I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the timing and rationale for
the introduction of “word erase” functionality to the kernel terminal
driver. My surface skim earlier leads me to believe it came to Unix
with 4BSD, but it was not reincorporated into 8th Edition or later,
nor did it make it to Plan 9 (which did incorporate ^U for the "line
kill" command). TOPS-20 supports it via the familiar ^W, but I'm not
sure about other PDP-10 OSes (Lars?). Multics does not support it.
VMS does not support it.
What was the proximal inspiration? The early terminal drivers seem to
use the Multics command editing suite (`#` for erase/backspace, `@`
for line kill), though at some point that changed, one presumes as
TTYs fell out of favor and display terminals came to the fore.
- Dan C.
I've been doing some research on Lisp machines and came across an
interesting tidbit: there was Chaosnet support in Unix v8, e.g.
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/sys/chunix/chaos.c
Does anyone remember why that went in? My first guess would be for
interoperability with the Symbolics users at Bell Labs (see Bromley's
"Lisp Lore", 1986), but that's just speculation.
john
Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link to
https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.
I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
cscope on their projects or anything about its development.
-Marcus.
> You can always read Josh Fisher's book on the "Bulldog" compiler, I
> believe he did this work at Yale.
Are you thinking of John Ellis’s thesis:
Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures
John R. Ellis
February 1985
http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf
Fisher was Ellis’s advisor. The thesis was also published in ACM’s Doctoral Dissertation Award:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050340/bulldog/
I believe Ellis still has a tape with his thesis software on it, but I don’t know if he’s been able to read it.
Hello Everyone
One of polish academic institutions was getting rid of old IT-related stuff
and they were kind enough to give me all Solaris related stuff, including
lots (and i mean lots) of installation CD-ROMS, documentations, manuals,
and some solaris software, mostly compilers and scientific stuff.
If anyone would be interested feel free to contact me and i'd be happy to
share - almost everything is in more than a few copies and I have no
intention of keeping everything for myself.
Currently all of the stuff is located in Warsaw, Poland.
Best regards,
mjb
--
Maciej Jan Broniarz
> [Tex's] oversetting of lines caused by the periodic failure of the
> paragraph-justification algorithms drove me nuts.
Amen. If Tex can't do what it thinks is a good job, it throws a fit
and violates the margin, hoping to force a rewrite. Fortunately,
one can shut off the line-break algorithm and simply fill greedily.
The command to do so is \sloppy--an ironic descriptor of text
that looks better, albeit not up to Tex's discriminating standard.
Further irony: when obliged to write in Tex, I have resorted to
turning \sloppy mode on globally.
Apologies for airing an off-topic pet peeve,
Doug
I happened upon
https://old.gustavobarbieri.com.br/trabalhos-universidade/mc722/lowney92mul…
and I am curious as to whether any of the original Multiflow compilers
survive. I had never heard of them before now, but the fact that they were
licensed to so many influential companies makes me think that there might
be folks on this list who know of its history.
-Henry
ACPI has 4-byte identifiers (guess why!), but I just wondered, writing some
assembly:
is it globl, not global, or glbl, because globl would be a one-word
constant on the PDP-10 (5 7-bit bytes)?
Not entirely off track, netbsd at some point (still does?) ran on the
PDP-10.
> "BI" fonts can, it seems, largely be traced to the impact
> of PostScript
There was no room for BI on the C/A/T. It appeared in
troff upon the taming of the Linotron 202, just after v7
and five years before PostScript.
> Seventh Edition Unix shipped a tc(1) command to help
> you preview your troff output with that device before you
> spent precious departmental money sending it to the
> actual typesetter.
Slight exaggeration. It wasn't money, It was time and messing
with film cartridges, chemicals, and wet prints. You could buy a
lot of typesetter film and developer for the price of a 4014.
Doug
yeah that was the one that id' first mentioned.
Although I was more so interested in when/where the 386 PCC came from
Seems at best all those sources are locked away.
____
| From: Angus Robinson
| To: Jason Stevens
| Cc: TUHS main list
| Sent: March 25, 2024 09:17 AM
| Subject: Re: [TUHS] 386 PCC
|
|
| Is this it ?
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20071017025542/http://pcc.l
| udd.ltu.se/
|
| Kind Regards,
| Angus Robinson
|
|
| On Sun, Mar 24, 2024 at 2:13?AM Jason Stevens <
| jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
|
|
| I'd been on this whole rabbithole exploration thing of
| those MIT PCC 8086
| uploads that have been on the site & on bitsavers, it
| had me wondering is
| there any version of PCC that targeted the 386?
|
| While rebuilding all the 8086 port stuff, and MIT
| PC/IP was fun, it'd be
| kind of interesting to see if anything that ancient
| could be forced to work
| with a DOS Extender..
|
| I know there was the Anders Magnusson one in 2007,
| although the site is now
| offline. But surely there must have been another one
| between 1988/2007?
|
| Thanks!
|
|
|
|
I'd been on this whole rabbithole exploration thing of those MIT PCC 8086
uploads that have been on the site & on bitsavers, it had me wondering is
there any version of PCC that targeted the 386?
While rebuilding all the 8086 port stuff, and MIT PC/IP was fun, it'd be
kind of interesting to see if anything that ancient could be forced to work
with a DOS Extender..
I know there was the Anders Magnusson one in 2007, although the site is now
offline. But surely there must have been another one between 1988/2007?
Thanks!
Not that I'm looking for drama but any idea what happened?
Such a shame it just evaporated.
____
| From: arnold(a)skeeve.com
| To: tuhs@tuhs.org;jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com
| Cc:
| Sent: March 25, 2024 08:46 AM
| Subject: Re: [TUHS] 386 PCC
|
|
| Jason Stevens <jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
|
| > I know there was the Anders Magnusson one in 2007,
| although the site is now
| > offline.
|
| A mirror of that work is available at
| https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/pcc-revived.
| It's current as of the last time the main site was
| still online,
| back in the fall of 2023.
|
| Magnusson has more than once said he's working to get
| things back
| online, but nothing has happened yet. I check weekly.
|
| FWIW,
|
| Arnold
|
Hi Everyone,
I’m cleaning the office and I have the following free books available first-come, first-served (just pay shipping).
“Solaris Internals.” Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro. 2007 Second Edition. 1020pp hardbound. (2 copies)
“Sun Performance and Tuning - Java and the Internet.“ Adrian Cockcroft and Richard Pettit. 1998 Second Edition. 587pp softbound.
“DTrace - Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, MacOSX, and FreeBSD.” Brendan Gregg and Jim Mauro. 2011. 1115 pp softbound. (2 copies)
“Oracle Database 11g Release 2 High Availability.” Scott Jesse, Bill Burton, & Bryan Vongray. 2011 Second Edition. 515pp softbound.
“Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration - The Complete Reference.” Michael Jang, Harry Foxwell, Christine Tran, & Alan Formy-Duval. 2013. 582pp softbound. (12 copies). NOTE, this is an older edition not the one covering 11.2.
“Strategies for Real-Time System Specification.” Derek Hatley & Imtiaz Pirbhai. 1988. 386pp hardbound.
“Mathematica.” Stephen Wolfram. 1991 Second Edition. 961pp hardbound. (Anyone want to save this from the landfill?)
Please send me mail off-list with your name and address and I’ll let you know shipping cost.
I expect to have additional books later this year.
Regards,
Stephen
> From: Rich Salz <rich.salz(a)gmail.com <mailto:rich.salz@gmail.com>>
>> Don't forget the Imagen's
>>
>
> What, no Dover "call key operator"? :) (It was a Xerox product based on
> their 9700 copier.)
Actually, it was based on a Xerox 7000:
"The Dover is strip-down [sic] Xerox 7000 Reduction Duplicator. All optical system, electronics, contact relays, top harness, control console and related components are eliminated from the Xerox 7000. The paper feeder, paper transports, engines, solenoid, paper path sensing switches and related components are not disturbed. …"
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/dover/dover.pdf
Evenin' all...
I have a vague recollection that /dev/tty8 was the console in Edition 5
(we only used it briefly until Ed 6 appeared), but cannot find a reference
to it; lots of stuff about Penguin/OS though...
Something to do with 0-7 being the mux, so "8" was left (remember that
/dev/tty and /dev/console didn't exist back then), mayhaps?
Thanks.
-- Dave
> There was lawyerly concern about the code being stolen.
Not always misplaced. There was a guy in Boston who sold Unix look-alike
programs. A quick look at the binary revealed perfect correlation with our
C source. Coincidentally, DEC had hired this person as a consultant in
connection with cross-licensing negotiations with AT&T. Socializing at
the end of a day's negotiations, our lawyer somehow managed to turn the
conversation to software piracy. He discussed a case he was working on,
and happened to have some documents about it in his briefcase. He pulled
out a page disassembled binary and a page of source code and showed them to
the consultant.
After a little study, the consultant confidently opined that the binary was
obviously compiled from that source. "Would it surprise you," the lawyer
asked, "if I told you that this is yours and that is ours?" The consultant
did not attend the following day's meeting.
Doug
In another thread there's been some discussion of Coherent. I just came
across this very detailed history, just posted last month. There's much
more to it than I knew.
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-mark-williams-company
Marc
VP/ix ran on both System III and UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2.
I do still have a copy of the VP/ix Environment documentation
and the diskettes for the software. I have the "Introduction to the
VP/ix Environment" for further reference for interested folks.
Also found some information about VP/ix on these web pages:
1.
https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/11/29/fun-with-vp-ix-under-interactive-unix-s…
2.
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/interactive_systems_is_adding_to_vpix_wit…
3.
https://manualzz.com/doc/7267897/interactive-unix-system-v-386-r3.2-v4.1---…
It's been a long time since I looked at this.
Heinz
On 3/13/2024 8:53 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Thanks. Fair enough. You mentioned PC/IX as /ISC's System III/
>
> I'm not sure I ever ran ISC's System III port—only the V.3 port -
> which was the basis for their ATT, Intel, and IBM work and later sold
> directly. I'm fairly sure ISCalso called that port PC/IX, but they
> might have added something to say with 386 in the name—I've forgotten.
> [Heinz probably can clarify here]. Anyway, this is likely the source
> of my thinking. FWIW: The copy of PC/IX for the 386 (which I still
> have on a system I have not booted in ages) definitely has VPIX.
> ᐧ
>
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 11:28 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> @Clem Cole <mailto:clemc@ccc.com>,
>
> I don't remember what it was. But, the XT had an 8088, so
> certainly no 386 technology was involved.
>
> Marc
>
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 8:38 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
>
> @Marc
>
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 1:18 PM Marc Rochkind
> <mrochkind(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At a trade show, I bought a utility that allowed me to run
> PC-DOS under PC/IX. I'm sure it wasn't a virtual machine.
> Rather, it just swapped back and forth. (Guessing a bit
> there.)
>
> Hmm ... you sure it was not either VPIX or DOS/Merge -- ISC
> built VPIX in cooperation with the Phoenix Tech folks for
> PC/IX. I always bought a copy with it, but it may have been an
> option. LCC did DOS/Merge originally as part of the AIX work
> for IBM and would become a core part of OS/2 Warp IIRC. Both
> Merge and VPIX had some rough edges but certainly worked fine
> for DOS 3.3 programs. The issue tended to be Win and DOS
> graphics-based programs/games that played fast and loose,
> bypassing the DOS OS interface and accessing the HW directly.
> For instance, I never got the flight simulator (Air War over
> Germany) for Dad's WWII plane (P-47 Thunderbolt) to run under
> either (i.e., only under DOS directly on the HW. FWIW: In that
> mode, Dad said the simulator flew a lot like how he remembered
> it).
>
> Both Merge and VPIX used the 386 VM support and a bunch of
> work in the core OS. Heinz would have to fill us in here.
> The version of the 386 port ISC delivered to AT&T and Intel
> only had the kernel changes to allow the VM support for VPIX
> to be linked in, but it was not there. IICR (and I'm not
> sure I am) is that Merge could run on PC/IX also, but you had
> to replace a couple of kernel modules. It certainly would
> work on the AT&T and Intel versions.
> ᐧ
>
>
>
> --
> /My new email address is mrochkind(a)gmail.com/
>
Did some reading today, curious on the current state of things with AT&T's UNIX copyright genealogy. The series of events as I understand it are:
AT&T partners with Novell for the Univel initiative.
Novell then acquires System V and USL from AT&T.
Novell sells UNIX System V's source to SCO, but as the courts have ruled, not the copyright.
Novell gets purchased by Microfocus.
Microfocus gets purchased by OpenText Corporation.
Does this make OpenText the current copyright holders of the commercial UNIX line from AT&T.
What got me looking a bit closer into this is curiosity regarding how the opening of Solaris and the CDDL may impact publication of UNIX code between System III and SVR4. I then felt the need to refresh on who might be the current copyright holder and this is where the trail has lead me.
My understanding too is that Sun's release under the CDDL set the precedent that other sub-licencees of System V codebases are also at liberty to relicense their codebases, but this may be reading too far into it. There's also the concern that the ghost of SCO will continue to punish anyone else who tries with costly-but-doomed-to-fail litigation. Have there been any happenings lately with regards to getting AT&T UNIX post-PDP-11 opened up more in the world? Reading up a bit on OpenText's business, they don't seem like they're invested in the OS world, seems that their primary sector is content management. Granted, there's certainly under-the-radar trading of bits and pieces, but it would be nice to have some more certainty about what can happen out in the open.
- Matt G.
Hi all,
I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
modern computing environment. I know that TUHS isn't really the right
place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is? I've made
significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
to a community if one exists. Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
-Henry
Hi all (and TUHS),
The Third Edition rand(III) page [1] ends with
WARNING The author of this routine has been writing
random-number generators for many years and has
never been known to write one that worked.
My understanding is that Ken wrote the rand implementation.
But I'm curious about the origin of this warning.
I had assumed that Ken wrote it as a combination warning+joke,
but Rob suggested that to him it didn't sound like Ken and
perhaps Doug or Dennis had written it. Does anyone remember?
Separately, I am trying to find out what the very first
Unix rand implementation was. In the TUHS archives,
the incomplete V2 sources contain a reference to srand
in cmd/bas0.s [2], but there is no definition in the tree.
The V3 man pages list it, but as far as I can tell full
library sources do not appear in the TUHS archives
until the V6 snapshot. The V6 rand [3] is:
rand:
mov r1,-(sp)
mov ranx,r1
mpy $13077.,r1
add $6925.,r1
mov r1,r0
mov r0,ranx
bic $100000,r0
mov (sp)+,r1
rts pc
Perhaps this is the original rand as well? It is hard to imagine
a much simpler one, other than perhaps removing the addition,
but doing so would create a sequence of only odd numbers.
From the man page description it sounds like this has to be the
original generator, perhaps with different constants.
Thanks!
Best,
Russ
[1]
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V3/man/man3/r…
[2]
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V2/cmd/bas0.s
[3]
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V6/usr/source…
I don't know about the PiSCSI in particular. For the SCSI2SD, if you have
the drive properly defined in the controller you can just use dd to write
the image to the SD card at the offset where the drive is defined. If the
drive is the first thing on the card, dd if=image of=drive conv=notrunc
will do what you want.
-Henry
On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:12, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote:
> I’ll have to see about pulling stuff out this weekend and maybe move
> forward.
>
> Still am missing one part — how to get an external SCSI emulator to the
> point where I can get a disk image to it.
>
> Is there a way to move the disk created in TME onto an emulator?? (BTW,
> I’ll probably be using the PiSCSI for this, since I want to have multiple
> images out there, as well as a SD drive so I don’t chance losing stuff
> after getting it all set up.
>
> Earl
>
> On Mar 13, 2024, at 6:09 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The emulation of proper tape drive records is present in TME - see this
> fragment from the setup file that I have to install SunOS 2:
>
> ## power up the machine:
> ##
> # uncomment this line to automatically power up the machine when
> # tmesh starts:
> #
> command tape0 load sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/01 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/02
> sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/03 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/04 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/05
> sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/06 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/07 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/08
> sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/09 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/10
> command mainbus0 power up
>
> Let me know if you need more of a walkthrough, I'd have to get NetBSD
> running in a VM as I haven't worked with this in a long time, but I'm sure
> it still works.
>
> -Henry
>
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:04, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote:
>
>> I had old instructions to do this but getting TME running was a bit
>> quirky. And the package had lost most of it’s support.
>> (I did just go out and find that some folks have somewhat resurrected
>> it…)
>>
>> I have the install manual for 3.5 (
>> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.5/800-2089-10A_Release_3.5_Manual_…
>> )
>> And did find this about TME Now ( https://pkgsrc.se/wip/tme )
>> And these instructions (which from the link before this page indicated as
>> of 2019 they still worked
>> http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/sun3-150-nbsd.html )
>>
>> That would get me “close” if I could somehow write to an emulated SCSI
>> device.. or the SD card that supported it… etc. Blue SCSI, Green SCSI, Pi
>> SCSI, etc. I don’t care which (would prefer something that would let me use
>> a “real” drive… SSD or similar is fine… rather than SD card). I do have an
>> image that gets me “somewhat” booting with a SCSI2SD but the additional
>> drive mounts are wrong in the fstab/mtab so I can’t get it fully to boot….
>>
>> If I can figure out the process, I’ll make images and share them (for all
>> the early Sun OS’s) and write up a web page and post it to archive.org so
>> nobody has to go thru this again :-)
>>
>> Earl
>>
>> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:56 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what
>> you want. Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that
>> it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running
>> it just works. I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on
>> sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures.
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a
>>> SCSI emulator to it and get the full OS installed.
>>> I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it
>>> used to work.
>>>
>>> From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition”
>>> and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when
>>> needed.
>>> So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc. I have all
>>> the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated
>>> trying to make some progress.
>>>
>>> Earl
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation
>>>> 5, seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
>>>> modern computing environment. I know that TUHS isn't really the right
>>>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is? I've made
>>>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
>>>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
>>>> to a community if one exists. Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>>>>
>>>> -Henry
>>>>
>>>> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...
>>>>
>>>> I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning
>>>> to see how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so
>>>> OpenIndiana's a bust)... but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least
>>>> for hobbyists (only get release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to
>>>> date 'release' was 11.4 in 2018). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I
>>>> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM,
>>>> turns out things have come a long way on that front:
>>>>
>>>> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/
>>>>
>>>> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I
>>>> could just remember how commands work on SunOS :).
>>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks Will! You may also be interested in
>>> https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another
>>> resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU. I have considered moving my setup
>>> to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image
>>> since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running
>>> these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.
>>>
>>> -Henry
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
The emulation of proper tape drive records is present in TME - see this
fragment from the setup file that I have to install SunOS 2:
## power up the machine:
##
# uncomment this line to automatically power up the machine when
# tmesh starts:
#
command tape0 load sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/01 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/02
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/03 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/04 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/05
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/06 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/07 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/08
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/09 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/10
command mainbus0 power up
Let me know if you need more of a walkthrough, I'd have to get NetBSD
running in a VM as I haven't worked with this in a long time, but I'm sure
it still works.
-Henry
On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:04, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote:
> I had old instructions to do this but getting TME running was a bit
> quirky. And the package had lost most of it’s support.
> (I did just go out and find that some folks have somewhat resurrected it…)
>
> I have the install manual for 3.5 (
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.5/800-2089-10A_Release_3.5_Manual_…
> )
> And did find this about TME Now ( https://pkgsrc.se/wip/tme )
> And these instructions (which from the link before this page indicated as
> of 2019 they still worked
> http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/sun3-150-nbsd.html )
>
> That would get me “close” if I could somehow write to an emulated SCSI
> device.. or the SD card that supported it… etc. Blue SCSI, Green SCSI, Pi
> SCSI, etc. I don’t care which (would prefer something that would let me use
> a “real” drive… SSD or similar is fine… rather than SD card). I do have an
> image that gets me “somewhat” booting with a SCSI2SD but the additional
> drive mounts are wrong in the fstab/mtab so I can’t get it fully to boot….
>
> If I can figure out the process, I’ll make images and share them (for all
> the early Sun OS’s) and write up a web page and post it to archive.org so
> nobody has to go thru this again :-)
>
> Earl
>
> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:56 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what
> you want. Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that
> it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running
> it just works. I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on
> sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures.
>
> -Henry
>
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote:
>
>> I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a
>> SCSI emulator to it and get the full OS installed.
>> I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it
>> used to work.
>>
>> From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition”
>> and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when
>> needed.
>> So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc. I have all
>> the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated
>> trying to make some progress.
>>
>> Earl
>>
>>
>> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
>>> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
>>> modern computing environment. I know that TUHS isn't really the right
>>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is? I've made
>>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
>>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
>>> to a community if one exists. Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>>>
>>> -Henry
>>>
>>> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...
>>>
>>> I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning
>>> to see how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so
>>> OpenIndiana's a bust)... but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least
>>> for hobbyists (only get release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to
>>> date 'release' was 11.4 in 2018). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I
>>> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM,
>>> turns out things have come a long way on that front:
>>>
>>> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/
>>>
>>> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could
>>> just remember how commands work on SunOS :).
>>>
>>
>> Thanks Will! You may also be interested in
>> https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another
>> resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU. I have considered moving my setup
>> to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image
>> since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running
>> these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>>
>>
>
TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what
you want. Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that
it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running
it just works. I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on
sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures.
-Henry
On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl(a)baugh.org> wrote:
> I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a SCSI
> emulator to it and get the full OS installed.
> I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it
> used to work.
>
> From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition”
> and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when
> needed.
> So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc. I have all
> the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated
> trying to make some progress.
>
> Earl
>
>
> On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
>> seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
>> modern computing environment. I know that TUHS isn't really the right
>> place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is? I've made
>> significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
>> for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
>> to a community if one exists. Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>> Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...
>>
>> I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning to
>> see how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so
>> OpenIndiana's a bust)... but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least
>> for hobbyists (only get release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to
>> date 'release' was 11.4 in 2018). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I
>> thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM,
>> turns out things have come a long way on that front:
>>
>> https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/
>>
>> OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could
>> just remember how commands work on SunOS :).
>>
>
> Thanks Will! You may also be interested in
> https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another
> resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU. I have considered moving my setup
> to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image
> since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running
> these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.
>
> -Henry
>
>
>
On Thu, Mar 7, 2024, 4:14 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com> wrote:
> For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C
> compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at Bell.
> Especially for x86. Anyone have tales?
> Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX?
An unusual one would be the “revenue bomb” compiler that Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie did at Microsoft in 1981.
This compiler was intended to provided a uniform environment for the menagerie of 8 and 16-bit computers of the era. It compiled to a byte code which executed through a small interpreter. This by itself was hardly new of course, but it had some unique features. It generated code in overlays, so that it could run a code base larger than 64KB (but it defined only one data segment). It also defined a small set of “system” commands, that allowed for uniform I/O. I still have the implementation spec for that interpreter somewhere.
This compiler was used for the first versions of Multiplan and Word, and my understanding is that the byte code engine was later re-used in Visual Basic. I think the compiler also had a Xenix port, maybe it even was Xenix native (and at this time, Xenix would still essentially have been V7).
I am not sure to what extent this compiler was independent of the Bell compilers. It could well be that it was based on PCC, Microsoft was a Unix licensee after all and at the time busy doing ports. On the other hand, Charles Simonyi would certainly have been capable of creating his own from scratch. I do know that this compiler preceded Lattice C, the latter of which was distributed by Microsoft as Microsoft C 1.0.
Maybe others know more about this Simonyi/Brodie compiler?
Paul
Notes:
http://www.memecentral.com/mylife.htmhttps://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.computerworld.com/sof…http://seefigure1.com/images/xenix/xenix-timeline.jpg
