Was thinking about our recent discussion about system call bloat and such.
Seemed to me that there was some argument that it was needed in order to
support modern needs. As I tried to say, I think that a good part of the
bloat stemmed from we-need-to-add-this-to-support-that thinking instead
of what's-the-best-way-to-extend-the-system-to-support-this-need thinking.
So if y'all are up for it, I'd like to have a discussion on what abstractions
would be appropriate in order to meet modern needs. Any takers?
Jon
I was lucky enough to actually have a chance to use wm at Carnegie Mellon before it was fully retired in favor of X11 on the systems in public clusters; it made a monochrome DECstation 3100 with 8MB much more livable.
When it was retired, it was still usable for a while because the CMU Computer Club maintained an enhanced version (wmc) that everyone had access to, and Club members got access to its sources.
Did anyone happen to preserve the wm or wmc codebase? There's some documentation in the papers that were published about the wm and Andrew API but no code.
-- Chris
I've been writing about unix design principles recently and tried
explaining "The Rule of Silence" by imagining unix as a restaurant
<http://codefaster.substack.com/p/rule-of-silence>. Do you agree with how I
presented it? Would you do it differently?
Tyler
All,
I'm tooling along during our newfangled rolling blackouts and frigid
temperatures (in Texas!) and reading some good old unix books. I keep
coming across the commands cut and paste and join and suchlike. I use
cut all the time for stuff like:
ls -l | tr -s ' '| cut -f1,4,9 -d \
...
-rw-r--r-- staff main.rs
and
who | grep wsenn | cut -c 1-8,10-17
wsenn  console
wsenn  ttys000
but that's just cuz it's convenient and useful.
To my knowledge, I've never used paste or join outside of initially
coming across them. But, they seem to 'fit' with cut. My question for
y'all is, was there a subset of related utilities that these were part
of that served some common purpose? On a related note, join seems like
part of an aborted (aka never fully realized) attempt at a text based
rdb to me...
What say you?
Will
Rich Morin <rdm(a)cfcl.com> wrote:
> PTF was inspired, in large part, by the volunteer work that produced the
> Sun User Group (SUG) tapes. Because most of the original volunteers had
> other fish to fry, I decided to broaden the focus and attempt a
> (somewhat) commercial venture. PTF, for better or worse, was the
> result.
>
> So, I should also relate some stories about running for and serving on
> the SUG board, hassling with AT&T and Sun's lawyers, assembling
> SUGtapes, etc. My copies of the SUGtapes are (probably) long gone, but
> John Gilmore (if nobody else :-) probably has the tapes and/or their
> included bits.
While I was involved, the Sun User Group made three tapes of freely
available software, in 1985, 1987, and 1989. The 1989 tape includes
both of the earlier ones, as well as new material.
A copy of both the 1987 tape and the 1989 tape are here:
http://www.toad.com/SunUserGroupTape-Rel-1987.1.0.tar.gzhttp://www.toad.com/SunUserGroupTape-Rel-1989.tarhttp://www.toad.com/
I'll have to do a bit more digging to turn up more than vague memories
about our dealings with the lawyers...
John
Has anyone written down the story of Prime Time Freeware or archived the various distributions? Is there even a complete listing of what they distributed?
I’ve imaged my own stuff (PTF AI 1-1, PTF SDK for UnixWare 1-1, PTF Tools & Toys for UnixWare 1-1) but I’d really like to find the original PTF 1-1 and things like it.
— Chris
Thank you for banner! I used the data, abliet modified, 40 years ago
in 1981, for a banner program as well, on an IBM 1130 (manufactured 1972)
so it could print on an 1132 line printer. The floor would vibrate
when it printed those banners. I used "X" as the printed char as the
1132 did not have the # char. But those banners looked great!
I wrote it in FORTRAN IV. On punched cards. I did this because
from 1980-1982 I only had access to UNIX on Monday evenings from
7PM-9PM, using a DEC LA120 terminal, it was slow and never had
enough ink on the ribbon.
I had only 8K of core memory with only EBCIDIC uppercase so there
were lots of compromises and cleverness needed -
- read in a 16-bit integer as a packed two 8-bit numbers
- limit the banner output to only A-Za-z0-9 !?#@'*+,-.=
- unpack the char data into buffer and then process it.
- fix the "U" charater data
- find the run-lenght ecnodings that could be consoldated to save space
(seeing those made me think it had to have been generated data)
The program still survives here - http://ibm1130.cuzuco.com/
(with sample output runs)
Also since I had to type all those numbers onto punch cards
with a 029 keypunch, to speed things up I coded my own free-form
atoi() equivalent in FORTRAN, reading cards, then packed two numbers into
a integer, then punch out those numbers along with card ID numbers in columns
73-80 on the 1442. This was many weeks of keypunching, checking,
fixing and re-keypunching.
That code is here http://ibm1130.cuzuco.com/ipack.html
When done the deck was around 8" or so. It took well over a
minute to read in the data cards, after complition.
Again thanks! Many hundreds of banners for many people were printed
by this, around 2 to 3 a week, until July 1982, when that IBM
was replaced by a Prime system. I still have many found memeories of
that 1130.
-Brian
Mary Ann Horton (mah at mhorton.net) wrote:
> We had vtroff at Berkeley around 1980, on the big Versatec wet plotter,
> 4 pages wide. We got really good at cutting up the pages on the output.
>
> It used the Hershey font. It was horrible. Mangled somehow, lots of
> parts of glyphs missing. I called it the "Horse Shit" font.
>
> I took it as my mission to clean it up. I wrote "fed" to edit it, dot by
> dot, on the graphical HP 2648 terminal at Berkeley. I got all the fonts
> reasonably cleaned up, but it was laborious.
>
> I still hated Hershey. It was my dream to get real C/A/T output at the
> largest 36 point size, and scan it in to create a decent set of Times
> fonts. I finally got the C/A/T output years later at Bell Labs, but
> there were no scanners available to me at the time. Then True Type came
> along and it was moot.
>
> I did stumble onto one nice rendition of Times Roman in one point size,
> from Stanford, I think. I used it to write banner(6).
At some point I thought NeWS source was released. Is it just another
Lost Source or it is out there somewhere?
Do I remember right that it was a Gosling effort?
Apparently they are getting 68040 levels of performance with a Pi... and
that interpreted. Going with JIT it's way higher.
-----Original Message-----
From: Gregg Levine [SMTP:gregg.drwho8@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2021 10:30 AM
To: Jason Stevens; The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode
An amazing idea.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 7:51 PM Jason Stevens
<jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
>
> You might find this interesting
>
> https://twitter.com/i/status/1320767372853190659
> <https://twitter.com/i/status/1320767372853190659>
>
> It's a pi (arm) running Musashi a 68000 core, but using voltage
buffers it's
> plugged into the 68000 socket of an Amiga!
>
> You can find more info on their github:
>
> https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm
> <https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm>
>
> Maybe we are at the point where numerous cheap CPU's can eliminate
FPGA's?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Parson [SMTP:mparson@bl.org]
> Sent: Friday, February 05, 2021 10:43 PM
> To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode
>
> On 2021-02-04 16:47, Henry Bent wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 4, 2021, 17:40 Adam Thornton
<athornton(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> I'm probably Stockholm Syndrommed about 6502. It's
what I grew
> up on,
> >> and
> >> I still like it a great deal. Admittedly
register-starved (well,
>
> >> unless
> >> you consider the zero page a whole page of registers),
> but...simple,
> >> easy
> >> to fit in your head, kinda wonderful.
> >>
> >> I'd love a 64-bit 6502-alike (but I'd probably give it
more than
> three
> >> registers). I mean given how little silicon (or how
few FPGA
> gates) a
> >> reasonable version of that would take, might as well
include
> 65C02 and
> >> 65816 cores in there too with some sort of
mode-switching
> instruction.
> >> Wouldn't a 6502ish with 64-bit wordsize and a 64-bit
address bus
> be
> >> fun?
> >> Throw in an onboard MMU and FPU too, I suppose, and
then you
> could
> >> have a
> >> real system on it.
> >>
> >>
> > Sounds like a perfect project for an FPGA. If there's
already a
> 6502
> > implementation out there, converting to 64 bit should be
fairly
> easy.
>
> There are FPGA implementations of the 6502 out there. If
you've not
> seen
> it, check out the MiSTer[0] project, FPGA implementations
of a LOT
> of
> computers, going back as far as the EDSAC, PDP-1, a LOT of
8, 16,
> and 32
> bit systems from the 70s and 80s along with gaming
consoles from the
> 70s
> and 80s.
>
> Keeping this semi-TUHS related, one guy[1] has even
implemented a
> Sparc 32m[2] (I think maybe an SS10), which boots SunOS 4,
5, Linux,
> NetBSD, and even the Sparc version of NeXTSTEP, but it's
not part of
> the
> "official" MiSTer bits (yet?).
>
> --
> Michael Parson
> Pflugerville, TX
> KF5LGQ
>
> [0] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
> [1] https://temlib.org/site/
> [2] https://temlib.org/pub/mister/SS/
