Folks,
For those of you who were unable to attend, I took this photo
yesterday, at the end of the closing remarks for ATC'25 in Boston:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/tcaAFQgjGPn5s8Dh7
As most of you know, USENIX has sunsetted the conference, and this
was the last time ATC will be run, though of course other USENIX
conferences will continue in its place. But I wanted to be in the room
as it ended, and I snapped this as everything was winding down, and am
now sharing it with our community.
For those of you who were able to attend, it was wonderful to see
a number of familiar faces, and also meet some folks I've known of and
interacted with here and elsewhere, face-to-face. USENIX also turned
50 this year, and the organization made sure to create space for
reflection on its history; remembrances were shared by Clem Cole, Bill
Cheswick, Doug McIlroy, Andrew Hume, Peter Honeyman, Tom Lyon, and
others.
On a personal note, I found this very meaningful: I was once told,
"never meet your heroes." However, in the Unix community, by and large
my heroes are wonderfully pleasant, generous, and kind people in real
life, all of whom have either indirectly or directly had a profound
influence on the course of my career and life. Thank you for that; it
was an honor to share space with you.
While ATC is ending, it is also clear that there is a vibrant
research community flourishing, building on the legacy of work created
by the USENIX community and shared through this conference. Many of
you nurtured that community, laying its framework, shepherding and
guiding its work, cultivating new generations of researchers while
providing the basic tools we all depend on, and thus creating the
fertile ground on which it now grows. What greater professional
accomplishment could one hope for?
Perhaps it is best not to think of this as an end, but an epoch
marking the transition from one stage of the community's evolution to
the next.
- Dan C.
Hi folks,
I'm trying to clear up a historical matter.
In reviewing groff's "LICENSES" file, I find myself stuck on the
following paragraph.
>grn, written by Barry Roitblat <barry(a)rentonww.com> and David
>Slattengren <slatteng(a)Xinet.COM>, was part of the Berkeley
>troff distribution. The files contain no AT&T code
>and are in the public domain. Historically, the original package could
>be found at <http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/misc/grn.tar.Z>.
I'm not sure about that reference to "Berkeley troff". I already
deleted the modifier "device-independent" from that sentence because
I've never seen even a whisper of evidence that the CSRG ever
distributed Kernighan's device-independent troff; that was locked up
behind AT&T's revenue-seeking aims.
But also, I can't find evidence that "grn" was distributed by Berkeley
at all. At Warren's "Unix Tree",[1] I see what looks superficially like
evidence of support for Gremlin terminals in "libplot", but that's not
the same thing.
However there is evidence of support for grn, the troff preprocessor, in
other unquestionable BSD artifacts, like Eric Allman's "me" package.
Can someone clear up my misconceptions or suggest non-misleading
alternative wording?
Was the grn preprocessor one of these "USENIX tape" things, like nethack
and jove?
Regards,
Branden
[1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl
Hi TUHS,
A poster on the Stardot Acorn forum asked whether the Numerical Turing
compiler had survived. I figure this is probably the best place to ask.
Numerical Turing was a mid-80s variant of the University of Toronto's
Turing programme language that provided arbitrary-precision decimal
float arithmetic, developed by Tom Hull and others.
It's described in this paper:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1057947.1057949
It ran on Toronto's ai VAX under 4.2BSD. The paper mentions the compiler
ntc and its man page, the demo program ntdemo.x, and the standard
include directory /usr/include/nt. There are a few references to it in
the utzoo Usenet archive but it looks like it was distributed upon
request.
Has anybody seen a surviving copy?
Thanks,
--
Adam Sampson <ats(a)offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
In the 2nd Edition Plan 9, in the Alef Language Reference Manual by
Phil Winterbottom, the title of section 7 is "The Plan 9
Implementation". Were there other implementations?
Anyone sitting on piles of old UNIX newsletters? I find they make for
fascinating reading.
I haven't found any online archives.
If you have a pile, I can scan them.
I'm going to scan my 3 copies of commUNIXations, the /usr/group newsletter,
and 4 copies of "UNIQUE - Your independent UNIX and C Advisor" - all from
1983/4.
Warren can hopefully find a home for these.
Hi All.
I found the following files recently:
$ ls -l
total 8748
-rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 5661471 Oct 1 2007 openmotif-2.3.0.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 4888 Jan 18 1999 xvfc.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 3281277 Jan 18 1999 xview3.2.tar.gz
They can be retrieved under https://www.skeeve.com/X11/.
I have sent them to Warren, who currently has them in his hidden
archive.
I also have a copy of the OpenLook CDROM, but I notice it's available
from GitHub: https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM.
Enjoy,
Arnold
This note gets a bit COFF-y; please redirect any replies
to that list.
USENIX Summer 1981, in Austin TX. First USENIX conference I
ever attended, and the first to which I travelled by train--
mostly.
I was somewhat shy about travelling in those days, but my
Caltech colleague Mark Bartelt talked me into going, and
suggested going by train. Except by the time I booked the
trip there was space available only from Los Angeles to
San Antonio and back, not onward from San Antonio to Austin.
But in those days I did a bit of cycle touring, often in
the company of my friend Brian Foster. Brian was also a
co-worker at the time, and was interested in attending too.
So we decided to travel together by train (in coach) to
San Antonio, arriving around 05h30, and spent the rest of
that day cycling, mostly up the frontage roads beside I-35,
to Austin.
After the conference we cycled back, mostly at night, which
was somewhat spooky (I remember seeing a thunderstorm off
on the horizon but we didn't get rained on) but saved us
a second dose of sunburn. They checked into a motel for
a day and a night until the return train came through at
02h55.
I have gone by train to nearly every other conference I've
attended since, but never again have I cycled. It was a
fun ride but a harder one than expected. In those days
of paper mapes, we visited the Caltech geography department
and plotted out what looked like a fairly smooth route,
with a slow but steady climb. The topo map we used had
a resolution of 50' altitude. Evidently the constant,
sometimes steep hills between San Antonio and Austin are
all no more than 49' tall.
It was a good conference too. One memory that sticks in
my head was Jim Joyce using Tinker Toys as a metaphor for
connecting Unix tools together.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Greg,
a long time a go while still working for Computer Division of Philips
Electronics I used X.25 and X.21 extensively on various proprietary
O.S.-es. X.25/X.21 (or PSDN/CSDN) was used for Teletex (CCITT T series,
TTX, better than telex but lost to FAX which was easier, cheaper and
legally acceptable).
I still have some dedicated boards which Philips used for X.25, X.21 and
SDLC. At a customer side in a test environment with SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2 SDLC
links are still used, X.25 was phased out a few years ago. Same with DEC
Tru64, a multi-port SYNC-2000 with appropriate DEC software could support
both X.25 and SDLC. AlphaServer DS25 with SDLC links still in production.
I still have all the applicable software for SCO UNIX and DEC Tru64.
Cheers,
uncle rubl
--
The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.
24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration.
24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration
24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration
24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration
I just discovered that this issue of the Australian UNIX User Group
Newsletter contains summaries of all the talks and sessions from the Usenix
Texas UNIX Users Conference - Summer 1981.
https://vtda.org/pubs/AUUGN/AUUGN-V03.4.pdf
In what I believe was my first public speaking role I presented
"UNIX vs Godzilla -- UNIX in an IBM Environment"
Lots of other familiar names in those notes too.
Hi,
I got interested in UI design and often study some historical aspects of it as I work on software. It’s hard not to notice how fast/usable Text User Interfaces are—ncurses and its siblings are still alive and well. From the ergonomy point of view, not needing a mouse in those interfaces if perfect.
Question: where did TUIs come from originally, and what were their earliest instances?
Many pages state that Vi was the first, but I’ve been looking through some old hardware photos, and things capable of more sophisticated interactions existed before Vi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen
Some terminals with block display:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270
^ ’71. Wiki says Vi showed up in ’76, but I suspect IBM mainframes may have had TUIs before.
Question 2: were there any manuals talking about TUIs? I’m thinking some of those spiffy IBM things mandating certain design.
Thanks,
Adam
