Arnold:
But for several years now I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the
research nature of most of the articles. Very few of them are actually
useful (or even interesting) to me in a day-to-day sense.
===
I guess it depends on your interests, and also on what you look at.
I've got way behind in reading ;login:, but have been regularly
attending conferences: the Annual Technical Conference (ATC) and
some workshops (HotStorage, HotCloud) that are usually co-located;
LISA. I still find plenty to interest me, both in talks and in
the hallway tracks, though LISA has been drying up over the years
(and it's clear that USENIX know that too and are working on
whether it should just be subsumed into the already-burgeoning
SREcons).
As I say, interests differ, but I've learned plenty of new things
about OS and networking design and implementation tradeoffs,
security at many levels, file systems, and storage devices.
Thanks to COVID, USENIX-sponsored conferences have all been
online for the past year and are expected to stay so through
the end of 2021. For obvious reasons that greatly reduces
the expenses of the conferences, so the registration fees are
about 10% of normal. Thanks to that, I've been able to sample
conferences I've never had time or money to travel to, like Security
and FAST (file systems and storage). It's been well worth my
time and money even though the money comes out of my own pocket.
UNIX history is not part of the mainstream USENIX world these
days, alas--I was disappointed that there was no official 50th-
birthday party two years ago in Seattle (though the not-officially-
sponsored one at LCM organized by Clem and others was a fine time,
and USENIX had no objection to hosting announcements of it).
I should point out that the only time I've met Our Esteemed
Leader and Listrunner in person was at a USENIX conference, where
he held a session to show off his reconstructed very-early PDP-11
UNIX from the tape Dennis found under the floor of the UNIX Room.
I too would like to see the organization harbour some less-formal
meetings or publications. The way to make that happen would
be to run for the Board and to actively sponsor such stuff (with
care about who is selected for the real work to avoid the problems
Ted describes). Maybe that's a good idea, or maybe it's better
to let the Linux and BSD worlds do their own thing. Either way
I think what USENIX does is worth while. I've been a member for
40 years this year, and although it's not the same organization
as it was in the early 1980s, neither is it the same world it
lives in. I still think they do worth while work and I am proud
to continue to support them, even though I'm not a published
academic researcher, just an old-style systems hack and sysadmin
from the ancient days when those were inseparable.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
All of the great discussion on this list about editors has made me curious about the data structures used in the various Unix editors.
I found a great discussion of this for sam in Rob Pike’s publication “The Text Editor sam.”
I’d like to read similar discussions of the data structures for ed, em, ex/vi. If anyone has suggestions of references, they would be very welcome!
Similarly, if there are any pointers to references on some other data structures in editors like TECO, QED and E, I’d welcome them as well.
All the best,
David
...........
David C. Brock
Director and Curator
Software History Center
Computer History Museum
computerhistory.org/softwarehistory<http://computerhistory.org/softwarehistory>
Email: dbrock(a)computerhistory.org
Twitter: @dcbrock
Skype: dcbrock
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94943
(650) 810-1010 main
(650) 810-1886 direct
Pronouns: he, him, his
>From spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU Thu Apr 4 23:11:22 1991
Path: ai-lab!mintaka!mit-eddie!wuarchive!usc!apple!amdahl!walldrug!moscvax!perdue!spaf
From: spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.announce.important,news.admin
Subject: Warning: April Fools Time again (forged messages on the loose!)
Message-ID: <4-1-1991(a)medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 1 Apr 91 00:00:00 GMT
Expires: 1 May 91 00:00:00 GMT
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ.
Lines: 25
Approved: spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU
Xref: ai-lab news.announce.important:19 news.admin:8235
Warning: April 1 is rapidly approaching, and with it comes a USENET
tradition. On April Fools day comes a series of forged, tongue-in-cheek
messages, either from non-existent sites or using the name of a Well Known
USENET person. In general, these messages are harmless and meant as a joke,
and people who respond to these messages without thinking, either by flaming
or otherwise responding, generally end up looking rather silly when the
forgery is exposed.
So, for the few weeks, if you see a message that seems completely out
of line or is otherwise unusual, think twice before posting a followup
or responding to it; it's very likely a forgery.
There are a few ways of checking to see if a message is a forgery. These
aren't foolproof, but since most forgery posters want people to figure it
out, they will allow you to track down the vast majority of forgeries:
o Russian computers. For historic reasons most forged messages have
as part of their Path: a non-existent (we think!) russian
computer, either kremvax or moscvax. Other possibilities are
nsacyber or wobegon. Please note, however, that walldrug is a real
site and isn't a forgery.
o Posted dates. Almost invariably, the date of the posting is forged
to be April 1.
o Funky Message-ID. Subtle hints are often lodged into the
Message-Id, as that field is more or less an unparsed text string
and can contain random information. Common values include pi,
the phone number of the red phone in the white house, and the
name of the forger's parrot.
o subtle mispellings. Look for subtle misspellings of the host names
in the Path: field when a message is forged in the name of a Big
Name USENET person. This is done so that the person being forged
actually gets a chance to see the message and wonder when he
actually posted it.
Forged messages, of course, are not to be condoned. But they happen, and
it's important for people on the net not to over-react. They happen at this
time every year, and the forger generally gets their kick from watching the
novice users take the posting seriously and try to flame their tails off. If
we can keep a level head and not react to these postings, they'll taper off
rather quickly and we can return to the normal state of affairs: chaos.
Thanks for your support.
Gene Spafford, Net.God (and probably tired of seeing this message)
> From: David C. Brock
> I'd like to read similar discussions of the data structures for ed, em,
> ex/vi. ... Similarly, if there are any pointers to references on some
> other data structures in editors like TECO, QED and E, I'd welcome them
> as well.
I don't have any discussions I can point you at, but I do have source - for
two things which are somewhat older than most of the ones you mention
(ex/vi/etc).
The first is a TECO from the fourth floor V6 machine (DSSR/RTS) at Tech Sq at
MIT:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/teco
There's some rudimentary documentation in there, in teco.doc, but don't expect
too much. You'll have to rely on the source, which is in MACRO-11 - but it
seems to be reasonably well commented. This actually predates V6; it was
originally written for an MIT OS called DELPHI, which ran on an -11/45 which
was the main EECS undergrad machine. At some point (probably post the Unix
port), it was modified to have '^R mode', which was a WYSIWYG display mode a
lot like the one in the ITS TECO in which EMACS was first written.
I have also put up the Montgomery Emacs for Unix:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/emacs
This is the version we were running on the 5th floor MIT V6 machine (CSR),
which by that point have absorbed a few V7isms (e.g. some ioctl() stuff). So
don't expect to be able to compile and run it, without a fair amount of
work. (I vaguely recall that it needs I+D space, so maybe not on a /23 at
all.) But at least the source is in C, so you can read it. I don't think
there's an un-modified version online (i.e. the original Montgomery source),
alas.
Noel
This just came in:
ACM has named Alfred Vaino Aho and Jeffrey David Ullman recipients of
the 2020 ACM A. M. Turing Award
https://awards.acm.org/about/2020-turing
for fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language
implementation and for synthesizing these results and those of others
in their highly influential books, which educated generations of
computer scientists.
Most of us probably have several of their books on the shelf; I certainly do!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I missed the fact that Posix and Linux ed support s/foo/bar/3 (as opposed
to s3/foo/bar); ex does not, unfortunately.
We need a Great Unification of Line Editors.
John Cowan:
We need a Great Unification of Line Editors.
====
A standard for the standard editor?
I thought the nice thing about standards was that there
were so many of them.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
I had *.clients.your-server.de crawling mcvoy.com in violation of my
robots.txt. For whatever reason, the tty settings (or something)
made vi not work, I dunno what the deal is, stty -tabs didn't help.
So I had to resort to ed to write and debug the little program below.
It was surprisingly pleasant, it's probably the first time I've used ed
for anything real in at least a decade. My fingers still know it.
+1 for ed. It's how many decades old and still useful?
#!/usr/libexec/bitkeeper/bk tclsh
int
main(void)
{
FILE log = popen("/var/log/apache2/dns.l", "r");
string buf, ip;
string dropped{string};
fconfigure(log, buffering: "line");
while (buf = <log>) {
unless (buf =~ /([^ ]+\.your-server\.de\.) /) continue;
ip = $1;
if (defined(dropped{ip})) continue;
dropped{ip} = "yes";
warn("DROP ${ip}\n");
system("/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s ${ip} -j DROP");
}
}
Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
> On 3/29/21, arnold(a)skeeve.com <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
> > Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
> >
> >> If ed(1) had cursor positioning and full screen capabilities along
> >> with line oriented editing (similar to Atari 8-bit default editor) it
> >> would be perfect. I still love it though and use it pretty often.
> >
> > Try out the 'se' editor, see www.se-editor.org.
>
> Thanks. It is a nice editor, but it actually resembles ex(1) when
> using visual mode. Maybe I am missing something but it appears you
> cannot actually use cursor keys to visually edit lines in the upper
> area of the screen in se -- you can only edit cmd line.
>
> As far as I know there is no editor in the Unix land which gives you
> the ability to work in the ed(1) line oriented mode BUT also allowing
> to freely move cursor keys in all directions. I gave example of the
> Atari editor[1] which does exactly that. I believe to accomplish it
> on Unix one would need to hack ed(1) and add ncurses(3) cursor
> positioning.
>
> --Andy
>
> [1] https://youtu.be/c9o92l5gupI
