TUHS

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6501 discussions

by Douglas McIlroy

The florid syntax of IBM's DD was rivaled by that of GE's file utility. I always wondered whether it was named FUTIL unwarily or with tongue in cheek. Doug

8 months, 1 week

Re: On computerese

by John Dow

> On 15 Sep 2024, at 20:21, Rik Farrow <rik(a)rikfarrow.com> wrote: > > Was the brevity typical of Unix command names a function of the tiny disk and memory available? Or more a function of having a Teletype 33 for input? Of course, it could simply be that 'cat' is more convenient than 'catenate'... Hangover from assembly mnemonics, perhaps. J — John Dow <jmd(a)nelefa.org> Written by a human.

8 months, 1 week

Re: Working at Bell Labs: photos by Larry Luckham, 1967

by Douglas McIlroy

> https://retronaut.com/retronaut-capsules/1967-life-at-bell-labs Luckham's introductory remark that all the programmers were men contrasts with the situation 10 years before, when most of the programmers were women. Women got shoved aside when it became apparent that programming was an honorable and challenging engineering profession, not mere routine translation of conceptual designd into machine language. It took almost 10 more years for the Labs to recognize that women programmers were engineers, too. Yet de jure recognition of women programmers has not yet become de facto. Here at Dartmouth, as at many schools, women form a far smaller fraction of computer science than they do of the engineering school. In engineering the proportion of women reflects that in the general population.

8 months, 1 week

Edison Design Group C Front End

by Henry Bent

Hi all, I was working with my IRIX 4 machine recently and noticed a mysterious file - /usr/lib/ecfe. It turns out that this is the Edison Design Group C (not C++) Front End, included almost certainly by accident with the last release of the Developer Toolkit for IRIX 4. No other piece of the compiler toolchain references the EDG product in any way and there is no documentation for it whatsoever. The research that I did seems to indicate that this is a source to source translator, akin to the contemporary Kuck & Associates product - is that correct? I also found a reference to EDG's tool being used in the Apogee C compiler. I have a copy of Apogee C for SunOS and it does appear that "cfe" is the same EDG product. Unfortunately there is no documentation specific to the C front end, and I don't have a license for Apogee C so I can't run the compiler to see how it's calling cfe. Just running a C file "blah.c" through the IRIX front end with no switches results in a transformed file "blah.int.c". Unfortunately running anything even moderately complex through the front end results in code that either doesn't compile or doesn't run, so I feel that I must be missing some flags or basic options. Does anyone have any information about SGI's use of this software, or any documentation/information in general about the EDG product? My usual sources came up empty. -Henry

8 months, 1 week

Re: On computerese

by Douglas McIlroy

>> I've despaired over the term ever since it wormed its way into >> computer folks' vocabulary. How does a "use case" differ from a "use"? > > Clarity as to whether one is employing a noun or a verb. Both "use" and > "case" can be either (he said, casing the joint for tomorrow's heist), > but juxtaposing them thus unambiguously makes a noun phrase. Usually context makes the nominal use of "use" clear : "many uses", "the use", "some uses". I'm not persuaded that "use case" disambiguates any more reliably. How do supermarkets display their wares? For some use cases they use cases. Metacomment. While the "use" in "nominal use" above must be a noun, "nominal" isn't compelled to have the intended meaning of "being a noun". It's a game of whac-a-mot. Kill one ambiguity and spawn another. Doug

8 months, 1 week

Re: History tract during the next IWMP9 in Paris next May

by Douglas McIlroy

Two remarks about Plan 9, one about an antecedent and the other about the limits of its influence. "Communication files" in the Dartmouth Time Sharing System have been cited as a predecesssor of Unix pipes, although we at Bell Labs were unaware of the DTSS feature when pipes were first implemented. In fact, communication files more directly foreshadow Plan 9 than they do Unix. Unlike Unix processes, which need not be aware that they are talking to pipes, the process at one end of a communication file, designated as "master", must be aware that it is a communication file. The master end controls the semantics of reads, writes and seeks(!) issued at the other end. Because of this asymmetry, a communication file cannnot serve as a pipe between pairs of unprepared processes. A pipe could be simulated in DTSS by a master process that relays flow between communications files connected to arbitrary end processes, but that seems never to have been done. Communication files are a closer antecedent to Plan 9. A master process's controls correspond to the part of Plan 9's foundational 9P protocol that handles open files. Though I don't think there's an actual ancestral connection, this likeness strengthens DTSS's claim to fame and extends their lead to nearly a quarter century. Linux has adopted surface features of Plan 9 like union directories, append-only files and system data access via file interfaces. Meanwhile Plan 9's revolutionary realization of what Vic Vyssotsky called distributable computing has not caught on. In distributable computing, the physical location of processes does not affect their logical interaction. In today's distributed computing, though, there is a world of difference between how processes interact remotely and locally. When will the crevasse between the possible and the normal be bridged? Doug Having recently read about the playful literary consortium, Oulipo, I am reminded of their term for little-known antecedents of their revolutionary works: "anticipatory plagiarism".

8 months, 1 week

Markdown Unix precursor

by Lynn Grant

Long before there was Markdown, there was a similar Unix tool. I remember reading about it before the Internet was popular, probably mid-to-late 1980s. I may have read about it in “Communications of the ACM”. It was designed to let secretaries compose memos, without learning the dot commands of troff or nroff. If you indented a space or two, it started a new paragraph. If you indented several spaces, it centered the line; very similar to Markdown in concept. It generated a file that could be fed into troff. I was thinking it might have been part of the System V Documentors Workbench, but I read through the doc for it and could not find anything like that. Does anyone remember this? Thanks!

8 months, 1 week

Fwd: History tract during the next IWMP9 in Paris next May

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, Edouard asked me to pass this e-mail on to both TUHS and COFF lists. Cheers, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Edouard Klein <edouardklein(a)gmail.com> ----- Subject: History tract during the next IWMP9 in Paris next May Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 22:46:30 +0200 (1 week, 4 days, 19 hours ago) Dear Unix history enthusiasts, The 11th International Workshop on Plan 9 will be held in Paris on May 22-24 2025. One of the focus area this year will be Plan 9's history and its influence on later computer science and industry trends. The history team at the CNAM (where the conference will be held) has agreed to help us prepare for the event and stands ready to record oral histories, or any other format that would make the participants happy. They had organized in 2017 a "colloque" at which Clem spoke (and I listened somewhere in the audience) on UNIX: https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-europe-ent… I will keep the list posted as our efforts pan out, but I thought I'd get the word out as soon as possible. I you have historical resources on Plan 9 or Inferno, or are reminded of any interesting tidbits, you can also share them here, as this list is already recognized by historians as a legitimate source. The program committee members, many (if not all) of whom roam this very list, would welcome any proposal or contributions in this area :) The CfP is at: http://iwp9.org/ Looking forward to read what you care to share, or to seeing you in person in Paris, Cheers, Edouard. ----- End forwarded message -----

8 months, 1 week

Re: BSD/OS

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Kevin Bowling > https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 and the parent page on seem to suggest > it originated off Net/2 directly. I wouldn't be putting too much weight on what that page says; most of the *BSD pages were done by people I don't know well, and who might have gotten details wrong I myself later just tried to quickly, without much effort, work out roughly what the relationship was between those *BSD systems, based on what other people had written. E.g the now-'BSD/OS' page was originally at '386/BSD', and I seem to have worked out that it's correct name was BSD/OS and moved it there. The BSD/386 page is probably roughly correct, since it contains a scan of a contemporary ad for it. (So confusing that '386BSD' is something different from 'BSD/386'. Was there ever actually a '386/BSD'?) Someone who knows the early history of all the *BSD systems (as in, you lived through all that) is welcome, nay invited, to fix any errors therein. Noel

8 months, 2 weeks

Bell Laboratories COBOL Syntax Checker?

by segaloco

So I was flipping through a System V software catalog from Fall 1984 and among the many AT&T Bell Laboratories items is the "COBOL Syntax Checker". From the text: ---QUOTE--- The COBOL Syntax Checker allows programmers to edit and check the syntax of COBOL programs before they are transmitted to mainframes for compilation and execution. The software increases the chances of a 'clean' compilation and execution and reduces the chance of a program being rejected due to syntax and simple semantic errors. As a result, expensive mainframe CPU time is reduced. The COBOL Syntax Checker processes a COBOL source program and produces three listings: 1. a diagnostic listing, 2. a cross-reference listing, 3. a source listing. ---END QUOTE--- There are two distributions listed, a C binary distribution for SVR2 for the 3B20 for $2000 and a C source distribution for SVR2 for the VAX 11/780 for $7500, both listed as released 2Q84. Some quick Googling only offers up additional catalog and magazine mentions. To me this sounds like a linter with some extra bits. Does anyone have any recollections of this software or know if there's much likelihood of the software itself or any documentation surviving? Thanks for any insights! - Matt G.

8 months, 2 weeks

HP-UX

by Kevin Bowling

Larry, I'll bite. Tell us about HP-UX :) My observations.. Up til 9.x it was a BSD-alike. In 10 and especially 11 it became much more SysV-alike. VUE desktop was nice for the time, CDE took on its visual style. 11.x becomes bloated like later Solaris releases. Technology transfer is hard. There are some nice internals docs: 6: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/9000_hpux/training/SE390_Series_300_HP-UX_Inte… 9: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/9000_hpux/training/SE390_Series_300_HP-UX_Inte… 11i: https://www.filibeto.org/unix/hp-ux/lib/kernel/inside-hp-ux-os.pdf 11i: ISBN 0130328618 hp-ux 11i internals book (the above doc is a lot more in depth) I wonder if we should collect resources like this on a wiki page or something? I really like this inside the factory stuff. Regards, Kevin

8 months, 2 weeks

Re: BSD/OS

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Noel Chiappa > Was there ever actually a '386/BSD'? I decided (for not particular reason) to take a quick read through Marshall Kirk McKusick's "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable": https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.html and he refers to Jolitz's system as "386/BSD" (apparently incorrectly). (So there's a lesson there; even people who '_were_ there' can occasionally get it wrong - something that professional historians are well aware of. I have a funny story of my learning that lesson, here: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/nontech/tmlotus.html in a totally different technical area.) I have yet to see a _scan_ of contemporary documentation (I believe nothing that isn't a contemporary _physical artifact_) that confirms it was actually named "386BSD", but that does seem to be the name as given in the Dr. Dobbs series on it. That series confirms that it was based directly on the 'Net/2' BSD release (although 'diff's on the sources are probably the most reliable proof). Noel

8 months, 2 weeks

BSD/OS

by Kevin Bowling

I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox. Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial FreeBSD variant. But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct strain of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD. There seems to be scant information about it online. Does anyone know if its story is told somewhere? Regards, Kevin

8 months, 2 weeks

the Y window system

by Rodrigo G. López

hello everyone, i recently came across a little window manager, written in Alef, that i've had in my /tmp folder for the last five years. it's called Y (probably as a response to X), and i grabbed it from 9gridchan's public griddisk; run by the late mycroftiv until 2022. i think it must've been an experimental project by Pike, Rosenthal or Tom Duff, but i can't find any documentation about it anywhere. i'd love to know if any of you remembers this, and if so, would you share the story behind it? i uploaded the source code here: http://antares-labs.eu/isometric/Y.tgz and it runs on 2nd ed plan 9 without issue (see the attached screenshot.) cheers! -rodri

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: HP-UX

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Kevin Bowling > I wonder if we should collect resources like this on a wiki page or > something? My habit on the CHWiki is to have the articles on subjects where there is a lot of documentation online is to have the articles mostly be 'executive summeries', and corral the links to the stuff online to a section at the end, so that people who want to see the gory details can look at the original documentation. See, for example: https://gunkies.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7 That works well, even for material that later goes 404, because with the URL, one can generally find it later in the Internet Archive (things like Google won't find things that are only there). Don't ask me to add them, though; I still haven't found time to add the links to the BSD/OS stuff you found! Noel

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: the Y window system

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rodrigo Lopez >> Google tells me: https://www.y-windows.org/ > from .. the code, that one has nothing to do with this. It actually makes sense that there are two separate ones called 'Y'. The X Window System was a descendant of the W window system, so if someone wanted to do another one, 'Y' was the obvious namee to pick. All it needs now is two separate people who decide they want to do a window system... voila! Noel

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: the Y window system

by Bakul Shah

On Aug 31, 2024, at 11:16 AM, Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna(a)xs4all.nl> wrote: > >> On 31 Aug 2024, at 20:09, Angel M Alganza <ama(a)ugr.es> wrote: >> >> On 2024-08-31 11:59, Rodrigo G. López wrote: >> >>> i'd love to know if any of you remembers this, and if so, would you share the story behind it? > > Google tells me: https://www.y-windows.org/ This is likely a different Y window sys than what Rodrigo found, which is written in Alef and runs on 2nd ed plan9. Rodrigo may want to trawl through 9fans mailing list/usenet group archives or ask there.

8 months, 3 weeks

Berkeley CSRG Building

by Pete Wright

Hey there folks, I'm going to find myself in Berkeley for the day this week and was curious if the buildings where the CSRG group worked are still standing? Thought it would be a fun place to visit after hacking on BSD for all these years. Cheers, -pete -- Pete Wright pete(a)nomadlogic.org

9 months, 1 week

Re: TUHS Digest, Vol 105, Issue 7

by Paul McJones

> On Mon, 12 Aug 2024 01:16:41 -0700,"Erik E. Fair" <fair-tuhs(a)netbsd.org <mailto:fair-tuhs@netbsd.org>> wrote: > > The main campus computer center was in the basement, but they charged by the CPU/second, so only classes used those systems - in my day (1980-1983), the computer center had a CDC 6400 and six or seven DEC PDP-11/70s. The CDC 6400 finally went away in September 1982: September 3rd, 1982 Memo to: Computing Affairs Staff From: M.Stuart Lynn, Director Subject: CDC 6400 Departure The CDC 6400 is no more. ... https://caltss.computerhistory.org/archive/820903-cdc-6400-departure-msl.pdf

9 months, 1 week

Re: Berkeley CSRG Building

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy {Moving this to COFF, as it's not UNIX-related. I'll have another reply there as well, about the social media point.} > The amazing thing, to me, is I was a CS student in very early 1980's > and I had no idea of the history behind the arpanet. I don't think that was that uncommon; at MIT (slightly earlier, I think - -'74-'77 for me) the undergrad's weren't learning anything about networking there either, then. I think the reason is that there wasn't much to teach - in part because we did not then know much about networking, and in part because it was not yet crystal clear how important it would become (more below on that). There was research going on in the area, but even at MIT one doesn't teach (or didn't then; I don't know about now) on-going research subjects to undergrads. MIT _did_ have, even then, a formal UROP ('undergrad research opportunities') program, which allowed undergrads to be part of research groups - a sheer genius idea - which in some fast-moving fields, like CS, was an inestimable benefit to more forward undergrads in those fields. I joined the CSR group at LCS in '77 because I had some operating system ideas I wanted to work on; I had no idea at that point that they were doing anything with networks. They took me on as the result of the sheerest chance; they had just gotten some money from DARPA to build a LAN, and the interface was going to be built for a UNIBUS PDP-11, and they needed diagnostics, etc written; and they were all Multicians. I, by chance, knew PDP-11 assembler - which none of them did - the MIT CS introductory course at that point taught it. So the deal was that I'd help them with that, and I could use the machine to explore my OS ideas in return. Which never really happened; it fairly became clear to me that data networking was going to have an enormous impact on the world, and at that point it was also technically interesting, so I quickly got sucked into that stuff. (I actually have a written document hiding in a file drawer somewhere from 1978 or so, which makes it plain that that I'm not suffering 20-20 hindsight here, in talking about foreseeing the impact; I should dig it up.) The future impact actually wasn't hard to foresee: looking at what printed books had done to the world, and then telgraphs/telephones, and what computers had already started to do at that point, it was clear that combining them all was going to have an incredible impact (and we're still adapting to it). Learning about networking at the time was tricky. The ARPANET - well, NCP and below - was pretty well documented in a couple of AFIPS papers (linked to at the bottom here: https://gunkies.org/wiki/ARPANET which I have a very vague memory I photocopied at the time out of the bound AFIPS proceedings in the LCS library). The applications were only documented in the RFC's. (Speaking of which, at that level, the difference between the ARPANET and the Internet was not very significant - it was only the internals, invisible to the people who did 'application' protocols, that were completely different. HTTP would probably run just fine on top of NCP, for instance.) Anything past that, the start of the internet work, that, I picked up by i) direct osmosis from other people in CSR who were starting to think about networks - principally Dave Clark and Dave Reed - and then ii) from documents prepared as part of the TCP/IP effort, which were distributed electronically. Which is an interesting point; the ARPANET was a key tool in the internet work. The most important aspect was email; non-stop discussion between the widely separated groups who were part of the project. It also made document distribution really easy (which had also been true of the latter stages of the ARPANET project, with the RFC's). And of course it was also a long-haul network that we used to tie the small internets at all the various sites (BBN, SRI, ISI - and eventually MIT) into the larger Internet. I hate to think about trying to do all that work on internets, and the Internet, without the ARPANE there, as a tool. Noel

9 months, 1 week

Unix spotted in Mumbai.

by Dan Cross

I thought some may appreciate the linked photo: Unix spotted near Mumbai Central Railway Station, Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India. https://photos.app.goo.gl/acTTsfvYt5suP4wS6 - Dan C.

9 months, 1 week

Re: Unix spotted in Mumbai.

by Bakul Shah

On Aug 13, 2024, at 6:48 AM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > I thought some may appreciate the linked photo: Unix spotted near Mumbai Central Railway Station, Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India. > https://photos.app.goo.gl/acTTsfvYt5suP4wS6 A lot of shells under that Unix umbrella! Coconut water + its jelly like flesh can be quite refreshing on a hot Mumbai day. Did you try any?

9 months, 1 week

Re: Berkeley CSRG Building

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Erik E. Fair" > before that, ARPANET was connected NOTE: "ARPANET" is _always_ (**ALWAYS**) used with the definite article ("the"). Don't take my word for it; check out, e.g. A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade https://walden-family.com/bbn/arpanet-completion-report.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA115440.pdf (There are a lot more contemporaneous documents - AFIPS conference papers, etc - if anyone is interested in them.) I was somewhat polite about it _this_ time. Noel

9 months, 1 week

Other POSIX Candidates?

by segaloco

I'm paraphrasing here but I've read in a few places something to the effect that UNIX was "selected" as the basis on which to build a portable operating system standard, which of course we all know as POSIX. However, I got thinking on the implications of that phrasing, and have to ask, was there actually a "selection" made picking UNIX over some other candidate, or was it pretty much established from the outset of pursuing a standard that UNIX was going to get standardized? Another way to put it would be as a chicken and egg, which came first, desire for a portable base system definition that UNIX happened to fit nicely, or the ongoing need for UNIX standardization finding sponsorship by the working groups, IEEE, etc.? Did any other OS contend for this coveted honor? - Matt G.

9 months, 2 weeks

Debate re optimization between Bill Harrison and Steve Johnson at POPL 8

by Dibyendu Majumdar

Hi I am looking for any write-up or recollection about the debate mentioned here: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~reps/popl00/cfd00.html And also mentioned in an interview with Fran Allen (Coders at Work). Many thanks Regards Dibyendu

9 months, 2 weeks

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