When I got into Unix in 1976 cron and at were both there.
I got to wondering for no particular reason which came first -- I had
always assumed cron, but ...?
Anyone know?
Last night I stumbled upon this speech by Doug McIlroy at Dijkstra's retirement banquet @ UT Austin where he tells the story of his first encounter with EWD and the origins of programming without goto.... Given that we recently had a discussion on "Goto considered harmful", you all may enjoy it. Make sure you watch the start of part 10 as well as that is where the story ends.
https://youtu.be/5OUPBwrufKA?list=PL328C7EFFC1F41674&t=326
Hoi,
I'm wondering what the name of the B compiler was.
Doug's ``Unix Reader'' lists:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
+ + + . . . . . . b compile b program
. . . . . + + + + bc arbitrary-precision arithmetic language
Via Wikipedia I found a scan of the ``Users' Reference to B'',
a technical memorandum by Ken, dated 1972-01-07 (which is between
the releases of the 1st and 2nd Edition).
https://web.archive.org/web/20150317033259/https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dm…
There on page 25:
10.0 Usage
Currently on UNIX, there is no B command. The B compiler phases
must be executed piecemeal. The first phase turns a B source
program into an intermediate language.
/etc/bc source interm
The next phase turns the intermediate language into assembler
source, at which time the intermediate language can be removed.
/etc/ba interm asource
rm interm
The next phase assembles the assembler source into the object
tile a.out. After this the a.out file can be renamed and the
assembler source file can be removed.
as asource
mv a.out object
rm asource
The last phase loads the various object files with the necessary
libraries in the desired order.
ld object /etc/brtl -lb /etc/bilib /etc/brt2
Now a.out contains the completely bound and loaded program and
can be executed.
a.out
A canned sequence of shell commands exists invoked as follows:
sh /usr/b/rc x
It will compile, convert, assemble and load the file x.b into the
executable file a.out.
It lists /etc/bc, as a command to convert into the intermediate
language, and /etc/ba, to convert the intermediate language into
assembler source, but lists no `b' command. The wrapper script is
/usr/b/rc.
Can someone clarify?
I came to this question because I was looking for one letter
commands. I always thought them to be a reserved namespace for the
user ... Any background on that topic is appreciated as well. ;-)
meillo
There's a back story. The paper appears in the proceedings of a
conference held in London in 1973, a few months after the advent of
pipes. While preparing the presentation, Ken was inspired to invent
and install the pipe operator. His talk wouldn't have been nearly as
compelling had it been expressed in the original pipeline syntax (for
which I take the blame).
References to eqn (v5), bc (v6), and ratfor (v7) obviously postdate
the London conference. Ken must have edited--or re-created--the
transcript for the proceedings sometime after v6 (May, 1975).
Bibliographic citations are missing. Can they be resurrected?
Reference 137, about Unix itself, probably refers to a
presentation by Ken and Dennis at SOSP in January1973. Alas, only an
abstract of the talk appears in the conference proceedings. But the
abstract does contain the potent and often-repeated sentence, "It
offers a number of features seldom found even in larger operating
systems, including ... inter-process IO ..." The talk--in Yorktown
Heights--was memorable, and so was a ride to the same place in Ken's
'vette. (I can't recall whether the two happened on the same
occasion.)
Given that the talk at SOSP preceded the talk in London, and that the
Unix manual was widely distributed by (1976) when the revised London
talk was printed, the claim that "The Unix command language" was the
first publication of Unix seems hyperbolic. In no way, though, does
this detract from the inherent interest of the paper.
Doug
Hi All,
So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly
versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not
aware of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know
of any from back in the day?
It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's
also pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about
how to do stuff w/those slots.
Thanks,
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
I'm also forwarding this message that arrived in my mailbox. Is this
**THE** Ken Thompson?
Yes, that's the real Ken. Those who have communicated
with him in the past (and didn't get a direct note as
some of us did) should notice the new e-mail address,
kenbob(a)gmail.com.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Somewhat late to the discussion, but GeckOS may be another curious
contender. You can find more information in http://6502.orghttp://www.6502.org/users/andre/index.html
j
--
Scientific Computing Service
Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, CSIC.
c/Darwin, 3. 28049 Madrid
+34 91 585 45 05
+34 659 978 577
I'm also forwarding this message that arrived in my mailbox. Is this
**THE** Ken Thompson?
Joachim
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 21:47:16 -0800
From: Ken Thompson <kenbob(a)gmail.com>
To: Joachim <j(a)tllds.com>
yes. the unix manual was published before that,
but i dont think it was released that early. it had
a manual page on the shell.
this paper might be the first paper ever released
outside bell labs.
On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 7:18 PM Joachim via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
<mailto:tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>> wrote:
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
> From: Steve Nickolas
> there's no easy way to do preemptive multitasking without extra
> hardware.
Perhaps you're using some idiosyncratic definition of "preemptive" and
"multitasking", but to me that statement's not accurate.
Let's take the "multitasking" part first: that just means 'two or more
computations can run at the same time, sharing the machine' - and that's not
hard to do, without special hardware, provided there's some way (in the
organization of the software) to save the state of one when the other is
running. Many simple systems do this; e.g. the MOS system that I used on
LSI-11's, BITD.
"Preemptive" is a bit trickier, because things have to be organized so that
one 'task' can be temporarily stopped arbitrarily (i.e. without it explicitly
giving up the processor, which is what e.g.MOS did) to let another run. There
does need to be some asynchronous way of inciting the second 'task' to run,
but interrupts (either clock, or device) do that, and pretty much every
machine has those. MINI-UNIX, for example, has premptive multitasking.
The thing that takes special hardware is _protecting_ one task from a bug in
another - a bug which could trash the first tasks's (or the system's!)
memory. One has to have memory management of some kind to do that.
> From: Dave Horsfall
> I would start with something like Mini-Unix
MINI-UNIX would be a good place to start if one wanted to bring up a system on
a machine without memory management; there's nothing in the kernel which is
PDP-11 dependent that I can think of (unlike V6, which had a fairly heavy
dependency on the PDP-11 memory management hardware - although one could of
course rip that all out, as MINI-UNIX did).
However, one's still looking at a fair amount of work, both to get rid of any
traces of PDP-11isms (e.g. stack growth direction), and translate the
assembler part (startup, and access to non-C operations). Something like FUZIX
might be an easier option.
Noel
I'm trying to find out why compress(1) uses .Z as filename extension.
My theory is that it was inspired by pack(1), which uses the .z extension.
However, I haven't been able to find any info on why pack(1) uses that
extension. Does anyone here know?
Some searching led me to [1] which is a man page for pack from AUSAM.
It's written by Steve Zucker in 1975, so perhaps the extension is z for
Zucker?
Was Zucker's pack(1) the first, though? This message [2] talks about a
Bell version.
Does anyone here have any information about this?
Cheers,
Hans
1. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM/doc/man/man1/pack.1
2. https://tech-insider.org/unix/research/1984/0319.html
I was making coffee into the cup I've had for decades that talks about
his networking books. I realized I might have something that would
help his wife a bit. I had her email but long since lost it. Anyone
have it?
--lm
Back in mid-January, I posted a note saying:
> TL; DR. I'm trying to find the best possible home for some dead trees. ...
A lot (far too much, IMNSHO!) has happened since then. In any case, I thought folks here might appreciate an update. In brief, Iain Maoileoin offered to pay for shipping a largely unknown amount of technical (mostly computer-related) books to his repurposed missile sile (!) near Inverness, Scotland.
Early this Fall, I packed up 16 cardboard boxes (designated 0-F, of course :-) and the shippers hauled them off. Dunno when they'll arrive, let alone in what condition, but trying to save them from recycling seemed worth the effort. FYI, the total weight was a bit over a ton.
Meanwhile, my spouse and I gave away and/or packed up the rest of our things and drove ourselves and five cats up to Seattle, WA, USA. Somewhere in a shipping container, there is still a cubic foot or so of historical Unix papers from Jim Joyce; when it surfaces, I'll post again about rehoming it.
-r
Well, it's a very rainy day and since COVID is keeping me home I just
fed my 516-TSS notebooks into the scanner. It's about 17MB of stuff.
Not sure what to do with it since I don't have a place to serve it and
since they're scanned images they're too big to post. Here's the list
of documents; email me if you're wanting something in a hurry while the
archive stuff is figured out. Note that the smell of mildew wasn't
preserved in the scanning process.
516-1-516-DOCUMENTATION.pdf
516-3-DDP-516-PRICE-LIST.pdf
516-4-Disk-Layout.pdf
516-5-System-Table-Formats.pdf
516-6-Segment-Format.pdf
516-8-Disk-Hole-Format.pdf
516-7-DMA-Mnemonics.pdf
516-9-Addresses.pdf
516-10-11-12-Ring-Formats.pdf
516-12-Specifications-For-The-Node-Modem-Interface.pdf
516-13-Trac-Character-Strings.pdf
516-14-GMAP-Assembler-for-the-Multi-Programmed-516.pdf
516-15-A-Suggested-Graphic-Display-with-Keyboard-for-Graphic-Terminals.pdf
516-16-516-Assembler-And-Post-Processor-For-Unsegmented-Programs.pdf
516-18-Format-For-Ring-Interrupt.pdf
516-19-Thread-Save-Blocks.pdf
516-20-Card-Reader-Bootstrap-and-Programs.pdf
516-21-Octal-Package.pdf
516-22-A-Repeater-For-The-Node-Modem.pdf
516-23-CLEAR-CORE-CARD.pdf
516-24-SOROBAN-CARD-READER-TEST-PROGRAM.pdf
516-25-IO-Table.pdf
516-26-Disk-DMA-Queue.pdf
516-27-GE-Disc-Files-For-516-Programming.pdf
516-27-Thread-Table.pdf
516-28-IO-Ring_Device-Codes.pdf
516-29-Five-Bit-Character-Codes.pdf
516-30-Text-Editor.pdf
516-31-Relocatable-Segment-Octal-Package.pdf
516-32-ASCII-Character-Mnemonics.pdf
516-34-Display-List-For-Glance.pdf
516-35-Internal-Megacycle-Clock.pdf
516-36-Node-Modem-Interface-For-Computer-Terminals.pdf
516-38-P8SYS.pdf
516-39-Resource-Monitor-Meters.pdf
516-40-SNAP-Time-Sharing-Calculator.pdf
516-41-516-Segment-Assembler.pdf
516-42-Memory-Service-Unit-Format.pdf
516-43-GEBKUP-and-FLOAD.pdf
516-44-FSNAP-Floating-Point-Time-Sharing-Calculator.pdf
516-45-516-316-Assembler-and-Binder.pdf
516-46-CALC-A-Desk-Calculator-Program.pdf
516-47-Remote-Data-Plotting.pdf
516-48-CODING-FOR-GLANCE-G-Graphics.pdf
516-49-516-Segment-Assembler.pdf
516-50-Use-Of-The-516-Segment-Assemblers-Macros-In-Application-Programs.pdf
516-51-FSNAP-Designers-Guide.pdf
516-51-FSNAP-Users-Guide.pdf
516-52-DESK-A-Desk-Calculator.pdf
516-53-FSEOF-Flag-End-Of-File.pdf
516-54-Context-Editing.pdf
516-55-One-Card-Core-Save-Program.pdf
516-56-PRIME-An-Integer-Factoring-Program.pdf
516-57-Format-For-The-516-Node-T-I-U-Spider-Interface.pdf
516-59-Calling-Procedures-For-Math-Routines.pdf
516-59-INITIALIZATION-OF-THE-516-TSS-SYSTEM.pdf
516-60-SORT-SUBR-FOR-SEGMENTED-PROGRAMS.pdf
516-61-516-TSS-SYSTEM-BOLTED-IN-CORE-SUBROUTINES.pdf
516-63-Display-Controller-Glance-G.pdf
516-65-SOME-DIGITAL-FILTER-APPLICATION-PROGRAMS.pdf
516-66-TSS-516-GE-Communication.pdf
516-67-Node-Format-For-PDP-11.pdf
516-68-DFILE-N-A-Program-for-TSS-516.pdf
516-69-GLANCE-G-COMMUNICATION-FORMAT-TSS-516-TO-SCOPE.pdf
516-70-Routines-to-Perform-Character-String-IO-in-a-FSNAP-Program.pdf
516-71-FSNAP-Debugging-Aids.pdf
516-72-Node-Test.pdf
516-73-Node-IO-Software.pdf
516-75-Display-Text-Editor-DTE.pdf
516-76-LOCAL-DATA-PLOTTING.pdf
516-77-GLANCE-PLOTTING-ROUTINES-GPLOT-GLANCE-CHRGEN.pdf
516-77-V2-GLANCE-PLOTTING-ROUTINES-GPLOT-GLANCE-CHRGEN.pdf
516-78-DUMP.pdf
516-79-New-File-Features-in-FSNAP.pdf
516-81-OPTION-CHANGING-IN-GPLOT.pdf
516-86-MODIFICATIONS-TO-201-DATAPHONE-SOFTWARE.pdf
DDP-516-PROGRAMMERS-REFERENCE-CARD.pdf
DDP-516-Instruction-Set-Summary.pdf
Index.pdf
README
> From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o"
> was there anything that had similar functionality which pre-dated Bill
> Joy and termcap in late 70's?
Is your question purely in Unix, or more general?
If the latter, there's the terminal-independent support of video terminals in
ITS; that dates to the mid-1970's (i.e. circa V5 or so). User programs output
device-independent display control codes (I have this memory that they were
called P-Codes, but that could be my memory failing), and the OS translated
them to the appropriate screen-control characters.
One additional hack was that the number of terminal types supported in the OS
was limited; there was however a protocol called SUPDUP which sent (basically)
those device-independent codes over a remote login (originally over NCP) frm
the server machine to the client. The User SUPDUP client supported a lot more
terminal types; so people with odd-ball terminals used to log in, SUPDUP
_back_ to their machine, and away they went.
Noel
Hello All,
I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new replies or
insight. How did package management start? Were sites keeping track of
packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god intended)
somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without significant
announcement? At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to have a
central way to track additional software"?
I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the '80s. What
was the mechanism before that?
-Henry
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 12:28 PM Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs(a)netbsd.org> wrote:
> The Honeywell DDP-516 was the computer (running specialized software
> written by Bolt, Bernanek & Newman (BBN)) which was the initial model of
> the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMP).
The IMPs had a lot of custom interface hardware; sui generis serial
interlocked host interfaces (so-called 1822), and also the high-speed modem
interfaces. I think there was also a watchdog time, IIRC (this is all from
memory, but the ARPANET papers from JCC cover it all).
Noel
These are in Warren's hands now and he'll let us know where their permanent
home ends up being. Since these are pretty much uncirculated unlike the UNIX
documents I wrote a README to go along with them which Heinz reviewed so it's
the best that two aging sets of memories can do. Here it is:
- - -
516-TSS is a little-known but groundbreaking and influential operating system
that was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories. I came across this system
because Carl Christensen and later Heinz Lycklama were major contributors to
it, and they were also advisors for the Bell Labs Explorer Scout Post at
Murray Hill. I was a member of that post which allowed us to play with
computers on Monday evenings, and 516-TSS was what most of us used. Through
a series of amazingly lucky events, I ended up working as a summer student
for Carl and Heinz and got to contribute to the system. Long before the term
"code spelunking" was coined Carl and Heinz taught us both code and spelunking.
This is not a complete set of 516-TSS documents, it's a couple of notebooks
that I found in a box in the basement. Probably my ancient work-at-home copy.
I don't know enough history to know if it was the first, but 516-TSS was an
early department-level time-sharing system. It was built around a Honeywell
DDP-516. While other time-sharing systems predate 516-TSS, they weren't
systems that one's department could afford. CTSS certainly came earlier,
but it used a monster IBM 7090 mainframe. In round numbers, a 7090 cost
$3,000,000 dollars, a DDP-516 cost $50,000.
516-TSS was also a virtual memory system; again not the first but a rarity
in that era. My recollection is that it used the 516's index register as
the base address register, and there was some complicated mucking around
that a program had to do if it needed to use the index register including
disabling interrupts and eventually restoring the register from .PRESB
(present base address), one of those weird things stuck in my memory from
long ago.
I believe that the system's development predated UNIX although I remember
our department getting a PDP-11/45 running UNIX Version 3 in the summer of
1973. This machine was acquired so that Doug Bayer and Heinz Lycklama could
develop the MERT operating system.
The 516 was a testbed for a lot of novel technologies. It had a local area
network called the ring which was later made to work on PDP-11s including
Ken and Dennis's machine up in the attic of building 2. It was also used
to develop the GLANCE graphics terminals. My recollection is that one of
the main drivers behind getting the ring to work on PDP-11s and UNIX was so
that Ken could get a GLANCE-G terminal for playing chess. Sandy Fraser's
Spider network was developed there. It supported a number of novel
applications including Dick Hause's DTE graphics editor; way ahead of its
time. I remember that one GLANCE terminal was fitted with an array of LEDs
and photodiodes to make an early version of a touch screen.
While it wasn't exactly work related, a number of the people in the department
had purchased property up in Vermont for ski cabins. An important use of the
516-TSS system and GLANCE-G terminals was to figure out survey closures. The
property surveys were ancient, of the "from the big rock to the left of the
tree that's no longer there" sorts of things, so figuring out the actual
property lines was an interesting problem.
The 516 also had a wide area network which consisted of picking up the phone
and calling the computer center. It had a monster GE-635 or maybe 645 left
over from the Multics project. It may have been renamed to be a Honeywell
6070 with Honeywell's acquisition of GE's computer business. The computer
center kept department costs down by hoarding all of the really expensive
peripherals. For example, we didn't have a card punch; that was effectively
done via remote job entry. We didn't have a graphics printer either, so when
I was working on GPLOT I'd submit remote jobs to the computer center for
printing. Matter of fact, I don't think that we even had a printer in our
department; we sent stuff up to the computer center for printing. Although,
in those days many terminals used paper. The 516 console was an ASR-33.
There was also the ability to send jobs to the computer center and have it
call back with results. This early approach to a WAN showed up as the tss
command in UNIX.
One of the missions of the department was the development of an all-digital
telephone exchange which is why some of the documents describe programs that
assist with digital filter design. Both Jim Kaiser and Hal Alles were in the
department. One of the side-effects of all this was Hal figuring out how to
use the filter hardware connected to a LSI-11/03 to make sound, followed by
Dave Hagelbarger building a very interesting keyboard for it, culminating in
a visit by Stevie Wonder trailed by a large number of screaming secretaries.
No sexism intended, it was a different world back then. The LSI-11 was one
of the motivations for Heinz to create the LSX operating system.
My recollection is that on Dave's keyboard each key was an antenna, and that
there was strip of ribbon cable underneath where each wire was driven by a
different bit on a binary counter. This allowed the position of each key to
be determined which I think was way ahead of its time. I don't think that
any commercially available keyboards did this at the time, they were all just
on/off. Dave also designed the GLANCE keyboard which spoiled me for life.
I don't remember how he did it, but the keys had a really good feel where once
they got pushed past a certain point they snapped down. I do recall that there
was a small solenoid mounted on the circuit board so that the keys gave a
satisfying click that you could feel in your fingers. Another of Dave's gizmos
was the chess board that he made for Ken. My recollection is that there was a
tuned circuit in the base of each chess piece and an antenna grid in the board
so that the PDP-11 could read the position of each piece.
Some of the success of the 516 system was that other departments used it. I
spent some time working an a 516-based integrated circuit test system where
the test equipment stations were on the ring. Seems really dumb now, it's hard
to believe that there was a time in which a computer cost more than a wafer
stepper.
In addition to his work on 516-TSS, Carl Christensen was one of the people who
interviewed Ken Thompson for a job at the labs and gave a thumbs up.
The 516-TSS documents don't have author names, just initials. Here's who they
are to the best of my recollection.
ADH Dick Hause
CC Carl Christensen
DJB Doug Bayer
DRW Dave Weller
EPR ?
HL Heinz Lycklama
JCS John Schwartzwelder
JES Jon Steinhart
JFK Jim Kaiser
JHC Joe Condon
JVC John Camlet
LIS ?
MAS ?
RFG Rudy Garcia
There is one mysterious document in the collection about a "memory service unit".
I had this filed under "zapper". To the best of my recollection it was the PROM
programmer that we used to burn the microcode PROMs for the GLANCE terminals.
Jon Steinhart, 11/20/2020
While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a
mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original
UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977. It was renamed to ;login:
in 1977 and has continued publication to this day. The envelope also
contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978).
I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here:
http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/
These have not been OCR'd, and many of the pages were rotated by 90
degrees in the original publication, to fit two pages of typewritten
correspondence (or recipient address lists) into one page of newsletter.
Still, in a quick web search I was unable to find copies of these
anywhere else, so I invested a few hours to scan them in and post them
for historical interest. As an example, Sixth Edition (v6) UNIX was
announced in issue number 1.
These are all free to publish nowadays. USENIX was one of the first
technical organizations to establish an Open Access policy for its
publications, a step which distinguishes them from ACM and many academic
publishers who favor revenue for themselves over the progress of
science. (I voted for this policy decades ago when I was a USENIX board
member.) This page, for example, says:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/schwarz
"USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our
events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once
the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted
after the event are also free and open to everyone."
The ;login: archives at USENIX.org are complete from October 1997 to today:
https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
Also, most but not all issues of ;login: from 1983 to 1997 have been
scanned by USENIX and uploaded to the Internet Archive here:
https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?&sort=date
The USENIX Association apparently has paper copies of the stuff I
scanned in today, but they are still trying to locate ;login: issues
from 1979 and parts of 1980 and 1981. In addition, they are backlogged
on scanning in their old materials (including copies of ;login: between
1978/09 and 1983/02). If you have old copies of ;login: that you don't
see visible in these places, please scan them, or offer them to USENIX.
Also, if you have old proceedings of USENIX conferences, there are still
three that the USENIX staff do not have any copy of:
XFree86 Technical Conference
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/xfree86/
2001-11-08
5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als01/tech.h…
2001-11-08
WORLDS '04
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/worlds04/tech/
2004-12-05
If you have any of these three, please let <info(a)usenix.org> know. They
also lack about twenty more for which they have posted the academic
papers, but don't have the covers or front-matter, so if you have other
proceedings from between 1989 and 2004 that you'd be willing to part
with or scan, also let them know. Thanks!
John
A couple of my friends from UC Berkeley were musing on another email
thread. The question from one of them came up: *"I'm teaching the
undergrad OS course this semester ... Mention where ~ comes."*
This comment begets a discussion among the 4 of us at where it showed up in
the UNIX heritage and it if was taken from somewhere else.
Using the tilde character as a short cut for $HOME was purely a userspace
convention and not part of the nami() kernel routine when it came into
being. We know that it was supported by Mike Lesk in UUCP and by Bill Joy
in cshell. The former was first widely released as part of Seventh Edition
but was working on V6 before that inside of BTL. Joy's cshell came out as
part of 2BSD (which was V7 based), but he had released "ashell" before that
and included it in the original BSD (*a.k.a.* 1BSD) which was for V6 [what
I don't remember is if it supported the convention and I can not easily un-
ar(1) the cont.a files in the 1BSD tar image in Warren's archives.
In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked it
up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, which were
popular at UCB [*i.e.* the reason hjkl are the movement keys on vi is the
were embossed on the top of those keys on the ADM3A]. It also was noted
that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its keyboard. But Lesk definitely needed
something to represent a remote user's home directory because each system
was different, so he was forced to use something.
It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on as
students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have been BTL
to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether.
So two questions for this august body are:
1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX?
2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as
CTSS, TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?
Fun read and it's totally wild that people's emotional comfort with *text*
drives a lot of their love or hate of unix.
http://theody.net/elements.html
Tyler
Ken's (?) Plan 9 assemblers are well known for their idiosyncratic
syntax, placing identical behaviour across platforms over a sense
of resemblance to people used to normal assemblers. While I am
aware of Rob's talk [1] on the basic design ideas and have read both
the Plan 9 [2] and Go [3] assembler manuals, many aspects of the
design (such as the strange way to specify static data) are
unclear and seem poorly documented.
Is there some document or other piece of information I can read on
the history of these assemblers? Or maybe someone recalls more bits
about these details?
Yours,
Robert Clausecker
[1]: https://talks.golang.org/2016/asm.slide
[2]: https://9p.io/sys/doc/asm.html
[3]: https://golang.org/doc/asm
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This memory just came back to me. There was a UNIX disribution
(PWB/UNIX?) that had a program called 1.
It printed tis quaint bit of propaganda.
One Bell System. It works.
This was fine until one day I’m at work in a big bull pen computer room
when Bernie, one of my co-workers, shouts.
“What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor?”
My reaction is, “Well, it’s all Bell System crud.” I walk over to his
terminal and find he is typing 1 repeatedly at the shell prompt and
getting the above message. (This was back in the old /bin/ed days where
1 got you to the top of the file). I had to point out he wasn’t in
the editor.
Later that day, the program was changed to say:
You’re not in the editor, Bernie.
This I think made it into one of the BRL releases and occassionally got
inquiries as to who Bernie is.
Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John
Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System".
I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of
scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for
some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't
been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on
alt.folklore.computers in 1994. But now it seems that the "book" had
been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was
the license revoked. Does anybody have any insights? What
restrictions were there on its distribution? What was the format?
Was it a real book, or just bound notes?
Greg
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There also exists a latter-day AT&T version of the Lions
book. White cover with deathstar logo; standard US letter-
sized paper, perfect-bound along the short edge. Two
volumes: one for the source code, one for the commentary.
I have a copy, and I bet Andrew does too: as I remember,
he got a handful of them from Judy Macor (who used to
handle licensing requests--I remember speaking to her
on the phone once in my pre-Labs days) when she was
clearing old stuff out of her office, and I nabbed one.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
