TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

6515 discussions

Re: [TUHS] What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > an altruistic person trying to make things better. They aren't all bad. I would echo that. During my time on the IESG, I'd say the vast majority of the people in the IETF really did want to make things better for everyone. Of course, that statement covers a vast range of subtle variations, from people who had nothing at all to gain personally, and thus really were pushing what they thought was best; through people who did stand to gain, but truly thought that what they were advocating was in everyone's interest; etc. But the people who I felt were deliberately and knowingly putting their own interests before the community's, i.e. recommending something they knew to be harmful because it was good for them - they were very rare. My recollection is now somewhat dim (too much was happening, at too high a pace) of the details of those later days (well, 'later' only in that they were considerably later than the very early days :-), but my sense is that people like that didn't last long in the community; I have the distinct impression that people figured them out, and as an eventual result, they tended to fade from the scene. The IETF culture was not welcoming to that kind of thinking. I dunno, maybe I'm just being naive (and I would certainly welcome correction if I'm wrong), but that's how I saw it. Noel

7 years, 6 months

Misguided standsads (was What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?)

by Doug McIlroy

> Standards committees are not filled with altruistic folks working to > make something great. Not only in big ways, such as to sway the market. An example from Posix is the undefined meaning of malloc(0). As I understand it, just one committee member held out for malloc(0) to be an optional error, thus confounding a harmless corner case with a fatal error. This nit has burdened conscientious programmers ever since, all so one company's easily fixable variant could be grandfathered into compliance. Doug

7 years, 6 months

Early Xenix source code (was: What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?)

by Paul Ruizendaal

> They might actually. Gates isn’t in charge, and there has been a major effort to being Linux compatibility into the Windows 10 kernel. I agree that they might. Once there was strong commercial logic to disown their Unix history; that commercial logic may have reversed in the last decade. > The biggest issue will be the never ending tangle of licenses, if they had other stuff integrated into there. Let’s analyse that bit: - They could pick the Nokia solution, i.e. to simply make an undertaking not to sue and thus avoid taking a position on Unix ownership etc. - It would seem that Xenix 2 (no apparent version 1?) was more or less V7 and for internal use only (lacking a binary redistribution license, as Clem pointed out). Very little chance of 3rd party source code in there, but also of little interest for the historical record. - The first real ports occur with Xenix 2.x in 1981-83. This would appear to have been based on System III with the PDP-11, Z8000, 68000 and 8086 as targets. Considering the size of MS at the time and how busy they were with IBM and DOS I don’t think they would have had much time to do more than a basic port: they contracted out much of the work to SCO, a two man shop at the time. It would seem that MS owned the IP with SCO being a contractor & part-owned subsidiary. - This Altos manual https://web.archive.org/web/20170222131722/http://www.tenox.net/docs/xenix/… actually says that Xenix 2.x was still based on V7 and would seem to be a vanilla port, i.e. unlikely to include other stuff than V7, some 2BSD and of course MS' own stuff. - The next release, Xenix 3.0 in 83-84, still appears to be SysIII based and would remain easy from that perspective. However, given two years of polishing it may have picked up bits and pieces from the outside and the tool chains probably started to include MS’ own compilers, it would be harder to figure out what could be released. However, looking at this highly interesting leaflet http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IBM-Seminar-Proceedi… it would seem that it is still all SysIII, BSD and Microsoft code. In my opinion the real hurdle is finding a retired MS VP who’s interested in knocking on doors and making the case for this public relations move. Paul PS: There is scope for confusion over version numbers. It would seem that MS never directly sold Xenix, only via OEM’s. For example, IBM PC Xenix 1.0 would appear to be the same as MS Xenix 3.0

7 years, 6 months

standard types

by Larry McVoy

I have my own types.h that I carry around that has stuff like typedef unsigned char u8; typedef unsigned short u16; typedef unsigned int u32; typedef unsigned long long u64; typedef signed char i8; typedef signed short i16; typedef signed int i32; typedef signed long long i64; and I wonder why the original Unix authors didn't make something similar? Instead we have uint64_t and I don't see the added value of more chars. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] THANK YOU for flavors! (fwd)

by Dave Horsfall

On Thu, 7 Dec 2017, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: >> On Thu, 7 Dec 2017 11:01:51 +1100 (EST), Dave Horsfall wrote: > > Since we're being pedantic, note that this should be AEDT. EST is > ambiguous, but in general refers to the east coast of the USA. That appears to be how Alpine formats it (I certainly didn't write it)... If it can be overridden then naturally I'm all ears. >>> Serious question: is "FLAVOUR" accepted as an alias, or does the rest >>> of the world have to put up with American spelling? > > Think of it as a keyword. No national origin necessary. Fair enough, I suppose. > We really have better things to think of. Indeed; in the meantime I see you finally fixed your DNS... Yes, I 4xx mail from servers with an improper chain, in the hope that they'll eventually notice (it catches a lot of spammers). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Dash options

by Steffen Nurpmeso

Hello. ||On Wednesday, 29 November 2017 at 20:16:43 +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: ||> Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: ||>> On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 21:51:13 -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote: ||>>> Does anybody know the history of dash options? Were they ||>>> a UNIX thing or did UNIX borrow them from something earlier? ||>> ||>> If you mean specificall the dash, I can't help much. But there were ||>> similar ideas elsewhere. UNIVAC EXEC-8 (for the 1108, late 1960s) had ||>> options that followed the command with a comma, like: ||>> ||>> @RUN,G GOPU,STANDARD,STANDARD ||>> @ADD,PL ASGDMS . ASSIGNIERT DATENBASIS ||> ||> "WEIßT DATENBASIS ZU" or "ZUWEISUNG DATENBASIS" ... ||>> @ASG,A PF. . PF IST PROGRAMM-FILE MIT GOPU ||> ||> "PF IST PROGRAMM-DATEI MIT GOPU" or so. ... I have apologised for this brusque and rude tone in private. Unfortunately Greg Lehey was the one who took up that thread. Puh; he is also right correcting my statements, it should have been "Weist Datenbasis zu" and "PF ist Programmdatei mit GOPU" instead of what i falsely claimed. |The question that should have been asked with mild interest and |very kind should have been "Why has German been used to comment |this code?" at first, i am afraid to realize. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index

by Doug McIlroy

Ralph, > > On unjustified text, fmt (which uses an algorithm purported to be like > > Knuth-Plass) > > I wonder if that accounts for modern, coreutils 8.28-1, fmt's weirdness > that I've seen for a while but never got around to investigating? > > $ yes x | fmt | awk '{print length, $0}' | uniq -c | sed 5q You threw it something of a curve ball--an infinite paragraph. At some point I suppose it chokes, and tries its best to make a semiparagraph of equal-length lines. (Since the real paragraph is not yet complete, it would be wrong to make the last line of the semiparagraph short.) Equilibrating apparently led to the split between 69- and 71-letter lines. Whether the alternation of 11 of one and 16 of the other is an infinite pattern or a subpattern is not clear. It could be part of a continued-fraction approximation, related to the staircse appearance of a bitmap "straight line". Doug

7 years, 6 months

What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by Rudi Blom

Regarding Theodore Bashkow I found a reference in this article http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.53.880&rep=rep1&ty… "[Jain 90a], N. Jain, M. Schwartz and T. R. Bashkov, "Transport Protocol Processing at GBPS Rates.", Computer Communications Review, Vol. 20 (4), 1990, pp. 188-199." No idea if this 'bashkov' is the 'bashkow' in the 'what's missing' discussion. Cheers, rudi

7 years, 6 months

What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by Warren Toomey

All, it's time to nudge the conversation away from debugging 2017 OOM issues and the pre-UNIX history of the Arpanet. We've been able to recover quite a deal of UNIX artifacts in the past two decades, but what artifacts (in your opinion) are still out there that we should try and unearth? Remember that the 50th anniversary is coming up in 2019. Here's my list: - more PDP-7 source code: the shell, the rest of the utilities - more 1st Edition source code: the rest of the utilities - ditto the missing bits of 3rd, 4th and 5th Editions - the Phil Foglio artwork that became a Usenix t-shirt (Armando, any ideas?) - more details on who was Ted Bashkow, and the story behind his (+ others?) analysis of the 1st Edition kernel at http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v1/PreliminaryUni… - a firm date on the day that Ken added pipes to the kernel :) What else should be we looking for? What physical artifacts (drawings, artwork etc.) have we missed that should be sought after? Cheers, Warren

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem

by Doug McIlroy

> Was this [v7 addenda] put out by the Labs? It is definitely Research code from the Labs. How it

7 years, 6 months

V10 spell vs. spell.old?

by Aharon Robbins

Hi. What's the difference between spell.old and spell in the V10 sources? I'm guessing spell.old is the original version for the small-address-space PDP-11 and that plain spell takes better advantage of the roomier vax... Thanks, Arnold

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] shell PS1/PS2 which survive cut-paste

by Paul Ruizendaal

>> The choice of "# " and "> " interests me. Because roots prompt of >> "hash" has a side effect of making a cut-paste over it a comment in >> most shells. > > "#" as the root prompt predates # as the comment in the Bourne shell, > not to mention predating copy/paste entirely. (My understanding is that > the do-nothing command, ":" was used for comments. Talk about minimalist!) > > Same point for ">", since copy/paste didn't exist in the late 70s when > Bourne was doing the shell, it wasn't an issue. As early as V5 the (thompson) shell prompts were “#” and “%”, and “:” for a label. As the goto command exists in V4 (there is a man page for it), I would assume that those characters were used in V4 as well. So it would seem to go back to 1974. In the V7 (bourne) shell the default non-root prompt is “$”. Goto is dropped at this point. Don’t know when or where “>” was first used on Unix as a prompt character (on my boxes it still is “$”). Paul

7 years, 6 months

What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by Paul Ruizendaal

> We've been able to recover quite a deal of UNIX artifacts in the past two > decades, but what artifacts (in your opinion) are still out there that > we should try and unearth? Remember that the 50th anniversary is coming up > in 2019. I’d be interested in anything on Spider/Datakit networking in V4-V7. (at them moment the trail starts at V8, with just a few hints in earlier source materials, and the bits that Noel found). My thinking is that there were two main lines of early networking development on Unix (and I realise that this gross simplification excludes many other worthy projects): 1. The “sockets” lineage from UoI NCP Unix -> BBN NCP Unix -> BBN TCP Unix -> 4.1a BSD -> 4.2 BSD 2. The “device” lineage from Spider -> Datakit -> UUCP -> streams -> STREAMS In the first lineage there is much material available, in the second very little. This is probably because Datakit was AT&T confidential at the time.

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> asks on Wed, 6 Dec 2017 08:21:13 +1000: >> - more details on who was Ted Bashkow, and the story behind his (+ others?) I found a short obituary at http://engineering.columbia.edu/web/newsletter/spring_2010/memoriam which is, in full: >> ... >> Theodore R. Bashkow Dr. Theodore R. Bashkow, professor emeritus of >> electricial engineering and computer science, died Dec. 23, 2009, at >> his home in Katonah, N.Y. See PDF version >> >> He was born in St. Louis, Mo., and attended Washington University, >> where he received his BS degree in mechanical engineering. He went on >> to receive his master’s and doctorate degrees at Stanford >> University. He served in the U.S. Air Force as a first lieutenant >> during World War II from 1943 to 1945. >> >> While in the Air Force, he served as maintenance officer and helped to >> stage the Enola Gay. In the 1950s, while at Bell Labs, Professor >> Bashkow became well known for his development of a new method for >> analyzing linear electrical networks, Professor Bashkow’s A matrix. He >> also became involved with digital computers. He joined the faculty of >> the Columbia Electrical Engineering Department in 1958 and helped >> transform the Electrical Engineering Department into the Department of >> Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. >> >> When, in 1979, this department was divided into the Electrical >> Engineering and Computer Science departments, Bashkow became one of >> the founding faculty members of Computer Science. He taught courses in >> digital logic, computer organization, and computer programming. He did >> research on parallel processing. In collaboration with Herbert >> Sullivan, he pioneered a new approach to that subject through the >> development of CHoPP, Columbia Homogeneous Parallel Processor, a >> large-scale, homogeneous, fully distributed parallel machine. A number >> of Columbia graduate students and a junior faculty member, David >> Klappholz, were also involved at various stages. >> >> In 1980, the Computer Science Department instituted an annual award in >> his honor, the Theodore R. Bashkow Award. Among his many affiliations, >> Professor Bashkow was an active member of IEEE, ACM, and Sigma Xi >> organizations. >> ... He is apparently not in Wikipedia. I then searched our local bibliography archives and found this publication-title summary (Bashkow is an uncommon name, so I didn't attempt to disambiguate the reported articles): MariaDB [bibtex]> select filename, label, substr(title,1,80) from bibtab where (author like '%Bashkow%') order by year, filename; +-------------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | filename | label | substr(title,1,80) | +-------------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | jacm.bib | Bashkow:1958:CPR | A ``Curve Plotting'' Routine for the Inverse Laplace Transform of Rational Funct | | ieeetranscomput.bib | Bashkow:1963:RDA | R63-106 The D 825 Automatic Operating and Scheduling Program | | ieeetranscomput.bib | Bashkow:1963:C | Contributors | | ieeetranscomput.bib | Bashkow:1963:PSD | A Programming System for Detection and Diagnosis of Machine Malfunctions | | ieeetranscomput.bib | Bashkow:1964:SCA | A Sequential Circuit for Algebraic Statement Translation | | fortran1.bib | Bashkow:1967:SDF | System Design of a FORTRAN Machine | | ieeetranscomput.bib | Bashkow:1967:SDF | System Design of a FORTRAN Machine | | ieeetranscomput1970.bib | Bashkow:1971:BSS | B71-6 System Structure in Data, Programs, and Computers | | ieeetranscomput1970.bib | Bashkow:1971:BIC | B71-2 Introduction to Computer Organization | | ieeetranscomput1970.bib | Bashkow:1973:CRO | Comment on Review of Operating Systems Survey | | ovr.bib | Sullivan77b | A Large Scale, Homogeneous, Fully Distributed Parallel Machine | | ovr.bib | Sullivan77a | A Large Scale Homogeneous Fully Distributed Parallel Machine | | sigarch.bib | Sullivan:1977:LSHb | A Large Scale, Homogenous, Fully Distributed Parallel Machine, II | | sigarch.bib | Sullivan:1977:LSHa | A large scale, homogeneous, fully distributed parallel machine, I | | ieeetranscomput1980.bib | Ghafoor:1989:BFT | Bisectional Fault-Tolerant Communication Architecture for Supercomputer Systems | | super.bib | Ghafoor:1989:BFT | Bisectional Fault-Tolerant Communication Architecture for Supercomputer Systems | | ieeetranscomput1990.bib | Ghafoor:1991:SOG | A study of odd graphs as fault-tolerant interconnection networks | +-------------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 17 rows in set (2.67 sec) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jon Forrest > LBL has never been part of UC Berkeley. It's (always?) been a > Department of Energy laboratory managed by the Univ. Actually, I think if you go back far enough (1930's), it was part of UCB, back when Lawrence first started it. And of course the DoE didn't exist until 1977, so during the early ARPANET era if would have been under the AEC, and then I assume the Energy Research and Development Administration after 1974 (I assume it didn't go with the NRC when the AEC was split up). Noel

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by Paul Ruizendaal

This page: http://www2.lbl.gov/Publications/75th/files/exhibit.html mentions 3 links between LBL and Arpanet: - In 1974, the Lab’s CDC 6600 became the first online supercomputer when it was connected to ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor. - In 1986, when the Internet was on the verge of collapse from congestion, a Berkeley Lab researcher, Van Jacobson, co-developed the congestion control algorithms that allowed the Internet to keep growing. - In 1995, Jacobson and Steven McCanne developed MBone, the first successful software for multiparty audio and video conferencing over the Internet.

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by Paul Ruizendaal

I don’t think anybody was thinking you wilfully misrepresented things, it is always interesting to hear about strands of history that might have been missed earlier. It would be helpful to better understand the time period, people involved and the scope of work. I’m a bit confused as to what time period you are referring to: I think you are referring to the initial development of Arpanet, i.e. the second half of the sixties. Is that correct? There is a page here with some info on events in that period and it may have missed some interesting development work done at LBL: https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_roberts.htm Paul > > Message: 7 > Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2017 19:46:21 -0800 > From: Deborah Scherrer <dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu> > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Subject: Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes > Message-ID: <8254fc85-12e6-4730-8f14-faf060ad6a70(a)solar.stanford.edu> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed > > Yes, Van Jacobson was involved. Great guy. So sorry you feel the need > to think I am lying. Why would I make up this stuff? I was a > teeny tiny piece of it. Doesn't affect my career one way or other. I > don't care what you believe, but this really did happen. > > D

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Deborah Scherrer > I don't know about the historical record. But everything I said is true, > based on my own personal experience. ... I was there, this happened. If > people didn't write it down, I don't know why. FWIW, I was actually at many of those meetings. (You can find my name in a lot of those Meeting Notes.) Nobody from LBL, or UCB in general, was involved - and the Meeting Notes (which, you will note, are quite detailed) indicate the same thing. (Later on, of course, Van Jacobson of LBL did some imporant work on TCP congestion control, but that was in '87 or so - I can't instantly lay my hands on my copy of Van's famous e-mail, to get a more exact date - some years after the full-scale deployment of TCP/IP in January, 1983.) > Why would I misrepresent? Perhaps you are conflating several different things in your memory? Human memory is very fallible, which is why historians prefer contemporary documents (and even those sometimes have errors). Here: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/nontech/tmlotus.html is a mildly amusing example (from a completely different arena) of all that. Noel

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Deborah Scherrer <dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu> > A lot of the TCP/IP development was done at the Lab. I think this is incorrect. The "Birth of the Internet" plaque: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/history/BirthInternetL.jpg mentions a number of organizations, but not UCB. Also, if you look at early TCP/IP Meeting Notes, which list all the meeting attendees, e.g.: http://www.postel.org/ien/txt/ien3.txt http://www.postel.org/ien/txt/ien121.txt http://www.postel.org/ien/txt/ien134.txt http://www.postel.org/ien/txt/ien121.txt http://www.postel.org/ien/txt/ien160.txt http://www.postel.org/ien/txt/ien175.txt (plus a bunch more only available in PDF form here: http://www.postel.org/ien/pdf which I couldn't be bothered to look at, since they are huge scans which take a while to download - see the IEN Index for the numbers) you won't find anyone from UCB listed in any of them. Berkeley did produce a now-common _implementation_ of TCP/IP, it's true, but it had nothing to do with the "development" of TCP/IP. Noel

7 years, 6 months

signals and blocked in I/O

by Larry McVoy

Does anyone remember the reason that processes blocked in I/O don't catch signals? When did that become a thing, was that part of the original design or did that happen in BSD? I'm asking because I'm banging on FreeBSD and I can wedge it hard, to the point that it won't recover, by just beating on tons of memory. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Deborah Scherrer > the initial research on the arpanet was done at Lawrence Berkeley Lab I was interested to find out more about this: I looked in Hafner, "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" (the popular, but well-researched, book on the ARPANET) but couldn't find 'Lawrence Berkeley' or 'LBL' in the index (although it did have Lawrence Livermore); there were a couple of 'Californa, University of (at Berkeley' listings, but none covered this. In Abbate, "Inventing the Internet" (the first half of which covers the ARPANET), nothing under any of 'Lawrence Berkeley', 'LBL', 'Berkeley' or 'California'. In Norberg/O'Neill, "Transforming Computer Technology" (the standard ARPA history, which has extensive coverage of the ARPANET project), there was one entry for 'Californa, University (Berkeley)', which might be about the work you refer to: "IPTO issued a contract for a 'network' project at the Berkeley campus of the University of California ... because of the presence at Berkeley of specialists in programming languages and heuristic programming". But there's nothing about what was produced. Is there anything you can point me at that provides more detail? Thanks! Noel

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> SRI, UCSD, UCLA, Utah: Ooops, typo: UCS_B_. Noel

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall > The ARPAnet reached four nodes on this day in 1969 (anyone know which?) SRI, UCSD, UCLA, Utah: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html All West Coast, plus Utah. Next was BBN; if you look at the IMP numbers, in HOSTS.TXT, they were assigned in order of installation. > at least one "history" site reckoned the third node was connected in > 1977 ... Well, I can believe that perhaps there were only three left by > then... No: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/arpalog.html 1977 was not too many years before the peak in size (with the MILNET split coming in October, 1983). Per: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/arpanet.html "Prior to the split, in 1983, there were 113 IMPs in the ARPANET; after the ARPANET/MILNET split, the MILNET consisted of 65 nodes, leaving the ARPANET with 68 nodes." Noel

7 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] RIP J.F.Ossanna

by Larry McVoy

On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 08:00:55PM +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > |On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 07:06:51PM -0500, Ron Natalie wrote: > |> 1977 marks my entry into the world of UNIX. I've always stated there was > |> only one person who truly understood nroff and he was dead. > |> I mourn the fact that of all the UNIX greats I've met, I missed out on > |> Ossanna. > > |I think one could argue that James Clark has a pretty good handle on > |roff (having written the GNU version of nroff/troff/tbl/eqn/pic etc). > > And Werner Lemberg, who carried the torch for the last almost two > decades. He brought in some really great improvements, like > arguments for strings, which allows to write pretty much TeX like > a.k.a. inline if you want to (as in "this is \*[I talic] text"). Yep. James exited stage left and Werner stepped in. I mean no disrespect to anyone, I was just saying that James has a really good handle on roff, he redid it all. I admire him for doing so (even though I curse the fact that he did it in C++).

7 years, 6 months

Unix on PDP8?

by Will Senn

All, Was Unix ever ported to a PDP8, or any other 12 bit environment, for that matter? If not, why not? My understanding, such as it is, is that Unix was created on the PDP7 - btw, thank you very much, Ken Thompson, you definitely changed my world :), which is an 18bit machine, and that it soon found its first real home on the 16 bit PDP11 series of machines (an 11/20), and from there, ever upward or at least ever onward. I'm curious about it for historical reasons, of course, but also because I've been messing around in the PDP8 emulation world and enjoying the excursion into simplified ISA and memory architectures. -will

7 years, 6 months

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TUHS