TUHS

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6413 discussions

by Lawrence Stewart

This explains something, I think! Luca Cardelli and Mark Manasse later worked at the Digital Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, which was formed in 1984 after PARC fired Bob Taylor. Mark helped write the window system we used, and at some point a cat appeared, which would sleep until you moved the mouse and then come over to pat at the mouse. My impression was that Luca wrote it, be he was cagy about it. This later evolved into xneko for X Windows. -Larry

4 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] [COFF] Fwd: Old and Tradition was V9 shell

by Adam Thornton

"I'd go to the local University that teaches Fortran and ask around." Aye, there's the rub. SIUE (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville) still had a COBOL curriculum a decade ago, and they might still. They were fairly forthright in training people to go work at a lot of the stodgier St. Louis enterprises that still had a large COBOL footprint (AB, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Caterpillar, et al). By 2010, though, Express Scripts was trying hard to move away from its ANCHOR (COBOL) system and whatever-it-was-they-had running on VMS, and it sure felt like in the early 2010s STL was mostly Java EE. I would think that FORTRAN is likelier to be passed around as folk wisdom and ancient PIs (uh, Primary Investigators, not the detective kind) thrusting a dog-eared FORTRAN IV manual at their new grad students and snarling "RTFM!" than as actual college courses. That said, if you want to learn FORTRAN and don't mind working from modern FORTRAN back, I really was impressed by https://lfortran.org/ , and the ability to run it in a JupyterLab playground environment is fantastic for quick-turnaround experimentation. Plus Ondřej Čertík <https://ondrejcertik.com/> was fun to talk to and hang out with. On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 8:19 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:40:10AM +0100, Sijmen J. Mulder wrote: > > Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > > > Fortran programmers are formally trained (at least I > > > was, there was a whole semester devoted to this) in accumulated errors. > > > You did a deep dive into how to code stuff so that the error was > reduced > > > each time instead of increased. It has a lot to do with how floating > > > point works, it's not exact like integers are. > > > > I was unaware that there's formal training to be had around this but > > it's something I'd like to learn more about. Any recommendations on > > materials? I don't mind diving into Fortran itself either. > > My training was 35 years ago, I have no idea where to go look for this > stuff now. I googled and didn't find much. I'd go to the local > University that teaches Fortran and ask around. > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF(a)minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff >

4 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Tech memos from Heinz on MERT and others

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > Heinz Lycklama has shared a binder full of old technical memos with > Clem Cole, who has scanned them in. Thanks to both of them for > preserving these documents. A big thank you to Heinz and Clem for their roles in making this happen! Very interesting material. I live in hope that someday the source will turn up - even a listing would be enough. Noel

4 years, 10 months

Fwd: Unix V0 on SIMH PDP-9

by Warren Toomey

All, I received this interesting e-mail from Michael Thompson: ----- Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 12:50:12 -0500 From: Michael Thompson <michael.99.thompson(a)gmail.com> To: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> Subject: Unix V0 on SIMH PDP-9 I modified the PDP-7 .simh file so it will run on a SIMH PDP-9. (attached) We have a running PDP-9 at the RICM. If I added EAE, (we likely have the necessary parts) and made a disk emulator like the one at the LCM, we could also run UNIX V0 on it. It would be nice to have the disk emulator emulate an RB disk, but that would also require emulating a DMA adapter. I am considering making an FPGA to emulate the memory controller and 32KW of memory. If I did that, I could put the RB and DMA emulation in the same device. -- Michael Thompson ----- End forwarded message ----- set cpu 8k set cpu eae set cpu history=100 show cpu # set up SIMH devices: # UNIX character translations (CR to NL, ESC to ALTMODE): set tti unix # RB09 fixed head disk: set rb ena att rb image.fs # enable TELNET in GRAPHICS-2 keyboard/display(!!) #set g2in ena #att -U g2in 12345 # disable hardware UNIX-7 doesn't know about: set lpt disa set drm disa set dt disa set mt disa set rf disa set ttix disa set ttox disa # show device settings: show dev # load and run the paper tape bootstrap # (loads system from disk) load boot.rim 010000 go Cheers, Warren

4 years, 10 months

Crabs

by Warren Toomey

Just saw this in a tweet by Charlie Stross: How AT&T's Bell Labs became infected with crabs (in 1985): http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Crabs.pdf Cheers, Warren

4 years, 10 months

Tech memos from Heinz on MERT and others

by Warren Toomey

All, Heinz Lycklama has shared a binder full of old technical memos with Clem Cole, who has scanned them in. Thanks to both of them for preserving these documents. I've just put them at: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TechReports/Heinz_Tech_Memos/ Here's a list of the documents: A_Minicomputer_Satellite_Processor_System.pdf A_Virtual_Memory_Mini-Computer_System_516-TSS.pdf MM-71-1383-3_Performance_Simulation_and_Measurement_of_a_Virtual_Memory_Multi-progamming_System_for_a_Small_Computer_19710120.pdf MM-72-1353-16_Bus_Interface_in_a_Single_Bus_Multi-processor_Environment_19720920.pdf Office_Communication_Research_in_Lab_135_19770208.pdf TM-74-1352-1_Implementstion_of_Large_Contiguous_Files_and_Asynchronous_IO_in_UNIX_19740104.pdf TM-74-1352-7_Plotting_Facilities_for_Mini-Computer_Systems_19740614.pdf TM-75-1352-2_Emulation_of_UNIX_on_Peripheral_Processors_19750109.pdf TM-75-1352-3_GLANCE_Terminals_on_UNIX_Time-Sharing_19750303.pdf TM-75-1352-4_A_Structured_Operating_System_for_a_PDP-11.45_19750506.pdf TM-75-1352-7_MERT_A_Multi-Environment_Real-Time_Operating_System_19751118.pdf TM-77-1352-1_The_MINI-UNIX_19770103.pdf TM-78-3114-1_UNIX_on_a_Microprocessor_19780322.pdf TM-78-3114-2_A_Minicomputer_Satellite_Processor_System_19780322.pdf TM-78-3114-3_The_MERT_Operating_System_19780422.pdf TM-78-3114-4_The_MERT-UNIX_Supervisor_19780420.pdf TM-78-3114-5_File_System_Structures_for_Real-Time_Applications_19780420.pdf The_MERT_Operating_System.pdf UNIX_on_a_Microprocessor_19780322.pdf Cheers, Warren

4 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

by Doug McIlroy

> one of the things I wanted to do in my retirement was convert > all the stuff that is in debian back from info to man(7) *all* the stuff? Please don't do that literally. The garrulity quotient of info pages dwarfs even that of the most excessive modern man pages. But I appplaud the intent to assure man pages are complete. Doug

4 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Bitsavers' RT/PC, AIX, AOS, etc. recent additions

by Jason Stevens

I was more interested in the "Mach" kernel itself as I've only recently been able to get it to boot up from sources for the i386. I hadn't looked into the other aos/vrm stuff. But that is interesting, a 4.3 with the vfs. In hind sight maybe Mach wasn't so bad with its messaging and threads, along with multiprocessor support.. Its what we all were eventually desiring anyway. One thing is for sure, multiple GHz machines sure make it a lot easier to use, these days. I'd gotten lucky with Mach as the platform code is really modular and even a monkey like me banging on a keyboard of an existing Mach 386 machine was able to get the latter source running under the older platform code. Shame Mach 3 seems to have broken all the fun stuff or requires real effort and understanding... Things I lack. But I was really surprised about the coprocessor cards.. I wonder what other interesting things are in there. Or how hard it is to hammer 386 BSD into aos "sort of a 4.3 Tahoe ++" From: Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 9:02 p.m. To: Jason Stevens Cc: Charles H Sauer; TUHS Subject: Re: [TUHS] Bitsavers' RT/PC, AIX, AOS, etc. recent additions Thanks for clarifying. I will reassert that the three pieces of systems software I mentioned (VRM, AIX2, AOS) are not Mach in any way I know about. AOS may have some generic cross pollination, it’d be whatever was going on at CSRG also for non-RT (4.2-4.3?) BSD platforms at the time of checkout. Kirk or Warner may be able to elucidate if provided the date and some reference material from AOS or I can do some original research. Most distinctly and important: VRM is not in any way Mach, it was its own bespoke microkernel. The microkernel would have been the most “Mach” part of Mach research, so this makes the VRM concept even more unique and enjoyable to me being so different and ambitious. Therefore I don’t think it is particularly correct to say any of VRM, AIX, AOS software is Mach without its ukernel. What you linked is a very late port (late 1990s) of a hybrid of 4.3 and 4.4 BSD (late meaning in the time when Net, Free, and Open had long taken over from CSRG BSD). I will quote a Twitter communication I had with Miod Vallat in the past:“Also it's not really 4.4. It's a mix of 4.3BSD-Reno plus the 4.4 VFS layer and new system calls. It still uses the 4.3, pre-Mach, VM system, hence no mmap(2).” What Miod means by “pre-Mach” above: 4.4 BSD adopted the kernel memory subsystem of Mach into the existing BSD monolithic kernel. Not any of the ukernel or things like Mach IPC. Not trying to be overly pedantic with you just trying to keep the records straight since these machines are one of my keen interests and I welcome new information on them. Regards,Kevin On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 5:30 AM Jason Stevens <jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote: Oh sure! I'm having to use my phone... It's the combined sources here:http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/IBM/RT/rt_bsd44/ doc mk jsteve@localhost:~/rt_bsd4/src/sys/.local/mach2.4$ pwd /home/jsteve/rt_bsd4/src/sys/.local/mach2.4 jsteve@localhost:~/rt_bsd4/src/sys/.local/mach2.4/mk/conf$ cat vers*6951X So 5.1x edit 69 jsteve@localhost:~/rt_bsd4/src/sys/.local/mach2.4/mk$ more CHANGELOGHISTORY 17-May-88 David Golub (dbg) at Carnegie-Mellon University XM21: David Black completely rewrote the accurate timing code (which is now implemented on all machines) and the priority and scheduling algorithms. The system now correctly reports cpu_usage per thread. The all file has this before i386 was added. So it's an older v2 than what is on the CSRG CD, but not as old as the VAX '86 stuff. It seems to be March 11 1989, although that could be when this was either archived or ported.. I guess they didn't exactly sync to a public kernel tree all that often. On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 4:05 PM +0800, "Kevin Bowling" <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote: I’m asking exactly where the Mach is in the linked archive. VRM, AIX or AOS? Can you support this with a reference for my own documentation On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 1:02 AM Jason Stevens <jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote: It's the CMU micro kernel. The hybrid "2.6" lived on in NeXTSTEP, and OPENSTEP, with various upgrades to bring it up to OS X. The RT as I understand it was a research machine, hence the BSD ports, and Mach port. What is interesting the more I dig around is that there was ROMP coprocoessor cards, and an OS/2 and DOS monitor program to let you boot BSD on the card. Peripheral IO was done on the x86 side. If RT's are rare, I can't imagine how impossible it would be to get one of those cards! The BSD assembler and linker source is in the archives too, no doubt it'll help someone make a RT emulator. Get Outlook for Android On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 12:54 PM +0800, "Kevin Bowling" <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote: Can you clarify what is Mach in this archive if I have a gap in my knowledge? I didn’t know the VRM had any direct relationship to Mach Regards,Kevin On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 9:43 PM Jason Stevens <jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote: Interesting stuff! And another version of Mach is buried in there. So the 4 csrg cd set may have updates to the romp support as it's an older version of the 5.1 kernel from 89... Not that think there is any Mach romp users. Get Outlook for Android From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org> on behalf of Charles H Sauer <sauer(a)technologists.com> Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 5:51 a.m. To: TUHS Subject: [TUHS] Bitsavers' RT/PC, AIX, AOS, etc. recent additions The Bitsavers' RSS feed (http://user.xmission.com/~legalize/vintage/bitsavers-bits.xml) seemed to me to be dominated by RT, AIX, AOS (BSD for RT), etc. stuff in the last week or so. I've only sampled a few items, but discovered a few things that I should have known (or knew and forgot?) while I was at IBM. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/rt/ -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

4 years, 10 months

Who is the inventor of email?

by Ed Carp

I've noticed that some guy named Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai is all over Twitter, claiming that he is the inventor of email. He doesn't look like he's nearly old enough. I thought it was Ray Tomlinson. Looks like he's trying to create some press for his Senate run. Anyone older that me here that can either confirm or deny? Thanks!

4 years, 11 months

Bitsavers' RT/PC, AIX, AOS, etc. recent additions

by Charles H Sauer

The Bitsavers' RSS feed (http://user.xmission.com/~legalize/vintage/bitsavers-bits.xml) seemed to me to be dominated by RT, AIX, AOS (BSD for RT), etc. stuff in the last week or so. I've only sampled a few items, but discovered a few things that I should have known (or knew and forgot?) while I was at IBM. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/rt/ -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

4 years, 11 months

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