TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

28 participants
6556 discussions

by Tom Lyon

Anyone sitting on piles of old UNIX newsletters? I find they make for fascinating reading. I haven't found any online archives. If you have a pile, I can scan them. I'm going to scan my 3 copies of commUNIXations, the /usr/group newsletter, and 4 copies of "UNIQUE - Your independent UNIX and C Advisor" - all from 1983/4. Warren can hopefully find a home for these.

1 month, 2 weeks

xview and open motif files

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. I found the following files recently: $ ls -l total 8748 -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 5661471 Oct 1 2007 openmotif-2.3.0.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 4888 Jan 18 1999 xvfc.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 3281277 Jan 18 1999 xview3.2.tar.gz They can be retrieved under https://www.skeeve.com/X11/. I have sent them to Warren, who currently has them in his hidden archive. I also have a copy of the OpenLook CDROM, but I notice it's available from GitHub: https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM. Enjoy, Arnold

1 month, 2 weeks

Texas UNIX Users Conference 1981

by norman＠oclsc.org

This note gets a bit COFF-y; please redirect any replies to that list. USENIX Summer 1981, in Austin TX. First USENIX conference I ever attended, and the first to which I travelled by train-- mostly. I was somewhat shy about travelling in those days, but my Caltech colleague Mark Bartelt talked me into going, and suggested going by train. Except by the time I booked the trip there was space available only from Los Angeles to San Antonio and back, not onward from San Antonio to Austin. But in those days I did a bit of cycle touring, often in the company of my friend Brian Foster. Brian was also a co-worker at the time, and was interested in attending too. So we decided to travel together by train (in coach) to San Antonio, arriving around 05h30, and spent the rest of that day cycling, mostly up the frontage roads beside I-35, to Austin. After the conference we cycled back, mostly at night, which was somewhat spooky (I remember seeing a thunderstorm off on the horizon but we didn't get rained on) but saved us a second dose of sunburn. They checked into a motel for a day and a night until the return train came through at 02h55. I have gone by train to nearly every other conference I've attended since, but never again have I cycled. It was a fun ride but a harder one than expected. In those days of paper mapes, we visited the Caltech geography department and plotted out what looked like a fairly smooth route, with a slow but steady climb. The topo map we used had a resolution of 50' altitude. Evidently the constant, sometimes steep hills between San Antonio and Austin are all no more than 49' tall. It was a good conference too. One memory that sticks in my head was Jim Joyce using Tinker Toys as a metaphor for connecting Unix tools together. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 month, 4 weeks

Re: X.25 stacks on Unix

by Rudi J. Blom

Greg, a long time a go while still working for Computer Division of Philips Electronics I used X.25 and X.21 extensively on various proprietary O.S.-es. X.25/X.21 (or PSDN/CSDN) was used for Teletex (CCITT T series, TTX, better than telex but lost to FAX which was easier, cheaper and legally acceptable). I still have some dedicated boards which Philips used for X.25, X.21 and SDLC. At a customer side in a test environment with SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2 SDLC links are still used, X.25 was phased out a few years ago. Same with DEC Tru64, a multi-port SYNC-2000 with appropriate DEC software could support both X.25 and SDLC. AlphaServer DS25 with SDLC links still in production. I still have all the applicable software for SCO UNIX and DEC Tru64. Cheers, uncle rubl -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing. 24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration. 24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration 24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration 24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration

1 month, 4 weeks

Texas UNIX Users Conference 1981

by Tom Lyon

I just discovered that this issue of the Australian UNIX User Group Newsletter contains summaries of all the talks and sessions from the Usenix Texas UNIX Users Conference - Summer 1981. https://vtda.org/pubs/AUUGN/AUUGN-V03.4.pdf In what I believe was my first public speaking role I presented "UNIX vs Godzilla -- UNIX in an IBM Environment" Lots of other familiar names in those notes too.

1 month, 4 weeks

Where/when did TUIs come from

by Adam Koszek

Hi, I got interested in UI design and often study some historical aspects of it as I work on software. It’s hard not to notice how fast/usable Text User Interfaces are—ncurses and its siblings are still alive and well. From the ergonomy point of view, not needing a mouse in those interfaces if perfect. Question: where did TUIs come from originally, and what were their earliest instances? Many pages state that Vi was the first, but I’ve been looking through some old hardware photos, and things capable of more sophisticated interactions existed before Vi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen Some terminals with block display: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270 ^ ’71. Wiki says Vi showed up in ’76, but I suspect IBM mainframes may have had TUIs before. Question 2: were there any manuals talking about TUIs? I’m thinking some of those spiffy IBM things mandating certain design. Thanks, Adam

2 months

Origins of touch(1)

by Joseph Holsten

A TikTok user was asking the history of the touch(1) command: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTjgSMyAQ/ Unix history repo let me find the first occurrence in V7: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7-Snapshot-D… But looking at ls source in V6, it’s clear that stat(2) had st_mtime so touch would have been useful earlier. I notice make was added at the same time, which cares significantly about mtime. Was that the impetus? (Also, wow just writing a single char! Compared to present day impls which give fine grained control to modify mtime & atime, the original seems both indirect for the purpose and delightfully literal.) -- Joseph Holsten http://josephholsten.com mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com tel:+1-360-927-7234

2 months

Do you have any historical UNIX computers?

by Vicente Collares

Hello TUHS people! Someone recently posted a question about your prized UNIX artifacts to this list, that discussion [1] seems to be about various memorabilia. What about computers made to run UNIX? Do you have or used to any interesting historical hardware? For my part, I have only used UNIX on emulated systems so far but would like to purchase some hardware. Given that I have little space it would need to be something small. According to you how does one get into that specific type of retro computing? See you around cyberspace, Vicente vicente(a)collares.ca [1] https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-June/032020.html

2 months, 1 week

How did Dennis Ritchie typeset his PhD Thesis? A Typographical mystery

by Dan Cross

I just ran across this. Fascinating: https://fermatslibrary.com/s/how-did-dennis-ritchie-produce-his-phd-thesis-… - Dan C.

2 months, 1 week

MACRO-11

by Henry Bent

Hi all, Do sources exist for a MACRO-11 assembler for UNIX? The only package I have found is written in MACRO-11 and relies on a provided binary to regenerate itself; it's on the brl.pdp11 archive on the CSRG DVD. -Henry

2 months, 1 week

Re: Do you have any historical UNIX computers?

by H.J.Thomassen

I still have two 19" racks with the main components of the PDP-11/45, built in 1972, on which we started using UNIX 5th Edition in late summer 1974. Later it ran 6th and 7th Ed. CPU with front panel w. switches and lamps, RK03 cartridge disk (2.5Mb!), floating point processor board (serial number 1), several core memory banks among which 8K ones, DEC-tape, ASR33-TTY, dozens of mini-lightbulbs, not a single LED. Its hour-meter has clocked 122532: that's 13,97 years. It is complete but doesn't run. I remember from the days when I administered it during its productive life that it required .5 day of maintenance per six weeks, by a qualified service engineer: tuning power supplies, adjusting the disk head with the help of a special "alignment" disk cartridge, checking the fans (25+ in just those two racks), etc. etc. The CPU consists of 17 large PCBs. The combined MTBF of these PCBs was 1.5 years approx. Then the service engineer came with his box with exchange boards and swapped until the machine was up&running again. Without a maintenance contract such a board had a 5-figure exchange fee..... Hendrik-Jan Thomassen

2 months, 1 week

Re: Do you have any historical UNIX computers?

by Vicente Collares

Hello Milo, On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 13:38:54 -0400 Milo Velimirović <milovelimirovic(a)gmail.com> wrote: > What’s your budget and what’s your level of hardware technical skill? If budget is no concern, there are occasional complete pdp11 or vaxen on eBay. Or, you could get CPU cards and interfaces to piece together a system. If you go that route a Unibone or Qbone is highly recommended for both debugging and filling in hardwar gaps via emulation. Alternatively, there are several FPGA projects to emulate -11s. Buying a complete PDP-11 or VAX is the dream, but it's not what I'm aiming for to start. I was thinking of something like a UNIX workstation. I haven't thought about the possibility of piecing together a system using various cards. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll have to look into it. Budget is a concern for me. So ideally I would like to spend around $500 USD on the actual computer. Is that realistic for the type of computer I mentioned above? I'm not hardware savvy, so I would have a limited ability to do repairs on the electronics. I do know someone who is though, so I might be able to get some help on this project. I wish you an excellent week, Vicente vicente(a)collares.ca

2 months, 1 week

Re: Do you have any historical UNIX computers?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Vicente Collares > I'm more interested in its historical signaficance. If that's your interest, PDP-11's are absolutely _the_ way to go. The PDP-11 is _the_ machine that made UNIX. That choice has good points, and a very bad point, though. Good points are that QBUS PDP-11's are pretty easy to find, pretty small (desktop PC-sized), and not very expensive. They're pretty robust, too - I have a large stack of PDP-11 QBUS CPUs, and none of them had failed, as of the last time that I powered them on. The very bad point is that working mass storage for them is very hard to find. The controllers are around, but not the drives. Does anyone know if anyone is making a QBUS mass storage clone? Bridgham and I were going to produce QBUS RK11/RP11 clone that used SD cards to hold the bits. We got the prototype working, and it booted UNIX, but then I came down with COVID and post-COVID myalgic encephalomyelitis, and that was the end of that. Noel

2 months, 1 week

Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

by Paul McJones

> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 15:16:08 -0400, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com <mailto:henry.r.bent@gmail.com>> wrote: > > On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:59, Lawrence Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com <mailto:stewart@serissa.com>> wrote: > >> My rare items are only Unix-adjacent. ... I have some boards for a Digital >> Firefly, a research vax multiprocessor that ran a Modula-2 based OS that >> would run Ultrix binaries. > > That's incredibly cool. Do you know if any of the Firefly machines > survived? I saw a VAXstation 3540 for sale at some point recently but it > was well out of my price range; I hope it found a good home. > > -Henry I have a set of Firefly boards (I worked on the Taos operating system for the Firefly). But as far as I can tell, no software survives. Charles P. Thacker and Lawrence C. Stewart. 1987. Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation. In Proceedings of the second international conference on Architectual support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS II). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1145/36206.36199 Paul McJones and Garret Swart. Evolving the UNIX system interface to support multithreaded programs. Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference, December 1989. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/evolving.pdf Also available as Part I of SRC Research Report 21 (https://mcjones.org/paul/SRC-RR-21.pdf) Part II of which is the Taos Programmer's Manual. Paul McJones and Andy Hisgen. The Topaz system: Distributed multiprocessor personal computing. Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems. IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Operating Systems, November 1987. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/wwospos.pdf (Topaz was the name for the Modula-2+ programming environment, which also ran on VAX Ultrix.) Paul

2 months, 1 week

Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

by norman＠oclsc.org

I have a number of old Unix artifacts that I value. If I had to pick one (or one set) top one, it would be the complete set of Research Unix manuals, 1/e through 10/e. Other contenders include the AT&T-branded copy of the Lions commentary (with deathstar on the cover), a signed copy of The Unix Programming Environment, several unix-branded plastic containers (not to do with the OS, but bought from a Korean supermarket a few blocks from where I've lived for 30 years), and a plastic-slide Spin Out puzzle from Binary Arts (later ThinkFun but not part of IBM), an educational puzzle/game company founded in the 1980s by Bill Ritchie (Dennis's brother) and his wife Andrea Barthello. (I remember a prototype Spin Out, hand-made of wood, spending some time in the Unix Room.) But far more than any of that, I prize the memories and friendships I've had with fellow Unix people over the decades, particularly (but not exclusively) from my six years as sysadmin-hack in 1127. I'm very disappointed that I won't be at the last-ever USENIX Technical Conference in Boston in a few weeks. A show-and-tell there of prized artifacts sounds like a great idea. I hope those who do make it bring plenty of artifacts and memories to share. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

2 months, 1 week

Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

by Douglas McIlroy

A complete set of manuals,v1-v10. The 8-volume History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System--not really a Unix artifact but an impressive memento of the Bell Labs experience. Unix rates several pages in it. A mock license plate, generously given to me by Jon Hall. A polyomino puzzle that I solved with the help of Gerard Halzmann's Spin model-checker. The opportunity for such an "abuse of tools" illuminates Unix and CSRC as a productive meeting place for disparate disciplines, occupations, and pastimes. Doug

2 months, 1 week

No Further LLM messages on TUHS

by Warren Toomey

All, the LLM conversation is no longer Unix-related. Please take it to COFF if you wish to continue it. Thanks, Warren

2 months, 3 weeks

Re: On the unreliability of LLM-based search results (was: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum)

by norman＠oclsc.org

G. Branden Robinson: That's why I think Norman has sussed it out accurately. LLMs are fantastic bullshit generators in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense,[1] wherein utterances are undertaken neither to enlighten nor to deceive, but to construct a simulacrum of plausible discourse. BSing is a close cousin to filibustering, where even plausibility is discarded, often for the sake of running out a clock or impeding achievement of consensus. ==== That's exactly what I had in mind. I think I had read Frankfurt's book before I first started calling LLMs bullshit generators, but I can't remember for sure. I don't plan to ask ChatGPT (which still, at least sometimes, credits me with far greater contributions to Unix than I have actually made). Here's an interesting paper I stumbled across last week which presents the case better than I could: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 To link this back to actual Unix history (or something much nearer that), I realized that `bullshit generator' was a reasonable summary of what LLMs do after also realizing that an LLM is pretty much just a much-fancier and better-automated descendant of Mark V Shaney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney Norman Wilson Toronto ON

2 months, 3 weeks

Re: 1972 UNIX V2 "Beta" Resurrected

by Thalia Archibald

Yufeng Gao wrote: > The s1 tape is a UNIX INIT DECtape containing the kernel, while s2 includes > most of the distribution files. [https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-February/031420.html] Hello Yufeng, Do you have more details on the format of the s1 tape? I want to reproduce your work. The s2 tape is in the tap format, which was easy to decode, and I assumed that s1 was similar, just with its file headers on an earlier tape. I’ve been able to fairly accurately segment s1 into files by observing that blocks duplicate the tail of the previous block when they are not a full 512 bytes. I’ve written a tool for this and have segmented all the text files and some of the binaries, but I’m floundering on the rest. What you say seems to suggest that s1 actually does have file metadata. Thalia

2 months, 3 weeks

Open source "code" for books typeset in troff

by Adam Koszek

Hello, troff.org <http://troff.org/> maintains a nice list of UNIX/networking books typed in troff: https://troff.org/pubs.html#advctt https://troff.org/books.html#strong There’s one book that’s been released out of the publisher’s copyright, transcribed, and the source is available: https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing Are there any other other long text/books that have the source code available? The only thing that I can think or are the manuals present in source trees of the current BSD systems. Thanks, Adam

2 months, 3 weeks

Several QD-600A Tapes from Bell Labs Circa Early 90s

by segaloco

Hello everyone, I'm just putting feelers out for a potential data recovery project that may have some UNIX history nuggets hiding somewhere. I just closed on this auction: https://www.ebay.com/itm/267254963191 After the link is an action for a set of 17 Sony QD-600A tapes featuring various backups from at least one machine named Zeus. The listing indicates they were property of a former Western Electric engineer. At least one tape has a label indicating a full /usr backup. My hope is that something downstream of the BTL internal version of System V might be living amongst these tapes, but either way I was wondering if anyone here with access to the correct tape drive would be willing to assist with ripping these tapes? I can also start hunting down a drive but figured I'd ask around first. I'm not currently spotting a drive on eBay but have a few other places I can ask around. Thanks for any input! - Matt G.

2 months, 3 weeks

Re: Demise of AT&T

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Steve Jenkin > An unanswered question about Silicon Valley is: > Why did it happen in California and not be successfully cloned > elsewhere? One good attempt at answering this is in "Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970", by Christophe Lecuyer; it's also a very good history of the early Silicon Valley (before the mid-1960's). Most of it's available online, at Google: https://books.google.com/books?id=5TgKinNy5p8C I have neither the time nor energy to comment in detail on your very detailed post, but I think Lecuyer would mostly agree with your points. > It wasn't just AT&T, IBM & DEC that got run over by commodity DRAM & > CPU's, it was the entire Minicomputer Industry, effectively extinct by > 1995. Same thing for the work-station industry (with Sun being merely the most notable example). I have a tiny bit of second-hand personal knowldge in this area; my wife works for NASA, as a structural engineer, and they run a lot of large computerized mathematical models. In the 70's, they were using CDC 7600's; they moved along through various things as technology changed (IIRC, at one point they had SGI machines). These days, they seem to mostly be using high-end personal computers for this. Some specialized uses (various forms of CAD) I guess still use things that look like work-stations, but I expect they are stock personal computers with special I/O (very large displays, etc). So I guess now there are just supercomputers (themselves mostly built out of large numbers of commodity CPUs), and laptops. Well, there is also cloud computing, which is huge, but that also just uses lots of commodity CPUs. Noel

2 months, 3 weeks

Is there a way to mirror Stevens' kohala.com ?

by Adam Koszek

Hi I recently noticed that some references from Richard Stevens’ website aren’t working: https://www.kohala.com/ - many links are broken, including links to the resources that worked before. I found some sub-directory there that appears to have copies of referenced files: http://www.kohala.com/start/ I’d be willing to chip in some $ to extend his domain + server to just work, in case anybody here knows the right people. I also wondered whether we could mirror his site on TUHS? Thanks, Adam

2 months, 3 weeks

Re: Is there a way to mirror Stevens' kohala.com ?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Adam Koszek > Try to access his: > Stevens, W. R. 1989. "Heuristics for Disk Drive Positioning in > 4.3BSD," Computing Systems, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 251-274 (Summer). I'm getting the exact same error you are, so it's nothing specific to your side. There is another copy of that paper here: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1989/sum_stevens.pdf though. (Multiple copies of things are _somewhat_ common.) Noel

2 months, 3 weeks

Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

by Aharon Robbins

I'm hoping that someone hear (*BSD folks?) might know what's happened with the PCC Revived project. The site and CVS server for it went offline in October 2023 or so, and I lost the email address for Ragge who was doing it. Thanks, Arnold

2 months, 3 weeks

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