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6501 discussions

Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

by norman＠oclsc.org

Steve Jenkin: I've never heard of a Computer Science or Software Engineering program that included a `case study' component, especially for Software Development & Projects. [...] Creating Unix V6, because it profoundly changed computing & development, would seem an obvious Case Study for many aspects of Software, Coding and Projects. ==== How about the course for which John Lions wrote his famous exegesis of the 6/e kernel? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

10 months, 3 weeks

"X Window System At 40"

by Alexis

David Rosenthal reflects on his involvement with the development of the X Window System: > Although most of my time was spent developing NeWS, I rapidly > ported X version 10 to the Sun/1, likely the second port to > non-DEC hardware. It worked, but I had to kludge several areas > that depended on DEC-specific hardware. The worst was the > completely DEC-specific keyboard support. > > Because it was clear that a major redesign of X was needed to > make it portable and in particular to make it work well on Sun > hardware, Gosling and I worked with the teams at DEC SRC and WRL > on the design of X version 11. Gosling provided significant > input on the imaging model, and I designed the keyboard > support. As the implementation evolved I maintained the Sun port > and did a lot of testing and bug fixing. All of which led to my > trip to Boston to pull all-nighters at MIT finalizing the > release. > > My involvement continued after the first release. I was the > editor and main author of the X Inter-Client Communications > Conventions Manual (ICCCM) that forms Part III of Robert > Scheifler and Jim Gettys' X Window System. -- https://blog.dshr.org/2024/07/x-window-system-at-40.html Alexis.

10 months, 3 weeks

Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

by Clem Cole

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-museum-logs-off-for… These folks hosted the UNIX 50th Celebration and had a physical PDP-7 that was used to bring up UNIX V0 (after first getting it running on SIMH). That later was not easy because the original PDP-7s (like the one Ken had access to) did not have disk storage. BTL had paid DEC's Custom Special Systems (CSS) to splice a Burrough's disk that DEC was selling using for the 15 and later the PDP-9. It started with splicing reverse engineering that code to build a simulation of that disk into the simh, so we could ensure that UNIX ran—finally, modeling that HW with a custom microprocessor-based board with an SD card with a functional replica of a PDP-7 I/O interface on one side obeying the device registers and operations that UNIX expected to see. The LCM-L folks were incredibly gracious and generous. I am so sad to see their collection go away. In particular, I hope the PDP-7s and the CDC-6500 find new homes. Clem

10 months, 3 weeks

most direct Unix descendant

by Andrew Lynch

Hi Out of curiosity, what would be considered the most direct descendent of Unix available today? Yes, there are many descendants, but they've all gone down their own evolutionary paths. Is it FreeBSD or NetBSD? Something else? I don't think it would be Minix or Linux because I remember when they came along, and it was well after various Unix versions were around. Does such a thing even exist anymore? I remember using AT&T Unix System V and various BSD variants back in college in the 1980's. System V was the "new thing" back then but was eventually sold and seems to have faded. Maybe it is only available commercially, but it does not seem as prominent as it once was. Any thoughts? Thanks, Andrew Lynch

10 months, 3 weeks

Re: On the term "justification"

by Douglas McIlroy

Oops, my last post ascribed Runoff to the 15th century, "sixty decades" ago. Doug

10 months, 3 weeks

Re: Documenting a set of functions with -man

by Douglas McIlroy

> The lack of a monospaced font is, I suspect, due either to > physical limitations of the C/A/T phototypesetter[1] or fiscal > limitations--no budget in that department to buy photographic > plates for Courier. Since the C/A/T held only four fonts, there was no room for Courier. But when we moved beyond that typesetter, inertia kept the old ways . Finally, in v9, I introduced the fixed-width "literal font", L, in -man and said goodbye to boldface in synopses. By then, though, Research Unix was merely a local branch of the Unix evolutionary tree, so the literal-font gene never spread. Doug

10 months, 3 weeks

The thread about standards is now closed

by Warren Toomey

All, I've decided to bring the ANSI C/POSIX thread to a close. While initially the thread was informative, it's recently become host to comments which are inappropriate and certainly well out of scope for a mailing list about UNIX and its history. If someone wants to resurrect a thread about standards, feel free to use the COFF list. But please, keep the conversation on-topic. Thanks, Warren

10 months, 4 weeks

another OSX 100% less Unix

by ron minnich

I have a directory, t: ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ ls -li total 0 23801442 -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a 23801443 -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b 23801443 -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c note that b and c are the same inode. let's make a cpio. ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -o >../t.cpio a b c ^D 1 block what's in it? ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -ivt < ../t.cpio -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b "c link to b"? wtf? Who thought that was a good idea? because ... ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ touch 'c link to b' ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b and ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -o >../t.cpio a b c c link to b ^D ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -ivt < ../t.cpio -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b so ... it looks like a file is there twice, because somebody thought it was a good idea to confuse a file name and file metadata. And, anyway, it's just as accurate to have it say -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b link to c -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b Right? :-) From the same people who brought you this: ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ bc >>> Somebody needs to get the osx folks a unix manual set :-)

10 months, 4 weeks

Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Aron <aki(a)insinga.com> > Now if only his family would take those wishes of his into account and > tell the lawyers to finish the job. I suspect that was his real mistake; he trusted that his family would do what he wanted (perhaps so that instead of putting the final bow on this, he could pay attention to something else that was more important to him) after he was gone - and they decided not to. My suspicion is that there is something else that is more important to his sister (probably political), and she decided that the pittance she'd get from flushing the LCM would be better put towards her project(s). I've just been re-reading Thucydides' extraordinarily outstanding meditation on the revolution on Corcyra (which is really a meditation on the death of the Greek polei - and is a pre-epitaph on the death of many democracies since), and if my pupposition is correct, it applies to this too I wonder what'll happen to all the less-valuable stuff that was given to the LCM? A PDP-10 will fetch 10K's of $, but a lot of the rest is worth pennies. I hope they don't scrap it for pennies, or throw it in the trash. I'm sure that someone who would ignore her brother's wishes about important pieces of history that meant a lot to him would have no qualms about doing either. Noel

10 months, 4 weeks

ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

by segaloco

Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1. Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead? Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in publishers? In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations. - Matt G.

10 months, 4 weeks

ACM Software System Award to Andrew S. Tanenbaum for MINIX

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

This announcement just arrived on the ACM Bulletins list: >> ... >> Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Vrije Universiteit, receives the ACM Software >> System Award (http://awards.acm.org/software-system) for MINIX, which >> influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple >> generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used >> operating systems, including Linux. >> ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

10 months, 4 weeks

Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

by John S Quarterman

Or like rms claimed Linux as part of GNU, he claimed POSIX and some people believed him. -jsq On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 9:38 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: > > > On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 6:15 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 8:12 AM John S Quarterman <jsqmobile(a)gmail.com> >> wrote: >> > I don't recall rms being involved, certainly not in the name. -jsq >> >> quip: Like childbirth, perhaps the unpleasant memory was simply blocked >> out? >> > > Is it possible that RMS suggested it as maybe an obvious quip to a > committee member who later credited him with that since that conversation > happened before that person heard it from others on the committee? Tricky > to know from this distance in time. > > Warner > > - Dan C. >> >

10 months, 4 weeks

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' • The Register

by Charles H Sauer (he/him)

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/version_256_systemd/ I don't see the boast at https://github.com/systemd/systemd/releases/tag/v256, but ... Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

11 months

Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> <clemc(a)ccc.com> > In particular, I hope the PDP-7s and the CDC-6500 find new homes. Also, their collection of PDP-10's, which is absolutely unrivalled; they had a KA10 and a KI10; also the MIT-MC KL10. Also a Multics front panel; AFAIK, the ony one in the world other than the CHM's. Any idea where it's all being sold? I might enquire about the Multics panel. Noel

11 months

Fwd: [multicians] Dennis Ritchie's 1993 Usenet posting "BTL Leaves Multics"

by Dan Cross

FYI, Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multicians list; DMR's recollections of the end of Multics at BTL. I can't resist asking about the nugget buried in here about Ken writing a small kernel for the 645. Is that in the archives anywhere? - Dan C. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Tom Van Vleck via groups.io <thvv=multicians.org(a)groups.io> Date: Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 10:38 AM Subject: [multicians] Dennis Ritchie's 1993 Usenet posting "BTL Leaves Multics" To: <multicians(a)groups.io> in "alt.os.multics" about Unix, CTSS, Multics, BTL, qed, and mail https://groups.google.com/g/alt.os.multics/c/1iHfrDJkyyE Comments by DMR, me, RMF, PAG, PAK, BSG, PWB, JJL, AE, MAP, EHR, DMW Covers many issues. (I feel like we should save this thread somehow. hard to trust Google any more. the posting ends with a heading of a response by JWG but no content.) _._,_._,_ ________________________________ Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5547) | Reply To Group | Reply To Sender | Mute This Topic | New Topic ________________________________ -- sent via multicians(a)groups.io -- more Multics info at https:://multicians.org/ ________________________________ Your Subscription | Contact Group Owner | Unsubscribe [crossd(a)gmail.com] _._,_._,_

11 months

Thank you all for your civility

by Warren Toomey

All, recently I saw on Bruce Schneier "Cryptogram" blog that he has had to change the moderation policy due to toxic comments: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/new-blog-moderation-policy.h… So I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your civility and respect for others on the TUHS and COFF lists. The recent systemd and make discussions have highlighted significant differences between people's experiences and opinions. Nonetheless, apart from a few pointed comments, the discussions have been polite and informative. These lists have been in use for decades now and, thankfully, I've only had to unsubscribe a handful of people for offensive behaviour. That's a testament to the calibre of people who are on the lists. Cheers and thank you again, Warren P.S. I'm a happy Devuan (non-systemd) user for many years now.

11 months

Re: autotools

by Steve Simon

my personal frustration with autotools was trying to port code to plan9. i wish autotools had an intermediate file format which described the packages requirements, that way i could have written my own backend to create my config.h and makefiles (or mkfiles) in the end i wrote my own tool which crudely parses a directory of C or F77 sourcecode and uses heuristics to create a config.h and a plan9 mkfile, it was named mkmk(1) it was almost _never_ completely correct, but usually got close enough that the files only needed a little manual hacking. it also took great pains to generate mkfiles that looked hand written; if you are going to auto generate files, make them look nice. -Steve

11 months

Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

by Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)

> This is The Way if you really care about portability. Autoconf, > once you get your head around what, why, and when it was created, > makes for nice Makefiles and projects that are easy to include in > the 100 Linux distributions with their own take on packaging the > world. This is outright claptrap and nonsense. In the latter half of the 90s I was responsible for writing installers and generating platform-native packages for about a dozen different commercial UNIX platforms (AIX, Solaris, Irix, HP/UX, OSF, BSD/OS, ...). Each of these package systems was as different as could be from the others. (HP/UX didn't even have one.) That entire process was driven by not very many lines of make recipes, with the assistance of some awk glue that read a template file from which it generated the native packages. And these were not trivial software distributions. We were shipping complex IMAP, X.400 and X.500 servers, along with a couple of MTAs. Our installers didn't just dump the files onto the system and point you at a README; we coded a lot of the site setup into the installers, so the end user mostly just had to edit a single config file to finish up. --lyndon

11 months

Fwd: Anyone have Plexus docs/software squirreled away?

by Al Kossow

FYI, for people like me that care about 80s 68K Unix systemf There is a pretty serious multi-purpose preservation effort that started a few weeks ago around Plexus systems as a result of a series of YouTube videos https://youtu.be/iltZYXg5hZw https://github.com/misterblack1/plexus-p20/

11 months

Be there a "remote diff" utility?

by Dave Horsfall

Every so often I want to compare files on remote machines, but all I can do is to fetch them first (usually into /tmp); I'd like to do something like: rdiff host1:file1 host2:file2 Breathes there such a beast? I see that Penguin/OS has already taken "rdiff" which doesn't seem to do what I want. Think of it as an extension to the Unix philosophy of "Everything looks like a file"... -- Dave

11 months

Re: [COFF] Re: Supervisor mode on ye olde PDP-11

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > 2.11BSD used a mode between kernel and user for the TCP stack to get > more effective address space... Is there a document for 2.11 which explains in detail why they did that? I suspect it's actually a little more complicated than just "more address space". The thing is that PDP-11 Unix had been using overlays in the kernel for quite a while to provide more address space. I forget where they first came in (I suspect there were a number of local hacks, before everyone started using the BSD approach), but by 2.9 BSD they were a standard part of the system. (See: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/src/sys/conf/Ovmak… for some clues about how this works. There is unfortunately no documentation that I know of which explains clearly how it works; if anyone knows of any, can you please let me know? Otherwise you'll have to read the sources.) I can think of two possible reasons they started using supervisor mode: i) There were a limited number of the 2.9-type overlays, and they were not large; trying to support all the networking code with the existing overlay system may have been too hard. ii) I think this one is unlikely, but I'll list it as a possibility. Switching overlays took a certain amount of overhead (since mapping registers had to be re-loaded); if all the networking code ran in supervisor mode, the supervisor mode mapping registers could be loaded with the right thing and just left. Noel

11 months, 1 week

Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Frankly my major complaint with much of the modern world is that when we > ignore the past "There are two kinds of fools. One says, 'This is old, therefore it is good'; the other says, 'This is new, therefore it is better.'" -- Dean Inge, quoted by John Brunner in "The Shockwave Rider". Noel

11 months, 1 week

Diff: The seminal water we swim in

by Douglas McIlroy

> this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what > would become a seminal, and is arguably the single most important, > piece of social software ever created. I'm flattered, but must point out that diff was just one of a sequence of more capable and robust versions of proof(1), which Mike Lesk contributed to Unix v3. It, in turn, copied a program written by Steve Johnson before Unix and general consciousness of software tools. Credit must also go to several people who studied and created algorithms for the "longest common subsequence" problem: Harold Stone (who invented the diff algorithm at a blackboard during a one-day visit to Bell Labs), Dan Hirschberg, Tom Szymanksi, Al Aho, and Jeff Ullman. For a legal case in which I served as an expert witness, I found several examples of diff-type programs developed in the late 1960s specifically for preparing critical editions of ancient documents. However, Steve Johnson's unpublished program from the same era appears to be the first that was inspired as a general tool, and thus as "social software". Doug

11 months, 1 week

Diff: The seminal water we swim in

by Rich Salz

From Mastodon, MHoye posting at https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/112615649865163136: I haven't seen anybody mentioning it or even noticing it, like it's just the water we swim in now, but this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what would become a seminal, and is arguably the single most important, piece of social software ever created. Written by Douglas McIlroy and James Hunt and released with the 5th Edition of Unix this month in 1974: diff. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree. <https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/diff1.c>..

11 months, 1 week

5ESS UNIX RTR Reference Manual - Issue 10 (2001)

by segaloco

Good evening, while I'm still waiting on the full uploads to progress (it's like there's a rule any >100MB upload to archive.org for me has to fail like 5 times before it'll finally go...) I decided to scrape out the UNIX RTR manual from a recent trove of 5ESS materials I received and tossed it up in a separate upload: https://archive.org/details/5ess-switch-unix-rtr-operating-system-reference… This time around I've got Issue 10 from December 2001. The last issue of this particular manual I found on another 5ESS disc is Issue 7 from 1998 which I shared previously (https://ia601200.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=%2F12%2Fitems%2F5e…) The manual is in "DynaText" format on the CD in question, unlike Issue 7 which was already a PDF on its respective CD. I used print-to-PDF to generate the above linked copy. Given that the CD itself is from 2007, this may point to UNIX RTR having no significant user-visible changes from 2001 to 2007 that would've necessitated manual revisions. In any case, I intend to upload bin/cue images of all 7 of the CDs I've received which span from 1999 to 2007, and mostly concern the 5ESS-2000 switch from the administrative and maintenance points of view. Once I get archive.org to choke these files down I also intend to go back around to the discs I've already archived and reupload them as proper bin/cue rips. I was in a hurry the last time around and simply zipped the contents from the discs, but aside from just being good archive practice, I think bin/cue is necessary for the other discs as they seem to have control information in the disc header that is required by the interactive documentation viewers therein. All that to say, the first pass will result in bin/cues which aren't easily readable through archive.org's interface, but I intend to also swing back around on these new discs and provide zips of the contents as well to ensure the archives are both correct (bin/cue) and easily navigable (zip). As always, if you have any such documentation or leads on where any may be awaiting archival, I'm happy to take on the work! - Matt G.

11 months, 2 weeks

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