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
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/10.1145/3488716https://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/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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
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."
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
> 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
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.
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
> 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
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?
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
> 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
> 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''.
> 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
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
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
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
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
We got in on the W4 from the IBM Federal Systems guy (later dealt out to
Loral, Martin Marietta, and then Lockheed-Martin). I started with
those guy doing a contract job to craft the second nework interface into
Secure Xenix (Jacob Recter I think was responsible for the first) to
provide a secure downgrading system for some government entity.
Then Intel developed the i860- and IBM came up with the Wizard card.
This was only designed to be.a coprocessor card and was done down in
Boca Raton. The fun and games with that one is that we were on early
steppings of the processor chips and spent a lot of time coding around
chip bugs (mostly with regard to interrupts). IBM/Intel had developed
this thing called hostlink that was supposed to be useful, but we
decided to port AIX to it. When IBM Owego came up with the W4, we were
asked to port AIX again to it.
We had one non-functional W4 kicking around for demo purposes that had 4
“delidded” i860 chips in it. I swapped one for an early stepping
(useless) chip and kept one of the delidded ones which I still have in a
box somewhere.
[ This also in from Peter Klapper. The files are at:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD_MSCP/ ]
This is a 2.9BSD kernel with a backported MSCP driver from 2.10BSD
I tried to make a clean integration of the driver into the 2.9BSD source tree in order to be able use the standard procedures to configure and build the kernel.
To try it, rename the original directories /usr/include/sys and /usr/src/sys and unpack the two tar archives into your /usr directory.
Then change into /usr/src/sys/conf and just do a ./config for the kernel you want.
I made some configurations for:
MSCP23 (MSCP enabled kernel for the PDP11/23)
MSCP73 (MSCP enabled kernel for the PDP11/73)
FLOP23 (MSCP enabled 11/23 kernel for a boot floppy)
FLOP73 (MSCP enabled 11/73 kernel for a boot floppy)
MSCPSH (MSCP enabled kernel for an extended SIMH environment)
You may need to adapt the kernel configurations for the correct timezone and maybe the line frequency.
This is probably the most recent BSD system which runs on the PDP11/23.
Read the full story about this here: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/scientific-micro-systems-sms-1000…
There is NO root password in this distribution. For installation on real hardware, at least a Maxtor XT-1085 (RD53) or larger is recommended.
My SMS1000 system currently has a Maxtor XT-1140 installed. Original was an XT-1085 in the system.
The disk layout for these two disks during installation is as follows:
Maxtor XT-1085 / DEC RD53
=========================
1024/8/18
interleave 1,4
--- layout ---
root = ra(0,0), size 3200
swap = ra(0,6400), size 1920
usr = ra(0,10240), size 64180
Maxtor XT-1140
==============
918/15/18
interleave 1,4
--- layout ----
root = ra(0,0), size 3200
swap = ra(0,6400), size 1920
usr = ra(0,10240), size 114880
I've split the data into 4 parts in order to not get too much when downloading:
1.) 29bsd-simh.tgz: A SIMH image including configuration file. "pdp11 sms1123.ini"
2.) 29bsd-smstape.tgz: A Linux dump of the QIC24 installation tape which was generated with my SMS1000 system. You can write this under Linux to a 60MB QIC tape with: "dd if=29bsd-sms-tape.dd of=/dev/st0" The SMS1000 generated format is not compatible with Linux, but the Linux dd'ed tape can be read by the SMS1000 system.
3.) 29bsd-tapefiles.tgz: The files to create a SIMH tape image, or real tape for another system.
4.) 29bsd-vtserver.tgz: The version of the vtserver and the corresponding configuration file with which I performed the successful initial installation. I worked with 19200bps, which is the maximum my SMS1000 supports on the console, under 2.9BSD only 9600bps works anyway.
Have fun with it, if you find bugs, they may of course be mine. ;)
I wish you and the community also a lot of fun with this version of 2.9BSD.
// Peter
Hi all, I just received this in the e-mail a few days ago:
[ now at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/DEC/Venix/ProVenix_2.0/ ]
From: Peter Klapper
Subject: PRO/VENIX 2.0 reconstructed ...
... and tested, for your collection ;-)
Probably the best OS for the Pro, see the benchmark:
PRO380 - PRO/VENIX V2.0:
========================
pk$ dryr
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 86
This machine benchmarks at 581 dhrystones/second
pk$ drynr
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 95
This machine benchmarks at 526 dhrystones/second
The four additional floppy disks contain also the source code which I
used to rebuild the missing binaries.
I wish you and the community much fun with the "new" resurrected
PRO/VENIX V2.0.