TUHS

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6504 discussions

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

by Rudi Blom

Not sure I had an "aha erlebnis" with UNIX. I'd done some testing on a Philips PTS6000 with T.O.S. All assembler code with debugging syslod the most fun (breakpointing code which moves itself in memory). Then I was a user on VAX 11/730, 11/750 with Ultrix which was a bit of a step down. The VAXes run VMS during the week and only in weekends we could place our disk pack and boot Ultrix. Funny feeling to go home when colleagues arrive in the morning. Later "Propriety UNIX" versions based on System III, 7, V. No source. Still had shells, command line, scripts, a bit of programming in C if all else fails (or is too slow). Never liked Windows. In that sense maybe more an 'aha windows' moment to quickly forget :-) Cheers, uncle rubl

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

by Jon Steinhart

Well, I guess mine is kinda weird. I had messed with a number of computer systems a litle bit and then became proficient with 516-TSS as a result of being part of the explorer scout post at BTL Murray Hill in high school. Interesting note is that one of my advisors who wrote a lot of 516-TSS interviewed Ken for his job at BTL. Ended up with a paid job at BTL starting near the end of my senior year of high school. Needed to document my work. Don't remember why, but my group acquired a PDP-11/40 that was across the hall from the 516 lab in building 2 that was running UNIX version 3. I started using roff on it to do my documentation which meant learning ed and a bunch of other tools. Of course, I took the manual home and read it cover to cover and started messing around with the various cool tools that it had and was hooked. Jon

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Welcome to new TUHS subscribers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Tony Travis > It's always puzzled me when everyone talks about [the] PDP11 when, in > fact, is says "pdp11" on the system itself: DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; e.g. the "pdp11 peripherals handbook" (to transcribe the cover exactly) uses "PDP-11" several times on pg 1-1. Noel

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > What was your "ahah" moment when you first saw that Unix was special, > especially compared to the systems you'd previously used? Sometime in my undergrad sophmore year, IIRC. A friend had a undergrad research thing with DSSR, who I think at that point had the first UNIX at MIT. He showed me the system, and wrote a tiny command in C, compiled it, and executed the binary from the shell. No big deal, right? Well, at that point ('75 or so), the only OS's I had used were RSTS-11, a batch system running on an Interdata (programs were submitted on card decks), the DELPHI system (done by the people in DSSR), and a few similar things. I had never used a system where an ordinary user could 'add' a command to the command interpreter, and was blown away. (At that point in time, not many OS's could do that.) Unix was in a whole different world compared to contemporaneous PDP-11 OS's. It felt like a 'mainframe' OS (background jobs, etc), but on a mini. Noel

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

by Doug McIlroy

For a contrast in aha moments, consider this introduction to an early Apple (Apple II, I think). When my wife got one, my natural curiosity led me to try to make "Hello world". I asked her what to use as an editor and learned it all depends on what you're editing. So I looked in the manual. First thing you do to make a C program is to set up a "project", as if it was a corporate undertaking. I found it easier to write a program in some other editor than the one for C. Bad idea. Every file had a type and that editor produced files of some type other than C program. After succumbing to the Apple straitjacket, I succeeded. Then I found "Hello world" given as an example in the manual. The code took up almost a page; real men make programs that set up their own windows. Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers. And that didn't change until OS X. Doug

5 years, 7 months

bwk

by Larry McVoy

I miss Brian on this list. I've interacted with him over the years, the one I remember the most was I was trying to do an awk like interface to a key/value "database". I talked to him about it and he sent me ~bwk/awk which had all the original awk source and the troff source to the awk book in english and french. Ken, Doug, Rob, Steve, anyone, could you coax him onto this list? If you want me to try first I will, I don't know if he remembers me or not. But I can try and then maybe one of you follow up?

5 years, 7 months

Welcome to new TUHS subscribers

by Warren Toomey

All, we just had about a dozen new subscribers to the TUHS list. Rather than e-mail you all individually, I thought I'd use the list itself to say "Welcome!". The TUHS list generally has a high signal/noise ratio on the history of Unix, the systems and software, and anecdotes from those who used the various flavours. Occasionally, we drift a bit off-topic and I'll gently nudge the conversation back to Unix history. The list archives are at: https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/ and you should browse the last couple of months to get a feel for what we talk about. Cheers, Warren

5 years, 7 months

My case for video footage of the machine Ken would later use to create Unix

by Warner Losh

https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/10/video-footage-of-first-pdp-7-to-run-uni… is a blog entry where I step through the evidence that the PDP-7 in The Incredible Machine video that was posted here a while ago is quite likely the PDP-7 Ken used to create Unix after its days of starting in Bell Labs films were over... Warner

5 years, 7 months

History talk in Dallas Texas October 10

by Berny Goodheart

I have “The” original first versions from John signed by him and Ken. Among a lot of other stuff….

5 years, 7 months

Old Unix and DWB manuals seeking scanning and a permanent home

by Rich Kulawiec

I've lugged these around for 35-ish years. I'd like to seem them scanned and stored someplace as permanent as can be found, so if someone/anyone could tell me how to facilitate that, I'll package them for shipping. My apologies if this has already been done and I'm simply not aware of it. I have other stuff that probably needs the same treatment, but excavating the alluvial layers that have accumulated will take time. Single small-format red binder: Unix System User Reference Manual - AT&T Bell Labs Unix System Release 2.0 including Division 452 standard and local commands October 1985 Set of four small format gray binders: Documenter's Workbench 1.0, April 1984 1. Introduction and Reference Manual, 307-150, issue 2 2. Text Formatter Reference, 307-151, issue 2 3. Macro Package Reference, 307-152 issue 2 4. Preprocessor Reference, 307-153, issue 2 Set of two slip-cased small format maroon/gray binders: Unix System V Documenters Workbench Release 2.0 1. Technical Discusion and Reference 310-005, issue 1 2. Product Overview 999-805-007IS, User Guide 999-805-006IS, Reference Card 999-805-008IS, issue 1 ---rsk

5 years, 7 months

Old Unix books

by David

I’ve got a few books I’ve just pulled off the shelf and no longer want/need. I’m hoping someone will give them a good home. UNIX System Labs Inc UNIX(r) System V Release 4 Programmers Guide: System Services and Application Packaging Tools Device Driver Interface/Driver-Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI) Reference Manual (2 copies) AT&T 3B2/3B5/3B15 Computers Assembly Programming Manual Sun Microsystems Inc (Sun Technical Reports) The UNIX System - 1985 Sun 3 Architecture - 1986 I’m willing to split postage on mailing them wherever. If you are local (San Diego) I’m willing to meet you wherever for an exchange and a coffee. David (Also posted on the cctalk mailing list)

5 years, 7 months

where are v7 manual scans? license details?

by reed＠reedmedia.net

I am surprised to not find any scans of early (pre-1980) Seventh Edition Unix Programmer's Manual. Does anyone have any? (We do have the source files and I see volume 2 manual scanned from later years.) Also where is a copy the new license introduced with v7? I have copy of 1973 and 1974. Anyone have a scanned later version? from etc/rc: echo "Restricted rights: Use, duplication, or disclosure is subject to restrictions stated in your contract with Western Electric Company, Inc." >/dev/console Thanks, Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy"

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > There was no 635 at Project MAC, was there? I seem to recall reading about one. And in: https://multicians.org/chrono.html there's this entry: "08/65 GE 635 delivered to Project MAC". Clicking on the 'GE 635' link leads to "MIT's GE-635 system was installed on the ninth floor of 545 Tech Square in 1965, and used to support a simulated 645 until the real hardware was delivered." Noel

5 years, 7 months

History talk in Dallas Texas October 10

by reed＠reedmedia.net

The Dallas Ft. Worth UNIX Users Group will be highlighting the 50th anniversary on October 10, November 14, and maybe in December. http://www.dfwuug.org/wiki/Main/Welcome I will be presenting about the early history next week and then about BSD-specific history in November. Any of you in the DFW area? Any suggestions on anyone local to invite? I am also looking for anyone local who can display old hardware or materials at the event. I only have some old books and training materials from 1980's. Does anyone have scanned copies of early Lions commentary? (Not the 2000 printing, unless it looks identical, please let me know.) I will try to share my slides to this list by end of this week. (I did look at an early draft of Warner's slides, but didn't look at his final slides nor watch his presentation yet. My presentation is from scratch for now.) Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy"

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10

by Doug McIlroy

> Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971) > same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later? > (~1973) No. The former was the BTL legal and patent department. The latter was at AT&T (or perhaps Western Electric). Doug

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > Unfortunately it's very small. There's a larger version hiding 'behind' it. There are very few 645 images. There's the large painting of a 645, which for many years hung in the hallway on the 5th floor of Tech Sq: https://multicians.org/645artist.html Noel

5 years, 7 months

Recovered /etc/passwd files

by Finn O'Leary

Hi, I remember that someone had recovered some ancient /etc/passwd files and had decrypted(?) them, and I remember reading that either ken or dmr's password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely punctuation characters, was around three different characters in total, and was pretty damn short). I've tried to find this since, as a friend was interested in it, and I cannot for the life of me find it! Do any of you remember or have a link? :) Thanks! -- "Too enough is always not much!"

5 years, 7 months

My EuroBSDcon talk (preview for commentary)

by Warner Losh

OK. I've shared my slides for the talk. Some of the family trees are simplified (V7 doesn't have room for all its ports, for example) Some of it is a little cheeseball since I'm also trying to be witty and entertaining (we'll see how that goes). Please don't share them around until after my talk on the September 20th I'd like feedback on the bits I got wrong. Or left out. Or if you're in this and don't want to be, etc. All the slides after the Questions slide won't be presented and will likely be deleted. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/177KxOif5oHARyIdZHDq-OO67_GVtMkzIAlD… Please be kind (but if it sucks, please do tell). I've turned on commenting on the slides. Probably best if you comment there. I have a video of me giving this talk, but it's too rough to share... Thanks for any help you can give me. Warner

5 years, 7 months

eqn

by Larry McVoy

So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him what troff can do. For the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program chair for Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant was I had the job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big deal but I pushed people towards troff and the few people that took the push came back and said "holy crap is this easy". My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output that they can share? Thanks, --lm

5 years, 7 months

RFC formatting

by ron minnich

"why is the formatting so weird" someone asked me. I am guessing, looking at RFC 1, that it was formatted with an ancestor of runoff but ... anyone? ron

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Poll: good location for Unix documentation?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > All, I'm just musing where is the best place to store Unix > documentation. My Unix Archive is really just a filesystem, so it's not > so good to capture and search metadata. > Is anybody using archive.org, gunkies or something else BitSavers seems to be the canonical location for old computer documentation. The CHWiki (gunkies.org) isn't really the best place to put original documentation, but that's where I'd recommend putting meta-data. As for searching meta-data, are you speaking of something more powerful than Google? Noel PS: Speaking of old Unix documentation, I recently acquired a paper copy of the PDP-11 V6 Unix manual. Is that something I should scan? I don't know if you already have it (I know where to find sources in the archives, but I don't know where documentation scans live.)

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] lowercase vs. uppercase PDP-7?

by Doug McIlroy

> The scans for v0 code are in lowercase. I assume printed on TTY 37. > But why is the early PDP-7 code in lowercase? Once you've used a device with lower case, upper case looks as offensive as a ransom note. I went through this in moving "up" from Whirlwind to IBM's 704. By 1969, we'd all had lower-case terminals in our homes for several years. So Unix was ASCII from the start. Upper-case from a TTY 33 was converted to lower. On the PDP-11, at least, there was an escape convention for upper case. I believe the lower-case convention was explained in the introduction. In particular if you logged in with an upper-case user name, the terminal driver was set to convert everything to lower. Remember, too, that 33's used yellow paper. For printing on white we had use other machines that had full ASCII support. Doug

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] eqn

by Doug McIlroy

> does anyone have some eqn input and output that they can share? I have a quite elaborate document that uses eqn, pic, and tbl. In fact one table contains both pic and eqn entries (but not subtables; Latex beats roff in being recursive). Take a look at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/wallpaper.pdf. If you think you'd like to see the source, just holler. > he maybe should do Latex Sadly, math journals often demand Latex, but I've also run into journals that require Word. I wanted to submit the document above to a cartography journal until I found out they were in the Word camp. I was, however, able to convert it to Latex. At one point the American Instutute of Physics took only roff (and retypeset other manuscripts--in roff). I don't know what their practice is q now. > Maybe v0 didn't have any manuals? > I understand they weren't in roff anyways. No manuals, true. But if there had been they would have been in some version of roff, just as all Research Unix manuals were. Doug

5 years, 7 months

lowercase vs. uppercase PDP-7? (was Re: Recovered /etc/passwd files)

by reed＠reedmedia.net

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > no, it was tty model 33. Changing the topic slightly ... The scans for v0 code are in lowercase. I assume printed on TTY 37. But why is the early PDP-7 code in lowercase? I do see the B language code for "lcase" which converts to lowercase. Maybe something like that was used? (I think I saw a scan mistake showing a "B" which is probably an "8" due to that. See pdp7-unix/src/cmd/bc.s "dab B i".) I didn't see anything in historical login code or manuals about upper versus lowercase. Any experiences about upper versus lower case to share? When did stuff get rewritten to have both cases in code? Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy"

5 years, 7 months

v0 manpages of November 3, 1970? and earliest writing about Unix?

by reed＠reedmedia.net

Several v0 manpages say 11/3/70 See https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/commit/14a2a9b10bd4f9c56217234afb321… The commit message says "I've borrowed the V1 manuals from http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man1 and changed them to reflect the PDP-7 utilities." Where did that 1970 date come from? Was it just made up? (Notice it is one year earlier, same day.) Maybe v0 didn't have any manuals? This was just an exercise in learning PDP7-Unix better? I understand they weren't in roff anyways. Also ... what is the earliest known date where we have some scanned/printed document? https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/ says "runs on the PDP-7 and -9 computers; a more modern version, a few months old, uses the PDP-11." but no specific date. The earliest date I see is from the 1stEdman / Dennis_v1 docs of November 3, 1971. That is a full set of docs. There must be something prior to that date. Anyone know of some early printed memo or other correspondence that mentions the work? Thanks, Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{'

5 years, 7 months

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