TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

43 participants
6501 discussions

by Rudi Blom

On SCO UNIX 3.2V4 you indeed have local virtual consoles moving from one to another using the function keys. Worked from F1 to F12, but how often you could login would depend on your license. Of course all still character based, and depending on your TERM setting. -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

2 years, 2 months

Unix 2.0v2 Vax-780 IP address access

by KenUnix

Hi! I have an updated Unix 2.0v2 package running under the current Vax-780 sim. It has been tuned up with missing packages and some new ones. Like automatic startup with date/time setting, running fsck at boot and properly shutting down ALL processes at shutdown allowing for a "clean" shutdown thereby avoiding fsck issues at the next boot. Also there is a virtual tape so you can do backups.. My question is can THIS version access an IP address? And if so, how. If there is any interest I could package it up into a tar file for others. Thanks, Ken -- WWL 📚

2 years, 2 months

PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

by segaloco

Hello folks, posing a question here that will help with some timelining. So System III, according to everything I've read, was commercially issued in 1982. However, PWB 3.0 was issued internally in 1980, two years prior. This isn't that surprising, give USL some time to work it up for commercial-readiness. Where I'm curious is if there was a similar gap for the public release of PWB, given that was earlier on and pre-support and such. Was there a particular "public release" date for PWB 1.0 or would it have just been whenever folks started getting tapes out of Bell? I know it shows up in a price sheet floating around from say 1983 or 1984 among the likes of V7, 32V, System III, and System V also for sale, but would anything that early have had a formal "ship date" indicating a day they cut the master to copy tapes from or was it more of a contact Bell, someone will cut you a tape of whatever we've got right now? Also, was PWB held as something that would be "marketable" from the get-go, or was it more of a happy accident that it wound up in the right place in the right time to become the commercial line? One would think USG Generic would be the one they'd shoot for being the "base" to build on, but everything I'm finding in my study of System III lately is pointing to a much more PWB-ish lineage with random borrowings from CB, PY, HO, IH, among others. - Matt G.

2 years, 2 months

converting C/A/T to postscript

by arnold＠skeeve.com

There was such a tool, psroff (same name as, but no shared code with the Adobe version) that read either C/A/T or ditroff output and produced postcript. It was in volume 24 of comp.sources.unix. There were also multiple patches to it. It dates from 1991. segaloco, you were looking for this? Contact me privately if you can't find it. Arnold

2 years, 2 months

Re: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ronald Natalie" > Multilevel breaks are as bad as goto with regard to structure violation. In a way, you are right. There isn't really much difference between: for (mumble) { for (foobar) { do some stuff break-2; } } and: for (mumble) { for (foobar) { do some stuff goto all_loops_done; } } all_loops_done: The former is basically just 'syntactic sugar' for the latter. I think the point is that goto's aren't necessarily _always_ bad, in and of themselves; it's _how_, _where_ and _why_ one uses them. If one uses goto's in a _structured_ way (oxymoronic as that sounds), to get around things that are lacking in the language's flow-control, they're probably fine. Then, of course, one gets into the usual shrubbery of 'but suppose someone uses them in a way that's _not_ structured?' There's no fixing stupid, is my response. Nested 'if/then/else' can be used to write comletely incomprehensible code (I have an amusing story about that) - but that's not an argument against nested 'if/then/else'. As I've said before, the best sculpting tools in the world won't make a great sculptor out of a ham-handed bozo. Noel

2 years, 2 months

Re: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > for breaking out of multiple levels of while/for loops. Yeah, multi-level 'breaks' were one of the things I really missed in C. The other was BCPL's 'VALOF/RESULTIS'. Back before C compilers got good enough to do inline substitutions of small procedures (making macros with arguments less useful), it would have been nice to have, for macros that wanted to return something. Instead, one had to stand on one's head and use a '(cond ? ret1 : ret2 )' of some form. Noel

2 years, 2 months

Re: Conditions, AKA exceptions. (Was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Ralph Corderoy > if you say above that most people are unfamiliar with them due to their > use of goto then that's probably wrong I didn't say that. I was just astonished that in a long thread about handling exceptional conditions, nobody had mentioned . . . exceptions. Clearly, either unfamiliarity (perhaps because not many laguages provide them - as you point out, Go does not), or not top of mind. Noel

2 years, 2 months

simh running System V add serial (telnet) lines

by KenUnix

I have successfully got System V running on a PDP11 sim. I have been trying to add serial lines like on Version 7 but have had no success. What would be necessary under System V on a sim to do so. I have already tried the SIMH group but no working answers. If direct telnet is a better way please let me know. Thanks Ken -- WWL 📚

2 years, 2 months

scaling on TCP socket connections

by ron minnich

Ca. 1981, if memory serves, having even small numbers of TCP connections was not common. I was told at some point that Sun used UDP for NFS for that reason. It was a reasonably big deal when we started to move to TCP for NFS ca 1990 (my memory of the date -- I know I did it on my own for SunOS as an experiment when I worked at the SRC -- it seemed to come into general use about that time). What kind of numbers for TCP connections would be reasonable in 1980, 90, 2000, 2010? I sort of think I know, but I sort of think I'm probably wrong.

2 years, 2 months

Fifth Edition Manual Restoration

by segaloco

So I decided to keep the momentum and have just finished the first pass of a Fifth Edition manual restoration based on the same process I used for 3B20 4.1: https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v5man There were a few pages missing from the extant PDF scan, at least as far as pages that were in both V4 and V6 sources, so those are handled by seeing how V5 source of the few programs compares to V6. I'll note which pages required this in a second pass. I've set my sights on V1 and V2 next, using V3's extant roff sources as a starting point, so more to come. - Matt G.

2 years, 2 months

Re: scaling on TCP socket connections

by Paul Ruizendaal

From reading a lot of papers on the origins of TCP I can confirm that people appear to have been thinking in terms of a dozen connections per machine, maybe half that on 16-bit hardware, around 1980. Maybe their expectations for PDP-10’s were higher, I have not looked into that much. > From: Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com> > Sun chose UDP for NFS at a point when few if any people believed TCP could > go fast. > I remember (early 80s) being told that one couldn't use TCP/IP in LANs > because they were WAN protocols. In the late 80s, WAN people were saying > you couldn't use TCP/IP because they were LAN protocols. I’m not disputing the above, but there was a lot of focus on making TCP go fast enough for LAN usage in 1981-1984. For example see this 1981 post by Fabry/Joy in the TCP-IP mailing list: https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/museum/tcp-ip-digest/tcp-ip-digest.v1n6… There are a few other similar messages to the list from around that time. An early issue was check-summing, with that initially taking 25% of CPU on a VAX750 when TCP was heavily used. Also ideas like having "trailing headers" (so that the data was block aligned) were driven by a search for LAN performance. Timeouts were reduced from 5s and 2s to 0.5s and 0.2s. Using a software interrupt instead of a kernel thread was another thing that made the stack more performant. It always seemed to me that the BBN-CSRG controversy over TCP code spurred both teams ahead with BBN more focussed on WAN use cases and CSRG more on LAN use cases. I would argue that no other contemporary network stack had this dual optimisation, with the possible exception of Datakit.

2 years, 2 months

Unix System V date command update

by KenUnix

Guys, Find attached an updated date.c for Y2K for System V IE: date 0309182123 Also works: # date +%D 03/09/23 # date +%y%m%d%H%M 2303091823 Interesting Version 7 wants: date 2303091821 Ken -- WWL 📚

2 years, 2 months

Re: Origins of the frame buffer device

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Kenneth Goodwin > The first frame buffers from Evans and Sutherland were at University of > Utah, DOD SITES and NYIT CGL as I recall. > Circa 1974 to 1978. Were those on PDP-11's, or PDP-10's? (Really early E+S gear attached to PDP-10's; '74-'78 sounds like an interim period.) Noel

2 years, 2 months

'Huge' file support removed from PWB1

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

In PWB1, support for 'huge' files appears to have been removed. If one compares bmap() in PWB1'S subr.c with V6's, the "'huge' fetch of double indirect block" code is gone. I guess PWB didn't need very large (> 8*256*512 = 1,048,576 bytes) files? I'm not sure what the _benefits_ of removing it were, though - unless PWB was generating lots of files of between 7*256*512 and 8*256*512 bytes in length, and they wanted to avoid the overhead of the double-indirect block? (The savings in code space are derisory - unlike in LSX/MINI-UNIX.) Anyone know? Noel

2 years, 2 months

Origins of the frame buffer device

by Paul Ruizendaal

I am confused on the history of the frame buffer device. On Linux, it seems that /dev/fbdev originated in 1999 from work done by Martin Schaller and Geert Uytterhoeven (and some input from Fabrice Bellard?). However, it would seem at first glance that early SunOS also had a frame buffer device (/dev/cgoneX. /dev/bwoneX, etc.) which was similar in nature (a character device that could be mmap’ed to give access to the hardware frame buffer, and ioctl’s to probe and configure the hardware). Is that correct, or were these entirely different in nature? Paul

2 years, 2 months

the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways

by ron minnich

The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to thinking: What I'm seeing is reversing the rotation of the wheel of reincarnation. Instead of pulling the task (e.g. graphics) from a special purpose device back into the general purpose domain, the general purpose computing domain is pushed into the special purpose device. I first saw this almost 10 years ago with a WLAN modem chip that ran linux on its 4 core cpu, all of it in a tiny package. It was faster, better, and cheaper than its traditional embedded predecessor -- because the software stack was less dedicated and single-company-created. Take Linux, add some stuff, voila! WLAN modem. Now I'm seeing it in peripheral devices that have, not one, but several independent SoCs, all running Linux, on one card. There's even been a recent remote code exploit on, ... an LCD panel. Any of these little devices, with the better part of a 1G flash and a large part of 1G DRAM, dwarfs anything Unix ever ran on. And there are more and more of them, all over the little PCB in a laptop. The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed systems continues. The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or sideways? I'm no longer sure the whole idea of the wheel or reincarnation is even applicable.

2 years, 2 months

Re: Origins of the frame buffer device

by norman＠oclsc.org

Rob Pike: As observed by many others, there is far more grunt today in the graphics card than the CPU, which in Sutherland's timeline would mean it was time to push that power back to the CPU. But no. ==== Indeed. Instead we are evolving ways to use graphics cards to do general-purpose computation, and assembling systems that have many graphics cards not to do graphics but to crunch numbers. My current responsibilities include running a small stable of those, because certain computer-science courses consider it important that students learn to use them. I sometimes wonder when someone will think of adding secondary storage and memory management and network interfaces to GPUs, and push to run Windows on them. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

2 years, 2 months

An odd disclaimer on the Lions Commentary

by Warner Losh

Recently, I stumbled upon a photo of the Lions Commentary that didn't have a bell disclaimer, but a Wollongong Group disclaimer on it. Not Wollongong University, but The Wollongong Group (a company I coincidentally used to work for). I wish I'd saved the images, because now I can't find it. Has anybody else seen this? Warner

2 years, 2 months

Re: Unix v7 icheck dup problem

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> I'll turn this into a 'Fixing damaged V5/V6 file systems' article on > the CHWiki. Here'a a first crack at it: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Repairing_early_UNIX_file_systems Any suggestions for improvements/additions will be gratefully received! I've also been amusing myself trying to figure out who wrote: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s1/fcheck.c and how it got to MIT - which might give us a clue as to who wrote it. (It's clearly a distant ancestor to 'fsck'.) The fact that we've lost Ted Kowalski is really hindering, alas. Interestingly, Dale DeJager, head of the CB-UNIX group, earlier remembered Hal Pierson working on a file system checker early on: "Hal also implemented the first file system check routine that was written in C. It replaced an .. assembler version from research" but it's not clear if the thing Hal wrote, mentioned there, has any relationship with the 'check' of V5: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/check.c Maybe one of the Labs old-timers here remembers where the V5 thing came from? (I.e. did Ken or Dennis write it, or did it come from Columbus?) If you do, it would be a big help! Noel

2 years, 2 months

Nice article on porting Unix

by KenUnix

I have not seen this before. Nice article on porting Unix includes an 8086 CPU. Ken -- WWL 📚

2 years, 2 months

Unix v7 ps command question

by KenUnix

Hi, When executing ps alx on the interdata sim I get good output: # ps alx F S UID PID PPID CPU PRI NICE ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD 3 S 0 0 0 255 0 20 2235 2 4262 ? 36:48 swapper 1 S 0 1 0 0 30 20 2255 8 46060 ? 0:00 /etc/init 1 S 0 19 1 0 30 20 2745 11 46114 co 0:00 -sh 1 R 0 301 19 4 50 20 4056 20 co 0:00 ps alx 1 S 0 12 1 0 40 20 2545 5 140000 ? 0:00 /etc/update 1 S 1 18 1 0 40 20 2625 10 140000 ? 0:00 /etc/cron # When executing ps alx on the pdp11 sim I get bad output: # ps alx F S UID PID PPID CPU PRI NICE ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD 115 5120 0 0 1 26 1 55 1 3003 ? 120150:37 swapper # I tried copying the source from one machine to the other. No luck, same issue. I have attached the source from both machines. Any help appreciated. Ken -- WWL 📚

2 years, 2 months

Re: A second Unix Patent

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Douglas McIlroy > Typo, in v3 through v6 ... > 26^3 16-bit trigram counts didn't fit in the PDP-11 memory Being mildly curious, I fed '26 3 ^p' into 'dc' to see just how big it was - and got "17576", a 16-bit word array of which would fit into a PDP-11 64KB address space. I think the answer is in the first line - V3 didn't use the PDP-11 memory management, so the kernel _and_ the application had to fit into 56KB. So there may well have not been 36KB available to hold a 26^3 array of 16-bit words. The other possible explanation is that it was perfectly possible to run UNIXes of that era (V4 on) on machines without enough main memory to hold the kernel and a 'full-sized' process simultaneously. (Our original machine, an -11/40, started out without a lot of memory; I don't recall exactly how much, though. It had, I'm pretty sure, 3 banks of core; I was thinking it was 3 MM11-L core units, which would be 3x16KB, or only 48KB, but my memory must be wrong; that's not really enough.) Noel

2 years, 2 months

Re: Unix v7 icheck dup problem

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole wrote: > It had more colorful name originally - fsck (pronounced as fisk BTW) > was finished. I suspect the fcheck name was a USG idea. I dunno. I don't think we at MIT wold have gratuitously changed the name to 'fcheck'; I rather think that was its original name - and we pretty definitely got it from CMU. 'fsck' was definitely descended from 'fcheck' (below). > From: Jonathan Gray >> (are 'fsck' and 'fcheck' the same program?) > https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7addenda/fsck Having looked the the source to both, it's quite clear that 'fcheck' is a distant ancestor of 'fsck' (see below for thoughts on the connection(s)). The latter has been _very_ extensively modified, but there are still some traces of 'fcheck' left. A lot of the changes are to increase the portability, and also to come into compliance with the latest 'C' (e.g. function prototypes); others are just to get rid of oddities in the original coding style. E.g.: unsigned dsize, fmin, fmax ; Perfectly legal C, but nobody uses that style. > From: Jonathan Gray > fcheck is from Hal Pierson at Bell according to > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/CB_Unix/readme.txt Hmm. "the major features that were added to UNIX by CB/UNIX ... Hal Person (or Pierson?) also rewrote the original check disk command into something that was useful by someone other than researchers." I poked around in CB/UNIX, and found 'check(1M)': https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/CB_Unix/cbunix_man1_01.pdf (dated November 1979). Alas, the source isn't there, but it's clearly in the fheck/fsck family. (CB/UNIX also has chkold(1M), which looks to me like it's 'icheck'.) So now we have a question about the ancestry of 'check' and 'fcheck' - is one an ancestor of the other, and if so, which - or are they independent creations? Without the source, it's hard to be definitive, bur from the messages (as given in the manual), they do seem related. Clem's message of 3 Mar, 14:35 seems to indicate the the original was from CMU, authored by Ted Kowalski; he also: https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=anecdotes:clem_cole_student says "Ted Kowalski shows up for his OYOC year in the EE dept after his summer at Bell Labs ... He also brought his cool (but unfinished) program he had started to write originally at U Mich - fsck". So maybe the CB/UNIX 'check' is descended from a version that Ted left behind at Bell Labs? Is anyone in touch with Hal Pierson? He could surely clear up these questions. Noel

2 years, 2 months

Re: Unix v7 icheck dup problem

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: KenUnix > So is it safe to say there is no fsck or similar for v7? There was a version of 'fcheck' (are 'fsck' and 'fcheck' the same program?) for V7, but I don't know if it's available. It would be really easy to convert the 'fcheck.c' that I put up to a V7 version; the V6 and V7 file systems are almost identical, except for the block size, I think. > From: Dan Cross > I believe you posted a link to end(3) here back in 2018 Yes, but that does't talk about '_end' not being defined if there are missing externals, either! All it says is: "Values are given to these symbols by the link editor 'ld' when, and only when, they are referred to but not defined in the set of programs loaded." Now that I think about it, I have this vague memory we had to look at the source for 'ld.c' to verify what was going on! > From: Jonathan Gray > That is close, but slightly different to the PWB fcheck.c Interesting. I wonder how 'fcheck' made it from CMU to Bell? Clem and I discussed how it made it from CMU to MIT, and we think it was via Wayne Gramlich, who'd been an undergrad at CMU, and then went to grad school at MIT. I'm pretty sure the reason we liked it was not any auto-repair capabilities, but ISTR it was somewhat faster than icheck/dcheck. (Interesting that they were separate programs in V6; V5 seems to have only had check: http://squoze.net/UNIX/v5man/man8/check https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/check.c which contained the functionality of both. I wonder why they were split? Space?) > From: Rich Salz > But the amazing point was it worked regardless of bit order. I forgot to mention thast, but yes, its input was the number in bit-serial form. I suspect there's a connection between the property he mentioned, and the fact that the grad student could design something which would work with binary numbers fed in from either end, but I can't bring myself to devote the brain cells to figure it out. > From: John Cowan > I didn't know that one was done at MIT. Yes; see: https://www.hactrn.net/sra/alice/alice.intro There's a really funny story at the end of that about the real Ann Marie Finn. In Rob's version, she took the role of KAREN in the earlier one. That would be Karen Prendergast, Patrick Winston's admin; why we used her I don't know, since I didn't really know her, but I guess she had a reputation as a bit of a 'tough cookie'. >> I think that the person fails their oral. I have no idea if it's a >> true story. > That's vicious. Hey, this _is_ the school that used to tell incoming freshpeople, at the welcoming picnic 'look at the person to your left, and to your right; at graduation, one of you won't be here'. I don't remeber if they said the same thing at mine, or if the story had just been passed down from class to class. Noel

2 years, 2 months

A second Unix Patent

by Warner Losh

In looking at the first AUUGN today, I noticed the following at the end of a letter John Lions sent home when he spent a sabbatical at Bell Labs [image: image.png] I've seen the first patent, but not the second one... That's got to be a joke or inside joke, right? Anybody know anything else about it?

2 years, 2 months

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

TUHS