Hi all,
I was working with my IRIX 4 machine recently and noticed a mysterious file
- /usr/lib/ecfe. It turns out that this is the Edison Design Group C (not
C++) Front End, included almost certainly by accident with the last release
of the Developer Toolkit for IRIX 4. No other piece of the compiler
toolchain references the EDG product in any way and there is no
documentation for it whatsoever.
The research that I did seems to indicate that this is a source to source
translator, akin to the contemporary Kuck & Associates product - is that
correct? I also found a reference to EDG's tool being used in the Apogee C
compiler. I have a copy of Apogee C for SunOS and it does appear that
"cfe" is the same EDG product. Unfortunately there is no documentation
specific to the C front end, and I don't have a license for Apogee C so I
can't run the compiler to see how it's calling cfe. Just running a C file
"blah.c" through the IRIX front end with no switches results in a
transformed file "blah.int.c". Unfortunately running anything even
moderately complex through the front end results in code that either
doesn't compile or doesn't run, so I feel that I must be missing some flags
or basic options.
Does anyone have any information about SGI's use of this software, or any
documentation/information in general about the EDG product? My usual
sources came up empty.
-Henry
> From: Kevin Bowling
> https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 and the parent page on seem to suggest
> it originated off Net/2 directly.
I wouldn't be putting too much weight on what that page says; most of the
*BSD pages were done by people I don't know well, and who might have gotten
details wrong
I myself later just tried to quickly, without much effort, work out roughly
what the relationship was between those *BSD systems, based on what other
people had written. E.g the now-'BSD/OS' page was originally at '386/BSD',
and I seem to have worked out that it's correct name was BSD/OS and moved it
there. The BSD/386 page is probably roughly correct, since it contains a scan
of a contemporary ad for it.
(So confusing that '386BSD' is something different from 'BSD/386'. Was there ever
actually a '386/BSD'?)
Someone who knows the early history of all the *BSD systems (as in, you lived
through all that) is welcome, nay invited, to fix any errors therein.
Noel
> From: Noel Chiappa
> Was there ever actually a '386/BSD'?
I decided (for not particular reason) to take a quick read through Marshall
Kirk McKusick's "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely
Redistributable":
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.html
and he refers to Jolitz's system as "386/BSD" (apparently incorrectly). (So
there's a lesson there; even people who '_were_ there' can occasionally get it
wrong - something that professional historians are well aware of. I have a
funny story of my learning that lesson, here:
http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/nontech/tmlotus.html
in a totally different technical area.)
I have yet to see a _scan_ of contemporary documentation (I believe nothing
that isn't a contemporary _physical artifact_) that confirms it was actually
named "386BSD", but that does seem to be the name as given in the Dr. Dobbs
series on it. That series confirms that it was based directly on the 'Net/2'
BSD release (although 'diff's on the sources are probably the most reliable
proof).
Noel
I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox.
Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial FreeBSD
variant. But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct strain
of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD. There seems to be scant information
about it online. Does anyone know if its story is told somewhere?
Regards,
Kevin
hello everyone,
i recently came across a little window manager, written in Alef, that
i've had in my /tmp folder
for the last five years. it's called Y (probably as a response to X),
and i grabbed it from
9gridchan's public griddisk; run by the late mycroftiv until 2022.
i think it must've been an experimental project by Pike, Rosenthal or
Tom Duff, but i can't find
any documentation about it anywhere. i'd love to know if any of you
remembers this, and if so,
would you share the story behind it?
i uploaded the source code here: http://antares-labs.eu/isometric/Y.tgz
and it runs on 2nd ed plan 9 without issue (see the attached screenshot.)
cheers!
-rodri
> From: Kevin Bowling
> I wonder if we should collect resources like this on a wiki page or
> something?
My habit on the CHWiki is to have the articles on subjects where there is a
lot of documentation online is to have the articles mostly be 'executive
summeries', and corral the links to the stuff online to a section at the end,
so that people who want to see the gory details can look at the original
documentation. See, for example:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7
That works well, even for material that later goes 404, because with the URL,
one can generally find it later in the Internet Archive (things like Google
won't find things that are only there).
Don't ask me to add them, though; I still haven't found time to add the links
to the BSD/OS stuff you found!
Noel
> From: Rodrigo Lopez
>> Google tells me: https://www.y-windows.org/
> from .. the code, that one has nothing to do with this.
It actually makes sense that there are two separate ones called 'Y'. The X
Window System was a descendant of the W window system, so if someone wanted
to do another one, 'Y' was the obvious namee to pick. All it needs now is two
separate people who decide they want to do a window system... voila!
Noel
On Aug 31, 2024, at 11:16 AM, Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna(a)xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>> On 31 Aug 2024, at 20:09, Angel M Alganza <ama(a)ugr.es> wrote:
>>
>> On 2024-08-31 11:59, Rodrigo G. López wrote:
>>
>>> i'd love to know if any of you remembers this, and if so, would you share the story behind it?
>
> Google tells me: https://www.y-windows.org/
This is likely a different Y window sys than what Rodrigo found,
which is written in Alef and runs on 2nd ed plan9. Rodrigo may
want to trawl through 9fans mailing list/usenet group archives
or ask there.
Hey there folks, I'm going to find myself in Berkeley for the day this
week and was curious if the buildings where the CSRG group worked are
still standing? Thought it would be a fun place to visit after hacking
on BSD for all these years.
Cheers,
-pete
--
Pete Wright
pete(a)nomadlogic.org
