TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

47 participants
6502 discussions

Micnet Was: Re: Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

by Paul Ruizendaal

Micnet would seem to fall within my interest scope of Unix networking 1975-1985. I’ve seen it mentioned before, but I don’t have a clear picture of what it was. There is some sysadmin material on bitsavers about it, but no info on how it worked on the inside or how it relates to other early networking. At first glance it seems to be conceptually related to Berknet. Does anybody here know the backstory to Micnet and/or how it worked? Paul

4 years, 2 months

Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

by Josh Good

Hello UNIX veterans. So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose. I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost spartan. The chapter titles are: 1. Introduction 2. vi: A Text Editor 3. ed 4. mail 5. Communicating with Other Sites 6. bc: A Calculator 7. The Shell 8. The C-Shell 9. Using the Visual Shell And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index. Granted, this Xenix version is derived from System V Release 2, and I think it was for the Intel 286 (not yet ported to the i386), but hey it's 1988 already and the Internet is supposed to be thriving on UNIX in the Pacific Coast, or so the lore says. I see now that it probably was only in the Berkely family that the Internet was going on... In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from those years. I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and the Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version, from a user's point of view. I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of": email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these days. -- Josh Good

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse

by M Douglas McIlroy

> When you're the phone company, calls are free Not so. But the culture prioritized phone use in a way that's been completely forgotten. High execs would answer their own phones when they were at their desks. "Your call is very important to us. Please wait for the first available representative" would have been anathema. One of my few managerial decrees in the Unix lab was to give a year's notice that "research" would stop forwarding Usenet traffic, not because of phones, but because uucp was becoming a burden on our computer. Doug

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

by M Douglas McIlroy

Connectivity evolved rapidly in the early 1980s. In 1980 I served on the board of CSNet, which connected have-not CS departments (including Bell Labs) via dialup and X.25 links onto the periphery of the magic circle of Arpanet. By 1982 it was not extraordinary that I could via international email arrange all aspects of a trip to visit lively universities of the AUUG.

4 years, 2 months

tabs vs spaces - entab, detab

by Will Senn

OK. So, I've been trying to decide (for the last time, I swear) whether to use tabs or spaces in my code... I did a quick pulse-check on the state of argument and it appears to be alive and well in 2021. My question for y'all is, was there a preference in the very early days or not? I saw an article talking about the 20 year feud, but that's not my recollection. In 1994, nobody agreed on this, but I'm sure it predates my entree into the field. I'm thinking the history of entab and detab are somehow related, but I've been wrong on these sorts of thoughts before. What say you? Will

4 years, 2 months

Fred Grampp

by Brian Walden

Amazing coincidences. A week prior I was researching Topper Toys looking for their old factory ("largest toy factory in the world") As there was litte on it's location and it lead me to find out in 1961 it took over the old Singer Factory in Elizabeth, NJ. So looking up the Singer factory led me to "Elizabeth, New Jersey, Then and Now" by Robert J. Baptista https://ia801304.us.archive.org/11/items/ElizabethNewJerseyThenAndNowSecond… Which had no information on Topper, but had had this paragraph in it's Singer section on page 28 -- Boys earned money "rushing the growler" at lunchtime at the Singer plant. German workers lowered their covered beer pails, called growlers, on ropes to the boys waiting below. They earned a nickel by filling them with beer at Grampp's saloon on Trumbull St. One of these boys was Thomas Dunn who later became a long term Mayor. In the early 1920s Frederick Grampp went into the hardware business at the corner of Elizabeth Ave. and Reid St. When I read it I thought funny, as I know the name Fred Grampp. But beleived just a coincidenental same name. After reading the biography post, I went back to the book as it turns out that Fred Grampp is your Fred Grampps's grandfather. You can find more his family and the hardware store and Grampp himself on pages 163-164, and 212. -Brian

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] 4.4BSD sparc, pmax binary recently compiled

by Jason Stevens

Wow this is nothing short of GREAT! I always wanted to tackle this but it was out of my reach as I barely got anything from this lineage to build to anything. Most excellent! -----Original Message----- From: MOCHIDA Shuji To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: 3/6/21 10:42 AM Subject: [TUHS] 4.4BSD sparc, pmax binary recently compiled I compiled 4.4BSD to get pmax and sparc binary, from CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4 source code. http://www.netside.co.jp/~mochid/comp/bsd44-build/ pmax: - Works on GXemul DECstaion(PMAX) emulation. - I used binutils 2.6 and gcc 2.7.2.3 taken from Gnu ftp site, as 4.4BSD src does not contain pmax support part in as, ld, gcc and gdb. - Lack of GDB. I got rid of compile errors of gdb 4.16, but that does not work yet. - gcc included can not deal c++ static constructor. So, contrib/groff can not be compiled. Instead, it uses old/{nroff,troff,eqn,tbl..}. sparc: - Works on sun4c. I use on SPARCstation 2, real hardware. TME sun4c emulation can boot to single user, but it locks up in middle of /etc/rc. CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4's source code (just after Lite2 release) seems have differences from CSRG's binary distributions before (2 times), e.g. mount systemcall is not compatible. I used NetBSD 1.0/sparc, NetBSD 1.1/pmax for 1st (slightly) cross compiling. NetBSD 1.0/sparc boots and works well on TME emulator. SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris7 works too, but this 4.4BSD binary doesn't.. -mochid

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Fred Grampp

by Norman Wilson

As I remember it, the Facilities folks were so upset about someone painting stuff on Their Water Tower that a complaint went to Vic Vyssotsky, then Executive Director of Division 112 (one step up from Sandy Fraser, who was Director of 1127). The story was that Vic and/or Sandy told them that there were 60 people in the research centre and no way to tell who did it. Word was then quietly passed to certain people--Vic and Sandy in fact knew exactly who--that things were getting out of hand, please lay off the Peter-face pranking for a while. I tried to start a rumour that Vic did the painting, but it never took off. I hope Vic at least heard it. He'd have enjoyed the rumour, surely laughed at the prank while knowing he'd have to calm things down, and 20 years earlier might well have been involved in something like that. It was Vic who, on learning I was a cyclist, urged me to try cycling on the newly-constructed but not yet open segment of interstate highway that ran behind the Labs. He apparently had done so and found it lots of fun. Alas, I never did. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] [COFF] Pondering the hosts file

by Paul Ruizendaal

BBN’s TCP implementation contained something akin to the hosts file, called hostmap there: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP/doc I have not looked at the code for a while, but if I remember correctly the BBN kernel code also read in this file (pre-processed into a binary form) to build its internal routing table. I do not recall having seen an equivalent file with UoI's NCP Unix in any of the surviving docs or sources - but that does not exclude a library having existed to do lookups in a local copy the SRI-NIC host file. In fact there is some evidence for that in the 2.9 BSD source. The only surviving copy of the 4.1a (network) source code that I know is in the back-port of this code to 2.8/2.9 BSD. This code includes #ifdef’ed code for accessing the SRI-NIC online host table via NCP: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/local This source also contains tools to convert the SRI-NIC data into - inter alia - a hosts file: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/man/man8/htable.8 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/man/man8/gettable… It would seem that the modern host.txt on Unix evolved late ’81 (BBN code) to early ’82 (4.1a BSD). Possibly NCP Unix has prior work. Paul

4 years, 2 months

Pondering the hosts file

by Grant Taylor

Hi, I'm not sure where this message best fits; TUHS, COFF, or Internet History, so please forgive me if this list is not the best location. I'm discussing the hosts file with someone and was wondering if there's any historical documentation around it's format and what should and should not be entered in the file. I've read the current man page on Gentoo Linux, but suspect that it's far from authoritative. I'm hoping that someone can point me to something more authoritative to the hosts file's format, guidelines around entering data, and how it's supposed to function. A couple of sticking points in the other discussion revolve around how many entries a host is supposed to have in the hosts file and any ramifications for having a host appear as an alias on multiple lines / entries. To whit, how correct / incorrect is the following: 192.0.2.1 host.example.net host 127.0.0.1 localhost host.example.net host -- Grant. . . . unix || die

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] manual humour (was tunefs -m 5%)

by norman＠oclsc.org

In the Seventh Edition manual, a joke was added to the entry for kill(1). It appears in every following Research manual, but seems to have been discarded by all modern descendants. I guess the prejudice against humour in the manual is extreme these days. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 2 months

Fred Grampp

by M Douglas McIlroy

In all that's been written about the Research Unix players, Fred Grampp has gotten far less coverage than he deserves. I hope to rectify that with this post, most of which was written soon after his death. Doug During Fred's long career at Bell Laboratories, his coworkers were delighted to work with him, primarily because of his innovative and often surprising ways of attacking problems. Fred's unique approach was by no means limited to work-related matters. Fred arranged an annual canoe-camping trip on the Delaware River replete with nearly professional grade fireworks. He also arranged a number of trips to New York City (referred to as culture nights) which included, among other things, trips to the planetarium and visits to various tea rooms. To his friends at Bell Labs, Fred Grampp was a true original. He knew the urban community of small, scrabbling business as well as the pampered life of industrial research in the country's greatest industrial research lab. And he brought the best of each to his approach to work. In his father's hardware store, Fred learned on the front line what "customer-oriented" meant--a far cry from the hypothetical nonsense on the subject put forth by flacks in a modern PR department, or by CEO Bob Allen thinking big thoughts on the golf course. Fred ran the computing facilities for the Computer Science Research Center. He had his finger on the pulse of the machinery at all hours of day and night. He and his colleague Ed Sitar rose early to pat the hardware and assure that everything was in order just as had been done at the hardware store. The rest of us, who kept more nerdish hours, could count on everything running. Packed with equipment, the machine room depended on air conditioning. Fred saw this as a threat to dependable service. As a backup, he had big galvanized barn fans installed in several windows--incongruous, but utterly practical. And they saw actual use on at least one occasion. Fred cooked up ingenious software to sniff the computers' health and sound alarms in his office and even by his bed when something was amiss. When a user found something wrong and popped into Fred's office to report the trouble, more often than not he'd find Fred already working on it. With his street smarts, Fred was ahead of the game when computer intrusion began to become a problem in the 1970s. He was a real white-hat marshall, who could read the the bad guys' minds and head them off at the pass. With Bob Morris, Fred wrote a paper to alert system administrators to the kinds of lapse of vigilance that leave them open to attack; the paper is still read as a classic. Other sage advice was put forth by Fred in collaboration with G. R. Emlin, who would become an important adjunct member of the lab, as several TUHS posts attest. Quietly he developed a suite of programs that probed a computer's defenses--fortunately before the bad guys really got geared up to do the same. That work led to the creation of a whole department that used Fred's methods to assess and repair the security of thousands of computers around Bell Labs. Fred's avocations of flying and lock-picking lent spice to life in the Labs. He was a central figure of the "computer science airforce" that organized forays to see fall colors, or to witness an eclipse. He joined Ken Thompson, who also flew in the department air force, on a trip to Russia to fly a MIG-29. Ken tells the story at cs.bell-labs.com/ken/mig.html. Fred's passion for opera was communicated to many. It was he who put the Met schedule on line for us colleagues long before the Met discovered the World Wide Web. He'd press new recordings on us to whet our appetites. He'd recount, or take us to, rehearsals and backstage visits, and furnish us with librettos. When CDs appeared on the scene, Fred undertook to build a systematic collection of opera recordings, which grew to over two hundred works. They regularly played quietly in the background of his office. To Fred the opera was an essential part of life, not just an expensive night on the town. Fred's down-to-earth approach lightened life at Bell Labs. When workmen were boarding up windows to protect them from some major construction--and incidentally to prevent us from enjoying the spectacle of ironworkers outside. Fred posted a little sign in his window to the effect that if the plywood happened to get left off, a case of Bud might appear on the sill. For the next year, we had a close-up view of the action. Fred, a graduate of Stevens Institute, began his career in the computer center, under the leadership of George Baldwin, perhaps the most affable and civic-minded mathematician I have ever met. At the end of one trying day, George wandered into Fred's office, leaned back in the visitor chair, and said, "I sure could use a cold one about now." Fred opened his window and retrieved a Bud that was cooling on the sill. Fred lived his whole life in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At one point he decided that for exercise he could get to the Labs by train to Scotch Plains and bike from there up to Bell Labs--no mean feat, for the labs sat atop the second range of the Watchung Mountains, two steep climbs away from Scotch Plains. He invested in a folding bike for the purpose. Some days into the new routine a conductor called him out for bringing a bicycle onto the train. Fred had looked forward to this moment. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a timetable and pointed to the fine print: bicycles were prohibited with the exception of folding bikes. Originally dated October 25, 2000. Lightly edited and three paragraphs added February 22, 2021.

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Fred Grampp

by Norman Wilson

Rob Pike: I don't believe the water tower was a one-person job. ==== I agree. Even if GR Emlin helped, I bet two live people were involved in painting. I'm quite sure more than that participated in making the stencil. Norman Wilson Toronto ON PS: I have never been on a water tower.

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] [COFF] Pondering the hosts file

by Bakul Shah

On Mar 11, 2021, at 10:08 AM, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 10:40 AM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote: >> From https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?hosts(5) >> For each host a single line should be present with the following information: >> Internet address >> official host name >> aliases >> HISTORY >> The hosts file format appeared in 4.2BSD. > > While this is true wrt the history of FreeBSD/Unix, I'm almost positive that BSD didn't invent it. I'm pretty sure it was picked up from the existing host file that was published by sri-nic.arpa before DNS. A different and more verbose format. See RFCs 810 & 952. Possibly because it had to serve more purposes? > Warner > >>> On Mar 11, 2021, at 9:14 AM, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> I'm not sure where this message best fits; TUHS, COFF, or Internet History, so please forgive me if this list is not the best location. >>> >>> I'm discussing the hosts file with someone and was wondering if there's any historical documentation around it's format and what should and should not be entered in the file. >>> >>> I've read the current man page on Gentoo Linux, but suspect that it's far from authoritative. I'm hoping that someone can point me to something more authoritative to the hosts file's format, guidelines around entering data, and how it's supposed to function. >>> >>> A couple of sticking points in the other discussion revolve around how many entries a host is supposed to have in the hosts file and any ramifications for having a host appear as an alias on multiple lines / entries. To whit, how correct / incorrect is the following: >>> >>> 192.0.2.1 host.example.net host >>> 127.0.0.1 localhost host.example.net host >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Grant. . . . >>> unix || die >> _______________________________________________ >> COFF mailing list >> COFF(a)minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff

4 years, 2 months

non-UNIX timesharing at Bell Labs ca 1972?

by Dan Halbert

In 1972, while in high school, I went to an Intel seminar on the 8008. There I met a Bell Labs scientist who gave me a sample 8008 and invited me for a visit at some NJ Bell Labs facility. That group had a timesharing system of some kind, but it was not Unix. I was also given a Bell Labs speech synthesis kit after meeting one of the speech scientists who happened to be in on the same Saturday. I have searched my attic but can't find further details. Would any of you alumni recall what this other timesharing system might have been? Dan

4 years, 2 months

Richard Stevens

by wojciech＠koszek.com

Hello everyone, I'm Wojciech Adam Koszek and I'm a new member here. After a short stint with Red Hat 6.0 and Slackware Linux around 2000-2001 (I think it was Slackware 7.0 or 7.1) my journey with UNIX started with FreeBSD 4.5. I fell in love with BSD and through Warner Losh, Robert Watson, and folks from a Polish UNIX scene, I became hooked. I ended up working with FreeBSD for the following 15 years or so. Anyway: the volume of the UNIX literature back then in Poland was scarce, yet through a small bookstore and a friendly salesman I got myself a "UNIX Network Programming Volume 1" at a huge discount, and read it back-to-back. Looking back, his books had a huge impact on my life (I had all his books, and read everything line by line, with a slight exception of TCP/IP illustrated vol 2, which I used as a reference), and while Stevens's website sheds some light on what he did, I often wonder what is the story behind how his books came to be. It doesn't help he appeared a very private person--never have I seen a photo of him anywhere. What was the reception of his books in the US? Did you know him? Do you know any more details about what he did after 1990? Thanks and take care, Wojciech Adam Koszek

4 years, 2 months

PWB/UNIX 1.0 on the PDP-11/23+

by Tom Ivar Helbekkmo

Following my success in getting 6th Edition UNIX running on a KDF11-B, with support for the MSCP disk controller, I was looking for ways to get as new a tool chain as possible onto it, with full source code (as I'd been using the tool chain from UNSW, for which the source is missing). Well, it turns out that there's an even newer one in PWB, and there are complete source and binary PWB distributions in the TUHS archive! I now have PWB/UNIX 1.0 running, and completely rebuilt from its own sources, on one of my physical /23+ boxes (and, of course, in simh). It's connected to my main (NetBSD) system using UUCP over a serial line. Oh, and it runs the University Ingres RDBMS. :) The write-up (and download) is at https://www.hamartun.priv.no/pwb.html -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] tabs vs spaces - entab, detab

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Here is a link to the 1897 bill of the Indiana State Legislature that legislated a new value for $\pi$: https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/ias/article/view/4753/4589 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4 years, 2 months

tabs vs spaces - entab, detab

by M Douglas McIlroy

> The reason to use tab was file size for one This is urban legend. The percentage of 512-byte blocks that tabs would save was never significant. (I agree that tabs and--especially--newlines can significantly compress fixed-field formats from punched-card tradition, but on the tiny Unix systems where tab conventions were established, big tabular files were very rare.) Tabs were a convenience for typists. Of course the tty driver could have replaced them with spaces, but that would have foreclosed important usage such as tab-separated fields and run-time-adjustable tab stops tab-separated fields. (I have run into latter-day trouble with selecting a space-substituted tab from a screen, only to discover that I was copying or searching for spaces instead of the tab.. That's not an intrinsic problem, though. Editors like sam handle it without fuss.) Doug

4 years, 2 months

4.4BSD sparc, pmax binary recently compiled

by MOCHIDA Shuji

I compiled 4.4BSD to get pmax and sparc binary, from CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4 source code. http://www.netside.co.jp/~mochid/comp/bsd44-build/ pmax: - Works on GXemul DECstaion(PMAX) emulation. - I used binutils 2.6 and gcc 2.7.2.3 taken from Gnu ftp site, as 4.4BSD src does not contain pmax support part in as, ld, gcc and gdb. - Lack of GDB. I got rid of compile errors of gdb 4.16, but that does not work yet. - gcc included can not deal c++ static constructor. So, contrib/groff can not be compiled. Instead, it uses old/{nroff,troff,eqn,tbl..}. sparc: - Works on sun4c. I use on SPARCstation 2, real hardware. TME sun4c emulation can boot to single user, but it locks up in middle of /etc/rc. CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4's source code (just after Lite2 release) seems have differences from CSRG's binary distributions before (2 times), e.g. mount systemcall is not compatible. I used NetBSD 1.0/sparc, NetBSD 1.1/pmax for 1st (slightly) cross compiling. NetBSD 1.0/sparc boots and works well on TME emulator. SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris7 works too, but this 4.4BSD binary doesn't.. -mochid

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] A stack of PDP-11 field maintenance print sets

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Floren > Can anyone on the list point me to either an existing archive where > these exist The canonical repository for historic documentation online is BitSavers. It has an almost-complete set of DEC stuff (both manuals and prints. QBUS devices are at: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/qbus/ QBUS CPU's will be in the relevant model directory, e.g.: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/1123/ and disk drives are in: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/disc/ I haven't checked your list, but I suspect most of them are there; I think the ADV11-A prints are missing, though. You can either send the originals to Al Kossow, or scan them for him; but check with him first, to make sure he doen't already have them, just hasn't got around to posting them yet. There's another site which indexes DEC online documentation: https://manx-docs.org/ There are a very few things which aren't in Bitsavers, and can be found there. > KFD11-A cpu I assume that's a typo for 'KDF11-A'? Noel

4 years, 2 months

A stack of PDP-11 field maintenance print sets

by John Floren

I've been hauling around a pile of DEC Field Maintenance Print Sets for PDP-11 components for over a decade now, intending to see if they're worth having scanned or if there are digital versions out there already. Can anyone on the list point me to either an existing archive where these exist, or an archivist who would be interested in scanning them? They're full of exploded diagrams, schematics, and assembly listings. Here's the list of what I have: Field Maintenance Print Set (17" wide, 11" high): RLV11 disk controller RL01-AK disk drive ADV-11A (??) Field Maintenance Print Set (14" wide, 8.5" high): RL01 disk drive DLV11-J serial line controller RLV11 disk controller KFD11-A cpu KEF11-A floating point processor PDP11/23 PDP11/03-L Thanks, John Floren

4 years, 2 months

tabs vs spaces - entab, detab

by Norman Wilson

I could chip in with my own strong opinions about code formatting, but I think others have already posted plenty of such boring off-topic fluff. A straight answer to Will's original question might be interesting, though: The oldest extant UNIX code samples I know are those the TUHS archive, in Distributions/Research/Dennis_v3/nsys.tar.gz; they're a very old kernel source tree. There are plenty of tabs there. This matches my memories of the V7-era source code, and of what I saw people like ken and dmr and rob and bwk and pjw typing in the not- so-early days of the 1980s when I worked with them. Tabs were generally eight spaces apart. In code, nobody worried about the effects on long lines, because the coding style was spare and didn't run to many deeply-nested constructs, so lines didn't get that long. (Maybe it was considered a feature rather than a bug that deep nesting and deep indentation looked messy, because it wasn't usually a good idea anyway.) I can't speak to original motivations, but I suspect my own reasons for using tabs aren't too different: -- It's quicker and faster to type than multiple spaces -- When not at the start of the line, tabs more often preserve alignment when earlier part of the line are edited -- Back when terminals were connected at speeds like 110 or 300 bps (I am old enough to have experienced that, especially when working from home), letting the system send a tab and the local terminal expand it was a lot faster, especially when reading code (more likely to have lots of indentation than prose). Not every device supported tabs, but enough did that it made a real difference. UNIX didn't originate any of this. I used tabs when writing in FORTRAN and ALGOL/SIMULA and MACRO-10 on the TOPS-10 system I used before I encountered UNIX. So did all the other hackers I knew in the terminal room where we all hung out. I don't know the history of entab/detab. Neither appears to have been around in the Research systems; they're not in V7 and they're not in V10. V7 does. As an aside, the V10 manual has a single manual page for col, [23456], mc, fold, and expand. It's a wonderful example of how gracefully Doug assembled collections of related small programs onto a single page to keep the manual size down. Also of his gift for concise prose: the first sentence is These programs rearrange files for appearance's sake. which is a spot-on but non-stodgy summary. I wish I could write half as well as Doug can. And as an almost-joke, it's a wonder those programs haven't all been made into options to cat in modern systems. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Favorite unix design principles?

by Tyler Adams

For sure, I've seen at least two interesting changes: - market forces have pushed fast iteration and fast prototyping into the mainstream in the form of Silicon valley "fail fast" culture and the "agile" culture. This, over the disastrous "waterfall" style, has led to a momentous improvement in overall productivity improvements. - As coders get pulled away from the machine and performance is less and less in coders hands, engineers aren't sucked into (premature) optimization as much. Tyler On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 6:10 AM M Douglas McIlroy < m.douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: > Have you spotted an evolutionary trend toward better, more productive > programmers? Or has programmer productivity risen across the board due to > better tools? Arguably what's happened is that principle has been > self-obsoleting, for we have cut back on the demand for unskilled (i.e. > less capable) programmers. A broad moral principle may be in play: > programmers should work to put themselves out of business, i.e. it is wrong > to be doing the same kind of work (or working in the same way) tomorrowas > yesterday. > > Doug > > > On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 5:23 AM Tyler Adams <coppero1237(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> Looking at the 1978 list, the last one really stands out: >> >> "Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task" >> -- The concept of unskilled help for a programming task...doesn't really >> exist in 2020. The only special case is doing unskilled labor yourself. >> What unskilled tasks did people used to do back in the day? >> >> Tyler >> >> >> On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 4:07 AM M Douglas McIlroy < >> m.douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: >> >>> It might be interesting to compare your final list with the two lists in >>> the 1978 special issue of the BSTJ--one in the Foreword, the other in the >>> revised version of the Ritchi/Thompson article from the CACM. How have >>> perceptions or values changed over time? >>> >>> Doug >>> >>> >>> On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 7:32 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co> >>> wrote: >>> >>>> On Mon, 25 Jan 2021, Tyler Adams wrote: >>>> >>>> > I'm writing about my 5 favorite unix design principles on my blog this >>>> > week, and it got me wondering what others' favorite unix design >>>> principles >>>> > are? For reference, mine are: >>>> > >>>> > - Rule of Separation (from TAOUP < >>>> http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/> >>>> > ) >>>> > - Let the Machine Do the Dirty Work (from Elements of Programming >>>> Style) >>>> > - Rule of Silence (from TAOUP < >>>> http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/>) >>>> > - Data Dominates (Rob Pike #5) >>>> > - The SPOT (Single Point of Truth) Rule (from TAOUP >>>> > <http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/>) >>>> > >>>> > Tyler >>>> > >>>> >>>> 1. Pipes >>>> 2. Text as the preferred format for input and output >>>> 3. 'Most everything as a file >>>> 4. The idea of simple tools that are optimized for a single task >>>> 5. A powerful scripting language built into the system that, combined >>>> with >>>> 1-4, makes writing new tools heaps easier. >>>> >>>> -uso. >>>> >>>

4 years, 2 months

Abstractions

by M Douglas McIlroy

> - separation of code and data using read-only and read/write file systems I'll bite. How do you install code in a read-only file system? And where does a.out go? My guess is that /bin is in a file system of its own. Executables from /letc and /lib are probably there too. On the other hand, I guess users' personal code is still read/write. I agree that such an arrangement is prudent. I don't see a way, though, to update bin without disrupting most running programs. Doug

4 years, 2 months

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