TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

4 participants
6478 discussions

by M Douglas McIlroy

> the hammer fired to make an impression the ribbon on the paper, which was > caused the noise people associated with computer printers. GE outdid the printer with a fantastically fast pneumatic card reader. The make and break of the suction on each card repeated at aural frequency and so loud that I hied off to the instrument stockroom to borrow a noise meter. It was 90db at the operator's position.

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Remember the ed thread?

by norman＠oclsc.org

ed is the standard editor, they say. The b command (stands for browse) came from late-1970s U of T; rob probably brought it to 1127. There were a handful of other syntactic conveniences, like being allowed to leave off the final delimeter of an s command, and declaring that a missing address means 1 before the comma or semicolon and $ after, so 3,s/fish/&head works over all lines from 3 to the last, and , standing alone addresses the whole buffer. Also the idea that s followed by a digit N means start with the Nth instance of the pattern: s3/fish/&head/ affects only the third fish, and s3/fish/&head/g every fish after the second. I have all those tweaks, plus a few others, embedded in my fingers from the qed produced by the same Toronto hacks. I contracted it from the copy rob left behind at Caltech, which means it has been my editor of choice for 40 years now (with sam as an alternate favourite since its inception 35 years or so ago). That qed has a lot of cryptic programming stuff that I have mostly forgotten because it was never that useful, but what really hooked me was a. Multiple buffers, with the ability to move and copy text between them reasonably smoothly (both with the m and t commands and with an interpolate-into-input magic character); b. The > < | commands, which respectively send the addressed lines to a shell command (default ,), replace the addressed lines or append after the single addressed line the standard output of the shell command (default .), and replaced addressed lines with what you get by sending them (default ,) to the shell command, replacing them with its standard output. The last operators make qed into a kind of workbench, both for massaging data and for constructing a list of commands to send to the shell. I gather current Linux/BSD eds have > and <, spelled r ! and w !, but without | it just ain't the same, rather like the way | revolutionized the shell. I believe the credit for U of T ed and qed go mainly to Rob Pike, Tom Duff, Hugh Redelmeier, and the (alas now late) David Tillbrook. David remained an avid user of qed, continuing to add stuff to it. Norman Wilson Toronto ON PS: this message, as most of my e-mail, composed by typing it into qed, editing as needed, then running >mail tuhs(a)tuhs.org

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Soft hyphens

by M Douglas McIlroy

> When hyphenation is disabled, soft (discretionary) hyphens are > interpreted. In pre-Unix roff hyphenation mode 0 turned off all breaking of words. The original troff, however, behaved as described above, and alsowant broke genuinely hyphenated words in mode 0. If you t really wants to break words one day, you may use

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] ching in Unix

by Norman Wilson

Noel Hunt: Who in the Unix world today writes, would even be able to write, a manual entry like that. ==== Doug McIlroy is still around, though (alas) he doesn't write many manual entries these days. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} .ss paragraph-style-footnote example, then and now

by M Douglas McIlroy

As the example came through in my mail reader--in a different, proportionally spaced font, the effect of .ll in the examples was hard to figure out. Which of the two line lengths in the new case is actually operative? Why are the inch lengths in the old and new examples so different? The new example is ticklish, since it depends on the peculiar AI that identifies sentence endings. Suppose reference 1 is naively broken after "Soc." I prefer the old example because it's clean to read, isn't mixed up with AI, and incidentally illustrates a nontrivial use for .nop. Doug > The example itself originally read: > > .ll 4.5i > 1.\ This is the first footnote.\c > .ss 48 > .nop > .ss 12 > 2.\ This is the second footnote. > > RESULT: > > 1. This is the first footnote. 2. This > is the second footnote. > > The new version of this example is: > > .ie n .ll 50n > .el .ll 2.75i > .ss 12 48 > 1. J. Fict. Ch. Soc. 6 (2020), 3\[en]14. > 2. Better known for other work. > > RESULT: > > 1. J. Fict. Ch. Soc. 6 (2020), 3-14. 2. Better > known for other work.

4 years, 1 month

Transfer of Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation

by arnold＠skeeve.com

FYI, folks. Arnold > Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2021 06:06:49 -0700 > From: a(a)9srv.net > To: 9fans(a)9fans.net > Subject: [9fans] Transfer of Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation > > We are thrilled to announce that Nokia has transferred the copyright of > Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation. This transfer applies to all of the > Plan 9 from Bell Labs code, from the earliest days through their final > release. > > The most exciting immediate effect of this is that the Plan 9 Foundation > is making the historical 1st through 4th editions of Plan 9 available > under the terms of the MIT license. These are the releases as they > existed at the time, with minimal changes to reflect the above. > > 1st and 2nd edition were never released as open source software, and > both (but especially 1st edition) were only available to a very small > number of people. 3rd and 4th were previously available as open source, > but under a license which was problematic for some people (especially > the 3rd edition). We think making these available under the MIT license > is something that's going to be a significant benefit for all projects > using Plan 9 code. While this doesn't automatically change the license > on any downstream projects, and you're welcome to keep using the LPL if > you like, you now have the option of switching to MIT, which we think > most everyone will find preferable. > > Obviously, for folks in the Plan 9 community, there isn't a way to say > "thank you" to Bell Labs, and its various parent organizations, that's > really adequate. None of us would be talking about any of this if it > weren't for the work done there for decades. All of us here at the Plan > 9 Foundation express our sincerest thanks to the team at Nokia who made > this possible, the Plan 9 alumni who supported the effort, and the Plan > 9 community who have kept kernels booting and the userland useful. > > The historical releases are available right now at: > https://p9f.org/dl/ > > You can read Nokia's press release on the transfer here: > https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/plan-9-bell-labs-cyberspace/ > > Thank you for your time, > Anthony Sorace > Plan 9 Foundation > > ------------------------------------------ > 9fans: 9fans > Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf20bce89ef96d4b6-M63f81768e4ffdfa4… > Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription

4 years, 1 month

Micnet Was: Re: Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

by Paul Ruizendaal

Micnet would seem to fall within my interest scope of Unix networking 1975-1985. I’ve seen it mentioned before, but I don’t have a clear picture of what it was. There is some sysadmin material on bitsavers about it, but no info on how it worked on the inside or how it relates to other early networking. At first glance it seems to be conceptually related to Berknet. Does anybody here know the backstory to Micnet and/or how it worked? Paul

4 years, 1 month

Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

by Josh Good

Hello UNIX veterans. So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose. I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost spartan. The chapter titles are: 1. Introduction 2. vi: A Text Editor 3. ed 4. mail 5. Communicating with Other Sites 6. bc: A Calculator 7. The Shell 8. The C-Shell 9. Using the Visual Shell And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index. Granted, this Xenix version is derived from System V Release 2, and I think it was for the Intel 286 (not yet ported to the i386), but hey it's 1988 already and the Internet is supposed to be thriving on UNIX in the Pacific Coast, or so the lore says. I see now that it probably was only in the Berkely family that the Internet was going on... In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from those years. I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and the Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version, from a user's point of view. I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of": email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these days. -- Josh Good

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse

by M Douglas McIlroy

> When you're the phone company, calls are free Not so. But the culture prioritized phone use in a way that's been completely forgotten. High execs would answer their own phones when they were at their desks. "Your call is very important to us. Please wait for the first available representative" would have been anathema. One of my few managerial decrees in the Unix lab was to give a year's notice that "research" would stop forwarding Usenet traffic, not because of phones, but because uucp was becoming a burden on our computer. Doug

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

by M Douglas McIlroy

Connectivity evolved rapidly in the early 1980s. In 1980 I served on the board of CSNet, which connected have-not CS departments (including Bell Labs) via dialup and X.25 links onto the periphery of the magic circle of Arpanet. By 1982 it was not extraordinary that I could via international email arrange all aspects of a trip to visit lively universities of the AUUG.

4 years, 1 month

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TUHS