TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

6515 discussions

by Aharon Robbins

Sent to me by a friend: https://youtu.be/vT_J6xc-Az0 There's another one there about "The C Programming Language" book as well. And looks like more to come. Arnold

9 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

On Fri, 2 Oct 2015 12:00:08 -0600, I posted to this list a summary of the earliest mentions of Unix in several corporate technical journals. This morning, I made a similar search in the complete bibliographies of 29 journals on the history of computing, mathematics, and science listed at http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/index.html#content As might be expected, there is little mention of Unix (or Linux) in those publications: they only ones that I found are these: +-----------------------+------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | filename | label | substr(title,1,80) | +-----------------------+------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | cryptologia.bib | Morris:1982:CFU | Cryptographic Features of the UNIX Operating System | | annhistcomput.bib | Tomayko:1989:ACI | Anecdotes: a Critical Incident; The First Port of UNIX | | annhistcomput.bib | Tomayko:1989:AWC | Anecdotes: The Windmill Computer---An Eyewitness Report of the Scheutz Differenc | | ieeeannhistcomput.bib | Toomey:2010:FEU | First Edition Unix: Its Creation and Restoration | | ieeeannhistcomput.bib | Sippl:2013:IIM | Informix: Information Management on Unix | +-----------------------+------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Recent traffic on the TUHS list has discussed early publications about UNIX at DECUS. The Digital Technical Journal of Digital Equipment Corporation began publishing in August 1985, and there is a nearly complete bibliography at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/dectechj.bib Change .bib to .html for a version with live hyperlinks. The first publication there that mentions ULTRIX in its title is from March 1986. Unix appears in a title first in Spring 1995. The document collection at http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/decus/ doesn't appear to have much that might be related to Unix ports to DEC hardware. The Hewlett-Packard Journal is documented in http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/hpj.bib The first paper recorded there that mentions Unix or HP-UX is from March 1984. The Intel Technical Journal is covered in those archives as well at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/intel-tech-j.bib but it only began relatively recently, in 1997. The IBM Systems Journal began in 1962, and the IBM Journal of Research and Development in 1957, and both are in those archives at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ibmsysj.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ibmjrd.bib In the Systems Journal, the first mention of Unix or AIX is in Fall 1979 (Unix) and then December 1987 (AIX). In the Journal of R&D, AIX appears in January 1990, and Unix appears in abstracts sporadically, but is in a title first in late Fall 2002. In the Bell Systems Technical Journal, covered at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1970.bib (and other decades from 1920 to 2010), the first mention of Unix in a title is July/August 1978. There may have been similar corporate technology journals at other computer companies, such as CDC, Cray, Data General, English Electric, Ferranti, Gould, Harris, NCR, Pr1me, Univac, Wang, and others, but I've so far made no attempt to track them down and add bibliographic coverage. Suggestions are welcome! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Norman Wilson

Dave Horsfall: Oh, and I also wrote many articles for AUUGN, and presented the original Unix paper at a DECUS conference, just to stir up the VMSoids. ===== Do you mean the first UNIX-related paper ever at a DECUS? If so, do you mean DECUS Australia or DECUS at all? I'm pretty sure there was UNIX-related activity in DECUS US in 1980, probably earlier, and am quite sure there was by 1981 when I was on the sidelines of what eventually became the UNIX SIG. It was initially called the Special Software and Operating Systems SIG, because DECUS US leadership always included a somewhat stodgy subgroup who were more afraid of offending Digital's marketing people than of serving the membership. So we ended up with a code name. Since there were in fact Digital technical and marketing people supporting the new SIG, it was only a couple of years before the name was fixed. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (Lived in Los Angeles and then New Jersey during that period)

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Hellwig Geisse

Hi, I don't know if John Lions ever wrote a full book about PCC, but there is a paper analyzing its second pass: https://github.com/eunuchs/unix-archive/blob/master/Documentation/Papers/li… Hellwig

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Clem Cole

On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 9:27 AM, <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote: > I think the Berkeley guys had an underground > pipeline to Bell labs and some stuff got out that way. :-) > It was not underground at all. Tools packaged in BSD came from all over the community. style and diction were released into the wild by themselves before the were packaged into an AT&T USG UNIX or Research UNIX release. It got them personally directly and had them installed at Tektronix soon after first publishing and a talk about them at USENIX (IIRC that was the Boulder conference in the "Black Hole" movie theatre. Since I had a minor stake in it (as my first C program) fsck is another good example of the path to UCB . Ted started the predecessor program when he was at UMich (with Bill Joy). He did his OYOC year and later a full PhD at CMU. He was one of my lab partners in his OYOC year. fsck was a we know it now was done during that time ( and I helped him a bit). He was bring the sources back and forth from Summit to CMU (at the time in an RK05 or sometimes a bootable DOS tape image of one - I may still have one of these). I believe he gave a copy of the sources very early to wnj -- which is how it ended up in 4.1BSD. I don't think it was in the original 3.0 or 4.0 packages as it was not in V5, V6 or V7 either. I believe it was released in PWB 2.0 - not sure and Minnie does not seem to have them. I'm pretty the SCCS and cpio sources came through one of the PWB releases (1 or 2) that UCB got from AT&T. Clem

9 years, 8 months

update on Bell System Technical Journal family archives

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

In late 2010, I released decade-specific bibliographies of the Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ) at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1920.bib ... http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj2010.bib (change .bib to .html for versions with live hyperlinks). I get weekly status reports for the hundreds of bibliographies in the archives to which the bstj*.bib files belong, and until recently, I'd been puzzling about the apparent cessation of publication of the Bell Labs Technical Journal (its current name) in March 2014. I now understand why: according to the Wiley Web site for the journal, ownership and the archives have been transferred to IEEE, effective with volume 19 (2014). The bstj2010.bib file has accordingly been updated today with coverage of (so far, only four) articles published by IEEE in volume 19. [The first of those is a 50-year retrospective on the discovery of the Cosmic Microware Background that provided some of the first solid evidence for the Big Bang theory of the origin and evolution of the universe, and led to the award of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics to Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. The article also includes a timeline of important Bell Labs developments, and Unix is listed there.] Older list readers may remember that a lot of the early research publications about Unix appeared in the BSTJ issues, so this journal should have considerable interest for TUHS list users, and the move of the archives from Wiley to IEEE may make the back issues somewhat more accessible outside those academic environments that have library subscriptions for Wiley journals in electronic form. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9 years, 8 months

where the docs have gone

by Doug McIlroy

The disappearance of some troff-related documents that had been on line at Bell Labs was recently reported on this list. That turns out to have been a bureaucratic snafu. Plan 9 and v7 are back now. It is hoped that CSTRs will follow. Doug

9 years, 8 months

getting nroff to underline in v6,v5

by Mark Longridge

It seems that nroff had the ability to show underlined text very early on, possibly as early as v3 according to the v3 manual. I haven't managed to get this to work right under simh but I was thinking maybe there's a way to do it. It needs an 'underline font' but the mechanism of how this worked in the old days is a bit of mystery to me. The output device would have to have the ability to either display or print underlined text. Maybe someone can remember which terminal devices supported this in the old days which worked "out of the box" in the v5,v6 era. Maybe there was the ability to use overstrike characters on the teletype? In bash I can use: echo -e "\e[4munderline\e[0m" Shouldn't be too hard to hack up something that works in emulated v5. Mark

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] getting nroff to underline in v6,v5

by Doug McIlroy

> It seems that nroff had the ability to show underlined text very early Pre-Unix roff had the .ul request. Thus I expect (but haven't checked) that it was in Unix roff. It would be very surprising if nroff, which was intended to be more capable that roff, didn't have some underlining facility right from the start. Doug

9 years, 8 months

Re {TUHS} Synchronous vs Asynchronous IO in Unix

by Doug McIlroy

Unix was what the authors wanted for a productive computing environment, not a bag of everything they thought somebody somewhere might want. One objective, perhaps subliminal originally, was to make program behavior easy to reason about. Thus pipes were accepted into research Unix, but more general (and unruly) IPC mechanisms such as messages and events never were. The infrastructure had to be asynchronous. The whole point was to surmount that difficult model and keep everyday programming simple. User visibility of asynchrony was held to a minimum: fork(), signal(), wait(). Signal() was there first and foremost to support SIGKILL; it did not purport to provide a sound basis for asynchronous IPC. The complexity of sigaction() is evidence that asynchrony remains untamed 40 years on. Doug

9 years, 8 months

From BWK on contributor names

by Aharon Robbins

Hi All. Here is BWK's contribution. | Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 17:28:21 -0400 (EDT) | From: Brian Kernighan <bwk(a)cs.princeton.edu> | To: arnold(a)skeeve.com | Subject: Re: please get out your flash light... | | Some answers interpolated, but lots remain mysteries... | | On Thu, 24 Sep 2015, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: | | > Hi. Can you shed some light? | > | >> From: Diomidis Spinellis <dds(a)aueb.gr> | >> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org | >> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 12:27:03 +0300 | >> Subject: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors | >> | >> I found out that the book "Life with Unix" by Don Libes and Sandy | >> Ressler has a seven page listing of Unix notables, and I'm using that to | >> fill gaps in the contributors of the Unix history repository [1,2]. | >> Working through the list, the following questions came up. | >> | >> - Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction. But diction.c first appears | >> in 4BSD and 2.10BSD. Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley? | | Nina Macdonald, maybe? Lorinda worked with people in that group. | | >> - Is Chuck Haley listed in the book as the author of tar the same as | >> Charles B. Haley who co-authored V7 usr/doc/{regen,security,setup}? He | >> appears to have worked both at Bell labs (tar, usr/doc/*) and at | >> Berkeley (ex, Pascal). Is this correct? | | I think so. | | >> - Andrew Koenig is credited with varargs. This is a four-line header | >> file in V7. Did he actually write it? | >> | >> - Ted Dolotta is credited with the mm macros, but the document "Typing | >> Documents with MM is written by by D. W. Smith and E. M. Piskorik. Did | >> its authors only write the documentation? Did Ted Dolotta also write | >> mmcheck? | | I don't think Ted wrote -mm; he might have been the manager of that | group? Ask him: ted(a)dolotta.org | | >> Also, I'm missing the login identifiers for the following people. If | >> anyone remembers them, please send me a note. | >> | >> Bell Labs, PWB, USG, USDL: | | ark | | >> Andrew Koenig | >> Charles B. Haley | >> Dick Haight | | Maybe rhaight, but don't quote me. Last address I have is from | long ago: rhaight(a)jedi.accn.org | | >> Greg Chesson | | Can't remember whether it was grc or greg | | >> Herb Gellis | >> Mark Rochkind | | You probably mean Marc J Rochkind. I think it was mmr, but | ask him: rochkind(a)basepath.com | | >> Ted Dolotta | >> | >> BSD: | >> Bill Reeves | >> Charles B. Haley | >> Colin L. Mc Master | >> Chris Van Wyk | | Was Chris ever part of BSD? He was at Stanford, then Bell Labs, | where he was cvw. | | >> Douglas Lanam | >> David Willcox | >> Eric Schienbrood | >> Earl T. Cohen | >> Herb Gellis | >> Ivan Maltz | >> Juan Porcar | >> Len Edmondson | >> Mark Rochkind | | See above | | >> Mike Tilson | >> Olivier Roubine | >> Peter Honeyman | | honey (remember honeydanber? | | >> R. Dowell | >> Ross Harvey | >> Robert Toxen | >> Tom Duff | | td | | >> Ted Dolotta | >> T. J. Kowalski | | frodo | | >> Finally, I've summarized all contributions allocated through file path | >> regular expressions [3] into two tables ordered by author [4]. (The | >> summary is auto-generated by taking the last significant part of each | >> path regex.) If you want, please have a look at them and point out | >> omissions and mistakes. | >> | >> I will try to commit all responses I receive with appropriate credit to | >> the repository. (You can also submit a GitHub pull-request, if you prefer.) | >> | >> [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo | >> [2] | >> http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.pdf | >> [3] | >> https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/author-path | >> [4] http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr/~dds/contributions.pdf | >> | >> Diomidis | >> _______________________________________________ | >> TUHS mailing list | >> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org | >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Doug McIlroy

I can assure you that Lorinda Cherry wrote most of the important code in WWB, including style and diction. The idea for them came from Bill Vesterman at Rutgers. Lorinda already had parts, a real tour de force, which assigned parts of speech to words in a text. Style was the killer app for parts and was running within days of his approach to the labs wondering whether such a thing could be built. Lorinda also wrote deroff, which these tools of course needed. WWB per se was packaged by USDL; I am sorry I can't remember the name of the guiding spirit. So Lorinda's code detoured through there on its way into research Unix. Chris van Wyk was cvw. He was at Bell Labs, not BSD. Chuck Haley is indeed Charles B. Haley. Andy Koenig was ark.

9 years, 8 months

Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Norman Wilson

A few scattered answers, some redundant with those of others: -- Lorinda Cherry (llc) worked at Bell Labs. She wrote diction (and the rest of the Writer's Workbench tools) there, in the early 1980s; if some people saw it first in BSD releases that is just an accident of timing (too late for V7) and exposure (I'm pretty sure it was available in the USG systems, which weren't generally accessible until a year or two later). Lorinda is one of the less-known members of the original Computer Science Research Center who nevertheless wrote or co-wrote a lot of things we now take for granted, like dc and bc and eqn and libplot. Checking some of this on the web, I came across an interesting tidbit apparently derived from an interview with Lorinda: http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/precis/cherry2.htm I wholly endorse what she says about UNIX and the group it came from. One fumble in the text: `Bob Ross' who liked to break programs is surely really Bob Morris. -- So far as I know, Tom Duff (td) was never at Berkeley. He's originally from Toronto; attended U of T; was at Lucasfilm for a while (he has a particular interest in graphics, though he is a very sharp and subtle programmer in general); started at Bell Labs in 1984, not long before I did. He left sometime in the 1990s, lives in Berkeley CA, but works neither at UCB nor at Google but at Pixar. -- T. J. Kowalski (frodo) was at Bell Labs; when I was there he worked in the research group down the hall (Acoustics, I think), with whom Computer Science shared a lot of UNIX-releasted stuff. Ted is well-known for his work on fsck, but did a lot of other stuff, including being the first to get Research UNIX to work on the MicroVAX II. He also had a high-quality mustache. -- Andrew Koenig (ark) was part of the Computer Science group when I was there in the latter 1980s. He was a early adopter of C++. asd, the automatic-software distributor we used to keep the software in sync on the 20-or-so systems that ran Research UNIX, was his work. -- Mike Tilson was, I think, one of the founders of HCR (Human Computing Resources), a UNIX-oriented software company based in Toronto in the early 1980s. The company was later acquired by SCO, in the days when SCO was still a technical company rather than a den of lawyers. -- Peter Honeyman (honey) was never, I think, at Berkeley, though he is certainly of the right character. In the 1980s he was variously (sometimes concurrently?) working for some part of AT&T and at Princeton. For many years now he has been in Ann Arbor MI at the University of Michigan, where his still-crusty manner appears not to interfere with his being a respected researcher and much-liked teacher. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (Bell Labs Computing Science Research, 1984-1990)

9 years, 8 months

Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Diomidis Spinellis

I found out that the book "Life with Unix" by Don Libes and Sandy Ressler has a seven page listing of Unix notables, and I'm using that to fill gaps in the contributors of the Unix history repository [1,2]. Working through the list, the following questions came up. - Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction. But diction.c first appears in 4BSD and 2.10BSD. Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley? - Is Chuck Haley listed in the book as the author of tar the same as Charles B. Haley who co-authored V7 usr/doc/{regen,security,setup}? He appears to have worked both at Bell labs (tar, usr/doc/*) and at Berkeley (ex, Pascal). Is this correct? - Andrew Koenig is credited with varargs. This is a four-line header file in V7. Did he actually write it? - Ted Dolotta is credited with the mm macros, but the document "Typing Documents with MM is written by by D. W. Smith and E. M. Piskorik. Did its authors only write the documentation? Did Ted Dolotta also write mmcheck? Also, I'm missing the login identifiers for the following people. If anyone remembers them, please send me a note. Bell Labs, PWB, USG, USDL: Andrew Koenig Charles B. Haley Dick Haight Greg Chesson Herb Gellis Mark Rochkind Ted Dolotta BSD: Bill Reeves Charles B. Haley Colin L. Mc Master Chris Van Wyk Douglas Lanam David Willcox Eric Schienbrood Earl T. Cohen Herb Gellis Ivan Maltz Juan Porcar Len Edmondson Mark Rochkind Mike Tilson Olivier Roubine Peter Honeyman R. Dowell Ross Harvey Robert Toxen Tom Duff Ted Dolotta T. J. Kowalski Finally, I've summarized all contributions allocated through file path regular expressions [3] into two tables ordered by author [4]. (The summary is auto-generated by taking the last significant part of each path regex.) If you want, please have a look at them and point out omissions and mistakes. I will try to commit all responses I receive with appropriate credit to the repository. (You can also submit a GitHub pull-request, if you prefer.) [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo [2] http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.pdf [3] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/author-path [4] http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr/~dds/contributions.pdf Diomidis

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Eric Schienbrood > .. Noel might remember his MIT moniker No, alas; and I tried 'finger Schienbrood(a)lcs.mit.edu' and got no result. Maybe he was in some other part of MIT, not Tech Sq? > From: Arnold Skeeve > Here too I think stuff written at ATT got out through Berkeley. (SCCS) That happened at MIT, too - we had SCCS quite early (my MIT V6 manual has it), plus all sorts of other stuff (e.g. TROFF). I think some of it may have come through Jon Sieber, who, while he was in high school, had been part of (IIRC) a Scout troop which had some association with Bell Labs, and continued to have contacts there after he became an MIT undergrad. Noel

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Synchronous vs Asynchronous IO in Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Peter Jeremy <peter(a)rulingia.com> > Why were the original read(2) and write(2) system calls written to > offer synchronous I/O only? A very interesting question (to me, particularly, see below). I don't think any of the Unix papers answer this question? > It's relatively easy to create synchronous I/O functions given > asynchronous I/O primitives but it's impossible to do the opposite. Indeed, and I've seen operating systems (e.g. a real-time PDP-11 OS I worked with a lot called MOS) that did that. I actually did add asynchronous I/O to V6 UNIX, for use with very early Internet networking software being done at MIT (in a user process). Actually, it wasn't just asynchronous, it was _raw_ asynchronous I/O! (The networking device was DMA, and the s/w did DMA directly into the user process' memory.) The code also allowed more than one outstanding I/O request, too. (So the input could be re-enabled on the device ASAP, without having to wake up a process, have it run, do a new read call, etc.) We didn't redo the whole Unix I/O system, to support/use asyn I/O throughout, though; I just kind of warted it onto the side. (IIRC, it notified the user process via a signal that the I/O had completed; the user software then had to do an sgtty() call to get the transfer status, size, etc.) Anyway, back to the original topic: I don't want to speculate (although I could :-); perhaps someone who was around 'back then' can offer some insight? If not, time for speculation! :-) Noel

9 years, 8 months

Synchronous vs Asynchronous IO in Unix

by Peter Jeremy

Why were the original read(2) and write(2) system calls written to offer synchronous I/O only? It's relatively easy to create synchronous I/O functions given asynchronous I/O primitives but it's impossible to do the opposite. Multics (at least) supported asynchronous I/O so the concept wasn't novel. And any multi-tasking kernel has to support asynchronous I/O internally so suitable code exists in the kernel. -- Peter Jeremy

9 years, 8 months

Why root user name?

by Warren Toomey

As I was dropping off to sleep last night, I wondered why the superuser account on Unix is called root. There's a hierarchy of directories and files beginning at the tree root /. There's a hierarchy of processes rooted with init. But there's no hierarchy of users, so why the moniker "root"? Any ideas? Cheers, Warren

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Did realloc ever zero the new memory?

by Doug McIlroy

> Did any Unix or Unix like OS ever zero fill on realloc? > On zero fill, I doubt many did that. Many really early on when memory > was small. This sparks rminiscence. When I wrote an allocation strategy somewhat more sophisticated than the original alloc(), I introduced realloc() and changed the error return from -1 to the honest pointer value 0. The latter change compelled a new name; "malloc" has been with us ever since. To keep the per-byte cost of allocation low, malloc stuck with alloc's nonzeroing policy. The minimal extra code to handle calls that triggered sbrk had the startling property that five passes through the arena might be required in some cases--not exactly scalable to giant virtual address spaces! It's odd that the later introduction of calloc() as a zeroing malloc() has never been complemented by a similar variant of realloc(). > Am I the only one that remembers realloc() being buggy on some systems? I've never met a particular realloc() bug, but realloc does inherit the portability bug that Posix baked into malloc(). Rob Pike and I requested that malloc(0) be required to return a pointer distinct from any live pointer. Posix instead allowed an undefined choice between that behavior and an error return, confounding it with the out-of-memory indication. Maybe it's time to right the wrong and retire "malloc". The name "alloc" might be recycled for it. It could also clear memory and obsolete calloc(). Doug

9 years, 8 months

Happy Programmers' Day!

by Norman Wilson

Dave Horsfall: Today is The Day of the Programmer, being the 0x100'th day of the year. === Are you sure you want to use that radix as your standard? You risk putting a hex on our profession. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy Programmers' Day!

by Doug McIlroy

> Today is The Day of the Programmer, being the 0x100'th day of the year. Still further off topic, but it reminds me of a Y2K incident circa 1960. Our IBM 7090 had been fitted with a homegrown time-of-day clock (no, big blue did not build such into their machines back then). The most significant bits of the clock registered the day of the year. On day 0x100 the clock went negative and the system went wild. Doug

9 years, 8 months

PDP-11/23+ just restored :)

by asbesto

Hi there, we just restored our PDP-11/23+ rebulding a new PSU around a normal PC PSU and creating the real time clock needed for some OS. we're wondering about what UNIX can eventually run on it :) http://museo.freaknet.org/en/restauro-pdp1123plus/ bye, Gabriele -- [ ::::::::: 73 de IW9HGS : http://freaknet.org/asbesto ::::::::::: ] [ 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 ]

9 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 128, Issue 7

by David

> http://xkcd.com/927/ > > Greg And as the original asker of this question, I declare it completely solved. David

9 years, 8 months

Happy Programmers' Day!

by Dave Horsfall

Today is The Day of the Programmer, being the 0x100'th day of the year. Take a bow, all programmers... Did you know that it's an official professional holiday in Russia? -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer." I'll support shark-culling when they have been observed walking on dry land.

9 years, 8 months

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