TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

47 participants
6503 discussions

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Heinz Lycklama > The DLV-11 supported only one serial port in 1975. Other DEC interface > devices may have been added to the Qbus after the mid 1970's. The DLV11-J: http://gunkies.org/wiki/DLV11-J_asynchronous_serial_line_interface is basically 4 DLV11's rolled into a single dual-width card; that's definitely an option for Mini-Unix (which apparently supports up to 4 simultaneous users). They are program compatible with the DHV11, so the driver should 'just work'. The boards are readily available on eBait; 'glitchworks' (of this parish) sells replacement cables (quite good, I have several). Another option for serial lines on QBUS machines are DZ11 and DH11 versions for QBUS. (The DZ11 is interrupt-per-character on output; the DH11 is DMA on output.) There are two generations of each: the DZV11 (quad-width) and DZQ11 (dual-width), and DHV11 (quad) and DHQ11 (dual). I think they are pretty much program compatible with their UNIBUS brethren, and should be easy to get running. The boards are easy to find on eBait, the breakout panels are somewhat rarer (although there sre some DH ohes up at the moment). Noel

4 years, 8 months

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> They are program compatible with the DHV11 Argh; typo. 'DLV11'. Noel

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

by norman＠oclsc.org

Brantley Coile: The fact that a pointer of zero generates a hardware trap is not defined in the language, whereas a 0 is is defined to be a null pointer. ===== The language doesn't require that dereferencing a null pointer cause a trap, either. There's no way to guarantee that behaviour in all environments unless every pointer dereference must include instructions to check for the null-pointer value, because C can run in environments in which any pointer value might be a valid address. On modern machines it's conventional for the null-pointer value in C, what you get when you assign 0 to a pointer, to be all-zeroes; and for operating systems to arrange that that address is unmapped. But that wasn't always so (on the PDP-7 there was no memory map; on the PDP-11 once memory-mapping was added, address space was too dear to throw away an eighth of it just to block null-pointer dereferencing), and it may still not be (consider a C program on an embedded system running without a memory map). It's good that modern systems usually whap you in the head if you deference a null pointer, but it's not required, and those who rely on it are as foolish as those who used to rely on the accident that the byte at address 0 on early VAX UNIX was a zero. Norman Wilson p&p6 and f(

4 years, 8 months

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> Thanks so much for your reply. That's what we're here for... :-) > I have an 11/23+ does that make a difference? No. The KDF11-B of the 23+: http://gunkies.org/wiki/KDF11-B_CPU is the same CPU as all the other KDF11 CPUs; it just has a couple of extra peripherals on the board (2 asyn serial lines, and some PROMs, IIRC). > From the manual it seems to have an MMU Like all KDF11 CPUs, it has a socket for an MMU chip, but the chip may or may not be there (I don't know if it was standard on the 23+; and in any event, it may have been pulled - the CPU will work without it). The main CPU is a DIP carrier which holds two chips; the optional KTF11-A MMU has one (see the image, above); the optional KEF11-A FPU is also a carrier with two chips. (The KDF11-B can also hold the large 6-chip carrier of the optional KEF11-B CIS chip - a rara avid indeed, if you'relucky enough to have it.) If yours doesn't have the MMU chip, you're probably SOL; those are very rare. KEF11-A FPU chips are avilable on eBay for modest amounts. > I'm not sure if it's split I/D. None of the KDF11 CPUs support splite I/D. Noel

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix on DEC AlphaServer 4000

by Rudi Blom

You're a bit harsh on the developers but I think in most cases it was the marketing/finance part of companies which decided on such mundane matters as licensing. My 2-1/2 cents. Cheers, uncle rubl >Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2020 12:42:39 -0700 >From: John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> >To: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> >Cc: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe(a)math.utah.edu>, tuhs > <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> >Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix on DEC AlphaServer 4000 >Message-ID: <32401.1600544559(a)hop.toad.com> ... snip ... >License managers now count as DRM, under the Digital Millennium >Copyright Act (though no such laws had been passed when the license >managers were first created). So: is it worth breaking the law in many >countries, to maintain a historical curiosity? >Personally, I would throw DRM-encrusted software, and the hardware that >is dependent on it, into the dustbin of history. Its creators had fair. >warning that they were making their products unusable after they stopped >caring to maintain them. They didn't care about their place in history, >nor about their users. They did it anyway, for short-term profit and to >harass those people foolish enough to be their customers. Their memes >should not be passed to future generations. As Sir Walter Scott >suggested in another context, they "doubly dying, shall go down, to the. >vile dust, from whence [they] sprung, unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung". John

4 years, 8 months

Unix on DEC AlphaServer 4000

by Paul Riley

I have an opportunity to buy a DEC AlphaServer. Is there a version of Unix which will run on this? Paul *Paul Riley*

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] revision history of troff -me macro set?

by saint.snit＠gmail.com

Thanks, everyone, for the very helpful replies. Those links are exactly what I was looking for.

4 years, 8 months

Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?

by Chris Hanson

I have an MVME121 that I’d like to run some stuff on. I’m planning what I’ll need to do to port MINIX 1.5 but since this has a 68451 segmented MMU, I’d like to actually make use of it. Have any historical sources been published for UNIX on the various 68010 + 68451 systems from the early-mid 1980s? I’m curious how they used segmented MMUs. I figure at minimum I could have several segments set up to enforce protections and a stable per-process address space, but it’d be good to have an example. — Chris

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Historical sources for 68010 + 68451 systems?

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Chris Hanson asks about historical sources for Unix on the Motorola 68K processor. >From my bibliography at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/unix.bib I find these Motorola contributions The Dynamics of a Semi-Large Software Project with Specific Reference to a UNIX System Port USENIX Conference Proceedings, Summer, 1984. Salt Lake City, UT pp. 332--342 [I think that I have a printed copy in my campus office, but won't be there for another 10 days or so.] Latent Source Bugs and UNIX System Portability Proceedings: USENIX Association Winter Conference, January 23--25, 1985, Dallas, Texas, USA pp. 125--130 Co-Resident Operating System: UNIX and Real-Time Distributed Processing Fifth Real-Time Software and Operating Systems Workshop Proceedings, May 12--13, 1988. Washington, DC pp 47--53 Co-Resident Operating System: UNIX and Real-Time Distributed Processing [Fifth RTOS... as above] pp. 47--53 A Faster fsck for BSD UNIX Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference: January 30--February 3, 1989, San Diego, California, USA pp. 173--185 Also take a look at the 200 entries in http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/minix.bib I have made attempts to install Debian 10 on the MC68K on QEMU from an ISO image at https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2020-05-30/ Source code is, of course, available, so it could be useful resource in porting Minix to the MC68K. However, while I can get the ISO image to boot, I get grub update failures and when I try run the installer, I get "No PCI buses available", For now, I have given up on that platform until new ideas for workarounds appear. I have similar emulated VMs for ARM64, RISC-V64, PowerPC (big and little endian), and IBM System 390x, all of which run nicely, have up-to-date O/Ses and binary software package repositories, and are used for routine software build testing. My attempts for other VMs for HPPA, Alpha, and SPARC64 CPUs have failed with install or network problems. Debian ISO images are available for IA-64, but QEMU has no support for the Itanium CPU family. We have a single phyical IA-64 system that runs fine, but is currently powered off due to machine-room air-conditioning issues that will be resolved in a couple of months. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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, 8 months

Plan 9 published manuals

by Al Kossow

https://www.ebay.com/itm/383710751719 how rare are these? $150 seems like a lot of money to spend on them

4 years, 8 months

revision history of troff -me macro set?

by saint.snit＠gmail.com

Hi, Is there a repository of historical versions of Eric Allman's -me macro set for troff? (For some context: the macro set has been forked to operate with two modern troff implementations: GNU groff and Heirloom troff. According to the header blocks of the respective files, groff's -me macros are forked from version 2.31 of Allman's, and Heirloom's from version 2.14. For help in debugging -me problems in these troff implementations, I'm trying to locate at least these versions of the -me package as they existed before forking. I posted this query on the troff email list, but no one there knew the answer, and one person suggested I ask here.) Thanks for any pointers.

4 years, 8 months

UNESCO call for a study on the future institutional structure for Software Heritage (fwd)

by Robert Brockway

FYI. UNESCO call for a study on the future institutional structure for Software Heritage. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Dear all, I do hope you are all safe, and could take some time off to recharge the batteries that these hectic times have drained quite a bit. Some of you know already Software Heritage (https://www.softwareheritage.org) it is a nonprofit initiative, started by Inria and supported by UNESCO, whose mission is to ensure that software source code, as part of the common heritage of humankind, is preserved over time and made available to all, building, maintaining and developing a universal source code archive, providing persistent identifiers for all software artifacts, and creating the largest shared knowledge base about software artifacts ever built. This is a long term undertaking, and UNESCO has just published a call for advice, via a small feasibility study providing options for establishing the future independent, non profit, multi-stakeholder organization that will host Software Heritage for the long run. As Software Heritage is a shared infrastructure that will support use cases of interest to the members of this list, I take the liberty to bring this call to your attention, and I'd be very grateful if you could also forward it to whomever you believe could be interested in answering. Detailed information on the expected advice and procedures to answer the call is online at: https://careers.unesco.org/job/Paris-Consultant-on-Software-Heritage-CIMID/… The deadline for the answer is September 26th. Thank you for your help Roberto Di Cosmo (roberto(a)dicosmo.org) _______________________________________________ foundations mailing list foundations(a)lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] The most surprising Unix programs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Guertin > I teach math in college ... Sometimes, during an exam, a student who > forgot to bring their calculator will ask if they can borrow mine I > always say "sure, but you'll regret it" and hand them the calculator > After wasting one or two minutes, they give it back Maybe I'm being clueless/over-asking, but to me it's appalling that any college student (at least all who have _any_ math requirement at all; not sure how many that is) doesn't know how an RPN calculator works. It's not exactly rocket science, and any reasonably intelligent high-schooler should get it extremely quickly; just tell them it's just a representational thing, number number operator instead of number operator number. I know it's not a key intellectual skill, but it does seem to me to be part of comon intellectual heritage that everyone should know, like musical scales or poetry rhyming. Have you ever considered taking two minutes (literally!) to cover it briefly, just 'someone tried to borrow my RPN calculator, here's the basic idea of how they work'? Noel

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Dennis Ritchie's ACM Turing Award lecture paper in Communications of the ACM 27(8) 758--760 (August 1984), doi:10.1145/358198.358207 was reprinted in UNIX Review 3(1) 28, 118--120, 122, (January 1985) [no DOI or URL yet found], and more recently, in Resonance 17(8) 810--816 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0091-y. There are two other UNIX-related papers in that issue of Resonance: Pramod Chandra P. Bhatt UNIX: Genesis and design features Resonance 17(8) 727--747 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0084-x K. Bhaskar C --- Past, present, and future --- A perspective Resonance 17(8) 748--758 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0085-9 I do not have access to that journal's archives from my campus library, so I have not seen the articles. In his paper, Dennis Ritchie referred to another UNIX article that I did manage to track down and record in unix.bib: Donald Arthur Norman The Truth about UNIX Datamation 27(12) 139--150 (November 1981) https://tinyurl.com/yyselmxq The original URL is 200+ characters long, and is a freely-downloadable PDF of a reprint in AUUGN volume IV number I. The PDF file has searchable text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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, 8 months

A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Warren Toomey

"Reflections on Software Research" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1283920.1283939?download=true Happy birthday, Dennis! Warren

4 years, 8 months

Whence did "XXX" come about?

by Dave Horsfall

For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more work" or "look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself. Whence did it come about? I think I saw it as early as PWB, but can't be sure. -- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX"

4 years, 8 months

Archeology Today - 516-TSS notebooks unearthed in old Wyse terminal box

by Jon Steinhart

Score! I'm not planning to scan all of these in unless someone really cares and has a better scanner than I do. I'm going to prioritize the following: 516-10, -11, -18 Ring Formats 516-12 Specifications for the Node Modem Interface 516-22 A Repeater for the Node Modem 516-28 I/O Ring Device Codes 516-36 Node Modem Interface for Computer Terminals 516-72 Node Test 516-73 Node I/O Software 516-57 Format for the 516 Node - TIU Spider Interface 516-67 Node Format for PDP-11 Jon

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] H.J. Lu Bootable Root & Base System disks

by norman＠oclsc.org

In my humble-but-correct opinion*, Linux and its origins fit into the general topic of UNIX history just as well as those of Research UNIX or BSD or SVr4.2.2.2.2.2.2.2 or SunOS or IRIX or Ultrix or Tru64-compaqted-HPSauce or whatever. It all stems from the same roots, despite the protestations of purists from all sides. Warren gets final say, of course, but to encourage him I will say: Ploooogie! Norman Wilson Toronto ON * One of Peter Weinberger's sayings that I still enjoy overusing.

4 years, 8 months

Unix tools to aid in the production of Internet RFCs?

by Dan Cross

Honestly, I'm not quite sure if this is a TUHS, COFF, or IH question. But since my background with respect to such things is largely Unix centric, I thought I'd ask in that context, hence asking on TUHS. I assume some of the regulars on this list have authored RFCs (of the IETF etc variety). The RFC format seems fairly well fixed: table of contents, fixed number of lines per page, page numbers and dates in the footer, and so forth. The format is sufficiently complex that it seems like some tooling could be usefully employed to aid in producing these documents. So I'm curious: what tools did people use to produce those documents? Perhaps `nroff` with custom macros or something? - Dan C.

4 years, 8 months

Quick video: what's the oldest BSD distro

by Warner Losh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww60o940kEk You may be surprised :) Warner P.S. Hope this is relevant enough to share here. Also, if I botched anything I've not yet mentioned in the comments, please let me know...

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] bare m4 (was BTL summmer employees)

by Doug McIlroy

A modestly corrected and improved version of my bare-m4 program, which quickly builds from nothing to arithmetic on binary numbers using no builtins other than `define'. is posted at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/barem4.txt. (.txt because browsers balk at .m4) Doug

4 years, 8 months

early BIND

by Tony Finch

Another question at the intersection of the Internet-History and TUHS lists... I was wondering about the early history of BIND. I started off wondering about the relative ages of JEEVES (the original PDP10 DNS server) and BIND. Judging by the dates on RFCs 881 - 883, the DARPA contract commissioning BIND, and the Berkeley tech reports, it seems there wasn't much time when the DNS was without BIND. But I was struck by the resolver API set out on page 8 of Berkeley tech report UCB/CSD-84-182: it looks nothing like the familiar API that ended up in 4.3BSD. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1984/5957.html https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/src/lib/libc/net/n… So I'm wondering if there's anything out there recording the history between the 1984 tech reports and the 4.3BSD release in 1986. (It's also noteworthy that early BIND supported incremental DNS updates and zone transfers, which didn't reappear in standard form until RFC 2136 (1997) and RFC 1995 (1996)...) Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ public services of the highest quality

4 years, 8 months

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

by Paul Ruizendaal

Doug, “In fact Dennis's compiler did not use AID instructions for that purpose.” Whilst local variables are indeed accessed as an offset from the base pointer, I’m not sure that the above statement is correct. In the V6 compiler (-sp) was certainly used to push arguments to the stack, and when the register allocation overflowed, the interim results were pushed to the stack as well with (-sp). See c10.c, the case CALL in rcexpr(), the function comarg() and sptab (which is right at the end of table.s) Links: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/c/c10.c https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/c/table.s For interim result pushing/popping I refer to the FS and SS macro’s. Dennis discusses these in his “A tour of the C compiler” paper. https://www.jslite.net/cgi-bin/9995/doc/tip/doc/old-ctour.pdf Of course this is all implementational detail, not a core design aspect - as Richard Miller showed in his port to the Interdata architecture (including a port of the Ritchie C compiler). Maybe the sentence should have read: "In fact Dennis's compiler did not rely on having AID instructions for that purpose." Paul @Warren: at moments like these I really like having the line highlight feature that we discussed before Summer.

4 years, 9 months

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Cowan > That's always true on the PDP-11 and Vax ... because the processor > architecture (which has pre-increment and post-decrement instructions, > but not their counterparts) After Doug's message, I carefull re-read this, and I'm not sure it's correct? The PDP-11 has pre-decrement and post-increment, not the other way around (as above) - unless I'm misunderstanding what you meant by those terms? That's why: *p++ = 0; turns (if p is in R2) into CLR (R2)+ R2 is used, and then incremented after it has been used. Noel

4 years, 9 months

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

by Doug McIlroy

> That's always true on the PDP-11 and Vax, no matter what the OS, > because the processor architecture (which has pre-increment and > post-decrement instructions, but not their counterparts) makes > anything but a downward-growing stack unmanageable. I hadn't heard this urban legend before. A stack is certainly manageable without auto-increment/decrement (AID) instructions. In fact Dennis's compiler did not use AID instructions for that purpose. AID instructions are nice for a LIFO stack, in which a stacked item disappears as soon as it's used--as do intermediate results in expression evaluation. But when the stack contains local variables that are accessed multiple times, the accesses are offset from the stack pointer. If AID instructions set the pointer, then the offset of a particular local varies throughout the code. The compiler can cope with that (I once wrote a compiler that did so), but a debugger will have a devil of a time doing a backtrace when the offset of the return address in each stack frame depends on the location counter. AID instructions are fine for sequentially accessing arrays, and in principle Ken's ++ and -- operators can exploit them. Yet idiomatic C typically wants post-increment and pre-decrement instructions--the opposite of what DEC offered. Examples: char a[N], b[N]; char *ap = a; char *bp = b; int i; for(i=0; i<N; i++) *ap++ = *bp++; int a[N], b[N]; int i = N; while(--i >= 0) a[i] = b[i]; Doug

4 years, 9 months

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TUHS