This scanned version includes all the cited manuals:
A Research UNIX Reader
Annotated Excepts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986
M. Douglas McIlroy
https://archive.org/details/a_research_unix_reader
> From: jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu <mailto:jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (Noel Chiappa)
>
>> From: Paul Ruizendaal
>
>> The "Research Unix Reader"
>
> Thanks for mentioning that; I'd never heard of it. Very interesting.
>
>
> A query: it seems to have been written with access to a set of manuals for the
> various early versions of Research Unix. The Unix Tree:
>
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl <http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl>
>
> has the manual pages for V3 and V4, and V6 and later, but not the other
> ones. Do the manuals used for the preparatio of that note still exist; and, if
> so, is there any chance of getting them scanned?
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
> The "Research Unix Reader"
Thanks for mentioning that; I'd never heard of it. Very interesting.
A query: it seems to have been written with access to a set of manuals for the
various early versions of Research Unix. The Unix Tree:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl
has the manual pages for V3 and V4, and V6 and later, but not the other
ones. Do the manuals used for the preparatio of that note still exist; and, if
so, is there any chance of getting them scanned?
(I have a auto-page-feed scanner, and volunteer to do said scanning. Someone
else is going to have to do the OCR, and back-conversion to NROFF source,
though... :-)
Noel
I spent a year or so working on this in 1977. I was wondering who wrote it.
Funny but: I once had a compile fail on Motorola's MPL compiler, which was
written in fortran. It had so many continued comment lines that the 16-bit
column number went negative, and I got a fairly obscure error.
Anyone remember who wrote it?
Mid-year 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the creation of Unix and I've
been quietly agitating for something to be done to celebrate this. Up to
now, there's been little response.
The original Unix user's group, Usenix, will hold its Annual Technical
Conference on the west coast of the US at this time, so it would make sense
to do something in conjunction with this conference. Some suggestions:
- a terminal room with a bunch of period terminals: ASR-33s, -37s, VT100s,
VT102s, VT220s
- these connected to real/emulated Unix systems either locally or via a
terminal server and telnet to remotely emulated systems
- some graphical terminals: Sun pizza boxes, a Blit would be great
- if possible, some actual real PDP-11s, VAXen
- emulated systems: V1 to V7 Unix, 32V, the BSDs etc. In fact there are
plenty of Unix versions that we could run in emulated mode.
- Unix of course was one of the systems used to implement the Arpanet
protcols, so it would be interesting to get some of the real/emulated
systems networked together
- how about an emulated UUCP network with Usenet on top of it, and
some mail/news clients on the emulated systems.
- retro workshops/tutorials: how to edit with ed, using nroff, posting
a Usenet article, dealing with bang paths.
I'm proposing to gather a bunch of people to start the ball rolling on the
technical/demonstration side. We'd need people:
- with terminals, portable PDP-11s and VAXen, Sun boxen
- prepared to set up emulated systems
- who can help bring the networking (UUCP, Usenet, Arpanet) back to life
- willing to write and run workshops that show off this old technology
- to help set up terminal servers and all the RS-232 to telnet stuff
Some of this we can start doing now, e.g. rebuild an emulated Arpanet, UUCP,
Usenet, get emulated systems up, build front-end telnet interfaces.
Is there anybody willing to sign up for this? I think once we have some
momentum, we can tell the Usenix people and get some buy-in from them.
Post back and/or e-mail me if you can help. Thanks, Warren
It's not really Unix history, but Dartmouth's "communication files"
have so often been cited as pipes before Unix, that you may like
to know what this fascinating facility actually was. See
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
On 6 Mar 2017, at 12:37 , Warren Toomey wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 12:16:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
>> Hopefully I will have some time later this year to add 'direct run' emulations to the TUHS site based on this code (assuming Warren agrees). The idea would be that next to Archive and the Tree there would be emulation. A visitor would go to e.g. the V5 page of the Tree and also find a link to run V5 in emulation. From the SIMH and Nankervis sites images for:
>
> Yes please. And an 11/20 for 1st Edition Unix too :-) (my wishlist).
>
> Thanks! Warren
From a quick glance at "u0.s" it would seem that V1 has support for a RK11 disk. Also, I would assume that when the MMU is disabled, that a 11/45 would boot up from a disk image with 11/20 code - at least it is worth a try. Do you have a RK11 disk image with V1 installed handy?
> From: Warner Losh
> On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com> wrote:
>>> My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
>>> distribute.
>> surely there are big chunks of the opensolaris code that are not *very
>> much* changed from the original System V code they're based on. Under
>> what theory, then, was Sun the copyright holder and therefore able to
>> release it under the CDDL?
> Their paid-up perpetual license that granted them the right to do that?
I wonder, if they do indeed have such a license, if they have the rights to
distribute original SysV source under the CDDL? Or does that license only
apply to SysV code that they have modified? And if so, _how much_ does it have
to be modified, to qualify?
Maybe we can get them to distribute SysV under the CDDL... :-)
Noel
All, I've been running the TUHS list since 1994 and it's always been an
open list. People can say what they want, and I rely on sense and courtesy
to ensure good behaviour. I think only once before I've had to hold and vet
an individual's postings.
However, I've seen undesirable behaviour recently on the list and I've had
a substantial amount of private correspondance about it. Therefore, I've
decided to hold and vet the postings of a few list members (i.e. >1).
I don't take this step lightly; in fact, I've dithered for a while on this.
But the new policy is: if you don't show respect to other members on the
TUHS list, I will hold and vet your postings. If your postings are respectful
then there will be no hold and vet.
I will e-mail the people involved. I feel disappointed to have taken this
step, but that's the way it is.
Cheers, Warren
> From: Wesley Parish
> I think the best thing for all would be the release of the Unix SysV
> source trees under a suitable open source license.
You may think that; I may think that, we _all_ may think that.
But in the legal world, that, and $2 (or whatever the going rate is these
days) will get you a cup of coffee.
Unless someone is prepared to chivvy a rights-holder into actually _doing_
something, any talk is ... just that.
Any volunteers to make something actually happen?
Noel
Hi there,
in case of someone is in need of data recovery, we managed
to do some nice work :)
http://hackaday.com/2017/03/03/raiders-of-the-lost-os-reclaiming-a-piece-of…
love all
--
[ ::::::::: 73 de IW9HGS : http://museum.freaknet.org :::::::::::: ]
[ Freaknet Medialab :: Poetry Hacklab : Dyne.Org :: Radio Cybernet ]
[ NON SCRIVERMI USANDO LETTERE ACCENTATE - NON MANDARMI ALLEGATI ]
[ *I DELETE* EMAIL > 100K, ATTACHMENTS, HTML, M$-WORD DOC and SPAM ]
The 'oldest' I have is a set of SCO UNIX 3.2V4.0 and V4.2
Mail me if you're interested
Cheers,
rudi
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2017 16:55:25 -0800
> From: Cory Smelosky <b4(a)gewt.net>
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Subject: [TUHS] SCO OpenDesktop 386 2.0.0
> Message-ID:
> <1488070525.154368.892915216.18B7F7A4(a)webmail.messagingengine.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hey,
>
> Does anyone have any of the floppies for OpenDesktop 2.0.0? Mine got
> damaged in a dehumidifier failure before they got to California. The
> only survivor was of all things...the QIC-24 tape (which I have read
> fine)
>
> sco-tape> tar tf file0 | more
> ./tmp/_lbl/prd=odtps/typ=u386/rel=2.0.0a/vol=1
>
> Anyone know a good starting point for attempting to install it in to a
> VM? ;)
> --
> Cory Smelosky
> b4(a)gewt.net
Yes. And I just want to point out the systems vendor's worst nightmare:
Competition from an earlier version of their own product. History is
littered with examples where something was deliberately left to wither and
die for this reason.
Apple II and IIgs: We all know that the IIgs was deliberately crippled, and
then discontinued in favour of the IIc+, as it presented a viable
alternative to the 68000-based Macs.
680x0 Macs: Apparently some licensees had 68060 Macs and accelerators in
the works, but Apple refused access to the ROMs to add the 68060 support
code, because it would have been a viable alternative to the PowerPC 603.
IBM OS/2: Was heavily DOS based (I believe it used the INT 21h API with
modifications for protected mode), but in fact was eclipsed by later
versions of DOS/Windows that were retrofitted with things like DPMI
support, hacky but effective in providing a viable alternative to OS/2.
BSD and SysIII: For a while it looked like the 32V-derived BSDs were going
provide a viable alternative to AT&T's official developments of the same,
and it took some heavy handed legal and political manouevring and backroom
deals to make sure that did not happen in the end.
AMD64 and Itanium: Enough said, a very expensive egg on face episode for
Intel. 8086/8088 and iAPX432: Same thing except it was actually Intel's own
product that provided a viable alternative to the "official" new version
rather than a competitor's development of it. Of course a similar story can
be told about 8080/Z80/8085/8086, Intel faced stiff competition from an
enhanced version of their own product before wresting back control with the
much improved 8086. A nightmare for them.
That's the real reason vendors won't open source.
Nick
On Mar 4, 2017 12:02 PM, "Henry Bent" <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3 March 2017 at 18:56, Wesley Parish <wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>
> And since the central Unix source trees have been static - I don't think
> Novell was much more than a
> caretaker, correct me if I'm wrong - and the last SysVR4 release of any
> consequence was Solaris - has
> Oracle done anything with it? - I think the best thing for all would be
> the release of the Unix SysV
> source trees under a suitable open source license.
There was an SVR5, even if it was not nearly the popular product that its
predecessors were. While development certainly slowed, it contained some
amount of technological progression. Obviously at this point development
has stopped completely and it probably does make sense to open source that
code base.
> (I've made a similar argument for the IBM/MS OS/2,
> DEC VAX VMS, and MS Windows and WinNT 3.x and 4.x source trees on various
> other Internet forums:
> the horse has bolted, it's a bit pointless welding shut the barn door now.
> Better to get the credit for
> being friendly and open, and clear up some residual bugs while you're at
> it ... )
Equating VMS, old versions of Windows, etc. isn't quite the same. Even old
versions of those products may well include source that contains, or is
believed by its owners to contain, novel ideas or novel implementations of
existing ideas that may have survived relatively unchanged in newer
versions. And because there is at least a reasonably sized user base for
all of the products you mentioned, corporate customers have an interest in
protecting their investment, and the software creators have an interest in
responding to the desires (or perceived desires) of their customers.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see a legal release of the VMS 5 source,
or Windows 3 source, or classic Macintosh source. I'm just not holding my
breath. I think the community's time would be better spend advocating for
source releases of products that are truly dead or all but dead.
-Henry
On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 9:13 PM, Jason Stevens <
jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
> Slightly off or on topic, but since you seem to know, and I've never seen
> aix 370 in the eild, did it require VM?
>
It could boot on raw HW.
> Did it take advantage of SNA, and allow front ends, along with SNA
> gateways and 3270's?
>
Not sure how to answer this. It was an IBM product and could be used
with a lot of other IBM's products. Generally speaking it was aimed at the
Educational market, although there were some commercial customers, for
instance Intel was reputed to do a lot of the 486 simulation on a TCF
cluster (I don't know that for sure, that was before I worked for Intel).
>
> Or was it more of a hosted TCP/IP accessable system?
>
Clearly, if you had a PS/2 in the cluster, that was your access point. I
think it was all mixed up in the politics of the day at IBM between
Enterprise, Workstations, and Entry systems. TCP/IP and Ethernets were not
something IBM wanted to use naturally. But the Educational market did
use it and certainly some folks at IBM saw the value.
UNIX was needed for the Education market as was TCP/IP so that going to be
the pointed head of the stick.
Hi!
Some of the stories on here reminded me of the fact that there's also likely
a whole boat-load of UNIX ports/variants in the past that were never released
to customers or outside certain companies.
Not talking about UNIX versions that have become obsolete or which have
vanished by now like IRIX or the original Apple A/UX (now *that* was an
interesting oddball though..) and such, but the ones that either died or
failed or got cancelled during the product development process or were never
intended to be released to the outside ar all.
Personally I came across one during some UNIX consultancy work at Commodore
during the time that they were working on bringing out an SVR4 release for the
Amiga (which they actually sold for some time)
Side-note.. Interestingly enough according to my contacts at that time inside
CBM it was based on the much cheaper to license 3B2 SVR4 codebase and not the
M68k codebase which explained some of the oddities and lack of M68k ABI
compliance of the Amiga SVR4 release..
However..
It turned out that they had been running an SVRIII port on much older Amiga
2000's with 68020 cards for some of their internal corporate networking and
email, UUCP, etc. and was called 'AMIX' internally. But as far as I know it
was never released to the public or external customers.
It was a fairly 'plain jane' SVRIII port with little specific 'Amiga' hardware
bits supported but otherwise quite complete and pretty stable.
Worked quite well in the 4MB DRAM available on these cards. The later SVR4
didn't fare so well.. Paged itself to death unless you had 8 or even (gasp!)
16MB.
It was known 'outside' that something like this existed as the boot ROM's on
the 68020 card had an 'AMIX' option but outside CBM few people really knew
much about it.
It may have been used at the University of Lowell as they developed a TI34010
based card that may already have had some support in this release.
Still..
This does make me wonder.. Does anyone else know of these kinds of special
'snowflake' UNIX versions that never got out at various companies/insitutes?
(and can talk about it without violating a whole stack of NDA's ;) )
No special reason.. Just idle curiosity :)
Likely all these are gone forever anyway as prototypes and small run production
devices and related software tends to get destroyed when companies go bust or
get aquired.
Bye, Arno.
> From: Dave Horsfall
> Another acronym is Esc Meta Alt Ctl Shift...
Good one!
And there was a pretty funny fake Exxx error code - I think it was
"EMACS - Editor too big"?
I was never happy with the size of EMACS, and it had nothing to do with the
amount of memory resources used. That big a binary implies a very large amount
of source, and the more lines of code, the more places for bugs... And it
makes it harder to understand, for someone working on it (to make a
change/improvement).
Noel
>Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2017 14:11:24 -0500
>From: Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com>
>To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
>Subject: [TUHS] Was 5ESS built on UNIX?
>Message-ID:
><CAJfiPzyDkUP7aAfxQTv51MF61a4CjKSSMxduQaW+Yp0cW00y5w(a)mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
>>I have looked at the papers published in the AT&T Technical J. in 1985
>and found no mention of UNIX.
>
>N.
My Prentice Hall "UNIX(R) System V Release 4, Programmer's Guide:
Streams" lists AT&T copyrights from 1984 - 1990 and UNIX Systems
Laboratories, Inc. 1991-1992.
Rudi
As Corey said, administrative computers in switching centers
ran Unix, but the call-processing machines ran an unrelated
operating system. The Unix lab did influence that operating
system. Bob Morris instigated, and Joe Condon, Lee McMahon,
Ken Thompson and others built TPC (the phone company), a switching
system controlled by a PDP-11. This system actually ran the
phones in CS Research for several years. ESS5 adopted some
of TPC's architecture, though none of its code.
Doug
Dave Horsfall:
And if my failing memory
serves me correctly, [Henry Spencer] wrote C-News in conjunction with Geoff Collier, as
B-News was starting to show its age and limitations.
====
Your failing memory is correct, except that his name is spelt
Collyer, not Collier.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Hi,
On the subject of Troff, this package seems to have disappeared:
flo—A Language for Typesetting Flowcharts
Anthony P. Wolfman and Daniel M. Berry
Computer Science, Technion, Haifa 32000, ISRAEL
1989
The paper about it is available but the code has gone.
Anyone have an archive of it?
-Steve
On 2017-02-27 08:26, Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote:
> Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>>> David wrote:
>>> I remember that GNU Emacs launched the first time and then dumped
>>> itself out as a core file. Each subsequent launch would then ‘undump’
>>> itself back into memory. All this because launching emacs the first
>>> time required compiling all that lisp code.
>> It still works like that. Indeed that's the conventional way that
>> Lisp systems tend to work for delivering applications
> Emacs came from ITS, and many Lisps derive from Maclisp which also came
> from ITS. In ITS, it was common for applications to be dumped into a
> loadable core image, even if they were written in assembly language.
Not only i ITS. This is how things work in OS/8, for example. I believe
it is also how things work in TOPS-10 and quite possible also in TOPS-20.
Not sure about RT-11, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the way
there too.
Essentially, the linker leaves the image in memory. It does not write it
to a file. And then, the command decode have a command for dumping your
memory to disk, as a runable image. There is some information kept
around that the linker sets up, which means you don't normally have to
tell the command decoder which parts of memory to save, or what the
start address is, and so on. But you can also give that information in
your save command.
One of the nice things of this approach is that you can load an image
into memory, and then use the debugger to look around in it, change it,
or run it. And if the program exists, it is still in memory, including
all data, which means you can check the state of everything at exit
time. And of course, if you want to, you can load a program, patch
around in it, in memory, and then run it. And, of course, you can load a
program, run some part of it, and dump it to disk at that stage, so all
initializations have been done.
Your memory is always around, and is not tied to a process that comes
and goes.
Of course, the back side of that is that you can't really run several
programs at once.
But it's not hard to see that RMS and GNU Emacs (coming from these
systems) wanted the same thing again. It do have some points.
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
Hmm well I am more interested in the ancient code, I am not averse to
adding improvements but I want to do so in a controlled way. Also I prefer
not to use any Sys3~5 interfaces in my current project which is exclusively
BSD.
Haha, well I de-algoled /bin/sh twice so far, first time was for my uzi to
Z180 port about 10yrs back, and second time was for my 4.3BSD to Linux
porting library project last month. In the intervening time I became quite
a sed wizard and my latest de-algolizer is completely automated and
produces very nice results. Could possibly be improved by astyle's removal
of braces around single statements, I considered this too risky at the time
but I have since realized I can compare the stripped executables to
convince myself that it does not change the logic, indeed I should check
the basic de-algolizer in this way also.
Lately I have been thinking of running all of 4.3BSD through astyle but I
hesitate to do unnecessary changes, one always regrets them when doing any
bisecting or rebasing stuff...
Nick
On Feb 28, 2017 3:43 AM, "Joerg Schilling" <schily(a)schily.net> wrote:
Derek Fawcus <dfawcus+lists-tuhs(a)employees.org> wrote:
> How about applying Geoff Collyer's change to the shell memory management
> routine available here:
>
> http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/stak.port.c
Depends on what shell you are talking about.
The code named by you only works with a very old Bourne Shell that can be
retrieved from the server of Geoff Collyer.
If you are interested in the recent Bourne Shell (SVr4 + Solaris changes),
you
better use my Bourne Shell sources that can be found inside the
schily-tools:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/
The code from above will not work in a recent Bourne Shell without changes
in
both, Geoff Collyer's stak.c and the rest of the Bourne Shell.
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353
Berlin
joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/http://sourceforge.net/
projects/schilytools/files/