TUHS

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6504 discussions

Re: [TUHS] weird problem with our Decwriter III terminal

by John Chung

I would start with the gears first. Stepper motor testing can be done by visual inpection by running through 1 character at a time. Mark each turn when moving to the next character. This requires diassembly of the casing and other visual blocking components. John --- tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote: > Send TUHS mailing list submissions to > tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, > visit > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > or, via email, send a message with subject or body > 'help' to > tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > tuhs-owner(a)minnie.tuhs.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it > is more specific > than "Re: Contents of TUHS digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. weird problem with our Decwriter III terminal > ... (asbesto) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 09:38:10 +0000 > From: asbesto <asbesto(a)freaknet.org> > Subject: [TUHS] weird problem with our Decwriter III > terminal ... > To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org > Message-ID: <20060621093810.GA24010(a)freaknet.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > > Hi, > > maybe someone here can help us - our problem is that > the > decwriter terminal seem to "jump" in particular > positions > when printing > > we don't understand how to solve this problem - > maybe this is a > stepper motor problem, or another problem in > gears/transmission? > > the problem is evident in this image: > > http://dyne.org/museum/dec/terminals/la120/tn/dscn3488.jpg.html > > does someone have an idea about this problem? > tnx! > > :) > > -- > [ asbesto : IW9HGS : freaknet medialab : > radiocybernet : poetry ] > [ http://freaknet.org/asbesto > http://papuasia.org/radiocybernet ] > [ NON SCRIVERMI USANDO LETTERE ACCENTATE, NON > MANDARMI ALLEGATI ] > [ *I DELETE* EMAIL > 100K, ATTACHMENTS, HTML, > M$-WORD DOC, SPAM ] > > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > > > End of TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 15 > ************************************ > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

18 years, 11 months

weird problem with our Decwriter III terminal ...

by asbesto

Hi, maybe someone here can help us - our problem is that the decwriter terminal seem to "jump" in particular positions when printing we don't understand how to solve this problem - maybe this is a stepper motor problem, or another problem in gears/transmission? the problem is evident in this image: http://dyne.org/museum/dec/terminals/la120/tn/dscn3488.jpg.html does someone have an idea about this problem? tnx! :) -- [ asbesto : IW9HGS : freaknet medialab : radiocybernet : poetry ] [ http://freaknet.org/asbesto http://papuasia.org/radiocybernet ] [ NON SCRIVERMI USANDO LETTERE ACCENTATE, NON MANDARMI ALLEGATI ] [ *I DELETE* EMAIL > 100K, ATTACHMENTS, HTML, M$-WORD DOC, SPAM ]

18 years, 11 months

[pups] Major/minor device numbers and device names for MSCP drives?

by Robert Armstrong

Probably this is documented somewhere, but I really need a pointer or a brief tutorial on the major/minor device numbers for mknod() and the device names for MSCP drives in 2.11bsd. If I have a really simple PDP with an RQDXn and one RDxx disk, then the device name is conventionally /dev/ra0x and the first partition, ra0a is (5,0), the second, ra0b, is (5,1), etc. Pretty easy. If I have two drives on my single RQDXn, then the second hard disk is /dev/ra1 and ra1a is (5,8), ra1b is (5,9), etc. I guess the offset of 8 must be the maximum number of partitions on a drive - OK, I'm still with you. But what if I have a second MSCP controller? Assuming that I've built the kernel to handle it and modified dtab to autoconfigure it, that is. What are the usual names and mknod() numbers for the drives on the second controller? Worse, what if the MSCP controller isn't a RQDX but is a real UDA/QDA ? Now the drives have their own MSCP unit numbers that can be anything from 0 to 250 - where does this figure in? Same question for TMSCP - what if I have more than one tape controller? This case is easier, though, since TMSCP controllers normally have only one drive associated with them. Thanks, Bob Armstrong

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 10

by lm＠bitmover.com

> The bandwidth of a mouse and menus is not very high. The bandwidth of a > keyboard is a lot higher. I've long thought that what we needed was control panel which operated on revision controlled flat files in /etc. So you could write scripts to do the automated stuff but you could point and click to do the stuff that you forgot how to do. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com

18 years, 11 months

[pups] bitsavers document

by Martin Lovick

whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf archive, I found a document called PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. Having had a quick scan through, it contains a source code listing and some commentary (lions i hear you say). The strange thing is that all of the source code appears to be in assembler... whats this about? is it a comentary of PDP-7 unix? regards Martin __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

18 years, 11 months

[pups] bitsavers document

by Carl Lowenstein

On 6/15/06, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: > On Wednesday, 14 June 2006 at 16:24:29 -0700, Martin Lovick wrote: > > whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf archive, I found a > > document called PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. > > Can you give a full URL for this document? I've taken a brief look at > the list in http://bitsavers.org/pdf/, but nothing jumped out at me. < http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bellLabs/unix/PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocumen… > carl -- carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego clowenst(a)ucsd.edu

18 years, 11 months

Re: [pups] bitsavers document

by dmr＠plan9.bell-labs.com

Martin Lovick remarked, > whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf archive, I > found a document called > PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. > Having had a quick scan through, it contains a source > code listing and some commentary (lions i hear you > say). The strange thing is that all of the source code > appears to be in assembler... > whats this about? > is it a comentary of PDP-7 unix? It is a fairly early version, with commentary, of PDP-11 Unix (the kernel), indeed still in assembler. It is an interesting find, probably the earliest version yet unearthed. Kossow told me about it when he did (or got) the scan of the document. I can't remember receiving it at the time. It is clearly different from what we in the research group were running at the time--it has devices we didn't have, and I think by then we were on the 11/45. Dennis

18 years, 11 months

NY Times article on Bell Labs Holmdel closure

by Jerry Peek

This is a long New York Times article with a lot of detail. They say there'll be at least one public open house before it's demolished. I think you can now read a limited number of NY Times articles without subscribing (they seem to count how many you read -- maybe with a cookie). Here's the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/realestate/commercial/14bell.html Jerry -- Jerry Peek, jpeek(a)jpeek.com, http://www.jpeek.com/

18 years, 11 months

Unix, eunuchs?

by Michael Welle

Hi, last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a castrated successor of Multics. Hmmm, I am interested in Unix history for several years now, but I haven't heard about that before. It is really a tale I guess. Any clear words about this topic? Michael -- biff4emacsen - A biff-like tool for (X)Emacs http://www.c0t0d0s0.de/biff4emacsen/biff4emacsen.html

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?

by Michael Welle

Hi, "Bill Cunningham" <billcu1(a)verizon.net> writes: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Welle" <m.welle(a)gmx.net> > To: <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> > Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 9:57 AM > Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? > > >> Hi, >> >> last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its >> name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a >> homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a >> castrated successor of Multics. Hmmm, I am interested in Unix history >> for several years now, but I haven't heard about that before. It is >> really a tale I guess. Any clear words about this topic? >> >> Michael >> > > I know Dennis have said pretty clearly that Unix is a pun on Multics > that the team really never got to start on because Bell changed there minds. > Ken continued with Unix which must've been his idea. In assembly first then > B. Dennis came up with C and its lasted down through the years. that sounds familiar to me. The same story is told in 'A quarter century of Unix' and other sources. VG hmw -- biff4emacsen - A biff-like tool for (X)Emacs http://www.c0t0d0s0.de/biff4emacsen/biff4emacsen.html

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

by lm＠bitmover.com

> There's a reason Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded > the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1998) and are fellows of the > Computer History Museum Online. Dave Cutler hasn't and isn't. > "You are not expected to understand this." And while I think this is a little unfair to Dave that's a great .sig It goes well with the recent post about Unix vs NT that concluded about NT "there is no there there". I live on both platforms and I couldn't agree more. Some day I'll post my view on this but here is the really short summary. There are two classes of people: those who derive answers and those who memorize them. As Mark Twain said, the latter group is much larger than the former. My claim is that Unix appeals to the first group - you can guess what it is going to do and you'll be right most of the time. Windows appeals to the other group. They don't have the ability to derive any answer and they are comfortable with a system that mostly works but has "no there there". They can't tell the difference. The sad part (and the good part!) is that all of us on this list are in the former group which is smaller. I think we (well, many of us) wish that more people thought like we do and figured stuff out for themselves but the reality is that most people aren't inclined to do that. So the good and bad part is that we're a small select group. Personally, I've come to accept that and like it. I've gotten to the point where I realize that people who can derive the answer are special, they are gift, and I consider myself lucky when I run into a concentrated group of them. Cough, cough, that would be you. :) -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com

18 years, 11 months

[pups] PDP-11

by Bill Cunningham

Did these old minis use a teletype or a monitor as stdout? The pictures I've seen of them looks like they used a printout as stdout. Bill

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX as literature

by bgoodheart

A great read Greg and so true too. Thanks for posting that. I particularly liked the bit about the overheard conversation in Palo Alto "there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let me see...cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10..." though not syntactically correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a diner from an NT shop probably couldn't have expressed himself as casually. This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in Starbucks in Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a heated debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It seemed to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to the other party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their conversation. Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all ushered out of Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was. Cheers, Berny

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

by lm＠bitmover.com

A somewhat different view on the Starbucks story: A friend of mine moved here from New Mexico (which is a fantastic place to live, amazing, I used to live there) and she said "It's unbelievable - you can watch people and realize that they are actually thinking before they are talking". Indeed. I'd rather be in the midst of rude people thinking than any sort of people not thinking. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX as literature

by Norman Wilson

Berny: This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in Starbucks in Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a heated debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It seemed to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to the other party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their conversation. Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all ushered out of Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was. ======= The Linux crowd is indeed ruder and more argumentative than the hackers of my youth. Maybe it's because they hang out in Starbucks, rather than in all-night terminal rooms with Coke machines down the hall. Or maybe it's just my memory. Norman Wilson Toronto ON Somewhat more than 30 years into the disease

18 years, 11 months

address change

by Paul Osborne

Hi, I know that this mail is going to hit moderation. May work email address has changed from P.A.Osborne(a)ukc.ac.uk to P.A.Osborne(a)kent.ac.uk Consequently my posts are getting moderated. Can you update the list please? Many thanks Paul

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?

by John Chung

> > 1. Re: Unix, eunuchs? (dmr(a)plan9.bell-labs.com) > 2. Unix V6 man pages (Wolfgang Helbig) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 22:32:46 -0400 > From: dmr(a)plan9.bell-labs.com > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Message-ID: > <49d52b2057749338fb3bb8d01ec2ca7d(a)plan9.bell-labs.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" > > Andrzey wrote: > > >I have taken my info about unics from > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics . > > > >Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your > person is mentioned there. > > > > Don't believe everything in a (or the) wiki. > > >BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and > Computer System" as > >UNIACS . > > One could, but wouldn't. > > Dennis > > Thanks for clearing it up Dennis. John __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11/23 questions ...

by Pete Turnbull

On Jun 8 2006, 17:15, asbesto wrote: > > 1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the > schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required, > so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS > backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this? Is it missing or just not working? It's hard to imagine a BA11-N box like the one in your picture without the PSU, since the screws that hold the front panel onto the backplane go through the PSU cover. If it's simply not working, it's not usually hard to repair. You will need to ensure that the BDCOK H (Bus DC OK, active high) signal is held high, also the BPOK H (Bus Power OK, active high, from the AC input) signal or the CPU won't run -- the normal PSU does this. "High" means tied to no less than 3.5V DC. The PSU also provides a mains-frequency square-wave at about 3.5V-4V which drives the BEVENT L line for a real-time clock interrupt, which Unix needs. One of the switches on the front panel can be configured to control this (there are times when you might want to switch it off). Note that devices that turn off BEVENT, including the switch on the front panel, or the DIP switch on the CPU card, do it by shorting that line to ground! The same switch that can be configured to stop the BEVENT signal, is also often used to control the rack's power controller via a 3-wire cable with a 3-pin AMP Mate-N-Lok connector on each end. The front panel with the three switches also has a flip-flop controlled by one of the switches, connected to the BHALT L line, and another connected by a flip-flop to BINIT L. The first halts the CPU when enabled (active low), the other provides a pulse to start it. The RUN light on the panel is driven by the SRUN L signal on the first slot in the backplane. Most of the signals I've mentioned are carried between the backplane and the panel by a narrow ribbon cable. The backplane pinout is shown in a PostScript file called QBusConnsBig.ps on my web page at http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/PDP-11/ QBusConns.ps is the same file, but actual size, if you want to hold it up against the backplane. > 2) what kind of UNIX can be run on an 11/23 using a RL02 disk > drive? (just one, unfortunately :!) Nothing later than about 7th Edition, because BSD needs separate I&D space, which an 11/23 doesn't have (2.9 BSD might work, I can't remember). BSD (any version) is much too big for a single RL02 anyway. 7th Edition works; my original PDP-11 Unix system is my second 11/23, still in its original condition, which looks rather like yours, except it has two RL02s and a slightly earlier front panel. Be aware that the RL11/RLV11/RLV12 driver was not a standard feature of 7th Edition, though. You ought to do an inventory of the cards. 7th Edition wants at least 256K of memory. You might also want to see what version of the CPU you have. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11/23 questions ...

by msokolov＠ivan.Harhan.ORG

asbesto <asbesto(a)freaknet.org> wrote: > 1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the > schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required, > so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS > backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this? Off the top of my head, two thoughts: 1. You need the DCOK and POK signals. 2. Do the math and make sure that your power supply provides enough amps -- a real computer needs quite a bit more juice than a sleazy PeeCee. MS

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX as literature

by Wolfgang Helbig

Greg, After I read all of it consulting my dictionary a lot one question remains: What are "Cliffs Notes"? Regards, Wolfgang -- Weniger, aber besser.

18 years, 11 months

PDP-11/23 questions ...

by asbesto

Hi dudes, We recovered an almost working pdp-11/23 and some other stuff for our computer museum. Some images are online at http://dyne.org/museum :) well, 2 questions: 1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required, so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this? 2) what kind of UNIX can be run on an 11/23 using a RL02 disk drive? (just one, unfortunately :!) that's all folks! *:) -- [ asbesto : IW9HGS : freaknet medialab : radiocybernet : poetry ] [ http://freaknet.org/asbesto http://papuasia.org/radiocybernet ] [ NON SCRIVERMI USANDO LETTERE ACCENTATE, NON MANDARMI ALLEGATI ] [ *I DELETE* EMAIL > 100K, ATTACHMENTS, HTML, M$-WORD DOC, SPAM ]

18 years, 11 months

UNIX as literature

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

This recently went round the FreeBSD-chat mailing list. I rather like it, and tend to agree with the opinions. Unfortunately, the URL appears mutilated, and the site itself is "under maintenance", but Google points me at what appears to be the same article at http://www.rap.ucar.edu/staff/tres/elements.html I haven't resisted the temptation to re-wrap the paragraphs :-) Greg Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 19:55:31 -0400 From: Allen <slackwarewolf(a)comcast.net> this is somewhat long... But some of you may have already read it, and probably liked it: [ From http://www.performancecomputing.com...s/9809of1.shtml ] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come so many were liberal-arts majors? It's the love of words that makes UNIX stand out. Thomas Scoville In the late 1980s, I worked in the advanced R&D arm of the Silicon Valley's regional telephone company. My lab was populated mostly by Ph.D.s and gifted hackers. It was, as you might expect, an all-UNIX shop. The manager of the group was an exception: no advanced degree, no technical credentials. He seemed pointedly self-conscious about it. We suspected he felt (wrongly, we agreed) underconfident of his education and intellect. One day, a story circulated through the group that confirmed our suspicions: the manager had confided he was indeed intimidated by the intelligence of the group, and was taking steps to remedy the situation. His prescription, though, was unanticipated: "I need to become more of an intellectual," he said. "I'm going to learn UNIX." Needless to say, we made more than a little fun out of this. I mean, come on: as if UNIX could transform him into a mastermind, like the supplicating scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz." I uncharitably imagined a variation on the old Charles Atlas ads: "Those senior engineers will never kick sand in my face again." But part of me was sympathetic: "The boss isn't entirely wrong, is he? There is something different about UNIX people, isn't there?" In the years since, I've come to recognize what my old manager was getting at. I still think he was misguided, but in retrospect I think his belief was more accurate than I recognized at the time. To be sure, the UNIX community has its own measure of technical parochialism and nerdy tunnel vision, but in my experience there seemed to be a suspicious overrepresentation of polyglots and liberal-arts folks in UNIX shops. I'll admit my evidence is sketchy and anecdotal. For instance, while banging out a line of shell, with a fellow engineer peering over my shoulder, I might make an intentionally obscure literary reference: if test -z `ps -fe | grep whom` then echo ^G fi # Let's see for whom the bell tolls. UNIX colleagues were much more likely to recognize and play in a way I'd never expect in the VMS shops, IBM's big-iron data centers, or DOS ghettos on my consulting beat. Being a liberal-arts type myself (though I cleverly concealed this in my resume), I wondered why this should be true. My original explanation--UNIX's historical association with university computing environments, like UC Berkeley's--didn't hold up over the years; many of the UNIX-philiacs I met came from schools with small or absent computer science departments. There had to be a connection, but I had no plausible hypothesis. It wasn't until I started regularly asking UNIX refuseniks what they didn't like about UNIX that better explanations emerged. Some of the prevailing dislike had a distinctly populist flavor--people caught a whiff of snobbery about UNIX and regarded it with the same proletarian resentment usually reserved for highbrow institutions like opera or ballet. They had a point: until recently, UNIX was the lingua franca of computing's upper crust. The more harried, practical, and underprivileged of the computing world seemed to object to this aura of privilege. UNIX adepts historically have been a coddled bunch, and tend to be proud of their hard-won knowledge. But these class differences are fading fast in modern computing environments. Now UNIX engineers are more common, and low- or no-cost UNIX variations run on inexpensive hardware. Certainly UNIX folks aren't as coddled in the age of NT. There was a standard litany of more specific criticisms: UNIX is difficult and time-consuming to learn. There are too many things to remember. It's arcane and needlessly complex. But the most recurrent complaint was that it was too text-oriented. People really hated the command line, with all the utilities, obscure flags, and arguments they had to memorize. They hated all the typing. One mislaid character and you had to start over. Interestingly, this complaint came most often from users of the GUI-laden Macintosh or Windows platforms. People who had slaved away on DOS batch scripts or spent their days on character-based terminals of multiuser non-UNIX machines were less likely to express the same grievance. Though I understood how people might be put off by having to remember such willfully obscure utility names like cat and grep, I continued to be puzzled at why they resented typing. Then I realized I could connect the complaint with the scores of "intellectual elite" (as my manager described them) in UNIX shops. The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn't seem so mysterious, and pointed the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture of the word. UNIX programmers express themselves in a rich vocabulary of system utilities and command-line arguments, along with a flexible, varied grammar and syntax. For UNIX enthusiasts, the language becomes second nature. Once, I overheard a conversation in a Palo Alto restaurant: "there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let me see...cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10..." though not syntactically correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a diner from an NT shop probably couldn't have expressed himself as casually. With UNIX, text--on the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR--is the primary interface mechanism: UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance. Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression. At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice. It doesn't take much exposure to UNIX before you realize that the UNIX core was the creation of a very few well-synchronized minds. I've never met Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, or Ken Thompson, but after a decade and a half on UNIX I imagine I might greet them as friends, knowing something of the shape of their thoughts. You might argue that UNIX is as visually oriented as other OSs. Modern UNIX offerings certainly have their fair share of GUI-based OS interfaces. In practice though, the UNIX core subverts them; they end up serving UNIX's tradition of word culture, not replacing it. Take a look at the console of most UNIX workstations: half the windows you see are terminal emulators with command-line prompts or vi jobs running within. Nowhere is this word/image culture tension better represented than in the contrast between UNIX and NT. When the much-vaunted UNIX-killer arrived a few years ago, backed by the full faith and credit of the Redmond juggernaut, I approached it with an open mind. But NT left me cold. There was something deeply unsatisfying about it. I had that ineffable feeling (apologies to Gertrude Stein) there was no there there. Granted, I already knew the major themes of system and network administration from my UNIX days, and I will admit that registry hacking did vex me for a few days, but after my short scramble up the learning curve I looked back at UNIX with the feeling I'd been demoted from a backhoe to a leaf-blower. NT just didn't offer room to move. The one-size-fits-all, point-and-click, we've-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k. I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world of Microsoft Foundation Classes. NT was definitely much too close to image culture for my comfort: endless point-and-click graphical dialog boxes, hunting around the screen with the mouse, pop-up after pop-up demanding my attention. The experience was almost exclusively reactive. Every task demanded a GUI-based utility front-end loaded with insidious assumptions about how to visualize (and thus conceptualize) the operation. I couldn't think "outside the box" because everything literally was a box. There was no opportunity for ad hoc consideration of how a task might alternately be performed. I will admit NT made my life easier in some respects. I found myself doing less remembering (names of utilities, command arguments, syntax) and more recognizing (solution components associated with check boxes, radio buttons, and pull-downs). I spent much less time typing. Certainly my right hand spent much more time herding the mouse around the desktop. But after a few months I started to get a tired, desolate feeling, akin to the fatigue I feel after too much channel surfing or videogaming: too much time spent reacting, not enough spent in active analysis and expression. In short, image-culture burnout. The one ray of light that illuminated my tenure in NT environments was the burgeoning popularity of Perl. Perl seemed to find its way into NT shops as a CGI solution for Web development, but people quickly recognized its power and adopted it for uses far outside the scope of Web development: system administration, revision control, remote file distribution, network administration. The irony is that Perl itself is a subset of UNIX features condensed into a quick-and-dirty scripting language. In a literary light, if UNIX is the Great Novel, Perl is the Cliffs Notes. Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I'm hoping that as IT folks become more seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill the need. Thomas Scoville has been wrestling with UNIX since 1983. He currently works at Expert Support Inc. in Mountain View, CA. -- Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers.

18 years, 11 months

Unix V6 man pages

by Wolfgang Helbig

Warren, please consider linking the Unix-V6 man pages at http://www.ba-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/v6/doc/index.html from your site at http://www.tuhs.org/manpages.html Regards, Wolfgang -- Weniger, aber besser.

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?

by dmr＠plan9.bell-labs.com

Andrzey wrote: >I have taken my info about unics from >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics . > >Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your person is mentioned there. > Don't believe everything in a (or the) wiki. >BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and Computer System" as >UNIACS . One could, but wouldn't. Dennis

18 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?

by Jose R Valverde

First, my apologies if this message looks awful. The pun might have stemmed from another variant. Like EUNICE. The original poster was certainly not much aware of UNIX history, so it might as well come to him from an also less knowledgeable user who got it from a vendor of a EUNI* variant. >From memory, I seem to remember at least a company named EUNICE involved with UNIX, and a UNIX-like environment for the VAX (under VMS). So, may be one of these later was actually named with the 'eunuchs' pun intended (perhaps as a castrated down UNIX system on top of VMS) and the pun circulated among some customers. For a newcomer buying it, it would be easy to assimilate *his* variant with standard UNIX and extend the pun. We just saw a similar confussion of LINUX with UNIX from a poster asking for LINUX v5, 6 o 7. It makes sense as well to have a similar pun circulated later, when other operating systems which were arguably better (and I DO NOT want to start that discussion) or more extensive had to deploy support for POSIX/UNIX due to market needs. To me it certainly has no sense having such an association in a time like the early 70s when it would have had a much stronger emotional charge and at a time when UNIX was still in its early development. j On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 23:41:06 -0400 dmr(a)plan9.bell-labs.com wrote: > Michael Welle originally asked, > > > last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its > > name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a > > homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a > > castrated successor of Multics. > > The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's mind, > but the original explanation was "one of whatever > Multics was many of." I think the quip about > "castrated Multics" came from MIT. > > Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred > in print, though I could be proved wrong. > > Dennis __________________________________________________ Correo Yahoo! Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ¡gratis! Regístrate ya - http://correo.yahoo.es

18 years, 11 months

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