TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

34 participants
6476 discussions

v7 tape in bitsavers vs recreated tape from Keith Bostic's v7 in TUHS

by Will Senn

Today I was looking around for more v7 stuff of interest that I might find on the web and came across a tape image in the ATT bits directory: http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/ATT/ labeled X7252.2015_UNIX_V7.tap and an image of the reel with original and added markings. I downloaded it and sure enough, it's a bootable v7. I then compared it with my recreated tape image from the files in the Keith Bostic folder on tuhs. The 11.7MB tapes are nearly identical, with only a handful of bytes that differ at the very end of the tape: ATT tape: 54532000 000000 000000 024000 000000 000000 000000 000077 000000 54532020 052135 014020 010000 034113 056720 023524 072143 122062 54532040 141401 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 54532060 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 54532100 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 037400 54532120 000000 000000 54532123 Bostic recreated tape: 54532000 000000 000000 024000 000000 000000 000000 177777 177777 54532020 I'm wondering - 1) Does anyone know the provenance of the X7252.2015_UNIX_V7.tap 2) Do the bytes at the end of the tapes look familiar or particularly meaningful? My knowledge of 40+ y.o. tape formats is woefully lacking, but I'm curious. Will

3 years, 3 months

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

by Bakul Shah

On Jan 10, 2022, at 12:33 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > TeX looks better but you instantly know it is > TeX, it has a particular look. Perhaps you’re thinking of documents using Computer Modern fonts, typeset using LaTeX’s document classes. Check out the examples here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typograp…

3 years, 3 months

awkcc available again!

by Arnold Robbins

Hello All. I am pleased to announce that, after a multi-year effort, Chris Ramming's awkcc is now once again available for download, and this time with a more permissive license. I would like to thank Brian Kernighan, Chris Ramming and Doug McIlroy for contributing letters of support to my efforts to get this program re-released. The lion's share of the thanks must go to Martin Carroll of Nokia Bell Labs, who fought the uphill battle within Bell Labs to get permission to release the code, and who uploaded it to GitHub. Me? I pushed here and there, and contributed the actual code snapshots; it seems that Bell Labs had misplaced the code in the meantime. :-) The code, both the 1988 and 2011 versions, may be found at https://github.com/nokia/awkcc. The code is primarily of historical interest; I think it would take a significant effort to build it on a more modern system, although I think it could be done. It'd also be an effort to bring it up to date with the current Unix version of awk. Again most likely doable, but not necessarily trivial. In any case, enjoy! Arnold

3 years, 3 months

Photos of University Computer Labs

by Alexander Jacocks

Hello, I’m looking for photographs of university computer labs from 1985 until 1995, particularly labs full of unix workstations, of course. Does anyone here have photos like that in their collection? I’m also thinking of reaching out to university archivists, but I don’t have any direct connections to any. Thanks much! - Alex

3 years, 3 months

Bolsky's C Programmer's Handbook

by Tony Finch

I have a copy of a spiral-bound booklet with yellow covers called "The C Programmer's Reference" by Morris I. Bolsky of the Systems Training Center, AT&T Bell Laboratories, (C) 1985. A curious little snapshot of 1980s pre-ANSI C. I posted a picture of the front cover (with table of contents) at https://twitter.com/fanf/status/1475407500946157570 I think I rescued it from the office clear-out in 2013 when Cambridge University Computing Service moved out of the old city-centre offices. I probably picked it up from a stack of old books that were to be chucked; wherever I found it, I can't remember who it belonged to. And now I no longer work for the University, it has come home with me. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> https://dotat.at/ Southwest Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger: Southerly or southeasterly, backing easterly or northeasterly later, 4 to 6, becoming variable 3 for a time in Cromarty and Forth. Moderate, occasionally rough at first in southwest Forties, Cromarty and Dogger. Rain or showers, fog patches developing. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor.

3 years, 3 months

asm helper routines in v7

by Douglas McIlroy

> It would be nice to hear about the rationale from a primary source. Assembly language was deemed a last resort, especially as portability was coming to the fore. As I wrote in A Research Unix Reader, "Assembly language and magic constants gradually declined from the status of the 'real truth' (v4) to utterly forgotten (v8)." In v7, assembler usage was demoted to the bottom of syscall man pages. It could also be found in /usr/src/libc/sys/*.s Doug

3 years, 3 months

vi on v7

by Will Senn

Well, hallelujah, after much travail (I've tried this every Christmas for at least 5 years now), I have succeeded in building vi on v7 from 2bsd. Had to patch the c compiler to enlarge the symbol table, tweak some stuff here and there, but it finally built and installed without any errors, yay. Now, I just want it to do some editing, preferably in visual mode. I can call it as ex or vi: # ex : or # vi : and q will exit, yay, again! I have at least two problems: 1. It's not going "full" screen, even with TERM=vt100 or TERM=ansi set (not that I was surprised, but it'd be nice)... 2. If I type a for append and type something, there's no way to get back to the : prompt (ESC doesn't seem to work). 3. I'd like manpages (figure they might help with the above), but they're on the tape as .u files? I'm hoping this triggers some, oh yeah I remember that, type responses. Thanks, Will

3 years, 3 months

asm helper routines in v7

by Will Senn

So, in v6, it was possible to use the mesg function from the system library with: ed hello.s / hello world using external mesg routine .globl mesg mov sp,r5 jsr r5,mesg; <Hello, World!\n\0>; .even sys exit as hello.sld -s a.out -l a.out Hello, World! This was because v6 included mesg in the library, in v7, it doesn't look like mesg is included, so doing the same thing as above requires that code to write the message out be included and in addition system call names are not predefined, so exit and write have to be looked up in /usr/include/sys.s, resulting in the v7 equivalent file: ed hello2.s / hello world using internal mesg routine mov sp,r5 jsr r5,mesg; <Hello, World!\n\0>; .even sys 1 mesg: mov r0,-(sp) mov r5,r0 mov r5,0f 1: tstb (r5)+ bne 1b sub r5,r0 com r0 mov r0,0f+2 mov $1,r0 sys 0; 9f .data 9: sys 4; 0:..; .. .text inc r5 bic $1,r5 mov (sp)+,r0 rts r5 as hello2.s a.out Hello, World! My questions are: 1. Is mesg or an equivalent available in v7? 2. If not, what was the v7 way of putting strings out? 3. Why aren't the system call names defined? 4. What was the v7 way of naming system calls? Will

3 years, 3 months

New Version of Installing and Using Research Unix Version 7 in the SimH PDP-11/45 and 11/70 Emulators Available

by Will Senn

All, I've completed a new version of my "Installing and Using Research Unix Version 7 in the SimH PDP-11/45 and 11/70 Emulators" tutorial/document (wow, that's a mouthful). I'm calling it Version 2.0 - It is a completely reorganized, updated, and edited version of the document. The blog post announcement is on the blog: https://decuser.blogspot.com/ and the pdf is on google drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gDBxULlpLwezH-1RO_3ou_W7trElgSgT/view?usp=… The new doc covers building a working v7 instance from tape files that will run on the SimH emulator. First, the reader is led through the restoration of a pristine v7 instance from tape to disk. Next, the reader is led through adding a regular user, making the system multi-user. Then, the reader is shown how to make the system multi-session cable allowing multiple simultaneous sessions. Finally, the system is put to use with hello world, DMR style, and the learn system is enabled. It also includes a hyperlinked table of contents. My hope is that the new version will be more useful than the prior version, as well as more accurate. I really appreciate the input and feedback y'all have given me over the intervening years. Regards, Will

3 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] roff(7) [ and other related stuff ]

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: John Cowan > Why use C syntax? What was wrong with Fortran, Lisp, or Cobol syntax, > extended to do what you wanted? Why do all hammers look basically the same? Because there's an 'ideal hammer', and over time hammer design has asymtoted toward that 'ideal hammer' design. One can't just keep improving the design indefinitely - diminishing returns set in. So I suspect there is, to some degree, a Platonic 'ideal syntax' for a 'classic block-structured' programming language, and to me, C came pretty close to it. I except LISP from that assessment, because LISP is built around a fundamentally different model of how computations/algorithms are organized, and C and LISP aren't directly comparable. But that realization points to a deeper bug with the 'Platonic ideal language' concept above, which is that languages are fundamentally, albeit at a very deep conceptual level, tied to the basic concept of the computing hardware they are to run on. C/COBOL/FORTRAN/etc are all for von Neumann-like (in a broad sense) computing engines - a single thread of computation, which happens sequentially. But we've pushed that paradigm about as far as it can go, we're into diminishing returns territory on that one. The future, starting with the hardware, will be very different - and will need quite different languages. (Go, from what little I know of it, is a baby step in this direction - it is intended to make it easy to use multiple simultaneous loci of execution, making use of the mutiple cores that are common now.) I suspect we'll be shifting to radically different paradigms, 50 years from now - massively parallel computing meshes (think Connection Machines on steroids - or the human brain), and those will use fundamentally different computing paradigms, and programming languages for them, which in turn will need very different syntax. Noel

3 years, 3 months

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TUHS