TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

12 participants
6534 discussions

by Warner Losh

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

4 years, 5 months

QED archive READMEs updated

by Arnold Robbins

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

4 years, 5 months

[TUHS} Qed vs ed

by M Douglas McIlroy

> 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

4 years, 5 months

More archeology

by Jon Steinhart

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

4 years, 5 months

[TUHS} Qed vs ed

by M Douglas McIlroy

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

4 years, 5 months

Qed vs ed

by Will Senn

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

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> 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

4 years, 5 months

/bin vs /sbin

by Grant Taylor

One of the things that I've noticed in my explorations into the H.J. Lu bootable root disks is that some of them predate the /sbin split in Linux. One of them has exactly one file in /sbin and other commands spread across /bin, /usr/bin, and /etc. The single file in /sbin is sln. To me, this makes it fairly self evident that /sbin was originally for statically linked binaries. At least in Linux. Does anyone have any history of /sbin from other traditional Unixes? I'd be quite interested in learning more. I also noticed that (at least) one of the early versions of the H.J. Lu disks had root's home directory in /usr/root. I seem to recall that one version used an atypical of /users vs /usr. Which as I understand it, goes back to the original / vs /usr split in Unix, before /home became a thing. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] bas(1) and bs(1) videos including features and use

by M Douglas McIlroy

Nice archaeology. Blinded by my distaste for Basic , I never bothered to try bs--and should have. Dave has highlighted features that deserve respect. One telling example suggests this should be legalized in C: printf("%s\n", {"true", "false"}[1]); Doug

4 years, 5 months

Troff to ps

by Will Senn

All, So... I've moved on from v7 to 2.11bsd - shucks, vi and tar and co. just work there and everything else seems to be similar enough for what I'm interested in anyway. So yay, I won't be pestering y'all about vi anymore :). One the other hand, now I'm interested in printing the docs. 2.11bsd comes with docs in, of all places, /usr/doc. In there are makefiles for making the docs - ok, make nroff will make ascii docs, and troff will make troff? docs using Ossana's 'original' troff. So, after adding -t to it so it didn't complain about 'typesetter busy', I got no errors. I mounted a tape, tar'ed my .out file and untar'ed it on my macbook (did it for the nroff and troff output). Then I hit the first snag, groff -Tps -ms troff.out > whatever.ps resulted in cannot adjust line and cannot break line errors and groff -Tps -ms nroff.out > whatever.ps resulted in a bunch of double vision. I seem to recall doing this in v6 and it working ok (at least for nroff). My questions: 1. Is there a troff to postcript conversion utility present in a stock 2.11 system (or even patch level 4xx system)? 2. Is there a way to build postscript directly on the system? 3. Is there an alternative modern way to get to ps or pdf output from the nroff/troff that 2.11 has? I'm still digging into the nroff stuff as that may be just minor diffs between ancient nroff macros and "modern" macros or even just errors (.sp -2 rather than .sp or .sp -1, .in -2 instead of .in +2), etc. Although, the files display ok in 2.11bsd using nroff -ms nroff.out... Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Norman Wilson > You get a good deal and support a worthwhile small business (not just > ABE but the individual selling shop) at the same time. ABE isn't a small business (any more); Amazon bought them a couple of years ago. Biblio (https://www.biblio.com/) is the same basic thing ("more than 6500 independent book stores"), but independent. There's also Alibris (https://www.alibris.com/) but I like Biblio's site better; YMMV. Noel

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

by Norman Wilson

Nemo Nusquam: Borenstein wrote a book ("Programming as if people mattered: Friendly Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions") in which he mused about W and X and Andrew. (A very nice read but horribly expensive -- fortunately I bought it when PUP had reasonably priced paperbacks.) ====== abebooks.com is your friend here. I just bought a used paperback copy for about USD 15 including shipping to Canada. There are others of similar price. Shipping to the US is probably a little cheaper. There's at least one copy available from a seller in the UK as well (and doubtless some from other countries if you dig further in the listings). For those who don't know, ABE is a central place for independent booksellers, including used-book shops, to sell online. You get a good deal and support a worthwhile small business (not just ABE but the individual selling shop) at the same time. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

David Tilbrook, RIP 2021-01-15

by Greg A. Woods

Since nobody seems to have mentioned his passing yet, I thought I might. David Tilbrook died (from complications of COVID-19) in the early hours of January 15, 2021. He had been in long term care in Toronto for just over a year. His web site remains up and running for now at http://qef.com/ though I don't know for how long that may last. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods(a)acm.org> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods(a)robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods(a)planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods(a)avoncote.ca>

4 years, 5 months

The terminal, the console, and the shell - what are they?

by Will Senn

All, I came across this note on vermaden's valuable news blog and thought y'all might enjoy it - it's not pure unix, but it's got a lot of crossover. The history is interesting and to us relative newbs, informative. I can't confirm its accuracy on the history side of things, but I'm sure you can :). http://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-terminal-the-console-and-the-shell-what-… Later, Will

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] System V Release 2, adding swap?

by Jason Stevens

SIMH has 3b2 emulation... Much of the work was documented here: https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator.html <https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator.html> -----Original Message----- From: Henry Bent [SMTP:henry.r.bent@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2021 12:05 AM To: Arnold Robbins Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Subject: Re: [TUHS] System V Release 2, adding swap? On Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 11:02, Arnold Robbins < arnold(a)skeeve.com <mailto:arnold@skeeve.com> > wrote: Hi. Does anyone know how to add swap space on a System V Release 2 system? In particular, on an emulated AT&T 3B1. The kernel is S5R1 or S5R2 vintage. I don't see any commands with 'swap' in their names. A little bit of Google Groups trawling turned up this: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.att/c/8XLILI3K8-Y/m/VxVMJNdt9NQJ <https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.att/c/8XLILI3K8-Y/m/VxVMJNdt9NQJ> But I don't have one of those systems, so I have no way to verify. -Henry

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Three-quarters to the next Epoch

by John Foust

At 03:46 PM 1/23/2021, Dave Horsfall wrote: >Sent to me from a fellow weirdo... > >At 19:25:36 AEDT (00:25:36 UTC), Unix time reached 0x60000000. We're three quarters of the way to 2038... That was January 14, 2021, right? https://www.epochconverter.com/hex - John

4 years, 5 months

System V Release 2, adding swap?

by Arnold Robbins

Hi. Does anyone know how to add swap space on a System V Release 2 system? In particular, on an emulated AT&T 3B1. The kernel is S5R1 or S5R2 vintage. I don't see any commands with 'swap' in their names. Thanks, Arnold

4 years, 5 months

Favorite unix design principles?

by Tyler Adams

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

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Riley > Is LSX the only option on the 11/03, or could I run V6 or Mini-Unix with > more RAM? All PDP-11 Unix versions from V4 on require the MMU, so the -11/03 is out for them. We don't have the code for V2-V4, though. So V1 (mostly all assembler, no C :-), LSW and Mini-Unix are the only options for it. V6 can be run on an -11/23 (I've done it), but not straight out of the box; it requires a few minor tweaks first: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_UNIX_V6_on_an_-11/23 Noel

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Apollo/token-ring networks

by Ed Carp

On 1/24/21, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote: > So I never liked Apollos much. What I was referring to was Apollo's claim > that their token-ring network performed better for large numbers of nodes. > And they were correct. However, they didn't consider the eventually > invention of switches that solved the problem. A problem that shouldn't have ever been there in the first place. When I was at EDS, we did a lot of benchmarks against token-ring vs. CSMA-CD. Token-ring was slower than CSMA-CD until the traffic got to be more than about 10% of capacity - then the collision detection exponential backoff algorithm would clobber the network. The argument that "well, we will never get above that anyway, so we want the fastest we can get" sort of short-sightedness won the day. It wasn't until switches and virtual LANs came into existence that (as you said) solved the problem.

4 years, 5 months

Three-quarters to the next Epoch

by Dave Horsfall

Sent to me from a fellow weirdo... At 19:25:36 AEDT (00:25:36 UTC), Unix time reached 0x60000000. We're three quarters of the way to 2038... Stock up on food, load dem guns, and batten down the hatches :-) -- Dave

4 years, 5 months

bas(1) and bs(1) videos including features and use

by Dave Plonka

Hi folks, In case you're interested: I've published a couple videos on these ancient Unix tools, sharing including some language details and showing them in action on v7 and System III, respectively: Ken Thompson's bas(1): https://youtu.be/LZUMNZTUJos Dick Haight's bs(1): https://youtu.be/ELICIa3L22o Thanks much for the help from TUHS, Mashey, Kernighan, McIlroy, and others cited therein. Peace, Dave -- dave(a)plonka.us http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/

4 years, 5 months

ACM Fellow, Ken Thompson

by Royce Williams

Congratulations to Ken Thompson, the newly-minted ACM Fellow: https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/thompson_4588371 (It seemed of historical interest, and therefore on-topic. :) ) -- Royce

4 years, 5 months

Happy Birthday to Marshall Kirk McKusick

by Caipenghui

Thank you for your work to make the world a better, happy birthday to you. God bless us. #define FS_UFS2_MAGIC 0x19540119 Caipenghui

4 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Bearded Fellow, Ken Thompson

by Norman Wilson

Dave Horsfall: At one place I worked, every Unix bod sported facial fungus; it must be a Unix thing... ==== Not really. I've seen bare faces and beards and operating systems over the decades that would scare the bugs out of any of the above beards and operating systems. There really isn't a lot of consistency. I've known plenty of bare-faced UNIX hacks, and plenty of RSX and VMS and Windows and IBM programmers who hide their embarrassment behind beards. The ultimate reference is, of course, the inhabitants of the UNIX Room. During my time there in mid-to-late 1980s, some people wore beards, some didn't. I have never seen Ken or Dennis or Brian clean-shaven, but I have never seen Doug or Rob or Tom Duff or Lorinda with a beard. And despite a certain remark attributed to the late Vic Vyssotsky (who I've never seen with a beard either), I am quite sure that my appearance had nothing to do with my being recruited by the group. Norman `too lazy to shave' Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 5 months

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TUHS