TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

29 participants
6557 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > typing hard started to become more important in the kernel. I can imagine! The V6 kernel had all sorts of, ah, 'unusual' typing - as I learned to my cost when I did that hack version of 'splice()' (to allow a process in a pipline to drop out, and join the two pipes together directly), which I did in V6 (my familiar kernel haunt). Since a lot of code does pointer math to generate wait 'channel' numbers, e.g.: sleep(ip+2, PPIPE); when I naively (out of habit) tried to declare my pointers to be the correct type, the math didn't work any more! ('ip', in this particular case, was declared to be an 'int *'.) No doubt part of this was inherited from older versions (of the system, and C); the code was working, and there was no call to tweak it. The lack of casts/coercion in the V6 C compiler may have been an issue, too - I had to do some equally odd things to make my splice() code work! Noel

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Oh *snap*!

by Norman Wilson

Derrik Walker v2.0: Webve got all our wood behind one error! ==== But you can't get the wood, you know. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 9 months

Fwd: [Simh] An abandoned piece of K&R C

by Lawrence Stewart

This caught my attention. Did early C really have min and max? Were they used for anything? In those days I was a BCPL user, which IIRC, did not have such things. -Larry > Begin forwarded message: > > From: Leo Broukhis <leob(a)mailcom.com> > Subject: [Simh] An abandoned piece of K&R C > Date: 2017, November 3 at 1:14:42 AM EDT > To: "simh(a)trailing-edge.com" <simh(a)trailing-edge.com> > > https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/4965/4025 <https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/4965/4025> > > In the UNIX V7 version of the C language, there were the /\ (min) and the \/ (max) operators. In the source of the scanner part of the compiler, > > case BSLASH: > if (subseq('/', 0, 1)) > return(MAX); > goto unkn; > > case DIVIDE: > if (subseq('\\', 0, 1)) > return(MIN); > ... > > However, attempting to use them reveals that the corresponding part in the code generator is missing. Trying to compile > > foo(a, b) { return a \/ b; } > > results in > > 1: No code table for op: \/ > > The scanner piece survived in the copies of the compiler for various systems for several years. I tried to look for copies of the code generator table which would contain an implementation, but failed. Has anyone ever seen a working MIN/MAX operator in K&R C? > > Thanks,Leo > > _______________________________________________ > Simh mailing list > Simh(a)trailing-edge.com > http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh

7 years, 9 months

Trouble wih TUHS rsync

by Dave Horsfall

Am I the only one having trouble? I mirror the site, and I'm now seeing: aneurin# tuhs + rsync -avz minnie.tuhs.org::UA_Root . rsync: failed to connect to minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53): Operation timed out (60) rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(125) [Receiver=3.1.2] + rsync -avz minnie.tuhs.org::UA_Applications Applications rsync: failed to connect to minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53): Operation timed out (60) rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(125) [Receiver=3.1.2] Etc. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 9 months

Unix half-billion years old

by Dave Horsfall

UNIX was half a billion (500000000) seconds old on Tue Nov 5 00:53:20 1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch) -- Andy Tannenbaum. (Yeah, an American billion, not the old British one.) -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 9 months

Oh *snap*!

by Don Hopkins

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 89 13:37 CDT From: Chris Garrigues <7thSon(a)slcs.slb.com> Subject: A quote from Interop '89 To: unix-haters(a)ai.ai.mit.edu Cc: 7thSon(a)slcs.slb.com "We all know that the Internet is Unix. We proved that last November." - David Mills, October 2, 1989

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold Skeeve > I suspect that he was also still young and fired up about things. :-) > ... > (In other words, he too probably deserves to be cut some slack.) Much as RTM was cut some slack? The thing is there's a key difference. RTM didn't _intend_ to melt down the network, whereas Gene presumbly - hopefully - thought about it for a while before he made his call to inflict severe punishment. Did RTM do something wrong? Absolutely. Did he deserve some punishment? Definitely. But years in jail? Yes, it caused a lot of disruption - but to any one person, not an overwhelming amount. Luckily, the judge was wise enough, and brave enough, to put the sentencing guidelines (and the DoJ recommendation, IIRC) to one side. However, that too was not without a cost; it was one more stone added to what is admittedlyalready a mountain of precedent that judges can ignore the legislature's recommendations - and once one does it, another will feel more free to do so. And so we pass from a government of laws to a government of men. But I don't give Gene the lion's share of the blame: that has to go to Rasch, and his superiors at the DoJ, who were apparently (as best I can understand their motives) willing to crush a young man under a bus to make a point. The power to prosecute and punish is an awesome one, and should be wielded carefully and with judgement, and it was their failure to do so that really was the root cause. Noel

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by Doug McIlroy

I think "classlessness" is intened as an antonym to "classy". Spafford with high dudgeon called early for punishment. He had tempered it somewhat by the time he wrote his CACM article, published in June 1985. But still some animus shows through, in "even-handedly" speculating about whether the worm was intended as a lark or as something nefarious. He evidently had mellowed a lot by the time of the last quotation below. In the CACM article Spaff quoted someone else as suggesting that Morris did it to impress Jodie Foster, and he called Allman's back door in Sendmail a debugging feature that people could optionally turn off. As far as I know it was not disclosed that DEBUG allowed remote control of Sendmail. In fact Sendmail was so opaque that Dave Presotto declined to install it and wrote his own (upas) for Research. I don't recall the cited "contest". And Dennis's reaction to the CaCM article seems somwhat harsh. But the context is that Spafford's overheated initial reaction did not win friends in research. > > Can anyone remember or decipher what this was about??? > > Date: 24 Mar 90 06:52:43 GMT > From: dmr(a)alice.att.com > Subject: Re: Contest announcement > To: misc-security(a)uunet.uu.net > > My own contest is "Most appalling display of classlessness in dealing with > a serious subject." The nominees are: > > 1) National Center for Computer Crime Data, Security Magazine, and > Gene Spafford, for their "How High Shall We Hang Robert Morris?" > contest. > > 2) Gene Spafford, for the most tasteless article ever to appear in CACM > (special credits for the Jodie Foster joke). > > Dennis Ritchie > > Some context maybe? >> >> “He has not tried to make any money or work in this area,” Purdue >> University computer science professor Eugene Spafford said of Morris >> in an interview with The Washington Post. “His behavior has been >> consistent in supporting his defense: that it was an accident and he >> felt badly about it. I think it’s very much to his credit that that has >> been his behavior ever since.”

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix

by Norman Wilson

Arnold: > OK, that I can understand. It's ages since I played with > readline, but I think you can preload the buffer it works on > (bash does that, no?) so ed + readline could be made to work > that way. ==== Or, if you have moved beyond the era of simulated glass teletypes on graphics screens, you could do the editing in the terminal (program). It's a real shame the mux/9term way of doing things never caught on. I suppose it is because so many people are wedded to programs that require cursor addressing; I'm glad I never succumbed to that. I use ed (or its cousin qed a la Toronto) for simple stuff. Mostly I'll use the traditional commands, but sometimes I will, in mux/9term style, print a line with p, type c, edit the line on the screen, pick it up and send it, type . return. And of course I can do that sort of thing with any program, whether or not it is compiled with some magic library. All this is something of a matter of taste, but I have sometimes amazed (in a good way) my colleagues with it. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by Norman Wilson

Robert T Morris (the son who committed the famous worm) was an intern at Bell Labs for a couple of summers while I was there. He certainly wasn't an idiot; he was a smart guy. Like many smart guys (and not-so-smart guys for that matter), however, he was a sloppy coder, and tended not to test enough. One of the jokes in the UNIX Room was that, had it been Bob Morris (the father) who did it, a. He wouldn't have done it, because he would have seen that it wasn't worth the potential big mess; but b. Had he done it, no one would ever have caught him, and probably no one would even have noticed the worm as it crept around. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Doug McIlroy > A little known fact is that the judge leaned on the prosecutor to reduce > the charge to a misdemeanor and accepted the felony only when the > prosecuter secured specific backing from higher echelons at DOJ. I had a tangential role in the legal aftermath, and am interested to hear this. I hadn't had much to do with the actual outbreak, so I was not particularly watching the whole saga. However, on the evening news one day, I happened to catch video of him coming out of the court-house after his conviction: from the look on his face (he looked like his dog had died, and then someone had kicked him in the stomach) it was pretty clear that incareration (which is what the sentencing guidelines called for, for that offense) was totally inappropriate. So I decided to weigh in. I got advice from the Washington branch of then-Hale&Dorr (my legal people at the time), who were well connected inside the DoJ (they had people who'd been there, and also ex-H+D people were serving, etc). IIRC, they agreed with me that this was over-charging, given the specifics of the offender, etc. (I forget exactly what they told me of what they made of the prosecutor and his actions, but it was highly not positive.) So we organized the IESG to submit a filing in the case on the sentencing, and got everyone to sign on; apparently in the legal system when there is an professional organization in a field, its opinions weigh heavily, and the IESG, representing as it did the IETF, was the closest thing to it here. I don't know how big an effect our filing had, but the judge did depart very considerably from the sentencing guidelines (which called, IIRC, for several years of jail-time) and gave him probation/community-service. Not everyone was happy about our actions (particularly some who'd had to work on the cleanup), but I think in retrospect it was the right call - yeah, he effed up, but several years in jail was not the right punsishment, for him, and for this particular case (no data damaged/deleted/stolen/etc). YMMV. Noel

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by Doug McIlroy

> the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first That would have "proved" that the worm worked safely, for once every host was infected, all would go quiet. Only half in jest, I have always held that Cornell was right to expel Morris, but their reason should have been his lack of appreciation of exponentials. (Full disclosure: I was a character witnesss at his trial. A little known fact is that the judge leaned on the prosecutor to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor and accepted the felony only when the prosecuter secured specific backing from higher echelons at DOJ.) Doug McIlroy

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix

by Norman Wilson

I too remember TECO. In my TOPS-10 days I was quite a whiz at it. Then I encountered UNIX and ed, and never looked back. Cryptic programmability is fun, but a simple but well-chosen set of commands including the g/v pair made me more efficient in the end. it could just be that ed is a better fit for the shape of my brain. C struck me similarly. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (Actually in the Bay Area for a few days for LISA, in case any UNIXtorians want to meet up.)

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall > I'm glad that I'm not the only one who remembers TECO Urp. I wish I _didn't_ remember TECO! "TECO Madness: A moment of convenience, a lifetime of regret." - Dave Moon (For those who didn't catch the reference, here: https://www.gammalyte.com/tag/reefer-madness/ you go.) Noel

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix

by Clem Cole

On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 12:39 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote: > > I have a similar and maybe even more extreme position. When I was a > manager > I placed restrictions on the tools and customizations for members of my > team. > My goal was to make sure that any team member could go over to any other > team > member's desk and get stuff done. And I think this loops back to what started some of this threat. The idea of a programmer with 'good taste.' Rob (and Brian) railed on BSD in cat -v considered harmful <http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/> and ‘*Program Design in the UNIX Environment*’ (pdf version <http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf>, ps version <http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.ps>) but the points in it was then and are still now, fresh: What is it that you need to get the job done - to me, that is Doug's "Universal Unix" concept. When I answer questions on quora about learning Linux and other UNIX derivative, I still point them at their book: *The Unix Programming Environment <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013937681X?ie=UTF8&tag=catv-20&linkCode=as…>* I would say, if the can login into the system and complete the exercises in UPE without having to make changes, you are pretty close to Doug's "Universal UNIX" environment. And if you can use the tools, without having to think about them and they pretty much are what you rely upon everyday, you are getting close to my ideal of 'good taste.' Clem

7 years, 9 months

First ARPAnet transmission

by Dave Horsfall

Of interest to the old farts here... At 22:30 (but which timezone?) on this day in 1969 the first packet got as far as "LO" ("LOGIN"?) then crashed. More details, anyone? -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Charles Forsyth on putting Unix on a diet.

by Norman Wilson

Chris Torek: You're not perpendicular to your own surface? :-) === I'm not as limber as I used to be. Besides, I'm left-handed, so what use would I have for right angles? Norman Wilson Toronto ON (I don't wish to know that)

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Charles Forsyth on putting Unix on a diet.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Steve Nickolas > I personally believe a lot of code in modern operating systems is larger > than the task requires. The "operating" is superfluous. Noel

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Charles Forsyth on putting Unix on a diet.

by Norman Wilson

George Michaelson: wish I hadn't read "Norman Wilson" as "Norman Wisdom" (british prat-fall comedian in the style of Jerry Lewis) === It's much better than the more-common typo in which people call me normal. Neither accurate nor an aspiration. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 9 months

Charles Forsyth on putting Unix on a diet.

by Dan Cross

I've always enjoyed this paper; recently I found occasion to thumb through it again. I thought I'd pass it on; I'm curious what some on the list think about this given their first-hand knowledge of relevant history (Larry, I'm looking at you; especially with respect his comments on the VM system). - Dan C. http://www.terzarima.net/doc/taste.pdf

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Charles Forsyth on putting Unix on a diet.

by Doug McIlroy

As an admirer of minimalism, who has given talks that extol Norman Wilson's streamlining of research Unix, I naturally like Forsythe's thesis. I noticed unintended irony in one more or less throw-away remark: "It is dangerous to place too much hope in any improvement coming from just following new fashions, if we lack insight into what really went wrong before. Without that insight, I suspect that rewriting UNIX in C++, for example, could easily become an excuse for increasing complexity (because by using C++ `we can handle more complexity')." Bjarne Stroustrup's avowed reason for building cfront, which evolved into C++, was to have a tool for building an operating system in object-oriented style. The tool took on a life of its own, and arguably became more complex than the old-fashioned Unix he aspired to improve on. Doug

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Last officially distributed and currently available BSD version

by Dan Cross

On Oct 22, 2017 1:39 AM, "Will Senn" <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: [...] What is the last bootable and installable media, officially distributed by Berkeley? Is that image currently publicly accessible? What is the closest version, that is currently available, that would match the os described in "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System"? Probably one of the best ways to get questions about installation media answered is to simply email Kirk McKusick. He's a really nice guy and will probably give you an answer pretty quickly. That said, of the three distributions you mentioned, bootable/installable media only existed for 4.4BSD (also called the "encumbered" distribution). -Lite and -Lite2 were "reference distributions." It didn't take *too* much work to get -Lite working, but it wasn't something that ran out of the box (or more properly, off of the tape). The original idea was to release 4.4BSD-encumbered to Unix source licensees, and at the same time publish 4.4BSD-Lite sans the redacted bits as an open source distribution. These were to be the final BSD releases from UCB, but the CSRG found they had some coin left in the coffers a few months later, so they did -Lite2 as something of a final hurrah snapshotting some ongoing maintenance work (and possibly some research?) before officially shutting down. At one point, I had a copy of a bootable exabyte tape with 4.4-encumbered installation and source images for SPARC, specifically sun4c machines, that I had liberated from somewhere. My understanding was that the reference hardware at Berkeley was 68030- and 68040-based HP 9000 machines, and the SPARC bits were a contribution from Chris Torek. I got -Lite running on an older SPARCstation 1, but it wasn't particularly reliable (the compiler would segfault, and it panic'ed once a day or so), so we put SunOS back on it pretty quickly. Hope that helps. - Dan C.

7 years, 10 months

Conceivably OT: 80s and 90s era CAD software

by Wesley Parish

I'm wondering, with 80s and 90s era Unix being discussed, if there are any copies of the 80s and 90s era CAD software extant in some form or other? (Preferably free to good archive?) IIRC it was a major driver of graphics capabilities in Unix workstations around that time. Wesley Parish

7 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] /bin/true (was basic tools / Universal Unix)

by Doug McIlroy

> macOS requires you to have a data section aligned to 4K, even if you > don't use it. The resulting binary is a little over 8K; again, mostly > zeros. Not quite. The classic empty executable file for /bin/true works on OS X. That is not just a clever trick;it's a natural consequence of Kernighan's ancient prrecept: do nothing gracefully. Conceivably the 4K data section is, too--if the page has no physical presence until it is accessed. Doug

7 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Last officially distributed and currently available BSD version

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> > Hope that helps. I don't have anything to add to this discussion, but may I point out that this is _exactly_ the kind of thing we'd like to make available at the Computer History Wiki: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Main_Page I'm too busy with other tasks to add it all myself, but I hope you all will be able to add your pearls there, where it will be available in an organized way, rather than having to hope Google/Bing/etc can find it in the list archives among the megatons of other dross on the Internet. If anyone would like an account there (due to spam issues, anon editing has been disabled), please let me know, and I'll get you set up right away - just send me the account name you like (a lot of us use our old time-sharing system account names :-), and the email address you'd like associated with it. Noel

7 years, 10 months

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TUHS