TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

22 participants
6516 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > 1. How do you escape # in order to write a C program if # is the erase > character in the terminal? "Use the source, Luke!" V7 is simple enough that it's pretty quick to find the answers to things like this. E.g. http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/sys/dev/tty.c> will answer this question (in "canon()"). > 3. Is there a way to echo the ascii value of a keypress in v7? A quick look through tty.c suggests this doesn't exist in V7 - without running a user program that puts the TTY in 'raw' mode and prints out what it sees. Not sure if there is one off the rack, or if you'd have to whip up a 20-line program to do it. Noel

7 years, 7 months

help building kernel after fresh install of V7

by Will Senn

After installing a fresh simh V7 instance with 2 RP06's and a TU10, I tried building the kernel and running it. I got a panic. I didn't mess with the defaults, so I'm at a loss as to how the stock kernel is different from the one I built. I tried building as root, then sys, same effect. Here's what I did: nboot.ini contents: set cpu 11/70 set cpu 2M set cpu idle set rp0 rp06 att rp0 rp06-0.disk set rp1 rp06 att rp1 rp06-1.disk boot rp0 pdp11 nboot.ini boot hp(0,0)unix (actually renamed hptmunix) mem = 2020544 CTRL-D login: root cd /usr/sys/conf make allsystems ... build stuff, no errors or warnings mv hptmunix / sync sync CTRL-E quit the sim pdp11 nboot.ini boot hp(0,0)hptmunix mem = 2021696 err on dev 0/0 bn=1 er=100000,4507 err on dev 0/0 bn=1 er=100000,4521 err on dev 0/0 ... etc. Am I doing something wrong or missing an important configuration step. I am just trying to rebuild the stock kernel before I try any reconfigurations. -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 7 months

New PDF version of Installing and Using Research Unix Version 7 In the SimH PDP-11/45 and 11/70 Emulators

by Will Senn

Hi all, I just finished creating an updated PDF version of a blog post I did a couple of years back, describing how to install and use Unix v7 in SimH. It's updated for 2017 and MacOS High Sierra 10.13. I started the update because I was wanting to do some research in v7 and thought it would be good to have a current set of instructions but really because I was interested in learning a bit about LaTeX and creating prettier, more useful documents. The notes still work fine as originally written, but I organized things a little differently and tweaked some of the language. I thought somebody else might like having a PDF version around so I uploaded the result, call it revision 1.1, and made it publicly accessible (the blog still needs updating, somebody oughta do something about link impermanence, but that's all for another day). Feel free to comment or complain. I added a section in honor of dmr at one commenter's suggestion. Here's the link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1_Jn6Hlzym-Zmx1TjR3TENDQTA Later, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 7 months

SGI Software Usability II (IRIX 5.1 memo)

by Michael-John Turner

Hi, I came across this on Lobsters[1] today and thought it may be of interest to the list: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html It appears to be an internal SGI memo that's rather critical of IRIX 5.1. Does anyone know if it's true? [1] https://lobste.rs/ Cheers, MJ -- Michael-John Turner * mj(a)mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/

7 years, 7 months

Re: SGI Software Usability II (IRIX 5.1 memo)

by Don Hopkins

When I was working at UniPress in New Jersey, we had an SGI Iris named pink on which we developed the 4Sight versions of NeWS Emacs (NeMACS). Speaking of SGI leaks: Those things are fucking heavy! It was raining torrentially outside and the UniPress office started to flood, so we had to keep taking shelves down off the wall and wedging them underneath the Iris to jack it up above the water, as it kept getting deeper and deeper. Ron will remember the emergency bailing technique MG and I developed of repeatedly filling the shop vac with water then flushing it down the toilet. The Indigos were another story entirely: They couldn't touch the raw graphics performance of an Iris, since the rendering was all in software, but you could actually stuff one of them in the overhead compartment on an airplane! And then there was the SGI Indy... They made up for being small on the outside, by being HUGE and BLOATED in the inside: "Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'". -- Mark Hughes (?) This legendary leaked SGI memo has become required reading for operating system and programming language design courses: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/irix-bloat.txt <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/irix-bloat.txt> -Don > On 12 Oct 2017, at 15:16, Don Hopkins <SimHacker(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDnPiXyME0 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDnPiXyME0> > >> On 12 Oct 2017, at 15:04, Michael-John Turner <mj(a)mjturner.net <mailto:mj@mjturner.net>> wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >> I came across this on Lobsters[1] today and thought it may be of interest to the list: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html <http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html> >> >> It appears to be an internal SGI memo that's rather critical of IRIX 5.1. Does anyone know if it's true? >> >> [1] https://lobste.rs/ <https://lobste.rs/> >> >> Cheers, MJ -- >> Michael-John Turner * mj(a)mjturner.net <mailto:mj@mjturner.net> * http://mjturner.net/ <http://mjturner.net/> >

7 years, 7 months

RIP Dennis Ritchie

by Dave Horsfall

We lost co-inventor of Unix and sheer genius Dennis Ritchie on this day in 2011; there's not really much more that I can say... Sic transit gloria mundi. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 7 months

4.2BSD steering committee members

by Paul Ruizendaal

According to the Unix Tree web pages, the development of 4.2BSD was at the request of DARPA guided by a steering committee consisting of: Bob Fabry, Bill Joy and Sam Leffler from UCB Alan Nemeth and Rob Gurwitz from BBN Dennis Ritchie from Bell Labs Keith Lantz from Stanford Rick Rashid from Carnegie-Mellon Bert Halstead from MIT Dan Lynch from ISI Gerald J. Popek of UCLA Although I can place most people on the list, for some names I’m in the dark: * Alan Nemeth - apparently the designer of the BBN C-series mini’s (I think the C30 was designed to replace the 316/516 as IMP). It is hard to find any info on the C-series, but I understand it to be a mini with 10 bit bytes, 20 bit words and 20 bit address space, more or less modeled after the PDP11 and an instruction set optimised to be an easy target for the C compilers of the day. Any other links to Unix? * Keith Lantz - apparently specialised in distributed computing. No clear links to Unix that I can find. * Rick Rashid - driving force behind message passing micro-kernels and the Accent operating systems. Evolved into Mach. Link to Unix seems to be that Accent was an influential design around 81/82 * Bert Halstead - seems to have built a shared memory multiprocessor around that time, “Concert”. * Dan Lynch - ISI program manager for TCP/IP and the switch-over from NCP on Arpanet. * Gerald Popek - worked on a secure version of (Arpanet enabled) Unix and on distributed systems (LOCUS) at the time. Next to networking, the link between these people seems to have been distributed computing — yet I don’t think 4.2BSD had a goal of being multiprocessor ready. All recollections about the steering committee, its goals and its members welcome. Paul

7 years, 8 months

Re: 4.2BSD steering committee members

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal > * Alan Nemeth - apparently the designer of the BBN C-series mini's ISTR him from some other context at BBN; don't recall off the top of my head, though. > (I think the C30 was designed to replace the 316/516 as IMP). They _did_ replace the Honeywell's. At MIT, they eventually came and took away the 516 (I offered it to the MIT Museum, but they didn't want it, as the work on it hadn't been done by MIT - idiots!), and replaced it with a C/30. (Actually, we had a couple of C/30 IMPs - the start was adding a C/30, to which the MIT Internet IP gateway was connected - the other two IMPs were full, and the only way to get another port for the gateway was to get another IMP - something which caused a very long delay in getting MIT connected to the Internet, to my intense frustration. I seem to recall DARPA/DCVA had stopped buying Honeywell machines, and the C/30 was late, or something like that.) > It is hard to find any info on the C-series, but I understand it to be a > mini with 10 bit bytes, 20 bit words and 20 bit address space, more or > less modeled after the PDP11 and an instruction set optimised to be an > easy target for the C compilers of the day. Yes and no. It was a general microprogrammed machine, but supported a daughter-board on the CPU to help with instruction decoding, etc; so the C/30 and C/70 had different daughter-boards, specific to their function. There's a paper on the C/70, I don't recall if I have a copy - let me look. > Any other links to Unix? I think the C/70 was intended to run Unix, as a general-purpose timesharing resource at BBN (and did). > * Bert Halstead - seems to have built a shared memory multiprocessor > around that time He was, as a grad student, a member of Steve Ward's group at MIT, the ones who did the Nu machine Unix 68K port. (He wrote the Unix V6/PWB1 driver for the Diva controller for the CalChomps they had on their -11/70, the former of which I eventually inherited.) After he got his PhD (I forget the topic; I know he did a language called 'D', the origin of the name should be obvious), he became a faculty member at MIT. > * Dan Lynch - ISI program manager for TCP/IP and the switch-over from > NCP on Arpanet. He was actually their facilities manager (or some title to that effect; he was in charge of all their TENEX/TWENEX machines, too). He was part of the early Internet crowd - I vividly remember him at a bar with Phill Gross and I in the DC suburbs, at a _very_ early IETF meeting, discussing how this Internet thing was going to reallly take off, and the IETF had got to get itself organized to be ready for that. > Next to networking, the link between these people seems to have been > distributed computing That wasn't really the tie - the tie was they were all part of the DARPA-funded circle. Now, as to why whomever at DARPA picked them - I think they probably looked for people with recognized competence, who had a need for a good VAX Unix for their research/organization. Noel

7 years, 8 months

Unix witticisms

by Wesley Parish

I've just visited Slashdot and found this little gem at the bottom of the page: Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the front cover of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them? Wesley Parish "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor, Method for Guitar "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

7 years, 8 months

Re: Unix witticisms

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > Annnnnnnd, that's the thread, noone can top that! "EMACS - Editor too big" Noel

7 years, 8 months

Please .. no DKIM chatter here

by Warren Toomey

Hi all. First up, it's TUHS so please no DKIM/email chatter here. Only a few of you are involved and it's not relevant to Unix history. Grant Taylor and Tom Ivar Helbekkmo having been working behind the scenes to find a good solution. We are hoping to a) merge the two lists back together, b) reinstate [TUHS] and non-mangled From: lines, and c) keep most MTAs happy in the process. With some luck, all of this will be resolved. So, let's get back to the discussion of old Unix systems :) Thanks, Warren

7 years, 8 months

Mangled and non-mangled TUHS mail lists

by Warren Toomey

All, there are now two variants of the TUHS mailing list. E-mail sent to tuhs(a)tuhs.org will propagate to both of them. The main TUHS list now: - doesn't strip incoming DKIM headers - doesn't alter the From: line - doesn't alter the Subject: line and hopefully will keep most mail systems happy. The alternative, "mangled", TUHS list: - strips incoming DKIM headers - alters the From: line - alters the Subject: line to say [TUHS] - puts in DKIM headers once this is done and hopefully will keep most mail systems happy but in a different way. You can choose to belong to either list, just send me an e-mail if you want to be switched to the other one. But be patient to start with as there will probably be quite a few wanting to change. Cheers, Warren

7 years, 8 months

And now ... Weirdnix?

by Warren Toomey

And now, we bring the RMS/Gnu thread to a close :-) To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc. Cheers, Warren -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

7 years, 8 months

NUMA, Sequent NUMA-Q, etc

by Kevin Bowling

NUMA is something that's been on my mind a lot lately. Partially in seeding beastie ideas into Larry McVoy's brain. I asked Paul McKenney for some history on what went down at Sequent since that's before my time. He sent me this, which I think the group will enjoy: http://www2.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/techreports/stingcacm3.1999.08.04a.pdf It looks pretty nice. Not sure anyone's come as close as Irix to solving and productizing "easy" NUMA but that's the one I have the most hands on experience with. They can affine, place, migrate, and even replicate many types of resources including vnodes. I'm actually surprised all that code seems to have been spiked and it doesn't seem like either Sequent née IBM nor SGI brought forward any of their architecture to Linux. Paul did RCU which is a tour de force, but the Linux topology and MM code looks like the product of sustaining engineers instead of architectural decree. Maybe the SCO lawsuit snubbed all of that? HP has an out of date competitive analysis that's worth a look http://h20566.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=5060289&docLoc…. I don't have enough seat time with Tru64 but maybe they had some good ideas. As open source, I do like Illumos' locality groups. I can't make much sense of Linux on this, too much seems to be in arch/ vs a first class concept like locality groups. Regards, Kevin

7 years, 8 months

Re: Favorite UNIX

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Don Hopkins > Solaris: so bad I left the company. Why was Solaris so much worse than SunOS? I guess the Sun management didn't understand that was the case? Or were they so hot for the AT+T linkup that they were willing to live with it? Noel

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] SunOS to Solaris - why?

by Larry McVoy

As I've said elsewhere, Sun was out of money. AT&T bought $200m of Sun stock at 35% over market but Sun had to dump SunOS and got to SVR4. I don't know if Scooter knew what he was dumping or not, I suspect not but all those late nights when he came over to egg us kernel geeks on, maybe he did know. I don't think he had a choice. On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 12:59:42PM -0400, Arthur Krewat via TUHSmangle wrote: > From Sun's point of view, what was the REAL reason to move from SunOS to > Solaris? > > I don't think I've read anything anywhere as to a real technical reason. Was > it just some stuffed-shirt's "great idea"? > > Or was it really a standards-based or other reality-based reason? > > As of SunOS 4.1.4, it seemed ready to go whole-hog into SMP, so that wasn't > the sole reason. > > thanks! > art k. > > -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

7 years, 8 months

Re: Favorite Unix?

by Lawrence Stewart

I’m an HPC guy. The only good OS is one that is not executing any instructions except mine. No daemons, no interrupts, nothing. Load my code, give me all physical memory, give me direct access to the interconnect and then get out of the way. If I want anything, I will let you know, but don’t wait up. When I put on an educator’s hat I still have a soft spot for V6 and V7. Those were my first exposure to Unix and the Unix Way. One could actually learn style by reading code and writing device drivers. These days kernels (Linux at least) are too complicated and too cluttered up with ifdefs to learn much. The real recent innovations like RCU and queuing locks and NUMA affinity are buried pretty deep, and actual reliable file systems like ZFS and BTRFS are just too complicated for mortals. As a user, what I really want are reliability, the commands and utilities, and stable APIs. I don’t like a lot of things about Posix, but it is at least a little stable and a little portable. For myself, I use MacOS and Debian Linux, and open, close, read, write. -Larry

7 years, 8 months

Re: Favorite UNIX

by Michael Parson

On Sun, 1 Oct 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2017 09:13:28 -0600 > Michael Parson <mparson(a)bl.org> wrote: > >> On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote: >>> On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote: >>> >>>> I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under >>>> qemu-sparc that I want to try as well. >>> >>> Can you share a pointer to those with us? >> >> Sure: >> >> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4 >> >> Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :) > > So then the next question is where can one find install media (or > image thereof...) I bought a boxed copy of 'Solaris 1.1.2' off e-bay many moon ago, though I've been told it can be found with the google search term of 'winworldpc'. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ

7 years, 8 months

Re: Favorite UNIX

by Will Senn

On Sep 28, 2017 11:02 PM, "Kevin Bowling" <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote: What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible categories, choose one or more: 1) Free 2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT. 3) Historical 1. FreeBSD. It's super stable and tends to be logical. The documentation is great once you get over the learning curve. Debian is a close second for the same reasons. Mint with KDE Plasma 5 is beautiful and user friendly. 2. I used Sun OS with a CDE-like interface back in the day and that was ok. Mac OS X 10.5-10.12 are great. 3. I enjoy the research versions of unix and other OSes that are available for the SimH PDP 11 emulator. Will

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Line Terminators in Text Files [

by Clem Cole

On Sun, Sep 3, 2017 at 11:08 AM, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: > > > On Sat, Sep 2, 2017 at 8:54 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > >> On Sat, 2 Sep 2017, Nemo wrote: >> >> Hhhmmm... This begs the historical question: When did LF replace CR/LF >>> in UNIX? >>> >> >> Unix has always used NL as the terminator :-) > > > <CR><LF> was the line terminator in DEC operating systems that grew up > around the same time as Unix. CP/M and MS-DOS inherited that from them > since those systems were developed, in part, using cross compilers running > on DEC gear with DEC OSes. Unix came from the Multics world where LF was > used as the line terminator... Thankfully, neither CP/M nor MS-DOS picked > up DEC's RMS... > > Warner > The fun story on that Warner is after years of dogged defense of RMS, when C was written for VMS, Cutler had to add Stream I/O. The moment is was released, much (?most?) of customer base (including a lot of internal folks like the compiler runtime and DB folks) switched to using it. It was so much easier. I never heard Dave back down, but it I used to smile when I saw the statistics.

7 years, 8 months

Favorite UNIX

by Kevin Bowling

What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible categories, choose one or more: 1) Free 2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT. 3) Historical Me: 1) FreeBSD - I find it to generally be the least annoying desktop and laptop experience with admittedly careful selection of hardware to ensure compatibility. It's ideal to me for commercial appliances and servers due to the license, tight coupling of kernel and base, and features like ZFS, jails, and pluggable TCP stacks. Linux distros lost their luster for me once systemd was integrated into Debian, and that kind of culture seems to be prevailing up and down the stack in a way that I'd prefer to be an outside observer of Linux and not dependent on it for now. 2) AIX - I often see people disparage AIX but I like it. I learned a lot in my teens about C, build systems, compilers, and lots of libraries trying to port random software to it for auto-didactic reasons. It definitely doesn't feel like any other UNIX. It probably supports high core count and NUMA better than any other system except Linux, it had advanced virtualization with LPARs and containers with WPARs before most and hot patchable kernel, fully pagable kernel, lots of rigorous kernel engineering there that didn't get a lot of fanfare. SMIT is kind of cool as a TUI and spits out commands that you can learn through repetition and use at the CLI or scripting. I think it probably peaked in the early 2000s, but the memory management, volume management, and file systems all seemed pretty forward thinking up until then. I don't think SMP performance was a strong suite until it was pretty much a relegated niche though. 3) IRIX - it just screams '90s cool like an acrylic sweater. Soft real time, immense graphics support, pro audio and video features, lots of interesting commercial software, NUMA, supercomputers. I enjoy tinkering on this still, but a lot of that is due to the neat hardware. Regards, Kevin

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX of choice these days?

by Norman Wilson

Warner Losh: It's an abundance of caution thing. This code had security problems in the past, we're not 100% sure that we've killed all the issues, though we believe we have. ==== And if there isn't anyone who's actively interested in the code, willing to dig in to clean it up and make security issues less likely, deal with multiprocessing matters, and so on, that's a perfectly reasonable stance. I think it's an unfortunate result, and I wonder how much of it comes from a cultural view that sysctl >> /proc. (Recall how Ken and Dennis originally resisted Doug's push for pipelines and filters, because--as Dennis once put it in a talk--it just wasn't the way programs worked?) But as someone who is sometimes credited with removing more code than he wrote while working on the latter-day Research kernel, it's hard for me to argue with the principle. A lot of the code I tossed out was complicated stuff that was barely used if used at all, and that nobody was willing to step up to volunteer to maintain. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 8 months

UNIX of choice these days?

by Arthur Krewat

What's your UNIX of choice to do normal "real" things these days? Home file server (NAS), business stuff, develop code, whatever. Mine is Solaris 11.3 at this point. Oracle has provided almost all the "normal" utilities that are used by Linux folk, and it runs on Intel hardware rather well. My main storage is a raidz2 of 24TB and I get 1.2GB/sec to a bunch of 3TB 512-byte-sector SAS drives. It serves my vmware farm with iSCSI at 10gbe using COMSTAR, which also houses a bunch of Solaris 11 guests that perform various chores. It also houses some Linux and Windows guests for prototyping/testing. It's also my Samba server, servicing a few Windows workstations. This is all in my home office where I do all my personal/professional work. What do you all use for day-to-day development and general playing around with new stuff? AAK

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] [Groff] pic.ps

by Doug McIlroy

>> The Fedora system I have access to lacks /usr/share/doc/groff > Fedora defaults to loading only the package "groff-base" so that man pages can be displayed. To actually use groff for any other purpose, the packages "groff", "groff-doc", "groff-perl", and "groff-X11" have to be installed. Annoying, but there it is. That explains all. Thanks. doug

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX of choice these days?

by Derek Fawcus

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 06:44:20PM +0100, Derek Fawcus wrote: > On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 08:34:28AM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote: > > Yes, that changed in 2007 based on bug reports you filed while working at Cisco. > > So fd 255 is my fault? :-) Or not - given that macOS, using an older bash already used 255: $ set|fgrep VERSION BASH_VERSION='3.2.57(1)-release' $ lsof -p $$|fgrep CHR bash 6843 derek 0u CHR 16,10 0t554677 701 /dev/ttys010 bash 6843 derek 1u CHR 16,10 0t554677 701 /dev/ttys010 bash 6843 derek 2u CHR 16,10 0t554677 701 /dev/ttys010 bash 6843 derek 255u CHR 16,10 0t554677 701 /dev/ttys010 DF

7 years, 8 months

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