Hi all, I've just received a set of MP3 recordings from Bob Kridle. He says:
These are recordings of Ken Thompson doing a read through of one of
an early UNIX kernel code listing with a group of grad students at
UC Berkeley while he was a visiting prof. there.
The date is roughly 1975. I've put the recordings here along with his
e-mails about the recordings:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Recordings/1975_Unix_Code_Walkthru/
I've only just listened to the first few minutes of each. The quality
is fine, but I might spend some time reducing the noise, bringing up
the quiet parts and removing a few clicks and pops.
If anybody else has more details of these recording, please let us know!
Cheers, Warren
Hi All.
A while back I found a copy of the MPM macros and code
that I undoubtedly got from Brian Kernighan.
Warren has put it in the archives:
> Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:04:55 +1000
> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com>
> Cc: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> Subject: Re: MPM macros and code
>
> On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 03:11:47PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > I have the following file:
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold arnold 100770 Feb 17 2002 mpm.shar
>
> Thanks Arnold, I've just put it here:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Typesetting/
>
> Cheers! Warren
Thanks Warren!
Arnold
Hi All.
A while back I found the Caldera release of awk, grep and
libregex from 2001. The tar file is dated 2012, but the
actual code is from earlier.
Warren has put it in the archive:
> Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:07:12 +1000
> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com>
> Cc: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> Subject: Re: Caldera release of awk, grep, and libregex from 2001
>
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2025 at 06:42:50PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > I'm looking through my Downloads directory to try to clean it up
> > a bit. I found this:
> >
> > $ ls -l osutils.tar.gz
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 101072 Nov 25 2012 osutils.tar.gz
>
> Thanks for this as well, it's now at:
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Awk_Grep/
>
> Cheers, Warren
Thanks Warren!
Arnold
Hello all , Here I am again , Maybe my ? might be relative to the
community .
I grabbed an archive of precompiled gnu software , During the
extraction I got a 'warning' from a gzip'd tar & decided to dig into the
underlying tarball to see if it was trully corrupted or repairable .
Tada , I did a silly and less'd one of the binary files and noticed
that the underlying file was 'ar'd by /usr/local/alphaev6-dec-osf5.1b/bin/ar ,
well all said and done My ol' as100 ain't a ev6 .
So my Question , Could I use these programs that were created on a ev6 cpu
system on my ev4 ?
Tia , JimL
--
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| James W. Laferriere | System Techniques | Give me VMS |
| Network & System Engineer | 3237 Holden Road | Give me Linux |
| jiml(a)system-techniques.com | Fairbanks, AK. 99709 | only on AXP |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
Hi,
This was seen on Dave Farber's IP list; with many of
the Dramatis Personae on this list it seems worthwhile
to share it here, too:
"What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9" by Geoff Collyer
https://adi.onl/oral.pdf
-Jan
As part of a discusion on the Linux kernel mailing list, there was an
assertion that ctime was orginally "creation time".
From the v7 sources in TUHS, we can see:
struct dinode
{
unsigned short di_mode; /* mode and type of file */
short di_nlink; /* number of links to file */
short di_uid; /* owner's user id */
short di_gid; /* owner's group id */
off_t di_size; /* number of bytes in file */
char di_addr[40]; /* disk block addresses */
time_t di_atime; /* time last accessed */
time_t di_mtime; /* time last modified */
time_t di_ctime; /* time created */
};
... although the v7 kernel sources does seem to update ctime when the
inode metadata changes, regardless of what the coment in
/usr/src/sys/h/ino.h might say.
More interestingly, this comment seems to continue in newer versions
up to 3BSD, and then the comments becomes "change time" in BSD 4.2,
probably coincident with the File System Implementation?
The best we can guess is that the change from "creation time" to
"inode change time" happened sometime between 1979 and 1982. Does
anyone who was around can give the story about how and when this
happened?
- Ted
In July 1974 I visited Bell Labs Murray Hill, and Ken & Dennis showed me
around. I was very impressed because we (Univ of Nijmegen, NL) had a
PDP-11/45 just like theirs and I knew that machine quite well.
It was clear that their software kicked the machine much heavier than
our (DEC-original) DOS-system did. But I was a naive student so I wanted
more information and asked Ken: are there many UNIX users in Europe?
Ken brought us to the library where a Ms. Irma B. Biren, librarian, kept
the record of licenses. We found prof. Colouris in London... When I
asked whether maybe somebody closer by our place was present, Ken found
Gideon Yuval in Tel Aviv. Nobody closer....
Hendrik-Jan Thomassen
> everyone should write for their first compiler in Pascal for a
> simple language and no cheating using YACC. You need to write the whole
> thing if you want to understand how parsing really works.
Yacc certainly makes it easier to write parsers for big grammars, but
it's far from cheating. You need to know a lot more about parsing to use
Yacc than you need to roll your own.
Hand parsing of a tiny grammar is almost a necessary step on the way to
understanding Yacc. But I think hand-building the whole parser for a
compiler is unnecessary torture--like doing trigonometry with log tables.
Doug
Found out today that we lost George Coulouris about a month ago, he was at QMC (then QMW, now Queen Mary, University of London) in CompSci and an old Unix hand (but not only).
Obituary from his PhD student (who wrote a Unix editor called “ded”):
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jan/19/george-coulouris-obituary