TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

64 participants
6514 discussions

by Warren Toomey

All, just received this from a fellow who isn't on the TUHS mail list (yet). I've answered him about using mknod (after reading the 6e docs: we don't have 5e docs). I thought I'd forward the e-mail here as a record of an attempt to rebuild the 5e kernel. Cheers, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Mark ----- I hope you don't mind me asking you about compiling the unix v5 kernel. I haven't been able to find any documentation for it. I tried this: ./mkconf rk tm tc dc lp ctrl-d # as mch.s # mv a.out mch.o # cc -c c.c # as l.s # ld -x a.out mch.o c.o ../lib1 ../lib2 There was no m40.s in v5 so I substituted mch.s for m40.s and that seemed to create a kernel and it booted but I can't access /dev/mt0. Any pointers are appreciated. Thanks for all your work on early unix, I thought it was very interesting. Mark ----- End forwarded message -----

10 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Excise process from a pipe

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

PS: I see I have over-generalized the problem. Doug's original message say "a process could excise itself from a pipeline". So presumably the initiation would come from process2 itself, and it would know when it had no internally-buffered data. So now we're back to the issue of 'either we need a system call to merge two pipes into one, or the process has to hang around and turn itself into a cat'. Noel

10 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Excise process from a pipe

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> > Making what you are talking about work is gonna be a mess of buffer > management and it's going to be hard to design system calls that would > work and still give you reasonable semantics on the pipe. Consider > calls that want to know if there is data in the pipe Oh, I didn't say it would work well, and cleanly! :-) I mean, taking one element in an existing, operating, chain, and blowing it away, is almost bound to cause problems. My previous note was merely to say that the file descriptor/pipe re-arrangement involved might be easier done with a system call - in fact, now that I think about it, as someone has already sort of pointed out, without a system call to merge the two pipes into one, you have to keep the middle process around, and have it turn into a 'cat'. Thinking out loud for a moment, though, along the lines you suggest.... Here's one problem - suppose process2 has read some data, but not yet processed it and output it towards process3, when you go to do the splice. How would the anything outside the process (be it the OS, or the command interpreter or whatever is initiating the splice) even detect that, much less retrieve the data? Even using a heuristic such as 'wait for process2 to try and read data, at which point we can assume that it no longer has any internally buffered data, and it's OK to do the splice' fails, because process2 may have decided it didn't have a complete semantic unit in hand (e.g. a complete line), and decided to go back and get the rest of the unit before outputting the complete, processed semantic unit (i.e. including data it had previously buffered internally). And suppose the reads _never_ happen to coincide with the semantic units being output; i.e. process2 will _always_ have some buffered data inside it, until the whole chain starts to shut down with EOFs from the first stage? In short, maybe this problem isn't solvable in the general case. In which case I guess we're back to your "Every utility that you put in a pipeline would have to be reworked". Stages would have to have some way to say 'I am not now holding any buffered data', and only when that state was true could they be spliced out. Or there could be some signal defined which means 'go into "not holding any buffered data" state'. At which point my proposed splice() system call might be some use... :-) Noel

10 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Excise process from a pipe

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> > Every utility that you put in a pipeline would have to be reworked to > pass file descriptors around Unless the whole operation is supported in the OS directly: if ((pipe1 = process1->stdout) == process2->stdin) && ((pipe2 = process2->stdout) == process3->stdin) { prepend_buffer_contents(pipe1, pipe2); process1->stdout = process2->stdout; kill_pipe(pipe1); } to be invoked from the chain's parent (e.g. shell). (The code would probably want to do something with process2's stdin and stdout, like close them; I wouldn't have the call kill process2 directly, that could be left to the parent, except in the rare cases where it might have some use for the spliced-out process.) Noel

10 years, 10 months

Subject:unpipeIt'seasy for a process to insert a new process intoapipelineeither upstream or down unpipe

by Doug McIlroy

It's easy for a process to insert a new process into a pipeline either upstrean or downstream. Was there ever a flavor of Unix in which a process could excise itselfa from a pipeline without breaking the pipeline? Doug

10 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] soviet computing

by norman＠oclsc.org

Armando P. Stettner: If I've said once, I've said it a million times: DECvax is NOT connected to kremvax. :) ==== Not any more, anyway. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (once upon a time, research!norman)

10 years, 10 months

soviet computing

by Tim Newsham

slightly off-topic but probably of interest to mailing list members: Pioneers of Soviet Computing http://www.sigcis.org/files/SIGCISMC2010_001.pdf -- Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | @newshtwit | thenewsh.blogspot.com

10 years, 10 months

1st Unix w/ ISO-8859-1 support?

by Dario Niedermann

Keywords: encoding, charset, latin, roman, accented, diacritical Hi! Does anyone know which was the earliest Unix release to support the ISO-8859-1 character set?

10 years, 10 months

Museo dell'Informatica Funzionante - CONTRIBUTE!

by asbesto

Hi there, Sorry for an eventual Offtopic but this is strictly related to our Computer Museum activity... We launched a campaign to get some help for our upcoming initiative, that will be the starting point for a big step forward to a new Museum! So please take time to read it, and please share everywhere to anyone interested! http://igg.me/at/insertcoin love asbesto

10 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] 40 years of Unix CACM Article

by Warren Toomey

Knowing Dave and his long history with Unix, I suspect it was simply a typo. Just like vi commands are now hardwired into my fingers, I guess K&R is imprinted on his fingers. Cheers, Warren On 28 June 2014 17:12:14 AEST, Armando Stettner <aps(a)ieee.org> wrote: >K&R usually refers to Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, writers of >the (I think) first book on C. If there were two people to acknowledge >for getting it right, it would be Ken and Dennis. > > aps > > >Begin forwarded message: > >> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> >> Subject: [TUHS] 40 years of Unix CACM Article >> Date: June 28, 2014 at 12:02:06 AM PDT >> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org >> >> Just in from an early Unix devotee. >> Warren >> >> From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> >> Sent: 28 June 2014 16:14:18 AEST >> To: Auug Talk <talk(a)lists.auug.org.au> >> Subject: [AUUG-Talk]: 40 years of Unix >> >> Next month sees the 40th anniversary of the article "The Unix >Timesharing >> System" published in Communications of the ACM; I was at UNSW at the >time, >> and we bought the first tape for subsequent distribution. >> >> At the time its only competitor was RSTS-11, and to a lesser extent >> RSX-11D and RSX-11M (all DEC systems). It saw CP/M vanish, MS-DOS >come >> and go, NT tried to challenge it, and even Windows hasn't beaten it. >> >> It spawned Linux, which Billy Gates regarded as a serious threat >("any box >> running Linux is not running Windows") and even tried a smear >campaign >> against it. >> >> Unix was a design that "just worked" because K&R simply got it right, > >> right from the start. >> >> It'll never go away. >> >> -- Dave >> >> Applix 1616 mailing list >> Applix-L(a)object-craft.com.au >> https://www.object-craft.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/applix-l >> >> Talk - The AUUG discussion list. >> Talk(a)lists.auug.org.au >> https://lists.auug.org.au/listinfo/talk >> >> -- >> Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my >brevity._______________________________________________ >> TUHS mailing list >> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

10 years, 11 months

40 years of Unix CACM Article

by Warren Toomey

Just in from an early Unix devotee. Warren -------- Original Message -------- From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> Sent: 28 June 2014 16:14:18 AEST To: Auug Talk <talk(a)lists.auug.org.au> Subject: [AUUG-Talk]: 40 years of Unix Next month sees the 40th anniversary of the article "The Unix Timesharing System" published in Communications of the ACM; I was at UNSW at the time, and we bought the first tape for subsequent distribution. At the time its only competitor was RSTS-11, and to a lesser extent RSX-11D and RSX-11M (all DEC systems). It saw CP/M vanish, MS-DOS come and go, NT tried to challenge it, and even Windows hasn't beaten it. It spawned Linux, which Billy Gates regarded as a serious threat ("any box running Linux is not running Windows") and even tried a smear campaign against it. Unix was a design that "just worked" because K&R simply got it right, right from the start. It'll never go away. -- Dave _______________________________________________ Applix 1616 mailing list Applix-L(a)object-craft.com.au https://www.object-craft.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/applix-l _______________________________________________ Talk - The AUUG discussion list. Talk(a)lists.auug.org.au https://lists.auug.org.au/listinfo/talk -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

by Douglas Comer

> Ahh! I wonder if they'll be making images and PDFs available? If you want to check, my contact has been: William Harnack <wharnack(a)computerhistory.org> Doug

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

by Douglas Comer

> > Have Xinu media to go with it? It's something I've been trying to track down. ;) > > Have you asked Doug? I've copied him I just donated my extra copy of Xinu tapes and floppies to the computer museum (along with first editions of the books). > (Hey Doug, you should be on this list, all the long time unix nerds seem to be > here, lots of fun with memory lane). I'd be happy to join. Doug

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

by Doug McIlroy

They pitched a PDP-10 for a similar reason--hardware to build a bigger Unix on. When a small pot of end-of-year money appeared, they took a PDP-11 instead--serendipitously, because university folks started proving this elegant system on cheap hardware in many projects in small labs, which they never could have done had the system existed on a PDP-10 mainframe. While upper management did not directly cause Unix to be built, their decisions to abandon Multics and not to buy a PDP-10 were notable causes for its creation and spread. Doug > Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:43:51 -0700 > From: iking(a)killthewabbit.org > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org,Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped > Message-ID: <ef723f8a-52b6-4810-be59-1837c75b1da3.maildroid@localhost> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Interesting - what's your source? It was also my understanding they used the -7 'because it was there' but that they had pitched for a PDP-10, which had TOPS-10. - Ian > > Sent from my android device. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Sent: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 4:06 AM > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped > > > > It's always been a bit of a mystery to me why Thompson and Ritchie decided they needed to write a new executive - UNICS - rather than use DECsys. > > It was the other way around. They had conceived a clean, simple, yet > powerful, operating system and needed a machine to build it on. A > cast-off PDP-7 happened to be at hand. > > Doug

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "A. P. Garcia" <a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com> > that's like asking george martin for his source regarding a beatles > song... Reminds me of the person on Wikipedia who tried to argue with me about the 'History of the Internet' article... :-) > From: John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> >> scj(a)yaccman.com scripsit: >> a Dec repair person who ran "preventive maintenance" on our disc that >> wiped out the file system! His excuse was that Dec didn't support >> "permanent storage" on the disc at the time... > Next time, mount a scratch monkey. It was probably a fixed-head disk (RS11 or RS04); can't exactly stick a different pack in! :-) Probably the DEC OS's only used it for swapping or something, since they were both relatively small - 512KB. (Speaking of RS11's: the first PDP-11 I used - an 11/20 running RSTS - had a grand total disk storage of _one_ RS11!) And speaking of putting file systems on them: I recently wrote this command for V6 called 'si' which allowed me (among many other interesting things) to watch the contents of the disk buffer(s). It turns out that even with other packs mounted, the buffer is almost always completely full of blocks from the root device; it makes plain the value of having the root on a _really_ fast disk. I don't know if that usage pattern is because /bin is there, or because pipes get created on the root, or what. When I get up the energy I'll move /bin to another drive (yeah, yeah, I know - good way to lose and create a systen that won't boot, so I'll actually make a _copy_ of /bin and mount it _over_ the original /bin - probably a host of interesting errors there, e.g. if a process has the old /bin as its current dir), and see what the cache contents look like then. Noel

10 years, 11 months

Tree of late BSD releases

by Diomidis Spinellis

For reconstructing Unix history on a single repository [1], I'd need to represent the branches, merges, and chronological sequence of the late BSD releases (after 4.3). However, I've found on the internet some conflicting and simplistic information, so I'd welcome your input on how to straighten things up. First, consider this widely reproduced BSD family tree [2]. It has 4.4BSD-Encumbered derive from a line that includes Net/1, which was freely redistributable. Wouldn't it be clearer to create two branches, one with distributions free of AT&T code (4.3 BSD Net/1, 4.3 BSD Net/2, 4.4 BSD Lite1, 4.4 BSD Lite2) and one with full distributions (4.4 BSD, ...)? On which side would Tahoe and Reno stand? Also, the same tree [2] shows 4.4 BSD having as its ancestor 4.3 BSD Net/2, whereas another tree depicted on Wikipedia [3] has shows 4.4 BSD and 4.3 BSD Net/2 having as their ancestor 4.3 BSD Reno. What's the correct genealogy? Finally, I have a conflict with release dates. Wikipedia gives the following dates for Tahoe and Net/1 [4]: 4.3 BSD Tahoe June 1988 4.3 BSD Net/1 June 1989 However, looking at time-stamp of the newest files available under the corresponding directories in the CSRG CD-ROMs [5] I find the opposite order: cd2/net.1/sendmail/src/util.c 1989-01-01 12:15:58 cd2/4.3tahoe/usr/src/sys/tahoevba/vx.c 1989-05-23 13:47:43 What's the actual time sequence, and what's the corresponding genealogy? [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo [2] http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/share/misc/bsd-family-t… [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution [5] https://www.mckusick.com/csrg/ Many thanks, Diomidis Spinellis PS Thank you all for the help you've provided so far.

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

by Norman Wilson

Interesting - what's your source? It was also my understanding they used the -7 'because it was there' but that they had pitched for a PDP-10, which had TOPS-10. ====== I think Doug's source is in the class `personal observation.' He was there at the time; Ken and Dennis's department head, if I've got it right. Remember that Bell Labs had just disengaged itself from the Multics project. The interest in a new OS sprang partly from the desire to have a comfortable multi-user system now that Multics was no longer available. That's why the DEC operating systems of the time, which were (as I understand it) simple single-user monitors, didn't fill the bill. The character of the players matters too: remember that Ken is the guy who one night sat down to write a Fortran compiler because real systems have Fortran, and ended up inventing B instead. I've read that there was indeed a pitch to buy a PDP-10; that there was some complicated plan to lower the effective cost; and that upper management (not Doug) turned it down because `Bell Labs doesn't do business that way.' I think I got that from Dennis's retrospective paper, published in the 1984 all-UNIX issue of the Bell Labs Techical Journal, a must-read (along with the late-1970s all-UNIX issue of BSTJ) for anyone on this list.

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

by Doug McIlroy

> It's always been a bit of a mystery to me why Thompson and Ritchie decided they needed to write a new executive - UNICS - rather than use DECsys. It was the other way around. They had conceived a clean, simple, yet powerful, operating system and needed a machine to build it on. A cast-off PDP-7 happened to be at hand. Doug

10 years, 11 months

Happy birthday, core dumped

by Norman Wilson

Jay Forrester, who invented core memory, first described it in a lab notebook 65 years ago today. (Thanks to the Living Computer Museum, through whose Twitter feed I learned this tidbit. It's a place--the real museum, not just the Twitter feed--many on this list might enjoy: among their aged-but-working computers are a Xerox Star and a PDP-7.) Norman Wilson Toronto ON

10 years, 11 months

pdp11 available

by Milo Velimirović

Greetings, I have a pdp11/84 and various peripherals available to whomever is willing to take them. I'm in La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA. pdp11/84 RX01 TU80 2 cabs of 2ea RA81 Thanks, Milo -- Milo Velimirović La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601 USA 43 48 48 N 91 13 53 W

10 years, 11 months

4.1BSD Networking

by Cory Smelosky

Hello all, recent subscriber to this list...but some might recognise me. I'm currently fighting (and mostly succeeding) with getting a pure 4.3BSD-Tahoe install rolling in a VAX simulator (all my tape drives are currently nonfunctional or I'd fire up a real II or III). Still in the middle of compiling (I know there are easier ways...but I like the feeling of doing it purely "from scratch"...feels more historically accurate). Anyways, while waiting for the compile I ended up with a working 4.1c installation and I began poking around its source tree (I also did a little bit of poking at the CSRG discs). I stumbled upon the fact 4.1c supports the DMC (which SIMH git now emulates!) and I see it's also still in src/old on some versions of 4.3 (I wonder if it'll still build...). Looking at the source is immensely confusing...does anyone have any knowledge/notes from the time period/documentation that will help me with my little experiment in archaic networking? I might just be tired...but the berknet configuration doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. (There's also the fact my grasp of C is minimal). -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects

10 years, 11 months

Archive of old ;login or EUUG newsletters?

by Warren Toomey

Speaking of old publications, is there an on-line archive of old ;login: or EUUG newsletters? I did one for the AUUG newsletters here: http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/ but it would be nice to have an archive for the U.S and Europe. Cheers, Warren

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX magazines

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

There is a complete bibliography of the journal Computing Systems (1988--1996) here: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/compsys.bib [change .bib to .html for a version with hyperlinks] Other journals about aspects of Unix include: Bell System Technical journal family (complete 1920--date) http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1920.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1930.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1940.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1950.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1960.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1970.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1980.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1990.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj2000.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj2010.bib Journal of C Language Translation (1989--1995) http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/jclt.bib Usenix conference proceedings and ";login" journal (incomplete) http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/usenix1980.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/usenix1990.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/usenix2000.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/usenix2010.bib The X Resource: A Practical Journal of the X Window System (1991--1994) http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/xres.bib There are also bibliographies of books about Unix, Linux, and the GNU Project: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/gnu.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/linux.bib http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/unix.bib Finally, there is a small bibliography of the AT&/Princeton lcc compiler: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/lcc.bib There are more than 800 bibliographies in those archives with about 1.01 million entries. Please mirror them to your site(s): mirror instructions, overviews, and space requirements can be found at the top-level sites http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/ The collections are active, and continuously enhanced and extended, with dozens of files being updated or added weekly. Using rsync for mirroring is easy and fast, so nightly or weekly mirrors pose no problem at either end of the connection. There is also a TUHS mirror in Salt Lake City, Utah: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/ It too can be mirrored with rsync. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 113, Issue 21

by jgsinowitz＠yahoo.com

This is a very enjoyable thread to follow! Jonah G Sinowitz Consultant 320 8th Street, #19 Lakewood, NJ 08701 732.367.7450

10 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX magazines

by norman＠oclsc.org

Doug McIlroy: > Does anyone know why [Computing Systems] folded? Arnold Skeeve: ISTR that they simply ran out of content; they weren't getting enough submissions to keep it going, and journal production isn't an inexpensive undertaking. ====== That's what I remember too, though there may also have been insufficient interest from the members. The front matter in the last issue suggests that. Computing Systems was published from Winter 1988 to Fall 1996. (More years than I'd have guessed, even looking at the physical journals on my shelf; it was a quarterly.) It would probably not have lasted much longer no matter what, as the USENIX community was likely in the forefront of putting papers online on the World-Wide Web. USENIX now makes all their conference papers available online, free to anyone, except that only those registered for a conference can read them before the conference actually happens. That's not a bad substitute for a journal, I suppose. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

10 years, 11 months

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