TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

48 participants
6504 discussions

by Warren Toomey

All, very off-topic for TUHS but you have a bounty of experience. If any of you have Intel ia64 skills and/or fixing compiler back-end bugs, could you contact me off-list? I'm writing a back-end for the SubC compiler and I have 'one last bug'™ before it can compile itself, and I'm stuck. Details at: https://minnie.tuhs.org/wktcloud/index.php/s/QdKZAqcBytoFBkQ/download?path=… Thanks, Warren

5 years, 7 months

DG/UX details?

by Chris Hanson

I’ve seen it said a couple of places that the DG/UX kernel was an almost complete rewrite and rather well-done. Have any details been preserved? There’s not a whole lot out there that I’ve been able to find about DG/UX or the AViiON workstation series (whether 88K or Intel x86). -- Chris PS - I’ve found that my asking around has prompted some people to put things online, so may as well keep asking in various places. :)

5 years, 7 months

SystemV R3.2 manpages in e-form ?

by Alexander Voropay

Hi! Is there a SystemV R3.2 manpages in the "-man" macropackage form or similar ? AFAIK there are scanned documentations at bitsavers: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/att/unix/System_V_386_Release_3.2/ http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/att/unix/System_V_Release_3/ P.S. The disks in the old days were small and vendors distributed manpages in print form... -- -=AV=-

5 years, 7 months

Leaked patches... v6 to v6.5

by Warner Losh

Ok. I know there was never a v6.5... officially. But there are several references to that in different bits of the early user group news letters. This refers to v6 plus all the patches that "leaked" out of bell Labs via udel and Lou Katz. My question is, have they survived? The story sure has, but I didn't find them in the archive..

5 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] understand earliest hardware?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jeremy C. Reed > "PDP-11 that had PDP-10 memory management, KS-1." ... What is this > PDP-11 and KS-1? Maybe this is the PDP-11/20 with KS-11? Yes. The reference to "PDP-10 memory management" is because apparently the KS11 did what the PDP-10 MMU did, i.e. divide the address space into two sections. (On the -10, one was for code, and one for data.) Alas, next to nothing is known of the KS11, although I've looked. There's a mention of it in "Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix": https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/odd.html but it doesn't say much. Noel

5 years, 7 months

understand earliest hardware?

by reed＠reedmedia.net

I read in the PDP-7 reference manual that Precision CRT Display Type 30 and Precision Incremental Display Type 340 are the typical displays used with the PDP-7, but aren't standard equipment. I read about the Graphics-II scope. Was it the only display? I read it was used as a second terminal and that it would pause per display full with a button to continue. I assume this second terminal's keyboard was TTY model 33 or similar since it was the standard equipment. Does anyone know? Do you know if the PDP-7 or early edition Unixes have pen support for that Graphics-II or similar displays? Clem has written that the PDP-7 had a disk from a PDP-9. Where is this cited? The ~1971 draft "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" says first version runs on PDP-9 also. https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/ But I cannot find any other reference of running on PDP-9 at all. Was this academic? That draft calls the PDP-7 version the "first edition" but later the PDP-11/20 is called the "first edition". When did the naming of first edition get defined to not include the PDP-7 version? Or is it because the early "0th" version was never released/shared outside? Thompson interview https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/OralHistory/transcripts/thompson… mentions an "interim machine" and a "PDP-11 that had PDP-10 memory management, KS-1." What is this interim machine? Is this a PDP-11 without a disk (for a few months?) What is this PDP-11 and KS-1? Maybe this is the PDP-11/20 with KS-11? Do we know what hardware was supported for the early editions? We don't have all the kernel code and from a quick look from what is available I didn't see specific hardware references. The later ~1974 "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" paper does mention some hardware at that time on the PDP-11/45 like a 201 dataset interface and a Tektronix 611 storage-tube display on a satellite PDP-11/20. When did a CRT with keyboard terminal like DEC vt01 (with Tektronix 611 CRT display), LS ADM-3, Hazeltine 2000, VT01A display with keyboard (what keyboard?) get supported? Any code to help find this? (The https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/picture.html does mention the VT01A plys keyboard). Thanks, Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy"

5 years, 7 months

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/1972_stuff/tmg.pdf > has an earlier version. That's the exact same as the one I have. > From: "Brian L. Stuart" > The M6 manual is another one that I didn't find. Got that too (it's by Andrew Hall). Noel

5 years, 7 months

Peter Collinson interviews?

by reed＠reedmedia.net

Does anyone know where I can find the Unix-related interviews with Dr. Peter Collinson? These are acknowledged in front-matter of Peter Salus's Quarter Century book which says previously appeared in ".EXE". Bottom of https://www.hillside.co.uk/articles/index.html mentions the magazines aren't found. I didn't try contacting him yet. I have read the Mahoney collection (archived at TUHS). Any other interview collections from long ago? Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy"

5 years, 7 months

capturing history of bs(1) command / programming language

by Dave Plonka

Hi TUHS folks, Earlier this month I did a fair bit of research on a little known Unix programming language - bs - and updated the wikipedia pages accordingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bs_(programming_language) Thanks for solving some bs mysteries goes to its author, Dick Haight, as well as those that got us in touch: Doug McIlroy, Brian Kernighan, and John Mashey. Apart from what is in the aforementioned wikipedia page, in exchanging email with me, Dick shared: q( I wrote bs at the time Unix (V 3?) and all of the commands were being converted from assembler to C. So Thompson’s bas became my bs — sort of. I included snobol’s succeed/fail feature (? Operator/fail return). [...] No one asked me to write bs. [...] I tried to get Dennis Ritche to add something like “? / fail” to C but he didn’t. This is probably part of why I wrote bs. I wasn’t part of the Unix inner circle (BTL Computing Research, e.g., Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy, etc). Neither were Mashey & Dolotta. We were “support”. ) The Release 3.0 manual (1980) mentions bs prominently on page 9: Writing a program. To enter the text of a source program into a UNIX file, use ed(1). The four principal languages available under UNIX are C (see cc(1)), Fortran (see f77(1)), bs (a compiler/interpreter in the spirit of Basic, see bs(1)), and assembly language (see as(1)). Personally, some reasons I find bs noteworthy is (a) it is not much like BASIC (from today's perspective) and (b) as mentioned in the wikipedia page, "The bs language is a hybrid interpreter and compiler and [an early] divergence in Unix programming" (from Research Unix mentioning only the other three languages): q( The bs language was meant for convenient development and debugging of small, modular programs. It has a collection of syntax and features from prior, popular languages but it is internally compiled, unlike a Shell script. As such, in purpose, design, and function, bs is a largely unknown, modest predecessor of hybrid interpreted/compiled languages such as Perl and Python. ) It survives today in some System III-derived or System V-derived commercial operating systems, including HP-UX and AIX. If you have additional information that might be useful for the wikipedia page, please do share it. Peace, Dave P.S. Here is a 2008 TUHS list discussion, "Re: /usr/bin/bs on HPUX?": On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 01:08:26PM -0500, John Cowan wrote: > Lord Doomicus scripsit: > > > I was poking around an HP UX system at work today, and noticed a > > command I've never noticed before ... /usr/bin/bs. > > > > I'm sure it's been there for a long time, even though I've been an > > HPUX admin for more than a decade, sometimes I'm just blind ... but > > anyway .... > > > > I tried to search on google ... it looks like only HPUX, AIX, and > > Maybe AU/X has it. Seems to be some kind of pseudo BASIC like > > interpreter. > > That's just what it is. Here are the things I now know about it. > > 0. The string "bs" gets an awful lot of false Google hits, no matter > how hard you try. > > 1. "bs" was written at AT&T, probably at the Labs, at some time between > the release of 32V and System III. It was part of both System III and > at least some System V releases. > > 2. It was probably meant as a replacement for "bas", which was a more > conventional GW-Basic-style interpreter written in PDP-11 assembly > language. (32V still had the PDP-11 source, which of course didn't work.) > > 3. At one time System III source code was available on the net, > including bs.c and bs.1, but apparently it no longer is. I downloaded > it then but don't have it any more. > > 4. I was able to compile it under several Unixes, but it wouldn't run: > I think there must have been some kind of dependency on memory layout, > but never found out exactly what. > > 5. I remember from the man page that it had regular expressions, and > two commands "compile" and "execute" that switched modes to storing > expressions and executing them on the spot, respectively. That eliminated > the need for line numbers. > > 6. It was apparently never part of Solaris. > > 7. It was never part of any BSD release, on which "bs" was the battleships > game. > > 8. I can't find the man page on line anywhere either. > > 9. The man page said it had some Snobol features. I think that meant > the ability to return failure -- I vaguely remember an "freturn" command. > > 10. 99 Bottles of Beer has a sample bs program at > http://www2.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-bs-103.html . > > 11. If someone sends me a man page, I'll consider reimplementing it as > Open Source. > > -- > We are lost, lost. No name, no business, no Precious, nothing. Only empty. > Only hungry: yes, we are hungry. A few little fishes, nassty bony little > fishes, for a poor creature, and they say death. So wise they are; so just, > so very just. --Gollum cowan at ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan -- dave(a)plonka.us http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/

5 years, 7 months

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

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Brian L. Stuart" > (The tmg doc was one I remember not being there.) Err, TMG(VI) is 1/2 page long. Is that really what you were looking for? (I _did_ specify the 'UPM'.) I do happen to have the V6-era TMG _manual_, if that's what you're looking for. Noel

5 years, 7 months

Poll: good location for Unix documentation?

by 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, and have recommendations? Cheers, Warren

5 years, 7 months

UNIX NEWS, volumes 1-7 out there?

by Warner Losh

I'm looking for complete compies of UNIX NEWS volumes 1-7. 8 and newer are available on the USENIX site, or on archive.org, but older ones are not. A few excerpts are published in newer login issues, but nothing complete. Reading the AUUGN issues, especially the early ones, are quite enlightening and help one judge the relative merits of later accounts with better contemporary context. I was hoping to get the same from UNIX NEWS (later login) and any other news letters that may exist from the time (I think I spotted references to one from the UK in AUUGN). It's really quite enlightening. Warner

5 years, 8 months

multi-booting four *nix plus 3 Win editions plus OS/2 on 1992 Dell 486D/50

by Charles H Sauer

tl;dr multibooting a 1992 Dell 486D/50 WFW3.11+Win95+Win2K+DellSVR4+NEXTSTEP+RedHat5.2+OS/2 3.0+OpenBSD2.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgKjSXI7HOI (Maybe it should be tl;dw — didn’t watch — the video is long.) This post is intended to both be more accessible summary and provide details that are not in the video. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/09/26/koko-welcome-to-eight-jura… Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

5 years, 8 months

Recovered!!! The Georgia Tech Software Tools Subystem for Prime Computers

by Arnold Robbins

Hello All. Believed lost in the mists of time for over 30 years, the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Prime Computers, along with the Georgia Tech C Compiler for Prime Computers, have been recovered! The source code and documentation (and binary files) are available in a Github repo: https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/gt-swt. The README.md there provides some brief history and credits with respect to the recovery, and w.r.t. the subsystem and C compilers themselves. Credit to Scott Lee for making and keeping the tapes and driving the recovery process, and to Dennis Boone and yours truly for contributing financially. I set up the repo. For anyone who used and/or contributed to this software, we hope you'll enjoy this trip down memory lane. Feel free to forward this note to interested parties. Enjoy, Arnold Robbins (On behalf of the swt recovery team. :-)

5 years, 8 months

congratulations to Warner on a great talk

by Eric Allman

Warner's talk just finished --- it was excellent. Those of you who didn't see it live might well want to see the recording when it comes out. eric

5 years, 8 months

Revived! The 10 Edition spell program!

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hello All. I have revived the 10th edition spell(1) program, allowing it to compile and run on "modern" systems. See https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/v10spell ; the README.md gives an overview of what was done. Enjoy! Arnold

5 years, 8 months

8bc -- a B compiler for the PDP-8

by Robert Clausecker

Greetings! As a project for our university's seminar on the PDP-8 I wrote a compiler for the B language targeting it. It's a bit rough around the edges and the runtime code needs some work (division and remainder are missing), but it does compile B code correctly, generating acceptable code (for my taste, though the function call sequence could be better). I hope some of you enjoy this compiler for an important historical language for an important historical computer (makes me wonder why the two weren't married before). https://github.com/fuzxxl/8bc Yours, Robert Clausecker -- () ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world /\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments

5 years, 8 months

My talk today 2019-09-20 at UTC 1230

by Warner Losh

https://2019.eurobsdcon.org/livestream-soria-moria/ Has a live stream. My talk is at 1230 UTC or just under 2 hours. There will be a recording I think that I'll be able to share with you in a day or three. Warner

5 years, 8 months

OpenSolaris Git ?

by Alexander Voropay

Hi! Is there a public OpenSolaris Git/CVS/SVN ? The openloaris.org site is down. AFIK the first sources set (not complete) was published around June 2005. The latest available sources were b135 March 2010 (available at TUHS) https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135 It would be interesting to see an evolution of "pure" SysV R4. -- -=AV=-

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff

by Norman Wilson

Larry McVoy: If you have something like perl that needs a zillion sub pages, info makes sense. For just a man page, info is horrible. ===== This pokes me in one of my longest-standing complaints: Manual entries, as printed by man and once upon a time in the Programmers' Manual Volume 1, should be concise references. They are not a place for tutorials or long-winded descriptions or even long lists of hundreds of options (let alone descriptions of why the developer thinks this is the neatest thing since sliced bread and what bread he had in his sandwiches that day). For many programs, one or two pages of concise reference is all the documentation that's needed; no one needs a ten-page tutorial on how to use cat or rm or ls, for example. But some programs really do deserve a longer treatment, either a tutorial or an extended reference with more detail or both. Those belong in separate documents, and are why the Programmers' Manual had a second volume. Nowadays people think nothing of writing 68-page-long manual entries (real example from something I'm working with right now) that are long, chatty lists of options or configuration-file directives with tutorial information interspersed. The result makes the developer feel good--look at all the documentation I've written!!--but it's useless for someone trying to figure out how to write a configuration file for the first time, and not so great even for someone trying to edit an existing one. Even the Research system didn't always get this right; some manual entries ran on and on and on when what was really needed was a concise list of something and a longer accompanying document. (The Tenth Edition manual was much better about that, mostly because of all the work Doug put in. I doubt there has ever been a better editor for technical text than Doug.) But it's far worse now in most systems, because there's rarely any editor at all; the manuals are just an accreted clump. And that's a shame, though I have no suggestions on how to fix it. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff

by Norman Wilson

Clem Cole: Exactly!!!! That's what Eric did when he wrote more(ucb) - he *added to Unix*. The funny part was that USG thought more(ucb) was a good idea and then wrote their own, pg(att); which was just as arrogant as the info behavior from the Gnu folks!!! ====== And others wrote their own too, of course. The one I know best is p(1), written by Rob Pike in the late 1970s at the University of Toronto. I encountered at Caltech on the system Rob had set up before leaving for Bell Labs (and which I cared for and hacked on for the next four years before following him). By the time I reached BTL it was a normal part of the Research system; I believe it's in all of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Edition manuals. p is interesting because it's so much lighter-weight, and because it has rather a different interior design: Rather than doing termcappy things, p just prints 22 lines (or the number specified in an option), then doesn't print the newline after the 22nd line. Hit return and it will print the next 22 lines, and so on. The resulting text just flows up the glass-tty screen without any fuss, cbreak, or anything. (I believe the first version predated V7 and therefore cbreak.) Why 22 lines instead of 24, the common height of glass ttys back then? Partly because that means you keep a line or two of context when advancing pages, making reading simpler. But also because in those days, a standard page destined for a printer (e.g. from pr or nroff, and therefore from man) was 66 lines long. 22 evenly divides 66, so man something | p never gives you a screen spanning pages. p was able to back up: type - (and return) instead of just return, and it reprints the previous 22-line page; -- (return) the 22 lines before that; and so on. This was implemented in an interesting and clever way: a wrapper around the standard I/O library which kept a circular buffer of some fixed number of characters (8KiB in early versions, I think), and a new call that, in effect, backed up the file pointer by one character and returned the character just backed over. That made it easy to back over the previous N lines: just make that call until you've seen N newlines, then discard the newline you've just backed over, and you're at the beginning the first line you want to reprint. As I vaguely recall, more was able to back up, but only when reading from a real file, not a pipeline. p could do (limited but sufficient) backup from a pipeline too. As a creature of its pre-window-system era, you could also type !command when p paused as well. I remember being quite interested in that wrapper as a possible library for use in other things, though I never found a use for it. I also remember a wonderful Elements-of-Programming-Style adventure with Rob's code. I discovered it had a bug under some specific case when read returned less than a full bufferful. I read the code carefully and couldn't see what was wrong. So I wrote my own replacement for the problematic subroutine from scratch, tested it carefully in corner cases, then with listings of Rob's code and mine side-by-side walked through each with the problem case and found the bug. I still carry my own version of p (rewritten from scratch mainly to make it more portable--Rob's code was old enough to be too clever in some details) wherever I go; ironically, even back to U of T where I have been on and off for the past 30 years. more and less and pg and the like are certainly useful programs; for various reasons they're not to my taste, but I don't scorn them. But I can't help being particular fond of p because it taught me a few things about programming too. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] [OT] Re: earliest Unix roff

by Norman Wilson

KatolaZ: > We can discuss whether the split was necessary or "right" in the first > instance, as we could discuss whether it was good or not for cat(1) to > leave Murray Hill in 1979 with no options and come back from Berkley > with a source code doubled in size and 9 options in 1982. We needn't discuss that (though of course there are opinions and mine are the correct ones), but in the interest of historic accuracy, I should point out by 1979 (V7) cat had developed a single option -u to turn off stdio buffering. Sometime before 1984 or so, that option was removed, and cat was simplified to just while ((n = read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf))) > 0) write(1, buf, n) (error checking elided for clarity) which worked just fine for the rest of the life of the Research system. So it's true that BSD added needless (in my humble but correct opinion) options, but not that it had none before they touched it. Unless all those other programs were stuffed into cat in an earlier Berkeley system, but I don't think they were. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (Three cats, no options)

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] [OT] Re: earliest Unix roff

by Norman Wilson

Arthur Krewat: Which is better, creating a whole new binary to put in /usr/bin to do a single task, or add a flag to cat? Which is better, a proliferation of binaries w/standalone source code, or a single code tree that can handle slightly different tasks and save space? ====== Which is simpler to write correctly, to debug, and to maintain: a simple program that does a single task, or a huge single program with lots of tasks mashed together? Which is easier to understand and use, individual programs each with a few options specialized to a particular task, or a monolith with many more options some of which apply only to one task or another, others to all? What are you trying to optimize for? The speed with which programmers can churn out yet another featureful utility full of bugs and corner cases, or the ease with which the end-user can figure out what tool to use and how to use it? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 8 months

A Couple of New Unix Artifacts

by Warren Toomey

I fear we're drifting a bit here and the S/N ratio is dropping a bit w.r.t the actual history of Unix. Please no more on the relative merits of version control systems or alternative text processing systems. So I'll try to distract you by saying this. I'm sitting on two artifacts that have recently been given to me: + by two large organisations + of great significance to Unix history + who want me to keep "mum" about them + as they are going to make announcements about them soon * and I am going slowly crazy as I wait for them to be offically released. Now you have a new topic to talk about :-) Cheers, Warren * for some definition of "soon"

5 years, 8 months

PWB vs Unix/TS

by Warner Losh

OK. I'm totally confused, and I see contradictory information around. So I thought I'd ask here. PWB was started to support unix time sharing at bell labs in 1973 (around V4 time). PWB 1.0 was released just after V6 "based on" it. PWB 2.0 was released just after V7, also "based on it". Later Unix TS 3.0 would become System III. We know there was no System I or System II. But was there a Unix TS 1.0 and 2.0? And were they the same thing as PWB 1.0 and 2.0, or somehow just closely related? And I've seen both Unix/TS and Unix TS. Is there a preferred spelling? Thanks for all your help with this topic and sorting things out. It's been quite helpful for my talk in a few weeks. Warner P.S. Would it be inappropriate to solicit feedback on an early version of my talk from this group? I'm sure they would be rather keener on catching errors in my understanding of Unix history than just about any other forum...

5 years, 8 months

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