TUHS July 2025

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59 participants
21 discussions

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curator of 2.11BSD patches?

by John Bruner

Who is the curator of the 2.11BSD patches? I have a couple of candidate fixes for a future patch. Thanks. --John

1 week, 3 days

Teletypes used for early Unix

by Thalia Archibald

Hello all, What teleprinter models were used at Bell Labs, particularly by the Unix groups? Judging by troff escape sequences, it expected a Teletype Model 37, and early all-caps support implies Model 33 usage. But I don’t have a sense of what users and the core developers used. I am working on building a Teletype Model 37 ASR emulator for my PiDP-11 with the goal of replicating the early Unix experience as accurately as possible without physical hardware. As I get deeper into research, I’ve learned of a variety of configuration options beyond what the operator could configure with buttons, e.g., sub-models which come with different components, optional components which can be installed later, and features that can be configured by a craftsman. Here are some examples: - Two-color was optional - The shift-out character set was configurable - An ASR could come without a tape reader/puncher - Half-line forward and reverse was optional - Character sizes varied, e.g., 72 chars per line at 10 chars per inch, adjustable up to 80 per line; or 86 per line at 12 per inch - The paper could be roll paper (friction feed)or flat-folded, form-feed paper with marginal perforations (sprocket feed) - Paper sizes varied, e.g., 3 to 8-1/2 wide or, for sprocket feed, up to 11 inches long and 9-1/2 wide - Some printed control characters; most didn’t - Holding a key could be configured to repeat the character - They could operate half-duplex (transmitted data is copied by the sender) or full-duplex (only received data is copied) - They could receive and transmit at various speeds That’s a lot of options and it’s not exhaustive. The Model 37 product catalog[0] has tables of many configurations and their catalog numbers. Is there a list of the teleprinters purchased by Bell Labs? With that, I could possibly narrow it down like how Warner Losh identified the PDP-7 model used for Unix V0. Thanks! Thalia Archibald [0]: https://ia800702.us.archive.org/32/items/TNM_Model_37_terminal_product_cata… [1]: https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-pdp-7-where-unix-began.html

1 week, 4 days

off topic: StarTech.com parallel port printer server to give away

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. Cleaning up the basement, I found a parallel port printer ethernet server. It lets you put a parallel port printer onto your local network. It speaks the BSD lpr protocol. I used to use it on an HP LaserJet 6 printer. If anyone wants it for an old printer you might have laying around, please let me know, *privately*. It's yours for the cost of postage from Israel. Note, I no longer remember how I got it working with Linux, but I did... This was a llllooonnnngggg time agao. :-) Thanks, Arnold

1 week, 4 days

Re: upwards from ed (was: End of an era: the last ATC)

by Steve Simon

sam was my only editor from 92 when i discovered it until last year. under continual peer pressure i moved to zed on a mac which does many clever things i don’t need and even occasionally gets in the way, but (for me) it had one killer feature: i write go these days and use dozens of third party libraries. zed allows me to ask “what methods are available on this variable?” i would love to go back to sam but i fear adding treesitter and the rest needed to support this feature would kill one of us for sure. -Steve

2 weeks, 1 day

End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference)

by Dan Cross

Folks, For those of you who were unable to attend, I took this photo yesterday, at the end of the closing remarks for ATC'25 in Boston: https://photos.app.goo.gl/tcaAFQgjGPn5s8Dh7 As most of you know, USENIX has sunsetted the conference, and this was the last time ATC will be run, though of course other USENIX conferences will continue in its place. But I wanted to be in the room as it ended, and I snapped this as everything was winding down, and am now sharing it with our community. For those of you who were able to attend, it was wonderful to see a number of familiar faces, and also meet some folks I've known of and interacted with here and elsewhere, face-to-face. USENIX also turned 50 this year, and the organization made sure to create space for reflection on its history; remembrances were shared by Clem Cole, Bill Cheswick, Doug McIlroy, Andrew Hume, Peter Honeyman, Tom Lyon, and others. On a personal note, I found this very meaningful: I was once told, "never meet your heroes." However, in the Unix community, by and large my heroes are wonderfully pleasant, generous, and kind people in real life, all of whom have either indirectly or directly had a profound influence on the course of my career and life. Thank you for that; it was an honor to share space with you. While ATC is ending, it is also clear that there is a vibrant research community flourishing, building on the legacy of work created by the USENIX community and shared through this conference. Many of you nurtured that community, laying its framework, shepherding and guiding its work, cultivating new generations of researchers while providing the basic tools we all depend on, and thus creating the fertile ground on which it now grows. What greater professional accomplishment could one hope for? Perhaps it is best not to think of this as an end, but an epoch marking the transition from one stage of the community's evolution to the next. - Dan C.

2 weeks, 1 day

formatting 1981 troff today?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. As a back burner project, I have the sources for a book, given to me by the author, from around 1981. It was originally formatted using the device independent troff suite. It used the -ms macros plus an additional set of custom macros. I have the additional macros. The book used tbl and pic. A quick grep does not find any instances of .EQ, so it looks like eqn isn't needed. I would like to be able to format the book and generate PDF. What's the best way to go about this? Using groff in compatibility mode? Or the Heirloom troff suite? If the latter, what's the canonical location for it? I will be working on Linux, Ubuntu 24.04. Any and all advice will be welcome. Thanks, Arnold

2 weeks, 6 days

Re: [COFF] Code/comment Ratios Style

by Douglas McIlroy

Larry McVoy wrote > Well, we had begin and end blocks. And other than that, the whole thing > is a wad that is called per line. That was definitely awk inspired. The way I have used m4, a program is executed just once from top to bottom. There is no input file. Another way to describe it is that the program is the input file, which happens to have some program elements interspersed. But m4 never acts as awk does, running the whole "wad" on each line of a separate input file. Of course, one often puts definitions in one file, and "data" in another and catenates them. Then, however, it is only convention--not language design--that keeps the program and data separate. In awk, the separation is absolute. > I'm surprised you see lisp and haskell. The language came from me > and I've never touched haskell and I tried to like lisp, I really > did, but it never grew on me. Care to explain why you saw that? The parenthesized decomposition of a list comes straight out of Lisp, with car-cdr terminology (referring to parts of an IBM 700-series word) modernized to Haskell's more intuitive head and tail. The functional style of programming imitates Haskell within the confines of m4 syntax, but of course. Lisp founded the functional tradition. The word "atom" is borrowed from Lisp, "foldl", "foldr", and "zip" come from Haskell. Doug On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 9:28 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > > Well, we had begin and end blocks. And other than that, the whole thing > is a wad that is called per line. That was definitely awk inspired. > > I'm surprised you see lisp and haskell. The language came from me > and I've never touched haskell and I tried to like lisp, I really > did, but it never grew on me. Care to explain why you saw that? > > For what it is worth, nobody cares because all that code is dead, but > I'm proud of that little language, it's miles and miles beyound what > SCCS could do. I whipped up that json dspec pretty quickly and my > memory is it just worked, we didn't have to go back and fix anything. > > And it is fast. It used to be lex/yacc but that was too slow so Rob > rewrote it as a recursive-descent parser that was boatloads faster. > We actually used that language quite a bit. > > On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 07:19:00AM -0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote: > No awk > at all. Much imitation of Lisp and Haskell > > On Sunday, July 20, 2025, > Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > > > On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 07:06:38PM > -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 08:30:45PM -0400, > Douglas McIlroy wrote: > > > > I just posted the most heavily commented > code I have ever written. > > > > It's a radical (mis?)application of m4, > which is about as inscrutable > > > > as any language short of APL. The > ratio of comments to code is more > > > > than 3:1. > > > > It's at > www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/barem4.m4. 3:1 may be > > > > overkill, but > I think 2:1 would not be unreasonable. > > > > > > > > Doug > > > > > > > Whenever I see something like this, it reminds me of one of my engineers > > > > who said you couldn't make BK produce json out put. > > > > > > Hold > my beer. > > > > > > http://mcvoy.com/lm/bkdocs/dspec-changes-json-v.txt > > > > > > > It's a lot less miserable than the m4 (and I'm a fan of m4). > > > > > It's pretty awk inspired. > > -- > > --- > > Larry McVoy > Retired to fishing > > http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat > > > > -- > --- > Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

2 weeks, 6 days

Re: xvi

by Douglas McIlroy

> I opened them all in vim instances running in the background at login time, > and then I read email until they were all loaded. I then put the process > with the file I needed into the foreground, examined it, and returned to > the shell with :stop (which all command line editors should have) when I > was done. Worked like a charm. A curious mix of present and past tenses. Haven't window systems made foreground/background distinctions irrelevant to most applications, including editors? To my mind :stop is none of an editor's business. Doug

2 weeks, 6 days

upwards from ed (was: End of an era: the last ATC)

by Douglas McIlroy

I always recoiled from vi's plethora of commands. Then came sam, and I haven't looked back since. It handles multiple windows with barely more commands than ed, real regular expressions, good mouse support, and great global editing capability. It can even run by script without a screen. Doug

3 weeks

And, finally...

by Cameron Míċeál Tyre

About a week ago, I designed a sticker for ed users. Hands up, I kind of half stole the tagline, but they're not-for-profit and I only did it because I couldn't find ed stickers by anyone else: https://i.postimg.cc/hjS5Wt6Z/esgag-fin3f.png As an homage to both teleprinters and monochrome monitors, the lettering is in a typewriter font and a representation of monitor green. The actual stickers have rounded corners and are 2-inches wide so ideal for laptops, desktop monitors or even teleprinters! If anyone on this list wants one, please contact me off-list and I will mail it to you, wherever in the world you live. These stickers are free/gratis and it will be my pleasure to post one to you. I haven't received them yet, they should arrive tomorrow, but I've had stickers made by the same company before and they were decent quality. Best regards, Cameron

3 weeks

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TUHS July 2025