> From: Clem Cole
> Just like the electric company, needs to deliver electrons at some
> rate/force.
If you want electrons at more than X bazillion per second, you'll have to pay
to have a higher-amperage service. And if you use more electrons, you pay
more. What's your problem with ISPs doing the same?
Noel
> From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
> look at the history, various ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, etc, have done
> stuff like block bittorrent, skype, etc
Bittorrent is a complex situation, some ISPs were ordered by a court to block
it.
As to Skype, I agree ISPs shouldn't block sites - but if you read my message,
I already said that.
> The problem is I paid for the bits. Bits is bits. I paid for a rate,
> that's what they got paid for, why should they get to charge a second
> time for the same bits? That's exactly what they want to do.
Fine, you pay your money, you get X Mbits/second.
If you (or the site you're getting bits from) wants _more_ than X
Mbits/second, charging you - or them, which is I gather mostly what ISPs want
to do - for that privilege is a problem... how?
Noel
Anyone on TUHS who made the list?
Greeting from your Dutch uncle rubl
For all the sound advise you don't want to hear.
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2017 13:23:13 +1100 (EST)
From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Grace Hopper and J.F.Ossana!
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.1712101314210.35694(a)aneurin.horsfall.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
On Sat, 9 Dec 2017, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>> Yeah, but all the same, two famous people in the same industry would
>> surely lengthen the odds somewhat...
>
> Yeah, you're pulling my leg. :-)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists
OK, it was worth a try :-) (I'm a born stirrer, and I blame my parents
for that.)
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
(At the risk of being flamed because it's not strictly Unix...)
We gained Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on this day in 1906; known as "Amazing
Grace", she was a remarkable woman, both in computers and the Navy. She
coined the term "debugging" when she extracted a moth from a set of relay
contacts from a computer (the Harvard Mk I) and wrote "computer debugged"
in the log, taping the deceased Lepidoptera in there as well. She was
convinced that computers could be programmed in an English-like language
and developed Flow-Matic, which in turn became, err, COBOL... She was
posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by Barack
Obama.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
As promised :-)
Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron),
was born on this day in 1815; arguably the world's first computer
programmer and a highly independent woman, she saw the potential in
Charles Babbage's new-fangled invention.
J.F.Ossanna was given unto us on this day in 1928; a prolific programmer,
he not only had a hand in developing Unix but also gave us the ROFF
series.
Who'ld've thought that two computer greats would share the same birthday?
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Something's been bothering me for a while... I've just remembered that
our 11/40 with more peripherals than you could shake a stick at -- it had
just about everything except a DECtape -- also had, so help me, a card
reader! As I dimly recall, 'twas a slow CDC (?) model; we didn't have it
for long, either because it was on loan or because it was so unreliable, I
simply don't remember.
Anyway, our driver handled it in two modes: you either got a raw image of
each card (likely via DMA instead of column by column, but I could be
wrong) i.e. 80 words with each column of 12 holes fitting nicely into a
16-bit word, or there was a half-arsed attempt at converting EBCDIC to
ASCII, with trailing blanks replaced by a newline (i.e. think of it as a
line printer in reverse). Or was it converting from whatever KRONOS used
to ASCII?
Now, what I *distinctly* remember was writing two scripts: "/etc/cdc" and
"/etc/dec" which switched between the two modes, quite likely by patching
the in-core kernel!
I'd give a testicle to have that "CSU tape" back again (and no doubt so
would Warren), but can anyone else remember this (or dare to call me a
liar; yes, I'm still touchy about that)? The snag is, towards the end of
the CSU before they were about to be engulfed by the admin suits and
forced to support payroll programs in COBOL etc, I was the only senior
Unix bod left, so it's unlikely that the CSU source code followed someone
else home...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Hello everyone,
A few weeks ago, I merged my work-in-progress AT&T 3B2/400 emulator
into the main SIMH source tree, and I realized that I should mention
it here, where there may be particular interest.
The 3B2 and 3B5 were main porting platforms for AT&T System V Release
3, and when I realized how scarce the equipment has become to find, I
set out to write an emulator for the 3B2. It was rough going at points
due to lack of documentation, but I was able to reverse engineer quite
a bit of the system through reading the SVR3 source code, and of
course strapping my own 3B2/310 to a logic analyzer.
The emulator is fairly complete. It certainly works well as a
standalone, single-user UNIX system. Support for multiple terminals is
coming very soon (as soon as I find the time, that is) so it will soon
be possible to allow multiple users to telnet into virtual terminals,
similar to how the SIMH PDP-11 and VAX emulators work.
For now, information about the emulator lives here:
https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator/
Best Wishes,
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
web(a)loomcom.com
OK. I'm confused. Maybe people here can help me understand.
Looking at the V7 sources, it looks for all the world like they were
released Jan 10, 1979. This release was PDP-11 only. So far, so good.
32V, a port to the VAX, is listed as 'early 1979'. Dates in the files in
the archive suggest March 26th, 1979 (though there are dates as late as May
3rd and April 30th on two files that are trivial). The tape we have in the
archive has a date Feb 22, 1980 written on it. Given the dates, that's only
3 months after V7 was released. This seems very fast, but maybe it's OK
since it's a swapping release....
3BSD, The Berkeley 32V has file dates as late as Mar 22, 1980... This seems
reasonable for turning V7 from swapping into paging... about a year is fast
but not crazy fast.
My question is: did these three events really happen in this quick
succession? Did USDL folks get started with a preliminary V7 for V32 or was
the port really done in 2 and a half months? Likewise with UCB and 3bsd:
did they start early?
Warner
> Venix/86 and Venix/86R might be interesting... I have impure versions of
> both...
+1
Venix/86 is the first Unix to run on PC hardware that I’m aware of. It could
go together with Idris and Minix as examples of early PC Unix.
For more on Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, by one who knew her well, see
Jean Sammet's remembrance:
Farewell to Grace Hopper: end of an era!
https://doi.org/10.1145/129852.214846
A Ph.D. thesis about her:
The Contributions of Grace Murray Hopper to Computer Science and Computer Education
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278692/m2/1/high_res_d/100…
Books:
Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea
1-59114-978-9
Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
ISBN 0-262-51726-4
Grace Hopper: Computer Whiz
ISBN 0-7660-2273-0 [juvenile literature]
I've always found it amusing that she was a strong proponent of the
work ethic: "Act first, get permission later", which is in direct
opposition to the military chain of command, despite her rank as Rear
Admiral of the US Navy.
See also
ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
https://awards.acm.org/hopperhttps://awards.acm.org/hopper/award-winners
[Awarded to the outstanding young computer professional of the
year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical
or service contribution. This award is accompanied by a prize
of $35,000. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or
less at the time the qualifying contribution was
made. Financial support of the Grace Murray Hopper Award is
provided by Microsoft.]
Don Knuth of Stanford was the first GMHA winner, in 1971; other
well-known people include Steve Wozniak (1971), Bob Metcalf (1980),
Dan Bricklin (1981), Brian Reid (1982), Bill Joy (1986), John
Ousterhout (1987), Guy Steele (1988), Richard Stallman (1990), Bjarne
Stroustrup (1993), Vern Paxson (2007), Craig Gentry (2010), ...
There is also a 1983 interview on a popular US news broadcast that
celebrates its 50th anniversary this year:
The 60 Minutes interview with Grace Murray Hopper
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-60-minutes-interview-with-grace-murray-hop…
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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 -
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I've never seen a detailed description of UNIX/TS, although I have seen
> the "Unix Program Description" (January 1976) which documents the USG
> version, and of course PWB is described in the BSTJ issue, and UNIX/TS
> is supposedly a merge of those two.
> ...
> Did the later USG versions takeup some of the PWB work, does anyone
> know? (My thinking is 'if I find traces of PWB [in the MIT system],
> would that be from /TS, or could it be a later USG version' - I think
> there were 1-3, from something I saw online.)
So I seem to have stumbled on something interesting here (or maybe it's not,
and the history is just unclear - well, unclear to me at least, I'm sure
someone knows).
Looking at "Unix Program Description" (January 1976), it's clearly marked as
"Published by the UNIX Support Group". (I have an actual hardcopy, which I
don't recall how I came by, but for those who wish to follow along this
document is available in the TUHS archive, at:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/unix_program_description_jan…
and in other TUHS mirrors).
So, given the credit, I _assume_ that it documents some version of the USG
system. So I started looking at that, and the PWB version that's in the
archive:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/spencer_pwb.tar.gz
to see how they compare, and it turns out (somewhat to my surprise) that the
USG document describes what seems to be an older version of the system.
For example, in text.c, it doesn't cover xlock()/xunlock()/xexpand(), all in
the PWB system - just xalloc()/xccdec()/xfree()/xswap().
Even more telling, in sys1.c, the USG document describes the older version of
exec(), where arguments are collected in a disk buffer, not (as in the PWB
system) in swap space. (I had thought that this change was mentioned in the
PWB paper in the BSTJ issue, but on checking, it appears my memory was
incorrect. Many of the PWB changes appear to be to things like the shell, not
the OS.)
So it seems the USG document describes a system very close to the 'classic'
V6 - not what I had expected. This may also make it hard to recognize USG
source (at least, the early versions).
More generally, it would be good to try and elucidate the relationship among
all these early Bell/AT+T versions: Research, USG, PWB, etc. Clearly the two
latter (from what we know now) are descended from V6 - but was there any
interchange between USG and PWB?
And did either of them feed back into V7? Or, perhaps more likely, were the
improvements to text.c, exec() etc _Research_ improvements that got fed into
PWB?
More questions than answers, sadly... I'm not at all familiar with V7, I'll
have to go read it at some point, and compare it to PWB. Not that I expect it
will answer many (any?) of these questions, but maybe we'll get lucky and
there will e.g. be stuff in this PWB which isn't in V7.
Speaking of which, I seem to recall there's more than one PWB version. I
wonder which one we have (above). Although there's another 'PWB' tape in the
archive:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/bostic_pwb.tar.gz
(much larger than the other one), when I poked around a bit through that,
seeing what's there, and comparing it to the other one, the system sources I
looked at there all seemed to be the same as the one on the Spencer tape.
> I should look at the MIT kernel and see how much of it is USG, and see
> if I can find any traces of the changes described as done for PWB. I
> know the MIT version has provisions for longer exec() arguments, and
> text.c is considerably more complex than the one in V6 (and IIRC matches
> the description in the USG document)
So, my memory was in error here; the text.c matches the one from the PWB tape,
_not_ the USG document. In general, the parts of the MIT system seem to be a
close match to what's on the PWB tape, with the exception that the MIT one
seems to be slightly earlier (no 'register' argument types).
> Perhaps the MIT system really was /TS
Without a better understanding of what was really in /TS, this is totally
opaque.
> I've always described it as a hacked PWB1, but I might be wrong there.
And for once, I think I was right. The MIT system _does_ closely match the
one on the 'PWB' tapes - whatever that was!
Noel
So, I'm getting the impression, from the reactions about civility, etc, that
people aren't disagreeing with the characterization of "rudeness" (which can
only be meaning my posts). Can someone please point to text in my messages
which they consider "rude"? Thanks.
Noel
The ARPAnet reached four nodes on this day in 1969 (anyone know which?);
at least one "history" site reckoned the third node was connected in 1977
(and I'm still waiting for a reply to my correction). Well, I can believe
that perhaps there were only three left by then...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
A long time ago, dmr wrote about something that IIRC BSD had done he did
not like: unlimited length identifiers in C, maybe? His argument was that
being too general was not a good thing.
Can't quite find the quote, anyone remember it? Would have been ca. 1980.
ron
> From: Clem Cole
> it's direct predecessor (UNIX/TS) which was not officially released made
> its way to number of places ... heavily hacked systems that were combo's
> of V6, PWB [1.0], UNIX/TS plus local additions. UNIX/TS had a newer
> kernel, updated FS and the compiler that was released with troff -
> a.k.a. 'Typesetter C'
I'm not sure quite what the MIT system was.
I've never seen a detailed description of UNIX/TS, although I have seen the
"Unix Program Description" (January 1976) which documents the USG version,
and of course PWB is described in the BSTJ issue, and UNIX/TS is supposedly a
merge of those two. (If we ever do find V6+ USG source, it should be easy to
verify - that document is pretty detailed.)
I should look at the MIT kernel and see how much of it is USG, and see if I
can find any traces of the changes described as done for PWB. I know the MIT
version has provisions for longer exec() arguments, and text.c is
considerably more complex than the one in V6 (and IIRC matches the
description in the USG document); but I don't recall withough careful
checking, what was done where. Perhaps the MIT system really was /TS, and I
didn't know that - I've always described it as a hacked PWB1, but I might be
wrong there.
Did the later USG versions takeup some of the PWB work, does anyone know? (My
thinking is 'if I find traces of PWB, would that be from /TS, or could it be a
later USG version' - I think there were 1-3, from something I saw online.)
I initially got /TS mixed up with /RT, which is the system I'd _really_ like
to find - well, MERT, actually. I think that's a really early micro-kernel
system (although I haven't done any research to confirm that), a direction I
think is important. (I think the 'THE Multiprogramming System' may be the
earliest work in that direction, although I'd be interested to hear of
anything else.)
I actually got contact info for some of the original MERT people, and was
going to contact them to see if they still retained anything, but I never
got a 'round tuit'... too many other projects. :-(
Noel
> 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
> 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
> 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
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.comhttp://www.mcvoy.com/lm
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."
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)
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
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