Rather than increase subject drift on a thread I started
"UNIX on (not quite bare) System/370", here's a new thread.
Since the TUHS archive seems to now include documentation,
I decided to take a look and see if the earliest UNIX manual I have
is in the archive:
It was given to me by a friend at Stevens Tech in Hoboken NJ (c. 1980)
who had graduated, and worked for AT&T.
It's hole punched for a four ring binder
(I found an unused Bell System Project Telstar binder to put it in).
The cover page has:
Upper left corner:
Bell Telephone Laboratories Incorperated
PROGRAM APPLICATION INSTRUCTION
Upper right corner:
PA-1C300-01
Section 1
Issue 1, January 1976
AT&TCo SPCS
Center:
UNIX PROGRAMMER'S MANUAL
Program Generic PG-1C300 Issue 2
Published by the UNIX Support Group
January, 1976
The preface starts with:
This document is published as part of the UNIX Operating System Program Generic,
PG-1C300 Issue 2. The development of the Program Generic is the result of the
efforts of the members of the UNIX Support Group, supervised by J.F. Maranzano
and composed of: R. B. Brant, J. Feder, C. D. Perez. T. M. Raleigh, R. E. Swift,
G. C. Vogel and I. A. Winheim.
and ends with
For corrections and comments please contact C. D. Perez, MH 2C-423, Extension
6041.
Not knowing who else I could ask, I brought it to a Boston Usenix (in
the 90's or oughts), and asked DMR if he could identify it. He said
it was an early supported UNIX, and he signed the preface page for me.
The manual has sections I through VIII; all manual pages start with page -1-
I found https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/unix_program_description_ja…
with cover page:
UNIX PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Program Generic PG-1C300 Issue 2
Published by the UNIX Support Group
January 1976
contents:
NUMBER ISSUE TITLE
PD-1C301-01 1 Operating System
PD-1C302-01 1 Device Drivers Section 1
PD-1C303-01 1 Device Drivers Section 2
And consists of descriptions of kernel functions.
So it seems likely that my manual is a companion to that.
I have a Brother printer/scanner, but the paper is fragile, so unless
it's of immediate and burning value to someone, it's unlikely to rise
to the top of my ever-static list of documents to scan....
But if someone has specific questions I can look up, let me know....
I’m re-reading Brian Kernighan’s book on Early Unix (‘Unix: A History & Memoir’)
and he mentions the (on disk) documentation that came with Unix - something that made it stand out, even for some decades.
Doug McIlroy has commented on v2-v3 (1972-73?) being an extremely productive year for Ken & Dennis.
But as well, they wrote papers and man pages, probably more.
I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of the CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
There’s at least one Internet meme that highly productive coders necessarily have good keyboard skills,
which leads to also producing documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often happens commercially.
Underlying this is something I once caught as a random comment:
The commonality of skills between Writing & Coding.
Does anyone has any good refs for this crossover?
Is it a real effect or a biased view.
That great programmers are also “good writers”:
takes time & focus, clarity of vision, deliberate intent and many revisions, chopping away the cruft that’s isn’t “the thing” and “polishing”, not rushing it out the door.
Ken is famous for his brevity and succinct statements.
Not sure if that’s a personal preference, a mastered skill or “economy in everything”.
steve j
=========
A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986
M.D. McIlroy
<https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf>
<https://archive.org/details/a_research_unix_reader/page/n13/mode/2up>
pg 10
3.4. Languages
CC (v2 page 52)
V2 saw a burst of languages:
a new TMG,
a B that worked in both core-resident and software-paged versions,
the completion of Fortran IV (Thompson and Ritchie), and
Ritchie's first C, conceived as B with data types.
In that furiously productive year Thompson and Ritchie together
wrote and debugged about
100,000 lines of production code.
=========
Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
<http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret…>
It's just simple arithmetic. If you spend more time hammering out code, then in order to keep up, you need to spend less time doing something else.
But when it comes to programming, there are only so many things you can sacrifice!
You can cut down on your documentation.
You can cut down on commenting your code.
You can cut down on email conversations and
participation in online discussions, preferring group discussions and hallway conversations.
And... well, that's about it.
So guess what non-touch-typists sacrifice?
All of it, man.
They sacrifice all of it.
Touch typists can spot an illtyperate programmer from a mile away.
They don't even have to be in the same room.
For starters, non-typists are almost invisible.
They don't leave a footprint in our online community.
=========
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
The discussion about the 3B2 triggered another question in my head: what were the earliest multi-processor versions of Unix and how did they relate?
My current understanding is that the earliest one is a dual-CPU VAX system with a modified 4BSD done at Purdue. This would have been late 1981, early 1982. I think one CPU was acting as master and had exclusive kernel access, the other CPU would only run user mode code.
Then I understand that Keith Kelleman spent a lot of effort to make Unix run on the 3B2 in a SMP setup, essentially going through the source and finding all critical sections and surrounding those with spinlocks. This would be around 1983, and became part of SVr3. I suppose that the “spl()” calls only protected critical sections that were shared between the main thread and interrupt sequences, so that a manual review was necessary to consider each kernel data structure for parallel access issues in the case of 2 CPU’s.
Any other notable work in this area prior to 1985?
How was the SMP implementation in SVr3 judged back in its day?
Paul
Greetings,
What's the canonical source for patches to 2.9BSD and 2.11BSD?
I see we have 2.11BSD patch 469 dated last month in the archive. Where does
it come from? Has anybody climbed the hill to import all the patches into a
git repo? I've found some mirrors, but moe.2bsd.org has been down for me
for ages... How does Warren keep things up to date?
I also have a (maybe faulty) memory of a similar series of patches to
2.9BSD because it was the last BSD to support non-split I&D space machines.
yet a quick google search turns up nothing other than a set of patches
dated August 1985 (also in our archive) and some changes for variants of
hardware (pro, mscp). Is that it?
Warner
Good morning all, currently trying to sort out one matter that still bewilders me with this documentation I'm working on scanning.
So I've got two copies of the "Release 5.0" User's Manual and one copy of the "System V" User's Manual. I haven't identified the exact differences, lots of pages...but they certainly are not identical, there are at least a few commands in one and not the other.
Given this, and past discussion, it's obvious Release 5.0 is the internal UNIX version that became System V, but what I'm curious about is if it was ever released publicly as "Release 5.0" before being branded as System V or if the name was System V from the moment the first commercial license was issued.
The reason I wonder this is some inconsistencies in the documentation I see out there. So both of my Release 5.0 User's Manuals have the Bell logo on the front and no mention of the court order to cease using it. Likewise, all but one of the System V related documents I received recently contain a Bell logo on the cover next to Western Electric save for the Opeartor's Guide which curiously doesn't exhibit the front page divestiture message that other documents missing the Bell logo include. Furthermore, the actual cover sheet says "Operator's Guide UNIX System Release 5.0" so technically not System V. In fact, only the User's Manual, Administrator's Manual, Error Message Manual, Transition Aids, and Release Description specifically say System V, all the rest don't have a version listed but some list Release 5.0 on their title page.
Furthering that discrepancy is this which I just purchased: https://www.ebay.com/itm/314135813726?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110…
Link lives as of this sending, but contains a closed auction for an Error Message Manual from the "Release 5.0" documentation line but no Bell logo. Until the Operator's Guide and this auction link, I haven't seen any "Release 5.0" branded stuff without a Bell logo, and before I bought the System V gold set, I hadn't seen System V branded stuff *with* the Bell logo.
This shatters an assumption that I had made that at the same time the documentation branding shifted to System V was the same time the removal of the Bell logo happened, given that divestiture was what allowed them to aggressively market System V, but now this presents four distinct sets of System V gold documentation:
Release 5.0 w/ Bell logo
Release 5.0 w/o Bell logo
System V w/ Bell logo
System V w/o Bell logo
I'm curious if anyone would happen to know what the significance here is. The covers are all printed, I can't see any indication that a bunch of 5.0 manuals were retroactively painted over nor that any System V manuals got stamped with a Bell post-production. What this means is "Release 5.0" documentation was being shipped post-divestiture and "System V" was being shipped pre-divestiture. If Release 5.0 was publicly sold as System V, then what explains the post-divestiture 5.0 manuals floating around in the wild, and vice versa, if USG couldn't effectively market and support UNIX until the divestiture, how is it so many "Release 5.0" documents are floating around in well produced commercial-quality binding, both pre and post-divestiture by the time the name "System V" would've been king. Were they still maintaining an internal 5.x branch past System V that warranted its own distinct documentation set even into the commercial period? This period right around '82-'83 is incredibly fascinating and I feel very under-documented.
- Matt G.
London and Reiser report about porting the shell that “it required by far the largest conversion effort of any supposedly portable program, for the simple reason that it is not portable.” By the time of SysIII this is greatly improved, but also in porting the SysIII user land it was the most complex of the set so far.
There were three aspects that I found noteworthy:
1. London/Reiser apparently felt strongly about a property of casts. The code argues that casting an l-value should not convert it into a r-value:
<quote from "mode.h">
/* the following nonsense is required
* because casts turn an Lvalue
* into an Rvalue so two cheats
* are necessary, one for each context.
*/
union { int _cheat;};
#define Lcheat(a) ((a)._cheat)
#define Rcheat(a) ((int)(a))
<endquote>
However, Lcheat is only used in two places (in service.c), to set and to clear a flag in a pointer. Interestingly, the 32V code already replaces one of these instances with a regular r-value cast. So far, I’d never thought about this aspect of casts. I stumbled across it, because the Plan 9 compiler did not accept the Lcheat expansion as valid C.
2. On the history of dup2
The shell code includes the following:
<quote from “io.c”>
rename(f1,f2)
REG INT f1, f2;
{
#ifdef RES /* research has different sys calls from TS */
IF f1!=f2
THEN dup(f1|DUPFLG, f2);
close(f1);
IF f2==0 THEN ioset|=1 FI
FI
#else
INT fs;
IF f1!=f2
THEN fs = fcntl(f2,1,0);
close(f2);
fcntl(f1,0,f2);
close(f1);
IF fs==1 THEN fcntl(f2,2,1) FI
IF f2==0 THEN ioset|=1 FI
FI
#endif
}
<endquote>
I’ve check the 8th edition source, and indeed it supports using DUPFLG to signal to dup() that it really is dup2(). I had earlier wondered why dup2() did not appear in research until 10th edition, but now that is clear. It would seem that the dup of 8th edition is a direct ancestor to dup() in Plan 9. I wonder why this way of doing things never caught on in the other Unices.
3. Halfway to demand paging
I stumbled across this one because I had a bug in my signal handling. From early days onwards, Unix supported dynamically growing the stack allocation, which arguably is a first step towards building the mechanisms for demand paging. It appears that the Bourne shell made another step, catching page faults and expanding the data/bss allocation dynamically:
<quote from “fault.c”>
VOID fault(sig)
REG INT sig;
{
signal(sig, fault);
IF sig==MEMF
THEN IF setbrk(brkincr) == -1
THEN error(nospace);
FI
ELIF ...
<endquote>
This was already present in 7th edition, so it is by no means new in 32V or SysIII -- it had just escaped my attention as a conceptual step in the development of Unix memory handling.
Here’s a stretch, but does anybody have a copy of the 1982-ish C With
Classes Reference Manual kicking around. I can take it in n/troff or a
more modern format if you have it.
As mentioned in the first post on SysIII porting, I was surprised to see how much code was needed to initialise modern hardware and to load an OS. Of course, modern devices are much more capable than the ones of 40 years ago, so maybe my surprise is misplaced. It did raise an interest in the history of Unix system configuration though.
It would seem that 5th Edition already contained a configuration program that generated a few system tables and the ‘low.s’ file with interrupt vectors and alike. Although it steadily grew in sophistication, the approach appears still the same in SysIII. I suppose this is all in line with common practice of the era, with OS’s typically having a ’system generation kit' to combine the pre-linked OS kernel with device drivers and system tables.
SysIII also introduces the "var struct" and the “v” kernel variable that summarises some of the system configuration. I’m not sure whether it has roots in earlier Unix systems, it does not seem to originate from Research. I’m not sure what the point of this ‘v’ kernel variable was. Does anybody remember?
One could argue that one of the drivers of the success of CP/M in the 1970’s was due to its clear separation between the boot rom, BIOS and BDOS components. As far as I am aware, Unix prior to 1985 did never attempt to separate the device drivers from the other kernel code. I am not very familiar with early Xenix, it could be that Microsoft had both the skill and the interest to separate Xenix in a standard binary (i.e. BDOS part) and a device driver binary (i.e. BIOS part). Maybe the differences in MMU for the machines of the early 80’s were such that a standard binary could not be done anyway and separating out the device drivers would serve no purpose. Once the PC became dominant, maybe the point became moot for MS.
It would seem that the next step for Unix in the area of boot, config and device drivers came with Sun’s OpenBoot in 1988 or so. This also appears to be the first appearance of device trees to describe the hardware to the bios and the kernel. Moreover, it would seem to me that OpenBoot is a spiritual ancestor of the modern Risc-V SBI specification. Maybe by 1988 the IO hardware had become sufficiently complex and/or diverse to warrant a break from tradition?
Was there any other notable Unix work on better organising the boot process and the device drivers prior to OpenBoot?
> "Originally the idea of adding command line editing to ksh was
> rejected in the hope that line editing would move into the terminal
> driver." [2]
> I have always wondered, what such a central terminal driver driven
> history/line-editing would have felt like.
You can get a feel for it in Rob's "sam" editor, which works that way.
Doug
at the risk of making a fool of myself - there are several people far better qualified here, however…
my memory is that the plan9 linker could be easily rebuilt to use malloc and free in the traditional style, reducing its memory footprint - though making it much slower.
-Steve
