TUHS January 2022

tuhs@tuhs.org

79 participants
47 discussions

Coastal cultures, collaboration, creativity and Sun vs DEC

by Douglas McIlroy

> most, if not all of these things were after I arrived. That may indicate the youth of the narrator more than a lightening of the culture. Some practical jokes and counter-culture customs from an earlier day: When I joined the Labs, everyone talked about the escapades of Claude Shannon and Dave Hagelbarger--unicycle, outguessing machines, the finger-on-the-switch box, etc. When John Kelly became a department head he refused to have his office carpeted. That would have kept him from stubbing out cigarettes on the floor. Bill Baker may have worn a coat and tie, but he kept a jalopy in his VP parking space. Another employee had a rusty vehicle with weeds growing out of the fenders. As early as 1960 BESYS began appending fortune cookies to every printout. The counter where printouts were delivered got messed up by people pawing around to see others' fortunes. One day the audio monitor on the low bit of the 7090 accumulator stopped producing white noise (with an occasional screech for an infinite loop) and intoned in aTexas drawl, "Help, I'm caught in a loop. Help. I'm caught in a loop. Help ..." A pixelated nude mural appeared in Ed David's office. (Maybe this no longer counts as a prank. It is now regarded as a foundational event in computer art.) Ed Gilbert had a four-drawer filing cabinet labeled integers, rationals, reals, and balloon. The latter held the tattered remains of lunchtime hot-air experiments. He also had a chalkboard globe with a world map on it. It sometimes took several spins before a visitor realized that you really shouldn't be able to see all the continents at once--the map appeared twice around the circumference of the globe. CS had a Gilbert-and-Sullivan duo, Mike Lesk and Peter Neumann, who produced original entertainment for department parties. Doug

2 years, 11 months

(no subject)

by Douglas McIlroy

> Ken and Dennis were teaching [the Votrax] to swear "Speak" being a phonetics-based program, I suspect they were exploring multiple spellings. Out of context, lots of spellings were indistinguishable. For example, cheap, cheat, cheek, chief was hard to tell from cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep.. At the risk of repeating myself, the fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck example came to the fore when a "speak" kiosk was installed at Epcot. PR folks were worried that people would try it on bad words in this public setting and asked me to block them. I said I'd block whatever words they told me to. Duly, I was sent a list--on the letterhead of an AT&T vice president. (Was that dictated to a secretary?) Later I heard that girls would often try friends' names, while boys would try bad words and exclaim that the machine didn't know them. In fact, those were among the few words the machine *did* know. Fortunately nobody ever complained that I hadn't blocked misspellings. Doug

2 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Douglas McIlroy

> Later Brian's work was updated after V7 and included some new tools, and became known as Writer's Workbench, which eventually was entered in the 'toolchest.' WWB wouldn't exist if text had not routinely existed in machine-readable form, thanks to word-processing. But the impetus for WWB came from "style", not from troff. Style was a spinoff of Lorinda Cherry's "parts", which assigned parts of speech to the words of a document. Style provided a statistical profile of the text: measures such as average word length: frequency of passives, adjectives and compound sentences, reading level, etc. WWB in turn offered writing advice based on such profiles. Style was stimulated by Bill Vesterman, a professor of English at Rutgers, who brought the idea to me. I introduced him to Lorinda, who had it running in a couple of weeks. Then Nina McDonald at USG conceived and packaged WWB as a distinct product, not just a collection of entries in man 1. Wikipedia reports a surmise that WWB sank out of sight because it was not a standard part of Unix distributions. Doug

2 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Jon Steinhart

Steffen Nurpmeso writes: > Note that heirloom doctools (on github) is a SysV-derived *roff Wow, thanks for mentioning this. I was unaware of it. When I recently wrote that it would be nice to add TeX's 2D formatting to troff I didn't realize that it had already been done. Something new to play with. Jon

2 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

On the subject of documtation of [nt]roff, no one seems to have mentioned Narain Gehani's two editions of ``Document Formatting and Typesetting on the UNIX System'' (700+ pages), and a second two-author volume that covers grap, mv, ms, and troff. There is a table of contents of the second edition recorded here: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1987:DFT There is an entry in that file for the first edition too http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1986:DF The second volume, co-authored with Steven Lally, is covered here: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1988:DFT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2 years, 11 months

v7 tape in bitsavers vs recreated tape from Keith Bostic's v7 in TUHS

by Will Senn

Today I was looking around for more v7 stuff of interest that I might find on the web and came across a tape image in the ATT bits directory: http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/ATT/ labeled X7252.2015_UNIX_V7.tap and an image of the reel with original and added markings. I downloaded it and sure enough, it's a bootable v7. I then compared it with my recreated tape image from the files in the Keith Bostic folder on tuhs. The 11.7MB tapes are nearly identical, with only a handful of bytes that differ at the very end of the tape: ATT tape: 54532000 000000 000000 024000 000000 000000 000000 000077 000000 54532020 052135 014020 010000 034113 056720 023524 072143 122062 54532040 141401 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 54532060 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 54532100 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 037400 54532120 000000 000000 54532123 Bostic recreated tape: 54532000 000000 000000 024000 000000 000000 000000 177777 177777 54532020 I'm wondering - 1) Does anyone know the provenance of the X7252.2015_UNIX_V7.tap 2) Do the bytes at the end of the tapes look familiar or particularly meaningful? My knowledge of 40+ y.o. tape formats is woefully lacking, but I'm curious. Will

2 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Bakul Shah

On Jan 10, 2022, at 12:33 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > TeX looks better but you instantly know it is > TeX, it has a particular look. Perhaps you’re thinking of documents using Computer Modern fonts, typeset using LaTeX’s document classes. Check out the examples here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typograp…

2 years, 11 months

awkcc available again!

by Arnold Robbins

Hello All. I am pleased to announce that, after a multi-year effort, Chris Ramming's awkcc is now once again available for download, and this time with a more permissive license. I would like to thank Brian Kernighan, Chris Ramming and Doug McIlroy for contributing letters of support to my efforts to get this program re-released. The lion's share of the thanks must go to Martin Carroll of Nokia Bell Labs, who fought the uphill battle within Bell Labs to get permission to release the code, and who uploaded it to GitHub. Me? I pushed here and there, and contributed the actual code snapshots; it seems that Bell Labs had misplaced the code in the meantime. :-) The code, both the 1988 and 2011 versions, may be found at https://github.com/nokia/awkcc. The code is primarily of historical interest; I think it would take a significant effort to build it on a more modern system, although I think it could be done. It'd also be an effort to bring it up to date with the current Unix version of awk. Again most likely doable, but not necessarily trivial. In any case, enjoy! Arnold

2 years, 11 months

Photos of University Computer Labs

by Alexander Jacocks

Hello, I’m looking for photographs of university computer labs from 1985 until 1995, particularly labs full of unix workstations, of course. Does anyone here have photos like that in their collection? I’m also thinking of reaching out to university archivists, but I don’t have any direct connections to any. Thanks much! - Alex

2 years, 11 months

Bolsky's C Programmer's Handbook

by Tony Finch

I have a copy of a spiral-bound booklet with yellow covers called "The C Programmer's Reference" by Morris I. Bolsky of the Systems Training Center, AT&T Bell Laboratories, (C) 1985. A curious little snapshot of 1980s pre-ANSI C. I posted a picture of the front cover (with table of contents) at https://twitter.com/fanf/status/1475407500946157570 I think I rescued it from the office clear-out in 2013 when Cambridge University Computing Service moved out of the old city-centre offices. I probably picked it up from a stack of old books that were to be chucked; wherever I found it, I can't remember who it belonged to. And now I no longer work for the University, it has come home with me. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> https://dotat.at/ Southwest Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger: Southerly or southeasterly, backing easterly or northeasterly later, 4 to 6, becoming variable 3 for a time in Cromarty and Forth. Moderate, occasionally rough at first in southwest Forties, Cromarty and Dogger. Rain or showers, fog patches developing. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor.

2 years, 11 months

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

TUHS January 2022