBC running CP/M? Or are you thinking of 68000 SBCs? Z80 CP/M machines were still competitive in 1981-1983 (Osborne, Kaypro) > I've never seen a 68k SBC. Have I missed out something along the way? Is there a community for 68k SBC's? Kind regards, Andrew Well, Rob Pike designed one: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/ I guess the original hacker scene for the 68K was around Hal Hardenberg’s newsletter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTACK_Grounded The ready-made 68K SBC’s only arrived 1984-1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL (I think Linus Torvalds owned one) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000 All these machines are rather similar at the hardware level - 68K processor, RAM shared between CPU and display. Only the Amiga had a (simple) hardware GPU. What set the SUN-1 apart was its MMU, which none of the above have. What influenced the timing was probably that Motorola made the 68K more affordable by the mid-80’s. Paul

4 years, 1 month

Can I use Apout simulator on Windows 10?

by Saif Resun

hello there! I want to use Unix Operating system but I use Windows and from TUHS I got to know that Apout can be installed on FreeBSD 2.x and 3.x, and on RedHat Linux 2.2. Can I use it on Windows 10? Thank you.

4 years, 1 month

Looking for a paper..

by Warner Losh

... or the proceedings that it's in. The paper is by Chris Torek entitled "A New Framework for Device Support in Berkeley Unix" from Proceedings of the UKUUG, London, Summer 1990. The Google hits I'm getting in the proceedings suggest I'd like a copy of the full thing. Closest I've found is from 2005 or 2006 on archive.org... Nothing in the TUHS archives I was able to find.... This paper is referenced in Chris Torek's "Device Configuration in 4.4BSD" which only ever seemed to circulate in draft form. That I have a pdf of which I converted from a ps that was on NetBSD.org... Any chance I can get a copy of it? Or will I need to figure out inter-library loan again for the first time in almost 2 decades... Warner

4 years, 1 month

Anyone know ancient versions of XLC?

by Ben Huntsman

I know this is a strange place to ask, but it was suggested to me that some people who may know may follow this list... Anyone on here used IBM's XLC in very old versions? Anyone know what the argument -qdebug=austlib does? I can't seem to find any documentation that says... It would have been an argument for the compiler shipping with AIX 3.2.5, I believe. Thanks in advance!

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] (no printed copy) (was (no subject))

by Norman Wilson

Nemo Nusquam: In this informal survey, I side with Dave, though I prefer to read in my comfy well-lit chair with tea/coffee/cocoa.B (A very similar thread was aired on MO last year.) ===== I should point out that, having at various times spilled hot chocolate on a tablet and on a paper book, it is much simpler to recover when it's a tablet. And a cat can flip pages for you with either technology. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (Curled up on the couch with my laptop, cat just left)

4 years, 1 month

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TUHS April 2021