TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

20 participants
6516 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Random832 > "a stream consisting of a serialized sequence of all of whatever > information would have been supplied to/by the calls to the special > function" seems like a universal solution at the high level. Yes, and when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything look like a nail. Noel

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Nick Downing > Programming is actually an addiction. _Can be_ an addition. A lot of people are immune... :-) > What makes it addictive to a certain type of personality is that little > rush of satisfaction when you try your code and it *works*... ... It was > not just the convenience and productivity improvements but that the > 'hit' was coming harder and faster. Joe Weizenbaum wrote about the addiction of programming in his famous book "Computer Power and Human Reason" (Chapter 4, "Science and the Compulsive Programmer"). He attributes it to the sense of power one gets, working in a 'world' where things do exactly what you tell them. There might be something to that, but I suspect your supposition is more likely. > This theory is well known to those who design slot machines and other > forms of gambling Oddly enough, he also analogizes to gamblers! Noel

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] DEC Wars

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ron Natalie" > I was thinking about Star Wars this morning and various parodies of it > (like Ernie Foss's Hardware Wars) The best one ever, I thought, was Mark Crispin's "Software Wars". (I have an actual original HAKMEM!) > I rememberd the old DEC WARS. I seem to vaguely recall a multi-page samizdat comic book of this name? Or am I mis-remembering its name? Does this ring any bells for anyone? Noel

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] X, Suntools, and the like

by Nick Downing

I realized after writing that I was being slightly unfair since one valid use case that DOES work correctly is something like: ssh -X <some host> <command that uses X> This is occasionally handy, although the best use case I can think of is running a browser on some internet-facing machine so as to temporarily change your IP address, and this use case isn't exactly bulletproof since at least google chrome will look for a running instance and hand over to it (despite that instance having a different DISPLAY= setting). Nevertheless my point stands which is that IMO a programmatic API (either through .so or .dll linkage, or through ioctls or dedicated syscalls) should be the first resort and anything else fancy such as remoting, domain specific languages, /proc or fuse type interfaces, whatever, should be done through extra layers as appropriate. You shouldn't HAVE to use them. cheers, Nick On Mar 15, 2017 9:15 PM, "Tim Bradshaw" <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote: On 15 Mar 2017, at 01:13, Nick Downing <downing.nick(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > But the difficulty with X Windows is that the remoting layer is always there, even though it is almost completely redundant today. It's redundant if you don't ever use machines which you aren't physically sitting next to and want to run any kind of graphical tool run on them. I do that all the time. --tim

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Tim Bradshaw > I don't know about other people, but I think the whole dope thing is why > computer people tend *not* to be hippies in the 'dope smoking' sense. I > need to be *really awake* to write reasonably good code ... our drugs > of choice are stimulants not depressants. Speak for yourself! :-) (Then again, I have wierd neuro-chemistry - I have modes where I have a large over-sppply of natural stimulant... :-) My group (which included Prof. Jerry Salzter, who's about as straight an arrow as they make) was remarkably tolerant of my, ah, quirks... I recall at one point having a giant tank of nitrous under the desk in my office - which they boggled at, but didn't say anything about! ;-) Noel

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] DEC Wars

by David

"Two Bacco, here, my Bookie.” Awesome. David > Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2017 21:26:16 -0400 > From: "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> > To: <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> > Subject: [TUHS] DEC Wars > Message-ID: <001d01d2a374$77e02dc0$67a08940$(a)ronnatalie.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > I was thinking about Star Wars this morning and various parodies of it (like > Ernie Foss's Hardware Wars) and I rememberd the old DEC WARS. Alas when I > tried to post it, it was too big for the listserv. So here's a link for > your nostalgic purposes. I had to find one that was still in its > fixed-pitch glory complete with the ASCII-art title. > > > > http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/decwars.txt >

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Steffen Nurpmeso > This "We owe it all to the Hippies" Well, yes and no. Read "Hackers". There wasn't a tremendous overlap between the set of 'nerds' (specifically, computer nerds) and 'hippies', especially in the early days. Not that the two groups were ideologically opposed, or incompatible, or anything like that. Just totally different. Later on, of course, there were quite a few hackers who were also 'hippies', to some greater or lesser degree - more from hackers taking on the hippie vibe, than the other way around, I reckon. (I think that to be a true computer nerd, you have to start down that road pretty early on, and with a pretty severe commitment - so I don't think a _lot_ of hippied turned into hackers. Although I guess the same thing, about starting early, is true of really serious musicians.) > "The real legacy of the 60s generation is the Computer Revolution" Well, there is something to that (and I think others have made this observation). The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that generation - including the computer nerds/hackers. Now, the hackers may have had a larger, impact, long-term, than the hippies did - but in some sense a lot of hippie ideals are reflected in the stuff a lot of hackers built: today's computer revolution can be seen as hippie idealism filtered through computer nerds... But remember things like this, from the dust-jacket of the biography of Prof. Licklider: "More than a decade will pass before personal computers emerge from the garages of Silicon Valley, and a full thirty years before the Internet explosion of the 1990s. The word computer still has an ominous tone, conjuring up the image of a huge, intimidating device hidden away in an over-lit, air-conditioned basement, relentlessly processing punch cards for some large institution: _them_. Yet, sitting in a nondescript office in McNamara's Pentagon, a quiet ... civilian is already planning the revolution that will change forever the way computers are perceived. Somehow, the occupant of that office ... has seen a future in which computers will empower individuals, instead of forcing them into rigid conformity. He is almost alone in his conviction that computers can become not just super-fast calculating machines, but joyful machines: tools that will serve as new media of expression, inspirations to creativity, and gateways to a vast world of online information. Now, technically Lick wasn't a hippie (he was, after all, 40 years old in 1965), and he sure didn't have a lot of hippie-like attributes - but he was, in some ways, an ideological close relative of some hippies. Noel

8 years, 2 months

more on CSTRs

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Some pointers. Warren, worth grabbing these IMHO. I will ask him if he's willing to donate whatever troff he has. Arnold > Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:47:42 -0400 (EDT) > From: Brian Kernighan <bwk(a)CS.Princeton.EDU> > To: arnold(a)skeeve.com > Subject: Re: CSTRs? > > There are a few things here: > http://www.netlib.org/cgi-bin/search.pl > but it seems to be mostly the numerical analysis ones. > > But Google reveals this one: > http://www.theobi.com/Bell.Labs/cstr/ > which seems to be all postscript. > > I have some odds and ends, like the troff manual and tutorial, > but otherwise only PDF. > > Sorry -- not much help. > > Brian > > On Wed, 22 Mar 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > > > Hi. > > > > Do you by chance happen to have copies of the CSTRs that used to be > > available at the Bell Labs web site? > > > > And/or troff source for any? The TUHS people would like to archive > > at least the Unix-related ones... > > > > Thanks, > > > > Arnold

8 years, 2 months

DEC Wars

by Ron Natalie

I was thinking about Star Wars this morning and various parodies of it (like Ernie Foss's Hardware Wars) and I rememberd the old DEC WARS. Alas when I tried to post it, it was too big for the listserv. So here's a link for your nostalgic purposes. I had to find one that was still in its fixed-pitch glory complete with the ASCII-art title. http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/decwars.txt

8 years, 2 months

Coffee

by Ron Natalie

Early on when I was consulting for what would become my company, I got stuck on a weekend to fix something with the coffee pot and a box of Entenmann's chocolate donuts. These have a coating that's kind of like wax you have to soften up in the hot coffee to be digestable. As a result of that weekend any crunch time was referred to as waxy chocolate donut time. Another crunch weekend I was working on the firmware for an esoteric digital data tape player. I would test it. Find the fault. Go to one machine running Xenix on a 286 which had the editor and the assembler. I'd then floppy it over to a DOS machine that had the EPROM burner. I then would take the eprom and stick it into the controller. The president of the company had two jobs. He was to follow behind me and refill my coffee cup and scarf up the used EPROMS and dump them into the eraser so we wouldn't run out of ones to program. For years, we were a six person company of which only me and the president drank coffee. When the one pot we made in the morning was gone, that was it for coffee. As the company got larger and there were more coffee drinkers, people would just make a new pot. This coincided with me having my office moved adjacent to the coffee maker. Every time I had a long compile or something I'd look down and see my cup was empty and I'd pop outside and get a new cup. Not surprisingly, I started to get heart palpitations. The doctor asks how much coffee I drank, and I tell her something like thirty cups a day. She tells me I may want to cut back on that. My best job was working for a friend whose company operates out of his home. He'd make espresso for me and we'd drink that (and eat his wife's excellent leftover food) until about six and then being another wine judge, we'd switch to wine. -----Original Message----- From: Tim Bradshaw [mailto:tfb@tfeb.org] Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 8:51 AM To: Ron Natalie Cc: Dave Horsfall; The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Subject: Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies? I don't know about other people, but I think the whole dope thing is why computer people tend *not* to be hippies in the 'dope smoking' sense. I need to be *really awake* to write reasonably good code (if ever I do write reasonably good code) in the same way I need to be really awake to do maths or physics. So I live on a diet of coffee and sugar and walk around twitching as a result (this is an exaggeration, but you get the idea). I have the strength of will to not use stronger stimulants (coffee is mostly self-limiting, speed not so much).

8 years, 2 months

Bell Labs Computer Science Technical Reports

by Diomidis Spinellis

I was searching today to find where the Unix pipeline spell checking method "tr | sort | uniq | comm" was first published. I found it in a document by Brian Kernighan titled "UNIX for Beginners". "The pipe mechanism lets you fabricate quite complicated operations out of spare parts already built. For example, the first draft of the spell program was (roughly) [...]" http://www.psue.uni-hannover.de/wise2014_2015/material/Unix-Beginners.pdf#p… Then my problem became properly citing the document. Searching on Google, Google Scholar, and IEEE Xplore didn't help me. In the end I found the reference in a 1993 refer file of all Bell Labs Computer Science Technical Reports I had saved from my student days. %cstr 75 %report Comp. Sci. Tech. Rep. No. 75 %keyword CSTR OBS %author B. W. Kernighan %title UNIX for Beginners %date February 1979 %journal UNIX Programmer's Manual %volume 2 %other Section 3 %date January 1979 %type techreport obsolete I couldn't find the refer file online, so I'll send a copy to Warren for archiving. However, I'm wondering whether we should/could do something to also archive the actual pages of all the Bell Labs Computer Science Technical Reports. I think some are the only authoritative primary source for many Unix-related gems and a lack of an electronic archive means they will slowly fade into non-existence. I remember we had many of those at the library of Imperial College London. Any suggestions on what we can do to archive this material? Diomidis

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] [Uucp] News readers

by Dave Horsfall

On Wed, 15 Mar 2017, Warren Toomey wrote: > On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 10:24:22AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > > Then, perhaps a better news reader. Any preferences :-) > > So far I've though of (and found) [...] After going through several readers, I ended up with "trn". Also, Alpine has a passable reader. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, PDP-8!

by Atindra Chaturvedi

Brings back memories... Back in early 1981 I worked for a shipping line in Cranford NJ in their IT department. The company had just ordered 4 new super-wide cargo ships that just fit the Panama Canal and the Chief Marine Architect came to the IT department to ask for assistance in programming a PDP-8 to write a load distribution check program so that the ship would not keel over, or break in the middle - when being loaded 12 stack high containers. Had to take into account stress and strain - mathematical algorithms. My boss called me in to talk to him and he asked " if I knew how to determine the area under a curve..." - I knew my engineering math - Simpson's rule and also FORTRAN IV and was immediately drafted. What was needed also was a graphical way of entering the data, and displaying the results optionally graphically on the screen (tty ?). My friend Wayne Rawls knew BASIC - he wrote the front end - passed me the input on a large floppy - my FORTRAN IV program ran and did the stress/strain analysis for the ship - and I passed the output back to him on the floppy that he then displayed on-screen. A lot of grinding of the floppy drives for the FORTRAN compiler - no spinning hard disks as the PDP-8 would be installed on-board ship - and in those days of A/C computer rooms would be a non-starter. It all worked well - Wayne took the PDP-8 on a ship to Norfolk to get it checked out and the company used it for many years ! Atindra. -----Original Message----- >From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> >Sent: Mar 21, 2017 5:34 PM >To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> >Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, PDP-8! > >OT, but of interest to a few people here :-) > >The venerable PDP-8 was introduced in 1965 today (or tomorrow if you're on >the wrong side of the date line). It was the first computer I ever >used, back around 1970 (I think I'd just left school and was checking out >the local University's computer department, with a view to majoring in >Computer Science (which I did)). > >-- >Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

by shawn wilson

Maybe there's a generation / technology gap here. But from history, it doesn't seem like there was much free - though most did indeed to be open - I suppose much like the VMS model. At least not until the 80s (or maybe bash predates that trend). The C language might've been free, but I wonder if there were any free compilers until gcc (hell I remember pirating Borland). Even most copies of *BSD were mainly sold on CD vs downloaded until 10 years or so ago (even though it was technically free - not including BSDi) On Mar 20, 2017 7:28 PM, "Doug McIlroy" <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: > The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that > generation - including the computer nerds/hackers. I'm not sure what hippie attributes you had in mind, but one candidate would be "free and open". In software, though, free and open was the style of the late 50s. By the hippie heyday p p

8 years, 2 months

Were all of you.. Hippies?

by Doug McIlroy

> The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that > generation - including the computer nerds/hackers. I'm not sure what hippie attributes you had in mind, but one candidate would be "free and open". In software, though, free and open was the style of the late 50s. By the hippie heyday p p

8 years, 2 months

Uucp project: more sites?

by Warren Toomey

Ok, the nascent historical uucp network now has 11 sites: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DoctorWkt/4bsd-uucp/4.3BSD/uucp.png and the build software is quite stable: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/4bsd-uucp We'd like to get a few more sites up and running. If you've ever wanted to "be" an important uucp/Usenet site, here's your chance. E-mail me! Warren

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] who invented the email attachment?

by Mary Ann Horton

I was at Berkeley until July 1981. The oldest SCCS file I have is 4/1/81 (for my dissertation project) and that was clearly my first use of it. I wasn't using SCCS in 1980 when I wrote uuencode. uuencode got SCCS-ized later when they put all of 4.xBSD under SCCS. On 2017-03-20 03:27, schily(a)schily.net wrote: > Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote: > >> I'm under the impression that shar came later in the 1980s. Google's >> archive for net.sources only goes back to 1987 (unless I'm doing it >> wrong) and clearly shar was already well established by then. >> >> Can anyone put a date on shar, or at least before/after 6/1/1980? > > BTW: do you remember why you did not check in uuencode into the SCCS? > > /*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/ > ... > Wed Jul 6 11:06:51 1988 bostic > * uuencode.c 5.6 > * uudecode.c 5.4 > written by Mark Horton; add Berkeley specific copyrights > > Wed Feb 24 20:03:58 1988 rick > * uuencode.c 5.5 > use library fread instead of rolling your own > > Mon Dec 22 14:43:09 1986 bostic > * uuencode.c 5.4 > bug report 4.1BSD/usr.bin/2 and 4.1BSD/usr.bin/3 > > Wed Apr 10 15:22:23 1985 ralph > * uudecode.c 5.3 > more changes from rick adams. > > Tue Jan 22 14:13:07 1985 ralph > * uuencode.c 5.3 > * uudecode.c 5.2 > bug fixes and changes from Rick Adams > > Mon Dec 19 15:42:38 1983 ralph > * uuencode.c 5.2 > use a reasonable mode for encoding data piped in. > > Sat Jul 2 17:57:51 1983 sam > * uuencode.c 5.1 > date and time created 83/07/02 17:57:51 by sam > > Sat Jul 2 17:57:49 1983 sam > * uudecode.c 5.1 > date and time created 83/07/02 17:57:49 by sam > /*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/ > > In special, do you know why it has been checked in by Samuel Leffler and > whether it existed before July 1983? > > Jörg

8 years, 2 months

who invented the email attachment?

by Mary Ann Horton

I'd like the opinion of this August Group. Should I make a claim to be the inventor of the email attachment? (It would go on my web site, resume, the Wikipedia page, that sort of thing.) Here's my understanding of the time line on all of this. 1. Originally, our files were all plain text and we just included them in the email message body. The ~r command in Kurt Shoen's Mail program was typical. There was no name for this, we were just emailing files. 2. In 1980, I wrote uuencode. It's stated purpose was to "encode a binary file for transmission by email". I didn't use the term "attachment". It became part of 4.0BSD and later systems, and was widely used. 3. In 1985, Lotus created cc:Mail. It eventually included attachments, using a file store method. When they added an SMTP gateway later, it used uuencode as the format. I believe cc:Mail first used the term "attachment". 4. Microsoft did the same thing with MS Mail somewhat later, possibly in the 1990s. It also used uuencode in the SMTP gateway. 5. In 1992, Nathaniel Borenstein and Ned Freed invented MIME. It had a different (and IMHO much better) way to send attachments, and it became an Internet Standard sometime later, possibly in 1996. What do you all think? Mary Ann

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] 4.3BSD help: getty ignoring modem status

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > So, DCD and CTS are being dropped, but getty (or something) isn't > responding and (presumably) sending a HUP signal to the shell. > Is there anybody with some modem or getty knowledge that can help? I know very little of 4.x, but I did write a V6 DZ driver, back in the Cenozoic or some such time period... :-) Looking at the 4.3Tahoe (which particular 4.3 version is in question here, anyway?) DZ driver: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Tahoe/usr/src/sys/vaxub… I find it hard (without further digging) to figure out how it gets from where it should discover carrier has gone away (in dzrint(), from dztimer()) to the rest of the system; they have added some linesw[] thing I don't know about. Looking at the 4.2 driver: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.2BSD/usr/src/sys/vaxuba/dz.c it seems (in the same routine) to do the right thing: gsignal(tp->t_pgrp, SIGHUP); so in that version, it's sending a SIGHUP to the whole pgroup when the carrier goes away - which should be the right thing. Noel

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX")

by Clem Cole

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 7:35 AM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote: > But the people who have spent 9-figure sums on all this > marginally-functional tin that the Unix vendors foisted on them don't > look at it that way: they just want something which is not Unix, and > which runs on cheap tin. > Fair enough -- but I think that this is really another way of describing Prof. Christiansen's disruption theory. The "lessor" technology wins over "better" technology because it's good enough. I'm curious for the Banks, in your experience - which were the UNIX vendors that were pushing 9-figure UNIX boxes. I'll guess, IBM was one of them. Maybe NCR. What HP, Sun, DEC in that bundle? > Linux is not Unix, and runs on cheap tin. > I believe that the point you are making is that "white box" PC's running a UNIX-like system - aka Linux could comes pretty close to doing what the highly touted AIX, NCR et al were doing and were "good enough" to get the job done. And that's not a statement about UNIX as much as a statement about, the WINTEL ecosystem, that Linux sat on top of and did an extremely impressive job of utilizing.

8 years, 2 months

4.3BSD help: getty ignoring modem status

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, over on the uucp project we are struggling with a problem. If a user is logged in with telnet, and they disconnect the telnet session, their shell hangs around. The next person that telnets in gets the shell. SimH, with the -a -m flags on a simulated DZ line, has these modem flags: Telnet connected: Modem Bits: DTR RTS DCD CTS DSR Telnet disconnected: Modem Bits: DTR RTS DSR So, DCD and CTS are being dropped, but getty (or something) isn't responding and (presumably) sending a HUP signal to the shell. Is there anybody with some modem or getty knowledge that can help? Thanks, Warren

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode

by Dave Horsfall

On Sun, 12 Mar 2017, William Pechter wrote: > Talk about security Remember when Shar files were sent to /bin/sh... > Often as root. > > We forget how safe we felt the environment was. Yep, which is why "unshar" came to be. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] who invented the email attachment?

by Doug McIlroy

> Should I make a claim to be the inventor of the email attachment? uuencode was critical to attaching arbitrary files, and I am sure one can find emails with uuencoded bits in them that read, "please find attached ...". But they would have said the same thing if what was being sent was source code. So attachment in that sense obviously predated uuencode. But to identify that kind of attachment with what mean by the word today is like identifying cat with tar. Doug

8 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] GNU vs BSD before the lawsuit and before Linux

by Doug McIlroy

> Many of the gnu tools started life as BSD code that was hacked on and > rebranded with the GPL. A small amount of code was likewise adopted from AT&T. Doug

8 years, 2 months

VAX SysVr2: tape /dev entries missing

by Cory Smelosky

All, Seems my SysVR2 simulation instance has at one point or another lost its /dev/mt/* and /dev/rmt/* device entries. Is there a script anywhere to regenerate these, or does anyone know the major/minor off hand for the SIMH TS device? -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects

8 years, 2 months

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

TUHS