TUHS August 2023

tuhs@tuhs.org

53 participants
37 discussions

John Warnock [1940--2023]

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

[This posting was sent earlier today to some local lists, but may also be of interest to TUHS members.] The UofUtah lost one its significant alumni, John Warnock, on Saturday. John received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Department of Mathematics, and his doctoral degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering. After jobs at Evans & Sutherland in Salt Lake City, and Xerox PARC labs in Palo Alto, CA, he later went on to co-found Adobe Systems with Chuck Geschke (1939--2021), and the PostScript, PDF, and font technologies, and many others, that came from their company changed the publishing model of the entire world. See https://www.cs.utah.edu/adobe-co-founder-and-kahlert-school-of-computing-al… https://www.ksl.com/article/50713319/adobe-co-founder-utah-native-john-warn… https://www.adobe.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Geschke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock John's doctoral thesis is available at: https://www.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/302478116/2F149E6F459946B7PQ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

8 months, 2 weeks

Re: when did v8 or later get networking?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> > a token ring driver (written by Noel Chiappa, if I remember well). No (unless they took one I wrote for the V6 machine and adapted it); I never did anything on any Unix after V6 (I think there's nothing of any significant interest in any later Unix). Anyway, writing a driver for that board would be about as much work as writing a driver for an RK11 controller - i.e. a day or so for someone competent. Noel

8 months, 4 weeks

Re: when did v8 or later get networking?

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2023 03:17:25 +0000 > From: segaloco > >>>> TCP/IP, not datakit > > > All of the files that have timestamps at the top list 83/07/29, except ip_input.c which has 83/08/16 instead. The V8 version has _device (device driver) and _ld (line discipline) components that the 4.1cBSD code does not have. Many other files have analogs between the two. The byte ordering subroutines have been copied into a file, goo.s, from their home in 4.1cBSD in the C library (/usr/src/lib/libc/net/misc). When this work originated someone else would need to answer, [...] As far as I can tell the history of this code line goes back to 1977, when Jack Haverty at BBN wrote a TCP/IP library (porting earlier work written in PDP-11 assembler) for a slightly modified 6th Edition Unix. Fighting with 64KB core limits, throughput was horrific and he concluded that a bigger PDP-11 was needed. Mike Wingfield then did a re-implementation in C for a PDP-11/70. This worked in early 1979 and is arguably the first Unix TCP/IP stack that can still interoperate with current IPv4. However, it was still mostly a proof of concept user mode design (it was funded as a test vehicle for the later abandoned Autodin-II fork of TCP). BBN then got a contract to write a kernel mode TCP/IP stack for 4BSD (“VAX TCP” in the old BBN doc’s). This work was performed by Rob Gurwitz under supervision of Jack Haverty. This stack - although all new code - still showed its heritage: it was designed as a loosely bound kernel process providing the NCP-Unix API. Some sources seem to imply that it was developed first as a user mode process and once working in that context changed into a kernel process / thread. Beta releases were available in 1981. It worked (and interoperates with modern IPv4), but in my experiments a few years back it turned out that it is difficult to get the scheduling for this kernel process right at higher system loads. Bill Joy of CSRG concluded that the BBN stack did not perform according to his expectations. Note that CSRG was focused on usage over (thick) ethernet links, and BBN was focused on usage over Arpanet and other wide-area networks (with much lower bandwidth, and higher latency and error rates). He then in 1982 rewrote the stack to match the CSRG environment, changing the design to use software interrupts instead of a kernel thread and optimising the code (e.g. checksumming and fast code paths). It was a matter of debate how new the code was, with the extremes being that it was written from scratch using the spec versus it being mostly copied. Looking at it with a nearly 50 year distance, it seems in between: small bits of surviving SCCS suggest CSRG starting with parts of BBN code followed by rapid, massive modification; the end result is quite different but retained the ‘mbuf’ core data structure and a BBN bug (off-by-one for OOB TCP segments). The shift from the NCP-Unix API to sockets is separate from this and was planned. CSRG had the contract to develop a new API for facilitating distributed systems with Unix and this gelled into the sockets interface. The first prototypes for this were done in 1981. Nearly all of the above source is available in the TUHS online Unix Tree (Wingfield, VAX-TCP and two early versions from CSRG - one in 2.9BSD and one in 4.1cBSD).

8 months, 4 weeks

Hundreds of HP-UX Manuals (Auction Links)

by segaloco

Good morning folks, just sharing some eBay sales I spotted that are just not in the cards for me, both in terms of expense and I just don't have the bandwidth to focus on other UNIX lines right now. That said, someone is selling a very, very large collection of HP-UX documents: https://www.ebay.com/itm/285425883705 https://www.ebay.com/itm/285425882004 As mentioned, quite pricy, and bulky too. However, if anyone knows anyone with a particular eye for HP-UX history, this may interest them. No idea what is and isn't preserved there, non-Bell-and-UCB stuff hasn't been on my radar hardly at all other than acknowledging it exists. Tangential but I do appreciate the consistency in their documentation appearance. I see HP-UX stuff pop up time to time and the cover motif is identical to the documents they published with analytical equipment like gas chromatographs before spinning that unit off into Agilent. - Matt G.

8 months, 4 weeks

V8 Streams // was Re: when did v8 or later get networking?

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com > Thu Aug 10 12:45:54 AEST 2023 > wrote: > > Yea, I thought it was 4.1bsd + later tcp code but with a STREAMS instead of > Socket interface... Please see this old TUHS post for some more background in DMR’s own words: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2019-August/018325.html On the topic of DMR Streams, I’m increasingly intrigued by its design: recently I’ve been deep diving into classic USB to better understand this class of devices and how to drive them (https://gitlab.com/pnru/usb_host). It would seem to me that Streams would have been a neat way to organise the USB driver stack in a v8 context. Note that an USB analog did exist in 1982: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex-Bus Sometimes I wonder what combining v8 streams with v8 virtual directories (i.e. like Killian’s /proc) could have looked like. Having the streams network stack (or usb stack) exposed as virtual directories would have been quite powerful.

9 months

when did v8 or later get networking?

by lm＠mcvoy.com

TCP/IP, not datakit.

9 months

Re: v8 /etc/motd

by Steve Simon

probably local, but i do remember: “Error 17. press control + backslash + underscore + exclamation mark to continue; or any other key to reboot.”

9 months

v8 /etc/motd

by ron minnich

Sorry if this has been asked before, but: "Welcome to Eighth Edition Unix. You may be sure that it is suitably protected by ironclad licences, contractual agreements, living wills, and trade secret laws of every sort. A trolley car is certain to grow in your stomach if you violate the conditions under which you got this tape. Consult your lawyer in case of any doubt. If doubt persists, consult our lawyers. Please commit this message to memory. If this is a hardcopy terminal, tear off the paper and affix it to your machine. Otherwise take a photo of your screen. Then delete /etc/motd. Thank you for choosing Eighth Edition Unix. Have a nice day." was this one person or a group effort. It's wonderful.

9 months

March 17, 1988 Bill Joy @ IBM Yorktown VHS discovered thanks to 512 byte C compiler

by Charles H Sauer (he/him)

At 1:46:50, Bill says "AIX is a good thing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmC5yoE_7PY backstory on how https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html led to this rediscovery at https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2023/08/07/koko-keeping-warm/ Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

9 months

Re: Help with a Unix-ish project?

by steve jenkin

six years later… A note for the list: Warren (in. IMHO, a stroke of genius) changed the Repo from xv6-minix to xv6-freebsd. <https://github.com/DoctorWkt/xv6-freebsd> -- 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

9 months

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TUHS August 2023