The Computer History Museum has an interesting blog post about
Dennis Ritchie's lost dissertation:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies-lost-dissertat…
Interesting fact is that Dennis never received his PhD because he failed
to provide a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library.
Kirk McKusick
> The use of honorifics was subtly discouraged at the Labs. I never saw a
policy statement, but nobody I knew used "Dr" (except those in the medical
department)
With the sole exception of the president's office, secretaries were
instructed not to say "Dr so-and-so's office" when they picked up an
unanswered phone call. (When that happened you could be sure that
the party you were calling was genuinely unavailable. Part of the
AT&T ethos--now abandoned--was that everybody, right up to the
president, answered their own phones.)
Doug
On another front. I know I've asked this before in v6, and possibly
related to v7, but I can't find the notes anywhere. vi doesn't come with
v7. So, has anybody put it on v7 in simh? I saw a thread sometime back
where vi on v7 wasn't the main topic, where Warren? I think it was, said
he'd done it and it was "easy." I don't suppose there are any notes
laying around telling how this might be accomplished?
I do see vi in 2bsd.tar, I don't suppose there is a 'how to install
2bsd on v7" note around either?
Thanks,
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
Is there full bsdi git repo anywhere?
I've vague recollections parts were merged into FreeBSD in the early
2000s so I assume it was open sourced?
There is a tarball of bsdi 2 on venus wetware but that's the best I
can do with searching.
--
Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5
> From: Will Senn
> I don't really understand how they work.
> ...
> maybe the way to understand the unix regex lies in a careful
> investigation into how it is implemented
I'm not sure what I did, but it wasn't the latter, since I have no idea how
they are done!
I just mentally break the regex search string up into substrings (I use them
most in Epsilon, which has syntax to do substrings of search strings, which
helps a lot); past that, I think it's just using them and getting used to
them.
> an IBM 7094 (whatever that is)
IBM's last 36-bit scientific mainframe before the System/360's. CTSS (which
DMR held out as the ancestor of Unix) ran on 7094's.
Noel
> "My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to
> be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural
> languages better than functional ones."
>
> Amen to that. Me too, I tried functional languages and my head hurt. C
> seems so natural to me.
Dennis made quite a generalization from a sample of one--Lisp,
the only functional language that existed when he was in grad
school. I'm sure he'd agree today that functional languages
shine for spplications rooted in algebraic domains. I
immodestly point to www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/powser.html,
which has nothing to do with Unix, but certainly would have
appealed to Dennis.
Doug
> From: Angelo Papenhoff
> I believe 11/20 UNIX also needs the EAE.
Some applications might have used it (the story about the KS11 bug with the
KW11-A confirms they did use it on that machine), but I found no trace of use
of it in a quick scan of the entire Version 1 source (the one which is
extant).
Also, the first file in the OS source:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/u0.s
lists the addresses of all device registers, and the KE11-A isn't there.
If the KE11 is needed to run some application on the -11/04, there are
KE11-B's (program compatible, but a single hex card) available, ISTR. For
emulation, something (SIMH?) supports it, since the TV -11 on ITS (now running
in emulation,I'm pretty sure) uses it.
Noel
> From: Will Senn
> can I run Unix on a PDP 11/04?
No, it doesn't have memory management, so not any of the well-known 'stock'
versions (V5/V6/etc).
Two choices, though:
- If you get the V1 that ran on an -11/20 (which is mostly compatible with
the /04 and /05), it should run on an /04. (Not sure what you'd use for mass
storage, on a physical /04, though.) I'm not sure when they dropped the /20 -
I think V4 n(at the latest)? But V2 and V3 are lost.
- There's a 'Unix' for the LSI-11, and with minor changes (the LSI-11 isn't
100% compatible with other MMU-less 11's, but the changes are minor, e.g.
MOS, written in MACRO-11, was conditionalized to run on both the LSI-11
and the -11/20) it should run on an /04.
Noel
> From: Clem Cole
> And if you could find a KS-11 MMU that Ken and Dennis had for the 11/20
> ... we can't even find documentation about it (Ken's surviving code is
> the best doc we have).
Where is that code? The Version 1 at TUHS appears to pre-date it.
It would be great to have a look at it, we might be able to partially document
the KS11 using it. (Ken had only vague memories of the KS11.)
> From: Ronald Natalie
> There's always MiniUnix.
Ah; I didn't realize that was something different from LSX (the LSI-11
system).
Noel
The question is can I run Unix on a PDP 11/04? I've dug around and it's
unclear to me, so I'm asking y'all.
Will
--
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