Hi,
The earliest I've found to be in the FHS from '94. Are there any earlier
examples of a home directory being at /home instead of /usr/$(user)? Are
there any current Unix systems that don't use /home by default (except
OSX)? Does anybody here do it intentionally? Also, what was the
rationale of moving the directory to /home?
Thanks!
--
caóc
I've just finished reading another article in the latest print issue
of Communications of the ACM that arrived in my mailbox earlier this
week:
Jean-Fran{\c{c}}ois Abramatic, Roberto Di Cosmo, and Stefano Zacchiroli
Viewpoint: Building the universal archive of source code
Comm. ACM 61(20) 29--31 October 2018
https://doi.org/10.1145/3183558https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3281635.3183558
I draw it to your attention to it because it has favorable mention of
the Computer History Museum, and of Diomidis Spinellis's work on the
Unix source code archive, described in his article
A repository of Unix history and evolution
Empirical Software Engineering 22(3) 1372--1404 June 2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9445-5https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-016-9445-5
The project that Abramatic describe is impressive: a goal of a
triplicated complete archive of the world's software history,
including both open source and proprietary code. They report holding
200TB of data already, covering 80 million code projects.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to everyone who replied with tarballs, zip files, pointers to
stuff in the archive, web links ... I will try (eventually) to thank
everyone individually as well, but in the meantime please accept this
broadcast. :-)
This has now become Yet Another Back Burner Project; I hope putting things
together into a reasonable github repo (or two) will happen without
too much of a delay.
This is a great group of people!
Thanks,
Arnold
> From: jsteve
> I'd say TripOS. There is some surce fragments but I never could get any
> BCPL to cross build anything.
I'm somewhat stunned to hear that, given that Martin Richards did both! What kind
of things are the compilers complaining about? (And I'm also kind of amazed that
Cambridge didn't make an effort to save Tripos.)
Noel
Might as well send this to the list:
There are Multics QEDX sources, but I haven't run across QED - however, there is an overview of it's use and commands in the General Electric June 1969 Multics Condensed Guide (http://bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condensed-g…)
I pulled the QEDX source at put it at https://ban.ai/~jhj/misc/qedx/ for easy access - this is the MR12.5 version and last modified in 1989, sadly, I don't ever recall seeing the BCPL QED. [ I'll be sure to remember now if I see it. ]
[ Somewhat off-topic ] How about Yale 'Z' as long as we're talking editors? Or another editor (that I very much like) is the 'G' editor, which has a long history, originating on Honeywell 6000 GCOS/TSS, originally written in B: https://github.com/ascheepe/g-editor - works nicely today. There is also the Ecce editor, which includes versions in IMP, BASIC, C, BCPL, and FORTRAN at http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/apps/ecce/ - bringing Ecce up on Multics is an item on my todo list.
-- Jeff - https://ban.ai/multics/
> From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe"
> a goal of a triplicated complete archive of the world's software
> history, including both open source and proprietary code. They report
> holding 200TB of data already, covering 80 million code projects.
I should ask them if they have a copy of MERT!
Now that we have Multics, ITS, PDP-7 UNIX and UNIX V0, etc MERT (which may
have been the first micro-kernel - although perhaps THE gets that palm) is
perhaps the most significant 'missing' OS.
If not, what am I missing? The Berkeley Genie OS for the SDS? (Dunno if that's
been saved.) The THE system? (Ditto - although I know someone has saved the
last X8.) The Atlas OS?
Noel
> On Oct 6, 2018 ,jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) wrote:
>
> Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2018 21:04:59 -0400 (EDT)
> From: jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu <mailto:jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (Noel Chiappa)
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix source code archive in the news
> Message-ID: <20181007010459.9098E18C096(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu <mailto:20181007010459.9098E18C096@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>>
>
> If not, what am I missing? The Berkeley Genie OS for the SDS? (Dunno if that's
> been saved.) The THE system? (Ditto - although I know someone has saved the
> last X8.) The Atlas OS?
The Computer History Museum’s Donald Knuth digital archive project (http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102726297 <http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102726297>) contains a scan of a listing of the source code of the THE Operating System by Bron, Dijkstra, et al. The finding aid for the collection is here: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index… <http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index…> — scan down for “Source code of the THE Operating System”.
I can only speak from my experience, but I think there was a more or less
official 1st Ed release. in 1993 I was working as a system manager
at UNSW I requested and receicved a Plan9 CDROM with about 5 inches of
printed manual (but unbound) manual from the labs.
Here is some bits and pieces about the Ed1 I scraped together some years ago,
including the artwork for the CD :-)
https://plan9.io/sources/contrib/steve/historic/1st-edition/
I also believe that the CD contained some music in RedBook form
(sadly I never got around to putting the disk in an audio cd drive).
If I am right, then this has been reissued.
https://bauhaus.bandcamp.com/
Everyone sing along now, Undead undead, undead...
-Steve
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:07 AM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 28 August 2018 at 23:23:10 -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> ....
>
>
> Creeping featurism!
>
No, I think its really is that many programmers that touch different
applications felt the need to pee on the code to feel that they left their
scent. 😘
Seriously, IMO the problem is you can never know what someone else really
values, so be careful at what you change. Pike's 'cat -v' dissertation
b*tched at UCB for the some of the same issues. Somewhere there is a
proper middle ground ( I think of as having good taste elegance). BSD nor
Linux was no more 'perfect' that 6th or 7th edition. Truth is a much as I
pine for the elegance, I don't want to run either of the later as my
day-2-day system in today's world and I >>loved<< running them when they
were what I had.
Rob has a real point and many of the changes really *are gratuitous* and
there *are better ways of doing* many things than adding a switch to old
command and reusing it because you can. I also think the complaint of just
adding 'crap' because you could started with BSD but the cause wasn't that
people were bad -- there was address space relief over the PDP-11 and often
added a new switch/new functionality was easy to do, instead of creating a
whole new solution just deidcated to that problen only. FWIW: sendmail is
my best example (useful tool that it was - there were/are much more elegant
solutions - sendmail should have been 'headerwriter' and smtpd should have
been a seperate program).
Dueling switches and functionality (dec vs -f bs -F) I fear is sometimes
ignorance of the past. I fear there is some sort of belief we need to shed
the past because someone feeld the it gets in the way of the future (I'll
pick on my on son here - who things 2-3 years is 'old' and its time to
throw things away). Truth is sometimes it might. But I would rather
inject a stronger strain into the mix and let the users decide and for good
or bad, BSD did that to the original (v6/v7) and now Linux is doing/has
done it to much of BSD.
The compaint is the 'throwing the baby out with the bath water' behavior
that seems to often follow (see systemd issues on other mailing lists);
*i.e*. did you really gain something for this huge disruption. To me when
something really new/a great innovation comes that should be celebrated.
BSD gave us VM and a number of 'useful' new utilities, and eventually an
networking API (al biet not everyone liked it, sockets was good enough,
solved the problems and became a standard that allowed us to move on).
Mach (while Larry may not like the VM implementation), moved the bar for
the kernel's handling of memory a huge amount and almost won the uK war
(which IMO was a too bad). BTW: other kernels would do nice VM's too, but
Mach was generally available (open source if you will and really was the
system the moived it forward).
That said, I give the Linux folks great credit for the addition of modules
was huge and it took BSD and the other UNIX systems a few years really pick
up that idea in the same way (yes Solaris, Tru64 and eventually HPUX etc..
had something too but again - my comment about being generally available
applies).
So here is the issue, how to do move the ball forward? BSD, then Linux,
became the 'stronger strain' and pushed out the old version. The problem
is the ROMs in my fingers (like Dave) never got reprogrammed so some of the
'new' becomes annoying. Will I learned to like systemd? We shall see...
Clem
Somewhat off topic, for which apologies beforehand.
I’m looking for source code of Plan9’s first edition. A quick search on Google came up dry.
Would that source be publicly available? Or were the licensing restrictions such that it only exists in non-public archives?
Warren wrote:
> I would like to do some work on how the content changed over time.
> The result would be, for me, an interesting paper to read but somehow
> I think the readership base would be limited :-)
"Critical editions", as they are known in literary circles,
garner wide respect if not wide readership. Go for it.
Incidentally the earliest diff programs I know about date
from about 1969. One was by Steve Johnson, specifically
for comparing comdecks--compressed assembler source. The
other arose in service of critical editions.
Doug
All, I just got an e-mail from a TUHS member who would like to lay their
hands on a copy of the original Unix SOSP paper:
Anyway, I am trying to get my hands on the original 1972/73 paper on The
UNIX TIME-SHARING SYSTEM that was published at the SOSP ‘73 Proceedings
of the fourth ACM symposium on operating system principles.
I do have the 1974 and 1978 reprint papers. But, I really want the
1972/73 original. I see it in the ACM digital library, but the full
text PDF prints only the abstract.
Does anybody have a scan of the original SOSP paper?
I'd also like a copy of the 1974 reprint in CACM.
Thanks, Warren
Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> comments on the use of "home
directory" on Thu, 27 Sep 2018 19:14:19 -0400 (EDT):
>> I _did_ find "home directory" in the ITS documentation; the oldest doc file I
>> found it in was dated 5/25/79. If ITS was the source, not sure how it spread -
>> maybe via EMACS?
I looked in my own TECO code (> 12K lines), and found "home directory"
in two files with internal date headers from 1983.
I scanned my archive of TOPS-20 emacs source code and found these
uses:
% grep -i 'home dire' *
babyl.info:operating system; this file resides in the user's "home directory" and
conv.info:stands for the user's home directory. If neither file exists, the
emacs.info:Home Directory Your home directory is the one on which your mail and
emacs.info: may be the same as your home directory's name.
emacs.mss:@Index{Home Directory}@Index{User Name}
emacs.mss:it should be called @ITS{<home directory>;<user name> EVARS instead of EMACS.}
emacs.mss:@Index{Home Directory}
emacs.mss:EMACS into the file @ITS[<home directory>;TS ESAVE](a)Twenex[ESAVE.EXE]
Binary file mkdump.info matches
teco.archiv:*) FS U HSNAMEnd FS U MAILllow you to get a user's home directory
teco.archiv:* FS HSNAME$ is the user's home directory, as a numeric sixbit word.
teco.archiv:On old versions of ITS that don't have home directories, it is the
teco.archiv:same as FS MSNAME$. The home directory is (presumably) where such things
teco.archiv: B) People whose home directory is a shared directory
tecord.info: If you @EJ a file TS FOO on your home directory, then FOO^K
tecord.info:FS HSNAME s the user's home directory. The home directory
tecord.ref:FS HSNAME user's home directory
tecord.ref:FS U HSNAME used to determine a user's home directory
Here are the file dates:
% grep -l -i 'home dire' * | xargs ls -log
-rw-r--r-- 1 51376 Jun 5 1981 babyl.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 81689 Oct 16 1981 conv.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 466772 Dec 28 1981 emacs.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 412673 Oct 16 1981 emacs.mss
-rw-r--r-- 1 12570 May 24 1982 mkdump.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 121865 Oct 16 1981 teco.archiv
-rw-r--r-- 1 225207 Oct 16 1981 tecord.info
-rw-r--r-- 1 16407 Dec 28 1981 tecord.ref
In another directory named emacs-162, there were 18 files containing
"home directory"; the oldest is dated 6-Mar-1980.
However, when I dug into teco.archiv, I found that the match occurred
in a change log block that begins
TECO 699:
RMS 10/14/77 Many changes
...
ITS only:
Thus, 14-Oct-1977 is the earliest date that I can find for "home
directory", credited to Richard Stallman.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> My memory is that the term "home directory" predates /home - perhaps on
> other OS's such as TOPS-20, but I don't have time to research that.
Well, I looked at the "Introduction to MIT-XX" (a TOPS-20 machine), and it
also used the terms "logged-in directory" (home dir) and "connected directory"
(current dir).
I couldn't find any use of 'home' in the V6 documentation.
I _did_ find "home directory" in the ITS documentation; the oldest doc file I
found it in was dated 5/25/79. If ITS was the source, not sure how it spread -
maybe via EMACS?
Noel
> I couldn't find any use of 'home' in the V6 documentation.
$HOME was set by default in v7. It probably dates from the
advent of enviroment variables.
Doug
At college we had /h but that may be an interdata/edition7 thing. mine was /h/beng4/ssimon.
each course/year was in a separate disk partition - if group filled their partition other groups could still work.
-Steve
As a followup to discussions on this thread about hardware
architectures, some of you may be interested in this new letter
published today:
Letters to the editor: Hennessy and Patterson on the roots of RISC
Comm. ACM 61(10) 6 (2018)
https://doi.org/10.1145/3273019http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3280000/3273019/p6-friedman.pdf
The short two-paragraph letter is from Fred Brooks, noted computer
architect, author, and computer scientist.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: Dan Cross
> particular in sites with lots of users like universities and
> production-focused corporate groups
The existence of /usr, /usr/bin, /etc, /lib, etc dates back to the Research
group at Bell, so I don't think we can look to these other environments for an
explanation.
> "Hmm. Well, we've got space in /usr: create /usr/bin
I seem to recall reading (don't recall where, OTTOMY) an explanation for the
creation of /usr/bin, and I think it was performance related; IIRC the issue
was that they wanted to keep the directory size down (both for disk block
caching, and search time, reasons). Or maybe that was later on, and it was
originally created for 'user-maintained' ancillary programs (another vague
memory)?
> The more intriguing possibility from the antiquarian point of view is
> whether someone coined "/home" and then THAT led to the rise of the "home
> directory" nomenclature.
My memory is that the term "home directory" predates /home - perhaps on other
OS's such as TOPS-20, but I don't have time to research that. (I did look
quickly in the Multics docs, and it has 'working directory', i.e. current dir
- but it refers to the home dir as 'original WD', i.e. the WD at the time of
login.)
Noel
> From: Jon Forrest
> Another reason why the home directory part of /usr was made into /home
> is because after doing so, it was possible to mount /usr read-only, and
> supply it from a server.
The real issue is that /usr contained stuff which wasn't true 'user data' -
e.g. /usr/bin. The reasons for that must have seemed good at the time it
started, but it was IMO a mistake. (Disgression about partitions, physical
packs, etc elided for now.)
Noel
> Did the 5150 have a UNIX available anywhere near its launch date? I know
> that it had DOS, CP/M-86, and the UCSD p-System relatively early on. It's
> not clear to me whether Xenix ever supported the original PC; were there
> other early porting efforts?
The first version of Venix-86 ran on the PC/XT, almost a 5150, in May 83. It was V7 based. I think it was the first Unix on a PC.
Heinz Lycklama (who did Unix LSX and MX at Bell labs in the 70’s) did PC/IX about a year later, based on Sys III. This was marketed by IBM.
Based on the early Xenix porting chart here http://seefigure1.com/2014/04/15/xenixtime.html , a PC/XT version of Xenix appeared around the same time as PC/IX. However, if the chart is correct there may have been Xenix versions for other 8086-based machines a year before that. Note that in this chart the “Xenix 2.0” and “Xenix 3.0” labels refer to MS internal versions, i.e. these numbers are not to be confused with the marketing labels IBM PC Xenix 2.0 and 3.0.
These versions are a hole in the TUHS archive (unless they are in the confidential archive). It would be wonderful if MS would open up pre-1984 Xenix on the occasion of Unix 50th. These builds would well illustrate the broad Unix portability, which was unique at the time.
Paul
> From: Arthur Krewat
> Also, granted, to this day you can still use only 8-bits of a register:
Yeah, but that's not totally useless; lots of byte-organized data out there in
the world, e.g. ASCII strings. 16-bit data, less so, although there is some in
networking protocols (checksums, ports, etc - although the checksums you
_compute_ using bigger chunks).
(Not a defense of the x86 instruction set, mind!)
Noel
Its register windows have spilled out into the SCRAP heap of history.
But to its credit, the SPARCSTATION represents PANTISOCRACY with NO RACIST PAST.
It ROASTS CATNIP for SATANIC SPORT with no PARTISAN COST.
It can create a CAT SOPRANIST with a CASTRATO SNIP.
-Don
Should have copied the list...
-----Original Message-----
From: William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com>
To: Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Wed, 26 Sep 2018 11:59
Subject: Re: [TUHS] SPARC is CRAPS spelled backwards.
There was Xenix-86 which ran on the AT&T 6300, and IBM PC/XT. I ran it on an 8MHz NEC V30 cpu on the 6300. I would love to install it on my Panasonic Sr. Partner but lost the install key.
-----Original Message-----
From: Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com>
To: TUHS main list <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent: Wed, 26 Sep 2018 11:45
Subject: Re: [TUHS] SPARC is CRAPS spelled backwards.
On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 at 02:21, Peter Jeremy <peter(a)rulingia.com> wrote:
>
> An 8-bit memory bus means half as many RAM chips and buffers. Keep in mind
> that the IBM 5150 was intentionally crippled to ensure it didn't compete
> with
> IBM's low-end minis.
>
Did the 5150 have a UNIX available anywhere near its launch date? I know
that it had DOS, CP/M-86, and the UCSD p-System relatively early on. It's
not clear to me whether Xenix ever supported the original PC; were there
other early porting efforts?
-Henry
> From: Tony Finch
> This paper has a nice survey of instruction set densities
And the winner is.... the PDP-11!
I'm not too surprised by this; back in the days of core memory (and limited,
at that - the first PDP-11's came standard with ... 8KB of memory :-), having
the denset possible code had real savings.
Noel
