TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6504 discussions

by Paul Ruizendaal

I’m looking for source code of the original Blit as described here: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf <http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf> It does not seem to be on the v8 tape. I found the following on the web: http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/software/ <http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/software/> but that seems to be from much later and for the 5620. Then there is this, which seems to be the Blit's graphics routines or a derivtive thereof: https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/Sdev/S/src/fun/blit/ <https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/Sdev/S/src/fun/blit/> (although it seems larger than the 8KB mentioned in the paper). I’m aware of this emulator: https://github.com/aap/blit <https://github.com/aap/blit> which uses a rom dump; it appears a good base for h/w documentation. Did the sources of these rom contents survive?

5 years, 5 months

Two BSD Additions to the Unix Archive

by Warren Toomey

All, we have a couple of new BSD-related additions to the Unix Archive. Steven Schulz has made an installation tape of 2.11BSD which includes all the patches up to patch level 457. It's available at: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD_patch457/ Mike Haertel has done a great job of reconstructing the September 1, 1981 release of 4.1BSD. His work is now available at: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/4.1BSD-19810901-reconstructe… Cheers & thanks to both Steven and Mike, Warren

5 years, 5 months

Happy birthday, Ada Lovelace and JFO!

by Dave Horsfall

Bit hard to classify this one; separate posts since COFF was created? Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron), was born on this day in 1815; arguably the world's first computer programmer and a highly independent woman, she saw the potential in Charles Babbage's new-fangled invention. J.F.Ossanna was given unto us on this day in 1928; a prolific programmer, he not only had a hand in developing Unix but also gave us the ROFF series. Who'ld've thought that two computer greats would share the same birthday? -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Gaming on early Unix

by Doug McIlroy

Moo and hunt-the-wumpus got quite a lot of play both in the lab and at home. Wump was an instant hit with my son who was 4 or 5 years old at the time. Amusingly, I speculated on how to generate degree-3 graphs for wump, but obviously not very deeply. It was only much later that I realized the graph always had the same topology--a dodecahedron. Doug\

5 years, 5 months

Gaming on early Unix

by Gabriel Diaz

Hello, Source code has been published of some early games. Were those games playable on Unix machines at the time? What was your favourite game? https://kryptonradio.com/2019/04/18/zork-source-code-presumed-lost-forever-… Gabi

5 years, 5 months

In Memoriam: John Lions

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Dr. John Lions on this day in 1998; he was one of my Comp Sci lecturers (yes, I helped him write The Book, and yes, you'll find my name in the back). -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

Origins of PPP

by Paul Ruizendaal

I’m looking for the origins of SLIP and PPP on Unix. Both seem to have been developed long before their RFC’s appeared. As far as I can tell, SLIP originally appeared in 3COM’s UNET for the PDP11, around 1980. From the TUHS Unix tree, first appearance in BSD seems to be 4.3 (1986). Not sure when PPP first appeared, but the linux man page for pppd has a credit that goes back to Carnegie Mellon 1984. First appearance in BSD seems to be FreeBSD 5.3 (2004), which seems improbably late (same source). Paul

5 years, 5 months

v10spell updated

by Arnold Robbins

Hello All. Anyone who pulled the code for v10spell that I made available a few months ago should 'make clean', 'git pull', and 'make'. A critical bug has been fixed for 64 bit systems, and the code has had some additional cleanups and the doc updated some as well. The repos is at git://github.com/arnoldrobbins/v10spell. Enjoy, Arnold

5 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Origins of PPP

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal > I'm looking for the origins of SLIP and PPP on Unix. Both seem to have > been developed long before their RFC's appeared. You're dealing with an epoch when the IETF motto - "rough consensus and running code" - really meant something. Formal RFC's way lagged protocol development; they're the last step in the process, pretty much. If you want to study the history, you'd need to look at Internet Drafts (if they're still online). Failing that, look at the IETF Proceedings; I think all the ones from this period have been scanned in. They won't have the detail that the I-D's would have, but they should give the rough outlines of the history. Noel

5 years, 5 months

another conversion of the CSRG BSD SCCS archives to Git

by Greg A. Woods

I've been fixing and enhancing James Youngman's git-sccsimport to use with some of my SCCS archives, and I thought it might be the ultimate stress test of it to convert the CSRG BSD SCCS archives. The conversion takes about an hour to run on my old-ish Dell server. This conversion is unlike others -- there is some mechanical compression of related deltas into a single Git commit. https://github.com/robohack/ucb-csrg-bsd https://github.com/robohack/git-sccsimport -- 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>

5 years, 5 months

In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna

by Dave Horsfall

We lost J.F. Ossanna on this day in 1977; he had a hand in developing Unix, and was responsible for "roff" and its descendants. Remember him, the next time you see "jfo" in Unix documentation. He also accomplished a lot more, too much to summarise here. -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

Someone wants to use an exabyte

by Richard Salz

Historically important he says. The guy had creds. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1198706617967095809?s=19

5 years, 5 months

FreeBSD retires gets()!

by Norman Wilson

We retired gets from Research UNIX back in 1984 or perhaps earlier, with no serious pain because replacing it wasn't hard and everybody agreed with the reason. I'm glad to hear some part of the rest of the world is catching up. We also decided to retire the old Enigma-derived crypt(1), except we didn't want to throw it out entirely in case someone had an old encrypted file and wanted the contents back. So it was removed from the manual and the binary moved to /usr/games. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 5 months

FreeBSD retires gets()!

by Dave Horsfall

Seen in the FreeBSD Quarterly Report: gets(3) retirement Contact: Ed Maste <emaste(a)FreeBSD.org> gets is an obsolete C library routine for reading a string from standard input. It was removed from the C standard as of C11 because there was no way to use it safely. Prompted by a comment during Paul Vixie's talk at vBSDCon 2017 I started investigating what it would take to remove gets from libc. The patch was posted to Phabricator and refined several times, and the portmgr team performed several exp-runs to identify ports broken by the removal. Symbol versioning is used to preserve binary compatibility for existing software that uses gets. The change was committed in September, and will be in FreeBSD 13.0. This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation. And the world is a slightly safer place... -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

Irix on MIPS -- was kernel mode paged

by ron minnich

I'm looking for a reference to any Unix ports where the kernel ran in a non-paged address space and user mode was paged. I could swear this was done at some point, and memory says it was on a soft-TLB system like the MIPS, to avoid TLB pollution and TLB fault overhead. But maybe I'm nuts. I am happy to hear either answer.

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte [ really bulk erasing ]

by Norman Wilson

I had a hand-held degausser, but lent it to someone years ago and never got it back. It was actually Exabyte that made me buy it. I bought a new 8505 through a reseller to supersede the 8200 I was using for home backups. It turned out the 8505's firmware refused to overwrite a tape already written at any but the highest density, so I couldn't reuse any of my existing backup tapes. Exabyte insisted it was a feature, not a bug. So I gave up and bought a degausser so I could turn a used tape into a blank tape so the damn tape drive would write on it. For further vintage-computing amusement: I decided to buy at that time because the reseller had arranged a deal with Exabyte: trade in any old tape drive, working or not, and get a couple of hundred bucks off on a brand-new 8505. So I gave the reseller an old, broken TK05 I had lying around. My sales contact for the reseller was a former service tech at the same company, so I figured (correctly) he'd get the joke. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte

by Norman Wilson

Snotty remarks aside, I have a couple of Exabyte drives in my home world. They haven't been used for a long time, but when they were (for some years I used them as a regular backup device) they worked just fine. I've pinged the guy. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 6 months

Steve Bellovin recounts the history of USENET

by Arnold Robbins

The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14a.html The Early History of Usenet, Part II: Hardware and Economics: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-15.html The Early History of Usenet, Part III: File Format: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-17.html Fun reading. Bellovin is another person we should try to get to join this list. Enjoy, Arnold

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Steve Bellovin recounts the history of USENET

by Jason Stevens

I keep a copy of the utzoo files. And then I hacked the altavista desktop search the files using Apache to filter content inline. https://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com/altavista I know I'd love to feed it more data, the utzoo stuff is massive for 1991, but it's really trivial for 2019. It's around 10GB decompressed. From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org> on behalf of Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2019, 11:53 AM To: Bakul Shah Cc: tuhs(a)tuhs.org Subject: Re: [TUHS] Steve Bellovin recounts the history of USENET On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 07:50:53PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote: > On Wed, 20 Nov 2019 19:14:23 -0800 Larry McVoy wrote: > > Yeah, I'd be super happy if he joined the list. I enjoyed reading > > those, wished he had gone into more detail. > > > > On the Usenet topic, does anyone remember dejanews? Searchable > > archive of all the posts to Usenet. Google bought them and then, > > so far as I know, the searchable part went away. > > > > If someone knows how to search back to the beginnings of Usenet, > > my early tech life is all there, I'd love to be able to show my kids > > that. Big arguing with Mash on comp.arch, following Guy Harris on > > comp.unix-wizards, etc. > > I have occasionally downloaded some mbox.zip files from > https://archive.org/details/usenet > But there are too many files there. Would be nice if there > was a collaborative effort to organize them in a more usable, > searchable state. Pretty much all of it (minus binaries > groups) can be stored locally (or using some global > namespace. So is that all of Usenet? -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

5 years, 6 months

Western Electric "Research Unix" License Contacts

by David C. Brock

Dear All: I was wondering if anyone had any first-hand information about the early decisions at Western Electric to make an education license for Unix that was both royalty-free and with an extremely modest “service charge”/delivery fee, or if anyone knows the names of key people who made these decisions. Best wishes, David .............. David C. Brock Director and Curator Software History Center Computer History Museum computerhistory.org/softwarehistory<http://computerhistory.org/softwarehistory> Email: dbrock(a)computerhistory.org Twitter: @dcbrock Skype: dcbrock 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94943 (650) 810-1010 main (650) 810-1886 direct Pronouns: he, him, his

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold Robbins > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too. And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin, courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site once, whereupon hilarity ensued. Noel

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Western Electric "Research Unix" License Contacts

by Norman Wilson

Clem Cole: Al Arms wrote and administer the license BTW. ==== Aside for entertainment purposes: at one point, the root password for the UNIX systems I ran in the Caltech High Energy Physics group was derived from Al's name, but through a level of punning indirection. I believe Mark Bartelt came up with it. Later we decided to change it. I believe I chose the successor, which continued the UNIX-licensing scheme, but in a different direction: *UiaTMoBL The systems that had either of these passwords are long- since turned off. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 6 months

Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

by Kevin Bowling

This stuff is extremely poorly preserved. No time like the present to fix that. I was reading Tom's blog https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart3/ and have been aware of Amdahl UTS a couple of the other ports for a while. I've got an HP 88780 quad density 9-track and access to a SCSI IBM 3490. Can fit them in air cargo and bring a laptop with a SCSI card. Tell me where to go. Regards, Kevin

5 years, 6 months

edx prize

by Doug McIlroy

Tangential, but interesting: https://blog.edx.org/congratulations-edx-prize-2019-winners/ Where would you expect a MOOC about C to originate? Not, it turns out, in a computer-science department. Professor Bonfert-Taylor is a mathematician in the school of engineering at Dartmouth. Doug

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Dave Horsfall

On Tue, 19 Nov 2019, Tony Finch wrote: > Amusingly POSIX says the C standard takes precedence wrt the details of > gets() (and other library functions) and C18 abolished gets(). I'm > slightly surprised that the POSIX committee didn't see that coming and > include the change in the 2018 edition... Didn't know that gets() had finally been abolished; it's possibly the most unsafe function (OK, macro) on the planet. I've long been tempted to remove gets() and see what breaks... -- Dave

5 years, 6 months

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TUHS