TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

12 participants
6534 discussions

Almost forgot: In Memoriam: Grace Hopper

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Rear Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper on this day in 1992; amongst other things she gave us COBOL and ADA, and was allegedly responsible for the term "debugging" when she removed a moth from a relay on the Harvard Mk I. -- Dave

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Upgrading from 11/40 to 11/45 in Unix v6

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > We are seriously considering upgrading our PDP 11/40 clone (SIMH), to a > PDP 11/45 (preferably another SIMH) Heh! When I saw the subject line, I thought you wanted to upgrade a _physical_ -11/40 to an -11/45. ('Step 1. Sell the -11/40. Step 2. Buy an -11/45.' :-) > for our Unix v6 installation. Why on earth would an organization have such a thing? :-) > Our CEO was traveling and met a techie in first class (seriously, > first class?) who told him that we needed one. Heh. If said techie knows about the two, he's probably pretty senior (i.e. eligible for Social Security :-), and thus elegible for first class... :-) > It has fairly low utilization - a developer logs in and writes code > every few days Who the *&%^&*(%& is still writing code under V6?! And how do you all get the bits in and out? (I run mine under Ersatz-11, which has this nice device which allows it to read files off the host file system; transfering stuff back and forth is a snap, I do all my editing with Epsilon on my Windoze box, 'cause I'm too lazy to bring up the V6 Emacs I have.) > 1. Are there any v6 specific concerns about upgrading? Not that I know of. > 2. Why should we consider taking the leap to the 11/45? Everything > seems to work fine now. You're asking _us_? Some larger applications will only run on an split-I-D machine, is about the only reason I can think of. Oh, also, the floating point instructions on the /45 are the only kind understood by V6; the C compiler doesn't emit the ones the /40 provides. Any floating point code run on the /40, the instructions are simulated by a trap handler (by way of the OS, which has to handle it and reflect it to the user process). I.e. very slow. > 3. If we jump in and do the upgrade, how can we immediately recognize > what has changed in the environment? I.e what are some things that we > can now do that we couldn't do before? See above. > 4. If we just insert our current diskpacks into the new system, will it > just boot and work? Or what do we need to before/after booting to > prepare/respond to the new system? Any V6 disk pack can be read/mounted on any V6 machine. Any binaries (the OS, or user commands) for the -11/40 will run on the -/45. (Which is why the V6 dist includes binaries for /40 versions of the OS only.) To make use of the /45, you need a different copy of the OS binary, built from a slightly different set of modules. (Replace m40.s with m45.s; and you will need to re-asssemble l.s, prepending it with data.s.) Both variants can live on the same pack, under different filenames; select the right one at boot time. > 5. Is 256K enough memory or what configuration do y'all recommend? 256KB is all you can have. Neither SIMH nor Ersatz-11 support the Able ENABLE: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Able_ENABLE which is what you need to have more than 256KB on a UNIBUS -11. > From: Clem Cole > You'll probably want to configure a kernel for the 45 class machine. > Look at the differences in the *.s files in the kernel. More importantly, look at the 'run' file in /usr/sys, which has commented out lines to build the OS image for /45-/70 class machines. > But either way you should configure the system to use the largest drive > v6 has. This is actually of limited utility, since a V6 file system is restricted to 65K blocks _max_. So a disk with 350K blocks (like an RP06), you'll have to split it into like 5 partitions to use it all. > From: Will Senn > Do you know of some commonly used at the time v6 programs that needed > that much space? Heh. Spun up my v6, and did "file * | grep separate" in /bin and /usr/bin, and then recalled that V6 was distributed in a form suitable for a /40. So, null set. Did the same thing on /bin from the MIT V6+ system, and got: a68: separate I&D executable not stripped a86: separate I&D executable not stripped bteco: separate I&D executable not stripped c86: separate I&D executable not stripped e: separate I&D executable not stripped emacs: separate I&D executable not stripped lisp: separate I&D executable not stripped mail: separate I&D executable not stripped ndd: separate I&D executable not stripped s: separate I&D executable not stripped send: separate I&D executable not stripped teco: separate I&D executable not stripped No idea what the difference is between 'teco' and 'bteco', what 's/send' do, etc. > Is there any material difference between doing it at install time vs > having run on 11/40 for a while and moving the disk over to the 11/45 > later? No; like I said, you can have two different OS binaries on the disk, and select which one you boot. > On a related note, how difficult is it to copy the system from rk to > hp? I know I can rebuild, but I'm sure there's a quicker/easier method... Build a system with both, and then copy the files? I'd use 'tar' (I have a V6 tar, but it uses a modified OS with the smdate() call added back in) to do the moving (which would retain the last-write dates); 'tp' or 'stp' would also work. The hack _I_ used on simulated systems was to expand the file that held the 'disk pack', mount it as a different kind of pack (RL or RP), and then go in and hand-patch the disk size in the root block with 'db', then 'icheck -s' to re-build the free list. Note: this won't give you more inodes, so you may run out, but the usual inode allocation is pretty generous. Noel PS: Speaking of the last write dates, I have versions of mv/mvall, cp/cpall, ln, chmod etc which retain them (using smdate()). If there's an actual community of people using V6, I should upload all the stuff I have. Although it might be good to establish some central location for exchange of V6 code. However, I don't and won't (don't even ask) use GitHub or any similar modern thing.

6 years, 6 months

building world using sh run in /usr/source in v6

by Will Senn

The setting up document hints at how to build world so to speak in v6. However, when I log in as bin (most files are owned by bin) and: chdir /usr/source sh run I get a number of failed items along these lines: cp a.out /etc/cron Can't create new file. cp a.out /etc/init Can't create new file. A little digging around points to the problem - some files are owned by daemon, others by root: -rwsrwsr-- 1 daemon 3246 Oct 10 12:54 cron -rwxrwxr-- 1 root 2054 May 13 23:50 init My question is this, is the system recompiled en-masse using the run script in /usr/source or not? It certainly appears to be the method, as it contains a bunch of chdir somedir; time sh run lines including the /usr/sys/run file... If it's not, what was the method? I gather I can force it by logging in as root and running those sections of the run script pertaining to files owned by root, and the same for daemon, but that seems inefficient and begs the question why didn't they have run scripts for root and daemon that were separate from the ones for bin. Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Upgrading from 11/40 to 11/45 in Unix v6

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Winalski > What is magic number 0411? That one I've never heard of before. It's a PDP-11-ism. Separate I+D. Noel

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Deleted lib1 and lib2 in v6, recoverable?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > I whacked /usr/sys/lib1 and lib2 'accidentally' meaning I logged in as > bin changed to /usr/sys and typed rm lib1 and rm lib2 :). Doesn't sound very accidental... :-) > sh run as bin doesn't do it. Odd. 'run' in /usr/sys on my V6 machine (not that I use that, mind) says: chdir ken cc -c -O *.c ar r ../lib1 rm *.o chdir ../dmr cc -c -O *.c ar r ../lib2 rm *.o which should regenerate them - sort of. I suspect you really meant 'doing sh run creates a lib1 and lib2, but then I get errors from the ld phase with missing symbols'. Yes? If so, the thing is that the V6 linker won't pull in an object module from a library unless a global in it satisfies an already existing (i.e. in the linking process) undefined global. (I don't know if this is true of later linkers; never used 'em.) In other words, when loading a multi-module system, the module with 'main' has to be first, and then the rest in an order such that each one holds a previously-undefined symbol. So the order of the object modules you'll get in lib? from the above, if you precede them with 'rm lib?', is probably not the right order. (The above shell script assumes they already exist, with the modules in the right order, so the above just replaces them with the newly compiled versions...) > So, what magic incantation is required to rebuild them. Here's the ordering in lib1: main.o alloc.o iget.o prf.o rdwri.o slp.o subr.o text.o trap.o sig.o sysent.o clock.o fio.o malloc.o nami.o pipe.o sys1.o sys2.o sys3.o sys4.o Other orders would work too (e.g. you could move sys?.o up just after sysent.o and it should work). My lib2 is somewhat odd, so I hesitate to list it, but since most modules in dmr are pulled in from entries in c.c, almost any order will work, I think. Noel

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Upgrading from 11/40 to 11/45 in Unix v6

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > Thanks for not dismissing the thread as frivolity. Hey, anyone wanting to do things with V6 I take seriously! :-) > I'm sure y'all have seen Mills's winning Best in Show IOCCC entry: > https://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html Yes, that was pretty awesome. > Fantastic, I'm prolly gonna try it. OK; if you want to know what it's doing (somehow I figured you probably didn't just want to simply follow the instructions :-) that is different from the /40 (it's quite different, and somewhat complicated), I just wrote this: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Unix_V6_kernel_memory_layout to explain it a bit. Currently, one has to read the source to 'sysfix', and also m45.s, to understand how the /45 version works; that new page is a little crude still, but it hopefully explains the big picture. > If the instructions in Setting up are as good for the 45 as they are for > the 40, I should be able to bring one up relatively painlessly. I just took a look at "Setting up UNIX - Sixth Edition", and it doesn't really say much about the /45; it basically just says 'the /45 is wiered inside' and 'look at sys/run'. It is certainly true that that does cover all one needs to bring V6 up on the /45, but... The coverage of what to do if your '45' has hardware floating point is pretty complete, though. > What it sounds like is that Unix was transitioning from non-I/D land to > I/D land and maintaining a measure of backward compatibility That's pretty accurate. One main advantage of the /45 is that it could have a lot more disk buffers, but I'm not sure that makes much difference for emulation. If you have some application that won't fit well in 64KB, that's big, but that's a user-land difference, not the OS. > Is there a bootable tape of the MIT system extant? Not yet, sorry. I do have a complete dump, but it i) includes all the users' personal files, and ii) is not well organized. It's on my to-do list. Noel

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Deleted lib1 and lib2 in v6, recoverable?

by Doug McIlroy

> But wasn't it tsort that did the heavy lifting to get things in order? An amusing notion. Having written tsort, I can assure you it couldn't lift anything heavy--it used the most naive quadratic algorithm. But it was good enough for libc. Doug

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Deleted lib1 and lib2 in v6, recoverable?

by Rudi Blom

>Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2018 14:24:55 -0500 >From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> >To: Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org> >Cc: tuhs(a)tuhs.org >Subject: Re: [TUHS] Deleted lib1 and lib2 in v6, recoverable? >Message-ID: > <CABH=_VTqZzNXPNecFCVZeqfMTnoJiWHbXZz->BriRGtxBY0J10Q(a)mail.gmail.com> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > >On 12/30/18, Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org> wrote: > >> <snip> >> >> Nowadays ranlib is no longer a separate program: ar >> recognizes object files and maintains an index if any are >> present. I never especially liked that; ar is in. >> principle a general tool so why should it have a special >> case for one type of file? But in practice I don't know >> anyone who uses ar for anything except libraries any more >> (everyone uses tar for the general case, since .it does a. >> better job). > >As you say, nobody these days uses ar for anything except object >module libraries. And just about anything you do that modifies an ar >library will require re-running ranlib afterwards. So as a >convenience and as a way to avoid cockpit errors, it makes sense to >merge the ranlib function into ar. MacOS still uses an independent >ranlib, and it's a pain in the butt to have to remember to run ranlib >after each time you modify an archive. > Maybe not on some of the older, more (resource) restricted systems, but now normally wouldn't modifying an archive be part of definitions/rules in a makefile and as such wouldn't the makefile include using ranlib if an archive was modified ? uncle rubl

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

by Norman Wilson

I wrote (re my approach to sendmail.cf): > Bill's half right. I didn't invent a language; I used what was there. Grant Taylor asked: Can I ask what language you did use? Was it m4 or something else? ==== I think you missed my point. The language I used was plain old sendmail.cf. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 6 months

Troff, eqn, tbl, etc

by Will Senn

In the help file for v6 (/usr/doc/hel), it says that troff, eqn, etc are not part of the distro and even though there are man pages, the utils are not present in my base v6 install. I know this because I copied the hel0-hel5 files and naa over to my mac and used groff to make ps files and ps2pdf to turn those files into pdfs. While they came out ok, there was some overlapping text and the math equations were imperfect. I figured if I could do more preprocessing in v6 before moving files into mac, they might come out better, but the utils as noted above. Do we have the utils as bits somewhere (or is this an oblique reference to 1bsd)? Thanks, Will Sent from my iPhone

6 years, 6 months

V6 intro file display in terminal

by Will Senn

There is a file, intro, in /usr/doc/man/man0, that is a system introduction prepared for a ‘Graphic System phototypesetter... in troff’. I was wondering if there was a way to display the file in v6 on the terminal, similar to displaying man pages: nroff /usr/doc/man/man0/naa /usr/doc/man/man1/write.1 I couldn’t find a troff command and the output from various nroff incantations were less readable than cat. Thanks, Will

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Deleted lib1 and lib2 in v6, recoverable?

by Warren Toomey

> On 12/28/18 7:35 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > > I just tried it here. I had to do: > > chdir ken; ... > > ar r ../lib1 *.o > > chdir ../dmr; ... > > ar r ../lib2 *.o On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 08:02:55PM -0600, Will Senn wrote: > I wound up doing: > chdir ken > cc -c -O *.c > ar r ../lib1 main.o > ar r ../lib1 alloc.o > ar r ../lib1 iget.o > ar r ../lib1 prf.o > ar r ../lib1 rdwri.o > ar r ../lib1 slp.o > ar r ../lib1 subr.o > ar r ../lib1 text.o > ar r ../lib1 trap.o > ar r ../lib1 sig.o > ar r ../lib1 sysent.o > ar r ../lib1 clock.o > ar r ../lib1 fio.o > ar r ../lib1 malloc.o > ar r ../lib1 nami.o > ar r ../lib1 pipe.o > ar r ../lib1 sys1.o > ar r ../lib1 sys2.o > ar r ../lib1 sys3.o > ar r ../lib1 sys4.o > > rm *.o > > chdir ../dmr > cc -c -O *.c > > ar r ../lib2 bio.o > ar r ../lib2 tty.o > ar r ../lib2 dc.o > ar r ../lib2 dn.o > ar r ../lib2 dp.o > ar r ../lib2 kl.o > ar r ../lib2 mem.o > ar r ../lib2 pc.o > ar r ../lib2 rf.o > ar r ../lib2 rk.o > ar r ../lib2 tc.o > ar r ../lib2 tm.o > ar r ../lib2 partab.o > ar r ../lib2 rp.o > ar r ../lib2 lp.o > ar r ../lib2 dhdm.o > ar r ../lib2 dh.o > ar r ../lib2 dhfdm.o > ar r ../lib2 sys.o > ar r ../lib2 hp.o > ar r ../lib2 ht.o > ar r ../lib2 hs.o > rm *.o > > Then I continued with the system build and it worked and my changes were > there! > Will Yes, order will be important, I forgot. There's no ranlib in v6 :-) Cheers, Warren

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Deleted lib1 and lib2 in v6, recoverable?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > I just tried it here. I had to do: > ... > ar r ../lib1 *.o > ... > to get them to rebuild. Otherwise, I had empty libraries. Duhh. I never noticed the missing "*.o"! I wonder how that one slipped through? Looking at 'run', it really does look like it was used to prepare the systems on the distribution tape. So probably the libraries just happened to already hold the latest and greatest, so that error had no effect. The thing with needing to order the library contents properly to cause all the modules to get loaded is, I reckon, the reason why 'ar' has those arguments to specify where in the archive a given file goes. Noel

6 years, 6 months

Deleted lib1 and lib2 in v6, recoverable?

by Will Senn

So... I whacked /usr/sys/lib1 and lib2 ‘accidentally’ meaning I logged in as bin changed to /usr/sys and typed rm lib1 and rm lib2 :). Now, I was thinking at the time that I could regenerate them... this seems like a possibility, but I can’t seem to get them back. sh run as bin doesn’t do it. So, what magic incantation is required to rebuild them. What motivated the exploration was a desire to modify main.c and see those changes manifest. Help. Thanks, Will Sent from my iPhone

6 years, 6 months

Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

by Dave Horsfall

We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, and if you haven't heard of him then you are barely human... As computer science goes, he's right up there with Alan Turing. There is speculation that he knew of Babbage's work; see https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/10828/the-relation-between-bab… . -- Dave

6 years, 6 months

NFS & Kerberos woes...

by Grant Taylor

Do any fellow TUHS subscribers have any experience with NFS, particularly in combination with Kerberos authentication? I'm messing with something that is making me think that Kerberos authentication (sec=krb5{,i,p}) usurps no_root_squash. Meaning that root can't access files owned by other users with go-rwx. Almost as if no_root_squash wasn't configured on the export. Does anyone have a spare bone that they would be willing to throw my way? -- Grant. . . . unix || die

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Usenix: no official Unix 50th celebration, (yet)

by Norman Wilson

I thought I read a different email saying that there will be a track about the 50th anniversary. But cannot find any details or reference to it now. Does anyone have information about Unix 50th celebration(s)? Is it time for paper submissions? ... ==== If you mean for the 2019 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, the CFP is https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc19/call-for-papers The submission deadline is about three weeks away, on 2019-01-10. I see nothing explicit about a UNIX 50th celebration, alas. At least one program-committee member is on this list; perhaps more information will appear. Or there's a contact address for the program co-chairs on the web page cited above. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 6 months

Usenix: no official Unix 50th celebration, apparently

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I've just heard that the Usenix board of directors do not want to explicitly celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unix. It's been suggested that we, the TUHS members, both lobby the board and also offer our assistance to help organisation such a celebration. Who, on the list, would put their hands up to help organising something that coincided with the 2019 Usenix ATC in July 2019? I'd like to get the bare bones of an organising team, then approach the Usenix board, offer our help and ask them to support us. What do you think? 11 months to go. Thanks, Warren P.S. Nokia Bell Labs are also going to organise something, possibly a month earlier but I have no solid details yet.

6 years, 6 months

Pdp11 implementations on fpga in 2018

by Will Senn

Hi folks, This is a little sideways from on topic, but no too far. Is there a good open source implementation of a pdp11 for fpga in verilog/vhdl that works well for Unix v6+? Google turns up a number, but I’m hoping some of y’all have actual experience with one that you could recommend over others. I’m financially challenged so it’s a requirement that it run on cheap fpga’s not some Tesla prototype :) Regards, Will Sent from my iPhone

6 years, 6 months

Archive(s) of old academic papers?

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, also an off-topic question. I got a private e-mail from a person who has been trying to collect old academic papers from the CompSci/IT field. Does anybody know of an existing archive for old CS/IT papers? Thanks, Warren

6 years, 6 months

Travesty Generators

by Wesley Parish

Hi One of the reasons I enjoy emacs is Meta-X dissociated-press, which turns the most turgid bureaucratic prose into something truly worth reading. Has anybody documented or provided a timeline for the emergence of the Travesty Generator? (I know that text processing was one of the major focuses of university research, as opposed to the more utilitarian focuses of the scientific computing or corporate record keeping areas. One early CompSci book I got from a second-hand booksellers in Christchurch before the earthquakes, had a nice section on SNOBOL.) So who wrote the first Travesty Generator/s?

6 years, 6 months

Mt Xinu manual scanning finished

by Al Kossow

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mtXinu

6 years, 6 months

vintage boards on ebay

by Arthur Krewat

https://www.ebay.com/str/Zees-Fine-Finds A few old DEC boards/modules. I don't think there's anything PDP-11 related, but figured someone on this mailing list might find something interesting. art k.

6 years, 6 months

Test e-mail: minnie upgrade

by Warren Toomey

All, I just upgraded minnie to Ubuntu 18.08 LTS. This is just a test e-mail to confirm that the mailing list software is stil working. Cheers, Warren

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] 2.9bsd with networking on 18-bit possible?

by Paul Ruizendaal

> The journey is documented here: > http://1587660.websites.xs4all.nl/cgi-bin/9995/timeline > > The network code is in a different tree, I'll move it over to the above tree over the weekend. Posted the network bit in the online repo; it's in the v6net directory. Also fixed the instability - it is quite satisfying to login to v6 from a 'nc' client on modern hardware. However, I also found that the BBN code from November 1981 is what is says on the can: beta. I'll move to the October 1982 code when I find some time. Paul PS, this is the 'server' that nc connects to: #define unchar unsigned char #define netaddr unsigned long #include "con.h" #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> unsigned long ipaddr(w,x,y,z) int w,x,y,z; { unsigned long ip; ip = w; ip = (ip<<8)|x; ip = (ip<<8)|y; ip = (ip<<8)|z; return ip; } struct con con; void child(fd) int fd; { close(0); dup(fd); close(1); dup(fd); close(2); dup(fd); close(fd); execl("/bin/sh", "[net-sh]", 0); } main() { int i, n, sd; con.c_mode = CONTCP; con.c_fcon = ipaddr(192,168,1,114); con.c_lcon = ipaddr(172,16,0,2); con.c_fport = 0; con.c_lport = 4000; sd = open("/net", &con); printf("Connected\n", sd); child(sd); close(sd); }

6 years, 6 months

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