All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link.
Cheers, Warren
----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp -----
I stumbled over this:
https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html
is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ?
----- End forwarded message -----
I'm wondering if there are places where people who were in the Unix
Room wrote about the origins and evolution of what people (at least
used to(*)) refer to as "Unix Philosophy", and since some are in THIS
(TUHS) room, what they might have to say about it.
How much was in reaction to the complexity of Multics, and how much
was simply a response to the limited address spaces of
available and affordable hardware?
Eric S. Raymond wrote in "The Art of Unix Programming" quoting
Doug McIlroy and Rob Pike:
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html
And I wonder if they care to comment on it?
I have trouble taking ESR as authoritative, as, it seems to me that
Research Unix was more a product of the "Cathedral" (or at least a
contained community) than the "Bazaar" (at least the modern bazaar,
where everyone needs to leave a new feature grafito on the town
walls), and ESR
A side question for Rob Pike, is the "Not only is UNIX dead, it's
starting to smell really bad." quote accurate? Was it in reaction to
BSD, GNU, or all of the above?
(*) I say "used to", because, for the most part, minimalism seems to
have left the building. I can't look at modern GNU utilities, and
many, if not most open source packages and think they've gone WAY past
classic Unix minimalism, especially since I remember hearing that Bell
Research had happily stripped excess features (removal of "cat -s"
sticks in my mind) from later day research Unix, and because Stallman
is said to have coined the term "New Jersey" style as a synonym for
what Richard P. Gabriel called "Worse is Better", which seems, an
attack on minimalism (nothing less than "the right thing" is acceptable)
Worse is.... readings:
https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.htmlhttps://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.htmlhttps://dreamsongs.com/Files/IsWorseReallyBetter.pdfhttps://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf
Anti-flamage disclainmers:
Inclusion of links above does not imply any agreement on my part! My
apologies in advance for any offense, misquote, or misunderstanding on
my part.
> From: Rik Farrow <rik(a)rikfarrow.com>
> Was the brevity typical of Unix command names a function of the tiny
> disk and memory available? Or more a function of having a Teletype 33
> for input?
I'm not sure the answer was ever written down (e.g. in a memo); we will
probably have to rely on memory - and memories that far back are now fairly
thin on the ground by now. Perhaps Mr. McIlroy (or Mr. Thompson, if we're
_really_ lucky) will humor us? :-)
I have the impression that some of the names are _possibly_ inherited from
Multics (which the early Unicians all used before Unix existed) - but maybe
not. The command to list a directory, on Multics, is 'ls' (but see below) -
but the Multics qcommand to remove a file is 'del' (not 'rm'); and change working
directory is 'cwd'. So maybe ls' is just chance?
Multics had a 'feature' where a segment (file) could have additional names (to
the main name), and this is used to add short aliases to many commands, so the
'base name'' for the directory list command is 'list'; 'ls' is a short
alias. A list of Multics commands (with short forms) is available here:
https://www.multicians.org/multics-commands.html
I'm not sure how early that alias mechanism came in, though; my copy of
"Introduction to Multics" (February, 1974) doesn't have short names (or, at
least, it doesn't use them).
It won't have anything to do with disk and memory. Having used a Teletype, it
would take noticeably longer to type in a longer name! It's also more effort
and time. I would expect those are the reasons for the short names.
Noel
> I wonder what happened to the amazing library at Murray Hill.
Last I knew, the Bell Labs archives were intact under supervision of a
professional archivist. Formally speaking, the archives and the library
were distinct entities. The library, which was open to self service 24
hours a day, declined rapidly after the bean counters decreed that it
should henceforth support itself on rental fees. Departments immediately
turned to buying books rather than borrowing them. It's very likely that
this was bad for the Labs' bottom line, but the cost (both monetary and
intellectual) was not visible as a budgetary line item.
The 24-hour library contributed to one of Ken's programming feats. Spurred
by a lunchtime remark that it would be nice to have a unit-conversion
program, Ken announced units(1) the next morning. Right from the start, the
program knew more than 200 units, thanks to a book Ken grabbed from the
library in the middle of the night.
Doug
> That CSTR number 1 is nicely formatted, is that troff?
The archive's CSTR 1 is ersatz. It's a 1973 journal article obtained from
JSTOR. I imagine the manuscript was largely copied from the CSTR, but the
printed paper certainly differs in meta-content and in layout, say nothing
of font. Having gone through the usual route of journal submission and
revision, the body text is probably not word-for-word identical to the CSTR
either.
Doug
Clem Cole:
Interesting -- 'Jason' had always been a Pascal hacker when the strip was
first created. As I recall, Berkeley Breathed had Wendell (his hacker
character) comment on that during the time of Pascal/C Wars.
====
But Jason later was revealed to be wearing Unix underpants:
https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Hello everyone, I've found myself in the exceptionally fortunate circumstance of securing ownership of a MAC-TUTOR BELLMAC-8 SBC unit. It is still in shipment so I can't assess its operation yet, but I was wondering if anyone is aware of any surviving assemblers, linkers, etc. for this architecture? If not, I'm prepared to roll my own based on available documentation, but figured I'd ask to see if there's anything I can start with. From what I can tell, the main development environment was PWB, specifically the Bell System internal varieties, with the BTL edition of Release 5.0 literature describing things like m8as(1), m8cc(1), etc. as Division 452 Computer Center standard commands.
There is a bit of information here as well: http://ferretronix.com/march/sbc/mactutor/
Thanks for any tips! Regardless of how much I can manage to do with it, I'll be sure to get some good pictures and take some notes on what I am able to figure out with the thing. I presume the Gunkies wiki would be a good place to document that sort of thing?
- Matt G.
P.S. Pardon if this belongs on COFF, I figured since UNIX was the canonical development system and it is also a Bell Labs thing, I'd ask here first.
I noticed there are kexec talks this year at Linux Plumbers. Kexec, kernel
boots kernel, has had a 25 year gestation in Linux, but it looks like it's
finally coming together, driven by need.
Thereby hangs a tale.
in 1977, I was working at udel with Ed Szurkowski, the first sysadmin of
the Unix systems we got in 1976 (first machine was an 11/70). Ed was a
gifted engineer and did all kinds of neat work on v6. He later went to the
Labs once he got his PhD and I lost track of him.
Ed got tired of watching the bootstrap slowness, and wrote a system call
that did the following:
1. load kernel in memory from system call argument
2. put special signature in low memory telling bootstrap "look in memory"
3. reboot via reset.
Now, this works, because back then, ROM boot code did not zero memory.
Memory was unchanged across reset. So the bootstrap could find the magic
bits and start the kernel.
I've lost the code, I carried the listings for decades but finally dumped
them. A shame.
But I'm wondering: is Ed's work in 1977 the first "kernel boots kernel" or
was there something before?
> The array size} limit that I found through trial and error is (2^15)-1.
> Declaring an array that is [larger] results in an error of "Constant
required",
On its face, it states that anything bigger cannot be an integer constant,
which is reasonable because that's the largest (signed) integer value. Does
that version of C support unsigned constants?
Doug
