You might find this interesting
https://twitter.com/i/status/1320767372853190659
<https://twitter.com/i/status/1320767372853190659>
It's a pi (arm) running Musashi a 68000 core, but using voltage buffers it's
plugged into the 68000 socket of an Amiga!
You can find more info on their github:
https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm
<https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm>
Maybe we are at the point where numerous cheap CPU's can eliminate FPGA's?
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Parson [SMTP:mparson@bl.org]
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2021 10:43 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode
On 2021-02-04 16:47, Henry Bent wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2021, 17:40 Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>> I'm probably Stockholm Syndrommed about 6502. It's what I grew
up on,
>> and
>> I still like it a great deal. Admittedly register-starved (well,
>> unless
>> you consider the zero page a whole page of registers),
but...simple,
>> easy
>> to fit in your head, kinda wonderful.
>>
>> I'd love a 64-bit 6502-alike (but I'd probably give it more than
three
>> registers). I mean given how little silicon (or how few FPGA
gates) a
>> reasonable version of that would take, might as well include
65C02 and
>> 65816 cores in there too with some sort of mode-switching
instruction.
>> Wouldn't a 6502ish with 64-bit wordsize and a 64-bit address bus
be
>> fun?
>> Throw in an onboard MMU and FPU too, I suppose, and then you
could
>> have a
>> real system on it.
>>
>>
> Sounds like a perfect project for an FPGA. If there's already a
6502
> implementation out there, converting to 64 bit should be fairly
easy.
There are FPGA implementations of the 6502 out there. If you've not
seen
it, check out the MiSTer[0] project, FPGA implementations of a LOT
of
computers, going back as far as the EDSAC, PDP-1, a LOT of 8, 16,
and 32
bit systems from the 70s and 80s along with gaming consoles from the
70s
and 80s.
Keeping this semi-TUHS related, one guy[1] has even implemented a
Sparc 32m[2] (I think maybe an SS10), which boots SunOS 4, 5, Linux,
NetBSD, and even the Sparc version of NeXTSTEP, but it's not part of
the
"official" MiSTer bits (yet?).
--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ
[0] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
[1] https://temlib.org/site/
[2] https://temlib.org/pub/mister/SS/
Apologies if this has already been linked here.
"The UNIX Command Languageis the first-ever paper published on the Unix
shell. It was written by Ken Thompson in 1976."
https://github.com/susam/tucl
Joachim
Recent discussions on this list are about the problem getting fonts
for typesetting before there was an industry to provide them. Noted
font designer Chuck Bigelow has written about the subject here:
Notes on typeface protection
TUGboat 7(3) 146--151 October 1986
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb07-3/tb16bigelow.pdf
Other TUGboat papers by him and his design partner, Kris Holmes, might
be of reader interest:
Lucida and {\TeX}: lessons of logic and history
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb15-3/tb44bigelow.pdf
About the DK versions of Lucida
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb36-3/tb114bigelow.pdf
A short history of the Lucida math fonts
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb37-2/tb116bigelow-lucidamath.pdf
Science and history behind the design of Lucida
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb39-3/tb123bigelow-lucida.pdf
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- 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 -
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Do they *really* want something which is just V7 Unix, with nothing else?
> No TCP/IP, no hot-plug USB support? No web browsing?
> Oh, you wanted more than that? Feature bloat! Feature bloat!
> Feature bloat! Shame! Shame! Shame!
% ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc
495 495 7230
% ls /bin|wc
2809 2809 30468
How many of roughly 500 system calls (to say nothing of uncounted
ioctl's) do you think are necessary for writing those few crucial
capabilities that distinguish Linux from v7? There is
undeniably bloat, but only a sliver of it contributes to the
distinctive utility of today's systems.
Or consider this. Unix grew by about 39 system calls in its first
decade, but an average of 40
per decade ever since. Is this accelerated growth more symptomatic of
maturity or of cancer?
Doug
There's so much experience here, I thought someone might know:
"Our goal is to develop an emulator for the Burroughs B6700 system. We
need help to find a complete release of MCP software for the Burroughs
B6700.
If you have old magnetic tapes (magtapes) in any format, or computer
printer listings of software or micro-fiche, micro-film, punched-card
decks for any Burroughs B6000 or Burroughs B7000 systems we would like
to hear from you.
Email nw(a)retroComputingTasmania.com"
Hi all,
On a completely different note... I’ve been delving into typing tutor programs of late. Quite a mishmash of approaches out there. Not at all like what I remember from junior high - The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, kinda stuff. Best of breed may be Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on the gui front, and I hate to admit it, gnu typist, on the console front.
I’m wondering if there are some well considered unix programs, historically, for learning typing? Or did everyone spring into the unix world accomplished typists straight outta school? I did see mention a while back about a TOPS-10 typing tutor, not unix, but in the spirit - surely there's some unix history around typing tutors.
Thanks,
Will
> Or consider this. Unix grew by about 39 system calls in its first
> decade, but an average of 40
> > per decade ever since. Is this accelerated growth more symptomatic of
> maturity or of cancer?
Looks like I need a typing tutor. 39 should be 30. And a math tutor, too. 40
should be 100.
Doug
$ k-2.9t
K 2.9t 2001-02-14 Copyright (C) 1993-2001 Kx Systems
Evaluation. Not for commercial use.
\ for help. \\ to exit.
This is a *linux* x86 binary from almost exactly 20 years ago running on FreeBSD built from last Wednesday’s sources.
$ uname -rom
FreeBSD 13.0-ALPHA3 amd64
Generally compatibility support for previous versions of FreeBSDs has been decent when I have tried. Though the future for x86 support doesn’t look bright.
> On Feb 8, 2021, at 10:56 PM, John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> wrote:
>
> (I'm not up on what the BSD releases are doing.)
This topic is evocative, even though I really have nothing to say about it.
Mike Lesk started, and I believe Brian contributed to, "learn", a program
for interactive tutorials about Unix. It was never pushed very far--almost
certainly not into typing.
But the mention of typing brings to mind the inimitable Fred Grampp--he
who pioneered massive white-hat computer cracking. Fred's exploits justified
the opening sentence I wrote for Bell Labs' first computer-security task
force report, "It is easy and not very risky to pilfer data from Bell
Laboratories computers." Among Fred's many distinctive and endearing
quirks was the fact that he was a confirmed two-finger typist--proof that
typing technique is an insignificant factor in programmer productivity.
I thought this would be an excuse to tell another ftg story, but I
don't want to repeat myself and a search for "Grampp" in the tuhs archives
misses many that have already been told. Have the entries been lost or
is the index defective?
Doug
I would like to revive Lorinda Cherry's "parts".
Implicit in "revival" is dispelling the hundreds
of warnings from gcc -Wpedantic -Wall -Wextra.
Has anybody done this already?
Doug
> Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on
8-bit bytes?
I give the credit to the IBM Stretch, aka 7030, and the Harvest attachment
they made for NSA. For autocorrelation on bit streams--a fundamental need
in codebreaking--the hardware was bit-addressable. But that was overkill
for other supercomputing needs, so there was coarse-grained addressability
too. Address conversion among various operand sizes made power of two a
natural, lest address conversion entail division. The Stretch project also
coined the felicitous word "byte" for the operand size suitable for
character
sets of the era.
With the 360 series, IBM fully committed to multiple operand sizes. DEC
followed suit and C naturalized the idea into programmers' working
vocabulary.
The power-of-2 word length had the side effect of making the smallest
reasonable size for floating-point be 32 bits. Someone on the
Apollo project once noted that the 36-bit word on previous IBM
equipment was just adequate for planning moon orbits; they'd
have had to use double-precision if the 700-series machines had
been 32-bit. And double-precision took 10 times as long. That
observation turned out to be prescient: double has become the
norm.
Doug
The topic of GBACA (Get Back At Corporate America), the video game for
the BLIT/5620, has come up on a Facebook group.
Does anyone happen to have any details about it, source code, author,
screen shots, ...?
Thanks,
Mary Ann
I will ask Warren's indulgence here - as this probably should be continued
in COFF, which I have CC'ed but since was asked in TUHS I will answer
On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 6:28 AM Peter Jeremy via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:
> I'm not sure that 16 (or any other 2^n) bits is that obvious up front.
> Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on
> 8-bit bytes?
>
Well, 'standardizing' is a little strong. Check out my QUORA answer: How
many bits are there in a byte
<https://www.quora.com/How-many-bits-are-there-in-a-byte/answer/Clem-Cole>
and What is a bit? Why are 8 bits considered as 1 byte? Why not 7 bit or 9
bit?
<https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-bit-Why-are-8-bits-considered-as-1-byte-Why…>
for my details but the 8-bit part of the tail is here (cribbed from those
posts):
The Industry followed IBM with the S/360.The story of why a byte is 8- bits
for the S/360 is one of my favorites since the number of bits in a byte is
defined for each computer architecture. Simply put, Fred Brooks (who lead
the IBM System 360 project) overruled the chief hardware designer, Gene
Amdahl, and told him to make things power of two to make it easier on the
SW writers. Amdahl famously thought it was a waste of hardware, but Brooks
had the final authority.
My friend Russ Robeleon, who was the lead HW guy on the 360/50 and later
the ASP (*a.k.a.* project X) who was in the room as it were, tells his yarn
this way: You need to remember that the 360 was designed to be IBM's
first *ASCII
machine*, (not EBCDIC as it ended up - a different story)[1] Amdahl was
planning for a word size to be 24-bits and the byte size to be 7-bits for
cost reasons. Fred kept throwing him out of his office and told him not to
come back “until a byte and word are powers of two, as we just don’t know
how to program it otherwise.”
Brooks would eventually relent on the original pointer on the Systems 360
became 24-bits, as long as it was stored in a 32-bit “word”.[2] As a
result, (and to answer your original question) a byte first widely became
8-bit with the IBM’s Systems 360.
It should be noted, that it still took some time before an 8-bit byte
occurred more widely and in almost all systems as we see it today. Many
systems like the DEC PDP-6/10 systems used 5, 7-bit bytes packed into a
36-bit word (with a single bit leftover) for a long time. I believe that
the real widespread use of the 8-bit byte did not really occur until the
rise of the minis such as the PDP-11 and the DG Nova in the late
1960s/early 1970s and eventually the mid-1970s’ microprocessors such as
8080/Z80/6502.
Clem
[1] While IBM did lead the effort to create ASCII, and System 360 actually
supported ASCII in hardware, but because the software was so late, IBM
marketing decided not the switch from BCD and instead used EBCDIC (their
own code). Most IBM software was released using that code for the System
360/370 over the years. It was not until IBM released their Series 1
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Series/1>minicomputer in the late 1970s
that IBM finally supported an ASCII-based system as the natural code for
the software, although it had a lot of support for EBCDIC as they were
selling them to interface to their ‘Mainframe’ products.
[2] Gordon Bell would later observe that those two choices (32-bit word and
8-bit byte) were what made the IBM System 360 architecture last in the
market, as neither would have been ‘fixable’ later.
> From: Greg A. Woods
> There's a "v6net" directory in this repository.
> ...
> I wonder if it is from either of the two ports you mention.
No; the NOSC system is an NCP system, not TCP; and this one has mbufs (which
the BBN v6 one did not have), so it's _probably_ a Berkleyism of some sort
(or did the BBN VAX code have mbuf's too; I don't recall - yes, it did:
https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP
see bbnnet/mbuf.c). It might also be totally new code which just chose to
re-use that meme. I don't have time to look closely to see if I see any
obvious descent.
> Too many broken half-baked MUAs seem to still be widely used.
I'm one of the offendors! Hey, this is a vintage computing list, so what's
the problem with vintage mail readers? :-)
Noel
PS: I'm just about done collecting up the MIT PWB1 TCP system; I only have
the Server FTP left to go. (Alas, it was a joint project between a student
and a staffer, who left just at the end, so half the source in one's personal
area, and the other half's in the other's. So I have to find all the pieces,
and put them in the system's source area.) Once that's done, I'll get it to
WKT to add to the repositoey. (Getting it to _actually run_ will take a
while, and will happen later: I have to write a device driver for it, the
code uses a rare, long-extinct board.)
> V6, as distributed, had no networking at all. There are two V6 systems with
> networking in TUHS:
>
> https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC <https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC>
> https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6 <https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6>
>
> The first is an 'NCP' Unix (unless unless you have an ARPANet); the second is
> a fairly early TCP/IP from BBN (ditto, out of the box; although one could write
> an Ethernet driver for it).
I’ve also done a port of the BBN VAX stack to V6 (running on a TI990 clone), using a serial
PPP interface to connect. Experimental, but may have the OP's interest:
https://www.jslite.net/cgi-bin/9995/dir?ci=tip
> There's also a fairly nice Internet-capable V6 (well, PWB1, actually) from MIT
> which I keep meaning to upload; it includes SMTP, FTP, etc, etc. I also have
> visions of porting an ARP I wrote to it, and bringing up an Ethernet driver
> for the DEQNA/DELQA, but I've yet to get to any of that.
I’d love to have a look at that and compare and contrast the approaches.
I’m finding that BBN’s original design, with a separate kernel thread for the network stack,
is elegant but difficult to tune: too much priority and it crowds out user processes, too little
and the slow PPP line is not kept busy.
I think I’m beginning to understand why CSRG (and later also BBN) moved to
the interrupt driven structure of 4.2BSD: perhaps it was also difficult to tune for a
VAX with ethernet.
> From: Paul Riley
> In the bootable images archive, there's the "Unknown V6" RL02
> image. I've tried that on SimH configured as an 11/23+ with 256kB of RAM
> and it seems to work fine.
Sorry, where's this archive? Somewhere in:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/
I assume? From the description, that might be from the 'Shoppa disks'; didn't
realize that was a /23 on those.
> I would assume that Ethernet boards are available, but not supported on
> V6.
V6, as distributed, had no networking at all. There are two V6 systems with
networking in TUHS:
https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSChttps://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6
The first is an 'NCP' Unix (unless unless you have an ARPANet); the second is
a fairly early TCP/IP from BBN (ditto, out of the box; although one could write
an Ethernet driver for it).
There's also a fairly nice Internet-capable V6 (well, PWB1, actually) from MIT
which I keep meaning to upload; it includes SMTP, FTP, etc, etc. I also have
visions of porting an ARP I wrote to it, and bringing up an Ethernet driver
for the DEQNA/DELQA, but I've yet to get to any of that.
> it's hard to glean that wisdom from reading the manual.
Yeah, DEC manuals went through a phase-change around about the time of the
/23. Old DEC manuals are wonderful; stuffed to the gills with deep technical
details. Suitable for engineers...
Later, they turned into manuals for 'ordinary people' - 'plug cable C1 into
plug P1'. Semi-useless; although one can often glean a few useful morsels if
you trawl through the entire thing.
That's why I've been doing PDP-11 pages on the CHWiki which attempt to cover a
lot of technical detail, in a high technical content/size way.
If you need something that's not there, let me know, and I'll get to adding it.
Noel
I've done some research for a friend about when the reboot() system call
was added, and how it related to the sync, sync, sync dance.
https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/07/when-unix-learned-to-reboot2.html
may be of interest. Please do let me know if I've gotten something wrong...
Warner
Hello All.
I have updated various READMEs in the QED archive I set up a while
back: https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/qed-archive. Now included
is a link to Leah's blog, mention that the SDS files came from Al Kossow,
and Doug's link to the Multics QED cheat sheet.
Thanks,
Arnold
> fairly early in PDP-11 development ed gained three features: & in the
> rhs of substitutions plus k and t commands. (I'm not sure about & ....
Oh, and backreferencing, which took regular expressions way up the
complexity hierarchy--into NP-complete territory were it not for the limit
of 9 backreferenced substrings. (Proof hint: reduce the knapsack problem to
an ed regex.)
Also g and s were generalized to allow escaped newlines.
I was indeed wrong about &. It was in v1.
Doug
Another stack of old notebooks. I can scan these in if anyone is interested
and if they're not available elsewhere. In addition to what's below, I have
a fat notebook with the BRL CAD package docs.
These are V/W papers from Stanford - Lantz/Cheriton et. al.
Multi-process Structuring of User Interface Software
Refernce Models, Window Systems, and Concurrency
An Experiment in Integrated Multimedia Conferencing
An Architecture for Configurable User Interfaces
An Empirical Study of Distributed Application Performance
Third Generation Graphics for Distributed Systems
Virtual Terminal Management In A Multiple Process environment
Distributed Process Groups in the V Kernel
The Distributed V Kernel and its Performance for Diskless Workstations
Effective Use of Large RAM Memories on Diskless Workstations with the V Virtual Memory System
Evaluating Hardware Support for Superconcurrency with the V Kernel
Fault-tolerant Transaction Management in a Workstation Cluster
File Access Performance of Diskless Workstations
An Introduction to the V System
The Multi-Satellite Star: Structuring Parallel Computations for a Workstation Cluster
UIO: A Uniform I/O System Interface for Distributed Systems
The V Kernel: A Software Base for Distributed Systems
Other random stuff
Bitmap Graphics (SIGGRAPH '84 Course Notes, Pike et. al.)
A Window Manager with a Moduler User Interface (Whitechapel?)
IRIS-4D Superworkstation and Visual Computing
IRIS GT Graphics Architecture
Position Paper on the Importance and Application of Video Mixing Display Architectures (Jack Grimes)
A Data-Flow Manager for an Interactive Programming Environment (Paul Haeberli)
Multiple Programs in One UNIX Process (Don Libes - from ;login:)
Lightweight Processes for UNIX Implementation and Applications (Jonathan Kepecs)
A Capability Based Hierarchic Architecture for UNIX Window Management (R. D. Trammell)
MEX - A Window Manager for the IRIS (Rocky Rhodes et. al.)
Windows for UNIX at Lucasfilm (Hawley, Leffler)
Next-Generation Hardware for Windowed Displays (McGeady)
Problems Implementing Window Systems in UNIX (Gettys)
Mach: A New Kernel Foundation For UNIX Development (Accetta et. al.)
Uwm: A User Interface for X Windows (Ganearz)
Programming with Windows on the Major Workstations or Through a Glass Darkly (Daniel, Rogers)
PIX, the latest NeWS (Leler)
Ace: a syntax-driven C preprocessor Overview (Gosling)
Attribute Considerations in Raster Graphics (Bresenham)
Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View (Teitelman)
W User's Manual (Asente)
The WA Beyond Traditional Window Systems (An Overviw of The Workstation Agent (Lantz et. al., draft, marked not to to be redistributed)
Performance Measurements of the WA (Islam)
STDWIN: A Standard Window System Interface (Rossum)
Summary of Current Research (Lantz et. al. at Olivetti)
User Interfaces in Window Systems: Architechure and Implementation (Farrell, Schwartz; SIGCHI)
Introduction to the GMW Window System (Hagiya)
UNIX Window Management Systems Client-Server Interface Specification (Williams et. al., Rutherford Apleton Laboaratory)
Curves Made Trivial (Gosling)
Smart Code, Stupid Memory: A Fast X Server for a Dumb Color Frame Buffer (McCormack)
Jon
I used Ken's qed in pre-Unix days. I understand its big departure from the
original was regular expressions. Unix ed was the same, with
multi-file capability dropped. Evidently the lost function was not much
missed, for it it didn't come back when machines got bigger. I remember
that fairly early in PDP-11 development ed gained three features: & in the
rhs of substitutions plus k and t commands. (I'm not sure about &--that was
50 years ago.).
With hindsight it's surprising that a "minimalist" design had m but not t,
for m can be built from t but not vice versa. A cheat sheet for multics qed
is at h
<http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condens…>
ttp://
www.bitsavers.org/pdf//honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condensed-gui….
It had two commands I don't remember: sort(!) and transform, which I assume
is like y in sed.
Doug
Hi all,
So. On a lighter note. I was tooling around the web and came across a discussion of QED, the editor. It’s been resurrected in no small part based on discussions on this list (and members like Rob Pike). Anyhow, there’s a version that compiles in modern systems and that handles wide characters. My question for the group is this how different is QED from ed? I’ve read Dennis’ paper on the history of QED and it’s fascinating, but all I really got out of the discussion related to ed, was that QED was a precursor. I’m curious about functional parity or lack thereof, more than technical differences. In full disclosure, and at the risk of drawing fire from lovers of other editors, I have to confess a love of the original ed (and it’s decendent ed’s and vi).
Cheers,
Will
Sent from my iPhone
> From: Jim Geist
> When did mmap(2) come about?
Pretty sure it's a Berserkleyism. I think it came in with the VM stuff that
DARPA mandated for VAX Unix (for the research project they funded).
Noel