Hello everyone, I'm just putting feelers out for a potential data recovery
project that may have some UNIX history nuggets hiding somewhere. I just closed
on this auction: https://www.ebay.com/itm/267254963191
After the link is an action for a set of 17 Sony QD-600A tapes featuring various
backups from at least one machine named Zeus. The listing indicates they were
property of a former Western Electric engineer. At least one tape has a label
indicating a full /usr backup. My hope is that something downstream of the BTL
internal version of System V might be living amongst these tapes, but either way
I was wondering if anyone here with access to the correct tape drive would be
willing to assist with ripping these tapes? I can also start hunting down a
drive but figured I'd ask around first. I'm not currently spotting a drive on
eBay but have a few other places I can ask around.
Thanks for any input!
- Matt G.
> From: Steve Jenkin
> An unanswered question about Silicon Valley is:
> Why did it happen in California and not be successfully cloned
> elsewhere?
One good attempt at answering this is in "Making Silicon Valley: Innovation
and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970", by Christophe Lecuyer; it's also a
very good history of the early Silicon Valley (before the mid-1960's).
Most of it's available online, at Google:
https://books.google.com/books?id=5TgKinNy5p8C
I have neither the time nor energy to comment in detail on your very detailed
post, but I think Lecuyer would mostly agree with your points.
> It wasn't just AT&T, IBM & DEC that got run over by commodity DRAM &
> CPU's, it was the entire Minicomputer Industry, effectively extinct by
> 1995.
Same thing for the work-station industry (with Sun being merely the most
notable example). I have a tiny bit of second-hand personal knowldge in this
area; my wife works for NASA, as a structural engineer, and they run a lot of
large computerized mathematical models. In the 70's, they were using CDC
7600's; they moved along through various things as technology changed (IIRC,
at one point they had SGI machines). These days, they seem to mostly be using
high-end personal computers for this.
Some specialized uses (various forms of CAD) I guess still use things that
look like work-stations, but I expect they are stock personal computers
with special I/O (very large displays, etc).
So I guess now there are just supercomputers (themselves mostly built out of
large numbers of commodity CPUs), and laptops. Well, there is also cloud
computing, which is huge, but that also just uses lots of commodity CPUs.
Noel
G. Branden Robinson:
That's why I think Norman has sussed it out accurately. LLMs are
fantastic bullshit generators in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense,[1]
wherein utterances are undertaken neither to enlighten nor to deceive,
but to construct a simulacrum of plausible discourse. BSing is a close
cousin to filibustering, where even plausibility is discarded, often for
the sake of running out a clock or impeding achievement of consensus.
====
That's exactly what I had in mind.
I think I had read Frankfurt's book before I first started
calling LLMs bullshit generators, but I can't remember for
sure. I don't plan to ask ChatGPT (which still, at least
sometimes, credits me with far greater contributions to Unix
than I have actually made).
Here's an interesting paper I stumbled across last week
which presents the case better than I could:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
To link this back to actual Unix history (or something much
nearer that), I realized that `bullshit generator' was a
reasonable summary of what LLMs do after also realizing that
an LLM is pretty much just a much-fancier and better-automated
descendant of Mark V Shaney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Yufeng Gao wrote:
> The s1 tape is a UNIX INIT DECtape containing the kernel, while s2 includes
> most of the distribution files.
[https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-February/031420.html]
Hello Yufeng,
Do you have more details on the format of the s1 tape? I want to reproduce your
work.
The s2 tape is in the tap format, which was easy to decode, and I assumed that
s1 was similar, just with its file headers on an earlier tape. I’ve been able to
fairly accurately segment s1 into files by observing that blocks duplicate the
tail of the previous block when they are not a full 512 bytes. I’ve written a
tool for this and have segmented all the text files and some of the binaries,
but I’m floundering on the rest. What you say seems to suggest that s1 actually
does have file metadata.
Thalia
Hi
I recently noticed that some references from Richard Stevens’ website aren’t working: https://www.kohala.com/ - many links are broken, including links to the resources that worked before.
I found some sub-directory there that appears to have copies of referenced files:
http://www.kohala.com/start/
I’d be willing to chip in some $ to extend his domain + server to just work, in case anybody here knows the right people. I also wondered whether we could mirror his site on TUHS?
Thanks,
Adam
> From: Adam Koszek
> Try to access his:
> Stevens, W. R. 1989. "Heuristics for Disk Drive Positioning in
> 4.3BSD," Computing Systems, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 251-274 (Summer).
I'm getting the exact same error you are, so it's nothing specific to your
side.
There is another copy of that paper here:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1989/sum_stevens.pdf
though. (Multiple copies of things are _somewhat_ common.)
Noel
I'm hoping that someone hear (*BSD folks?) might know what's happened
with the PCC Revived project. The site and CVS server for it went
offline in October 2023 or so, and I lost the email address for
Ragge who was doing it.
Thanks,
Arnold
> From: Noel Chiappa
> the PWB shell (which I guess Massey worked on; hence the name)
Someone pointed out to me that I needed to do a:
1,$s/Massey/Mashey/g
The pitfalls of creating replies in editor buffers: typos get replicated!
Noel
> From: "John Levine"
> I had heard that called the Mashey shell, also according to Wikipedia
> the PWB shell.
Wikipedia content is a little better than LLM output, but not much! (The best
thing in Wikipedia is the referencs.)
The changes to the Thompson shell to make the PWB shell (which I guess Massey
worked on; hence the name) are laid out pretty well in "UNIX Time-Sharing
System: The Programmer's Workbench" (of which Massey is a co-author):
https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-2177
The projects which used PWB made extensive use of shell command files. So,
PWB made two kinds of changes to the shell: i) flow-of-control commands used
in shell procedures were made built-ins (which gave a huge decrease in fork()
overhead), and ii) minor enhancements to shell command semantics (variables,
evaluation of expressions, nestable control structure), which made shell
command files much more powerful (and thus used a lot more).
Minnie's 'version comparison tool' is useful to use to compare the 'Massey'
shell:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1/sys/source/s2/sh.c
with the vanilla V6 ('Thompson') shell. The PWB shell is definitely a tweaked
version of the Thompson shell.
Noel