Clem Cole:
Also to be fair, Dennis did symlinks before 4.2. They were part of the V8
I believe.
=======
I'm pretty sure they came from Berkeley nevertheless. I don't know
the exact order of events, but the 8th Edition kernel was essentially
that from one of the later 4.1x BSDs, hacked in 1127 to remove sockets
and FFS (were they even there yet), then to add Dennis's stream I/O
system, Tom Killian's original /proc, and Peter Weinberger's neta
network-file-system client. Perhaps a few other hooks as well.
Symlinks were already there, and although we made some limited careful
use of them, made nobody very happy because they made such a big
irregular lump in so many things: file system no longer a tree,
difference between stat and lstat, and so on.
One thing 8/e did differently from Berkeley was that ls by default
hid symlinks rather than trotting them out proudly. If f was a
symlink, ls -l f showed the state of the target file, not that of
the link; one had to do ls -lL f to see the symlink itself.
That reflected a general feeling that symlinks should be neither
seen nor heard unless necessary.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
William Pechter:
Only thing I can think of is add another drive or partition and mount it
as /tmp.
=====
You say that as if it's a bad thing.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
mount >> ln -s
Just to be clear: I don't pine at all for UUCP.
I do still think it's a mistake that e-mail addresses and
domain names run backwards from the way directories and
filenames run. That's what I miss about !norman vs
norman@.
But it's all a Beta-vs-VHS matter these days, like a lot
of unfortunate design decisions that have become standard
over the years. Like git winning out over hg, which is
sort of like the VAX/VMS command language winning out over
the Bourne shell. (To toss another pebble into the pond
to see what the ripples look like, rather in the manner
of Rob and Dave.)
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
I recently noticed that lpr has a symlink option ("-s") on Solaris but
not on Apple. Is there anything here historically except prudence and
small drives?
N.
> I heard that Bob Morris was asked for his initials, he said “rm”, they insisted on a middle initial, which he didn’t have, so he supplied “h”, hence “rhm”.
True in principle, but when it happened and who "they" were, is lore
beyond my ken. I presume it was before he joined Bell Labs. At the
labs, interoffice communications typically used initials, so the
DMR, JFO, RHM convention was well established. Only the affectation
of lower-case only was new--and that was the fault of unicase Model
33. Who wanted to SHOUT EVERYTHING they wrote, or litter it with escapes?
doug
Google was not the first place Rob and Dave had fun with names.
At one point, Rob had a duplicate entry in /etc/passwd,
with login name r, password empty, normal userid/groupid/home
directory, special shell. The shell program checked whether
it was running on a particular host and a particular hardwired
serial line: if yes, it ran the program that started the Research
version of the window system for our bitmapped terminals;
otherwise it just exited. The idea seemed to be to let him
log in quickly in his office.
I think that by the time I arrived at Bell Labs he'd stopped
using it, because it no longer worked, because we no longer
ran serial lines directly from computers to offices--everyone
was connected via serial-port Datakit instead.
While I was there, senior management bought a Cray X-MP/24 for
the research group. (Thank you for using AT&T.) Since it too
was accessible via Datakit (using a custom hardware interface
built by Alan Kaplan, but that's another story), it had to have
a hostname. It was either Dave or Rob, I forget which, who
suggested 3k, because (a) it was a supercomputer, so `big bang'
seemed to fit; (b) it was Arno Penzias, then VP for Research,
who got us the money, so `big bang' and 3K radiation seemed
even more appropriate; and, most important, (c) it was fun to
see whether a hostname beginning with a digit broke anything.
So far as I recall, nothing broke. Some people who were
involved with TCP/IP networking at the labs were frightened
about it; I don't remember whether that Cray was ever connected
to an IP network so I don't know whether anything went wrong
there. Of course such names are not a problem today, but
in those long-lost days when nobody worried much about buffer
overflows either, such bugs were much more common. Weren't they?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Time to start a new thread :-)
Back when Unix was really Unix and dinosaurs strode the earth, login names
were restricted to just 8 characters, so you had to be inventive when
signing up lots of students every term (ObUS: semester).
A wonderful Japanese girl, Eriko Kinoshita, applied for an account on some
box somewhere. Did I mention that login names defaulted to the first 8
characters of the surname?
Understandably annoyed, Plan B for assigning logins was applied, which was
the first name followed by the first letter of the surname.
Sigh...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
One gets used to login names. In the 80ish I got 'rubl' and I'm still using it.
Of course in this age of the World Wild Web that may make me easily
trackable. Nothing to hide though :-)
Gr[aeiou]g Lehey:
And I wanted greg@, but it was taken. So I ended up with grog@, and
I've had that for nearly 30 years.
=====
I was !norman for some years, but when I left Bell
Labs for the real world 26 years ago, I was forced
to switch to norman@.
That was part of the price I paid for trading suburban
New Jersey for downtown Toronto. On the whole it was
a more-than-satisfactory trade, and emerging to the
real world broadened my perspectives in many areas,
but being stuck with Hideous Naming was certainly a
minor disadvantage.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
research!norman no more
On Jul 14, 2016 7:01 PM, "Peter Jeremy" <peter(a)rulingia.com> wrote:
>
> On 2016-Jul-15 08:36:56 +1000, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
> >On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Clem Cole wrote:
> >And on the Mac and FreeBSD, they still are (as well as being builtins).
>
> FreeBSD provides a convenient list of what commands are (currently)
builtin
> to the provided shells and available externally:
> https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?builtin
>
Bash man page does as well along with command -v (and hash IIRC) letting
you know.
I've always been curious though - what was the reason behind implementing
/bin/[ ? IDK any shell where this isn't implemented - I always assumed it's
a POSIX compatibility stopgap older systems needed to stay compliant with
their shipped shell.
I remember hearing that originally the Unix shell had control structures
(e.g. if, while, case) implemented through external commands. However,
I can't see this reflected in the source code. The 7th Edition Bourne
shell has these commands built-in (usr/src/cmd/sh/cmd.c), while the 6th
Edition (usr/source/s2/sh.c) seems to lack them completely.
The only external command I found was glob, which performed wildcard
expansion.
Am I missing something? Was this implemented in a version that was
never released? If so, does anyone know how this implementation worked?
(Nested commands might require holding some sort of globally
accessible stack.)
> As far as I know, it [|] has always been used as 'or' on computers.
I was on the NPL (eventually PL/I) committee when IBM 'generously'
increased the 360 character set from 48 to 60. George Radin grabbed
| for OR, before IBM announced the character set. Previously
the customary use for | in logic was the "Scheffer stroke", which
we now know as NAND. So "always" is ever since it became available.
Was PL/I the first to adopt it?
Doug
Dave Horsfall:
I still remember when the pipe command was "^" (pointy hat).
====
I still remember--barely--when \136 was up-arrow, not carat!
I don't think pipe was ever only ^, but that ^ was a
synonym for | added to make it easier to use on older
upper-case terminals that had no |. Those (remaining
few) who were there at the time can perhaps clarify.
I still habitually quote shell arguments containing ^,
even though I haven't used a shell that required that
since late 1984 (Rob had removed the special meaning
from /bin/sh before I arrived at Bell Labs). On the
other hand, I still cannot be bothered to get used to
quoting arguments containing !; I just disable all
that history and editing bloatware whenever possible.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Ok, I hope this question isn't too off-topic...
I was looking through the X10R3 source tree trying to find the
earliest paint program for X. I wasn't able to see anything that
looked like a paint program.
Xpaint might be the oldest, wikipedia says the first version appeared in 1989.
Searching for xpaint on tuhs returned no matches, but I saw that
4.3BSD-Tahoe had some old X programs but nothing listed there seemed
to be a paint program.
Maybe xgedit? It's listed as a "simple graphic editor for the X window
system", but I don't know if it really qualifies as a paint program.
Mark
On 2016-07-11 04:00, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Johnny Billquist scripsit:
>> > Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
>> > comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
>> > Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which
>> > means they all share a common root.
> Absolutely.
>
>> > What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from
>> > English?
> Because when words change, they change according to common patterns
> specific to the language. For example, a change between Old English (OE)
> and Modern English (ModE) is that long-a has become long-o. Consequently,
> the descendants of OE bát, tá, ác are ModE boat, toe, oak. In Scots,
> which is also descended from OE, this change did not operate, and long-a
> changed in the Great Vowel Shift along with long-a from other sources,
> giving the Older Scots words bait, tae, eik. However, current Scots
> does not use bait, but rather boat, and we can see that because this
> breaks the pattern it must be a borrowing from English.
So the obvious question then becomes: Are you saying that Old English
also borrowed the word from English?
(See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boat)
>> > (I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)
> OE steor 'steering oar, rudder' + bord 'side of a ship'. Parallel
> formations gave us common Scandinavian styrbord from ON stjórnborði,
> similarly Dutch stuurbord, German Steuerbord. Larboard, the other side,
> began life as Middle English ladde 'load' + bord, because it was the side
> you loaded a ship from, and was altered under the influence of starboard.
> Because the two were easily confused, port officially replaced it in the
> 19C, though it had been used in this meaning since the 16C.
Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called "babord", which comes from
bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on. No
rudder to break... And it's from way before medieval times... But I'm
pretty sure the term is from even before the Vikings were around.
Johnny
I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
would give an Englishman a stroke.
If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
after the brief but illuminating detour on character sets and the
evolution of human languages, we now return you to the Unix Heritage
mailing list :-)
[ Please! ]
Cheers, Warren
If 19961 is the oldest citation the OED can come up with, "slash"
really is a coinage of the computer age. Yet the character had
been in algebra books for centuries. The oral tradition that underlies
eqn would be the authority for a "solid" name. I suspect, though,
that regardless of what the algebra books called it, the name
would be "divided by".
This is sheer hypothesis, but I have always thought that \ got
onto printer chains and type balls as a crude drawing aid. Ditto
for |. Once the characters became available people began to find
uses for them.
On 2016-07-10 02:52, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit:
>> > "Die Segel streichen" (Taking in the sails),
> "Striking the sails" in technical English. All the nations around the
> North and Baltic Seas exchanged their vocabularies like diseases, and if
> we didn't have records of their earlier histories, we would know they
> were related but we'd never figure out exactly how. For example, it
> can be shown that French bateau, German Boot, common Scandinavian båt,
> Irish bád, Scottish Gaelic bàta, Scots boat, and the equivalents in
> the various Frisian languages are none of them original native words:
> they all were borrowed from English boat.
Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which means
they all share a common root.
What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from English? I
would guess/suspect that the term is older than English itself, and the
similarity of the word in the different languages comes from the fact
that it's old enough to have been around when all these languages were
closer to the roots and each other. Boats have been around for much
longer than the English language so I would suspect some term for them
have been around for a long time too...
If you ask me, you all got most terms from the Vikings anyway, who were
the first good seafarers... :-)
(I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)
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
Steffen Nurpmeso:
...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
created what became POSIX preferred slash instead -- i hope it is
not the proud of high skills in using (maybe light) sabers that
some people of the engineer community seem to foster. But it
could be the sober truth. Or, it could be a bug caused by
inconsideration. And that seems very likely now.
====
It had nothing to do with engineers. `Slash' for / has been
conventional American usage for as long as I can remember,
dating back well before POSIX or UNIX or the movie that made
a meme of light sabers.
It's unclear exactly how far back it dates. The earliest
OED citation for `slash' as `A thin sloping line, thus /'
is dated 1961; but the cite is from Webster's 3rd.
Given the amount of violence prevalent in American metaphor,
it is hardly noteworthy.
Make American Language Violent Again (and I HATE MOSQUITOS*).
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
* If you don't know what this refers to, you probably don't
want to know.
On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen(a)sdaoden.eu> wrote:
> ...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
> created what became POSIX preferred slash instead
>
I can not speak for anyone else. But at the time when I was a part of
the /usr/group UNIX standards** mtgs I personally do not believe I had
ever heard of the term "solidus." Such a term maybe had been used in my
first form Latin classes from the 1960s, but by the 1980s I had long ago
forgotten any/all of my Latin. I certainly did not try to remember it as a
computer professional.
In those days many of us, including me, did (and still do) refer to the
asterisk as "splat" and the exclamation point as "bang" from the sound
made by them when they printed yellow oiled paper @ 10 cps from the console
TTY. But slash was what we called the character that is now next to the
shift key on modern keyboards. I do not remember ever using, much less
needed to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap
that the folks in Redmond forced on the industry. Although interestingly
enough, the vertical bar or UNIX "pipe" symbol was used and discussed
freely in those days. I find it interesting that Redmond-ism became the
unshifted character, not the vertical bar by the shear force of economics
of the PC.
Clem
** For those that do not know (my apologies to those that do) the 1985
/usr/group standards committee was the forerunner to IEEE P1003. Which we
published as the first "official UNIX API standard agreed by the community"
(I still have a hardcopy). But neither /usr/group nor USENIX had the
political authority to bring an official standard to FIPS, ANSI, ECMA, ISO
or like, while IEEE did. So a few months before the last meeting, Jim
Issak petitioned IEEE for standards status, and the last meeting of the
/usr/group UNIX standards meeting was very short -- about 10 minutes. We
voted to disband and then everyone in the room officially reformed a few
minutes later all signing in as IEEE P1003, later to be called POSIX. For
further historical note, I was a "founding member" of both groups and the
editor of a number of early drafts (numbers 5-11 IIRC), as well as the
primary author of the Tape Format and Terminal I/O sections of P1003.1.
With Keith Bostic, I would later be part of the P1003.2 and pen the
original PAX compromise. After that whole mess I was so disgusted with the
politics of the effort, I stopping going to the POSIX mtgs.
PPS While I did not work for them at the time, you can blame DEC for the
mess with the case/character sets in the POSIX & FIPS standards. A number
of the compromises in the standard documents were forced by VMS, 7-bit
(case insensitivity) being the prime one. While we did get in the
rational section of document that it was suggested/advised that systems
implementations and applications code be case insensitive and 8 bit clean
so that other character sets could be supported. However the DEC folks
were firmly against anything more than 7-bit ASCII and supporting anything
in that character set. My memory is that the IBM folks were silent at the
time and just let the DEC guys carry the torch for 1960's 7-bit US English.
Thanks for reminding me about that one, Clem. I think I even have
Darnell's book somewhere.
I haven't decided what to do about batch interpreters for C. They aren't
interactive but there is still some overlap of concerns. I'll probably
post a list of them somewhere. I also have Al Stevens' Quincy,
Przemyslaw Podsiadly's SeeR, and Herb Schildt's from "Building your own
C interpreter."
On Wed, Jul 6, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> From the The Unix Historical Society mailing list, I discovered your
> historical interest in C interpreters. It looks like you are missing at
> least one, so I though I would introduce you all.
>
> Paul/Wendell meet Peter Darnell -- Pete wrote one an early C interpreter
> for his C programming book. I'll leave it to you folks to discuss what
> he
> did, its current status et al.
>
> Best Wishes,
>
> Clem Cole (old time UNIX and C guy)
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> Date: Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 6:01 PM
> Subject: [TUHS] Interactive C Environments
> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org
>
>
> All, I've been asked by Wendell to forward this query about C
> interpreters to the mailing list for him.
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Wendell P <wendellp(a)operamail.com> -----
>
> I have a project at softwarepreservation.org to collect work done,
> mostly in the 1970s and 80s, on C interpreters.
>
> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c
>
> One thing I'm trying to track down is Cin, the C interpreter in UNIX
> v10. I found the man page online and the tutorial in v2 of the Saunders
> book, but that's it. Can anyone help me to find files or docs?
>
> BTW, if you have anything related to the other commercial systems
> listed, I'd like to hear. I've found that in nearly all cases, the
> original developers did not keep the files or papers.
>
> Cheers,
> Wendell
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
--
http://www.fastmail.com - The professional email service
Clem Cole:
I do not remember ever using, much less
needed to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap
that the folks in Redmond forced on the industry.
=====
Oh, come on. You programmed in C. You probably used
UNIX back when @ was the default kill character (though
I doubt you're odd enough still to use that kill character,
as I do). You surely used troff, LaTeX, or both, and have
doubtless sworn at regular expressions more often than
most of the young Linux crowd have had chocolate bars.
I think you've just forgotten it out of PBSD (post-backlash
stress disorder, nothing to do with Berkeley).
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
UNIX\(tm old fart who swore at a regexp just yesterday
