> 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
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
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
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
> 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
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
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>
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
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
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
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
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
> 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
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.
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
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/
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
Andrew Hume (dammit andrew):
i have probed recently about the origins of the bEGREGb (its all greg cession's fault) error in Research Unix.
alas, i recall nothing about this, and can't recall ever getting the message.
===
Your memory fails you, which is not unreasonable for stuff you
probably haven't thought about in more than 30 years:
/*
SCSI Pass-Thru driver for the TD Systems UD? -- Andrew Hume
Ninth Edition Unix
*/
[...]
scsiwrite(dev)
dev_t dev;
{
register count;
register struct scsi *p = &scsi[minor(dev)];
register struct mscmd *cmd = &p->junk->cmd.msg;
unsigned char flag, bus_id;
if(p->flag&NEXTWR)
p->flag &= ~NEXTWR;
else {
u.u_error = EGREG;
return;
}
As I remember it, EGREG went into errno.h and libc out
of a desire to have some never-normally-used error to
be returned when debugging. I forget just who was in
the UNIX Room conversation that created it; almost certainly
I was. I thought andrew was as well; very likely one or
more of andrew td presotto.
I do remember being a bit annoyed at Andrew for putting it
in permanent use in the raw-SCSI driver (which was at the
time of interest mainly to Andrew for controlling an
early optical-disc jukebox, used by the original File
Motel backup system).
As to the origin of `It's all Greg's fault' as a meme,
that was already around and established when I arrived at
the Labs in mid-1984, though Greg himself had already
moved west. Maybe Doug or Ken remembers how that started.
Andrew himself was responsible for or blamed by more than
one meme of the days. The scsi driver spawned one, in fact:
the first attempt used a SCSI interface from Emulex, which
never worked quite right, and despite repeated phone calls
to Emulex Andrew could never get it figured out. He tried
and tried, though, and his attempts spawned the catch
phrase `Time to call Emulex again!'
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
an urgent request: can someone please send me sam leaflet’s email address?
its needed for a funeral (dave tilbrook just died).
also, rob pike, can you send me your email please?
(these are for tilbrook’s son.)