Can people **please** send posts to one of these two lists, only? Having to go
through and delete every other post (yeah, I know, I could relete _all_
messages to either list, since they are archived, but old habits are hard to
break) is _really_ annoying.
OK, I can see sending an _initial_ query to both lists, to get it to as wide
a circle as possible: _but_ BCC at least one of them, to prevent lazy people
just hitting 'reply all' and thereby sanding out multiple copies of their
reply.
Thank you.
Noel
I wanted to pass on a recommendation of a new book from MIT Press called:
“A New History of Computing” by Thomas Haigh and Paul Cerruzzi, ISBN
978-0-262-54299-0
Full disclosure, I reviewed a bit of it for them and have been eagerly
awaiting final publication.
I do expect a lot of the readers of this mailing list will enjoy it. They
did a super job researching it and it’s very complete and of course,
interesting. FWIW: the work of a number people that are part of this list
is nice chronicled.
Clem
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
I have been looking for some time for a C Reference Manual from early 1973 (or late 1972) where Dennis comments that multiple array subscripts will eventually have Fortran-like syntax with commas separating rather than multiple sets of square brackets. That was the first C manual I had back when I first learned the language. Silly me, I discarded it when a newer one was issued, not realizing the historical significance of the earlier one.
- Alan
> Is there a trick to make a macro or string return a value?
I know what you mean. Though a string does return a value, it
can't compute an arithmetic result. Alternatively, a macro,
which can use arithmetic, can only return the result as a distinct
input line. (That might be overcome by a trick with \c, but I don't
see one right off.)
Though I have no useful advice about this dilemma, it does spur
memories. I wrote the pre-Unix roff that was reimplemented on
Unix and then superseded by Joe Ossanna's nroff. Joe introduced
macros. Curiously, I had implemented macros in an assembler so
early on (1959) that I have (incorrectly) been cited as the father of
macros, yet it never occurred to me to put them in roff.
Joe's work inspired me to add macros to pre-Unix roff. I did
one thing differently. A macro could be called the usual way or
it could be called inline like an nroff string. The only difference
was that a macro's final newline was omitted when it was
expanded inline. That implementation might have helped with
the dilemma.
Doug
Just a quick note to announce that the retro-fuse project now supports
mounting seventh-edition file systems for read and write on Linux and
MacOS. As was done for v6, the project incorporates the actual
filesystem code from v7 Unix, lightly modernized to run in user space on
current systems.
The code is available on github for anyone who's interested:
https://github.com/jaylogue/retro-fuse
--Jay
Hello all,
I was wondering if there exists a book on Unix administration, specifically
for v7. I have the Unix programmers book already.
Regards
Joseph Turco
> From: "Ron Natalie"
> However, the last NCP host table shows this statistic for DEC machines
> on the NCP Arpanet
> ...
> PDP11 (MOS): 11
> PDP11 (MINITS); 10
Hi, which host table was this that you're looking at?
I'm pretty sure there was no MINITS NCP ('NCP' in the sense of 'Initial
Connection Protocol (ICP)' and 'ARPANET Host-to-Host Protocol (AHHP)' - see
below). There was _certainaly_ no MINITS machine on the ARPANET at MIT (the
birthplace of MINITS).
To confirm, I looked at a major MINITS source repository, here:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/mits_s
and saw nothing like that. (Not even an 1822 interface driver.)
If you look there, you _will_ see things labelled 'NCP', but this is just a
terminological affliction among the CHAOS people, to whom 'NCP' apparently
meant 'protocol implementation' or 'network code'.
Also, implementations of the 'Host-to-IMP Protocol (HIP)' are _not_ NCP
either; there was an HIP implementation in the C Gateway, but that was
as IP router, one that could connect to an IMP.
IF IT DOESN'T HAVE AHHP, IT"S NOT NCP.
Also, I was intimately familiar with MOS, and neither of the two earliest
applications that ran on it (the TIU, and the Port Expander, both of which I
have the source code for) had any NCP. I looked at a lot of the MOS 'NCP"
listings in a old host table (see here:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/Talk:Network_Control_Program
for details) and concluded that the MOS 'NCP' entries were all 'confused'.
> From: Clem Cole
> I was under the impression, that you folks at MIT did a ChaosNet
> interface, IIRC, so there may have been some sort of conversion on
> your LAN, but I really doubt there was a real NCP running.
The AI Lab did both i) a LAN called CHAOS (4 Mbit/seccond CSMA-CD over CATV
cable) and ii) a protocol family callled CHAOS (which later ran over XDI
Ethernet). I'm not sure that any of it has any relvance to what's under
discussion here.
> But there was a Rand stack around the same time and III think
> Holmgren ended up at UCSB after his time at UICI. Im fairly sure there
> was cross polinartion but I don't know how much.
I looked through my V6 Unix NCP, but although there were some RAND #ifdefs, I
didn't see anything about Rand (except that the MMDF is noted as being based
on something done at Rand). I retain the distinct impression that all V6 Unix
NCP machines were running some descendant of the UIUC code. NOSC seems to have
served as a distro center at one point, see:
https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/new/dist.log
but I can't tell who they were sending it too.
(We never tried to get it running at MIT since we were out of IMP ports.
By the time we got another IMP, we had IP running on the -11 and
NCP was done anyway.)
As for UCB, there are a bunch of UCBUFMOD #ifdef's, not sure what that
was about.
> As for other NCPs, PARC had MAXC on the net, but I thought it had
> originally a DG Nova front end that was replaced with an Alto.
No, Maxc1 had a Nova, Maxc2 had an Alto.
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
> they started with 32V in the Fall of 1979, and ported UIUC's NCP code
> to it
Thanks for straightening that out. I had a vague memory that there were a
few VAXen that ran NCP, but wasn't sure.
> 2. Note that the BBN TCP worked over NCP as its primary transport.
Your terminology is confused. TCP _never_ ran 'on' NCP; they were
_alternative_ protocol stacks on top of IHP (on the ARPANET). No
AHHP, no NCP.
> The driver is still there if you look
That acc.c is a driver for the ACC 1822 interface; it includes bits of IHP
("Try to send 3 no-ops to IMP") but I don't think it includes the complete IHP.
There are other BSD 1822 device drivers, e.g.:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/sys/pdpif/if_sri.c
That's the BSD2.11 Stanford/SRI 1822 device driver.
Noel
I'm experimenting with my PiDP-11; I think I may have my modem set up properly to accept incoming calls, but with only one phone line I'm unable to test it. If anyone with a modem is willing to help me test, send me a message off-list and I'll give you my phone number & some login details.
john
Has anyone other than the owner of m88k.com preserved Motorola System V/68? Besides that, there’s the SVR1 (v2.8) for the Motorola VME/10 on Bitsavers and that’s about it.
I’m especially curious as to whether anyone has preserved the SVR2 1.1 binary+sources distribution, since there might be useful information in it—or derivable from it—about much of the early VME hardware.
— Chris
Sent from my iPad
