> The lack of a monospaced font is, I suspect, due either to
> physical limitations of the C/A/T phototypesetter[1] or fiscal
> limitations--no budget in that department to buy photographic
> plates for Courier.
Since the C/A/T held only four fonts, there was no room for
Courier. But when we moved beyond that typesetter, inertia
kept the old ways . Finally, in v9, I introduced the fixed-width
"literal font", L, in -man and said goodbye to boldface in
synopses. By then, though, Research Unix was merely a
local branch of the Unix evolutionary tree, so the literal-font
gene never spread.
Doug
> <clemc(a)ccc.com>
> In particular, I hope the PDP-7s and the CDC-6500 find new homes.
Also, their collection of PDP-10's, which is absolutely unrivalled; they
had a KA10 and a KI10; also the MIT-MC KL10.
Also a Multics front panel; AFAIK, the ony one in the world other than the
CHM's. Any idea where it's all being sold? I might enquire about the Multics
panel.
Noel
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-museum-logs-off-for…
These folks hosted the UNIX 50th Celebration and had a physical PDP-7 that
was used to bring up UNIX V0 (after first getting it running on SIMH). That
later was not easy because the original PDP-7s (like the one Ken had access
to) did not have disk storage. BTL had paid DEC's Custom Special Systems
(CSS) to splice a Burrough's disk that DEC was selling using for the 15 and
later the PDP-9. It started with splicing reverse engineering that code
to build a simulation of that disk into the simh, so we could ensure that
UNIX ran—finally, modeling that HW with a custom microprocessor-based board
with an SD card with a functional replica of a PDP-7 I/O interface on one
side obeying the device registers and operations that UNIX expected to see.
The LCM-L folks were incredibly gracious and generous. I am so sad to see
their collection go away. In particular, I hope the PDP-7s and the CDC-6500
find new homes.
Clem
FYI, Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multicians list; DMR's
recollections of the end of Multics at BTL.
I can't resist asking about the nugget buried in here about Ken
writing a small kernel for the 645. Is that in the archives anywhere?
- Dan C.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Tom Van Vleck via groups.io <thvv=multicians.org(a)groups.io>
Date: Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 10:38 AM
Subject: [multicians] Dennis Ritchie's 1993 Usenet posting "BTL Leaves Multics"
To: <multicians(a)groups.io>
in "alt.os.multics"
about Unix, CTSS, Multics, BTL, qed, and mail
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.os.multics/c/1iHfrDJkyyE
Comments by DMR, me, RMF, PAG, PAK, BSG, PWB, JJL, AE, MAP, EHR, DMW
Covers many issues.
(I feel like we should save this thread somehow. hard to trust Google any more.
the posting ends with a heading of a response by JWG but no content.)
_._,_._,_
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All, recently I saw on Bruce Schneier "Cryptogram" blog that he has had
to change the moderation policy due to toxic comments:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/new-blog-moderation-policy.h…
So I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your civility
and respect for others on the TUHS and COFF lists. The recent systemd
and make discussions have highlighted significant differences between
people's experiences and opinions. Nonetheless, apart from a few pointed
comments, the discussions have been polite and informative.
These lists have been in use for decades now and, thankfully, I've
only had to unsubscribe a handful of people for offensive behaviour.
That's a testament to the calibre of people who are on the lists.
Cheers and thank you again,
Warren
P.S. I'm a happy Devuan (non-systemd) user for many years now.
my personal frustration with autotools was trying to port code to plan9.
i wish autotools had an intermediate file format which described the packages requirements, that way i could have written my own backend to create my config.h and makefiles (or mkfiles)
in the end i wrote my own tool which crudely parses a directory of C or F77 sourcecode and uses heuristics to create a config.h and a plan9 mkfile, it was named mkmk(1)
it was almost _never_ completely correct, but usually got close enough that the files only needed a little manual hacking.
it also took great pains to generate mkfiles that looked hand written; if you are going to auto generate files, make them look nice.
-Steve
> This is The Way if you really care about portability. Autoconf,
> once you get your head around what, why, and when it was created,
> makes for nice Makefiles and projects that are easy to include in
> the 100 Linux distributions with their own take on packaging the
> world.
This is outright claptrap and nonsense. In the latter half of the
90s I was responsible for writing installers and generating
platform-native packages for about a dozen different commercial
UNIX platforms (AIX, Solaris, Irix, HP/UX, OSF, BSD/OS, ...). Each
of these package systems was as different as could be from the
others. (HP/UX didn't even have one.)
That entire process was driven by not very many lines of make
recipes, with the assistance of some awk glue that read a template
file from which it generated the native packages. And these were
not trivial software distributions. We were shipping complex IMAP,
X.400 and X.500 servers, along with a couple of MTAs. Our installers
didn't just dump the files onto the system and point you at a README;
we coded a lot of the site setup into the installers, so the end
user mostly just had to edit a single config file to finish up.
--lyndon
FYI, for people like me that care about 80s 68K Unix systemf
There is a pretty serious multi-purpose preservation effort that started a few weeks ago
around Plexus systems as a result of a series of YouTube videos
https://youtu.be/iltZYXg5hZwhttps://github.com/misterblack1/plexus-p20/
This announcement just arrived on the ACM Bulletins list:
>> ...
>> Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Vrije Universiteit, receives the ACM Software
>> System Award (http://awards.acm.org/software-system) for MINIX, which
>> influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple
>> generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used
>> operating systems, including Linux.
>> ...
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