TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

43 participants
6501 discussions

by segaloco

Does anyone know if there are any surviving examples of SVR2 for the PDP-11? Various SVR2 manuals still make mention of the assembler, linker, etc. and the pdp11 variable is present in machid(1)*. And on the note of the later years of the PDP-11, was there any hope for SVR3 on the PDP? I presume the introduction of demand paging was the end of things but I would be curious for anyone's recollections on the final years of System V on the PDP-11. - Matt G. P.S. *interesting little 3B5 side note, found as I was checking references that machid(1) in the "System V" branded manual from the initial System V commercial release mentions the pdp11, vax, and u3b machines, the latter being the 3B20S. However, the "Release 5.0" branded manuals also make mention of the u3b5 machine, the 3B5. The System V manuals are from January 1983 and the Release 5.0 manuals are June 1982. There isn't an earlier reference to cite as machid(1) was introduced in Release 5.0, at least from the literature I have available. The 4.x series ran on at least the PDP-11, VAX, and 3B20S computers at least, matching those listed in the System V manual. From what I have available initial 3B5 literature was distributed in the form of small binders a little different from the grey-on-black 1984 DEC Processor SVR2 binders, possibly right on the cusp of the split of p_man from u_man as this 3B5 User's Manual that I have contains sections 1-6 rather than just 1 and 6. They're dark grey with a large orange square in the middle (I believe I've sent a photograph of the manual before).

1 year, 9 months

emacs

by Will Senn

As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs, but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff. My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix? Will

1 year, 9 months

Re: Split addressing (I/D) space (inspired by the death of the python... thread)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > A new hire in 1976, Jeff Mitchell supposedly had a bet with Bill > Strecker that he could implement an 11 on a single"hex high" CPU board > if he got rid of the lights and switches. He ran out of room to > implement seperate I/D, so it became an 11/40 class [and it has an > 8008-1 that runs the front panel]. I don't know about the Strecker story, but the first PDP-11 CPU on a single card (a hex card) was the KD11-D: https://gunkies.org/wiki/KD11-D_CPU of the -11/04. It didn't have _any_ memory management, though (or a front panel; to get that, you had to use the KY"11-LB: https://gunkies.org/wiki/KY11-LB_Programmer%27s_Console which added another quad card). The first -11 CPU i) on a single card and ii) with memory management was the FDF11-A: https://gunkies.org/wiki/KDF11-A_CPU The first -11 CPU i) on a single card and ii) with split I+D memory management was the KDJ11-A. > It was not until 11/44 that DEC was able to make a hex height > implementation of the 11 that managed to cram a full 11/70 into that > system. I'm not sure what your point is here? The KD11-Z CPU of the -11/44: https://gunkies.org/wiki/KD11-Z_CPU was a _minimum_ of five hex boards; a little smaller than a KB11-B (15 hex cards). Floating point was an extra card; CIS was 2 more. > if you look at the link line of sys/run the 45 does not have -i Split I+D for the kernel was not supported by the linker in V6; a combination of 'sysfix' (a special post-processor, which took as input a relocatable linked image) and code in m45.s was needed. https://gunkies.org/wiki/Upgrading_UNIX_Sixth_Edition https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_V6_memory_layout The code in m45.s to handle split I+D in the kernel: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/sys/conf/m45.s starts at 'start:' and is adequately commented to tell you what it's doing when it plays around with kernel memory. > From: Will Senn > with I/D, you can use 64k for I and 64k for D. Was that it, or were > there other tricks to get even more allocated I have this vague memory that someone (Berkeley, I think?) added support for automatic code overlays in user processes. The programmer had to decide which modules went in which overlays, but after that it was all automagic. There was a 4xx code allocated to them. I think the support for that (in e.g. the linker) was somehow involved with the use of overlays in the kernel, but I don't know the details (nothing after V6 is at all interesting to me). > didn't the 11 max out at 256k)? You need to distinguish between i) the amount of memory the machine could handle, and ii) the amount of memory that running code could 'see' at any instant. The latter was always either 64KB, or 64KB+64KB (with split I+D turned on, on CPUs which supported it). The former, it's complicated. Mostly, on UNIBUS only machines, it was 256KB. (Although there was the Able ENABLE: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Able_ENABLE which added an Extended UNIBUS, and could take them up to 4MB.) The -11/70, as mentioned, had a Main Memory Bus, and could handle up to 4MB. The -11/44 had an Extended UNIBUS, and could also handle up to 4MB (but only after the MS11-P became available; there were only 4 main memory slots in the backplane, and MS11-M cards were only 256KB.) On QBUS achines, after the KB11-A (Revision A), which only suppported 256 KB, all later revisions and CPUs could also handle up to 4MB. Noel

1 year, 9 months

Re: Split addressing (I/D) space (inspired by the death of the python... thread)

by Steve Simon

not quite split i and d but i do have a memory of some code which could run in three parts as overlays. this could have been through exec’ing the next overlay with an appropriate argv and a pipe or file of data, or, perhaps there was some kernel support for overlays in early unix. anyone seen evidence of this? sadly i cannot remember where i saw it, i want to say it was a versatex printer driver but i am pretty sure that is rubbish. -Steve

1 year, 9 months

Re: Split addressing (I/D) space (inspired by the death of the python... thread)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > Does unix (v7) know about the PDP-11 45's split I/D space through > configuration or is it convention and programmer's responsibility to > know and manage what's actually available? There are two different cases: i) support of split I+D in the kernel, and ii) support of split I+D in user processes. Both arrived with V6; the V5 source: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/sys/conf/mch.s https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/sys/ken/main.c (former for kernel; later for users) shows no sign of it. > From: Kenneth Goodwin <kennethgoodwin56(a)gmail.com> > 1. I don't think the 11/45 had split I & d. > But I could be wrong. > That did not appear until the 11/70 You are wrong. The chief differences between the KB11-A&-D of the -11/45 and the -B&-C of the -11/70 were i) the latter had a cache, and ii) the latter used the 32-bit wide Main Memory Bus, which also allowed up to 4 Mbytes of main memory. Detail here: https://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11/70 along with a couple of lesser differences. > From: "Ronald Natalie" > with only 8 segment registers combined for code, data, and stack I think you meant for code, data, and user block. > The 55 (just a tweaked 45) The /50 and /55 had the identical KB11-A&-D of the /45; the difference was that they came pre-configured with Fastbus memory. > In addition the 23/24/J-11 and those derived processors did. No; the F-11 processors did not support I&D, the J-11 did. Noel

1 year, 9 months

Re: Make(1) Historical Behavior (was Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman)

by segaloco

> And I think even V7 make supported what you described, as well as implicit rules for compiling .c into a .o or into a binary. > > Warner Losh You're right, I just tried it out. Been avoiding that pattern for years because I swear some make implementation I used at one point was very unhappy with that, but if V7 does it, then whatever implementation that was is probably not what I want to be using anyway. Also shows how little I've used specifics of BSD, I've never made a Makefile using bsd.prog.mk, although I have this desire for a write-once-build-everywhere Makefile that the preponderance of build systems that generate them imply is an exercise in futility... On that note, one quirk I've found with the implicit .c.o rule on older UNIX, just tested on V7 and System III, is that they render: cc -c $< rather than cc -c -o $@ $< If you have an object list with objects in several different directories, it spits them all out in the CWD, causing problems if you have similarly named files in multiple directories, and then outright failing on the final compilation if it's something like $(CC) -o $(BIN) $(OBJS) because $(OBJS) is a string of object pathnames with the full nested path, not just the resulting *.o files. Granted, I could be anti-patterning here for all I know, I haven't worked closely with a whole lot of Make-based projects that aren't my own. Maybe I just haven't read these darn papers I'm always hunting down enough. - Matt G.

1 year, 9 months

Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

by Douglas McIlroy

"Lessons learned" overlooked the Morris worm, which exploited not only the unpardonable gets interface, but also the unpardonable back door that Allman built into sendmail. This reminds me of how I agonized over Mike Lesk's refusal to remove remote execution from uucp. (Like Eric, Mike created the feature to help fix the myriad trouble reports these communication facilities stimulated.) It seemed irresponsible to distribute v7 with the feature present, yet the rest of uucp provided an almost indispensable service. The fig leaf for allowing uucp in the distribution was that remote execution was described in the manual. If you didn't like it you could delete or fix uucp. (Sendmail's Trojan horse was undocumented, though visible in the code.) Doug

1 year, 9 months

Posted a video on installing and running v7

by Will Senn

Hi All, I got some questions recently about getting v7 working, so I fired up OBS to create a video walkthrough of the install process and first steps (it's basically following my v7 note, but hey some folks dig video). The video is totally amateur hour, but it was fun. I never get tired of logging in as dmr, writing hello.c, running cc, running hello and watch the magic of hello, world appear on "screen". As a reminder - the note (and thus, the video) walks the user through installing OpenSIMH (including pdp11), building a tape image, installing to disk from tape, booting off the disk, building and using a DZ-11 as a telnet listener on 16 lines, adding a user, running learn, and piddly stuff like setting baud, delays, and such. Not a lot of hand-holding, but some. When I get around to it, I'll probably update the note to add additional test environments (I'm pretty sure it works anywhere OpenSIMH does, but some folks like to see there system or one kinda like it in the list of tested systems). I'm running LMDE5 and Debian 12 Bookworm these days, so I know they work there in addition to pretty much any Linux Mint, MX Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS, etc. I'm still in awe of Hayle and Ritchie's Setting Up Unix - Seventh Edition as the basis of my note - 44 y.o. and counting... for holding up so well. The blog: https://decuser.github.io The blog post: https://decuser.github.io/unix/research-unix/v7/videos/2023/07/14/installin… The note blog post: https://decuser.github.io/unix/research-unix/v7/2022/10/28/installing-and-u… Later, Will

1 year, 10 months

Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

by Rich Morin

Lessons Learned from Sendmail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re1MAO6jOLE -r

1 year, 10 months

Offering Free Unbound System V Document Processing Guide (1983)

by segaloco

Good day all, I'm emailing to offer a duplicate UNIX document I picked up free of charge to whoever speaks for it first, I'll even cover the shipping. What I've got is a second copy of the Document Processing Guide shipped with the initial System V version, code 341-920, from 1983. Now for the caveat: I ordered this second copy as it was in much rougher shape than the one I currently have. I intend to chop the spine off so I can get quality scans of the pages rather than having to deal with creasing the hell out of the binding on my other copy (unlike the manuals and some of the other guides, this one is a typical paperback glue binding.) Once I'm done with the scans I'm just going to put all of the pages in a binder (as they're already Bell-style 7-hole punched.) That to say, I'm not ready to ship it right now, just got it today, still need to do the scans. As for contents, this contains the System V-era versions of the following papers (titles paraphrased): - Advanced Editing on UNIX - Sed - NROFF/TROFF User's Manual - TROFF Tutorial - Tbl - Eqn - MM Macros Manual - View Graphs and Slide Macros Anywho, figured I'd see if anyone was interested in this after I'm done with it. Otherwise I'll just see if a library around here is interested. - Matt G.

1 year, 10 months

AT&T UNIX Support Activities Post-1983

by segaloco

Hello, I received in the mail today a USOC listing from the NY Bell division listing various standardized service codes in 1982. I wasn't particularly expecting to see anything relevant to UNIX in there, but flipping through the pages, it did have me curious on one point. Prior to divestiture, one of the conditions placed on Bell was that they could not support UNIX. Sure, tapes could find their way to individuals for service costs or under particular agreements, but this provision of "service" seemed to be right out and not allowed under their then-terms. This is presumably why there is nothing resembling UNIX in this manual, nor can I find anything implying 3B20(D/S) services. So after 1983 when the cat is out of the bag and AT&T begins aggressive marketing, what sorts of "services" were they then providing to UNIX customers that they couldn't before? One item I've got that further complicates my understanding, a class listing from Western Electric Corporate Education from July, 1983[1]. Did offering classes like this not constitute "support", or was there a little window between 1982 and 1984 where AT&T could start their true marketing and support in earnest while still not being absolutely complete with the divestiture of the Western Electric business? In any case, if WECo was out the door as part of the legal settlement, it does strike me as a bit odd they'd put any work into spinning up the WECo Corporate Education machine on this for the space of just part of a year in 1983, only to then rebrand it all for ATTIS when Jan 1st passes. An additional time-frame indicator is while this foldout does list WECo, it is devoid of Bell system logos, consistent with the date as that was one of the conditions that started to take effect that summer. Anywho, I'm sure some of the general information what services they provided in addition to licensing and distributing for UNIX license holders lives in documentation out there, so I'll be reading up too, but figured it'd be good to ask if nothing else to figure out what was going on in the early 80s, because that WECo training document certainly has me a bit curious on the timeframe vs what they could and couldn't do throughout the Bell System breakup years. - Matt G. [1] -https://imgur.com/a/xbEOGZn Note, I intend to do a proper scan on glass with this after I get through some IBM stuff I'm working on, so don't worry, I don't intend these photos to be historical record.

1 year, 10 months

"UNIX/370: A Feasibility Study" by W.A. Felton (Bell TM)

by Tom Lyon

A friend found this doc which as far as I can tell is not online anywhere yet. Preliminary sketch for the UNIX/370 effort at Bell based on TSS/370. Apparently started at Holmdel, I had always thought Indian Hill. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zrnKJ7fT1yrt_9r8QJHtZm7cI9EQEw76/view?usp=… Please archive!

1 year, 10 months

(Amdahl UNIX) "Notes on Au Performance - or How to get the Pb out of Au"

by Tom Lyon

This is perhaps the first significant document I wrote at Amdahl. Although undated, I believe this was written in August 1979, after I had attended a 2 week class at IBM Chicago about VM//370(CP) internals and performance. The paper makes reference to V7 UNIX being "on order", so this is when the V6 UNIX system was in use. IIRC, V7 UNIX was released in Nov. of 1979. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cB2eqTwmicj1AQOiULDZjED5Rq-_V4N4/view?usp=… Huge thanks to my friend Karl D. for hanging on to this for 44 years.

1 year, 10 months

Re: Research UNIX PDP 11/45

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Henry Bent > there will be a lengthy addendum shortly. The most useful thing is probably this: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/nsys/ken/low.s which lists exactly what was there; not only the types, but how many of each there are. This is from 'nsys', which is slightly before the actual V4, so it's quite early. 'low.s' is inherently machine-specific; i.e. different machines would share most kernel files identically, but _not_ this one - unless they had _absolutely identical_ device sets. So this one is _probably_ the one from the /45 in picture. It shows: RK11 RF11 PC11 TC11 TM11 1xKL11 12xDC11 1xDP11 (synchronous serial) 1xDN11 (dial-out asynch control) 1xDR11C (parallel port to -11/20) 2xDC11 (Screw Works voice synthesizer) 1xDR11A (voice response unit) 1xDR11C (C/A/T typesetter) (Line printer, card reader and RP11 are commented out; more about the RP11 in a later message. There's also this: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/nsys/ken/11-45 which is a bit hard to interpret, but I think might list what's in each rack: the TC11, RK11 (early ones), RF11 and TM11 (early ones) were large custom wire-wrapped backplanes which bolted into the front or back of a 19 inch rack; this: https://gunkies.org/wiki/RK11-C_disk_controller has an image of such an RK11. The "MOS 16-24" is probably a reference to an MS11: https://gunkies.org/wiki/MS11_Semiconductor_Memory_System which had to mount in the CPU backplane. The "MM" entries are likely core memory units; probably MM11-K's: https://gunkies.org/wiki/MM11-K_core_memory since they seem to be 4KW each. (Maybe MM11-E's or 'F's, though; those are also 4KW each.) I'm not sure what they "PL"s are - probably Plessey core? Anyway,it looks like the machine had 104KB total. This file: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/nsys/ken/conf.c lists all the types of devices on the machine. One oddity is that it lists two RK11's; but if you look at the RK11 driver: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/nsys/dmr/rk.c it's only set up to handle one physical controller. But there is this: #define JRK 1 /* temp */ if (bp->b_dev.d_major==JRK) d = bp->b_dev.d_minor; else d = bp->b_blkno%3; so the two different major device entries appear to handle the same disks in different ways ("d = bp->b_blkno%3" will spread a virtual drive across three physical drives). Memory, it would have been hard to say (UNIX even then sized memory at start up) but then I found that '11-45' file. I also found a copy of the CACM version of the UNIX paper: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/unix.pdf which says the machine had 144KB (so they had added 40KB more at that point). (I seem to recall someone had scanned the SOSP version; I didn't save the pointer, but if someone knows where it is, it would be interesting to look, and see what it says - they seemed to update this paper on a regular basis - the copy included with V6 talks about the -11/70.) The system at that point had "a 1M byte fixed-head disk .. four moving-head disk drives which each provide 2.5M bytes on removable disk cartridges, and a single moving-head disk drive which uses removable 40M byte disk packs" The RS11 disks for the RF11 were 512KB, so either they'd added a second one, or switched to an RS04 (but that's a MASSBUS device). The big disk was an RP03 so they had added an RP11, which wasn't present earlier. Noel

1 year, 10 months

Research UNIX PDP 11/45

by Henry Bent

Hello all, I asked this question in a different thread but it may have been bogged down in other discussion so I figured it was worth asking again. What was the hardware configuration of the 11/45 that Research used to implement early UNIX? This would be circa late 1972/earlty 1973. I have found numerous references to it being an early production 11/45, and I assume that it had an RK05, but I cannot find any details about things like memory size and other peripherals. Since the only extant sources are for V1, which was as I understand only run on a singular 11/20, and V5 by which time UNIX had spread it doesn't seem possible to infer a hardware configuration from existing code. -Henry

1 year, 10 months

Re: Research UNIX PDP 11/45

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Henry Bent > What was the hardware configuration of the 11/45 that Research used to > implement early UNIX? .. I have found numerous references to it being > an early production 11/45, and I assume that it had an RK05, but I > cannot find any details about things like memory size and other > peripherals. A good source is the Ken+Dennis picture: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/picture.html and the caption which Dennis wrote for it. The image is not quite definitive, because there are two machines in that bank of racks: a PDP-11/20, and a PDP-11/45 (mostly hidden behind the right-hand Teletype), and it's not possible to say which of the two machines the various peripherals are attached to. But it seems to have had two RK03's (and an RK11 somewhere to drive them) and an RF11 (no idea how many RS11 drives it had at that point),; a TU56 (and a TC11 somewhere to drive that), and a PC05 (with PC11 controller boards). (There are pages for all these things here: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Category:UNIBUS_Peripherals which include links to the DEC documentation on them.) I'm doing more searching, through documents I recall having additional crumbs; let me go ahead and send this, and there will be a lengthy addendum shortly. Noel

1 year, 10 months

Some old DECtapes from Dennis Ritchie

by Warren Toomey

All, way back when, Dennis sent me some DECtape images to look after. I've put some of them in the Unix Archive (the s1 and s2 tapes) as they contained Unix source code or binaries. The others I kept aside as they didn't contain Unix code, or they were potentially sensitive. Anyway, Angelo Papenhoff asked for any old tapes from the Labs that might contain fragments of B source code or B binaries. I passed the extra tapes on to him, and he has found some very interesting nuggets from the time period when B -> NB -> C. So, to help provide the context around Angelo's work, I've decided to put all the tapes that Dennis gave me here: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes/ Cheers, Warren

1 year, 10 months

Re: Bell COBOL Environment?

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Reading through [1], there are documents offered by AT&T for the "Level II COBOL" system, which some further research indicates is a product from Convergent (same folks as the UNIX PC.) There's also the LPI-COBOL which appears to be a Language Processor Inc. product. Ryan-McFarland comes to mind: in my recollection they were the leading Cobol on small machines in the early 80’s. Ryan-McFarland’s predecessor company Digitek was contracted to do the PL/I compiler for Multics, but failed. It seems they later did Bell Labs PL/I (says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitek) I think they did a Unix version of their Cobol in the mid/late 80’s as well. A few years ago I tried to find out more about RM-Cobol as it existed in the late 70’s and early 80’s, but with little success. As a product it survived till the present day under the ownership of Micro-Focus and most web mentions are for more recent versions. It would seem to me that compilers on machines with small memories and word sizes in the 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s tended to compile to a virtual machine / intermediate code -- sometimes with the option to compile to native from there. Think BCPL and o-code, Pascal and p-code, the Amsterdam Compiler Kit and m-code, the Microsoft “revenue bomb” p-code C compiler, etc. According to the above Wikipedia article RM-Cobol used the same approach. I did once see the source for another 80’s Cobol compiler and it compiled to a virtual machine with 60-bit words. By the way, I loved the recent posts on B and NB. THUS at its best!

1 year, 10 months

Bell COBOL Environment?

by segaloco

Reading through [1], there are documents offered by AT&T for the "Level II COBOL" system, which some further research indicates is a product from Convergent (same folks as the UNIX PC.) There's also the LPI-COBOL which appears to be a Language Processor Inc. product. Are these the earliest AT&T endorsed COBOL solutions for UNIX or were there other efforts either promoted by Bell or even perhaps developed locally that were in any use before this version? Or otherwise is there any other family of ubiquitous UNIX COBOL tools that was in use in the 70s and early 80s, before the timeframe of this document? Additionally is anyone aware of any surviving code or binaries of either of these or other, earlier efforts at COBOL on UNIX? I have no goal for this information in mind yet, but just gathering details at this point. Thanks all! - Matt G. [1] - http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/000-111_ATT_Documentation_Guide_Nov87.pdf

1 year, 10 months

B compiler restored

by Angelo Papenhoff

So there's been quite a bit of talk about B recently (mostly from my side) and right now I feel that I've reach an interesting enough milestone to warrant a separate thread for this here. First of all, I want to stress that this is still WIP, but everything can be found here now: https://github.com/aap/b/tree/master/unix1_bdir In this repo you will find the following: - bc and ba that can build themselves (I've included .s files so everything can be bootstrapped easily). - libb and bilib in source form from object/library and binary files of the s2 tape - brt1 and brt2 restored from binary files of the s2 tape - olibb, obilib and obrt1, older versions of the above - a version of ba that does not generate threaded code but an interpreted code more like the pdp-7 code. ken told me such a thing existed at one point and indeed it is the only way to fit the compiler into 8kb/4kw - an implementation of this interpreted code. With this bc and ba fit into 8kb Note I have only tested this under apout so far. The version I used [1] needed two tweaks, but see my README. With this I was able to build the recently reversed B programs [2] and produce exact matches to the originals (modulo assembler differences). In that process I found a few mistakes I made, now the programs are exact. I want to thank everyone who was of help in this endeavour in one way or another: Ken Thompson, Phil Budne, Robert Swierczek, Steve Johnson, Warren Toomey What's left to do now is to actually run this under UNIX v1 proper, preferably even on a real machine. I've been too lazy for that so far. Also there are inaccuracies and unknowns in the compiler and assembler. Right now the intermediate code is a binary code that's easy to generate and to parse, but if I understood ken correctly the intermediate code was more like something the PDP-7 assembler could deal with. I'm also rather unsure how to handle the conditional ?: operator. The printf.o file shows that it produces labels that are in line with all the other labels. Now the C compiler uses labels starting at L10000 for the ones generated in the second pass. So it *feels* like the conditional should be generated by bc directly and not by ba but this leads to other problems, which I won't go into detail now. Finally the code should probably be a bit closer to the C compiler than it currently is. Cheers, Angelo [1] https://github.com/philbudne/pdp11-B/tree/pb/tools/apout [2] http://squoze.net/B/programs/

1 year, 10 months

OSDI/ATC?

by Dan Cross

Is anyone else at OSDI/ATC this year? Any interest in a BoF? - Dan C.

1 year, 10 months

Re: Who stated that the power of Unix stems from the wise choice of a few design principles rather than the endless accumulation of special cases

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Diomidis Spinellis <dds(a)aueb.gr> > I seem to recall reading that the power of Unix stems from the wise > choice of a few design principles rather than the endless accumulation > of special cases. However, I cannot find where this is stated. I think you're thinking of something in the CACM paper: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html "The success of Unix lies not so much in new inventions but rather in the full exploitation of a carefully selected set of fertile ideas" Noel

1 year, 10 months

Who stated that the power of Unix stems from the wise choice of a few design principles rather than the endless accumulation of special cases

by Diomidis Spinellis

I seem to recall reading that the power of Unix stems from the wise choice of a few design principles rather than the endless accumulation of special cases. However, I cannot find where this is stated. I tried a Google web and a Google Scholar search using the terms "unix endless accumulation special cases", and I also asked ChatGPT for a publication associated with this phrase. I also searched for "special" in D.M.Ritchie's "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System" and "The UNIX Time-sharing System A Retrospective". (Amazingly, both have several parts that still highly relevant.) Can anyone help? Am I misremembering something?

1 year, 10 months

PSA: Several 1983 SysV Documents on eBay

by segaloco

Howdy folks, I just wanted to pass on word that there is currently a stack of 1983 System V documents on eBay, here's a link to the User's Manual: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225659365754 The same seller has these documents available in their shop (as well as a bunch of other old computing documents and magazines): - User's Manual - Administrator's Manual - Error Message Manual - Operator's Guide - Graphics Guide - Transition Aids - Release Description So not the whole lot, but a nice spread nonetheless. I've already got all of these and they're already all scanned in some fashion or another, or I'd have scooped em up already. Anywho, figured that might pique folks' curiosity. The pricing is very agreeable might I add, sometimes I see single volumes from this set going for over $100. - Matt G.

1 year, 10 months

Lions commentary

by Rich Salz

I have a copy of Lions's "A Commentary on the UNIX Operating System" It is an n-th generation photocopy that I've had for some number of decades. It also has the source code, as I guess all of those copies did back in the day. I could just recycle the paper -- it's yellowed with age -- but I'd rather pay it forward and ship it to someone who promises to make copies for others who want it. This is also on bitsavers, so you're only doing this to preserve the sense of history in passing photocopies around. I'll take bids on how many copies you'll provide. I'll post the winning bid (without their address), so that the community can pressureXXXXXX ensure they meet their commitment. I'll send it out by the end of the week. I will give preference to US/Canada domestic addresses since that is easier for me. How much preference is left to my discretion. :) I hope this doesn't make me sound like a jerk; it's intended to be lighthearted community service.

1 year, 10 months

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