TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

21 participants
6516 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language Unearthed!

by Doug McIlroy

> If Unix was written in Pascal I would've happily continued using Pascal! Amusing in the context of Brian's piece, which essentially says if Unix could have been written in Pascal, then Pascal wouldn't have been Pascal. doug\

7 years, 9 months

CSTR 100 now on Github

by Arnold Robbins

Hi All. I have created a Git repo: https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/cstr100 I set it up with the original MS macros and a Makefile to create a PDF. THANKS again to Brian Kernighan for finding the document and sharing it. Arnold

7 years, 9 months

Bell Labs history question

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi. For a project I'm working on, I wonder if the Bell Labs alumni present can tell me what was the default group for files for the researchers? That is, what group did ls -l show? In particular, in the late 90s - ~ V10 time frame. Much thanks, Arnold

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] CSTR files

by Doug McIlroy

> As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the original roff sources. > Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc. I have the source for CSTR 155, a trilogy on raster ellipses. It uses interesting preprocessors that are, alas, mostly lost: ideal, prefer, eqn. (If anybody has ideal, I'd love to get it. Even its author, Chris Van Wyk, doesn't have it.) Doug

7 years, 9 months

Ideal

by Noel Hunt

Doug McIlroy's mentioning `ideal' prompts me to ask something I've long wanted to ask. The only use I ever saw of ideal was in Peter Weinberger's memo about his C B-tree package. Was ideal used for anything other than that? Noel Hunt

7 years, 9 months

CSTR files

by Aharon Robbins

Hi All. I have made a tarball of all the Bell Labs CSTRs that I could file: http://www.skeeve.com/cstr.tar.gz. It's just under ten megs. Warren, can we get this into the archives? Thanks, Arnold

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] CSTR files

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arthur Krewat > That's not RUNOFF on TOPS-10 (or one it's predecessors) is it? No, RUNOFF on CTSS - _much_ earlier - CTSS RUNOFF was in '64, which was the year the PDP-6 came out. Noel

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] CSTR files

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Labovitz > I found the earliest succession of roff predecessors went something like this: > TJ-2 -> RUNOFF (capitals) -> runoff (lowercase) -> rf -> roff Did you manage to find out from Jerry if he knew of/anything about TJ2 when he did RUNOFF? Noel

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] arithmetic IF (was origin of string.h and ctype.h)

by Paul McJones

On Aug 17, 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > I remember reading an article somewhere on the history of the first > FORTRAN compiler. The guys doing it wanted it to succeed, and they > were fighting the mentality that high level languages could not possibly > be as efficient as hand-coded assembly, so they put a lot of work into > the optimization of the generated code. > > It worked so well that the results that came out of the compiler > sometimes suprised the compiler writers! They then would have to > dive into the compiler sources to figure out how it was done. > > I don't remember where I read this article. If the story rings a > bell with anyone, let me know. In his paper "The history of FORTRAN I, II and III” presented at the First ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of Programming Languages (1978), John Backus said: > It was an exciting period; when later on we began to get fragments of compiled programs out of the system, we were often astonished at the surprising transformations in the indexing operations and in the arrangement of the computation which the compiler made, changes which made the object program efficient but which we would not have thought to make as programmers ourselves (even though, of course, Nelson or Ziller could figure out how the indexing worked, Sheridan could explain how an expresssion had been optimized beyond recognition, and Goldberg or Sayre could tell us how section 5 had generated additional indexing operations). Transfers of control appeared which corresponded to no source statement, expressions were radically rearranged, and the same DO statement might produce no instructions in the object program in one context, and in another it would produce many instructions in different places in the program. The paper is available here, courtesy of ACM: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/index.html .

7 years, 9 months

CSTR 122 on CHEM?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Does anyone have this, even just in PostScript? Thanks, Arnold P.S. Chem itself is at http://www.netlib.org/typesetting/chem.

7 years, 9 months

[tuhs] new paper on Unix pipes

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

This new paper was published today, and it is open access, so everyone should have access: Diomidis Spinellis and Marios Fragkoulis Extending Unix Pipelines to DAGs IEEE Transactions on Computers 66(9) 1547--1561 September 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TC.2017.2695447 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] arithmetic IF (was origin of string.h and ctype.h)

by Doug McIlroy

> [Fortran's optimization] worked so well that the results that came out of the compiler > sometimes suprised the compiler writers! Except when it didn't. They gave particular attention to nested loops with subscripted variables, exemplified by linear-algebra computations. But their algorithms behaved quite wildly on nonstandard loops. Vic Vyssotsky cooked up a nest of loops surrounding a single awful statement that filled up the maximum 10 continuation lines with triple subscripts in all permutations of several variables. That statement compiled into thousands of instructions, far more than a naively written compiler would have produced. doug

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] arithmetic IF (was origin of string.h and ctype.h)

by Paul Winalski

On 8/16/17, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: >>> the 709 added CAS > >> It was my understanding that the 704 had this instruction too > > Yes. It's in the manual. > > (I searched in vain for an online manual. A quick trip to the > attic turned up the real thing in less time.) > > Doug > >From what I've been able to determine, FORTRAN came out shortly after the IBM 704. Undoubtedly both were under development at the same time. So the question is, was arithmetic IF put in FORTRAN to take advantage of the CAS instruction, or was CAS added to the IBM 704 instruction set to provide hardware support for arithmetic IF? Or maybe neither? According to the Wikipedia article on FORTRAN, CAS was usually not the most efficient way to implement arithmetic IF anyway. CAS takes up four words of memory and takes three cycles to execute, whereas you can do it in two words and two cycles with the transfer instructions. -Paul W.

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] arithmetic IF (was origin of string.h and ctype.h)

by Doug McIlroy

> According to the Wikipedia article on FORTRAN, CAS was usually not the > most efficient way to implement arithmetic IF anyway. CAS takes up > four words of memory and takes three cycles to execute, whereas you > can do it in two words and two cycles with the transfer instructions. Though the article's conclusion was right, its numbers were wrong. As a correct discussion of possible implementations of arithmetic-IF would be long and essentially off topic, I have chopped most of it out of the article. doug

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h

by Doug McIlroy

>> the 709 added CAS > It was my understanding that the 704 had this instruction too Yes. It's in the manual. (I searched in vain for an online manual. A quick trip to the attic turned up the real thing in less time.) Doug

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h

by Paul McJones

On Sun, 13 Aug 2017, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Sat, 12 Aug 2017, Steve Johnson wrote: > >> A little Googling shows that the IF I mentioned was called the >> "arithmetic IF". > > Ah yes. It was in FORTRAN II, as I recall. It turns out the original FORTRAN (manual published in October 1956; code first shipped around April 1957) included the arithmetic IF as well as the assigned and computed GOTO statements — see chapter 4 of this manual: J.W. Backus, R.J. Beeber, S. Best, R. Goldberg, H.L. Herrick, R.A. Hughes, L.B. Mitchell, R.A. Nelson, R. Nutt, D. Sayre, P.B. Sheridan, H. Stern, I. Ziller. The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 EDPM : Programmer's Reference Manual. Applied Science Division and Programming Research Department, International Business Machines Corporation, October 15, 1956, 51 pages. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/704/704_FortranProgRefMan_Oct56.pdf (For more on the original FORTRAN compiler, see http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/.)

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h

by Paul McJones

On Tue, 15 Aug 2017, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: >> On Mon, 14 Aug 2017, Paul Winalski wrote: >> >> [ Ye olde 704 ] >> >>> TMP (transfer on plus) >> > That's rather an odd mnemonic… Actually, the 704 manual of operation gives the mnemonic as TPL: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/704/24-6661-2_704_Manual_1955.pdf

7 years, 9 months

origin of string.h and ctype.h

by Doug McIlroy

Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> asked this question (not on tuhs). It highlights some less well known contributors to research Unix. > I'm trying to find out who came up with strcmp and the idea of > returning -1,0,1 for a string comparison. I can see that it's not in > my V6 manual but is in V7. Don't see anything in Algol, PL/I, BCPL, or B The -1,0,1 return from comparisons stems from the interface of qsort, which was written by Lee McMahon. As far as I know, the interface for the comparison-function parameter originated with him, but conceivably he borrowed it from some other sort utility. The negative-zero-positive convention for the return value encouraged (and perhaps was motivated by) this trivial comparison function for integers int compar(a,b) { return(a-b); } This screws up on overflow, so cautious folks would write it with comparisons. And -1,0,1 were the easiest conventional values to return: int compar(a,b) { if(a<b) return(-1); if(a>b) return(1); return(0); } qsort was in v2. In v3 a string-comparison routine called "compar" appeared, with a man page titled "string comparison for sort". So the convention was established early on. Compar provided the model for strcmp, one of a package of basic string operations that came much later, in v7, under the banner of string.h and ctype.h. These packages were introduced at the urging of Nils-Peter Nelson, a good friend of the Unix lab, who was in the Bell Labs comp center. Here's the story in his own words. I wrote a memo to dmr with some suggestions for additions to C. I asked for the str... because the mainframes had single instructions to implement them. I know for sure I had a blindingly fast implementation of isupper, ispunct, etc. I had a table of length 128 integers for the ascii character set; I assigned bits for upper, lower, numeric, punct, control, etc. So ispunct(c) became #define PUNCT 0400 return(qtable[c]&PUNCT) instead of if(c==':' || c ==';' || ... [or switch(c) { default: return 0; case ':': case ';': ... return 1; } MDM] dmr argued people could easily write their own but when I showed him my qtable was 20 times faster he gave in. I also asked for type logical which dmr implemented as unsigned, which was especially useful when bitfields were implemented (a 2 bit int would have values -2, -1, 0, 1 instead of 0, 1, 2, 3). I requested a way to interject assembler, which became asm() (yes, a bad idea).

7 years, 9 months

further off topic: Fortran was OK

by Charles H. Sauer

TL;DR - I learned procedural programming in Fortran, wrote essentially the same queueing network solution algorithms and simulator in Fortran, then PL/I, then Pascal. For those purposes, PL/I seemed best, but Fortran was OK. (With Fortran and PL/I) the critical issue was to avoid undesirable constructs of the language. When I got started with procedural programming at U.T. Austin C.S. in 1971, the dominant machine and language was CDC 6600 Fortran. For my dissertation I needed to write a queueing network simulator to attempt to validate approximate numerical methods I developed. Though by then Pascal was an option, Fortran seemed expedient. In 1975 I joined IBM Yorktown and was asked to dramatically enhance my simulator. It became the core of the “Research Queueing Package” (http://web.archive.org/web/20130627040507/http://www.research.ibm.com/comps…) For the first year or so, I continued to use Fortran. From my perspective, the biggest problems weren’t the bad features, which I could avoid, but the lack of more natural control structures, pointers, and something like structs. My managers lamented that I wasn’t using PL/I. I spent a couple of weeks crafting a SNOBOL program to successfully translate the Fortran to PL/I. For the next decade plus, RESQ development was in PL/I (even after I left Yorktown and subsequently left IBM). While writing Computer Systems Performance Modeling (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0131651757/0596-2808191-282542) I wanted to illustrate the analysis, algorithms, and simulation concepts developed with RESQ, but be careful not to take anything directly from RESQ. So I wrote everything for the book in PASCAL. For a variety of reasons, I remember much preferring PL/I over Fortran and Pascal. The Pascal development environments I used weren’t as productive as the PL/I environments. Fortran was missing very useful constructs. But Fortran was OK, in my experience. -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com <mailto:sauer@technologists.com> fax: +1.512.346.5240 web: http://technologists.com/sauer/ <http://technologists.com/sauer/> Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h

by Johnny Billquist

On 2017-08-13 19:24, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > On Sat, 12 Aug 2017, Steve Johnson wrote: >> A little Googling shows that the IF I mentioned was called the >> "arithmetic IF". > Ah yes. It was in FORTRAN II, as I recall. Still there in FORTRAN 77. >> There was also a Computed GOTO that branched to one of N labels >> depending on the value of the expression. > I think that was still in FORTRAN IV? Still there in FORTRAN 77. >> And an Assigned GOTO whose main use, as I remember, was to allow for >> error recovery when a subroutine failed... > A real ugly statement; you assigned a statement number to a variable, then > did a sort of indirect GOTO (or did the compiler recognise "GOTO I")? The compiler recognize "GOTO I". And I have to be assigned to a statement number (label). It has to be an integer variable, and when you assign it to a label, you cannot do any arithmetic with it anymore. And you assign it with a special statement. Thus, it can be used to store what label to jump to, but you cannot use arithmetic to set what it should jump to. > How those poor devils ever debugged their code with such monstrous > constructions I'll never know. It's actually not that hard. All this stuff is fairly simple to deal with. The real horror in FORTRAN is EQUIVALENCE, which can give C a fair fight for real horror stories. But of course, bad programmers can mess things up beyond belief in any language. (And I never went beyond FORTRAN 77, so I don't know how current versions look like. I stayed with PDP-11s (well, still do), and nothing newer than FORTRAN 77 exists there. :-) ) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

7 years, 9 months

Slightly [OT]: 12 year old bug quashed by debian

by Ian Zimmerman

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=401792 I think this qualifies as history :-) At least for me personally, the last 12 years feel like a lifetime. It is significant that so far the report has not been ported forward to a newer emacs version (as it had been previously from 21 to 24). I have no newer version installed so I cannot check but I bet the bug is still present. Maybe someone else on the list can check? -- Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet.

7 years, 9 months

Off-topic: any logic designers here?

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, sorry for this off-topic posting. I just came across this series of videos where a guy built a CPU out of 7400 series chips on a breadboard: https://eater.net/8bit/ Anyway, I thought it would be fun to do something similar but with a bigger address space and as few chips as I could get away with. I've got a design that works in Logisim, but I've never actually built anything before with real chips. So, if there's someone on the list who could quickly look at what I've done and point out problems or gotchas (or indeed, what ROM/RAM chips to use), that would be great! The design so far: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/eeprom_cpu Thanks in advance, Warren

7 years, 10 months

SVR 3.2

by Tom Manos

Hi all, Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask... I started my home UNIX hobby in the mid-1980's with Microport SVR2 on Intel 286. With a couple of modems I started a public access UNIX system in Hampton Roads, VA. That system graduated to SVR3.0, 3.1, 3.2 on 386, and finally 4.2 with 4 modems running on an AST 4-port card on 486. That was about 1992 when I started an ISP using SVR4.2. That ISP, also in Hampton Roads, grew quite large. We were in 100 cities and partnered with newspapers and managed their content on the brand new web. By then we had graduated to large Alpha systems and Sun Enterprise. Now I'm all grown up and and experiencing a 2nd childhood. I run SVR4.2MP here on a real dual processor Pentium system, but I'd like to get back to SVR3.2 on period hardware, and later to r2. My problem is I don't have a copy and don't know where to find one. Do any of you happen to have a diskette (or disk image) set you can part with? Ideally I'd like a development system and networking. But I've always been an optimist :) I'm happy to pay reasonable fees. Tom

7 years, 10 months

Photo of some Unix greats

by Dave Horsfall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Bellovin#/media/File:Usenix84_1.jpg Dennis Ritchie, Steve Bellovin, Eric Allman, Andrew Hume (I know him), Don Seeley, Mike Karels, Clem Cole... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 10 months

SYSVR2,3,4

by Tom Manos

Thanks for the replies! I figured that like other lists I frequent, most here would be BSDish folk. Glad to know there are others with commercial AT&T experience. I know r2 has no networking and used UUCP extensively back when. I'll be using it for local transfer along with Kermit. My particular sickness requires me to run these operating systems on mostly period hardware. My SVR4 runs on all period stuff except I use SCSI2SD for the disk. Old disks are becoming hard to find and expensive, and I really don't want to be playing with MFM or RLL anymore. I'll likely try to find some kind of substitute. I know they are out there. I think r3.2 supported SCSI, so I should be ok there. Tom

7 years, 10 months

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TUHS