TUHS

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6514 discussions

PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

There is a provocative article published today in the lastest issue of Communications of the ACM: David Chisnall C is not a low-level language Comm ACM 61(7) 44--48 July 2018 https://doi.org/10.1145/3209212 Because C is the implementation language of choice for a substantial part of the UNIX world, it seems useful to announce the new article to TUHS list members. David Chisnall discusses the PDP-11 legacy, the design of C, and the massive parallelism available in modern processors that is not so easy to exploit in C, particularly, portable C. He also observes: >> ... >> A processor designed purely for speed, not for a compromise between >> speed and C support, would likely support large numbers of threads, >> have wide vector units, and have a much simpler memory model. Running >> C code on such a system would be problematic, so, given the large >> amount of legacy C code in the world, it would not likely be a >> commercial success. >> ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6 years, 11 months

ATT Hardware

by ron＠ronnatalie.com

The recent reference to the Dennis's comments on ATT chip production had me feeling nostalgic to the 3B line of computers. In the late 80's I was in charge of all the UNIX systems (among other things) at the state university system in New Jersey. As a result we got a lot of this hardware gifted to us. The 3B5 and 3B2s were pretty doggy compared with the stuff on the market then. The best thing I could say about the 3B5 is that it stood up well to having many gallons of water dumped on it (that's another story, Rutgers had the computer center under a seven story building and it still had a leaky roof). The 3B20 was another thing. It was a work of telephone company art. You knew this when it came to power it down where you turned a knob inside the rack and held a button down until it clicked off. This is pretty akin to how you'd do things on classic phone equipment (for instance, the same procedure is used to loopback the old 303 "broadband" 50K modems that the Arpanet/Milnet was built out of). Of course, the 3B20 was built as phone equipment. It just got sort of "recycled" as a GP computer.

6 years, 11 months

Faster cpus at any cost

by Steve Simon

I know this is a dangerous game to play, but what of the future? I am intrigued by the idea of true optical computers, perhaps the $10M super-computer will return? GPUs have definitely taken over in some areas - even where SIMD would not seem a good fit. My previous employer does motion estimation of realtime video and has moved from custom electronics and FPGAs to using off the shelf GPUs in PCs. -Steve

6 years, 11 months

C Threading

by ron＠ronnatalie.com

Thread local storage and starting threads up is largely a rather inconsequential implementation detail. When it comes down to actual parallel programming, of which I have done more than a little, the big thing is thread synchronization. It's rather hardware dependent. You can pretty much entirely wipe out any parallism gains with a synchronization call that results in a context switch or even a serious cache impact. On one side you have machines like the Denelcor HEP where every memory word had a pair of semaphores on it and the instructions could stall the process while waiting for them and the hardware would schedule the other threads. On the other hand you have your x86, which you can do a few clever things with some atomic operations and inlined assembler but a lot of the "standard" (boost, pthread, etc...) synchs will kill you.

6 years, 11 months

please ignore this message

by Doug McIlroy

This tests a guess about anomalous behavior of the mailing-list digest. I apologize for inflicting it on everybody. Doug

6 years, 11 months

Any Definitive Unix Celebrations Next Year?

by Warren Toomey

All, I'm planning to come to the Usenix ATC next year on July 10-12 on the assumption that there will be some Unix 50th celebration there. Does anybody know of other events in the date range June 28 to July 9, as those are the dates I'll be able to get off work. And/or, if I'm in the U.S on these dates, does anybody want to catch up? Just trying to build an itinerary for this time next year. Thanks, Warren

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> But don't forget Clarke's Third Law! Ooops. Read my Web search results wrong. (Should have taken the time to click through, sigh.) Meant 'Clarke's First Law'. Noel

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > This is a really poor place for a younger person to come in and make > loud points, that is frowned upon. It's a fantastic place for a younger > person to come in and learn. But don't forget Clarke's Third Law! And maybe you can remember what it's like when you're young... :-) But Ted does have a point. 'Distributed' != 'parallel'. Noel

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > the MTA part is not there That system was using the MMDF MTA: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/mmdf written by David Crocker while he was at UDel (under Farber). Noel

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] core

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

The discussion of the last few days about the Colossus is getting somewhat off-topic for Unix heritage and history, but perhaps this list of titles (truncated to 80 characters) and locations may be of interest to some TUHS list readers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Papers and book chapters about the Colossus at Bletchley Park Journal- and subject specific Bibliography files are found at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/NAME.bib and author-specific ones under http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/N/ where N is the first letter of the bibliography filename. The first line in each group contains the bibliography filename, and the citation label of the cited publication. DOIs are supplied whenever they are available. Paragraphs are sorted by filename. adabooks.bib Randell:1976:C The COLOSSUS annhistcomput.bib Good:1979:EWC Early Work on Computers at Bletchley https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1979.10011 annhistcomput.bib deLeeuw:2007:HIS Tunny and Colossus: breaking the Lorenz Schl{\"u}sselzusatz traffic https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978044451608450016X babbage-charles.bib Randell:1976:C The COLOSSUS cacm2010.bib Anderson:2013:MNF Max Newman: forgotten man of early British computing https://doi.org/10.1145/2447976.2447986 computer1990.bib Anonymous:1996:UWI Update: WW II Colossus computer is restored to operation cryptography.bib Good:1979:EWC Early Work on Computers at Bletchley cryptography1990.bib Anonymous:1997:CBP The Colossus of Bletchley Park, IEEE Rev., vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 55--59 [Book Revi https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1997.560758 cryptography2000.bib Rojas:2000:FCH The first computers: history and architectures cryptography2010.bib Copeland:2010:CBG Colossus: Breaking the German `Tunny' Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated His cryptologia.bib Michie:2002:CBW Colossus and the Breaking of the Wartime ``Fish'' Codes debroglie-louis.bib Homberger:1970:CMN The Cambridge mind: ninety years of the booktitle Cambridge Review, 1879--1969 dijkstra-edsger-w.bib Randell:1980:C The COLOSSUS dyson-freeman-j.bib Brockman:2015:WTA What to think about machines that think: today's leading thinkers on the age of fparith.bib Randell:1977:CGC Colossus: Godfather of the Computer ieeeannhistcomput.bib Anonymous:1997:CBP The Colossus of Bletchley Park, IEEE Rev., vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 55--59 [Book Revi https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1997.560758 lncs1997b.bib Carter:1997:BLC The Breaking of the Lorenz Cipher: An Introduction to the Theory behind the Oper lncs2000.bib Sale:2000:CGL Colossus and the German Lorenz Cipher --- Code Breaking in WW II master.bib Randell:1977:CGC Colossus: Godfather of the Computer mathcw.bib Randell:1982:ODC The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61812-3 rutherford-ernest.bib Homberger:1970:CMN The Cambridge mind: ninety years of the booktitle Cambridge Review, 1879--1969 rutherfordj.bib Copeland:2010:CBG Colossus: Breaking the German `Tunny' Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated His sigcse1990.bib Plimmer:1998:MIW Machines invented for WW II code breaking https://doi.org/10.1145/306286.306309 turing-alan-mathison.bib Randell:1976:C The COLOSSUS von-neumann-john.bib Randell:1982:ODC The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

by Johnny Billquist

On 2018-06-22 20:01, Clem Cole<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > One of the other BI people, who's name now escapes me, although I can see > his face in my mind, maybe I'll think of it later), would go on to do the > PCI for Alpha a couple of years later. As I said, DEC did manage to get > that one public, after the BI was made private as Erik points out. Clem, I think I saw you say something similar in an earlier post. To me it sounds as if you are saying that DEC did/designed PCI. Are you sure about that? As far as I know, PCI was designed and created by Intel, and the first users were just plain PC machines. Alpha did eventually also get PCI, but it was not where it started, and DEC had no control at all about PCI being public. Might you have been thinking of Turbobus, Futurebus, or some other thing that DEC did? Or do you have some more information about DEC being the creator of PCI? Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

6 years, 11 months

Masscomp Engineering Mailing List, Custom Products Engineering and the Manatee

by Clem Cole

Semi-Unix History.... Dave's "this date in history stuff" has reminded me of a great Masscomp story that really needs to be written down and not lost to Unix history. I'm hoping Warren can forgive me a little as the Unix history is the Masscomp part and people involved; but I think it is fun and should be more widely known. Some of you may know who Jack Burness is (and even be part of his humor mailing list - which is one of the most amazing who-is-who of the industry). Jack is probably most infamous for his being the author of RT-11 Moonlander <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre)>. Some of his stunts over his career are legends, as our old friend and colleague Mike Leibensperger once said, I want to be like Jack, when he grows up (at ~70, I can assure you that he still has not). After Jack left DEC, he became the original one man Masscomp Graphics group. While the year really does not matter, at some point, Jack had been given a tear off desk calendar as a Christmas present from his girfriend called the 'Sex Fact of the Day Calendar.' Like Dave's daily reminders to us on TUHS, every morning he typed in the one line factiod and passed it on to the Masscomp Engineering Mailing List. This is important because the VCs had just given us a straight laced ex-IBM guy as a president named Gus Klein (aka Mr. Potatohead), who did not read email, and of course did not read the engineering mailing list. He wants to workspace to be 'professional' and look like his idea of an 'office' and his 'memos' were amazing as you can imagine. The other important note to the story is that the late Roger Gourd, our direct boss, had just created Masscomp's new Custom Product Engineering (CPE) group; to be the analog to DEC's CSS. When Roger had left DEC for Gould he had of course, moved to south Florida where they were based and become quite a fisherman and protector of natural resources. When he was recruited to come move back to New England to take on the reins in development at Masscomp be brought some of south Florida back with him. Well from Jack we had learn two important facts and from those facts realized that mediterranean fisherman were liars: at some time in March it was reported that fisherman in the med that caught a female manatee in their nets and brought it into their boat considered it bad luck unless they sodomized them because the manatee were thought to be mermaids; and some time in May we learned that the Roman Catholic Church would excommunicate any fisherman if it was discovered that said fisherman had caught a manatee and that manatee had been used as a sex toy. Upon learning this interesting catch-22, Gourd immediately sponsors the "Save the Manatee Society in South Florida" and makes it the Group Mascot for CPE. Well, manatees start popping up all over engineering. Mr. Potatohead is clueless of the significance of course. At his memorial I gave Roger's widow a stuffed manatee I still had from my desk from those days, she knew and laughed and laughed knowing that Roger would have approved. BTW: I do however, still keep 'Darth Tater, on my desk at Intel'.

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > I may have the the original Rand MH release somewhere. There's this: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/mh Not sure how modified from the formal release this is, it may be pretty much the original (it's certainly quite old - pre-TCP/IP). Noel

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> On 06/23/2018 04:38 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > Others like DNS are pretty perfect and scale fantastic. It's perhaps worth noting that today's DNS is somewhat different from the original; some fairly substantial changes were made early on (although maybe it was just in the security, I don't quite recall). (The details escape me at this point, but at one point I did a detailed study of DNS, and DNS security, for writing the security architecture document for the resolution system in LISP - the networking one, not the language.) Noel

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

by Norman Wilson

Paul Winalski: That was the VAXstation-11/RC. === Yep, that's the name. My first batch of discarded MicroVAX IIs were the original backbone routers for a large university campus, installed ca. 1990. That backbone ran over serial-line connections, at 56Kbps, which was quite impressive for the day given the physical distances involved. Either they had a bunch of Qbus backplanes lying around, or someone computed that the cost of an 11/RC plus a backplane was appreciably less than a system with an unobstructed backplane. In any case, they swapped most of the backplanes themselves. The one I got that still had the glue in was an anomaly; maybe it was a spare chassis. The MicroVAX routers ran Ultrix, and some of them had uptimes of five years when they were finally shut down to be discarded. All the hardware I rescued tested out fine, and some of it is still running happily in my basement. I've had a few disk failures over the years, and I think lost one power supply back around Y2K and maybe had a DZV11 fail, but that's it. We don't make hardware like that any more. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

by Norman Wilson

Paul Winalski: Rather than design a new CPU, they just put NOPs in the Skipjack microcode to slow it down. The official code name for this machine was Flounder, but within DEC engineering we called it "Wimpjack". Customers could buy a field upgrade for Flounder microcode that restored it to Skipjack performance levels. ==== As I remember it, once it came out that the upgrade merely removed gratuitous nops, customers raised sufficient fuss that the denopped microcode was made available for free (perhaps only to those with service contracts) and Flounder (VAX 8500) was no longer sold. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

by norman＠oclsc.org

Ron Minnich: Jon Hall used to love telling the story of the VAX backplane with the glue in the board slots, which clever customers managed to damage and have repaired with a non-glued-up backplane. ===== It wasn't exactly a VAX backplane; it was a QBus backplane, though I don't know whether this marketing-induced castration was performed on anywhere but on the backplaces of certain MicroVAX models. I think one of my saved-from-the-dumpster BA23s had one of those backplanes. I just declared it to be a source of spare parts, other than backplanes. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

by norman＠oclsc.org

Grant Taylor: Why do you have to give up one tool to start using a different tool? ==== I hereby declare this part of the conversation very much on-topic for TUHS. The question of what tools should exist, what should do what, whether to make a new tool or add something to an existing one, is a continuing thread in the history of UNIX and its use and abuse. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Request: Unix Photos, scanned ephemera, anecdotes, stories, interviews

by Peter Adams

Over the last few years I’ve photographed many of the people listed on the wiki. You can see the photos here: http://facesofopensource.com -P- -- Peter Adams http://www.peteradamsphoto.com > On Jun 22, 2018, at 7:32 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote: > > All, I've had a fair bit of positive feedback for my TUHS work. In reality > I'm just the facilitator, collecting the stuff that you send me and keeping > the mailing list going. > > I think we've captured nearly all we can of the 1970s Unix in terms of > software. After that it becomes commercial, but I am building up the > "Hidden Unix" archive to hold that. Just wish I could open that up ... > > What we haven't done a good job yet is to collect other things: photos, > stories, anecdotes, scanned ephemera. > > Photos & scanned things: I'm very happy to collect these, but does anybody > know of an existing place that accepts (and makes available online) photos > and scanned ephemera? They are a bit out of scope for bitsavers as far as > I can tell, but I'm happy to be corrected. Al? Other comments here? > > Stories & anecdotes: definitely type them in & e-mail them in and/or e-mail > them to me if you want me just to preserve them. There is the Unix wiki I > started here: https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=start, but maybe there is > already a better place. Gunkies? > > Interviews: Sometimes it's easier to glean stories & knowledge with interviews. > I've never tried this but perhaps it's time. Who is up to have an audio > interview? I'll worry about the technical details eventually, but is there > interest? > > All of the above would slot in with the upcoming 50th anniversary. If you > do have photos, bits of paper, stories to tell etc., then let's try to > preserve them so that they are not lost. > > Cheers all, Warren >

6 years, 11 months

(Meta) mail about mail about mail ...

by Warren Toomey

I think it might be time for "Peter Out" to arrive here :-) Cheers, Warren

6 years, 11 months

Request: Unix Photos, scanned ephemera, anecdotes, stories, interviews

by Warren Toomey

All, I've had a fair bit of positive feedback for my TUHS work. In reality I'm just the facilitator, collecting the stuff that you send me and keeping the mailing list going. I think we've captured nearly all we can of the 1970s Unix in terms of software. After that it becomes commercial, but I am building up the "Hidden Unix" archive to hold that. Just wish I could open that up ... What we haven't done a good job yet is to collect other things: photos, stories, anecdotes, scanned ephemera. Photos & scanned things: I'm very happy to collect these, but does anybody know of an existing place that accepts (and makes available online) photos and scanned ephemera? They are a bit out of scope for bitsavers as far as I can tell, but I'm happy to be corrected. Al? Other comments here? Stories & anecdotes: definitely type them in & e-mail them in and/or e-mail them to me if you want me just to preserve them. There is the Unix wiki I started here: https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=start, but maybe there is already a better place. Gunkies? Interviews: Sometimes it's easier to glean stories & knowledge with interviews. I've never tried this but perhaps it's time. Who is up to have an audio interview? I'll worry about the technical details eventually, but is there interest? All of the above would slot in with the upcoming 50th anniversary. If you do have photos, bits of paper, stories to tell etc., then let's try to preserve them so that they are not lost. Cheers all, Warren

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] core

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "John P. Linderman" > 4 bucks a bit! When IBM went to license the core patent(s?) from MIT, they offered MIT a choice of a large lump sump (the number US$20M sticks in my mind), or US$.01 a bit. The negotiators from MIT took the lump sum. When I first heard this story, I thought it was corrupt folklore, but I later found it in one of the IBM histories. This story repets itself over and over again, though: one of the Watson's saying there was a probably market for <single-digit> of computers; Ken Olsen saying people wouldn't want computers in their homes; etc, etc. Noel

6 years, 11 months

Slight TUHS Mailing List Policy Change

by Warren Toomey

[ A few list members asked me to re-post this out of the existing thread, so that it is more prominent. ] All, based on the comments we've had in the past day or so, it seems that you are mostly happy to stick with one list, and to tolerate a bit of off-topic material. I'm also aware that this list is approaching its own quarter-century anniversary and it has become an important historical record. So feel free to drift away from Unix now and then. But please self-regulate: if you (as an individual) think the S/N ratio is dropping, please ask the list to improve it. As always, I'll insert my own nudges and requests based on my own eclectic set of rules :-) Cheers all, Warren

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

by Doug McIlroy

Because some "off-topic" discussions wander into estoterica that's beyond me, I superficially thought an off-topic siding would be a good thing for some trains of thought. But then I wondered, if I ignore the siding how will I hear of new hear about new topics that get initiated there? I could miss good stuff. So I'm quite happy with the current arrangement where occasionally ever-patient Warren gives a nudge. (I'm a digest reader. If every posting came as a distinct message, I might feel otherwise.) Doug

6 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Erik E. Fair" > ordered a VAX-8810 to replace two 11/780s on the promise from DEC that > all our UniBus and MASSbus peripherals would still work ... which we > knew (from others on the Internet who'd and tried reported their > experiences) to be a lie. Just out of curiousity, why'd you all order something you knew wouldn't work? So you could get a better deal out of DEC for whatever you ordered instead, later, as they tried to make it up to you all for trying to sell you something broken? Noel

6 years, 11 months

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