TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

43 participants
6501 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold Robbins > CCI made the Tahoe that 4.4 ran on, but I'm guessing it's a different > architecture than the Interdata? I think so. Almost all documentation on the Tahoe has been lost in the mists of time (if ANYONE retains ANY hardcopies of ANY hardware documentation for the Tahoe, PLEASE let me know), but I recently managed to work out a bit about it from the instruction decoding/printing routines in the debuggers from 4.3 BSD Tahoe: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Power_6/32 and it seems to be fairly different from the Interdata: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/interdata/32bit/29-365R01_32BitRefMan_Jun74.pdf Also, 'CCI' is 'Computer Consoles Incorporated', not "Concurrent Computer Corp". Noel

3 weeks

Re: V7 ls and dot files?

by Douglas McIlroy

http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_origin_of_dot_filename.html says > I'm not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite .. was there from the beginning. The v1 man page directory(v) says, > By convention, the first two entries in each directory are for "." and "..". Doug

3 weeks, 1 day

Re: Any Interdata war stories?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rich Salz > The PC/IP software from MIT included a port of the "Portable C > Compiler" to generate 8086-era code. It ran on a Unix machine and built > binaries that you downloaded to the PC. ... So you need an ATT source > license to get the full PCIP dev kit. That makes sense. The 'MIT license' (about which Jerry Saltzer did a note for the October-December 2020 issue of the 'IEEE Annals of the History of Computing', available here: https://www.mit.edu/~Saltzer/publications/MITLicense.pdf and which mentions that it was initially done for the MIT PC/IP code) only applied to the MIT-written applications, not a 'derived work' (to use the intellectual property law 'term of art') based on Bell code. Noel

3 weeks, 1 day

Searching for game history

by Brian "Beej" Hall

Hi everyone, I'm here with a Unix/Bell Labs history question at the suggestion of BWK. I have a bit of a computing mystery on my hands... _Conquest_ is an old game that apparently came to life in Bell Labs, but no one seems to know anything more about it, including who the author is. The instructions for the game[1] contain the following text at the bottom: Amiga port by Bob Shimbo, orginal author unknown. This game started life on a UNIX system at Bell Labs. It was ported to CP/M 80 by a Scott Kamin. The manual was thrown together in an afternoon. (Typos and corrections welcome). You can reach me through Compuserve (UID 70260,231) or TBBS of colorado (303)-693-4735. The LHA archive for the Amiga was packaged in 1986. I did get in touch with Bob Shimbo, but he writes: You can imagine how long ago I did that port given I referenced my Compuserve account. I don't recall where I found the code originally. Sorry. We've been through 3 house moves since then and I don't know where any references might have gotten to. Scott Kamin--I found a reference to someone by his name in the CP/M world in the 80s in New Jersey. (Internet Archive has lots of old computer magazine scans and his name showed up in the classified ads.) And a search turned up a snail mail address for someone in the right age range living a few miles from the business listed in the ad. A Hail Mary snail mail got no reply. Does any of it ring a bell, by any chance? I've begun the work of getting it to run on modern systems[2], and it would be great to be able to include more history in the man page. Cheers, -Beej [1] https://github.com/beejjorgensen/conquest/blob/master/instructions.txt [2] https://github.com/beejjorgensen/conquest/ -- Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall beej(a)beej.us https://beej.us/

3 weeks, 1 day

BTL 'S' manual from 1981

by Tom Lyon

Not UNIX, but adjacent... With the permission of John Chambers, I'm sharing a scan of "S - A Language and System for Data Analysis" by Richard Becker and John Chambers, January 1981. Enjoy: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14ijVPw1DihydXFqTzj-wgl3C5LYEJdKX?us… I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.

3 weeks, 2 days

V7 ls and dot files?

by Aharon Robbins

Hi All. The V7 ls.c ignores `.' and `..', unless given the -a option. The V1 - V6 ls ignores all files that start with `.', unless given -a, and this is the default for all modern versions of ls. BWK tells me there's a story about the V7 behavior but he doesn't remember what it is. Does anyone here know? Thanks, Arnold

3 weeks, 3 days

Re: UniPress Emacs V2.20 from 1989

by Lars Brinkhoff

Mark Seiden writes: > the display updating code, as i recall, had a skull and crossbones on it > i remember there was a bit of a kerfuffle when richard stallman introduced > that code into gnu emacs This is true. Gosling Emacs from 1984 and GNU Emacs 13 from 1985 both have the skull and crossbones comment.

1 month

UniPress Emacs V2.20 from 1989

by Lars Brinkhoff

The floppy label says it's for AIX, but the source code hits it runs on Sun, IRIS, Apollo, HP, X10, X11, Amiga, Mac, MS-DOS, Xenix. https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/Hans%20H%C3%BCb…

1 month

Pre-Symposium on Operating System Principles Public UNIX Mentions?

by segaloco

I see in many places the 1973 Symposium on Operating System Principles mentioned as one of the earliest if not the earliest discussion of UNIX in the public eye. This would be around the time of the Fourth Edition and the rewrite of the system for the PDP-11/45 in C. Well, I recently picked up Aho and Ullman's The Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling. The very last sentence of the preface in Volume 1 reads: > The use of UNIX, an operating system for the PDP-11 computer designed by > Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson, expedited the preparation of certain > parts of this manuscript. Given that this text was published in 1972, would this have been a completely esoteric reference to the general target audience of these books or was knowledge of UNIX already well circulated in the computing community by then? What other sorts of notoriety/publicity did UNIX get out in the general public prior to its presentation in 1973 and subsequent publication of the paper in CACM? - Matt G.

1 month

running BSD 2.11 on my PDP 11/70 emulator

by Folkert van Heusden

Hi, For fun I'm developing a PDP 11/70 emulator. It runs on everything from ESP32 microcontrollers up to linux, windows, etc https://vanheusden.com/emulation/PDP-11/kek/ Currently it can run UNIX 7 in multi user mode. Of course I would like it to run BSD 2.11 as well (because of the networking support). It boots, but after outputting the memory amounts it produces a lot of garbage. It does eventually complete booting and then allows you to log in. I wonder if you sees this: https://paste.nurd.space/mqIDB_0SjoDoJoasOGkiNQ_NjpRsCufAJCnKTA7ZxUI (text) or https://imgpaste.nurd.space/pics/437bcf0d149a017168cbbf2def8560917a037a3935… (image), does this ring a bell to anyone? I verified with simh that the disk-image should work. regards -- www.vanheusden.com

1 month

Current Status of AT&T/USL Licensing?

by segaloco

So System V shops had to hold a license with AT&T to modify and redistribute code based on UNIX System V and they would then license directly with their customers correct? This being distinct from the way licensing with BSD was concerned in that you had to pursue the license with AT&T to then use BSD. That is my current understanding anyway that I base this question on. So IBM, DEC, Sun, HP, Microsoft, etc. approach AT&T, got a source license, and started producing their System V value adds out there in the world. In this present day and age, for those still shipping genuine System V derivatives, what does this licensing landscape actually look like? Do the players still in the game still refer to whatever license they started with back in the 80s, did they renew up until say SVR4 when folks stopped drinking from the USL well, or are there still ongoing licenses that the remaining vendors have to renew to distribute their software? Where I'm going with this is just another angle on the whole "who owns System V" question which comes up in my mind all the time. Knowing the specific legal entities involved in the most recent licensing documentation would certainly factor into understanding the landscape a little better. To boil that down to a specific example, once upon a time, Sun held a license with AT&T to use, modify, and redistribute UNIX System V. At the present moment, Oracle is the distributor of Solaris. If there is a piece of licensing paperwork sitting in a filing cabinet at Oracle somewhere, who would that paperwork say is the original licensor of the product? Would that even matter in this year of 2025? - Matt G.

1 month, 1 week

2.11BSD Patch Announcements

by Henry Bent

Hi all, I see that there has been quite a bit of activity in the last few weeks with 2.11BSD, resulting in the release of a number of patches. Is there any sort of announcement list that one could subscribe to in order to be notified of when these patch releases occur? Would it make sense to post patch announcements to the TUHS or SIMH lists? TUHS seems somewhat natural since one of the patch distribution methods is through their archive, though I am open to thoughts that anyone else has about this. I only happened to be aware of the patches because I have the "History of the Berkeley Software Distribution" page on my Wikipedia watchlist and someone has been very diligent about updating the 2.11BSD patch status there. -Henry

1 month, 1 week

Re: non-Posix input files

by Douglas McIlroy

> "The requirement that awk add a trailing <newline> to the program argument > text is to simplify the grammar, making it match a text file in form." This should no more be a *requirement* for awk than globbing should have been a requirement for MS-DOS apps. A widespread principle deserves a widespread answer. If it is a requirement on awk, then for interoperability it should be made a requirement on all programs that handle text files, especially editors. The way to do that, of course, would be to redefine text file to allow a non-newline as the last character. Ugh. Not warning perpetuates travesties like "awk END{print NR}' " giving a different answer than "wc -l". I agree that awk does the kind thing by supplying the final newline. But it should recognize that this is non-standard behavior and warn in the interest of discouraging the proliferation of garbage. Postel's so-called "robustness principle" is in play here. "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" would better read, "Send conservatively; receive amply but grudgingly". Doug

1 month, 3 weeks

Re: non-Posix input files

by Steve Simon

Re: newlines at the end of files. I hesitate to ask this in such exalted company, but isn’t it a question of whether the newline is (or should be) a line terminator, or a statement separator? -Steve

1 month, 3 weeks

Re: non-Posix input files

by Douglas McIlroy

>> info groff gives semantics for including nonempty files that don't end >> with newline. Such files violate the Posix definition of text file. >> >> Although groff is certainly justified in providing semantics for >> non-Posix text, I suggest that it should warn when it does so. > That's true but I'm hesitant to put groff in the business of wagging its > finger at users feeding it non-strictly-conforming text files when doing > so doesn't cause it any problems. Causing groff problems is an odd criterion. The fact that groff will paste files together unless the first happens to end in a newline is a sign of groff 's internals, not of the underlying problem. A newline missing at the end of a file is typically a symptom of either the incaution of some other program (perhaps an editor) or of a file having been unexpectedly truncated (as by a program abort). The latter cause is common enough to justify warning always, not just about cases that are inconvenient to groff. Groff is what it is, but if the treatment of absent final newlines were up for grabs, I'd argue for the more common solution: in all cases insert a newline and warn. Doug

1 month, 3 weeks

Marc Rochkind's article on SCCS has been published

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

The March 2025 issue of an IEEE journal has published Marc Rochkind's article on SCCS. TUHS list members discussed a draft version of the article last fall. Here is its BibTeX entry: @String{j-IEEE-TRANS-SOFTW-ENG = "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering"} @Article{Rochkind:2025:RSC, author = "Marc J. Rochkind", title = "A Retrospective on the {Source Code Control System}", journal = j-IEEE-TRANS-SOFTW-ENG, volume = "51", number = "3", pages = "695--699", month = mar, year = "2025", CODEN = "IESEDJ", DOI = "https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2024.3524947", ISSN = "0098-5589 (print), 1939-3520 (electronic)", ISSN-L = "0098-5589", bibdate = "Tue Mar 25 08:57:56 2025", bibsource = "https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ieeetranssoftweng2020.bib", acknowledgement = ack-nhfb, ajournal = "IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng.", fjournal = "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering", journal-URL = "https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=32", keywords = "Codes; Control systems; CSSC; Mainframes; Merging; Programming; SCCS; Software; software configuration management; Software development management; software engineering; Software engineering; software reliability; Software reliability; software tools; Source coding; source control management; version control systems", } ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - 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: https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 month, 3 weeks

Moore's Law: PDP-11 1970 vs TI's low-power small chip for under 20 cents.

by sjenkin＠canb.auug.org.au

The specs aren’t that quite equivalent: 1Kb SRAM vs 48K core memory, 32-bit vs 16-bit CPU and 24Mhz vs 1MHz, but what does that clock mean in MIPS? Anyone want to take a stab at the Moore’s Law constant over 55 years, given the specs non-equivalence? ~2.5M times price change, = 2^22 times. ===================== <https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/unix-history/firstport.html> In 1970, they proposed buying a PDP-11 for about $65,000. [ $535,000 in 2025 according to US Inflation Calculator ] ===================== Texas Instruments Introduces MSPM0C1104 as the Smallest Available Microcontroller <https://linuxgizmos.com/texas-instruments-introduces-mspm0c1104-as-the-smal…> Measuring only 1.38mm², this wafer chip-scale package MCU is 38% smaller than existing alternatives. The MSPM0C1104 includes a 24MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ core (32-bit), 16KB of flash memory, 1KB of SRAM, a 12-bit ADC with three channels, and six GPIO pins. It also supports standard communication interfaces, including UART, SPI, and I2C. Additional features include 5V-tolerant I/Os, a 1-channel DMA controller, a CRC-16 accelerator, and various timers, including a 16-bit advanced timer and two 16-bit general-purpose timers. These MCUs operate in an extended temperature range from -40°C to 125°C and support supply voltages from 1.62V to 3.6V. The MSPM0 series starts at $0.16 in 1,000-unit quantities, with multiple configurations available. ===================== -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

1 month, 3 weeks

"Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

by ron minnich

I know it's out there, I just can't find it. It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper, a nice companion to "going for baroque..."

2 months

A Unix Code Walkthrough by Ken Thompson

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I've just received a set of MP3 recordings from Bob Kridle. He says: These are recordings of Ken Thompson doing a read through of one of an early UNIX kernel code listing with a group of grad students at UC Berkeley while he was a visiting prof. there. The date is roughly 1975. I've put the recordings here along with his e-mails about the recordings: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Recordings/1975_Unix_Code_Walkthru/ I've only just listened to the first few minutes of each. The quality is fine, but I might spend some time reducing the noise, bringing up the quiet parts and removing a few clicks and pops. If anybody else has more details of these recording, please let us know! Cheers, Warren

2 months

MPM macros and code from 2002

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. A while back I found a copy of the MPM macros and code that I undoubtedly got from Brian Kernighan. Warren has put it in the archives: > Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:04:55 +1000 > From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> > To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com> > Cc: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> > Subject: Re: MPM macros and code > > On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 03:11:47PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote: > > I have the following file: > > -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold arnold 100770 Feb 17 2002 mpm.shar > > Thanks Arnold, I've just put it here: > > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Typesetting/ > > Cheers! Warren Thanks Warren! Arnold

2 months

Caldera release of awk, grep, and libregex from 2001

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. A while back I found the Caldera release of awk, grep and libregex from 2001. The tar file is dated 2012, but the actual code is from earlier. Warren has put it in the archive: > Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:07:12 +1000 > From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> > To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com> > Cc: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> > Subject: Re: Caldera release of awk, grep, and libregex from 2001 > > On Mon, Feb 24, 2025 at 06:42:50PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote: > > I'm looking through my Downloads directory to try to clean it up > > a bit. I found this: > > > > $ ls -l osutils.tar.gz > > -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 101072 Nov 25 2012 osutils.tar.gz > > Thanks for this as well, it's now at: > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Awk_Grep/ > > Cheers, Warren Thanks Warren! Arnold

2 months

Question about compiled programs on a newer machine type be usable ?

by babydr DBA James W. Laferriere

Hello all , Here I am again , Maybe my ? might be relative to the community . I grabbed an archive of precompiled gnu software , During the extraction I got a 'warning' from a gzip'd tar & decided to dig into the underlying tarball to see if it was trully corrupted or repairable . Tada , I did a silly and less'd one of the binary files and noticed that the underlying file was 'ar'd by /usr/local/alphaev6-dec-osf5.1b/bin/ar , well all said and done My ol' as100 ain't a ev6 . So my Question , Could I use these programs that were created on a ev6 cpu system on my ev4 ? Tia , JimL -- +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | James W. Laferriere | System Techniques | Give me VMS | | Network & System Engineer | 3237 Holden Road | Give me Linux | | jiml(a)system-techniques.com | Fairbanks, AK. 99709 | only on AXP | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+

2 months

a bit of Plan9 history

by Jan Schaumann

Hi, This was seen on Dave Farber's IP list; with many of the Dramatis Personae on this list it seems worthwhile to share it here, too: "What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9" by Geoff Collyer https://adi.onl/oral.pdf -Jan

2 months

When/how did ctime change from inode "creation" to "change" time?

by Theodore Ts'o

As part of a discusion on the Linux kernel mailing list, there was an assertion that ctime was orginally "creation time". From the v7 sources in TUHS, we can see: struct dinode { unsigned short di_mode; /* mode and type of file */ short di_nlink; /* number of links to file */ short di_uid; /* owner's user id */ short di_gid; /* owner's group id */ off_t di_size; /* number of bytes in file */ char di_addr[40]; /* disk block addresses */ time_t di_atime; /* time last accessed */ time_t di_mtime; /* time last modified */ time_t di_ctime; /* time created */ }; ... although the v7 kernel sources does seem to update ctime when the inode metadata changes, regardless of what the coment in /usr/src/sys/h/ino.h might say. More interestingly, this comment seems to continue in newer versions up to 3BSD, and then the comments becomes "change time" in BSD 4.2, probably coincident with the File System Implementation? The best we can guess is that the change from "creation time" to "inode change time" happened sometime between 1979 and 1982. Does anyone who was around can give the story about how and when this happened? - Ted

2 months, 1 week

Sad news: we lost George Colouris

by H.J.Thomassen

In July 1974 I visited Bell Labs Murray Hill, and Ken & Dennis showed me around. I was very impressed because we (Univ of Nijmegen, NL) had a PDP-11/45 just like theirs and I knew that machine quite well. It was clear that their software kicked the machine much heavier than our (DEC-original) DOS-system did. But I was a naive student so I wanted more information and asked Ken: are there many UNIX users in Europe? Ken brought us to the library where a Ms. Irma B. Biren, librarian, kept the record of licenses. We found prof. Colouris in London... When I asked whether maybe somebody closer by our place was present, Ken found Gideon Yuval in Tel Aviv. Nobody closer.... Hendrik-Jan Thomassen

2 months, 1 week

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