Where did chunix (which contains chaos.c) and several other branches of the
v8 /usr/sys tree on TUHS come from? This stuff does not appear in the v8
manual. I don't recall a Lisp machine anywhere near the Unix room, nor any
collaborations that involved a Lisp machine.
Doug
I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the timing and rationale for
the introduction of “word erase” functionality to the kernel terminal
driver. My surface skim earlier leads me to believe it came to Unix
with 4BSD, but it was not reincorporated into 8th Edition or later,
nor did it make it to Plan 9 (which did incorporate ^U for the "line
kill" command). TOPS-20 supports it via the familiar ^W, but I'm not
sure about other PDP-10 OSes (Lars?). Multics does not support it.
VMS does not support it.
What was the proximal inspiration? The early terminal drivers seem to
use the Multics command editing suite (`#` for erase/backspace, `@`
for line kill), though at some point that changed, one presumes as
TTYs fell out of favor and display terminals came to the fore.
- Dan C.
I've been doing some research on Lisp machines and came across an
interesting tidbit: there was Chaosnet support in Unix v8, e.g.
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/sys/chunix/chaos.c
Does anyone remember why that went in? My first guess would be for
interoperability with the Symbolics users at Bell Labs (see Bromley's
"Lisp Lore", 1986), but that's just speculation.
john
Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link to
https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.
I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
cscope on their projects or anything about its development.
-Marcus.
So I've been doing a bit of reading on 1A and 4ESS technologies lately, getting
a feel for the state of things just prior to 3B and 5ESS popping onto the scene,
and came across some BSTJ references to the programming environments involved
in the 4ESS and TSPS No. 1 systems.
The general assembly system targeting the 1A machine language was known as
SPC-SWAP (SWitching Assembly Program)[1](p. 206) and ran under OS/360/370, with
editing typically performed in QED. This then gave way to the EPL (ESS
Programming Language) and ultimately EPLX (EPL eXtra)[2](p. 1)[3](p. 8)
languages which, among other things, were used for later 4ESS work with cross-
compilers for at least TSS/360 by the sounds of it.
Are there any recollections of attempts by the Bell System to rebase any of
these 1A-targeting environments into UNIX, or by the time UNIX was being
considered more broadly for Bell System projects, was 3B/5ESS technology well on
the way, rendering attempting to move entrenched IBM-based environments for the
older switching computation systems moot?
For the record, in addition to the evolution of ESS to the 5ESS generation, a
revision of TSPS, 1B, was also introduced which was rebased on the 3B20D
processor and utilized the same 3B cross-compilation SGS under UNIX as other 3B-
targeted applications[4]. Interestingly, the paper on software development
in [4](p. 109) still makes reference to Programmer's Workbench as of 1982,
implying that nomenclature may have still been the norm at some Bell Labs sites
such as Naperville, Illinois, although I can't tell if they're referring to
PWB as in the branch of UNIX or the environment of make, sccs, etc.
Additionally, is anyone aware of surviving accessible specimens of SWAP
assembly, EPL, or EPLX code or literature beyond the BSTJ references and paper
referenced in the IEEE library below? Thanks for any insights!
- Matt G.
[1] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V58N06_1…
[2] - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/810323
[3] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V60N06_1…
[4] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V62N03_1…
> You can always read Josh Fisher's book on the "Bulldog" compiler, I
> believe he did this work at Yale.
Are you thinking of John Ellis’s thesis:
Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures
John R. Ellis
February 1985
http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf
Fisher was Ellis’s advisor. The thesis was also published in ACM’s Doctoral Dissertation Award:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050340/bulldog/
I believe Ellis still has a tape with his thesis software on it, but I don’t know if he’s been able to read it.
Hello Everyone
One of polish academic institutions was getting rid of old IT-related stuff
and they were kind enough to give me all Solaris related stuff, including
lots (and i mean lots) of installation CD-ROMS, documentations, manuals,
and some solaris software, mostly compilers and scientific stuff.
If anyone would be interested feel free to contact me and i'd be happy to
share - almost everything is in more than a few copies and I have no
intention of keeping everything for myself.
Currently all of the stuff is located in Warsaw, Poland.
Best regards,
mjb
--
Maciej Jan Broniarz
> [Tex's] oversetting of lines caused by the periodic failure of the
> paragraph-justification algorithms drove me nuts.
Amen. If Tex can't do what it thinks is a good job, it throws a fit
and violates the margin, hoping to force a rewrite. Fortunately,
one can shut off the line-break algorithm and simply fill greedily.
The command to do so is \sloppy--an ironic descriptor of text
that looks better, albeit not up to Tex's discriminating standard.
Further irony: when obliged to write in Tex, I have resorted to
turning \sloppy mode on globally.
Apologies for airing an off-topic pet peeve,
Doug
I happened upon
https://old.gustavobarbieri.com.br/trabalhos-universidade/mc722/lowney92mul…
and I am curious as to whether any of the original Multiflow compilers
survive. I had never heard of them before now, but the fact that they were
licensed to so many influential companies makes me think that there might
be folks on this list who know of its history.
-Henry
ACPI has 4-byte identifiers (guess why!), but I just wondered, writing some
assembly:
is it globl, not global, or glbl, because globl would be a one-word
constant on the PDP-10 (5 7-bit bytes)?
Not entirely off track, netbsd at some point (still does?) ran on the
PDP-10.
