TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

46 participants
6502 discussions

by norman＠oclsc.org

Thomas Paulsen: bash is clearly more advanced. ksh is retro computing. ==== Shell wars are, in the end, no more interesting than editor wars. I use bash on Linux systems because it's the least-poorly supported of the Bourne-family shells, besides which bash is there by default. Ksh isn't. I use ksh on OpenBSD systems because it's the least-poorly supported of the Bourne-family shells, besides which kh is there by default. Bash isn't. I don't actually care for most of the extra crap in either of those shells. I don't want my shell to do line editing or auto-completion, and I find the csh-derived history mechanisms more annoying than useful so I turn them off too. To my mind, the Research 10/e sh had it about right, including the simple way functions were exported and the whatis built-in that told you whether something was a variable or a shell function or an external executable, and printed the first two in forms easily edited on the screen and re-used. Terminal programs that don't let you easily edit input or output from the screen and re-send it, and programs that abet them by spouting gratuitous ANSI control sequences: now THAT's what I call retro-computing. Probably further discussion of any of this belongs in COFF. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] ksh88 source code?

by norman＠oclsc.org

John Cowan: Unfortunately, approximately nobody except you has access to [the 10/e sh] man page. Can you post or email it? === I am happy to remind you that you're a few years out of date: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/man/man1/sh.1 Norman Wilson Toronto ON

3 years, 5 months

Faces of Open Source (and NFTs)

by Dan Cross

So a number of Unix luminaries were photographed as part of the "Faces of Open Source" project. I have to admit, the photos themselves are quite good: https://www.facesofopensource.com/collect/ It seems that the photographer is now selling NFTs based on those photos, which is...a thing. - Dan C.

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP 11/23 running UNIX version 6 at VCF Midwest!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal > Does anyone remember, was this a real life bug back in 6th edition The 'V6' at MIT (actually, PWB1) never had an issue, but then again, its TTY driver (here: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/mit/dmr/tty.c if anyone wants to see it) was heavily re-written. But from the below, it's almost certainlynothing to do with the TTY code... > From: Dave Plonka > one experiment we did was to redirection the bas(1)ic program's output > to a file and what we found was that (a) characters would still > sometimes be lost Good test. If you all want to chase this down (I can lend V6 expertise, if needed), I'd say the first step is to work out whether it's the application, or the system, losing the characters. To do that, I'd put a little bit of code in write() to store a copy of data sent through that in a circular buffer, along with tagging it with the writing process, etc. Once you figure out where it's getting lost, then you can move on to how/why. > From: Clem Cole > First Sixth Edition does not have support for either the 11/23 Yeah, but it's super-trivial to add /23 support to V6: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_UNIX_V6_on_an_-11/23 The only places where change is needed (no LKS register, no switch register, and support for more than 256KB of main memory - and that one one can get by without), it's hard to see how they could cause this problem. > One other thought, I'm pretty sure that Noel's V6+ system from MIT can > support a 23 No, we never ran than on a /23 BITD (no need, no mass storage); and I have yet to bring the V6+ system up (although I have all the bits, and intend to, at some point, to get its TCP/IP running). I've been using stock (well, hacked a bit, in a number of ways - e.g. 8-bit serial line output) V6. Noel

3 years, 5 months

32V with virtual memory

by Paul Ruizendaal

I am making some slow progress on the topic of Tom Reiser’s 32V with virtual memory. Two more names popped up of folks who worked with his virtual memory code base at Bell Labs / USG in the early 80’s: Robert (Bob) Baron and Jim McCormick. Bob Barron was later working on Mach at CMU. If anybody on this list has contact suggestions for these two folks, please send a private message. Paul

3 years, 5 months

PDP 11/23 running UNIX version 6 at VCF Midwest!

by Paul Ruizendaal

> While doing some end of year retrocomputing revisiting, I thought some > of you might enjoy this - there is hope for the next generation(s)! ;) > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zyng5Ob-e8 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zyng5Ob-e8> Thanks for that video link! I noticed the bit at the end about V6 and the occasional dropped character and that this was not a serial line issue. I have the same issue in my V6 port to the TI-990 and always assumed that it was a bug I introduced myself when hacking the tty driver. Does anyone remember, was this a real life bug back in 6th edition back in the 1970’s? Maybe only showing at higher baud rates? Paul

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] {TUHS} efl

by Douglas McIlroy

> there was a commercial package called Spag i which claimed to un-spagatti-ify your code which i always wanted but, could never afford. You needed struct(1) in v7. It did precisely that, converting Fortran to Ratfor. Amazingly (to me, anyway) it embodied a theorem: a Fortran program has a canonical form. People found the converted code to be easier to understand--even when they had written the original code themselves. Doug

3 years, 5 months

efl

by Steve Simon

hi, having supported Pafec and then in a different job flow3d, i was most interested in anything that could make large fortran packages more manageable. there was a commercial package called Spag i which claimed to un-spagatti-ify your code which i always wanted but, could never afford. the best i managed was sed and awk scripts to split huge fortran files into one file per function and build a makefile. this at least made rebuilds quicker. i do not miss maintaining fortran code hacked by dozens of people over many decades. -Steve

3 years, 5 months

PDP 11/23 running UNIX version 6 at VCF Midwest!

by Dave Plonka

Hi folks! While doing some end of year retrocomputing revisiting, I thought some of you might enjoy this - there is hope for the next generation(s)! ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zyng5Ob-e8 In this video I share my personal pick for "best" demo at VCF Midwest: Gavin's PDP 11/23 running UNIX Version 6! We write and run a simple BASIC program in Ken Thompson's bas(1), finding some quirks with this (currently) entirely floppy-based system, possible having to do with a glitch in disk I/O. (We discovered bas(1) uses a temporary file as backing store.) Filmed at the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest: VCF Midwest 16, September 11, 2021 http://vcfmw.org/ Here's the source code to the simple program we wrote; you can also run it on modern machines if you install a Research UNIX version using SimH (pdp-11 simulator). 5 goto 30 10 for col = 1 arg(1) 12 prompt " " 14 next 20 print "Welcome to VCF Midwest!" 25 return 30 for x = 0 55 40 10(x) 50 next 60 for x = _56 _1 70 10(_x) 80 next -- dave(a)plonka.us http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/

3 years, 5 months

efl(1) anyone?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi TUHS folks! After having reincarnated ratfor, I am wondering about Stuart Feldman's efl (extended fortran language). It was a real compiler that let you define structs, and generated more or less readable Fortran code. I have the impression that it was pretty cool, but that it just didn't catch on. So: - Did anyone here ever use it personally? - Is my impression that it didn't catch on correct? Or am I ignorant? Thoughts etc. welcome. :-) Thanks, Arnold

3 years, 5 months

Belated Introduction

by Alexander Jacocks

Spurred on by Bryan, I thought I should properly introduce myself: I am a fairly young Unix devotee, having gotten my start with System V on a Wang word processing system (believe it or not, they made one!), at my mother’s office, in the late 1980s. My first personal system, which ran SLS Linux, came about in 1992. I am a member of the Vintage Computing Federation, and have given talks and made exhibits on Unix history at VCF’s museum, in Wall, New Jersey. I have also had the pleasure to show Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson, who are two of my computing heroes, my exhibit on the origins of BSD Unix on the Intel 386. I learned C from Brian’s book, as probably did many others here. I have spent my entire professional career supporting Unix, in some form or another. I started with SunOS at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, and moved on to Solaris, HP-UX, SCO, and finally Linux. I worked for AT&T, in Virginia, in the early 2000s, but there were few vestiges of Unix present, other than some 3b1 and 3b2 monitors and keyboards. I current work for Red Hat, in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, as a principal sales engineer, where I spend most of my time teaching and presenting at conferences, both in person and virtual. Thank you to everyone here who created the tools that have enabled my career and love of computing! - Alexander Jacocks

3 years, 5 months

New Member

by Bryan St. Amour

Hello! I have just joined this mailing list recently, and figured I would give an introduction to myself. My first encounter with Unix took place in 2006 when I started my undergraduate studies in Computer Science. The main servers all ran Solaris, and we accessed them via thin clients. Eventually I wanted a similar feeling operating system for my personal computer, so that I could do my assignments without having to always log into the school servers, and so I came across Linux. I hopped around for a while, but eventually settled with Slackware for my personal computers. Nowadays I run a mixture of Linux and BSD operating systems for various purposes. Unfortunately my day job has me writing desktop software for Windows (no fun there :(), so I'm thankful to have found a group of people with similar computing interests as myself, and I look forward to chatting with you all! Regards, Bryan St. Amour

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] [COFF] Book Recommendation

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

OK, this is my last _civil_ request to stop email-bombing both lists with trafic. In the future, I will say publicly _exactly_ what I think - and if screens still had phosphor, it would probably peel it off. I can see that there are cases when one might validly want to post to both lists - e.g. when starting a new discusson. However, one of the two should _always_ be BCC'd, so that simple use of reply won't generate a copy to both. I would suggest that one might say something like 'this discussion is probably best continued on the <foo> list' - which could be seeded by BCCing the _other_. Thank you. Noel

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation

by Douglas McIlroy

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/fission.pdf Duncan Mak wrote > Haskell's powerful higher-level functions > make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large > code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional > programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for > improved readability. > I went looking for this paper by Jeremy Gibbons here: https://dblp.org/pid/53/1090.html but didn't find anything resembling it. What's the name of the paper?

3 years, 5 months

UNIX/AT&T patent licensing

by Warren Toomey

All, I got this e-mail forwarded on from John Fox via Eric S. Raymond. Cheers, Warren Hi Eric, I think you might find this interesting. I have a 2001 copy of your book. I dog-eared page 9 twenty years ago because of this section: It spread very rapidly with AT&T, in spite of the lack of any formal support program for it. By 1980 it had spread to a large number of university and research computing sites, and thousands of hackers considered it home. Regarding the "spread", I believe one of the contributing factors was AT&T's decision to give the source code away to universities. And in doing so, unwittingly provided the fertile soil for open source development. I happen to know the man who made that decision. He was my father-in-law. He died Tuesday. He had no idea what UNIX was, and had no idea what his decision helped to create. Funny when things we do have such a major impact without us even knowing. That was certainly true in this case. Anyway, I thought you'd be interested to know. His name is John (Jack) H. Bolt. He was 95. PS, before making the decision, he called Ken Olson at DEC to see if he'd be interested in buying it, lock, stock, and barrel. Jack's opening offer was $250k. Olson wasn't interested. And on that, Jack's decision was made. John Fox

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation

by Douglas McIlroy

>> The former notation C(B(A)) became A->B->C. This was PL/I's gift to C. > You seem to have a gift for notation. That's rare. Curious what you think of APL? I take credit as a go-between, not as an inventor. Ken Knowlton introduced the notation ABC in BEFLIX, a pixel-based animation language. Ken didn't need an operator because identifiers were single letters. I showed Ken's scheme to Bud Lawson, the originator of PL/I's pointer facility. Bud liked it and came up with the vivid -> notation to accommodate longer identifiers. If I had a real gift of notation I would have come up with the pipe symbol. In my original notation ls|wc was written ls>wc>. Ken Thompson invented | a couple of months later. That was so influential that recently, in a paper that had nothing to do with Unix, I saw | referred to as the "pipe character"! APL is a fascinating invention, but can be so compact as to be inscrutable. (I confess not to have practiced APL enough to become fluent.) In the same vein, Haskell's powerful higher-level functions make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for improved readability. Human impatience balks at tarrying over a saying that puts so much in a small space. Yet it helps once you learn it. Try reading transcripts of medieval Arabic algebra carried out in words rather than symbols. Iverson's hardware descriptions in APL are another case where symbology pays off. Doug

3 years, 5 months

Ratfor revived!

by Arnold Robbins

Hi All. Mainly for fun (sic), I decided to revive the Ratfor (Rational Fortran) preprocessor. Please see: https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/ratfor I started with the V6 code, then added the V7, V8 and V10 versions on top of it. Each one has its own branch so that you can look at the original code, if you wish. The man page and the paper from the V7 manual are also included. Starting with the Tenth Edition version, I set about to modernize the code and get it to compile and run on a modern-day system. (ANSI style declarations and function headers, modern include files, use of getopt, and most importantly, correct use of Yacc yyval and yylval variables.) You will need Berkely Yacc installed as byacc in order to build it. I have only touch-tested it, but so far it seems OK. 'make' runs in like 2 seconds, really quick. On my Ubuntu Linux systems, it compiles with no warnings. I hope to eventually add a test suite also, if I can steal some time. Before anyone asks, no, I don't think anybody today has any real use for it. This was simply "for fun", and because Ratfor has a soft spot in my heart. "Software Tools" was, for me, the most influential programming book that I ever read. I don't think there's a better book to convey the "zen" of Unix. Thanks, Arnold

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Encoding an ISA: Random Logic vs. Control Stores

by Douglas McIlroy

My take on defining random logic random logic : hardware :: spaghetti code : software Doug

3 years, 5 months

Encoding an ISA: Random Logic vs. Control Stores

by pbirkel＠gmail.com

I believe that the PDP-11 ISA was defined at a time when DEC was still using random logic rather than a control store (which came pretty soon thereafter). Given a random logic design it's efficient to organize the ISA encoding to maximize its regularity. Probably also of some benefit to compilers in a memory-constrained environment? I'm not sure at what point in time we can say "lots of processors" had moved to a control store based implementation. Certainly the IBM System/360 was there in the mid-60's. HP was there by the late 60's. -----Original Message----- From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org> On Behalf Of Larry McVoy Sent: Monday, November 29, 2021 10:18 PM To: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>; Eugene Miya <eugene(a)soe.ucsc.edu> Subject: Re: [TUHS] A New History of Modern Computing - my thoughts On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 05:12:44PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote: > I remember Ken Witte (my TA for the PDP-11 class) trying to get me to > see how easy it was to read the octal. If I remember correctly (and I > probably don't, this was ~40 years ago), the instructions were divided > into fields, so instruction, operand, operand and it was all regular, > so you could see that this was some form of an add or whatever, it got > the values from these registers and put it in that register. I've looked it up and it is pretty much as Ken described. The weird thing is that there is no need to do it like the PDP-11 did it, you could use random numbers for each instruction and lots of processors did pretty much that. The PDP-11 didn't, it was very uniform to the point that Ken's ability to read octal made perfect sense. I was never that good but a little google and reading and I can see how he got there. ... --lm

3 years, 5 months

Encoding an ISA: Random Logic vs. Control Stores

by Paul Ruizendaal

For DEC memo’s on designing the PDP-11 see bitsavers: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/memos/ (thank you Bitsavers! I love that archive) Ad van de Goor (author of a few of the memo’s) was my MSc thesis professor. I recall him saying in the early 80’s that in his view the PDP-11 should have been an 18-bit machine; he reasoned that even in the late 60’s it was obvious that 16-bits of address space was not enough for the lifespan of the design. --- For those who want to experiment with FPGA’s and ancient ISA’s, here is my plain Verilog code for the TI 9995 chip, which has an instruction set that is highly reminiscent of the PDP-11: https://gitlab.com/pnru/cortex/-/tree/master The actual CPU code (TMS99095.v) is less than 1000 lines of code. Paul

3 years, 5 months

A New History of Modern Computing - my thoughts

by Jon Steinhart

Eugene Miya visited by last week and accidentally left his copy of the book here so I decided to read it before he came back to pick it up. My overall impression is that while it contained a lot of information, it wasn't presented in a manner that I found interesting. I don't know the intended target audience, but it's not me. A good part of it is that my interest is in the evolution of technology. I think that a more accurate title for the book would be "A New History of the Business of Modern Computing". The book was thorough in covering the number of each type of machine sold and how much money was made, but that's only of passing interest to me. Were it me I would have just summarized all that in a table and used the space to tell some engaging anecdotes. There were a number of things that I felt the book glossed over or missed completely. One is that I didn't think that they gave sufficient credit to the symbiosis between C and the PDP-11 instruction set and the degree to which the PDP-11 was enormously influential. Another is that I felt that the book didn't give computer graphics adequate treatment. I realize that it was primarily in the workstation market segment which was not as large as some of the other segments, but in my opinion the development of the technology was hugely important as it eventually became commodified and highly profitable. Probably due to my personal involvement I felt that the book missed some important steps along the path toward open source. In particular, it used the IPO of Red Hat as the seminal moment while not even mentioning the role of Cygnus. My opinion is that Cygnus was a huge icebreaker in the adoption of open source by the business world, and that the Red Hat IPO was just the culmination. I also didn't feel that there was any message or takeaways for readers. I didn't get any "based on all this I should go and do that" sort of feeling. If the purpose of the book was to present a dry history then it pretty much did it's job. Obviously the authors had to pick and choose what to write about and I would have made some different choices. But, not my book. Jon

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] A New History of Modern Computing - my thoughts

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> The ++ operator appears to have been. One would expect that most people on this list would have read "The Development of the C Language", by Dennis Ritchie, which makes perfectly clear (at 'More History') that the PDP-11 had nothing to do with it: Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html thereby alleviating the need for Ken to chime in (although they do allow a very efficient implementation of it). Too much to hope for, I guess. Noel

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] PL/I stuff - was: Book Recommendation

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Charles H. Sauer"k <sauer(a)technologists.com> > I haven't done anything with 9 ktrack tapes for a long time ... > I don't recall problems reading any of them. ... > IMNSHO, it all depends on the brand/formulation of the tape. I've been > going through old audio tapes and digitizing them The vintage computer community has considerable experience with old tapes; in fact Chuck Guzis has a business reading them (which often includes converting old file formats to something modern software can grok). We originally depended heavily on the work of the vintage audio community, who pioneered working with old tapes, including the discovert of 'baking' them to improve their mechanical playability. ("the binder used to adhere the magnetic material to the backing ... becomes unstable" - playing such a tape will transfer much of the magnetic material to the head, destroying the tape's contents.) It's amazing how bad a tape can be, and still be readable. I had a couple of dump tapes of the CSR PWB1 machine at MIT, which I had thoughtlessly stored in my (at one period damp) basement, and they were covered in mold - and not just on the edges! Chuck had to build a special fixture to clean off the mold, but we read most of the first tape. (I had thoughtfully ade a second copy, which read perfectly.) Then I had to work out what the format was - it turned out that even though the machine had a V6 filesystem, my tape was a 'dd' of a BSD4.1c filesystem (for reasons I eventually worked out, but won't bore you all with). Dave Bridgham managed to mount that under Linux, and transform it into a TAR file. That was the source of many old treasures, including the V6 NCP UNIX. Noel

3 years, 5 months

PL/I stuff - was: Book Recommendation

by Douglas McIlroy

> What, if any, features does PL/I have that are not realized in a modern language? Here are a few dredged from the mental cranny where they have mouldered for 50+ years. 1. Assignment by name. If A and B are structs (not official PL/I terminology), then A + B A = B copies similarly named fields of B to corresponding fields in A. 2. Both binary and decimal data with arithmetic rounded to any specified precision. 3. Bit strings of arbitrary length, with bitwise Boolean operations plus substr and catenation. 4. A named array is normally passed by reference, as in F(A). But if the argument is not a bare name, as in F((A)), it is passed by value. 5. IO by name. On input this behaves like assignment from a constant, with appropriate type conversion. 6. A SORT statement. 7. Astonishingly complete set of implicit data conversions. E.g. if X is floating-point and S is a string, the assignment X = S works when S = "2" and raises an exception (not PL/I terminology) when S = "A". My 1967 contribution to ACM collected algorithms exploited 3 and 4. I don't know another language in which that algorithm is as succinct. Doug

3 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] 9-track tape (was PL/I stuff)

by Paul Winalski

DEC's VAX/VMS group got a customer bug report that was accompanied by a 9-track tape containing the programs and data necessary to reproduce the problem. When the engineer mounted the tape, it contained completely different data. He tried a different tape drive and this time he got the expected data. It turned out that the customer had reused the tape and recorded the reproducer at 1600 bpi on top of previous data recorded at 800 bpi. If the tape was mounted such that the drive didn't see the PE burst, it could still read the NRZI-encoded 800 bpi data. -Paul W.

3 years, 5 months

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