TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

16 participants
6536 discussions

by Larry McVoy

Hey I'm at the hackers conference (having a blast, I thought I was too retired and burned out and I'm apparently still somewhat OK with that crowd, much to my surprise. Super fun bunch of nerds). Steve Bourne is here and I mentioned this list and he didn't know about it. His interest perked up a bit when I said Doug and Rob and Ken are here, I think his comment was something like "if Ken is there it must be something, Ken likes to do stuff more than talk about stuff". Probably have that not quite right but it was something like that. I'd love to have all of the Bell Labs alumni here, hearing history from them is awesome. So Warren, it's your list, Steve is srb(a)acm.org, you want to do an invite? I can do it if you prefer that but I thought I'd ask first. Cheers, --lm

5 years, 8 months

Dick Haight's one page essay on "You can't fool an honest programmer"

by John Adams

Perhaps someone can help me locate a very humorous short essay from Dick Haight of PWB (I believe Dick was John Mashey's boss at the time) work in Piscataway. I had a paper copy that Dick gave me that has long since disappeared in many office moves over almost 50 years. *John "Jack" Lossin Adams* *LinkedIn CV <http://lnkd.in/_Q_w7p>* and on *Facebook <http://facebook.com/John.Lossin.Adams>* *If God is your Co-Pilot, you're sitting in the wrong seat!* Veritas per Scientiam - NJIT motto *We live at a time when emotions and feelings **count more than **truth, and there * *is a vast ignorance of science. - James Lovelock* *Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what * *they **do not manage, and those who manage what they do not * *understand. - Archibald Putt* *We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly * *anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan* *Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, * *and I'm not sure about the former. - Albert Einstein*

5 years, 8 months

Fwd: Re: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129

by Warren Toomey

-------- Original Message -------- From: Stephen Jones <StephenJo(a)livingcomputers.org> Sent: 3 November 2019 3:05:31 am AEST Subject: Re: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129 A couple of videos of the action this week: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pvaPaWyiuLA&t=18s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L5MKwp2uj2k&t=119s The JK09 turns out not to be an emulator but the newest storage device and driver for the pdp-7 and unix v0! -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

5 years, 8 months

Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by Dave Horsfall

The infamous Morris Worm was released in 1988; making use of known vulnerabilities in Sendmail/finger/RSH (and weak passwords), it took out a metric shitload of SUN-3s and 4BSD Vaxen (the author claimed that it was accidental, but the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first). A temporary "condom" was discovered by Rich Kulawiec with "mkdir /tmp/sh". Another fix was to move the C compiler elsewhere. -- Dave

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out

by Norman Wilson

ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that. I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in bricks-and-mortar bookshops any time soon? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 8 months

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Alexander Voropay

Robert Clausecker <fuz(a)fuz.su> wrote: > > I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF > Nice find! It seems to use lcall to selector 7 for system calls. A > similar choice was made in 386BSD all the way through FreeBSD 2.2.8 > where it was replaced with int $0x80 as in Linux. Technically speaking lcall $0x07,$0 uses selector 0 with RPL=3 (bit0 and bit1==1) and LDT (bit2==1) It seems it's oldest way to call kernel from userspace on x86 architecture. AT&T's programmers used this sycall convention for SysVR3 and SysVR4 on i386 (not sure about SysVR2 on i286). There are very few examples with lcall-type syscall i.e. http://www.sco.com/developers/devspecs/abi386-4.pdf (figure 3-26) (and leaked SysVR4 i386 sources) William Jolitz used this convention in his amazing articles about porting BSD4.3 to the i386 (c)1991 http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix-source-code/research/1991/0101.html (p."System Call Inteface"). See also 386BSD 0.0: https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/blob/0.0/arch/i386/i386/locore.s#L361 (Did he run AT&T userspace on his kernel ???) As you mentioned, most of early *BSD systems on i386 also used lcall. Linus selected to use "DOS-style" call with INT 0x80. More recent BSD on i386 also use INT. https://john-millikin.com/unix-syscalls http://asm.sourceforge.net/intro/hello.html Solaris on x86 (ex. SysVR4) also uses lcall. See a https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/sergey/cs258/solaris-on-x86.pdf p.4.2.3 and Solaris (later OpenSolaris and later Illumos) sourcecode.

5 years, 8 months

Fwd: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129

by Warren Toomey

All, I just received this from Stephen Jones at the LCM+L. ----- Forwarded message from Stephen Jones <StephenJo(a)livingcomputers.org> ----- Subject: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129 Hello Folks .. you’ll hear through official channels along with videos and pictures (hopefully soon) that we just got PDP-7 UNICS to boot on a real PDP-7 (sn 129) using our newly designed “JK09” disk drive. The recent posting of source is going to be great .. we’ve been using the simh image that has been available for a while. BTW, compiling the B Hello World on a real 7 is much more satisfying than it is under simh … More to come, please watch Living Computers for updates. (PS sorry we’re late to the BTL party). Stephen M. Jones ----- End forwarded message -----

5 years, 8 months

Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code

by Doug McIlroy

> 10-36-55.pdf user-mode programs: pool game This game, written by ken, used the Graphic 2. One of its earliest tests--random starting positions and velocities on a frictionless table with no collision detection--produced a mesmerizing result. This was saved in a program called "weird1", which was carried across to the PDP11. Weird1 was a spectacular accidental demonstration of structure in pseudo-random numbers. After several minutes the dots representing pool balls would evanescently form short local alignments. Thereafter from time to time ever-larger alignments would materialize. Finally in a grand climax all the balls converged to a single point. It was stunning to watch perfect order emerge from apparent chaos. One of my fondest hopes is to see weird1 revived. Doug

5 years, 8 months

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Robert Clausecker

Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T assembler syntax. While I'm still not quite sure if everything in there is correct, this explanation seemed plausible to me; the PDP-11 assembler being adapted for the 8086, then the 80386 and then ELF targets, giving us today's convoluted syntax. The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. Supposedly, it would get away without % as a register prefix, thus being much less obnoxious to use. Any idea if such an assembler ever existed and if yes where? I suppose Xenix might have shipped something like that. The only AT&T syntax assemblers I know today are those from Solaris, the GNU project, the LLVM project, and possibly whatever macOS ships. Are there (or where there) any other x86 AT&T assemblers? Who was the first party to introduce this? Yours, Robert Clausecker [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501 -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments

5 years, 8 months

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Robert Clausecker

5 years, 8 months

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Alexander Voropay

Robert Clausecker <fuz(a)fuz.su>wrote: > The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style > assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. There were alot of AT&T codebase ports to x86 architecture except Xenix: Microport, INTERACTIVE, Everex, Wyse e.t.c. using AT&T x86 syntax. I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF as format for executables: See: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?67736-History-behind-the-disk-ima… (Rather interesting kernel ABI/Call convention) and https://gunkies.org/wiki/Unix_SYSVr3 There were also SystemV R2 to i286 ports i.e.: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Microport_System_V with a.out binary format.

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is

by Norman Wilson

Bother: Here's a good pictore of G R herself, with what I believe to be at least a second-generation badge. Forgot to paste in the URL. Here it is: http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/g-r-emlin/

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is

by Norman Wilson

Mary Ann Horton: I'm enjoying bwk's book very much, but it has me wondering. There are two stories I've heard that supposedly occurred at Murray Hill, but he didn't include them. ==== You can't expect every story to be there. The book would be too heavy to lift! Could the `monkey picture on a badge' story be that of G. R. Emlin's badge? She was a gremlin doll, not a monkey, but it would be reasonable to mistake the former for the latter. Here's a good pictore of G R herself, with what I believe to be at least a second-generation badge. The original badge was an old-style Bell Labs one with a green border; I forget whether that meant contractor or something else, but a regular MTS badge was blue-bordered at the time. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 8 months

UNIX Backslash History

by Doug McIlroy

> What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And \ as the escape character. \ came from Multics. The first day Multics ran at Bell Labs Bob Morris famously typed backslash-newline at the login prompt and crashed the system. Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how pathnames were punctuated. Doug

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Charles Anthony >> I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? > user_dir_dir>Project>User Oh, right. Too many years spent on Unix! :-) > "Names" are aliases, similar to soft links I feel like they are more similar to hard links; they belong to a segment, and if the name is given to another segment, and the original segment has only that name, it goes away. (See the discussion under "add_name" in the MPM 'Commands and Active Fuinctions'). Also, Multics does real soft links (too), so names can't be soft links! :-) Noel

5 years, 8 months

My EuroBSDCon talk

by Warner Losh

My talk has been posted. https://youtu.be/FTlzaDgzPY8 Thanks to everyone who helped make it better. Warner P.s. this may be a duplicate email... I had domain issues when I sent it before...

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Charles Anthony > /home/CAnthony I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? I seem to remember my homedir on MIT-Multics was >udd>CSR>JNChiappa? And I wonder if the 'dd' directory on PDP-7 Unix owe anything to 'udd'? Getting back to the original query, I'm wondering if '/' was picked as it wasn't shifted, unlike '>'? Noel

5 years, 8 months

My EuroBSDCon Unix Talk is up

by Warner Losh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlzaDgzPY8 has my EuroBSDcon unix talk that everybody here was so kind to assist me on. Warner

5 years, 8 months

Two Unix50 Videos

by Warren Toomey

from the Nokia event are up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUt3L3fLFt4 Unix Today and Tomorrow: Future of Compute & Platforms: The Kernel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz3GADLe__M The origin of Unix panel session Cheers, Warren

5 years, 8 months

UNIX Backslash History

by Caipenghui

Hello everyone, What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And \ as the escape character. Caipenghui

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] How to do differential/integral on a PDP-7, was: Space Travel

by Dave Horsfall

On Mon, 21 Oct 2019, Andrew Hume wrote: > the gt40??? oh my lord! good job i am en route to the bell labs 50th > anniversary. > its been a long time since i heard the name “Dave Horsfall”! Yep :-) Although now retired, I'm still active in Unix projects. -- Dave

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code

by Doug McIlroy

I was about to add a footnote to history about how the broad interests and collegiality of Bell Labs staff made Space Travel work, when I saw that Ken beat me to telling how he got help from another Turing Award winner. > while writing "space travel," > i could not get the space ship integration > around a planet to keep from either gaining or > losing energy due to floating point errors. > i asked dick hamming if he could help. after > a couple hours, he came back with a formula. > i tried it and it worked perfectly. it was some > weird simple double integration that self > corrected for fp round off. as near as i can > ascertain, the formula was never published > and no one i have asked (including me) has > been able to recreate it. If I remember correctly, the cause of Ken's difficulty was not roundoff error. It was discretization error in the integration formula--probably f(t+dt)=f(t)+f'(t)dt. Dick saw that the formula did not conserve energy and found an alternative that did.

5 years, 8 months

What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

by Warren Toomey

All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd previously used? Mine was: Oh, I can: + write a simple script + to edit a file on the fly + with no temporary files (a la pipes) + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. Cheers, Warren

5 years, 8 months

PDP-7 UNIX filesystem

by Angelo Papenhoff

DMR explained how PDP-7 UNIX was used in "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System" but having played with it myself, I stumbled in a couple of cases and found it a bit awkward to use. Maybe someone (ken and doug?) can shed some light on "elaborate set of conventions" that dmr mentioned. My questions are these: you cannot execute a program if you're in a directory you can't write into. I asked Warren about this when I first tried pdp7 unix and he explained it to me: the shell creates a link to the binary and executes it. If it can't write into the current directory, it fails to create the link and hence can't execute the program. How was this handled in practice? did users have write permissions on all directories? did you just stay in your directory all the time? . and .. Was this introduced first with PDP-11 unix or did the convention start on the PDP-7 already? It certainly seems to be the case with . but how about ..? the dd directory seems to take on the role of a sort of root directory and the now discovered program pd actually creates a file .. (haven't tried to understand what it does though yet) What does dd stand for, dotdot? directory directory? aap

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX file systam

by Doug McIlroy

> As noted in the jargon file, the dd(1) syntax is deliberately reminiscent > of the DD statement in IBM JCL. This was presumably a joke That is certainly true and reflects its major early usage to prepare tapes to carry to other systems. Though I haven't use dit in ages, I recall that the joke was so fully engtained that the command was more likely to be written "dd ifile=x ofile=y" than "dd <x >y" Doug

5 years, 8 months

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TUHS