TUHS

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6556 discussions

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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 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, 5 months

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. I have seen Gnu code likewise adopted from AT&T. Doug

8 years, 5 months

pathalias and sendmail experience?

by Warren Toomey

I know it's a long shot. Does anybody remember how to use the output of pathalias in sendmail.cf? Specifically, we have set up 4.3BSD with uucp-only e-mail, and we have a map file which pathalias digests and outputs fine. I can't find any useful documentation on putting this output into sendmail. There's part of a book in Google books, but two pages are hidden. I also threw out my old bat book ages ago. I have a PDF of Sendmail_4th_Edition_Oct_2007.pdf but it doesn't mention pathalias. Thanks in advance! Warren

8 years, 5 months

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ron Natalie" >>> I think most people will attribute the desktop metaphor to Xerox. >> Strictly speaking, to Smalltalk (from PARC) ^^^^ > I beg to differ. The Star not only pioneered the WISIWYG application > presentation PARC _was_ Xerox. The Star was a product based on the Alto, but much of the Star stuff was pioneered on the Alto. For instance, WYSIWYG was one of the modes that the Alto's Bravo editor could be run in; it definitely pre-dates the Star. > also the concept of the desktop. Depending on exactly what you mean by 'desktop', that also pre-dated the Star. I heard the multiple overlapping windows of Smalltalk (an Alto application) likened to a collection of sheets of paper on a desktop (which is where the term came from); clicking on one with the mouse brought it to the top, just like pulling a particular sheet of paper out from the ones on a physical desktop. > The whole conscept of dropping documents as icons on the desktop appears > to have orginated there. Yes, as I mentioned: >> things like Bravo, and the basic user command interface on the Alto >> [the Exec, my brain finally coughed up the name - can't find my Alto >> manual at the moment] didn't have any concept of windows/desktop The concept of having a graphical front end as the main user interface was not from the Alto, and the Alto didn't have icons either; both came later (I'll let the Lisa people and Star people argue that one out). Noel

8 years, 5 months

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ron Natalie" > I think most people will attribute the desktop metaphor to Xerox. Strictly speaking, to Smalltalk (from PARC); things like Bravo, and the basic user command interface on the Alto (I forget what its name was), didn't have any concept of windows/desktop (although Bravo did use the bitmap screen). Noel

8 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] System Economics

by Doug McIlroy

"Open" was certainly not a work heard in the Unix lab, where our lawyers made sure we knew it was a "trade secret". John Lions was brought into the lab both because we admired his work and because the lawyers wanted to reel that work back in-house. Out in the field, the trade secret was treated in many different ways. Perhaps the most extreme was MIT, whose lawyers believed it could not be adequately protected in academia and forbade its use there. I don't know what eventually broke the logjam. Doug

8 years, 5 months

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

by Norman Wilson

William Pechter: VMS source fiche was very common of sites owned by large corporations. Their IT staff used it to research bugs... and as sample code for writing their own drivers etc... ===== Indeed, I used the VMS source microfiche to learn how to handle various sorts of errors (machine checks, memory errors) better in UNIX. Stock VAX systems at the time just crashed on any error, but it turned out that many of them admitted recovery: some errors were transient, others could be ridden over by disabling some piece of the hardware. This led to an amusing event on the VAX-11/750 that at the time handled e-mail as uucp node research!. (Its internal name on our datakit node was grigg.) People noticed that the system was running slowly. I checked and discovered that the CPU itself seemed to be a bit slower. Then I checked logs and discovered that a week earlier, there had been a cache error; my new recovery code had turned off the failing half of the cache, logged the error, and forged ahead. At the next convenient time, we took the system down and ran DEC's standalone diagnostics. (Contrary to the rude stories one hears, those diags were in fact pretty thorough.) The problem didn't show up, so we booted grigg back up again, secure in the knowledge that if the problem was persistent, my code would let us know without crashing. (I don't think it ever showed up again.) We also learned to pay more attention to console messages! Norman Wilson Toronto ON

8 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] System Economics

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Do you know the time frame of the banishment? Noel any memories of what > allowed it be used? Sorry, this is something I know nothing of; it must have happened while I was still an early undergrad. The first Unix I knew of at MIT was the one in the DSSR/RTS group in LCS, which arrived (I think) roughly around the start of my sophmore year (so early '76 or so) - I have a memory of one of my friends (who was an undergrad working in that group) telling me about it, and showing it to me. (I remember being totally blown away with the way you could write a command 'foo', compile it, and jut say 'foo' to run it...) Actually, it may have shown up well before that - perhaps they had it well before I first saw it. Certainly by the time I showed up at LCS (fall of '77) it had already spread to CSR; they had an 11/40 with Unix on it, cloned from the DSSR system. Again, I don't know if there was any paperwork that had to happen, or if that system was already covered under whatever license the DSSR machine was under. Of course, this was all DARPA-funded work, and there may have been something there that allowed it. We certainly passed Unix source around with other DARPA projects (e.g. at BBN) without, AFAICR, worrying much about paperwork. > we had a sign a document with the university stating something that we > understood it was AT&Ts IP I don't recall anything like that at MIT; maybe in the very early days, there was something, but certainly not by '77. If it's important to know what happened, I can ask (e.g. Prof. Ward, head of DSSR). Noel

8 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Random832 > I think he means the fact that MIME specifies the type of the main > message body (not just attachments), so you can have a message with *no* > text parts. Right, that I could discern; what I couldn't get with an definitiveness was _why_ that was particularly a problem. (Another possibility, other than the one I previously gave, is perhaps that there simply is no text part, which one can peruse, ignoring the rest?) Noel

8 years, 5 months

"Xenix 2.2.3c Restoration" articles by Michael Casadevall

by Josh Good

Hello. Perhaps you haven't been made aware yet of these series of --IMHO-- very interesting articles about Xenix 386, entitled "Xenix 2.2.3c Restoration", by Michael Casadevall, a.k.a. NCommander at the geek site https://soylentnews.org (of which he is one of the founders): Part 1: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/03/03/1620222 Part 2: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/03/07/1632251 Part 3: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/03/11/2014253 I wish Bela Lubkin, ex- kernel engineer at "classic" SCO, would have joined the list to comment on those articles and pour some light into the more obscure points. I sent an email to Bela some time ago telling him about the TUHS mailing list, but I didn't hear back from him. -- Josh Good

8 years, 5 months

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

by Nick Downing

Hmm yes although perhaps controversially I see this as a bad feature and one area where Microsoft actually gets it right. Despite the old issues of "DLL Hell" which have largely been resolved by standardizing all DLLs and in newer code by using assemblies... you have to admit that they provide a direct, local API (indeed ABI) to every subsystem you would want to use, here I am thinking of GDI, but also lots of things that would require ioctls (CD burning, say) or domain specific languages (such as Postscript) on Linux. This makes it really easy for Windows developers to use the feature and the interface is fast and reliable. And where a domain specific language is actually NEEDED (printing to a Postscript printer on Windows, or RDP-type desktop remoting etc) it is easy to insert a proxy DLL or object or device driver that does the necessary scrambling and unscrambling. It is not so easy to go the other way as it requires extensive emulation (think of ghostscript driving my Canon non-PS printer). I wrote about this issue earlier using some examples like an "ESC [" capable terminal as opposed to a memory mapped local console, or an "AT" capable external modem as opposed to an internal "WinModem" that just exposes its D/A and A/D converters with minimal signal processing and needs the host to do the heavy lifting. Same thing applies to a graphics terminal. Of course it should be programmed at a high level by specifying shapes, etc to be drawn, regions to be blitted, clipping regions and pens etc, a font manager, and it should be possible to load bitmaps, etc, into its offscreen memory and/or create offscreen drawing buffers, if these features are used correctly by applications then it is of course trivial to add a remoting proxy driver similar to Microsoft's RDP, or indeed X Windows. But the difficulty with X Windows is that the remoting layer is always there, even though it is almost completely redundant today. This hurts performance but more importantly it requires extensive workarounds as you described, which add enormous extra complexity and in my view sharply increase the learning curve and setup costs. Having said that, Xlib does offer a decent API/ABI so if we just code to that it's not TOO bad, I would like to see the rest of it deprecated though, and vendors encouraged to implement Xlib with whatever backend seems appropriate. The ridiculous thing here is that X setup is so damn convoluted and incestuously tied in with the window, session and display managers, THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO RUN X REMOTELY ANYMORE AND HAVE A FULL FEATURED DESKTOP, I have tried many times and have had various tries at thin clients and terminal serving in my home network and it basically fell over because environments like Gnome do not support multiple sessions of the same home directory, not to mention numerous other problems that mean if you login remotely you basically just get a blank screen with a default X cursor and maybe a context menu that can run an Xterm. Bleh! In my experience you have to use a remoter like VNC and guess what that does, tricks X into thinking it's running locally and then intervenes further up in the display stack to do the actual remoting. It's a complete dog's breakfast and frankly could never compete with Windows in any realistic way. I use it because it is the least bad of the available options (no way am I having advertising in my start menu and my computer loaded with bloatware and spyware before I even open the box, and no way am I putting up with vague messages like "Something went wrong" or "Windows is making some checks to optimize your experience" or whatnot), and because my computer is so fast despite being 6yrs old that X only feels borderline sluggish, i.e. is tolerable. But so much better would be possible with a redesign. CUPS is also a dogs breakfast and hugely unreliable, Windows GDI printing just wins hands down for all the same reasons. End rant. Nick On Mar 15, 2017 5:49 AM, "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: Nice thing about X was that it would talk to remote displays. I still remember sitting in the Pentagon demonstrating that the Suntools screen lock wasn't particularly secure. Then there was NeWS. This was Gosling's first attempt at a deployable language. However PostScript (even with Owen Densmore's class extensions), while a reasonable intermediary language is really sucky to actually develop. Java was a bit more refined. Of course, lots of things either implement X under the native window system or backdoor X with local extensions. We got around doing high frame rate image work on X via the SharedMemoryExtension and the ability to flip buffers on the retrace interval (both extensions, but commonly implemented by many servers).

8 years, 5 months

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TUHS