TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

16 participants
6536 discussions

by Warren Toomey

If I'm lucky, this will be the first e-mail to the TUHS list using the mailman3 software on the new minnie server. Cheers, Warren

3 years, 1 month

Re: Pronunciation

by Norman Wilson

It's spelled TUHS but it's pronounced values of beeta may give rise to dom!

3 years, 1 month

Archives of the TUHS mailing list

by Warren Toomey

All, now that the TUHS list has migrated over to the new mailman3 system, I should point out where the list archives are now available. They are: https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/ - new mailman3 format https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/ - old mailman2 format https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TUHS/Mail_list/ - same as above, but in a format that makes it easier to download All mail to the TUHS list should, eventually, end up in all three places. Cheers, Warren

3 years, 1 month

Old UNIX file system formats

by norman＠nose.cita.utoronto.ca

I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the Seventh Edition: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome. (It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)

3 years, 1 month

tuhs.org e-mail cutover

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I'm hoping to cut the tuhs.org e-mail from the old server over to the new server tomorrow, at around 0400 UTC May 18 2002. I'll stop accepting e-mails on the old server first, then cut over and start accepting e-mails on the new server. If something goes pear shaped, you'll be able to contact me on my Gmail address warren.toomey@.... and on my DoctorWkt twitter account. Cheers & fingers crossed :-) Warren

3 years, 1 month

Unix-haters handbook on Kindle for $3

by Richard Salz

Humor is kind of screed-like and may be dated, but some here might find it a fun read. (Disclaimer: I wrote the chapter on Usenet.)

3 years, 1 month

[tuhs] Go programming language

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

List readers may enjoy a new article about the history of the Go programming language published today: Russ Cox, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ian Lance Taylor, and Ken Thompson The Go programming language and environment Comm. ACM 65(5) 70--78 May 2022 https://doi.org/10.1145/3488716 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488716 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3 years, 1 month

First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

by Andrew Warkentin

What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was actually the first.

3 years, 2 months

Document management in Unix, back in the day?

by Will Senn

Today I bit the bullet and dropped my many articles and electronic documents related to my technical explorations into Zotero. I was tired of constantly having to remember where the documents were located and I wanted to be able to curate them better (I tried git for a while, back when, but I'm not a fan of non-text data in my repos, and it wasn't really much better than the base file system approach). I've been using Zotero for years now, for academic works, but not for technical works unrelated to my research. I realized the man-years of effort to clean up the entries that I had created in about 30-40 seconds of exciting drag and drop, just about the time I deleted them from their original locations. I think the work will pay off in due time, but we'll see. Then I thought, surely, I'm not the first person to have had this problem... it occurred to me that y'all must have faced this very problem, a few years in, back in the late 70's, early 80's. That is, document management. What did you do, variously, considering both text and non-text? Will

3 years, 2 months

FTP service is not happy

by Gregg Levine

Hello! As this service is being phased out, I am trying to download the relevant (well relevant to me) bits from it. And as it happens I found that the clients I use are triggering an interesting problem. This is from ncftp on Linux ncftp> open minnie.tuhs.org Server hungup immediately after connect. Stop connecting frequently Sleeping 20 seconds... And I first saw it using FileZilla, I promptly scaled it back from multiple connections for downloads, to one and only one, but it repeated. To put it simply, what am I doing wrong here? ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

3 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?

by Douglas McIlroy

The main FJCC 1964 papar, by Vyssotsky, Corbato, and Graham, spelled Multics with an initial cap. By contrast, Ken transcribed the aural pun as UNIX. The lawyers did their best to keep it that way after most of us had decided it looks better as a proper noun. As I recall, there was an acronymic reading of Multics, but it wasn't taken seriously enough to drag the word into all caps. Nobody proposed an acronymic reading of UNIX. So both words defy the convention of rendering acronyms in upper-case. Doug

3 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dan Cross > In Kernighan's Unix memoir, on page 9, he touches briefly on the > typography of "Unix": > "(Multics was originally spelled MULTICS ..." > Here, he is talking about interning at MIT in 1966. bwk would certainly > know better than me, but I can find no historical reference to this > "MULTICS" spelling; is anyone familiar with that? I looked at my early Multics stuff, and it's "Multics" almost everywhere: - "GE-645 System Manual", GE, 1968 - "The Multics Virtual Memory", GE, 1970 - "Introduction to Multics", MIT MAC TR-123, 1973 However, in my "A New Remote-Access Man-Machine System", on the title papge it says "Reprints of the MULTICS system presented at the" [FJCC, 1965]. No clue as to who printed it, or when - and all the FJCC papers themselves use "Multics". I have yet to ask Jerry Saltzer, but I suspect that if it ever was 'MULTICS', it was at a _very_ early stage, and was formally changed even before the FJCC papers (which were themselves very early). BTW, ISTR hearing that it was 'Unix' originally, and the 'UNIX' spelling was adopted at the insistence of Bell lawyers. So I went looking for an early (i.e. PDP-7 era) scanned document, to see what it was then, and all I could find was: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZ… which seems to be from just after the PDP-7 -> PDP-11/20 transition, and it uses 'UNIX'. Would the Bell lawyers have already been involved at that stage? Noel

3 years, 2 months

Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?

by Dan Cross

This is tangentially related to Unix, and came up randomly at work yesterday. In Kernighan's Unix memoir, on page 9, he touches briefly on the typography of "Unix": "(Multics was originally spelled MULTICS, but the lower-case version is less visually jarring; as with UNIX versus Unix and some other all-caps words, I’ll use the nicer-looking form even though it’s not historically accurate.)" Here, he is talking about interning at MIT in 1966. bwk would certainly know better than me, but I can find no historical reference to this "MULTICS" spelling; is anyone familiar with that? The earliest reference I can find (the 1965 paper from the FJCC: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1463891.1463912) uses the more "Multics" styling, but it may have been typeset later. Alternatively, could someone send me Brian's email address? - Dan C.

3 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Armando plate

by Clem Cole

I did not realize Shannon must have had it first. Armando had it on his Nisson and he passed it to John Hall (Maddog) when he moved. Somewhere I have a picture of Armando’s car and my then Black Jetta with the MA plate together. On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 9:53 PM Tom Lyon <pugs(a)ieee.org> wrote: > Bill Shannon had the actual NH UNIX plates.Upgraded to VMUNIX for > California. > > On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 6:03 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > >> Ultrix plates were much later. The original Unix plates were there for a >> few years. >> >> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 8:58 PM Kenneth Goodwin < >> kennethgoodwin56(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> As I recall, The UNIX plates were the first in the series and >>> distributed at a USENIX conference AT THE DEC booth The next year, they >>> came out with the ULTRIX plates. >>> >>> On Tue, May 10, 2022, 8:54 PM Steve Bourne <srb(a)acm.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Armando also responsible for the UNIX "live free or die" plates. I >>>> still have a few. >>>> >>>> Steve >>>> >>> -- >> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual >> > > > -- > - Tom > -- Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

3 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] {TUHS] Interesting Commentary on Unix from Multicians

by Douglas McIlroy

> Single Level Storage is an awesome concept and removes so many ugly > hacks from algorithms that otherwise have to process data in files. This was Vic Vyssotsky's signature contribution to Multics, though in typical Vyssotsky fashion he never sought personal credit for it. Other awesome Vyssotsky inventions: BLODI (block diagram), the first data-flow language, for sample-data systems. Parallel flow analysis (later reinvented and published by John Cocke). Vic installed this in Fortran to produce diagnostics such as, "If the third branch of IF statement 15 is ever taken, then variable E will be used before being set". Darwin, the original game of predation and self-reproduction among programs. Corewars.org keeps a descendant version going 60 years later. A minimum-spanning-tree algorithm quite different from the well-known methods due to his colleagues Bob Prim and Joe Kruskal, again unpublished. Not long ago on TUHS, Andrew Hume told how Vic found the same isolated bug in dc by mathematically generating hard cases that Andrew stumbled on by accident, As you may infer, Vic is one of my personal computing heroes. Doug

3 years, 2 months

Armando plate

by Steve Bourne

Armando also responsible for the UNIX "live free or die" plates. I still have a few. Steve

3 years, 2 months

conventions around zero padding in ip4

by ron minnich

I first learned in the 80s that 127.1 meant 127.0.0.1. I always assumed zero padding was defined in a standard *somewhere*, but am finding out maybe not. I talked to the IP OG, and he tells me that padding was not in any standard. [side note: it's weird and wonderful to still have so many people "present at the creation" of computing as we know it still around, and to find they are so willing to answer naive questions!] Padding is a standard in ip6, possibly because the addresses are so long. :: is your friend. IP4 padding came up recently: the ip command interprets 10.2 as 10.2.0.0, whereas most things (golang libraries, ping, ...) interpret it as 10.0.0.2. The latter interpretation accords with what I learned 40y ago. But, I find myself wondering: where was the first use of the IP4 zero padding convention?

3 years, 2 months

TUHS web server has changed

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I've just changed the DNS CNAME record of www.tuhs.org from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) to newmin.tuhs.org (50.116.15.146). Minnie is running Ubuntu 18.04LTS and is getting a bit long in the tooth. Newmin is running 22.04LTS. So far I've got the web service up and running on newmin. Doing the e-mail migration will be fun :-) Let me know if you spot anything wrong with the new web server. I've also set up oldwww.tuhs.org which points at minnie, so you can still get to things on the old server. Cheers, Warren

3 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] conventions around zero padding in ip4

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> There were other ways of specifying a IP address numerically, initially; I decided to set the Way-Back Machine to as close to 0 as I could get, and looked to see what the Terminal Interface Unit: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Terminal_Interface_Unit whose source I recently recovered, did. This is an interesting implementation, because it was definitely one of the first 4 TCP implementations done (before any UNIX ones); likely one of the first two, along with the TENEX one. (Actually, they both likely originally predate the split of TCP and IP into separate protocols, although this version post-dates that split.) The manual: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/mos/docs/tiunv1.lpt (in "B. TELNET Commands") and the source: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/mos/tiu/telnet-1.mac disagree on how the user gave addresses in numeric form in an 'open' command; both agree that it was '@O <rest>,<net>,<socket>', but the manual claims that 'rest' "may be specified symbolically, or numerically in decimal", but the code shows that '#xxx' could also be used, to give it in hex. (Although if hex were used, the number could be a max of 16 bits; decimal alloweded up to 42 bits.) > From: Michael Kjörling > Looks like [A/B/C addresses] happened in 1978 or thereabouts? > https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien46.txt No; it post-dates the IEN era; "Assigned Numbers" of September 1981 (RFC-790) is the first mention I could find of it. (That Dave Clark IEN is talking about what later became 'IP subnets' - which ironically long pre-date A/B/C - see IEN-82, February 1979.) The Internet Protocol spec of September 1981 (RFC-791) also has A/B/C; my memory is that this change was _not_ discussed in the INWG, Postel just sprung it on us in these two RFCs. I suspect what happened is that Jon (as keeper of the network numbers) realized that there was an increasing demand for network numbers, and 256 would only last so long, so he sprung into action and did the A/B/C thing. (If this topic is of more interest, it should get moved to the 'internet-history' list, it's off-topic here.) Interestingly, RFC-790 says: "One notation for internet host addresses commonly used divides the 32-bit address into four 8-bit fields and specifies the value of each field as a decimal number with the fields separated by periods." Note the "one notation", implying that it wasn't any kind of standard at that point. Noel

3 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] conventions around zero padding in ip4

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Ron Minnich > I first learned in the 80s that 127.1 meant 127.0.0.1. I always assumed > zero padding was defined in a standard *somewhere*, but am finding out > maybe not. I talked to the IP OG, and he tells me that padding was not > in any standard. I don't think it was very standardized; I've been working on the Internet since 1977, and this is the very first I ever recall hearing of it! :-) > From: Bakul Shah > The converse question is who came up with the a.b.c.d format where each > of a,b,c,d is in 0..255? Again, that was not standardized at an early stage, but was, as best I can now recall, just adopted by general usage (i.e. without any formal discussion). There were other ways of specifying a IP address numerically, initially; e.g. for a while at MIT we were using w,x,y,z (with w-z in octal - note the ','s, which were a syntatic tag for the octal form), which was easier to interpret when looking at a packet dump on a PDP-11. Here: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/arc/tftp.c.1 is the source for a user command (from July, 1979) which allowed host addresses to be given in that form. I'm not sure who came up with the dotted decimal form; I suspect you'd need to find some really old email archives, and look in that. There was, early on, a list called "tcp-ip", used by people who were getting their machines ready for the NCP->TCP/IP conversion. However, I suspect the 'dotted quad' predates that; there was an even earlier mailing list, used in early experimental work, by the group working on internet technology, whose name escapes me (it was something like "internet working group"). It's possible that an IEN: https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien-index.html might mention the 'dotted quad' syntax; TCP and IP meeting minutes would be a good place to start. Noel PS: The A/B/C addresses are actually a moderately late stage of IP addresses. At the very start, they were all '8 bits network numbers, and 24 bits of 'rest''.

3 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Alternative Implementation Proposal for Unix/370 (BTL, 1979)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Tom Lyon > there were a few icustomer nstallations. Bell Labs Indian Hill was one > - so that's why TSS was the base of their UNIX port. "A UNIX System Implementation for System/370" (by W. A. Felton, G. L. Miller, and J. M. Milner): https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/otherports/ibm.html says "code to support System/370 I/O, paging, error recording and recovery, and multiprocessing already existed in several available operating systems, we investigated the possibility of using an existing operating system, or at least the machine-interface parts of one, as a base to provide these functions for the System/370 implementation ... Of the available systems, TSS/370 came the closest to meeting our needs and was thus chosen as the base for our UNIX system implementation". Alas, it doesn't say which other systems were also considered. >> On May 6, 2022, at 09:39, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: >> So, why, given the letter from these folks, including DMR, did they go >> ahead and use the TSS solution anyway? That paper says: "We initially thought about porting the UNIX operating system directly to System/370 with minimal changes. Unfortunately, there are a number of System/370 characteristics that, in the light of our objectives and resources, made such a direct port unattractive. The Input/Output (I/O) architecture of System/370 is rather complex; in a large configuration, the operating system must deal with a bewildering number of channels, controllers, and devices, many of which may be interconnected through multiple paths. Recovery from hardware errors is both complex and model-dependent. For hardware diagnosis and tracking, customer engineers expect the operating system to provide error logs in a specific format; software to support this logging and reporting would have to be written. ... Finally, several models of System/370 machines provide multiprocessing, with two (or more) processors operating with shared memory; the UNIX system did not support multiprocessing." Presumably these factors outweighed the factors listed in the Haley/London/Maranzaro/Ritchie letter. Noel

3 years, 2 months

Alternative Implementation Proposal for Unix/370 (BTL, 1979)

by Tom Lyon

I was (re?)introduced to Chuck Haley recently and discovered he had a copy of a Bell Labs memo from himself, London, Maranzaro, and Ritchie. They suggest that the path pursued to get UNIX running in/under TSS/370 was the hard way to go. Enjoy: http://charles.the-haleys.org/papers/Alternate_Implementation_Proposal_for_… -- - Tom

3 years, 2 months

tuhs hiccups?

by Tom Lyon

For some reason, against my wishes, I'm not getting TUHS messages as they happen, but in batches (not digest) after 5-7 days. Last I've received right now is from May 2. Anyone know why? -- - Tom

3 years, 2 months

Bob Widlar Poster

by Janek Gál

Hey folks, there is a cool poster by Bob Widlar, which we would like to have as a big poster in the hackspace: https://august.sax.de/widlar.jpg This is already a high resolution scan (2048 × 3048) but we are looking for something better (for A0 paper). Does anyone have something like this maybe still in his collection? greetings, Janek :) -- Janek Gál <janek(a)sax.de> Dresden, Germany http://www.sax.de

3 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

by John Foust

At 04:17 PM 5/2/2022, Dan Cross wrote: >I vaguely remember Metaware being somewhat religiously extreme, but again the details are fuzzy now. Was there some kind of ecclesiastical reference in the man page? I have the manuals around somewhere, and that rings a bell. I used Metaware High C and the Pharlap extender in the early 1990s in the odd 32-bit DOS enviroment to make 3D import/export plugins for Autodesk's 3D Studio. - John

3 years, 2 months

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