TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

12 participants
6534 discussions

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

On 1/22/20, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > Pretty interesting machine, if you study its instruction set, BTW; with no > stack, subroutines are 'interesting'. Another machine family like that was the CDC 6x00 and 7x00 machines of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I worked on a CDC 6400 for a few years. A call was done by storing the return address in the first word of the called routine, and jumping to its second word. The return was done with an indirect jump through the first word. That was fine for Fortran, which at the time had no concept of recursion. However, Urs Ammann implemented a compiler for Niklaus Wirth's Pascal language on a CDC 6400 (or 6600) in Zurich, and he had to simulate a stack. See On Code Generation in a PASCAL Compiler Software --- Practice and Experience 7(3) 391--423 May/June 1977 https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380070311 I have read that article in the past, but don't have download access from our academic library to get a copy to refresh my memory. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

5 years, 5 months

More oldies but goodies available if anyone wants them

by Jon Steinhart

Kind of scary what's in my basement. For those of you building UNIX workstations in the early days, I have a big fat notebook full of Weitek floating point chip specs, many of which are marked as preliminary. Also a set of CORBA specs. Again, low-hanging fruit that's getting recycled unless anyone has a use for them. In the not completely sure that I want to part with them yet for some strange reason, I have a set of SunOS manuals. Also, if anyone collects old hardware I have a SparcStation 20 with a slightly modified SunOS sitting around and an Ultra 60 Solaris box. Jon

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Spider (and back to quiz)

by Paul Ruizendaal

There is more in that issue of BSTJ, and indeed it seems this was a precursor. https://ia801905.us.archive.org/25/items/bstj51-6-1147/bstj51-6-1147_text.p… https://ia801603.us.archive.org/0/items/bstj51-6-1167/bstj51-6-1167_text.pdf The first paper makes mention of repeaters starting to self oscillate, and a redesign being underway. There is a possibility that a Unix PDP11 was connected to this earlier network prior to Spider existing, in which case the accepted quiz answer would be wrong. >> Ugh. Memory lane has a lot of potholes. This was a really long time ago. > > Many thanks for that post - really interesting! > > I had to look up "Pierce Network", and found it described in the Bell Journal: > https://ia801903.us.archive.org/31/items/bstj51-6-1133/bstj51-6-1133_text.p… > > In my reading the Spider network is a type of Pierce network. > > However, the network that you remember is indeed most likely different from Spider: > - it was coax based, whereas the Spider line was a twisted pair > - there was more than one, whereas Spider only ever had one (operational) loop > > Condon and Weller are acknowledged in the report about Spider as having done many of its hardware details. The report discusses learnings from the project and having to tune repeaters is not among them (but another operational issue with its 'line access modules’ is discussed). > > All in all, maybe these coax loops were pre-cursors to the Spider network, without a switch on the loop (“C” nodes in the Pierce paper). It makes sense to first try out the electrical and line data protocol before starting work on higher level functions. > > I have no idea what a GLANCE G is...

5 years, 5 months

Another oldie but goodie available if anyone wants it [ DECNET ]

by Jon Steinhart

Was looking for my DomainOS manuals and came across a fat notebook containing the DECNET Phase III spec. Anyone want it? Not anything that I need to keep and low-hanging fruit on the decluttering list. Jon

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Spider

by Paul Ruizendaal

> I have vague memories here that maybe Heinz can help with if his are any better. > I believe that Sandy played a part in "the loop" or "the ring" or whatever it > was called that we had connecting our Honeywell 516 to peripherals. I do > remember the 74S00 repeaters because of the amount of time that Dave Weller > spent tuning them when the error rate got high. Also, being a loop, Joe > Condon used to pull his connectors out of the wall whenever people weren't > showing up to a meeting on time. I don't know whether our network was a > forerunner to the spider network. It most likely was Spider - it became operational in 1972. The vist report that I linked to earlier also says: "The current system contains just one loop with the switching computer (TEMPO I), four PDP-11/45 computers, two Honeywell 516 computers, two DDP 224 computers, and one each of Honeywell 6070, PDP-8 and PDP-11/20. In fact many of these are connected in turn to other items of digital equipment.” It would be interesting to know more about the H516’s and Spider, any other recollections?

5 years, 5 months

Spider [was: Unix quix]

by Paul Ruizendaal

I can answer some of the below, as I was looking into that a few years ago. > 81. Q: What was the first Unix network? > A: spider > You thought it was Datakit, didn't you? But Sandy Fraser had an earlier > project. > > When did Alexander G Fraser's spider cell network happen? For that matter, > when did Datakit happen? I can't find references to either start date on > line (nor anything on spider except for references to it in Dr Fraser's > bio). I can find references to Datakit in 1978 or so. Spider was designed between 1969 and 1974 - the final lab report (#23) dates from December 1974. It was based around a serial loop running at T1 signalling speed (~1.5Mhz). Here is a video recorded by Dr. Fraser about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojRtJ1U6Qzw (first half is about Spider, second half about Datakit). It connected to its hosts via a (discrete TTL-based) microcontroller or “TIU” and seems to have been connected almost immediately to Unix systems: the oldest driver I have been able to locate is in the V4 tree (https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/nsys/dmr/tdir/tiu.c) It used a DMA-based parallel interface into the PDP11. As such, it seems to have been much faster than the typical Datakit connection later - but I know too little about Datakit to be sure. There is an interesting visit report from 1975 that discusses some of the stuff that was done with Spider here: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:rq704hx4375/rq704hx4375.pdf Beyond those experiments I think Spider usage was limited to file serving (’nfs’ and ‘ufs’) and printing (’npr’). It would seem logical that it was used for remote login, but I have not found any traces of such usage. Same for email usage. From what little I know, I think that Datakit became operational in a test network in 1979 and as a product in 1982. > I thought the answer was "ARPANET" since we had a NCP on 4th edition Unix > in late 1974 or early 1975 from the University of Illinois dating from that > time (the code in TUHS appears to be based on V6 + a number of patches). “Network Unix” (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc681.html) was written by Steve Holmgren, Gary Grossman and Steve Bunch in the last 3 months of 1974. To my best knowledge they used V5 and migrated to V6 as it came along. I think they were getting regular update tapes, and they implemented their system as a device driver (plus userland support) to be able to keep up with the steady flow of updates. Greg Chesson was also involved with this Arpanet Unix. As far as I can tell, Arpanet Unix saw fairly wide deployment within the Arpanet research community, also as a front end processor for other systems. A few years back I asked on this list why “Network Unix” was not more enthusiastically received by the core Unix development team and (conceptually) integrated into the main code base. I understood the replies as that (i) people were very satisfied with Spider; and (ii) being part of Bell they wanted a networking system that was more compatible with the Bell network, i.e. Datakit. == In my opinion both “Spider Unix” and “Arpanet Unix” threw a very long conceptual shadow. From Spider onwards, the Research systems viewed the network as a device (Spider), that could be multiplexed (V8 streams) or even mounted (Plan9). The Arpa lineage saw the network as a long distance bidirectional pipe, with the actual I/O device hidden from view; this view persists all the way to 4.2BSD and beyond. I often wonder if it was (is?) possible to come up with a design with the conceptual clarity of Plan9, but organised around the “network as a pipe” view instead.

5 years, 5 months

Unix quix

by Rob Pike

I reposted the original Unix quiz, which disappeared when public Google Plus was turned off. Answers will reappear in a few days. https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/unix-quiz.html -rob

5 years, 5 months

"Network Unix" (i.e. Arpanet Unix)

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Because we can't ask Greg sadly, I think the Holmgren is the last around that would know definitively and I've personally lost track of him. Steve Holmgren and the Arpanet Unix team are still around (at least they were 3 years ago). I just remembered that I put some of my notes & findings in a draft wiki that I wanted to develop for TUHS - but I never finished it: http://chiselapp.com/user/pnr/repository/TUHS_wiki/wiki?name=early_networki… The recent find of CSRG report 3 and 4 may be the incentive I needed to complete my notes about 4.1a, 4.1c and 4.2BSD. However, still looking for the actual source tape to 4.1a - the closest I have is its derivative in 2.9BSD (https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net)

5 years, 5 months

Apollo Domain/OS

by Pete Wright

Apologies that this isn't specifically a Unix specific question but I was wondering if anyone had insight in running domain/OS and it's relationship to Plan 9 (assuming there is any). One of my early mentors was a former product person at Apollo in Mass. and was nice enough to tell me all sorts of war stories working there. I had known about Plan9 at the time, and from what he described to me about domain/OS it sounded like there was lots of overlap between the two from a high level design perspective at the least. I've always been keen to understand if domain/OS grew out of former Bell Labs folks, or how it got started. As an aside, he gifted me a whole bunch of marketing collateral from Apollo (from before the HQ acquisition) that i'd be happy to share if there is any historical value in that. At the time I was a video/special effects engineer are was amazed at how beneficial having something like domain/OS or Plan9 would have been for us, it felt we were basically trying to accomplish a lot of the same goals by duct taping a bunch of Irix and Linux systems together. Cheers, -pete -- Pete Wright pete(a)nomadlogic.org @nomadlogicLA

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix on Zilog Z8000?

by Paul Ruizendaal

My memory failed me: the part numbers were Z8001/Z8002 for the original and Z8003/Z8004 for the revised chips (segmented/unsegmented). Hence it is unlikely that the Onyx had any form of demand paging (other than extending the stack in PDP11-like fashion). —— A somewhat comparable machine to the Onyx was the Zilog S8000. It ran “Zeus”, which was also a Unix version: https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/zilog/s8000/ Instead of the MMU described below it used the Zilog segmented MMU chips, 3 of them. These could be used to give a plain 16 bit address space divided in 3 segments, or could be used with the segmented addresses of the Z8001. The approach used by Onyx seems much cleaner to me, and reminiscent of the MMU on a DG Eclipse. I think the original chips were the Z8000 (unsegmented) and the the Z8001 (segmented). These could not abort/restart instructions and were replaced by the Z8002 (unsegmented) and Z8003 (segmented). On these chips one could effectively assert reset during a fault and this would leave the registers in a state where a software routine could roll back the faulted instruction. If the sources to the Onyx Unix survived, it would be interesting to see if it used this capability of the Z8002 and implemented a form demand paging. Last but not least, the Xenix overview I linked earlier (http://seefigure1.com/images/xenix/xenix-timeline.jpg) shows Xenix ports to 4 other Z800 machines: Paradyne, Compucorp, Bleasedale and Kontron; maybe all of these never got to production. > Message: 7 > Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2020 21:32:51 +0000 > From: Derek Fawcus <dfawcus+lists-tuhs(a)employees.org> > To: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> > Subject: [TUHS] Onyx (was Re: Unix on Zilog Z8000?) > Message-ID: <20200121213251.GA25322(a)clarinet.employees.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 01:28:14PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote: >> The Onyx box redated all the 68K and later Intel or other systems. > > That was a fun bit of grubbing around courtesy of a bitsavers mirror > (https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/onyx/) > > It seems they started with a board based upon the non-segmented Z8002 > and only later switched to using the segmented Z8001. In the initial > board, they created their own MMU: > > Page 6 of: https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/onyx/c8002/Onyx_C… > > Memory Management Controller: > > The Memory Management Controller (MMC) enables the C8002 to perform > address translation, memory block protection, and separation of > instruction and data spaces. Sixteen independent map sets are > implemented, with each map set consisting of an instruction map and > a data map. Within each map there are 32 page registers. Each page > register relocates and validates a 2K byte page. The MMC generates > a 20 bit address allowing the C8002 to access up to one Mbyte of > physical memory. > > So I'd guess the MMC was actually programed through I/O instuctions > to io space, and hence preserved the necessary protection domains. > > Cute. I've had a background interest in the Z8000 (triggered by reading > a Z80000 datasheet around 87/88), and always though about using > the segmented rather than unsegmented device. > > The following has a bit more info about the version of System III > ported to their boxes: > > https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/onyx/c8002/UNIX_3… > > DF

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix on Zilog Z8000?

by Paul Ruizendaal

A somewhat comparable machine to the Onyx was the Zilog S8000. It ran “Zeus”, which was also a Unix version: https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/zilog/s8000/ Instead of the MMU described below it used the Zilog segmented MMU chips, 3 of them. These could be used to give a plain 16 bit address space divided in 3 segments, or could be used with the segmented addresses of the Z8001. The approach used by Onyx seems much cleaner to me, and reminiscent of the MMU on a DG Eclipse. I think the original chips were the Z8000 (unsegmented) and the the Z8001 (segmented). These could not abort/restart instructions and were replaced by the Z8002 (unsegmented) and Z8003 (segmented). On these chips one could effectively assert reset during a fault and this would leave the registers in a state where a software routine could roll back the faulted instruction. If the sources to the Onyx Unix survived, it would be interesting to see if it used this capability of the Z8002 and implemented a form demand paging. Last but not least, the Xenix overview I linked earlier (http://seefigure1.com/images/xenix/xenix-timeline.jpg) shows Xenix ports to 4 other Z800 machines: Paradyne, Compucorp, Bleasedale and Kontron; maybe all of these never got to production. > Message: 7 > Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2020 21:32:51 +0000 > From: Derek Fawcus <dfawcus+lists-tuhs(a)employees.org> > To: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> > Subject: [TUHS] Onyx (was Re: Unix on Zilog Z8000?) > Message-ID: <20200121213251.GA25322(a)clarinet.employees.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 01:28:14PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote: >> The Onyx box redated all the 68K and later Intel or other systems. > > That was a fun bit of grubbing around courtesy of a bitsavers mirror > (https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/onyx/) > > It seems they started with a board based upon the non-segmented Z8002 > and only later switched to using the segmented Z8001. In the initial > board, they created their own MMU: > > Page 6 of: https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/onyx/c8002/Onyx_C… > > Memory Management Controller: > > The Memory Management Controller (MMC) enables the C8002 to perform > address translation, memory block protection, and separation of > instruction and data spaces. Sixteen independent map sets are > implemented, with each map set consisting of an instruction map and > a data map. Within each map there are 32 page registers. Each page > register relocates and validates a 2K byte page. The MMC generates > a 20 bit address allowing the C8002 to access up to one Mbyte of > physical memory. > > So I'd guess the MMC was actually programed through I/O instuctions > to io space, and hence preserved the necessary protection domains. > > Cute. I've had a background interest in the Z8000 (triggered by reading > a Z80000 datasheet around 87/88), and always though about using > the segmented rather than unsegmented device. > > The following has a bit more info about the version of System III > ported to their boxes: > > https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/onyx/c8002/UNIX_3… > > DF

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Tech Sq elevator (Was: screen editors) [ really I think efficiency now ]

by Dan Cross

[Resending as this got squashed a few days ago. Jon, sorry for the duplicate. Again.] On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 4:38 PM Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote: > [snip] > So I think that the point that you're trying to make, correct me if I'm > wrong, > is that if lists just knew how long they were you could just ask and that > it > would be more efficient. > What I understood was that, by translating into a lowest-common-denominator format like text, one loses much of the semantic information implicit in a richer representation. In particular, much of the internal knowledge (like type information...) is lost during translation and presentation. Put another way, with text as usually used by the standard suite of Unix tools, type information is implicit, rather than explicit. I took this to be less an issue of efficiency and more of expressiveness. It is, perhaps, important to remember that Unix works so well because of heavy use of convention: to take Doug's example, the total number of commands might be easy to find with `wc` because one assumes each command is presented on a separate line, with no gaudy header or footer information or extraneous explanatory text. This sort of convention, where each logical "record" is a line by itself, is pervasive on Unix systems, but is not guaranteed. In some sense, those representations are fragile: a change in output might break something else downstream in the pipeline, whereas a representation that captures more semantic meaning is more robust in the face of change but, as in Doug's example, often harder to use. The Lisp Machine had all sorts of cool information in the image and a good Lisp hacker familiar with the machine's structures could write programs to extract and present that information. But doing so wasn't trivial in the way that '| wc -l' in response to a casual query is. While that may be true, it sort of assume that this is something so common > that > the extra overhead for line counting should be part of every list. And it > doesn't > address the issue that while maybe you want a line count I may want a > character > count or a count of all lines that begin with the letter A. Limiting this > example > to just line numbers ignores the fact that different people might want > different > information that can't all be predicted in advance and built into every > program. > This I think illustrates an important point: Unix conventions worked well enough in practice that many interesting tasks were not just tractable, but easy and in some cases trivial. Combining programs was easy via pipelines. Harder stuff involving more elaborate data formats was possible, but, well, harder and required more involved programming. By contrast, the Lisp machine could do the hard stuff, but the simple stuff also required non-trivial programming. The SQL database point was similarly interesting: having written programs to talk to relational databases, yes, one can do powerful things: but the amount of programming required is significant at a minimum and often substantial. > It also seems to me that the root problem here is that the data in the > original > example was in an emacs-specific format instead of the default UNIX text > file > format. > > The beauty of UNIX is that with a common file format one can create tools > that > process data in different ways that then operate on all data. Yes, it's > not as > efficient as creating a custom tool for a particular purpose, but is much > better > for casual use. One can always create a special purpose tool if a > particular > use becomes so prevalent that the extra efficiency is worthwhile. If > you're not > familiar with it, find a copy of the Communications of the ACM issue where > Knuth > presented a clever search algorithm (if I remember correctly) and McIlroy > did a > critique. One of the things that Doug pointed out what that while Don's > code was > more efficient, by creating a new pile of special-purpose code he > introduced bugs. > The flip side is that one often loses information in the conversion to text: yes, there are structured data formats with text serializations that can preserve the lost information, but consuming and processing those with the standard Unix tools can be messy. Seemingly trivial changes in text, like reversing the order of two fields, can break programs that consume that data. Data must be suitable for pipelining (e.g., perhaps free-form text must be free of newlines or something). These are all limitations. Where I think the argument went awry is in not recognizing that very often those problems, while real, are at least tractable. Many people have claimed, incorrectly in my opinion, that this model fails > in the > modern era because it only works on text data. They change the subject > when I > point out that ImageMagick works on binary data. And, there are now stream > processing utilities for JSON data and such that show that the UNIX model > still > works IF you understand it and know how to use it. > Certainly. I think you hit the nail on the head with the proviso that one must _understand_ the Unix model and how to use it. If one does so, it's very powerful indeed, and it really is applicable more often than not. But it is not a panacea (not that anyone suggested it is). As an example, how do I apply an unmodified `grep` to arbitrary JSON data (which may span more than one line)? Perhaps there is a way (I can imagine a 'record2line' program that consumes a single JSON object and emits it as a syntactically valid one-liner...) but I can also imagine all sorts of ways that might go wrong. - Dan C.

5 years, 5 months

On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"

by Arrigo Triulzi

[I originally asked the following on Twitter which was probably not the smartest idea] I was recently wondering about the origins of Linux, i.e. Linux Torvalds doing his MSc and deciding to write Linux (the kernel) for the i386 because Minix did not support the i386 properly. While this is perfectly understandable I was trying to understand why, as he was in academia, he did not decide to write a “free X” for a different X. The example I picked was Plan 9, simply because I always liked it but X could be any number of other operating systems which he would have been exposed to in academia. This all started in my mind because I was thinking about my friends who were CompSci university students with me at the time and they were into all sorts of esoteric stuff like Miranda-based operating systems, building a complete interface builder for X11 on SunOS including sparkly mouse pointers, etc. (I guess you could define it as “the usual frivolous MSc projects”) and comparing their choices with Linus’. The answers I got varied from “the world needed a free Unix and BSD was embroiled in the AT&T lawsuit at the time” to “Plan 9 also had a restrictive license” (to the latter my response was that “so did Unix and that’s why Linus built Linux!”) but I don’t feel any of the answers addressed my underlying question as to what was wrong in the exposure to other operating systems which made Unix the choice? Personally I feel that if we had a distributed OS now instead of Linux we’d be better off with the current architecture of the world so I am sad that "Linux is not Plan 9" which is what prompted the question. Obviously I am most grateful for being able to boot the Mathematics department’s MS-DOS i486 machines with Linux 0.12 floppy disks and not having to code Fortran 77 in Notepad followed by eventually taking over the department with X-Terminals based on Linux connected to the departmental servers (Sun, DEC Alpha, IBM RS/6000s). Without Linux they had been running eXeed (sp?) on Windows 3.11! In this respect Linux definitely filled in a huge gap. Arrigo

5 years, 5 months

Shell Level...

by Grant Taylor

Hi, Have you ever used shell level, $SHLVL, in your weekly ~> daily use of Unix? I had largely dismissed it until a recent conversation in a newsgroup. I learned that shelling out of programs also increments the shell level. I.e. :shell or :!/bin/sh in vim. Someone also mentioned quickly starting a new sub-shell from the current shell for quick transient tasks, i.e. dc / bc, mount / cp / unmount, {,r,s}cp, etc., in an existing terminal window to avoid cluttering that first terminals history with the transient commands. That got me to wondering if there were other uses for shell level ($SHLVL). Hence my question. This is more about using (contemporary) shells on Unix, than it is about Unix history. But I suspect that TUHS is one of the best places to find the most people that are likely to know about shell level. Feel free to reply to COFF if it would be better there. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

5 years, 5 months

"What UNIX Cost Us"

by Rich Morin

FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting. "What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM -r

5 years, 5 months

Cctalk mail list is back up

by Warren Toomey

Just thought you should know. http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/ Cheers, Warren -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

5 years, 5 months

"What Unix cost us" and Unix in 1981

by Paul Ruizendaal

I thought Benno Rice’s argument a bit unorganized and ultimately unconvincing, but I think the underlying point that we should from time to time step back a bit and review fundamentals has some merit. Unfortunately he does not distinguish much between a poor concept and a poor implementation. For example, what does “everything is a file” mean in Unix? - Devices and files are accessed through the same small API? - All I/O is through unstructured byte streams? - I/O is accessed via a single unified name space? etc. Once that is clear, how can the concept then best be applied to USB devices? Or: is there a fundamental difference between windows-style completion ports and completion signals? Many of the underlying questions have been considered in the past, with carefully laid out arguments in various papers. In my view it is worthwhile to go back to these papers and see how the arguments pro and contra various approaches were weighed then and considering if the same still holds true today. Interestingly, several points that Benno touches upon in his talk were also the topic of debate when Unix was transitioning to a 32 bits address space and incorporating networking in the early 80’s, as the TR/4 and TR/3 papers show. Of course, the system that CSRG delivered is different from the ambitions expressed in these papers and for sure opinions on the best choices differed as much back then as they will now - and that makes for an interesting discussion.

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

5 years, 5 months

CSRG report TR/4 was in Jim Joyce papers

by Paul Ruizendaal

Rich was kind enough to look through the Joyce papers to see if it contained "CSRG Tech Report 4: Proposals for Unix on the VAX”. It did. As list regulars will know I’ve been looking for that paper for years as it documents the early ideas for networking and IPC in what was to become 4.2BSD. It is an intriguing paper that discusses a network API that is imo fairly different from what ended up being in 4.1a and 4.2BSD. It confirms Kirk McKusick’s recollection that the select statement was modelled after the ADA select statement. It also confirms Clem Cole’s recollection that the initial ideas for 4.2BSB were significantly influenced by the ideas of Richard Rashid (Aleph/Accent/Mach). Besides IPC and networking, it also discusses file systems and a wide array of potential improvements in various other areas.

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> If you search for "Jolitz" Oh, I meant in the DDJ search box, not a general Web search. > One of the items listed in WP, "Copyright, Copyleft, and Competitive > Advantage" (Apr/1991) wasn't in the search results .. Since it's not in > the 'releases' page, it might not really be part of the series? Also, the last article in the series ("The Final Step") says the series was 17 articles long, not the 18 you get if you include "Copyright". Noel

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] screen editors

by Rudi Blom

>Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2020 14:57:40 -0500. >From: Doug McIlroy <> >To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org, thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de >Subject: Re: [TUHS] screen editors >Message-ID: <202001071957.007JveQu169574(a)coolidge.cs.dartmouth.edu> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii .. snip .. >% wc -c /bin/vi bin/sam bin/samterm >1706152 /bin/vi > 112208 bin/sam > 153624 bin/samterm >These mumbers are from Red Hat Linux. >The 6:1 discrepancy is understated because >vi is stripped and the sam files are not. >All are 64-bit, dynamically linked. That's a real big vi in RHL. Looking at a few (commercial) unixes I get SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2 132898 Aug 22 1996 /usr/bin/vi - /usr/bin/vi: iAPX 386 executable Tru64 V5.1B-5 331552 Aug 21 2010 /usr/bin/vi - /usr/bin/vi: COFF format alpha dynamically linked, demand paged sticky executable or object module stripped - version 3.13-14 HP-UX 11.31 748996 Aug 28 2009 /bin/vi -- /bin/vi: ELF-32 executable object file - IA64

5 years, 5 months

bitsavers.org down?

by Warner Losh

I'm trying to grab some stuff from bitsavers.org. It seems to be failing to lookup name records. I'd send mail directly to Al, but the only address I have for him at at bitsavers.org :( Anybody have a better contact or good back-channel to Al? Warner

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

by Jason Stevens

I would imagine that the user land changes made its way into 386 Mach. Although I haven't seen anything I can recall off the top of my head about 386 commits in user land until much later. Maybe one day more of that Mt Xinu stuff will surface, although I'm still amazed I got the kernel to build. Internet legend is that the rift was massive. From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org> on behalf of Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2020, 12:26 a.m. To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey Cc: UNIX Heritage Society Subject: Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 03:19:13PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Friday, 17 January 2020 at 22:50:51 -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > > > > In the super-early days (late 1991, early 1992), those of us who > > worked on it just wanted a "something Unix-like" that we could run at > > home (my first computer was a 40 MHz 386 with 16 MB of memory). This > > was before the AT&T/BSD Lawsuit (which was in 1992) and while Jolitz > > may have been demonstrating 386BSD in private, I was certainly never > > aware of it > > At the start of this time, Bill was working for BSDI, who were > preparing a commercial product that (in March 1992) became BSD/386. Wikipedia says he was working on 386BSD as early has 1989 and that clicks with me (Jolitz worked for me around 1992 or 3). I don't remember him mentioning working at BSDI, are you sure about that part? Those guys did not like each other at all.

5 years, 5 months

Bruce Evans: RIP

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

Ted Ts'o mentioned Bruce Evans in a reply to "On the origins of Linux". I'm really sorry to have to announce that he died last month. His family is holding a "small farewell gathering" in Sydney in late February. To quote his sister Julie Saravanos: We would be pleased if you, or any other BSD/computer friend, came There's no date yet, and I don't think it's appropriate to broadcast details. If anybody is interested, please contact Warren or me. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

5 years, 5 months

Lions book

by Doug McIlroy

I learned from Marianne Lions that she's still receiving royalties from John's book. What a testimonial to both John and the system! Doug

5 years, 5 months

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