TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

11 participants
6516 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Unix v6 File System information

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Random832 > That's the superblock. Look in ino.h. Oh, right you are. Thanks for catching my mistake! (I don't have anything like the same familiarity with V7 as I do with V6; never did any system hacking on the former.) Now that you mention it, I do seem to remember this kludge; IIRC, a later Unix paper described the V7 inode layout. I never looked at the actual code, though. Now that I do, it looks like iexpand() (in iget.c) is not exactly portable! On a machine with a different byte order for the bytes within a long, that ain't gonna work... Noel

9 years, 3 months

Some PDP-7 source code

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, Norman Wilson has kindly scanned in some PDP-7 Unix source code that he has kept hidden away. I've just added it into the Unix Archive at: http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/ I've updated the Readme with the details. The files are 0*.pdf. I'm not sure if there's enough there to bring up a kernel and some applications. I'll leave that to someone who knows PDP-7 assembly programming :-) Many thanks Norman! Cheers, Warren

9 years, 3 months

For all you troff hackers...

by Ronald Natalie

9 years, 3 months

On this day... (Wirth, Feynman) (fwd)

by Dave Horsfall

Of some possible intertest to the denizens here... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer." ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2016 07:11:44 +1100 (EST) From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> To: Applix List Subject: APPLIX-L On this day... (Wirth, Feynman) We gained Niklaus Wirth, otherwise known as Mr ALGOL (and thereby freeing us from the chains of FORTRAN), back in 1934; you can either call him by name, or call him by value (non-programmers are not expected to understand this computer joke). Upon the other paw, we lost Richard Feynman, back in 1988; he was the bloke who sorted out those NASA management liars, over that little O-ring incident... Well, that's what happens when the suits ignore the engineers. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

9 years, 3 months

RIP John von Neumann

by Dave Horsfall

John von Neumann halted in 1957; without him, we probably would not have had computers as we know them (CPU-buss-memory etc). -- Dave Horsfall Unit 13, 79 Glennie St North Gosford NSW 2250 0490 095 371

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Working e-mail for Henry Spencer?

by Norman Wilson

> There is a Henry Spencer <henry(a)spsystems.net>, who about a year ago or > so posted to the IETF TLS list and posted to comp.compilers a decade > ago. I believe that's The Henry Spencer, all right. SP Systems is what called (perhaps still does) himself when consulting. I've already dug up and sent Warren another contact address for Henry, gleaned from a mutual friend. Norman Wilson* Toronto ON (Not to be confused with Norman D. Wilson, civil engineer, after whom Wilson Avenue in Toronto is named)

9 years, 4 months

Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!

by Dave Horsfall

One half of Unix, and what more can I say? Well, I'll bet not many people know that he shares a birthday with Alice Cooper... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Short history of 'grep'

by Doug McIlroy

Ken kindly tells me that both stories are right, though clearly my impression that my query prompted Ken to write grep is wrong: i dont see any differences between our stories. you asked and i dug around and found it. Would we have greps today, had that little incident not occurred? Doug

9 years, 4 months

Short history of 'grep'

by Warren Toomey

Norman put this link up on twitter: https://medium.com/@rualthanzauva/grep-was-a-private-command-of-mine-for-qu… All good, except I'm not sure I would have written "One guy McIlroy claimed grep was invented for him." :-) Cheers, Warren (a lesser guy)

9 years, 4 months

Unix-related Usenet Postings

by Warren Toomey

All, I've spent some time working on the UTZoo Usenet Archive postings from https://archive.org/download/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive I've reformatted each group's postings into mbox format so I could run them through the mailman archive tool. The results are here: http://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/ You can now browse by group/year/month/thread. I'll drop an index.html file in there tomorrow with a description of each newsgroup. There are still some blemishes to fix up, as the archiver failed to recognise the headers on some articles and they end up "posted" in February 2016. Other newgroups archives are here: https://archive.org/search.php?query=usenet. I might pull out some other Unix relates groups (aus.sources etc.) and add them. Are there any other Usenet archives around? Cheers, Warren P.S If anybody is still trying to recover the old 2.11BSD patches, you may find some of them lurking in http://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.bugs.2bsd/

9 years, 4 months

32V, 3BSD and 4.0BSD on VAX-11/780

by nao

Hi, I successfully made SIMH VAX-11/780 emulator run 32V, 3BSD and 4.0BSD. Details are on my web site (thogh rather tarse): http://zazie.tom-yam.or.jp/starunix/ Enjoy! Naoki Hamada nao(a)tom-yam.or.jp

9 years, 4 months

Links to relevant Unix Usenet newgroups?

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, does anybody know of on-line historical Usenet archives that I can link to, especially if they have unpacked articles (visible subject lines would be better)? What newsgroups are relevant? net.v7bugs, comp.sources.unix, comp.sources.misc, net.sources, mod.sources, comp.sources.bugs? What about platform or system-specific newsgroups? I'll put the links here: http://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:newsgroups Thanks, Warren P.S A good history of the legal side of Unix is here: http://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:theses

9 years, 4 months

Working e-mail for Henry Spencer?

by Warren Toomey

Does anybody have a working e-mail address for Henry Spencer? I've tried his "zoo.utoronto..." address but the box is refusing SMTP connections (from me, at least). Alternatively, could someone e-mail him and see if he would be interested in joining the TUHS list? And ditto for any other old Unix users! Cheers, Warren

9 years, 4 months

Fwd: [SIGCIS-Members] Need help identifying a photo

by Al Kossow

Can someone here ID the mystery person? Embarrassingly, CHM has the person misidentified as well. -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Need help identifying a photo Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2016 16:46:45 +0000 From: Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP(a)si.edu> To: members(a)lists.sigcis.org <members(a)lists.sigcis.org> There is a famous photo on Wikimedia commons, of what purports to be Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie in front of a PDP-11, presumably working on UNIX. The problem is that the seated person doesn’t look like either of them. And he is clean-shaven. Could it be Bjarne Stroustrup? Does anyone recall seeing T&R w/o facial hair? Any help in tracking this down would be much appreciated! The photo has been reprinted in many places, and I’d like to track this down before I inadvertently propagate an error. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ken_Thompson_(sitting)_and_Dennis_R… Paul E. Ceruzzi Curator, Division of Space History National Air and Space Museum MRC 311, PO Box 37012 Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC 20013-7012 www.ceruzzi.com <http://www.ceruzzi.com> ceruzzip(a)si.edu <mailto:ceruzzip@si.edu> 202-633-2414

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: [SIGCIS-Members] Need help identifying a photo

by Doug McIlroy

No question about it. That is Ken Thompson. I saw him just like that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times in that very seat. doug

9 years, 4 months

And, contacts in the UK or Europe?

by Warren Toomey

[I feel like I'm spamming my own list] I've tried to make contact with people in the UK that might have copies of the UKUUG and EUUG newsletters: Peter Collinson, Sunil Das, Bruce Anderson. No luck with this. There are newsletters back to 1992 at http://www.ukuug.org/newsletter/ but I'm after the ones in the 1970s and 1980s. The current secretary doesn't know about the earlier newsletters. Who else can I contact? Cheers, Warren

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

by Doug McIlroy

> we can probably substitute part of the db(1) man page from 1st > Edition Unix for the missing page A7 That would be appropriate--properly documented, of course. doug

9 years, 4 months

"Edition 0" manual

by Doug McIlroy

Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as) a technical report with numbered sections and subsections. It does not resemble the familiar layout of the numbered editions. Besides the usual overview of kernel and shell, it describes system calls and some commands, in a layout unrelated to the familiar man-page style. Detailed reference/tutorial manuals for as, roff, db and ed are included as appendices. The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX contains a numer of features very seldom offered even by larger systems" appears on page 1. A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else? Doug

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions

by Doug McIlroy

> Dr. Wang invented the core memory at IBM BTW Wang did make a magnetic-core storage device (a 2-core-per-bit shift register) but Jay Forrester's core memory, first installed on MIT's Whirlwind computer in 1953, is the one that actually saw use and very quickly dominated the market. Doug

9 years, 4 months

PDP-11 questions

by Mark Longridge

Ok, I got a few questions about PDP-11. First, I was wondering when Bell Labs got that first PDP-11/20 what software (if any) came with it? I assume when one bought a PDP-11/20 you would get some type of OS with it. According to the folks at alt.sys.pdp11 the PDP-11 computer doesn't have anything equivalent to a PC's BIOS. But I know a bit about what a PC's BIOS does and that includes RAM Initialization. Wouldn't the DRAM on the PDP-11/something need to be initialized too? Perhaps an older PDP-11 doesn't have DRAM but surely the later models did? Now the last question has to do with what made the PDP-11 architecture so great. Part of that had to be the relatively affordablility of the PDP-11 and of course it was the machine that made Unix possible. It seems though that there should have been a PDP-11 based desktop and as far as I can tell that didn't happen. Instead we got a bunch of micros with 8080, z80 and 6502 cpus, but nothing that could run Unix, at least not a Unix v7 with source code. Mark

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions

by Doug McIlroy

> First, I was wondering when Bell Labs got that first PDP-11/20 what software (if any) came with it? > I have this bit set that they didn't get anything, they wrote a cross-assembler on another machine. I know that when it came, it didn't have a disk (wasn't ready yet), so it ran a chess problem (memory only) for quite a while until the disk came. That is exactly right. Unix was up and running as a time-sharing system with remote access before a primitive DOS emerged from DEC. The chess problem was enumeration of closed knight tours. Doug

9 years, 4 months

PC-bootable PDP-11 Unix

by arnold＠skeeve.com

FYI folks: Sanos PDP-11 Simulator with UNIX V7 http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm Arnold

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions

by Norman Wilson

Noel Chiappa: I'd lay good money that the vast majority of PDP-11's never ran Unix. And UNIX might have happened on some other machine - it's not crucially tied to the PDP-11 - in fact, the ease with which it could be used on other machines was a huge part of its eventual success. ======= I have to disagree in part: the PDP-11 is a big part of what made UNIX so widespread, especially in university departments, in the latter part of the 1970s. That wasn't due so much to the PDP-11's technical details as to its pricing. The PDP-11 was a big sales success because it was such a powerful machine, with a price that individual departments could afford. Without a platform like that, I don't think UNIX would have spread nearly the way it did, even before it began to appear in a significant way on other architectures. Save for the VAX, which was really a PDP-11 in a gorilla suit, that didn't really happen until the early 1980s anyway, and I'm not convinced it would have happened had UNIX not already spread so much on the PDP-11. It worked both ways, of course. I too suspect that a majority (though I'm not so sure about `vast') of PDP-11s never ran UNIX. But I also suspect that a vast majority of those that did might not have been purchased without UNIX as a magnet. I don't think those who weren't around in the latter 1970s and early 1980s can appreciate the ways in which UNIX captured many programmers and sysadmins (the two were not so distinct back then!) as no other competing system could. It felt enormously more efficient and more pleasant to work on and with UNIX than with any of the competition, whether from DEC or elsewhere. At the very least, none of the other system vendors had anything to match UNIX; and by the same token, had UNIX not been there, other hardware vendors' systems would have had better sales. Sometime around 1981, the university department I worked at, which already had a VAX-11/780 and a PDP-11/45 running UNIX, wanted to get another system. Data General tried very hard to convince us to buy their VAX-competitor. I remember our visiting their local office to run some FORTRAN benchmarks. The code needed some tweaking to work under their OS, which DG claimed was better than UNIX. Us UNIX people had trouble restraining our chuckles as we watched the DG guys, who I truly believe were experts in their own OS, taking 15 or 20 minutes to do things that would have taken two or three with a few shell loops and ed commands. DG did not get the sale. We bought a second-hand VAX. Blame UNIX. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions

by Johnny Billquist

On 2016-01-25 02:11, John Cowan<cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote: > Ronald Natalie scripsit: > >> >There were the Dec Professional 325 and 350 desktops which had the >> >F-11 and the 380 had the J-11 (which should make a pretty snazzy little >> >retro UNIX system) > As well as the 310, which was not a desk*top* but a whole desk with a > PDP/8-A built into it. The first regular job I ever had was with a > company that sold these along with their accounting software. The 310 was not called a Professional, though. It was the EDUsystem if I remember right. There was also PDP-11 based EDUsystems, called 350. Not the same as the desktop thingy... Isn't it wonderful how DEC reused different designations sometimes. There was also a DECstation 88, if I remember right, which was a PDP-8 based thing. 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

9 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] v6 debugging

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > to help debug the kernel, we even put adb into the core resident port of > V7 which was tricky - Noel I seem to remember we .. stole that from you > guys at MIT Well, I certainly don't remember doing such a thing - but I should point out that the Unix 'community' at MIT was not at all in good touch with each other. So perhaps someone else at MIT did it? Or perhaps it was done after I left for Proteon? Also, the group I was in - CSR - was, during my time with them, not well connected to other Unix users outside MIT. So even the things we _did_ do seem not to have made it to many (any?) people. I'm not sure why this was: probably, since we were working exclusively on early TCP/IP stuff, we were mostly in touch with other networking people. The disconnect to the rest of MIT may have been because, in our case, the technical community at Tech Square didn't have good contacts with the rest of campus; we were kind of self-sufficient. The AI Lab people had some contacts with the Plasma fusion group, and later the EE department on campus, but CSR (and maybe all of LCS - I'm not sure, the groups in LCS were pretty isolated from each other) didn't. Also, Tech Sq was mostly about PDP-10's - initially running ITS, later TWENEX - and only a couple of smaller groups ran Unix. The DSSR group had an 11/70, and we were quite close to them, but AFAIK we were the only two groups in Tech Sq running Unix. I don't think anyone else at MIT had a PDP-10, until the EE department on campus got an TWENEX machine, so there wasn't really anyone on campus for most of Tech Sq to interact with. Noel

9 years, 4 months

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TUHS