TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

28 participants
6556 discussions

by Clem Cole

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com <https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=rminnich@gmail.com>> wrote: > Larry, had Sun open sourced SunOS, as you fought so hard to make happen, > Linux might not have happened as it did. SunOS was really good. Chalk up > another win for ATT! > FWIW: I disagree. For details look at my discussion of rewriting Linux in RUST <https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linu…> on quora. But a quick point is this .... Linux original took off (and was successful) not because of GPL, but in spite of it and later the GPL would help it. But it was not the GPL per say that made Linux vs BSD vs SunOS et al. What made Linux happen was the BSDi/UCB vs AT&T case. At the time, a lot of hackers (myself included) thought the case was about *copyright*. It was not, it was about *trade secret* and the ideas around UNIX. * i.e.* folks like, we "mentally contaminated" with the AT&T Intellectual Property. When the case came, folks like me that were running 386BSD which would later begat FreeBSD et al, got scared. At that time, *BSD (and SunOS) were much farther along in the development and stability. But .... may of us hought Linux would insulate us from losing UNIX on cheap HW because their was not AT&T copyrighted code in it. Sadly, the truth is that if AT&T had won the case, *all UNIX-like systems* would have had to be removed from the market in the USA and EU [NATO-allies for sure]. That said, the fact the *BSD and Linux were in the wild, would have made it hard to enforce and at a "Free" (as in beer) price it may have been hard to make it stick. But that it was a misunderstanding of legal thing that made Linux "valuable" to us, not the implementation. If SunOS has been available, it would not have been any different. It would have been thought of based on the AT&T IP, but trade secret and original copyright. Clem

8 years, 7 months

nice interview with Steve Bourne

by Arnold Robbins

Just came across this: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/279011/-z_programming_languages_bou… >From 2009. There are links to other interviews about Unix stuff as well. Arnold

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code

by Rudi Blom

>Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2017 08:45:47 -0700 >From: arnold(a)skeeve.com >To: rochkind(a)basepath.com >Cc: tuhs(a)tuhs.org >Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code >Message-ID: <201701091545.v09FjlXE027448(a)freefriends.org> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > >I remember the Bournegol well; I did some hacking on the BSD shell. > >In general, it wasn't too unusual for people from Pascal backgrounds to >do similar things, e.g. > > #define repeat do { > #define until(cond) } while (! (cond)) > >(I remember for me personally that do...while sure looked weird for. >my first few years of C programming. :-) > >(Also, I would not recommend doing that; I'm just noting that >people often did do stuff like that.) When the Philips computer division worked on MPX (multi-processor UNIX) in late 80tish they had an include file 'syntax.h' which did a lot of that Pascal-like mapping. Here part of it: /* For a full explanation see the file syntax.help */ #define IF if( #define THEN ){ #define ELSIF }else if( #define ELSE }else{ #define ENDIF } #define NOT ! #define AND && #define OR || #define CASE switch( #define OF ){ #define ENDCASE break;} #define WHEN break;case #define CWHEN case #define IMPL : #define COR :case #define BREAK break #define WHENOTHERS break;default #define CWHENOTHERS default #define SELECT do{{ #define SWHEN }if( #define SIMPL ){ #define ENDSELECT }}while(0) #define SCOPE { #define ENDSCOPE } #define BLOCK { #define ENDBLOCK } #define FOREVER for(;; #define FOR for( #define SKIP #define COND ; #define STEP ; #define LOOP ){ #define ENDLOOP } #define NULLOOP ){} #define WHILE while( #define DO do{ #define UNTIL }while(!( #define ENDDO )) #define EXITWHEN(e) if(e)break #define CONTINUE continue #define RETURN return #define GOTO goto

8 years, 7 months

the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

by Larry McVoy

I was in building 5 at Sun when they were switching to SVr4 which became Solaris 2.0 (I think). Building 5 housed the kernel people at Sun. John Pope was the poor bastard who got stuck with doing the bring up. Everyone hated him for doing it, we all wanted it to fail. I was busting my ass on something in SunOS 4.x and I was there late into the night, frequently to around midnight or beyond. So was John. We became close friends. We both moved to San Francisco and ended up commuting to Mountain View together (and hit the bars together). John was just at my place, here's a few pictures for those who might be interested. He's a great guy, got stuck with a shitty job. http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/2016-pope/ --lm

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code

by Paul McJones

> On Jan 9, 2017, at 6:00 PM,"Steve Johnson" <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote: > > I can certainly confirm that Steve Bourne not only knew Algol 68, he > was quite an evangelist for it. Bourne had led the Algol68C development team at Cambridge until 1975. See http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/algol68impl/#Algol68C .

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code

by Doug McIlroy

> if-fi and case-esac notation from Algol came to shell [via Steve Bourne] There was some pushback which resulted in the strange compromise of if-fi, case-esac, do-done. Alas, the details have slipped from memory. Help, scj? doug

8 years, 7 months

2.11BSD source code cross-reference

by Warren Toomey

All, I'm not sure if you know of Walter Müller's work at implementing a PDP-11 on FPGAs: https://wfjm.github.io/home/w11/. He sent me this e-mail with an excellent source code cross-reference of the 2.11BSD kernel: P.S.: long time ago I wrote a source code viewer for 2.11BSD and OS with a similar file and directory layout. I made a few tune-ups lately and wrote some sort of introduction, see https://wfjm.github.io/home/ouxr/ Might be helpful for you in case you inspect 2.11BSD source code. Cheers all, Warren

8 years, 7 months

Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code

by Walter F.J. Mueller

There was thread 'Unix stories' were Stephen Bourne played role. Here another story about Stephen Bourne. He worked first on Algol 68, than joined the Unix team at Bell labs and wrote sh and adb. It's well known that the if-fi and case-esac notation from Algol came to shell syntax this way. Maybe less know is that Bourne tried as hard as he could to make the C code of sh and adb look like Algol, with the help of preprocessor macros. I stumbled across this when I looked into the 2.11BSD code base some time ago. Look at http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/bin/sh/main.c.html http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/bin/adb/main.c.html to enjoy C with an Algol-look. The definitions are in http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/bin/sh/mac.h.html http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/bin/adb/defs.h.html Cheers, Walter

8 years, 7 months

Resurrecting the B (which came before C) programming language

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

I was amused this morning to see a post on the tack-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net mailing list (TACK = The Amsterdam Compiler Kit) today from David Given, who writes: >> ... >> ... I took some time off from thinking about register allocation (ugh) >> and ported the ABC B compiler to the ACK. It's now integrated into the >> system and everything. >> >> B is Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie's untyped programming language >> which later acquired types and turned into K&R C. Everything's a machine >> word, and pointers are *word* address, not byte addresses. >> >> The port's a bit clunky and doesn't generate good code, but it works and >> it passes its own tests. It runs on all supported backends. There's not >> much standard library, though. >> >> Example: >> >> https://github.com/davidgiven/ack/blob/default/examples/hilo.b >> >> (Also, in the process it found lots of bugs in the PowerPC mcg backend, >> now fixed, as well as several subtle bugs in the PowerPC ncg backend; so >> that's good. I'm pretty sure that this is the only B compiler for the >> PowerPC in existence.) >> ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

by Kirk McKusick

> Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2017 20:09:18 -0700 > From: Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> > To: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog(a)lemis.com> > Cc: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society > <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> > Subject: Re: [TUHS] SunOS vs Linux > >> On Friday, 6 January 2017 at 9:27:36 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: >> >> I think that if SunOS 4 had been released to the world at the right >> time, the free BSDs wouldn't have happened in the way they did either; >> they would have evolved intimately coupled with SunOS. > > With the right license (BSD), I'd go so far as to saying there'd be no > BSD 4.4, or if there was, it would have been rebased from the SunOS > base... There were discussions between CSRG and Sun about Sun donating > it's reworked VM and VFS to Berkeley to replace the Mach VM that was > in there... Don't know the scope of these talks, or if they included > any of the dozens of other areas that Sun improved from its BSD 4.3 > base... The talks fell apart over the value of the code, if the rumors > I've heard are correct. > > Warner Since I was involved with the negotiations with Sun, I can speak directly to this discussion. The 4.2BSD VM was based on the implementation done by Ozalp Babaoglu that was incorporated into the BSD kernel by Bill Joy. It was very VAX centric and was not able to handle shared read-write mappings. Before Bill Joy left Berkeley for Sun, he wrote up the API specification for the mmap interface but did not finish an implementation. At Sun, he was very involved in the implementation though did not write much (if any) of the code for the SunOS VM. The original plan was to ship 4.2BSD with an mmap implementation, but with Bill's departure that did not happen. So, it fell to me to sort out how to get it into 4.3BSD. CSRG did not have the resources to do it from scratch (there were only three of us). So, I researched existing implementations and it came down to the SunOS and MACH implementations. The obvious choice was SunOS, so I approached Sun about contributing their implementation to Berkeley. We had had a lot of cooperation about exchanging bug fixes, so this is not as crazy as it seems. The Sun engineers were all for it, and convinced their managers to push my request up the hierarchy. Skipping over lots of drama it eventually got to Scott McNealy who was dubious, but eventually bought into the idea and cleared it. At that point it went to the Sun lawyers to draw up the paperwork. The lawyers came back and said that "giving away SunOS technology could lead to a stockholder lawsuit concerning the giving away of stockhoder assets." End of discussion. We had to go with MACH. Kirk McKusick

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] GPL or not (was SVR4 vs Sun disagreement)

by Clem Cole

This is a history list and I'm going to try to answer this to give some historical context and hopefully end this otherwise a thread that I'm not sure adds to the history of UNIX much one way of the other. Some people love GPL, some do not. I'll gladly take some of this off list. But I would like to see us not devolve TUHS into my favorite license or favorite unix discussion. On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > That makes sense to me, the GPL was hated inside of Sun, it was considered > > a virus. The idea that you used a tiny bit of GPLed code and then > everything > > else is GPLed was viewed as highway robbery. > I'm not lawyer, nor play one. I am speaking for myself not Intel here so take what I have to say with that in mind. Note I do teach the required "GPL and Copyright Course" of all Intel SW folks so I have had some training and I do have some opinions. I also have lived this for 5 start up, and a number of large firms both inside and as the a consultant. Basically, history has shown that they both viral an non-viral licenses have their place. Before I worked Intel I admit I was pretty much negative on the GPL "virus" and I >>mostly<< still am. IMHO, it's done more damage than it has helped and the CMU/MIT/BSD style "Dead Fish" license has done for more positive *for the industry @ large *than the GPL in the long run. But I admit, I'm a capitalist and I see the value in letting some one make some profit for their work. All I have seen the virus do in the long run is that firms have lawyers to figure out how to deal with it. There is a lot of miss information about the term "open source" .... open source does not mean "free" as in beer. It means available and "open" to be read and modified. Unix has >>always<< be open and available - which is why their are so many versions of Unix (and Linux). The question was the *price* of the license and who had it. Most hacker actually did have access as this list shows -- we had from our universities for little money or our employees for much more. GPL and the virus it has, does not protect any one from this diversity. In fact, in some ways it makes it harder. The diversity comes from the market place. The problem is that in the computer business, the diversity can be bad and keeping things "my way" is better for the owner of the gold (be it a firm like IBM, DEC, or Microsoft) or a technology like Linux. What GPL is >>supposed<< to do it ensure that secrets are not locked up and ensure that all can see and share in the ideas. This is a great idea in theory, the risk is that if you have IP that you want to some how protect, as Larry suggests, the virus can put your IP in danger. To the credit of firms like Intel, GE, IBM et al, they have learned how to try to firewall their >>important<< IP with processes and procedures to protect it (which is exactly what rms did not want to have happen BTW). [In my experience, it made the locks even tighter than before], although it has made some things more available. I now this rankles some folks. There are positives and negatives to each way of doing things. IMO, history has shown that it has been the economics of >>Clay Christiansen style disruption<<, not a license that changed things in our industry. When the price of UNIX of any version (Linux, *BSD, SunOS, MInux, etc...) and the low cost HW came to be and the "enough" hackers did something. Different legal events pushed one version ahead of others, and things had to be technology "good enough" -- but it was economics not license that made the difference. License played into the economics for sure, but in the end, it was free (as in beer) vs $s that made it all work. Having lived through they completely open, completely closed, GPLed and dead-fish world of the computer industry, I'm not sure if we are really any farther ahead in practice. We just have to be careful and more lawyers make more money - by that's my being a cynic. Anyway, I hope we can keep from devolving from really history. Clem

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] MacOS X is Unix (tm)

by Nick Downing

One significant area of non compliance with unix conventions is its non case sensitive filesystem (HFS and variants like HFS+ if I recall). I think this is partly for historical reasons to make Classic / MacOS9 emulation easier during the transition. But I could never understand why they did this, they could have put case insensitivity in their shell and apps without breaking the filesystem. Anyway despite its being unix I can't really see it gaining much traction with serious unix users (when did you last get a 404 from a major website with a tagline "Apache running on MacOSX"?), the MacPorts and Fink repos are a really bad and patchy implementation of something like apt/ctan/cpan/etc (I think possibly at least one of those repos builds from source with attendant advantages/problems), it does not support X properly, the dylibs are non standard, everything is a bit broken compared with Linux (or FreeBSD) and Apple does not really have the motivation or the manpower to create a modern, clean system like unix users expect. Open sourcing Darwin was supposed to open it up to user contributed enhancements but Apple was never serious about this, it was just a sop to people who claimed (correctly) that Apple was riding on the back of open source and giving nothing back to the community. Since Apple refused to release any important code like drivers or bootstrap routines the Darwin release was never really any more useable than something like 4.4BSDLite. People who loved their Macs and loved unix and dreamed of someday running the Mac UI on top of a proper unix, put significant effort into supplying the missing pieces but were rebuffed by Apple at every turn, Apple would constantly make new releases with even more missing pieces and breakage and eventually stopped making any open source releases at all, leaving a lot of people crushed and very bitter. As for me I got on the Apple bandwagon briefly in 2005 or so, at that time I was experimenting with RedHat but my primary development machines were Windows 98 and 2000 (occasionally XP). My assessment was RedHat was not ready for desktop use, since I had trouble with stuff like printers and scanners that required me to stay with Windows (actually this was probably surmountable but I did not have the knowledge or really the desire to spend time debugging it). That's why I selected Apple as a "compromise unix" which should connect to my devices easily. I got enthusiastic and spent a good $4k on new hardware. Shortly afterwards Apple announced the Intel transition so I realized my brand new gear would soon be obsolete and unsupported. I was still pretty happy though. Two things took the shine off eventually (a) I spilt champagne on my machine, tore it down to discover my beautiful and elegant and spare (on the outside) machine was a horrible hodgepodge of strange piggyback PCBs and third party gear (on the inside), this apparently happened because options like the backlit keyboard had become standard equipment at some point but Apple had never redesigned them into the motherboard, the whole thing was horribly complicated and fragile and never worked well after the teardown (b) I got seriously into FreeBSD and Linux and soon discovered the shortcomings of the Mac as a serious development machine, everything was just slightly incompatible leading to time waste. Happily matters have improved a lot. Lately I was setting up some Windows 7 and 10 machines for my wife to use MS Office on for her uni work. Both had serious driver issues like "The graphics card has crashed and recovered". And on the Windows 10 machine, despite it being BRAND NEW out of the box and manufacturer preloaded, the wifi also did not work, constantly crashed requiring a reboot. Windows Update did not fix these problems. Downloading and trying various updated drivers from the manufacturer's website seems to have for now, except on the Windows 7 machine where the issue is noted and listed as "won't fix" because the graphics card is out of date, the fixed driver won't load on this machine. Given this seems to be the landscape even for people who are happy to spend the $$ on the official manufacturer supported Windows based solutions, Linux looks pretty easy to install and use by comparison. Not problem free, but may have fewer problems and easier to fix problems. It appears to me that with the growing complexity of the hardware due to the millions of compatibility layers and ad hoc protocols built into it, the job of the manufacturers and official OS or driver writers gets harder and harder, whereas the crowdsourced principle of open source shows its value since the gear is better tested in a wider variety of realistic situations. cheers, Nick On Jan 1, 2017 9:46 AM, "David" <david(a)kdbarto.org> wrote: > On Dec 31, 2016, at 8:58 AM, tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote: > > From: Michael Kjörling <michael(a)kjorling.se> > To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Historic Linux versions not on kernel.org > Message-ID: <20161231111339.GK576(a)yeono.kjorling.se> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 > > I might be colored by the fact that I'm running Linux myself, but I'd > say that those are almost certainly worth preserving somehow, > somewhere. Linux and OS X are the Unix-like systems people are most > likely to come in contact with these days MacOS X is a certified Unix (tm) OS. Not Unix-Like. http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm It has been so since 10.0. Since 10.5 (Leopard) it has been so noted on the above Open Group page. The Open Group only lists the most recent release however. The Tech Brief for 10.7 (http://images.apple.com/media/us/osx/2012/docs/OSX_ for_UNIX_Users_TB_July2011.pdf) also notes the compliance. David

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] lost ports

by Lawrence Stewart

I left Digital in 1994, so I don’t know much about the later evolution of the Alphaservers, but 1998 would have been about right for en EV-56 (EV-5 shrink) or EV-6. There’s a Wikipedia article about all the different systems but most of the dates are missing. The white label parts are all PAL22V10-15s. The 8 square chips are cache SRAMS, and most the the SOIC jellybeans are bus transceivers to connect the CPU to RAM and I/O. The PC derived stuff is in the back corner. There are 16 DIMM slots to make two ranks of 54 bit RAM out of 8-bit DIMMs. We usually ran with a SCSI card, an ethernet, and an 8514 graphics card plugged into the riser. -L > On 2017, Jan 5, at 5:55 PM, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > What version of this would I have bought ca. 1998? I had 16 of some kind of Alpha nodes in AMD sockets, interconnected with SCI for encoding videos. I ended up writing and releasing what I think were the first open source drivers for SCI -- it took a long time to get Dolphin to let me release them. > > The DIPs with white labels -- are those PALs or somethin? Or are the labels just to cover up part names :-) > > On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 2:39 PM Lawrence Stewart <lstewart2(a)gmail.com <mailto:lstewart2@gmail.com>> wrote: > Alphas in PC boxes! I dug around in the basement and found my Beta (photo attached). > > This was from 1992 or 1993 I think. This is an EV-3 or EV-4 in a low profile PC box using pc peripherals. Dave Conroy designed the hardware, I did the console ROMS (BIOS equivalent) and X server, and Tom Levergood ported OSF-1. A joint project of DEC Semiconductor Engineering and the DEC Cambridge Research Lab. I think about 20 were built, and the idea kickstarted a line of low end Alphaservers. > > This was a typical Conroy minimalist design, crunching the off-chip caches, PC junk I/O, ISA bus, and 64 MBytes of RAM into this little space. I think one gate array would replace about half of the chips. > > -L > > > <IMG_0939.JPG><IMG_0939.JPG>

8 years, 7 months

My Hidden Archive (was: lost ports)

by Warren Toomey

All, following on from the "lost ports" thread, I might remind you all that I'm keeping a hidden archive of Unix material which cannot be made public due to copyright and other reasons. The goal is to ensure that these bits don't > /dev/null, even if we can't (yet) do anything with them. If you have anything that could be added to the archive, please let me know. My rules are: I don't divulge what's in the archive, nor who I got stuff from. There have been very few exceptions. I have sent copies of the archive to two important historical computer organisations who must abide by the same rules. I think I've had one or two individuals who were desperate to get software to run on their old kit, and I've "loaned" some bits to them. Anway, that's it. If that seems reasonable to you, and you want an off-site backup of your bits, I'm happy to look after them for you. Cheers, Warren

8 years, 7 months

What sparked lint? [Was: Unix stories]

by Nemo

On 4 January 2017 at 13:51, Steve Johnson <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote (in part): > These rules provided rich fodder for Lint, when it came along, [...] All this lint talk caused me to reread your Lint article but no history there. Was there a specific incident that begat lint? N.

8 years, 7 months

lost ports

by ron minnich

So there are a few ports I know of that I wonder if they ever made it back into that great github repo.I don't think they did. harris gould That weird BBN 20-bit machine (20 bits? true story: 5 4-bit modules fit in a 19" rack. So 20 bits) Alpha port (Tru64) Precision Architecture Unix port to Cray vector machines others? What's the list of "lost machines" look like? Would companies consider a donation, do you think? If that Cray port is of any interest I have a thread I can push on maybe. but another true story: I visited DEC in 2000 or so, as LANL was about to spend about $120M on an Alpha system. The question came up about the SRM firmware for Alpha. As it was described to me, it was written in BLISS and the only machine left that could build it was an 11/750, "somewhere in the basement, man, we haven't turned that thing on in years". I suspect there's a lot of these containing oxide oersteds of interest. ron

8 years, 7 months

Leap Second

by Dave Horsfall

(Yes, a repeat, but this momentous event only happens every few years.) The International Earth Rotation Service has announced that there will be a Leap Second inserted at 23:59:59 UTC on the 31st December, due to the earth slowly slowing down. It's fun to listen to see how the time beeps handle it; will your GPS clock display 23:59:60, or will it go nuts (because the programmer was an idiot)? I actually have a recording of the last one, over at www.horsfall.org/leapsecond.webm (yes, I am a tragic geek), -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] lost ports

by Rudi Blom

>Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2017 16:41:07 -0500 >From: "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> >To: "'ron minnich'" <rminnich(a)gmail.com>, <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> >Subject: Re: [TUHS] lost ports >Message-ID: <01c001d266d3$42294820$c67bd860$(a)ronnatalie.com> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" ... >I did kernel work on the PA for HP also worked on their X server (did a few other X server >over the years). >The hard part would be finding anybody from these companies who could even remember >they made computers let alone had UNIX software. I worked for the computer division in Philips Electronics, DEC, Compaq, HP, HPE and still remember some of it :-) I wasn't involved in OS development, but in testing, turnover to National Sales Organisations, etc. Even now at some customer side I still have a few aDEC400xP servers from 1992 running SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2 (last update 1999). Also a few AlphaServers with Digital UNIX, Tru64; finally some Itanium servers with HP-UX 11.23/11.31. Especially the big/small endian issue gave our customer (and therefore myself) a few headaches. Imagine getting a chunk of shared memory and casting pointers assuming the 'system' takes care of alignment. Big surprise for the customer moving from Tru64 to HP-UX.

8 years, 7 months

# as first character of file

by ron minnich

I just went looking at the v6 source to confirm a memory, namely that cpp was only invoked if a # was the first character in the file. Hence, this: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V6-Snapshot-D… People occasionally forgot this, and hilarity ensued. Now I'm curious. Anyone know when that convention ended? ron

8 years, 7 months

OK, time to step back from the keyboard (for a bit)

by Warren Toomey

Goodness, I go to sleep, wake up 8 hours later and there's 50 messages in the TUHS mailing list. Some of these do relate to the history of Unix, but some are getting quite off-topic. So, can I get you all to just pause before you send in a reply and ask: is this really relevant to the history of Unix, and does it contribute in a meaningful way to the conversation. Looks like we lost Armando, that's a real shame. Cheers, Warren

8 years, 7 months

Pipes in the Third Edition Unix

by Diomidis Spinellis

Peter Salus writes "The other innovation present in the Third Edition was the pipe" ("A Quarter Century of Unix", p. 50). Yet, in the corresponding sys/ken/sysent.c, the pipe system call seems to be a stump. 1, &fpe, /* 40 = fpe */ 0, &dup, /* 41 = dup */ 0, &nosys, /* 42 = pipe */ 1, &times, /* 43 = times */ On the other hand, the Fourth Edition manual documents the pipe system call, the construction of pipelines through the shell, and the use of wc as a filter (without an input file, as was required in the Second Edition). Would it therefore be correct to say that pipes were introduced in the Fourth rather than the Third Edition?

8 years, 7 months

Mentally Contaminated

by David

> > What made Linux happen was the BSDi/UCB vs AT&T case. At the time, a > lot of hackers (myself included) thought the case was about *copyright*. > It was not, it was about *trade secret* and the ideas around UNIX. * i.e.* > folks like, we "mentally contaminated" with the AT&T Intellectual Property. > Wasn’t there a Usenix button with the phrase “Mentally Contaminated” on it? I’m sure I’ve got it around here somewhere. Or is my memory suffering from parity errors? David

8 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Mac OS X is Unix

by Doug McIlroy

> keeping the code I work on portable between Linux and the Mac requires > more than a bit of ‘ifdef’ hell. Curmudgeonly comment: I bristle at the coupling of "ifdef" and "portable". Ifdefs that adjust code for different systems are prima facie evidence of NON-portability. I'll buy "configurable" as a descriptor for such ifdef'ed code, but not "portable". And, while I am venting about ifdef: As a matter of sytle, ifdefs are global constructs. Yet they often have local effects like an if statement. Why do we almost always write #ifdef LINUX linux code #else default unix code #endif instead of the much cleaner if(LINUX) linux code else default unix code In early days the latter would have cluttered precious memory with unfreachable code, but now we have optimizing compilers that will excise the useless branch just as effectively as cpp. Much as the trait of overeating has been ascribed to our hunter ancestors' need to eat fully when nature provided, so overuse of ifdef echos coding practices tuned to the capabilities of bygone computing systems. "Ifdef hell" is a fitting image for what has to be one of Unix's least felicitous contributions to computing. Down with ifdef! Doug

8 years, 7 months

Ifdef hell

by David

From: "Doug McIlroy" <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> Subject:Re: [TUHS] Mac OS X is Unix > keeping the code I work on portable between Linux and the Mac requires > more than a bit of ‘ifdef’ hell. | Curmudgeonly comment: I bristle at the coupling of "ifdef” and "portable". | Ifdefs that adjust code for different systems are prima facie | evidence of NON-portability. I'll buy "configurable" as a descriptor | for such ifdef'ed code, but not "portable". | <snip> | "Ifdef hell" is a fitting image for what has to be one of | Unix's least felicitous contributions to computing. Down | with ifdef! | Doug Doug makes a very good point about ifdef hell. Though I’d claim that it isn’t even “configurable” at some level. Several years ago I was working at Megatek, a graphics h/w vendor. We were porting the X11 suite to various new boards at the rate of about 1 a week it seemed. Needless to say the code became such a mishmash of ifdef’s that you couldn’t figure out what some functions did any longer. You just hoped and prayed that your patch worked properly on the various hardware you were targeting and didn’t break it for anyone else. You ran the unit tests, if they passed you pushed your change and ran an hid under a rock for a while until you were sure it was safe to come out again. David

8 years, 7 months

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by Armando Stettner

8 years, 7 months

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