TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

17 participants
6470 discussions

Re: [TUHS] A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Dennis Ritchie's ACM Turing Award lecture paper in Communications of the ACM 27(8) 758--760 (August 1984), doi:10.1145/358198.358207 was reprinted in UNIX Review 3(1) 28, 118--120, 122, (January 1985) [no DOI or URL yet found], and more recently, in Resonance 17(8) 810--816 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0091-y. There are two other UNIX-related papers in that issue of Resonance: Pramod Chandra P. Bhatt UNIX: Genesis and design features Resonance 17(8) 727--747 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0084-x K. Bhaskar C --- Past, present, and future --- A perspective Resonance 17(8) 748--758 (August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0085-9 I do not have access to that journal's archives from my campus library, so I have not seen the articles. In his paper, Dennis Ritchie referred to another UNIX article that I did manage to track down and record in unix.bib: Donald Arthur Norman The Truth about UNIX Datamation 27(12) 139--150 (November 1981) https://tinyurl.com/yyselmxq The original URL is 200+ characters long, and is a freely-downloadable PDF of a reprint in AUUGN volume IV number I. The PDF file has searchable text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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, 7 months

A Paper by dmr in 1984

by Warren Toomey

"Reflections on Software Research" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1283920.1283939?download=true Happy birthday, Dennis! Warren

4 years, 7 months

Whence did "XXX" come about?

by Dave Horsfall

For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more work" or "look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself. Whence did it come about? I think I saw it as early as PWB, but can't be sure. -- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX"

4 years, 7 months

Archeology Today - 516-TSS notebooks unearthed in old Wyse terminal box

by Jon Steinhart

Score! I'm not planning to scan all of these in unless someone really cares and has a better scanner than I do. I'm going to prioritize the following: 516-10, -11, -18 Ring Formats 516-12 Specifications for the Node Modem Interface 516-22 A Repeater for the Node Modem 516-28 I/O Ring Device Codes 516-36 Node Modem Interface for Computer Terminals 516-72 Node Test 516-73 Node I/O Software 516-57 Format for the 516 Node - TIU Spider Interface 516-67 Node Format for PDP-11 Jon

4 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] H.J. Lu Bootable Root & Base System disks

by norman＠oclsc.org

In my humble-but-correct opinion*, Linux and its origins fit into the general topic of UNIX history just as well as those of Research UNIX or BSD or SVr4.2.2.2.2.2.2.2 or SunOS or IRIX or Ultrix or Tru64-compaqted-HPSauce or whatever. It all stems from the same roots, despite the protestations of purists from all sides. Warren gets final say, of course, but to encourage him I will say: Ploooogie! Norman Wilson Toronto ON * One of Peter Weinberger's sayings that I still enjoy overusing.

4 years, 7 months

Unix tools to aid in the production of Internet RFCs?

by Dan Cross

Honestly, I'm not quite sure if this is a TUHS, COFF, or IH question. But since my background with respect to such things is largely Unix centric, I thought I'd ask in that context, hence asking on TUHS. I assume some of the regulars on this list have authored RFCs (of the IETF etc variety). The RFC format seems fairly well fixed: table of contents, fixed number of lines per page, page numbers and dates in the footer, and so forth. The format is sufficiently complex that it seems like some tooling could be usefully employed to aid in producing these documents. So I'm curious: what tools did people use to produce those documents? Perhaps `nroff` with custom macros or something? - Dan C.

4 years, 7 months

Quick video: what's the oldest BSD distro

by Warner Losh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww60o940kEk You may be surprised :) Warner P.S. Hope this is relevant enough to share here. Also, if I botched anything I've not yet mentioned in the comments, please let me know...

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] bare m4 (was BTL summmer employees)

by Doug McIlroy

A modestly corrected and improved version of my bare-m4 program, which quickly builds from nothing to arithmetic on binary numbers using no builtins other than `define'. is posted at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/barem4.txt. (.txt because browsers balk at .m4) Doug

4 years, 8 months

early BIND

by Tony Finch

Another question at the intersection of the Internet-History and TUHS lists... I was wondering about the early history of BIND. I started off wondering about the relative ages of JEEVES (the original PDP10 DNS server) and BIND. Judging by the dates on RFCs 881 - 883, the DARPA contract commissioning BIND, and the Berkeley tech reports, it seems there wasn't much time when the DNS was without BIND. But I was struck by the resolver API set out on page 8 of Berkeley tech report UCB/CSD-84-182: it looks nothing like the familiar API that ended up in 4.3BSD. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1984/5957.html https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/src/lib/libc/net/n… So I'm wondering if there's anything out there recording the history between the 1984 tech reports and the 4.3BSD release in 1986. (It's also noteworthy that early BIND supported incremental DNS updates and zone transfers, which didn't reappear in standard form until RFC 2136 (1997) and RFC 1995 (1996)...) Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ public services of the highest quality

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Memory management in Dennis Ritchie's C Compiler

by Paul Ruizendaal

Doug, “In fact Dennis's compiler did not use AID instructions for that purpose.” Whilst local variables are indeed accessed as an offset from the base pointer, I’m not sure that the above statement is correct. In the V6 compiler (-sp) was certainly used to push arguments to the stack, and when the register allocation overflowed, the interim results were pushed to the stack as well with (-sp). See c10.c, the case CALL in rcexpr(), the function comarg() and sptab (which is right at the end of table.s) Links: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/c/c10.c https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/c/table.s For interim result pushing/popping I refer to the FS and SS macro’s. Dennis discusses these in his “A tour of the C compiler” paper. https://www.jslite.net/cgi-bin/9995/doc/tip/doc/old-ctour.pdf Of course this is all implementational detail, not a core design aspect - as Richard Miller showed in his port to the Interdata architecture (including a port of the Ritchie C compiler). Maybe the sentence should have read: "In fact Dennis's compiler did not rely on having AID instructions for that purpose." Paul @Warren: at moments like these I really like having the line highlight feature that we discussed before Summer.

4 years, 8 months

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

TUHS