TUHS

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6476 discussions

Coastal cultures, collaboration, creativity and Sun vs DEC.

by Dan Cross

I've been meaning to ask about this for a while.... "... The reason why is because there was tremendous antagonism between New York and L.A. L.A. was, you know, full of color, full of acid, full of hippies, and we were not like that. We dressed in black and white. We did not like free love. ..... We took amphetamine; they took LSD. They were, you know, sort of loving and happy, and we were - we weren't really evil, we were more intellectual, more about art." [Mary Woronov, in an interview with NPR's Terry Gross on "Fresh Air", talking about New York City, Warhol's Factory and shows in Los Angeles while touring with the Velvet Underground: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=241437872] Note: I am not suggesting that anyone involved with Unix ever took amphetamines, nor, despite the usual crack about LSD and BSD, that anyone on the west coast was taking acid, though Markov's "What the Dormouse Said" would indicate that many of you WERE tripping. It seems like Unix is largely a child of the coasts. Notable work in Utah, Colorado and Chicago aside, it seems the bulk of early Unix work happened in either the greater New York metro area in northern New Jersey or the greater Bay area around San Francisco. Notable work was also done in Massachusetts, but again, that's a coastal state and I think it's fair to say that most of that was inside the route 128 corridor. Of course work was done internationally, but I'm particularly curious about differences in US culture here, and how they influenced things. The question is, to what extent did differences in coastal cultures influence things like design aesthetics? I think it's is accurate to characterize early BTL Unix by it's minimalism, and others have echoed this (cf. Richard Gabriel in the "Worse is Better" papers). But similarly, BSD has always felt like a larger system -- didn't Lions go as far as to quip about the succinctness of 6th Edition being "fixed" by 4BSD? Anyway, I believe it is fair to say that early Unix has a rather distinct feel from later BSD-derived systems and the two did evolve in different geographic locations. Furthermore, the world was not as connected then as it is now. So to what extent, if any, was this a function of the larger cultural forces at play near where that work was taking place? - Dan C.

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Douglas McIlroy

> If I can be so bold as to offer an interpretation: Doug's approximations > treat ellipses as mathematical objects and algorithmically determine what > pixels are closest to points on the infinitesimally-thin curves, while > Knuth's (or one his students') method acknowledges that the curve has a > width defined by the nib Just so. > I find it impossible that neither Knuth nor Hobby were unaware of McIlroy's > work and vice-versa; of course he would have known about and examined troff > just as the Bell Labs folks knew about TeX. We were generally aware of each other's work. My papers on drawing lines, circles, and ellipses on rasters, though, were barely connected to troff. Troff did not contain any drawing algorithms. That work was relegated to the rendering programs that interpreted ditroff output. Thus publication-quality rendering with support for thick lines was outsourced to Adobe and Mergenthaler. Various PostScript or ditroff postprocessors for screen-based terminals were written in house. These programs paid little or no attention to fonts and line widths. But the blit renderers made a tenuous connection between my ellipse algorithm and troff, since my work on the topic was stimulated by Rob's need for an ellipse generator. Doug

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] moving directories in svr2

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Bakul Shah > My guess is *not* storing a path instead of a ptr to the inode was done > to save on memory. More probably speed; those old disks were not fast, and on a PDP-11, disk caches were so small that converting the path to the current directory to its in memory inode could take a bunch of disk reads. > Every inode has a linkcount so detecting when the last conn. is severed > not a problem. Depends; if a directory _has_ to be empty before it can be deleted, maybe; but if not, no. (Consider if /a/b/c/d exists, and /a/b is removed; the tree underneath it has to be walked and the components deleted. That could take a while...) In the general case (e.g. without the restriction to a tree), it's basically the same problem as garbage collection in LISP. Noel

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] *roff history as told to GNU

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dan Cross > a port of the _CTSS_ BCPL ROFF sources purportedly written by Doug. I > wonder if that was actually a thing, or an error? > ... > Fortunately, the source [of the original CTSS runoff] is online: > ... > Indeed; one finds the following in at least one of the Multics RUNOFF > source files: It sounds like all the steps in the chain have pretty definitive evidence - _except_ whether there was ever a CTSS RUNOFF in BCPL, from Doug. Happily, we have someone here who should be able to answer that! :-) Noel

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Jon Steinhart

Been reading the heirloom docs. Remember one thing that I disliked about troff which maybe Doug can explain. It's the language in the docs. I never understood "interpolating a register" to have any relation to the definition of interpolate that I learned in math. Made it a bit hard to learn initially. Any memory of why that term was used?

3 years, 3 months

Coastal cultures, collaboration, creativity and Sun vs DEC

by Douglas McIlroy

> most, if not all of these things were after I arrived. That may indicate the youth of the narrator more than a lightening of the culture. Some practical jokes and counter-culture customs from an earlier day: When I joined the Labs, everyone talked about the escapades of Claude Shannon and Dave Hagelbarger--unicycle, outguessing machines, the finger-on-the-switch box, etc. When John Kelly became a department head he refused to have his office carpeted. That would have kept him from stubbing out cigarettes on the floor. Bill Baker may have worn a coat and tie, but he kept a jalopy in his VP parking space. Another employee had a rusty vehicle with weeds growing out of the fenders. As early as 1960 BESYS began appending fortune cookies to every printout. The counter where printouts were delivered got messed up by people pawing around to see others' fortunes. One day the audio monitor on the low bit of the 7090 accumulator stopped producing white noise (with an occasional screech for an infinite loop) and intoned in aTexas drawl, "Help, I'm caught in a loop. Help. I'm caught in a loop. Help ..." A pixelated nude mural appeared in Ed David's office. (Maybe this no longer counts as a prank. It is now regarded as a foundational event in computer art.) Ed Gilbert had a four-drawer filing cabinet labeled integers, rationals, reals, and balloon. The latter held the tattered remains of lunchtime hot-air experiments. He also had a chalkboard globe with a world map on it. It sometimes took several spins before a visitor realized that you really shouldn't be able to see all the continents at once--the map appeared twice around the circumference of the globe. CS had a Gilbert-and-Sullivan duo, Mike Lesk and Peter Neumann, who produced original entertainment for department parties. Doug

3 years, 3 months

(no subject)

by Douglas McIlroy

> Ken and Dennis were teaching [the Votrax] to swear "Speak" being a phonetics-based program, I suspect they were exploring multiple spellings. Out of context, lots of spellings were indistinguishable. For example, cheap, cheat, cheek, chief was hard to tell from cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep.. At the risk of repeating myself, the fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck example came to the fore when a "speak" kiosk was installed at Epcot. PR folks were worried that people would try it on bad words in this public setting and asked me to block them. I said I'd block whatever words they told me to. Duly, I was sent a list--on the letterhead of an AT&T vice president. (Was that dictated to a secretary?) Later I heard that girls would often try friends' names, while boys would try bad words and exclaim that the machine didn't know them. In fact, those were among the few words the machine *did* know. Fortunately nobody ever complained that I hadn't blocked misspellings. Doug

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Douglas McIlroy

> Later Brian's work was updated after V7 and included some new tools, and became known as Writer's Workbench, which eventually was entered in the 'toolchest.' WWB wouldn't exist if text had not routinely existed in machine-readable form, thanks to word-processing. But the impetus for WWB came from "style", not from troff. Style was a spinoff of Lorinda Cherry's "parts", which assigned parts of speech to the words of a document. Style provided a statistical profile of the text: measures such as average word length: frequency of passives, adjectives and compound sentences, reading level, etc. WWB in turn offered writing advice based on such profiles. Style was stimulated by Bill Vesterman, a professor of English at Rutgers, who brought the idea to me. I introduced him to Lorinda, who had it running in a couple of weeks. Then Nina McDonald at USG conceived and packaged WWB as a distinct product, not just a collection of entries in man 1. Wikipedia reports a surmise that WWB sank out of sight because it was not a standard part of Unix distributions. Doug

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Jon Steinhart

Steffen Nurpmeso writes: > Note that heirloom doctools (on github) is a SysV-derived *roff Wow, thanks for mentioning this. I was unaware of it. When I recently wrote that it would be nice to add TeX's 2D formatting to troff I didn't realize that it had already been done. Something new to play with. Jon

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

On the subject of documtation of [nt]roff, no one seems to have mentioned Narain Gehani's two editions of ``Document Formatting and Typesetting on the UNIX System'' (700+ pages), and a second two-author volume that covers grap, mv, ms, and troff. There is a table of contents of the second edition recorded here: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1987:DFT There is an entry in that file for the first edition too http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1986:DF The second volume, co-authored with Steven Lally, is covered here: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1988:DFT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3 years, 3 months

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TUHS