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70th anniversary of (official) programming errors

by Steffen Nurpmeso

Not Unix in particular. At least in Germany it is already the 16th, and my BSD calendar notifies that "first programming error is encountered at the U. S. Census Bureau". As not being hard-to-the-core i may have missed it, but also in 1951, in March, the wonderful Grace Hopper "conceives the first compiler, called A-O and later released as Math-Matic. Hopper is also credited with coining the term 'bug' following an incident involving a moth and a Mark II. All (hm!) according to COMPUTERWORLD January 18th, 1999 (i was young!), with assistance of the Computer Museum of Boston. Like McCartney said in the legendary 1999 concert at the Cavern club, the first after his wonderful wife Linda died, "See, with this band, if we don't get it right ... we start again!". Thank you. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

4 years

Re: [TUHS] Disassemblers

by norman＠oclsc.org

Rob Pike: Although upon reflection, I think what I did was fix 'adb' and call it 'db'. Haven't had my coffee yet this morning. ==== I don't think so. I did quite a lot of work on adb during my time at the Labs. I remember clearly that it still used all the Bournegol macros when I started; I doubt Rob would have left that there. (It was Rob who translated the shell back to C, I believe.) I got into adb because it still used ptrace and everyone else seemed scared to touch the code to convert it to use /proc. So I fixed that, and fixed sdb too, and finally removed the ptrace call from the kernel. I remember celebrating by expunging ptrace from the UNIX Room copy of the V8 manual. ptrace happened to occupt two facing pages, which I glued together. I did a lot more hacking on adb after that, ranging from little stuff like making # a synonym for 0x in input (so that adb's output could be picked up from the screen and re-used as input, a principle established firmly and correctly by Rob!) to a major restructuring to isolate machine-dependent pieces like instruction decoding and word formats, so that it was simpler not only to make adb work on a new processor architecture but even to make a sort of cross-adb that could, say, correctly interpret a PDP-11 core image on a VAX. (This actually mattered; by the time I arrived Research had no PDP-11s running general-purpose UNIX, but did have LSI-11s acting as Datakit controllers and a standalone power-backed-up LSI-11 that decoded the time signal from WWVB.) I was never really happy about the restructuring; it did more or less what I wanted but it wasn't really graceful. And cross-adb needed a distinct binary for each target. I had thoughts of trying to make a meta-language to describe the target's data formats (simple except for floating point) and how to print its instructions (messier, but I remember being inspired by the clever table-driven code in an disassembler Ken wrote for, I think it was, the NS32000), so that one could load a table from a file at startup; never had the time or the courage to carry through on it. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years

Re: [TUHS] Disassemblers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Henry Bent > From what I can gather the only way to reasonably examine the > disassembly of a program in the early days of Unix was adb. Is this > true? Was there a way to easily produce a full disassembly? 'adb' is quite late. We had it on the PWB1 (V6 enhanced, basically) system at MIT, so its roots lie before V7. (Every time I run across people who think V7 is early, I go into 'get off my lawn' mode.) The first thing I know of that could disassemble PDP-11 code on Unix was 'db', which dates back to V1: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man1/db.1 It wasn't optimal for doing disassembly, because it was non-trivial to dump an entire object file as assembler source - but it could be done. Later (V5 era) there was something called 'cdb', which was 'db' with extensions to make it useful for debugging code whose source was in C: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/man/man1/cdb.1 There were other non-Unix disassembler (such as DDT), also. Noel

4 years

[tuhs] New version of a paper on Unix evolution

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

A new journal issue published today carries this paper: Diomidis Spinellis and Paris Avgeriou Evolution of the Unix System Architecture: An Exploratory Case Study IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 47(6) 1134--1163 June 2021 https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2892149 A preprint is available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332826685_Evolution_of_the_Unix_Sy… However, it is dated four years ago, and after removing its cover page, diffpdf shows numerous changes compared to today's publication. In the new version, a footnote on the first page says Manuscript received 19 May 2018; revised 18 Dec. 2018; accepted 28 Dec. 2018. Date of publication 2 May 2019; date of current version 14 June 2021. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4 years

Re: [TUHS] 70th anniversary of (official) programming errors

by Jason Stevens

Sounds very "Deus ex machina" like. Although it's hard to staple a ghost to your notebook. -----Original Message----- From: Bakul Shah To: Rob Pike Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Sent: 6/16/21 12:13 PM Subject: Re: [TUHS] 70th anniversary of (official) programming errors https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/ieee-history/did-you-know-edison -coined-the-term-bug <https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/ieee-history/did-you-know-ediso n-coined-the-term-bug> Like Edison, she (Grace Hopper) was recalling the word’s older origins in the Welsh bwg, the Scottish bogill or bogle, the German bögge, and the Middle English bugge: the hobgoblins of pre-modern life, resurrected in the 19th century as, to paraphrase philosopher Gilbert Ryle, ghosts in the machine. Electrical circuits can have "bad connections" so I do wonder if Edison coined this word based on "ghost like" faults that magically appear and disappear! -- Bakul On Jun 15, 2021, at 8:48 PM, Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: There are citations from Edison in the 19th century using the word, and a quote somewhere by Maurice Wilkes about the stairwell moment when he realized much of the rest of his life would be spent finding programming errors. That moth was not the first bug, nor the first "bug", it was the first recorded "actual bug". -rob On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 9:46 AM Dan Cross < crossd(a)gmail.com <mailto:crossd@gmail.com> > wrote: On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 6:55 PM John Cowan < cowan(a)ccil.org <mailto:cowan@ccil.org> > wrote: On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 6:25 PM Steffen Nurpmeso < steffen(a)sdaoden.eu <mailto:steffen@sdaoden.eu> > wrote: As not being hard-to-the-core i may have missed it, but also in 1951, in March, the wonderful Grace Hopper "conceives the first compiler, called A-O and later released as Math-Matic. Hopper is also credited with coining the term 'bug' following an incident involving a moth and a Mark II. Yes, but wrongly. The label next to the moth is "First actual case of bug being found", and the word "actual" shows that the slang term already existed then. Brief unexplained faults on telephony (and before that telegraphy) lines were "bugs on the line" back in the 19C. Vibroplex telegraph keys, first sold in 1905, had a picture of a beetle on the top of the key, and were notorious for creating bugs when inexperienced operators used them. (Vibroplex is still in business, still selling its continuous-operation telegraph keys, which ditt as long as you hold the paddle to the right.) Indeed, the Vibroplex key is called a "bug". I suspect this has something to do with its appearance more than anything else, though (it kinda sorta looks like, er, a bug). - Dan C.

4 years

Help Contacting Unix Legal People

by Paul Ruizendaal

I understand the preference for a bottom-up entry, with somebody already sympathetic. If there is no such entry point, top-down may work at Microfocus. I guess the ask is for a statement for SysV similar to the Nokia statement for 8th-10th Edition: https://media-bell-labs-com.s3.amazonaws.com/pages/20170327_1602/statement%… According to Companies’ House, the general counsel is Jane Smithard: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/01504593… She appears to be 67, to have a long tenure with Microfocus and maybe is just the right person: "Jane has more than 25 years’ experience as a lawyer in the IT industry and software sector. She has worked with Micro Focus for over 20 years providing a wide range of commercial and corporate legal services, from leading the efforts through the 2005 IPO to driving the legal aspects of the group’s mergers, acquisitions and divestitures strategy including the acquisition of HPE Software and divestiture of SUSE. Jane leads a team of approximately 60 lawyers and other professionals worldwide, the majority of whom are focused directly on supporting the Company’s commercial teams and business.” https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/about/leadership-about Her e-mail appears to be jane (dot) smithard (at) microfocus (dot) com But I guess that Dan Doernberg already knows all that. His book project sounds intriguing, by the way. Paul

4 years

Re: [TUHS] Help Contacting Unix Legal People

by Jason Stevens

I tried sending a letter a while back asking how much is a commercial SYSV license anyways, never got a reply. I called their legal and they didn't know what a Unix was. I guess shockingly all the public facing micro focus is all on cobol -----Original Message----- From: Warren Toomey To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org Sent: 6/10/21 8:32 AM Subject: [TUHS] Help Contacting Unix Legal People All, we need help contacting some people so that Dan Doernberg can make progress on a new Unix book that he's working on. I've attached his request to the TUHS list below. If you can help out in any way, please contact Dan directly. Cheers, Warren From: Peer-to-Peer Communications LLC <dan(a)peerllc.com> Hello all, I’m the publisher of Lions' Commentary on UNIX (still going strong after 25 years!) and I have an “Ancient UNIX” book project in mind that I need some community help with. To avoid running into any “who has copyright rights to UNIX” legal problems, we’re trying to reach out in advance to any companies/organizations that may have such rights (Micro Focus, Xinuos, Nokia, are there others?) in advance. To that end, I’m trying to find staffers there who are: 1. sympathetic to sharing information about “ancient UNIX” with the operating system/UNIX communities 2. somewhat familiar with the past legal issues and controversies over UNIX ownership (perhaps someone in the legal department) If you know any such person(s) at Micro Focus, Xinuos, Nokia, and/or other relevant organizations that has either quality (or ideally a unicorn with both!), please pass on their name and email address to me (even better, add any context about why they might be helpful to me, if it’s OK to say that you referred me to them, etc.]. Thanks much, all referrals greatly appreciated! Dan Doernberg dan(a)peerllc.com

4 years

System IV

by Warner Losh

So I've seen a number of places that talk about Unix TS 3.0 -> 4.0 -> 5.0 progression and how System III was released and System V was released and System IV was internal only. What I've not seen is the "why" part of this. Why was it internal only? Warner

4 years, 1 month

Help Contacting Unix Legal People

by Warren Toomey

All, we need help contacting some people so that Dan Doernberg can make progress on a new Unix book that he's working on. I've attached his request to the TUHS list below. If you can help out in any way, please contact Dan directly. Cheers, Warren From: Peer-to-Peer Communications LLC <dan(a)peerllc.com> Hello all, I’m the publisher of Lions' Commentary on UNIX (still going strong after 25 years!) and I have an “Ancient UNIX” book project in mind that I need some community help with. To avoid running into any “who has copyright rights to UNIX” legal problems, we’re trying to reach out in advance to any companies/organizations that may have such rights (Micro Focus, Xinuos, Nokia, are there others?) in advance. To that end, I’m trying to find staffers there who are: 1. sympathetic to sharing information about “ancient UNIX” with the operating system/UNIX communities 2. somewhat familiar with the past legal issues and controversies over UNIX ownership (perhaps someone in the legal department) If you know any such person(s) at Micro Focus, Xinuos, Nokia, and/or other relevant organizations that has either quality (or ideally a unicorn with both!), please pass on their name and email address to me (even better, add any context about why they might be helpful to me, if it’s OK to say that you referred me to them, etc.]. Thanks much, all referrals greatly appreciated! Dan Doernberg dan(a)peerllc.com

4 years, 1 month

32V memory management: not quite V7 style swapping -- source code update

by Paul Ruizendaal

I just noticed that the 32V tape on the TUHS Unix Tree page includes a directory “slowsys”: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=32V/usr/src/slowsys This “slowsys” directory appears to contain the 32V kernel with a pure swapping architecture. It is not quite the kernel described in the well known 32V paper, as it seems to have advanced from a fixed 192KB image size mapping to a more variable mapping of up to 1MB — but otherwise the code appears to be as described in the July 1978 paper. The directory https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=32V/usr/src/sys contains the scatter loading, partial swapping version of the 32V kernel. Paul

4 years, 1 month

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