TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

6 participants
6532 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > anything similar to modern behavior when handling the delete/backspace > key where the character is deleted from the input and rubbed out? The > default, like in v6/v7 for erase and kill is # and @. I can live with > this, if I can't get it to do the rubout, because at least you can see > the # in the input I use ASCII 'backspace' (^H) on my V6, and it 'sort of' works; it doesn't erase the deleted character on the screen, but if one then types corrected characters, they overlay the deleted ones, leaving the corrected input. That should work on everything later than V6. The MIT PWB1 tty handler (link in a prior message) not only supported a 'kill line' (we generally used '^U') which actually visibly deleted the old line contents (on screen terminals, of course; on printing terminals you're stuck), it also had suppport for '^R' (re-type line) and some other stuff. Noel

3 years, 6 months

svr2 delete behavior

by Will Senn

Did svr2 have anything similar to modern behavior when handling the delete/backspace key where the character is deleted from the input and rubbed out? The default, like in v6/v7 for erase and kill is # and @. I can live with this, if I can't get it to do the rubout, because at least you can see the # in the input, but if I can figure out how to get it to rubout the last character, I'd map erase to DEL, which I believe to be ^U (but since it's invisible, it's confusing when it doesn't rubout). Will

3 years, 6 months

Are there images of any SVR2's available online?

by Will Senn

All, Are there any bootable media available for any SVR 2 systems available online? Or are they all under IP lock and key? If so, what's the closest system that is available to get a feel for that variety of OS? Happy holidays, folks. Will

3 years, 6 months

ksh88 source code?

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I received an e-mail looking for the ksh-88 source code. A quick search for it on-line doesn't reveal it. Does anybody have a copy? Cheers, Warren Original e-mail: I recently built a PiDP11 and have been enjoying going back in time to 2.11BSD.. I was at UC Davis in the the early 1980's and we had a few PDP-11/70's running 2.8/2.9 BSD. Back then we reached out to David Korn and he sent us the source for KSH -- this would have been in 1985ish if I remember, and we compiled it for 2.9 & 4.1BSD, Xenix, and some other variants that used K&R C. It may have been what was later called ksh88. I wish I still had the files from then.. I was wondering if you might know if there's an older version like this or one that's been ported for 2.11BSD? Many thanks, Joe

3 years, 6 months

COFF subscription

by Clay Hickman

Hey Warren, First and foremost; Thank you so much for maintaining this mailing list, and for including me within the subscribers list. I find myself intrigued by some of the topics that transfer over to the “COFF” mailing list. Could you include me on that mailing list as well? Peace.

3 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ksh88 source code?

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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 months

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