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6531 discussions

Re: Pipes (was Re: After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?)

by Douglas McIlroy

Many tree and dag pipe notations have been proposed. Marc's was one of the first. I devised one myself, but didn't like it enough to publish it even as a TM. A recent one is Spinellis's dgsh. More elaborate networks with feedback loops evolve for power-series computation. The idea of implementing cellular automata as arrays of processes with nearest neighbors connected by pipes was suggested early on, but I've never seen such an arrangement implemented--it would be hideously slow. I once wrote a general plumber that worked from a connection list: connect fd m in process A to fd n in process B. The main challenge was to find an order of hooking things up so that the number of live file descriptors in the plumber didn't exceed the system limit. Doug

6 months, 3 weeks

Re: After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?

by Douglas McIlroy

> Pipes were invented at least three times I would add a 4th: POGOL--a remarkable data-processing language from NSA, described by Gloria Lambert at the first POPL conference, 1973. A POGOL program is made of processes that read and write notional files. The compiler considers all the processes together and optimizes files out of existence wherever it sees that written data can be read immediately. Otherwise a buffering file is instantiated. Unlike Unix pipes, though, a pair of communicating processes must share common knowledge about the connection--the file name. A ready-made theory of pipe networks was published essentially simultaneously with the advent of DTSS communication files: R.M. Karp, R.E. Miller, and S. Winograd. The organization of computations for uniform recurrence equations. Journal of the ACM, 14(3):563-590, July 1967. Completely unsuspecting processes could have been connected by a pair of DTSS communication files controlled by a master relay process. As far as I know this was never done, although such a mechanism was used for the DTSS chat facility. For the special case of clocked sample-data networks, BLODI (block diagram compiler) by Lochbaum, Kelly and Vyssotsky was way ahead (1960) of all the pipe-based formalisms. Doug

6 months, 3 weeks

I threw together a MINIX 1.5 system call emulator

by Chris Hanson

Since MINIX was a UNIX V7 clone for teaching, I figure this is at least somewhat on-topic. I’ve wanted to port MINIX 1.5 for M68000 to other systems besides Amiga, Atari ST, and the classic Mac, but trying to do that within a system emulator is a pain and doesn’t help you use a modern editor or SCM system. So I took the Musashi M68000 emulator and, using the MINIX 1.5 sources for Atari ST for reference, I’ve implemented a system call emulator that’s now _almost_ sufficient to run /usr/bin/cc. It’s up on GitHub at https://github.com/eschaton/MINIXCompat and I’ve released it under an MIT license. It requires my forked version of the Musashi project that supports implementing a TRAP instruction via a callback, which is necessary for implementing system calls on the host side. I reference this via a submodule so it can be kept at least logically distinct from the rest of the code. There’s no Makefile as I’m using Xcode on macOS to develop it, though I expect to write one at some point so I can run it on NetBSD and Linux as well as on macOS; writing one should be straightforward. -- Chris

6 months, 3 weeks

Amdahl UTS use by 386 designers

by Jonathan Gray

I found it interesting that Amdahl UTS was used by designers of the 386. "we instituted Unix for the 386 design. Again if management knew what we were doing they wouldn't have let us do it." https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Intel_386_D… pp. 14-15 Intel Alumni Network, 386 panel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj8fnwuJGto&t=1540s Pat Gelsinger - UTS for Design Engineers https://www.gregbryant.com/intel/pat_gelsinger_unix_1984.pdf via https://mastodon.social/@aka_pugs/111723262047370983 "Given Pat was a bit of a UNIX hacker at the time, he set up the entire design team inside of his CMS account which was running the UTS UNIX environment from Amdahl." Gelsinger, Kirkpatrick, Kolodny, Singer Coping with the Complexity of Microprocessor Design at Intel - A CAD History https://kolodny.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/IntelCADPaperFinal2.pdf

6 months, 3 weeks

Re: Typesetter C Compiler and Troff (Re: Re: v6 Unix Documents)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: > I was able to rebuild both the UNSW and the native PWB compiler on PWB > 1.0, but not to backport either to vanilla v6. Any idea what the problem was? I'm curious, because we ran a version of the Typesetter compiler on the MIT systems, which ran an enhanced V6. Noel

6 months, 3 weeks

Re: After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?

by Douglas McIlroy

Rich's remark about file types reminded me of an ancient non-Unix story that I sent to Coff. Doug

6 months, 3 weeks

The History of the BSD Daemon

by Jan Schaumann

Marshall Kirk McKusick gave a talk on the history of the BSD Daemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDaD-CEzzg "This video tells the history of the BSD Daemon. It starts with the first renditions in the 1970s of the daemons that help UNIX systems provide services to users. These early daemons were the inspiration for the well-known daemon created by John Lasseter in the early 1980s that became synonymous with BSD as they adorned the covers of the first three editions of `The Design and Implementation of the BSD Operating System' textbooks. The talk will also highlight many of the shirt designs that featured the BSD Daemon."

6 months, 3 weeks

Re: v6 Unix Documents

by Jonathan Gray

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 01:23:23AM -0400, Dan Plassche wrote: > > On Sat, 19 Oct 2024, Jonathan Gray wrote: > > > PWB was an early external distribution with troff. > > > > Documents for the PWB/UNIX Time-Sharing System > > https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Bits:30007124 > > https://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/PWB_UNIX/ > > > > NROFF/TROFF User's Manual > > October 11, 1976 > > datamuseum.dk, pp 325-357 > > bitsavers, pp 217-249 > > > > Addendum to the NROFF/TROFF User's Manual > > May 1977 > > datamuseum.dk, p 358 > > bitsavers, p 250 > > > > fonts described in: > > Administrative Advice for PWB/UNIX > > 23. PHOTOTYPESETTING EQUIPMENT AND SUPPLIES > > datamuseum.dk, p 647 > > Thank you Jonathan. I was previously not sure where to place the > PWB documentation in the timeline but a clearer picture is > emerging. > > Based on the v6 "NROFF User's Manual" revised in 1974 and > published in 1975, I can now see that the PWB documentation with > the "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual" from 1976-77 has most of the > content that later appears in v7. The major change immediately > beforehand was the rewrite of troff into C.[1] Some clear > differences are the combination of nroff and troff manpages and > the addition of troff specific features like the special fonts > into the user's manual. > > [1]. Apparently in 1976: > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/unix_program_description-tr… "It was rewritten in C around 1975" Kernighan in CSTR 97, A Typesetter-independent TROFF I've seen references to "Documents for Use with the Phototypesetter (Version 7)" which was likely distributed with the licensed phototypesetter tape in 1977. What may have been the manual distributed with that tape is also close to v7. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Interdata732/usr/source/troff/doc https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Other/Interdata/ tuhs Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz usr/source/formatters/troff/doc/

7 months

Re: Canonical Historic Approach to iconv(1)

by Rudi Blom

The "man 1 iconv" page on both HP-UX 11i 11.23 (Aug 2003) and 11.31 (Feb 2007) remark that iconv was developed by HP. Cheers, uncle rubl -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

7 months

Canonical Historic Approach to iconv(1)

by segaloco

So a project I'm working on recently includes a need to store UTF-8 Japanese kana text in source files for readability, but then process those source files through tools only guaranteed to support single-byte code points, with something mapping the UTF-8 code points to single-byte points in the destination execution environment. After a bit of futzing, I've landed on the definition of iconv(1) provided by the Single UNIX Specification to push this character mapping concern to the tip of my pipelines. It is working well thus far and insulates the utilities down-pipe from needing multi-byte support (I'm looking at you Apple). I started thumbing through my old manuals and noted that iconv(1) is not a historic utility, rather, SUS picked it up from HP-UX along the way. Was there any older utility or set of practices for converting files between character encodings besides the ASCII/EBCDIC stuff in dd(1)? As I understand it, iconv(1) is just recognizing sequences of bytes, mapping them to a symbolic name, then emitting them in the complementary series of bytes assigned to that symbolic name in a second charmap file. This sounds like a simple filter operation that could be done in a few other ways. I'm curious if any particular approach was relatively ubiquitous, or if this was an exercise largely left to the individual and so solutions were wide and varied? My tool chain doesn't need to work on historic UNIX, but it would be cool to understand how to make it work on the least common denominator. - Matt G.

7 months

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