TUHS

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61 participants
6531 discussions

by Paul Ruizendaal

Herewith some interesting (somewhat) contemporary papers on early windowing systems: 1. There was a conference in the UK early in 1985 discussing the state of window systems on Unix. Much interesting discussion and two talks by James Gosling, one about NeWS (then still called SunDew), and one about what seems to be SunWindows. It would seem then that these were developed almost in parallel. http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/contents.htm 2. Then there is a 1986 paper by James Gettys, discussing the 18 month journey towards X10. In particular it focuses on the constraints that Unix set on the design of the X system. https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/acrobat/860201-b.pdf 3. Next is the 1989 NeWS book that has a nice overview and history of windowing systems in its chapter 3: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/sun/NeWS/The_NeWS_Book_1989.pdf Both the UK conference and the NeWS book mention a Unix kernel-based windowing system done at MIT in 1981 or 1982, “NU" or “NUnix”, by Jack Test. That one had not been mentioned before here and may have been the first graphical windowing work on Unix, preceding the Blit. Who remembers this one? 4. Finally, an undated paper by Stephen Uhler discussing the design of MGR is here: https://sau.homeip.net/papers/arch.pdf I’ve not included Rob Pike’s papers, as I assume they are well known on this list. Some of the above papers may be worthy of stable archiving.

2 years, 4 months

Initial uses of the '-d' convention for daemons?

by Alexis

Hi all, Firstly, thanks to Warren for adding me to the list! The 6th Edition manual refers to 'cron', not 'crond' (even though cron was indeed referred to as a 'daemon'). By 4.2BSD, however, we have things like 'telnetd' and 'tftpd'. Does anyone have any pointers as to when and where the '-d' convention started to be used? Thanks in anticipation, Alexis.

2 years, 4 months

Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

by Will Senn

All, I just saw this over on dragonflydigest.com: https://0j2zj3i75g.unbox.ifarchive.org/0j2zj3i75g/Article.html It's an article from 2007 about the history and genesis of the Colossal Cave Adventure game - replete with lots of pics. What I found fascinating was that the game is based on the author's actual cave explorations vis a vis the real Colossal Cave. Gives you a whole new appreciation for the game. My question is do y'all know of any interesting backstories about games that were developed and or gained traction on unix? I like some of the early stuff (wumpus, in particular), but know nothing of origins. Or, was it all just mindless entertainment designed to wile away the time? Spacewar, I know a bit about, but not the story, if there is one... Maybe, somebody needed to develop a new program to simulate the use of fuel in rockets against gravity and... so... lunar lander was born? I dunno, as somebody who grew up playing text games, I'd like to think there was more behind the fun that mindless entertainment... So, how about it, was your officemate at bell labs tooling away nights writing a game that had the whole office addicted to playing it, while little did they know the characters were characterizations of his annoying neighbors? If you don't mind, if you take the thread off into the distance and away from unix game origins, please rename the thread quickly :). Thanks, Will

2 years, 4 months

Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

by Douglas McIlroy

> In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9. Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to have met the same fate. Doug

2 years, 4 months

Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> segaloco wrote: > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that > have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even > just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes > (games with networking notwithstanding)? The machine of the DSSR/RTS group at MIT-LCS, Steve Ward's group (an -11/70 running roughly PWB1) had an implementation of a form of Perquackey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perquackey that was a multi-player game; I'm pretty sure there was a process per player, and they communicated, I'm pretty sure, through pipes, not files - there was certainly no IPC in that system. IIIRC, the way it worked was that there was a parent process, and it spawned a child process for each terminal that was playing, and the children could all communicate through pipes. (They had to communicate because in that version, all the players shared a single set of dice, and once one person had played a word, the other players couldn't play that word. So speed was important in playing; people got really addicted to it.) Alas, although their machine was very similar to CSR's (although ours was an -11/45 with an Able ENABLE and a lot of memory, making it a lot more like a /70), and we shared most code between the machines, and I have a full dump of the CSR machine, we apparently didn't have any of the games on the CSR machine, so I can't look at the source to confirm exactly how it worked. Noel

2 years, 4 months

yet another C discussion (YACD) and: Rust is not C++

by ron minnich

I did not want to disrupt the FD 2 discussion, but I could not really let this comment go unanswered: "Smells like C++ to me. Rust in essence is a re-implementation of C++ not C. It tries to pack as much features as it possibly can. " It's hard for me to see how you can say this if you have done any work in Rust and C++. But, short form: Rust is not C++. Full stop. I did not feel that comment should go unanswered, lest people believe it.

2 years, 4 months

Re: yet another C discussion (YACD)

by Warren Toomey

On Wed, Feb 01, 2023 at 01:50:05AM +0000, segaloco via COFF wrote: > COFF'd Thanks Matt. Yes please, C vs. Rust should mv to the COFF list. Cheers, Warren

2 years, 4 months

FD 2

by ron minnich

I am trying to remember when fd 2 (aka stderr) became a thing. I have a vague memory that it was post-v6 but that may be way off.

2 years, 4 months

Earliest UNIX Workstations?

by Joseph Holsten

2 years, 5 months

Unix v6 chess source code?

by Mattis Lind

Hello! I saw someone playing chess on their pdp-11 and thought it could be an interesting project to run on my pdp-11. At this point the RK05s are not yet running so booting unix v6 is not possible. I then thought that if the source code could be found it might be possible to get it to run standalone with some modifications. After some googling I found the archive https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UNSW/7/record0.tar.gz which contained a chess.lib file. It appeared that this archive contained source code for some kind of chess program. I have been told that it isn't the chess written by Ken Thompson so the question is who wrote it? There are not many comments in the code. Could be interesting to know more about this chess implementation. Just looking through the source files and the mk file show that it is missing a set of files. The mk file references a set of "b"-prefixed assembly files, bgen.s, bmove.s, bheur.s and bplay.s which are present in the archive. But it also references a set of files with "w"-prefix, wgen.s, wmove.s, wheur.s and wplay.s which are missing. I also recognise that there is an include file, "old.h" that is included from all c-modules that most likely is present in the overload.lib which seems to be an overlay loader. Anyone that has an idea how this thing was built once upon a time? /Mattis

2 years, 5 months

Job Control and other terminal fun

by Ron Natalie

A lot of this dates back from the old “tty” days (or at least crt terminals that were still alphanumeric). Even the concept of putting a job in the background with & is really a feature of trying to multiplex multiple tasks on the same dumb terminal. This is indeed less important with windowing things like the DMDs or modern windowing workstatiosn when you can just get another window. The Berkeley job control was an interesting hack. For us at BRL the problem was I absolutely detested the C shell syntax. The Korn shell hadn’t escaped from AT&T yet, so, I spent time figuring out how that really worked in the C shell (not really well documented), mostly by inspection, and then reimplemented it in the Bourne Shell (we were using the System V source code version for that). I still couldn’t get traction at BRL for using the Bourne shell because by that time, tcsh had come out with command line editing. So back to the shell sources I went. By this time, 5R2 had come out so I grabbed the shell source form that. I was very delighted to find that the macros that made C look sorta like Algol had been unwound and the thing was back to straight C. I reworked emacs-ish command line editing into the shell. Subsequently, I had a nice conversation with David Korn at USENIX, being probably at that point the two most familiar with Bourne shell job control internals. I also sat down with the guys writing either bash or the pdksh (can’t remember which) and explained all how this work. As a result my name ended up in the Linux manpages which was pretty much all I found for a while when I googled myself. Years later, I had left the BRL, spent three years as a Rutgers administrator and was working for a small startup in Virginia. There was a MIPS workstation there. I was slogging along using ed (my employees always were amazed that if there was no emacs on the system, I just used ed, having never learned vi). Not thinking about it, I attempted to retrieve a backgrounded job by typing “fg.” To my surprise the shell printed “Job control not enabled.” Hmm, I say. That sounds like my error message. “set -J” I type. “Job control enabled.” Hey! This is my shell. Turns out Doug Gwyn put my mods into his “System V on BSD” distribution tape and it had made its way into the Mach code base and so every Mach-derived system ended up with it. Certainly, I found it convenient. There have been other schemes other than job control to multiplex terminals. IBM in the AIX that ran on the 370/PS2/i860 had a device called the High Function Terminal that allowed you to swap screens on the console. When we implemented the i860 (which was an add in card for the micro channel), we called our console the Low Function Terminal. Then after spending some time on MIT’s ITS and TOPS20, I got intrigued by the fact on those systems you could have a “shell” that persisted across logins and could be detached and reattached on another device at another time. I set about making such an implementation. Not particularly efficient, it essentially grabbed one of the BSD ptys and spawned the shell there and then a small alternative login shell forwarded the real tty to that. You could then detach it leaving the shell running on the PTY and reattach it elsewhere. Much like ITS, on. login it reminded you that you had a detached shell running and offered to reattach it rather than spawning a new one (complete with the ITS-ish: space for yes, rubout for no). It never really caught on. Oh well, pardon my ramblings. -Ron

2 years, 5 months

Thread Drift

by Warren Toomey

All, w.r.t. FD 2, if your e-mail doesn't mention file descriptors, can you please change the subject line? And this, in general, for all TUHS discussions :-) Thanks! Warren

2 years, 5 months

Sun+Java article by Bradford Morgan White

by Rich Salz

Some folks here might be interested in this. I haven't read this (not gonna subscribe), I know nothing about the author (Bradford Morgan White), but I saw Steve Sinofsky tweet good things about it. The Network is the Computer The story of Sun Microsystems and the Java programming language https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-network-is-the-computer

2 years, 5 months

Re: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

by Douglas McIlroy

> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a > PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it > the integration of display into the system that differentiates? Certainly integration is critical. The display should be integral to the terminal, not simply an available device. Without that stipulation Ken's original single-user PDP-7 system would count (unless, perhaps, the system had not yet been christened "Unix"). Doug

2 years, 5 months

File descriptor fun and games (setuid)

by Ron Natalie

Another of Ron’s historical diversions that came to mind. Most of you probably know of various exploits that can happen now with setuid programs, but this was pretty loose back in the early days. I was a budding system programmer back in 1979 at Johns Hopkins. Back then hacking the UNIX system was generally considered as sport by the students. The few of us who were on the admin side spent a lot of time figuring out how it had happened and running around fixing it. The first one found was the fact that the “su” program decided that if it couldn’t open /etc/passwd for some reason, things must be really bad and the invoker should be given a root shell anyhow. The common exploit would be to open all the available file descriptors (16 I think back then) and thus there wasn’t one available. That was fixed before my time at JHU (but I used it on other systems). One day one of the guys who was shuffling stuff back and forth between MiniUnix on a PDP-11/40 and our main 11/45 UNIX came to me with his RK05 file system corrupted. I found that the superblock was corrupted. With some painstaking comparison to another RK05 superblock, I reconstituded it enough to run icheck -s etc.. and get the thing back. What I had found was that the output of the “mount” command had been written on the superblock. WTF? I said, how did this happen. Interrogating the user yielded the fact that he decided he didn’t want to see the mount output so he closed file descriptor one prior to invoking mount. Still it seemed odd. At JHU we had lots of people with removable packs, so someone had modified mount to run setuid (with the provision of only allowing certain devices to be mounted certain places). At his point we had started with the idea of putting volume labels in the superblock to identify the pack being mounted. Rather than put the stuff in the kernel right away, Mike Muuss just hacked reading it from the super block in the usermode mount program so that he could put the volume label in /etc/mtab. Now you can probably see where this is headed. It opens up the disk, seeks to the pack label in the superblock and reads it (for somereason things were opened RW). Then the output goes to file descriptor 1 which just happens to be further in the superblock. I figured this out. Fixed it and told Mike about it. I told him there were probably other setuid programs around that had the problem and asked if it was OK if I hacked on things (at the time I yet was not trusted with the root password). He told me to go ahead, knock yourself out. Well I spent the evening closing various combinations of file descriptors and invoking setuid programs. I found a few more and noted them. After a while I got tired and went home. The next day I came in and looked through our paper logbook that we filled out anytime the machine was shutdown (or crashed). There was a note from two of the other system admins saying they had shut the system down to rebuild the accounting file (this was essentially the shadow password file and some additional per-user information not stored in /etc/passwd). The first 8 bytes were corrupted. Oh, I say, I think I might know how that happened. Yeah, we thought you might. Your user name was what was written over the root entry in the file. The passwd changing program was one of the ones I tested, but I hadn’t noticed any ill-effects for it at the time.

2 years, 5 months

I've just come across some old Unix Sources

by David Barto

Notably: 32v_usr.tar.gz and sys3.tar.gz. I’ve not unpacked the tar files. If someone would like more detail about the contents I’ll produce a TOC offline for them. David

2 years, 5 months

Earliest UNIX Workstations?

by Paul Ruizendaal

As a result of the recent discussion on this list I’m trying to understand the timeline of graphical computing on Unix, first of all in my preferred time slot ’75 -’85. When it comes to Bell Labs I’m aware of the following: - around 1975 the Labs worked on the Glance-G vector graphics terminal. This was TSS-516 based with no Unix overlap I think. - around the same time the Labs seem to have used the 1973 Dec VT11 vector graphics terminal; at least the surviving LSX Unix source has a driver for it - in 1976 there was the Terak 8510; this ran primarily USCD pascal, but it also ran LSX and/or MX (but maybe only much later) - then it seems to jump 1981 and to the Blit. - in 1984 there was MGR that was done at Bellcore Outside of the labs (but on Unix), I have: - I am not sure what graphics software ran on the SUN-1, but it must have been something - Clem just mentioned the 1981 Tektronix Magnolia system - Wikipedia says that X1 was 1984 and X11 was 1987; I’m not sure when it became Unix centered - Sun’s NeWS arrived only in 1989, I think? Outside of Unix, in the microcomputer world there was a lot of cheap(er) graphics hardware. Lot’s of stuff at 256 x 192 resolution, but up to 512 x 512 at the higher end. John Walker writes that the breakout product for Autodesk was Interact (the precursor to AutoCAD). Initially developed for S-100 bus systems it quickly moved to the PC. There was a lot of demand for CAD at a 5K price point that did not exist at a 50K price point.

2 years, 5 months

Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > It's my understanding it was started by Bob Scheifler of the CLU group. Yes, that's correct. (Bob's office was right around the corner from me - although I had very little knowledge of what his group was up to; I was too busy with other things.) I have this vague memory that his version was actually written in CLU? Can that be correct? It would make sense, since that group was so focused on CLU - but maybe not, see below. X must have been done after LCS got the 750 farm (on which we ran 4.1c, to start with) - although I don't know what kind of terminals they were using to run X on - we didn't have any bit-mapped displays on them, I'm pretty sure. Although maybe it was later, once Micro-Vaxes appeared? I have this vague memory that it was based (perhaps only in design, not code re-use) on a window system done at Stanford {looks}; yes, W (hence 'X'): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System The X paper listed there: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/22949.24053 doesn't say anything about the implementation, so maybe that vague memory/assumption that I had that it was originally written in CLU is wrong. Liskov's 'History of CLU' paper, which lists things done in CLU, doesn't mention it, so I must have been confused? Do any of the really early versions of X (and W) still exist? Noel

2 years, 5 months

[off-topic] Anyone still using USENET?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi. I've been using trn for decades to read a very few USENET groups. Until recently I've been using aioe.org as my NNTP server but it seems to have gone dark. Before that I used eternal-september.org, but when I try that I now get: | $ NNTPSERVER=news.eternal-september.org trn | Connecting to news.eternal-september.org...Done. | | Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: comp.sys.3b1 | | Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: comp.sources.bugs | | Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: comp.misc | | Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: comp.compilers | .... And those all are (or were!) valid groups. If anyone has suggestions for a good free NNTP server, please let me know. Privately is fine. I'm at a bit of a loss otherwise. Thanks, Arnold

2 years, 5 months

reading historic magnetic tapes

by Steve Simon

i worked for some years on video and film archive restoration. baking old, badly stored magnetic tapes prior to reading them is a common practice. my favourite was a story of a rock band (i think the stones) who wanted to play an old 24 track master tape but discovered it seemed to be stuck together. there is a nasty affliction of mag tapes called sticky vinegar syndrome, so they did the right thing and sent a section of tape for analysis. the results came back: the tape had suffered impregnation with “vodka and coke”. some things never change. -Steve

2 years, 5 months

tesseract has gotten so much better

by Will Senn

Hi All, I just wanted to let y'all know that tesseract ocr has significantly improved and is much easier to use that it used to be. I have been using it with my workflow for a bit and it's crazy how much better it is than it was back when I tried it last (admittedly 5-6 years ago). For those of you doing your own scans, or those of you finding sad little pdfs without ocr, the process is fairly simple. Let's say you find "The Master Manual of Fortran.pdf" out there in the wild (or scan it). Here's how to turn it into a glorious ocr'd version: Export your pdf as a multi-image tiff - it'll be ginormous, but you can delete it later (on Mac, this is just export from preview and select tiff, but gs will do it to, if I remember correctly) and then: tesseract The\ Master\ Manual\ of\ Fortran.tiff out -l eng PDF et voila, I nice, if large pdf, called out.pdf or somesuch will appear with ocr text that actually matches your scan (it seems to have caught up to adobe's ocr, or is quite close in my view, ymmv). I speak English, so I installed tesseract and tesseract-eng, but it supports a bunch of other languages if you need them. Apparently google's been supporting and developing it for while now and if my results are any indicator, it's paying off (boy do I remember all the gobbledegook it used to produce). tesseract will import from different image types, multiple images, etc. I just like the simplicity of tiff->pdf. Anyhow, thought y'all might like to know as many of you live off the scans :). Will

2 years, 5 months

C port of Ken Thompson's Space Travel

by Lars Brinkhoff

If you don't want to play Space Travel on PDP-7 Unix, you can now do it more easily running this C port. The controls are--so far--just as quirky as the original. https://github.com/mohd-akram/st

2 years, 5 months

Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

by John Foust

At 01:20 AM 1/26/2023, John Cowan wrote: >WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came out in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System.Â I had never heard of it before. I have a dozen or so Teraks (a PDP-11/03 based system) as well as many floppies and other inherited items and notebooks from one of the Terak founders. This may seem like a lot but there's another guy who might still have a larger collection. Mini-Unix is described here: http://www.tavi.co.uk/unixhistory/mini-unix.html Sixth edition, no MMU. The Bell memo there is dated January 1977. There was a Mini-Unix for the Terak described here in May 1979 but I don't think I have a copy. See page 14... https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/159028/UCC_Special%20_Is… Terak floppies are described here: http://www.60bits.net/msu/mycomp/terak/termedia.htm A memo there says they got their copy in April 1980. There's no indication that this Mini-Unix can *use* the Terak's mono bitmapped display, short of writing your own routines. Pinning "first" on computers is always a tricky process. - John

2 years, 5 months

Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

by Paul Ruizendaal

>> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a >> PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is >> it the integration of display into the system that differentiates? > > I remember people calling something a workstation, > if it has the four "M" > > at least 1 MByte memory > at least 1 megapixel display > at least 1 mbit/s network > can't remember the fourth(was there a fourth?) I remember it as: at least 1 MByte memory at least 1 megapixel display at least 1 MIPS cost at most 1 mega penny (10K, maybe 35K in today’s money) That matches with Wikipedia, for whatever that is worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer but note that it talks about 3M not 4M. With hindsight, not adding in networking speed looks strange -- but maybe the world had already settled on LAN speeds above 1Mb/s by 1980 (Ethernet, ARCNet)

2 years, 5 months

Fwd: How did Bell Labs start to work on Project MAC?

by Dan Cross

[Bcc: to TUHS as it's not strictly Unix related, but relevant to the pre-history] This came from USENET, specifically, alt.os.multics. Since it's unlikely anyone in a position to answer is going to see it there, I'm reposting here: From Acceptable Name <metta.crawler(a)gmail.com>: >Did Bell Labs approach MIT or was it the other way around? >Did participating in Project MAC come from researchers requesting >management at Bell Labs/MIT or did management make the >decision due to dealing with other managers in each of the two >organizations? Did it grow out of an informal arrangement into >a format one?" These are interesting questions. Perhaps Doug may be in the know? - Dan C.

2 years, 5 months

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