Kevin Bowling:
The conference looks supremely uninteresting outside one WAFL talk to me.
====
That is, of course, a matter of opinion. Just from skimming
titles I see about two dozen talks of at least some interest
to me in the ATC program. And that's just ATC; I'm planning
to attend the Hot* workshops on Monday and Tuesday as well.
Of course I won't attend every one of those talks--some coincide
in time, some I'll miss because I get stuck in the hallway track.
And some will prove less interesting in practice, though others
that don't seem all that interesting in the program will likely
prove much better in person.
I've been attending USENIX ATC for decades, and although some
conferences have been meatier than others, I've never ended up
feeling the trip was a waste of time.
Perhaps us old farts just aren't as discriminating as you
youngsters.
That said, I think Kevin's question
Is there a way to participate [on the UNIX50 event] without attending Usenix ATC?
is a good one.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Bud Lawson, long an expat living in Sweden, died yesterday. Not a
Unix person, he was, however, the originator of a characteristic Unix
programmer's idiom.
Using an idea adapted from Ken Knowlton, Bud invented the pointer-
chasing arrow operator that Dennis Ritchie adopted for C. I played
matchmaker. When Bud first proposed the "based storage" (pointer)
facility for PL/I, he used the well-established field(pointer)
notation. I introduced him to the pointer-chasing notation Knowlton
devised for L6. Knowlton, however, had no operator because he had only
single-letter identifiers. What we now write as a->b->c, Knowlton wrote
as abc. Appreciating the absence of parentheses, Bud came up with the
wonderfully intuitive pointer->field notation.
Doug
I came across Scott Taylor’s site which mentions his adventure with MtXinu (https://www.retrosys.net/) I had asked a few years ago (February 2017?) about locating a set
Of this to no avail, but thanks to Scott the binary set is now available.
ftp://ftp.mrynet.com/operatingsystems/Mach2.5/MtXinu-binary-dist/floppies/M…
There is some additional documentation to be found here.
ftp://ftp.mrynet.com/operatingsystems/Mach2.5/MtXinu-binary-dist/docs
The floppy drive like 386BSD is super weak and I had no luck with Qemu. VMWare worked fine to install. The VMDK will run on Qemu as low as 0.90 just fine.
I haven’t tried the networking at all, so I don’t know about adapters/protocol support. I’ve been using a serial line to uuencode stuff in & out but it’s been stable.
We are all thrilled and thankful for the generosity of SDF and LCM+L by
sponsoring and providing a celebration of Internet History with their UNIX
at 50 Event for the USENIX ATC Attendees. We understand not all of you
can participate in the conference, but would still like to be part of the
celebration. Our hosts have graciously opened the event to the community
at large, as I said in my previous message, it should be an evening of
computer people being able to be around and discussing computer history.
However, if you are not planning to attend the conference but wish to
attend the evening's event, we wish that you would at least consider
joining one or more of the organizations to help support them all in the
future. All three organizations are members supported and need all our help
and contributions to function and bring their services to everyone today
and hopefully 50 years from now. Membership details for each can be found
at Join SDF <https://sdf.org/join>, LCM+L Memberships
<https://livingcomputers.org/Join/Memberships.aspx>, and USENIX Association
Memberships <https://www.usenix.org/membership-services>
ᐧ
I've been playing with simh recently, and there is a nonzero chance I will
soon be acquiring a PDP/11-70.
I realize I could run 2.11BSD on it, and as long as I stay away from a
networking stack, I probably won't see too many coremap overflow errors.
But I think I'd really rather run V7.
However, there's one thing that makes it a less than ideal environment for
me. I grew up after cursor-addressable terminals were a thing, and, even
if I can eventually make "ed" do what I want, it isn't much fun. I've been
an Emacs user since 1988 and my muscle memory isn't going to change soon
(and failing being able to find and build Gosmacs or an early GNU Emacs,
yes, I can get by in vi more easily than in ed; all those years playing
Nethack poorly were good for something).
So...where can I find a curses implementation (and really all I need in the
termcap or terminfo layer is ANSI or VTxxx) that can be coerced into
building on V7 pretty easily?
Also, I think folks here might enjoy reading a little personal travelogue
of some early Unix systems from my perspective (which is to say, a happy
user of Unix for 30+ years but hardly ever near core development (I did do
the DIAG 250 block driver for the zSeries port of OpenSolaris; then IBM
pushed a little too hard on the price and Sun sold itself to (ugh) Oracle
instead; the world would have been more fun if IBM had bought the company
like we were betting on)). That's at
https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14340.html ; that in turn references a
review I did about a year ago of The Unix Hater's Handbook, at
https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14272.html .
Adam
> From: Mary Ann Horton
> Warren's emacs would have been part of the Bell Labs 'exptools'
> (experimental tools) package ... it's possible that's what you have.
I don't think so; Warren had been a grad student in our group, and we got it
on that basis. I'm pretty sure we didn't have termcap or any of that stuff.
Noel
I'm reminded since Erik brought this up...
Is Warren Montgomery's emacs available, like, anywhere... I used it long
ago on V7m, and I had it on my AT&T 7300 (where it was available as a
binary package).
It's the first emacs I ever used. I don't recall where we got it for the
PDP-11. On our system, we had it permission-restricted so only certain
trusted users could use it - basically, people who could be trusted not to
be in it all the time, and not to use it while the system was busy. We
had an 11/40 with 128K, and 2 or 3 people trying to use Mongomery emacs
would basically crush the system...
In the absence of that, I've always found JOVE to be the next best thing,
as far as being lightweight and sufficently emacs-like. I actually
install it on almost all of my Linux systems. Did JOVE ever run on V7?
--Pat.
> From: Pat Barron
> Is Warren Montgomery's emacs available, like, anywhere...
I've got a copy on the dump of the MIT PWB system. I'm actually supposed to
resurrect it for someone, IIRC, (the MIT system was .. idiosyncratic, so it'll
take a bit of tweaking), but haven't gotten to it yet.
Does anyone else have the source, or is mine the only one left?
Noel
Sorry for the long delay on this notice, but until this weekend there were
still a few things to iron out before I made a broad announcement.
First, I want to thank the wonderful folks at the Living Computers Museum
and Labs <https://livingcomputers.org/> who are set up to host an event at
their museum for our members on the evening of July 10, which is during the
week of USENIX ATC. To quote an email from their Curator, Aaron Alcorn: "*an
easy-going members events with USENIX attendees as their special invited
guests.*" As Aaron suggested, this event will just be computer people
and computers, which seems fitting and a good match ;-)
Our desire is to have as many of the old and new 'UNIX folks' at this event
as possible and we can share stories of how our community got to where we
are. Please spread the word, since we want to get as many people coming
and sharing as we can. BTW: The Museum is hoping to have their
refurbished PDP-7 running by that date. A couple of us on this list will
be bringing a kit of SW in the hopes that we can boot Unix V0!!
Second, USENIX BOD will provide us a room at ATC all week long to set up
equipment and show off some things our community has done in the past. I
have been in contact with some of you offline and will continue to do so.
There should be some smaller historical systems that people will bring
(plus connections to the LCM's systems via the Internet, of course) and
there will be some RPi's running different emulators.
I do hope that both the event and the computer room should be fun for all.
Thanks,
Clem Cole
I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did.
So, anyone ever use this feature?
David
Several list members report having used, or suffered under, filesystem
quotas.
At the University Utah, in the College of Science, and later, the
Department of Mathematics, we have always had an opposing view:
Disk quotas are magic meaningless numbers imposed by some bozo
ignorant system administrator in order to prevent users from
getting their work done.
Thus, in my 41 years of systems management at Utah, we have not had a
SINGLE SYSTEM with user disk quotas enabled.
We have run PDP-11s with RT-11, RSX, and RSTS, PDP-10s with TOPS-20,
VAXes with VMS and BSD Unix, an Ardent Titan, a Stardent, a Cray
EL/94, and hundreds of Unix workstations from Apple, DEC, Dell, HP,
IBM, NeXT, SGI, and Sun with numerous CPU families (Alpha, Arm, MC68K,
SPARC, MIPS, NS 88000, PowerPC, x86, x86_64, and maybe others that I
forget at the moment).
For the last 15+ years, our central fileservers have run ZFS on
Solaris 10 (SPARC, then on Intel x86_64), and for the last 17 months,
on GNU/Linux CentOS 7.
Each ZFS dataset gets its space from a large shared pool of disks, and
each dataset has a quota: thus, space CAN fill up in a given dataset,
so that some users might experience a disk-full situation. In
practice, that rarely happens, because a cron job runs every 20
minutes, looking for datasets that are nearly full, and giving them a
few extra GB if needed. Affected users in a average of 10 minutes or
so will no longer see disk-full problems. If we see serious imbalance
in the sizes of previously similar-sized datasets, we manually move
directory trees between datasets to achieve a reasonable balance, and
reset the dataset quotas.
We make nightly ZFS snapshots (hourly for user home directories), and
send the nightlies to an off-campus server in a large datacenter, and
we write nightly filesystem backs to a tape robot. The tape technology
generations have evolved through 9-track, QIC, 4mm DAT, 8mm DAT, DLT,
LTO-4, LTO-6, and perhaps soon, LTO-8.
Our main fileserver talks through a live SAN FibreChannel mirror to
independent storage arrays in two different buildings.
Thus, we always have two live copies of all data, and third far-away
live copy that is no more than 24 hours old.
Yes, we do see runaway output files from time to time, and an
occasional student (among currently more than 17,000 accounts) who
uses an unreasonable amount of space. In such cases, we deal with the
job, or user, involved, and get space freed up; other users remain
largely remain unaware of the temporary space crisis.
The result of our no-quotas policy is that few of our users have ever
seen a disk-full condition; they just get on with their work, as they,
and we, expect them to do.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i used the fair share schedular whilst a sysadmin of a small cray at UNSW. being an expensive machine the various departments who paid for it wanted, well, their fair share.
in a different job i had a cron job that restricted Sybase backend engines to a subset of the cpus on an big SGI box during peak hours, at night sybase had free reign of all cpus.
anyone did anything similar?
-Steve
> From: KatolaZ
> I remember a 5MB quota at uni when I was an undergrad, and I definitely
> remember when it was increased to 10MB :)
Light your cigar with disk blocks!
When I was in high school, I had an account on the school's computer, a
PDP-11/20 running RSTS, with a single RF11 disk (well, technically, an RS11
drive on an RF11 controller). For those whose jaw didn't bounce off the floor,
reading that, the RS11 was a fixed-head disk with a total capacity of 512KB
(1024 512-byte blocks).
IIRC, my disk quota was 5 blocks. :-)
Noel
----- Forwarded message from meljmel-unix(a)yahoo.com -----
Warren,
Thanks for your help. To my amazement in one day I received
8 requests for the documents you posted on the TUHS mailing
list for me. If you think it's appropriate you can post that
everything has been claimed. I will be mailing the Unix TMs
and other papers to Robert Swierczek <rmswierczek(a)gmail.com>
who said he will scan any one-of-a-kind items and make them
available to you and TUHS. The manuals/books will be going
to someone else who very much wanted them.
Mel
----- End forwarded message -----
> That photo is not Belle, or at least not the Belle machine that the article
is about.
The photo shows the piece-sensing (by tuned resonant circuits)
chess board that Joe Condon built before he and Ken built the
harware version of Belle that reigned as world computer chess
champion for several years beginning in 1980 and became the
first machine to earn a master rating.
Doug
> From: "John P. Linderman"
> Brian interviewing Ken
Ah, thanks for that. I had intended going (since I've never met Ken), but
alas, my daughter's family had previously scheduled to visit that weekend, so
I couldn't go.
The 'grep' story was amusing, but historically, probably the most valuable
thing was the detail on the origins of B - DMR's paper on early C ("The
Development of the C Language") mentions the FORTRAN, but doesn't give the
detail on why that got canned, and B appeared instead.
Noel
Decades ago there was an interpreted C in an X10 or X11 app, I believe it
came from the UK. And maybe it wasn't X11, maybe it was Sunview?
Whatever it was the author didn't like the bundled scrollbars and had
their own custom made one.
You could set breakpoints like a debugger and then go look around at state.
Does anyone else remember that app and what it was called?
Bakul Shah:
This could've been avoided if there was a convention about
where to store per user per app settings & possibly state. On
one of my Unix machines I have over 200 dotfiles.
====
Some, I think including Ken and Dennis, might have argued
that real UNIX programs aren't complex enough to need
lots of configuration files.
Agree with it or not, that likely explains why the Research
stream never supplied a better convention about where to
store such files. I do remember some general debate in the
community (e.g. on netnews) about the matter back in the
early 1980s. One suggestion I recall was to move all the
files to subdirectory `$HOME/...'. Personally I think
$HOME/conf would have been better (though I lean toward
the view that very few programs should need such files
anyway).
But by then BSD had spread the convention of leaving
`hidden' files in $HOME had spread too far to call
back. It wouldn't surprise me if some at Berkeley
would rather have moved to a cleaner convention, just
as the silly uucp-baud-rate flags were removed from
wc, but the cat was already out of the bag and too
hard to stuff back in.
On the Ubuntu Linux systems I help run these days, there
is a directory $HOME/.config. The tree within has 192
directories and 187 regular files. I have no idea what
all those files are for, but from the names, most are
from programs I may have run once years ago to test
something, or from programs I run occasionally but
have no context I care about saving. The whole tree
occupies almost six megabytes, which seems small
by current standards, but (as those on this list
certainly know) in the early 1980s it was possible
to run a complete multi-user UNIX system comfortably
from a single 2.5MB RK05 disk.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Dennis's `The UNIX I/O System' paper in Volume 2 of the 7/e
manual is basically about how drivers work. Is that near
enough, possibly as augmented by Ken's `UNIX Implementation'
paper in the same book?
Those were my own starting point, long ago, for understanding
how to write device drivers. Along with existing source code
as examples, of course, but (unlikely many who hack on device
drivers, I'm afraid) I have always preferred to have a proper
statement of rules, conventions, and interfaces rather than
just reading code and guessing.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Greetings,
I'm trying to find the predecessor to "Writing a UNIX Device Driver, J.
Egan & T. Teixeira, 1st ed, 1988". In the preface, it says:
"This book is based on a MASSCOMP manual, Guide to Writing a Unix Device
Driver. The first version that MASSCOMP published as part of the
documentation set for the MC-500 was based on preliminary drafts prepared
for MASSCOMP by Cliff Cary and Tom Albough of Creare R&D."
I checked bit keepers and found nothing.
I was wondering if people on this list know of this manual, have a copy,
etc. In general, I'm looking for pre-SysV driver manuals. I can find all
kinds of SysV driver books (some of which cover 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD as well),
but nothing for System III or V7 unix. There were a lot of early systems
that were based on ports of V7 to different architectures that were then
updated to System III or System V (at least according to the big chart of
unix history and some wikipedia entries, which may be just repeating
marketing schlock and not reflect actual reality).
As part of a talk I'm putting together on the 40th anniversary of V7, I
wanted to have a bit of history for things we still have in unix today
(like strategy) and things that successors to unix have added or left
behind (like the packet mux in V7 that was tossed aside for either STREAMS
or netinet from BSD, though packet muxing to userland is back with DPDK).
Warner
