TUHS June 2024

tuhs@tuhs.org

81 participants
39 discussions

Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> <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

3 days

Fwd: [multicians] Dennis Ritchie's 1993 Usenet posting "BTL Leaves Multics"

by Dan Cross

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.) _._,_._,_ ________________________________ Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5547) | Reply To Group | Reply To Sender | Mute This Topic | New Topic ________________________________ -- sent via multicians(a)groups.io -- more Multics info at https:://multicians.org/ ________________________________ Your Subscription | Contact Group Owner | Unsubscribe [crossd(a)gmail.com] _._,_._,_

4 days, 1 hour

Thank you all for your civility

by Warren Toomey

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.

6 days, 18 hours

Re: autotools

by Steve Simon

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

1 week

Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

by Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)

> 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

1 week, 1 day

Fwd: Anyone have Plexus docs/software squirreled away?

by Al Kossow

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/iltZYXg5hZw https://github.com/misterblack1/plexus-p20/

1 week, 1 day

Be there a "remote diff" utility?

by Dave Horsfall

Every so often I want to compare files on remote machines, but all I can do is to fetch them first (usually into /tmp); I'd like to do something like: rdiff host1:file1 host2:file2 Breathes there such a beast? I see that Penguin/OS has already taken "rdiff" which doesn't seem to do what I want. Think of it as an extension to the Unix philosophy of "Everything looks like a file"... -- Dave

1 week, 1 day

Re: [COFF] Re: Supervisor mode on ye olde PDP-11

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > 2.11BSD used a mode between kernel and user for the TCP stack to get > more effective address space... Is there a document for 2.11 which explains in detail why they did that? I suspect it's actually a little more complicated than just "more address space". The thing is that PDP-11 Unix had been using overlays in the kernel for quite a while to provide more address space. I forget where they first came in (I suspect there were a number of local hacks, before everyone started using the BSD approach), but by 2.9 BSD they were a standard part of the system. (See: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/src/sys/conf/Ovmak… for some clues about how this works. There is unfortunately no documentation that I know of which explains clearly how it works; if anyone knows of any, can you please let me know? Otherwise you'll have to read the sources.) I can think of two possible reasons they started using supervisor mode: i) There were a limited number of the 2.9-type overlays, and they were not large; trying to support all the networking code with the existing overlay system may have been too hard. ii) I think this one is unlikely, but I'll list it as a possibility. Switching overlays took a certain amount of overhead (since mapping registers had to be re-loaded); if all the networking code ran in supervisor mode, the supervisor mode mapping registers could be loaded with the right thing and just left. Noel

1 week, 2 days

Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Frankly my major complaint with much of the modern world is that when we > ignore the past "There are two kinds of fools. One says, 'This is old, therefore it is good'; the other says, 'This is new, therefore it is better.'" -- Dean Inge, quoted by John Brunner in "The Shockwave Rider". Noel

1 week, 3 days

Diff: The seminal water we swim in

by Douglas McIlroy

> this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what > would become a seminal, and is arguably the single most important, > piece of social software ever created. I'm flattered, but must point out that diff was just one of a sequence of more capable and robust versions of proof(1), which Mike Lesk contributed to Unix v3. It, in turn, copied a program written by Steve Johnson before Unix and general consciousness of software tools. Credit must also go to several people who studied and created algorithms for the "longest common subsequence" problem: Harold Stone (who invented the diff algorithm at a blackboard during a one-day visit to Bell Labs), Dan Hirschberg, Tom Szymanksi, Al Aho, and Jeff Ullman. For a legal case in which I served as an expert witness, I found several examples of diff-type programs developed in the late 1960s specifically for preparing critical editions of ancient documents. However, Steve Johnson's unpublished program from the same era appears to be the first that was inspired as a general tool, and thus as "social software". Doug

1 week, 4 days

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TUHS June 2024