TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

60 participants
6509 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Reconstructed and newly set UNIX Manual

by Angelo Papenhoff

[this was meant to go over the list, Warren quoted it, but it destroyed the formatting somewhat] On 27/10/18, Warren Toomey wrote: > On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 09:46:36PM +0200, Angelo Papenhoff wrote: > > And most importantly: is the old troff really lost? > > Angelo, I just trawled through the Unix Archive. Below is a list > of tarballs with roff stuff in them. Hope this helps. Sorry that > they are not in date order. > Cheers, Warren Unfortunately that does not include the old troff written in PDP-11 assembly. The v6 tape and file system contain traces of it in the directory /usr/source/s7, so we at least know (some of) the file names: │002655f0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | | │00265600 6d 01 72 6f 66 66 33 2e-73 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |m?roff3.s | │00265610 6c 01 72 6f 66 66 34 2e-73 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |l?roff4.s | │00265620 6b 01 72 6f 66 66 35 2e-73 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |k?roff5.s | │00265630 6a 01 72 6f 66 66 37 2e-73 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |j?roff7.s | │00265640 69 01 72 6f 66 66 38 2e-73 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |i?roff8.s | │00265650 00 00 73 75 66 72 63 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | sufrc | │00265660 67 01 73 75 66 74 61 62-2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 00 |g?suftab.s | │00265670 00 00 74 63 61 74 73 69-6d 2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 | tcatsim.s | │00265680 00 00 74 72 63 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | trc | │00265690 00 00 74 72 6f 66 66 31-2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 00 | troff1.s | │002656a0 00 00 74 72 6f 66 66 32-2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 00 | troff2.s | │002656b0 00 00 74 72 6f 66 66 33-2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 00 | troff3.s | │002656c0 00 00 74 72 6f 66 66 34-2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 00 | troff4.s | │002656d0 00 00 74 72 6f 66 66 35-2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 00 | troff5.s | │002656e0 00 00 74 72 6f 66 66 36-2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 00 | troff6.s | │002656f0 00 00 74 72 6f 66 66 36-61 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | troff6a | │00265700 00 00 74 72 6f 66 66 38-2e 73 00 00 00 00 00 00 | troff8.s | │00265710 00 00 78 78 78 78 78 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | xxxxx | │00265720 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | | Now it could be that v7 troff is perfectly capable of generating the manual just like older troff would have, I just haven't dived more deeply into it all yet. I was more concerned about reconstructing the actual content rather than the exact looks for now, but it's still something i want to get right eventually. This didn't go through the list but I'll reply here: On 26/10/18, Ken Thompson wrote: > nice job. Thanks, You've always been an inspiration to me! aap

6 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] System III on 11/34 + rl02

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jacob Ritorto > If this is true, I wonder why the install only offers rl01? Where does it say this? (I didn't search for that.) > I'm totally in the market for an Able Enable board too! Out of > zcuriosity, is it totally out of the question to just find the prints > and do a production run? Rotsa ruck! They're down the same mine as Jimmy Hoffa!! :-) But seriously, if you could find them, that would be fantastic. I've managed to collect (thanks Clem!) a tiny bit of info about them: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Able_ENABLE and I _think_ I've worked out how they worked, but more is better. We had a set of the prints at MIT BITD, but we didn't have the PROM/PLA/PAL/etc programming info, and one would need that too to reproduce them. > I sure hope there's a pdp11 sdcard / usb disk solution someday like they > did for the Commodore 64 So Dave Bridgham and I have been working on a QBUS card with an FPGA that uses an SD card to hold the bits, and emulates an RK11/RP11/etc controller. We have a wire-wrap prototype working (the RK11's done, the RP11 should be a short edit of that), and UNIX boots and runs. Now to turn it into PCB's... We've planned that the next step will be to do a UNIBUS version, which will also include ENABLE functionality (although it won't be plug compatible with an ENABLE, the memory will be on-board). Now to find the time/energy to make it happen... :-( Noel

6 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Software Archeology: QED

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Noel Hunt > In addition to SINE, does anyone know what happened to EINE? Was replaced by ZWEI fairly early on. Zwei Was Eine Initially Dunno if it still exists on an MIT dump-tape somewhere. Noel

6 years, 7 months

Software Archeology: QED

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. I am starting to collect, if possible, different versions of the QED editor; with a hope to put up a git repo. If you have a tarball of code, please send it to me with as much info about it as you have. I would like to track down the qedbuf(1) man page also. I have contacted Rob Pike and got one tarball from him. I have another tarball that I got sometime in 1987 and have a promise of code coming Donald Mitchell. Much thanks! Arnold

6 years, 7 months

System III on 11/34 + rl02

by Jacob Ritorto

Hi, Was wanting to put together a fully functional (meaning able to load the whole distro and recompile itself) and "reliable" System III machine made of real, albeit not terribly sexy parts. I have (4) working rl02 drives and an 11/34, so I feel like there's a chance it could work. I'll have to build it on the emulator, of course, then vtserver it over to the real hw in chunks. But the blocker is that System III only supports rl01, not rl02, which kills the 'full distro' prospect. Would anyone know if it's trivial to modify the source for the rl01 driver to just add double the blocks, thereby supporting rl02? Or am I wildly underestimating the task at hand? Has this been done before? Tips? thx jake

6 years, 7 months

X11 Secondary Selection

by Grant Taylor

Does anyone know any history about X11's secondary selection? What did / still does use it? I'm fairly familiar with the primary selection and clipboard. But I'm not aware of anything that uses the secondary selection. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

6 years, 7 months

Happy birthday, Peter Naur!

by Dave Horsfall

Computer science pioneer Peter Naur was born on this day in 1928; he was responsible for ALGOL60, BNF syntax (he notably insisted upon calling it Backus-NORMAL-Form), etc. -- Dave

6 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] System III on 11/34 + rl02

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto(a)gmail.com> > System III only supports rl01, not rl02 Really? That seems odd; SysII long post-dates (I think) the RL0x, if so it's odd they only supported the RL01. Looking at: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/uts/pdp11/io/… it seems to support RL02's: #define RL02 0200 /* bit 7 indicates an rl02 present if set */ > Would anyone know if it's trivial to modify the source for the rl01 > driver to just add double the blocks The only difference between the two is that the RL02 has twice as many cylinders, so there's an extra bit in use on the high end of the 'disk address' register. > From: Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> > Also if you have a 40 class system like the 34 of 34A see if you can > find an Able Enable board. I'm sure there are a stack of them stored away with Jimmy Hoffa's body and the Ark of the Covenant in King Solomon's Mine! :-) Seriously, if anyone has one, I'd pay a very substantial sum for it. Noel

6 years, 7 months

IBM Mach 3.0 Ports

by Kevin Bowling

Does anyone have these documents or the ports themselves? Or know who to talk to so they can be preserved? https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/mach/public/FAQ/rs6k_announce Regards, Kevin

6 years, 7 months

Anyone have any luck trying to contact Micro Focus regarding Unix licensing?

by jsteve＠superglobalmegacorp.com

I've tried calling, emails to sales, using their website and I'm getting nowhere. I know this is more complicated than v6’s context switching …. I've also read that apparently Microsoft swooped in 2010 acting as CPTN Holdings and bought all the Novell patents and turned them over to GPL v2? I know after the whole SCO personal licenses and then Ransom Loves’s making 32v and all prior open was great but apparently it wasn’t his to give away. Or am I wrong? Are Unix licenses transferrable? Anyone know someone wanting to lease/loan/sell? I don't want to kick up too much of the hornets nest. I'd just hate to think that the original Unix is going to languish. I know many people worked so hard to keep the “Unix lights on”, just want to see that it doesn't die clouded in secrecy like VMS.

6 years, 7 months

Ultrix Tape: Block Size?

by Warren Toomey

All, I received this request from Matthew who isn't subscribed to either the TUHS or cctalk lists. He knows how to read the lists archives. Many thanks for any help you can provide. Cheers, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Matthew Whitehead ----- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2018 08:25:39 -0400 From: Matthew Whitehead Subject: Ultrix Tape Blocks Warren, I wonder if you can give me a referral. I want to install Ultrix-32 on my MicroVAX II using the ancient TK-50 tape drive. I know the tape files are on your archive, but I need to know the block size for each of the many files; it can vary a lot. Who might be able to help me with this? Matthew Whitehead ----- End forwarded message -----

6 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Alan Snyder's portable C compiler

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > I have Alan Snyder's C compiler running Way cool! Congrats! Where did you find it? Do you have source too? > there may also be machine descriptions for Honeywell 6000 series and > PDP-11 There _was_ one for the H6000, not sure about the -11. > At some point it seems like this compiler was tangled with Stephen > Johnson's PCC. It would be good to find out what, if any, the connection is. Noel

6 years, 7 months

Alan Snyder's portable C compiler

by Lars Brinkhoff

Hello, I have Alan Snyder's C compiler running in case anyone would like to play with it. It's from around 1975, so the syntax is yummily archaic. The primary host is a PDP-10 running ITS, but there may also be machine descriptions for Honeywell 6000 series and PDP-11. At some point it seems like this compiler was tangled with Stephen Johnson's PCC.

6 years, 7 months

In memoriam: Ken Iverson

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Ken Iverson on this day in 2004; a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, he gave us APL (and its obscure one-liners). -- Dave

6 years, 7 months

Vaxen, my children...

by Dave Horsfall

Time to post this classic; I don't recall who wrote it. Note that the references are pretty obscure now... ----- VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. In my business, I am frequently called by small sites and startups having VAX problems. So when a friend of mine in an Extremely Large Financial Institution (ELFI) called me one day to ask for help, I was intrigued because this outfit is a really major VAX user - they have several large herds of VAXen - and plenty of sharp VAXherds to take care of them. So I went to see what sort of an ELFI mess they had gotten into. It seems they had shoved a small 750 with two RA60s running a single application, PC style, into a data center with two IBM 3090s and just about all the rest of the disk drives in the world. The computer room was so big it had three street addresses. The operators had only IBM experience and, to quote my friend, they were having "a little trouble adjusting to the VAX", were a bit hostile towards it and probably needed some help with system management. Hmmm, hostility... Sigh. Well, I thought it was pretty ridiculous for an outfit with all that VAX muscle elsewhere to isolate a dinky old 750 in their Big Blue Country, and said so bluntly. But my friend patiently explained that although small, it was an "extremely sensitive and confidential application." It seems that the 750 had originally been properly clustered with the rest of a herd and in the care of one of their best VAXherds. But the trouble started when the Chief User went to visit his computer and its VAXherd. He came away visibly disturbed and immediately complained to the ELFI's Director of Data Processing that, "There are some very strange people in there with the computers." Now since this user person was the Comptroller of this Extremely Large Financial Institution, the 750 had been promptly hustled over to the IBM data center which the Comptroller said, "was a more suitable place." The people there wore shirts and ties and didn't wear head bands or cowboy hats. So my friend introduced me to the Comptroller, who turned out to be five feet tall, 85 and a former gnome of Zurich. He had a young apprentice gnome who was about 65. The two gnomes interviewed me in whispers for about an hour before they decided my modes of dress and speech were suitable for managing their system and I got the assignment. There was some confusion, understandably, when I explained that I would immediately establish a procedure for nightly backups. The senior gnome seemed to think I was going to put the computer in reverse, but the apprentice's son had an IBM PC and he quickly whispered that "backup" meant making a copy of a program borrowed from a friend and why was I doing that? Sigh. I was shortly introduced to the manager of the IBM data center, who greeted me with joy and anything but hostility. And the operators really weren't hostile - it just seemed that way. It's like the driver of a Mack 18 wheeler, with a condo behind the cab, who was doing 75 when he ran over a moped doing its best to get away at 45. He explained sadly, "I really warn't mad at mopeds but to keep from runnin' over that'n, I'da had to slow down or change lanes!" Now the only operation they had figured out how to do on the 750 was reboot it. This was their universal cure for any and all problems. After all it works on a PC, why not a VAX? Was there a difference? Sigh. But I smiled and said, "No sweat, I'll train you. The first command you learn is HELP" and proceeded to type it in on the console terminal. So the data center manager, the shift supervisor and the eight day-operators watched the LA100 buzz out the usual introductory text. When it finished they turned to me with expectant faces and I said in an avuncular manner, "This is your most important command!" The shift supervisor stepped forward and studied the text for about a minute. He then turned with a very puzzled expression on his face and asked, "What do you use it for?" Sigh. Well, I tried everything. I trained and I put the doc set on shelves by the 750 and I wrote a special 40 page doc set and then a four page doc set. I designed all kinds of command files to make complex operations into simple foreign commands and I taped a list of these simplified commands to the top of the VAX. The most successful move was adding my home phone number. The cheat sheets taped on the top of the CPU cabinet needed continual maintenance, however. It seems the VAX was in the quietest part of the data center, over behind the scratch tape racks. The operators ate lunch on the CPU cabinet and the sheets quickly became coated with pizza drippings, etc. But still the most used solution to hangups was a reboot and I gradually got things organized so that during the day when the gnomes were using the system, the operators didn't have to touch it. This smoothed things out a lot. Meanwhile, the data center was getting new TV security cameras, a halon gas fire extinguisher system and an immortal power source. The data center manager apologized because the VAX had not been foreseen in the plan and so could not be connected to immortal power. The VAX and I felt a little rejected but I made sure that booting on power recovery was working right. At least it would get going again quickly when power came back. Anyway, as a consolation prize, the data center manager said he would have one of the security cameras adjusted to cover the VAX. I thought to myself, "Great, now we can have 24 hour video tapes of the operators eating Chinese takeout on the CPU." I resolved to get a piece of plastic to cover the cheat sheets. One day, the apprentice gnome called to whisper that the senior was going to give an extremely important demonstration. Now I must explain that what the 750 was really doing was holding our National Debt. The Reagan administration had decided to privatize it and had quietly put it out for bid. My Extreme Large Financial Institution had won the bid for it and was, as ELFIs are wont to do, making an absolute bundle on the float. On Monday the Comptroller was going to demonstrate to the board of directors how he could move a trillion dollars from Switzerland to the Bahamas. The apprentice whispered, "Would you please look in on our computer? I'm sure everything will be fine, sir, but we will feel better if you are present. I'm sure you understand?" I did. Monday morning, I got there about five hours before the scheduled demo to check things over. Everything was cool. I was chatting with the shift supervisor and about to go upstairs to the Comptroller's office. Suddenly there was a power failure. The emergency lighting came on and the immortal power system took over the load of the IBM 3090s. They continued smoothly, but of course the VAX, still on city power, died. Everyone smiled and the dead 750 was no big deal because it was 7 AM and gnomes don't work before 10 AM. I began worrying about whether I could beg some immortal power from the data center manager in case this was a long outage. Immortal power in this system comes from storage batteries for the first five minutes of an outage. Promptly at one minute into the outage we hear the gas turbine powered generator in the sub-basement under us automatically start up getting ready to take the load on the fifth minute. We all beam at each other. At two minutes into the outage we hear the whine of the backup gas turbine generator starting. The 3090s and all those disk drives are doing just fine. Business as usual. The VAX is dead as a door nail but what the hell. At precisely five minutes into the outage, just as the gas turbine is taking the load, city power comes back on and the immortal power source commits suicide. Actually it was a double murder and suicide because it took both 3090s with it. So now the whole data center was dead, sort of. The fire alarm system had its own battery backup and was still alive. The lead acid storage batteries of the immortal power system had been discharging at a furious rate keeping all those big blue boxes running and there was a significant amount of sulfuric acid vapor. Nothing actually caught fire but the smoke detectors were convinced it had. The fire alarm klaxon went off and the siren warning of imminent halon gas release was screaming. We started to panic but the data center manager shouted over the din, "Don't worry, the halon system failed its acceptance test last week. It's disabled and nothing will happen." He was half right, the primary halon system indeed failed to discharge. But the secondary halon system observed that the primary had conked and instantly did its duty, which was to deal with Dire Disasters. It had twice the capacity and six times the discharge rate. Now the ear splitting gas discharge under the raised floor was so massive and fast, it blew about half of the floor tiles up out of their framework. It came up through the floor into a communications rack and blew the cover panels off, decking an operator. Looking out across that vast computer room, we could see the air shimmering as the halon mixed with it. We stampeded for exits to the dying whine of 175 IBM disks. As I was escaping I glanced back at the VAX, on city power, and noticed the usual flickering of the unit select light on its system disk indicating it was happily rebooting. Twelve firemen with air tanks and axes invaded. There were frantic phone calls to the local IBM Field Service office because both the live and backup 3090s were down. About twenty minutes later, seventeen IBM CEs arrived with dozens of boxes and, so help me, a barrel. It seems they knew what to expect when an immortal power source commits murder. In the midst of absolute pandemonium, I crept off to the gnome office and logged on. After extensive checking it was clear that everything was just fine with the VAX and I began to calm down. I called the data center manager's office to tell him the good news. His secretary answered with, "He isn't expected to be available for some time. May I take a message?" I left a slightly smug note to the effect that, unlike some other computers, the VAX was intact and functioning normally. Several hours later, the gnome was whispering his way into a demonstration of how to flick a trillion dollars from country 2 to country 5. He was just coming to the tricky part, where the money had been withdrawn from Switzerland but not yet deposited in the Bahamas. He was proceeding very slowly and the directors were spellbound. I decided I had better check up on the data center. Most of the floor tiles were back in place. IBM had resurrected one of the 3090s and was running tests. What looked like a bucket brigade was working on the other one. The communication rack was still naked and a fireman was standing guard over the immortal power corpse. Life was returning to normal, but the Big Blue Country crew was still pretty shaky. Smiling proudly, I headed back toward the triumphant VAX behind the tape racks where one of the operators was eating a plump jelly bun on the 750 CPU. He saw me coming, turned pale and screamed to the shift supervisor, "Oh my God, we forgot about the VAX!" Then, before I could open my mouth, he rebooted it. It was Monday, 19-Oct-1987. VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. -- Dave

6 years, 7 months

TK50, was: Re: Ultrix Tape: Block Size?

by emanuel stiebler

On 2018-10-16 20:37, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > > >> On Oct 16, 2018, at 1:23 PM, William Pechter via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: >> >> DEC Tape II was the serial driven TU58. >> The TK50 was CompacTape or something like that. It was the predecessor of a number of square tapes... >> >> See DLT on Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Linear_Tape >> >> Bill > I used DLT on RSTS systems, with a Qbus interface. Those were modest speed hosts and buses, but I never remember data late or overrun issues, and we drove those tapes quite hard in full time streaming mode for backup and software distribution. Longer blocks, too (2k or so) which would make any buffering issues more severe. Just few words here, as I'm not sure anymore we are talking about the same thing ... there were TK50Z as an external drive, on "SCSI" TZ30 internal drive, on "SCSI", using TK50 tapes TK50 on QBUS with an TQK50 controller which really didn't stream to often TK50 on QBUS with an TQK70 controller, which doubled the memory of the TQK50, which was capable of streaming ...

6 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Another one (Was: In memoriam: Jon Postel)

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

For more information on J. C. R. Licklider, see these books Cyber reader ISBN 0-7148-4071-8 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution ISBN 1-4711-3879-8 The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal ISBN 0-670-89976-3 The computing universe: a journey through a revolution ISBN 0-521-76645-1 Detailed BibTeX entries, with table of contents information, can be found at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/master.html http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/t/turing-alan-mathison.html http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/b/babbage-charles.html (change .html to .bib for a BibTeX file). A Library of Congress search found another book, by Licklider himself: Libraries of the future xvii + 219 pp Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, MA (1965) LCCN: Z699 .L5 Given its age and small publisher, I suspect that it may be hard to find; I have not seen it myself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6 years, 7 months

In memoriam: Jon Postel

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Jon Postel, regarded as the Father of the Internet (due to his many RFCs) on this day in 1998. -- Dave

6 years, 7 months

Paul Allen dead at 65.

by Dan Cross

I just saw this headline. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen dead of cancer, aged 65. Relevancy to TUHS as Microsoft has been both a competitor to and supporter of both Unix and (much more recently) Linux. Allen also funded the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, where one can log into a real PDP-11/70 running 7th Edition Unix. - Dan C.

6 years, 7 months

Paul Allen dead at 65.

by norman＠oclsc.org

Dan Cross: Allen also funded the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, where one can log into a real PDP-11/70 running 7th Edition Unix. And see a real live PDP-7, and many other marvellous artifacts. Their basic idea is to be a museum of history that runs. Well worth a visit when in Seattle. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] The origin of /home

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Norman Wilson > Unfortunately all the quick hacks and poorly-considered tweaks of the > past have long since been cast in stone by widespread convention There seem to be two kind of people in the world; i) those who cannot bring themselves to change anything, and ii) those who change all sort of things, usually with no good reason (perhaps just to be different). The world of Unix seems to be thickly stocked with both. Noel

6 years, 7 months

In memoriam: Dennis Ritchie

by Dave Horsfall

Co-inventor of Unix, we lost him in 2011. -- Dave

6 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] The origin of /home

by Norman Wilson

Dave Horsfall: Before I started using /home (Slowaris had yet to appear), I used /u/* instead (I didn't want to pollute /usr with home directories). === I'm late to the party, but I'll chime in too: The first UNIX system I ever used, ca. 1980, had users' home directories in /u. I suspect it was that way (as suggested in some earlier messages) just for storage management: separate file system from /usr. I've carried /u around with me ever since to other systems I've set up from scratch, except in my home environment where I've made a radical departure: everything that isn't part of the base OS is in a tree rooted at /con, so home directories are /con/u. /con was `constant,' inspired by /var, meaning stuff that should be preserved when the OS is reinstalled--everything else should come from installation media or configuration management. But in any case there's nothing especially novel about moving users' home directories out of /usr, and since it's UNIX, nothing that says there has to be any standard at all. On the systems I am currently paid to help run, most users have home-directory names like /h/u12/c4/00/c4ntest. There is no attempt to glue together a single name hierarchy; we have in excess of 17000 users so that would be something of a mess. (I guess enormous directories aren't the resource pigs they used to be, though symlinks are just as bad as they have ever been.) There's the ~user shell syntax for those who like that; I don't, but I have a little shell script in my personal bin directory so I can do things like ls `home c4ntest`; it all just works. I once thought of writing a paper entitled `/usr and /etc considered harmful,' in which I would have proposed: a. It no longer matters a whit whether the (real) root file system can fit into a 5MB slice of the disk or the like, so just merge everything that spilled into /usr in the tiny-disk days back into the root where it belongs. b. /etc is largely junk. Executables have long since moved into /sbin. Pretty much everything else that's there belongs (according to the original scheme, not the latter-day complications inflicted by those who didn't understand) in /lib. Unfortunately all the quick hacks and poorly-considered tweaks of the past have long since been cast in stone by widespread convention, so it's fruitless to try to clean any of this up. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Software Archeology: QED

by Norman Wilson

Leah Neukirchen: I tried contacting David Tilbrook several times and got no replies. I think some people around Toronto still use qed, but they seem to be very secretive about it. ==== David is likely well-retired by now, but I don't really know. Even though I walk within a block of his house fairly often, we've never really been consistently in touch. But he was responsible for a distinct branch of the qed that originated at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s (same one Rob supplied). Certainly worth tracking down. I don't know your definitions of `people around Toronto' or `secretive.' I still use qed daily; my copy is one I've been carrying around, and occasionally tweaking, since my time at Caltech (where I got it from Rob). I'll send Arnold a copy. I'm really tired both of having to recompile it (and deal with yet another bit of obsolete-C assumption that no previous compiler or C library has shown up) now and then, and with its private variant of regular expressions, so I keep threatening (mainly to myself) to rewrite it in Python, but I have no idea whether I'll ever get around to that. If I do I suspect I'll throw away some of the programmability hooks, which I never use, and perhaps extend it here and there (I really want nesting globals, and they're not that hard to do--I did them in my half-baked personal mail reader, which has an ed-like interface). I don't know offhand of anyone else around Toronto using my branch of qed. I do know of a couple of friends in California, one who left Caltech before I did but is now back there, another elsewhere in Los Angeles, who still use my version at least occasionally. It wouldn't surprise me if there were people around Toronto who use Tilbrook's branch, since it was part of his qef toolkit and he introduced several companies to it when consulting for them; but I don't know of any specifics. None of which is as archaeologically interesting as the non-UNIX qeds, of course. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 7 months

Cellular Irix

by Kevin Bowling

https://cug.org/5-publications/proceedings_attendee_lists/1998CD/S98PROC/AU… anyone know more about this? Seems like they were thinking about the interesting problems at the time Regards, Kevin

6 years, 7 months

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TUHS