TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

17 participants
6470 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Command line options and complexity

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Arnold Robbins writes: >> There was no tac in V7 Unix. It was first posted to USENET, I don't >> know by who, and picked up by Linux and *BSD. That brought back memories, and to verify them, I checked the tac.c source code in the latest GNU coreutils test release. It says /* Written by Jay Lepreau (lepreau(a)cs.utah.edu) GNU enhancements by David MacKenzie (djm(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu) */ So my memory was right that my old friend Jay was the author. Sadly, we lost him in September 2008: see https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/saltlaketribune/obituary.aspx?page=lifest… Jay founded the influential Flux group in advanced networking research: http://www.flux.utah.edu/profile/lepreau ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

5 years, 1 month

First appearance of named pipes

by Paul Ruizendaal

The Luderer paper on distributed Unix has the following paragraph: "A new special UNIX interprocess communication mechanism is the fifo, which provides communication between unrelated processes by associating a new special file type with a file name. Since remote fifos are legal, they can be used for interprocessor communication between S-UNIX machines or between an S-UNIX machine and an F-UNIX machine.” The paper is from late 1981. Maybe I’m especially mud-eyed today, but I cannot see FIFO’s implemented in V7..V8 or 4.1xBSD. When did FIFO’s become a standard Unix feature? Paul

5 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Command line options and complexity

by Doug McIlroy

> These go all the way back to v7 unix, where ls has an option to reverse the sort order (which could have been done by passing the output to tac). A cool idea, but tac was not in v7. And tail didn't get the -r option until v8. As for rev, I don't know why it was first written, but one use was to examine suffixes--a kind of thing that several word lovers in the Unix lab were prone to do. Apropos of using rev to make rhyming dictionaries, Walker's Rhyming Dictionary was published decades before Noah Webster's dictionary appeared and stayed in print for about 200 years. Notionally the relation between webster and walker is rev <webster | sort | rev >walker Doug

5 years, 1 month

Early Datakit

by Paul Ruizendaal

I’m making a little progress with early Datakit & Unix. It would seem that there were various experimental protocols before URP was arrived upon. The first protocol appears to have been designed by Chesson in 1979. One Fraser paper says: ""The first Datakit protocols used a packet structure that was aligned with cell boundaries. Chesson designed a file transfer protocol that transported data in variable length packets, each ending with a trailer.” I think this protocol is being described in his paper "Datakit Software Architecture” (vol. 2, pp. 20.2.1-20.2.5 Proceedings of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Communications, June 1979, Boston) - which unfortunately does not seem to be available in the IEEE online library. Maybe it will surface some day. Next there was a protocol tied to a Datakit terminal interface board that used an 8-slot packet sequence/acknowledge mechanism that carried over into URP. Not much appears to have been published about this. The most interesting experiment seems to have been a project by Luderer, Che and Marshall to build a Datakit-based distributed Unix in 1980/81. Marshall is credited by Fraser as one of the inventors of the URP protocol. The papers are “A virtual switch as the basis for distributed systems” and “A distributed unix system based on a virtual circuit switch” (available online from the ACM library). The first has a good overview description of how early Datakit worked (including interface hardware) and describes the Network Kernel or “NK protocol”. It would seem that URP combines the flow & retransmission control from the terminal interface board with the concept of a single simple receiver algorithm from NK. Unfortunately the paper does not describe the design of the NK transmitter algorithm(s). It confirms that everything ran on V7, but it remains unclear how the Datakit channels were exposed to the user (I currently assume as a cluster of character devices, with the major number identifying the switch connection and the minor number identifying the channel - similar to what later would be used in V8). The second has a description of a modified Unix system, where clients (“S-Unix”) talk to file servers (“F-Unix”), with the file servers mounted into the local file tree of the client. This appears to predate the work of Weinberger for the V8 network file system and its implementation appears different. Questions: - Are Luderer, Che and Marshall still around? (especially Bill Marshall might still recall some more details of the genesis of the URP protocol) - Any recollections about S/F-Unix and how it did or did not influence V8-V10/Plan9?

5 years, 1 month

Full set of "Computing Systems" for the cost of shipping

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. I have a full set (hardcopy) of the USENIX "Computing Systems" journal. It's just sitting on my shelf taking up space, and I'd like to give them to someone who'll give them a good home. So, first person to reply to me directly, who's willing to pay shipping from Israel, gets them. (Payment via paypal, or preferably a US dollar check sent to my US address.) Thanks! Arnold

5 years, 1 month

What was the release history timeline of Ultrix for VAX/MicroVAX?

by Pat Barron

I was just discussing this with someone today, and I realized this information has fallen out of working memory, and I can't find it on secondary storage anywhere... ;-) Does anyone remember the release history and version numbering of Ultrix for the VAX and MicroVAX (which I believe was referred to at various times as Ultrix-32 and Ultrix-32M, until some point when the "-32" thing was dropped, I think?) I was trying to remember what the various released versions of Ultrix were. The person I was discussing with thinks he remembers a version 1.4 and 1.6, before Ultrix 2.0. I honestly don't remember any 1.x version beyond 1.2. Is there a timeline somewhere? --Pat.

5 years, 1 month

First COFF Video Session in ~22 hours

by Warren Toomey

All, I've had a few queries about the proposed video chat sessions, so I'll kick the first one off tomorrow: UTC Brisbane London New York Friday, 28 Feb 2020 at 21:00 Sat 7:00am Fri 9:00pm Fri 4:00 pm I'll only be able to stay for an hour but the chat session should continue when I've gone. URL: https://meet.tuhs.org/COFF Password: unix Cheers, Warren

5 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Crabs

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

5 years, 2 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 >

5 years, 2 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

5 years, 2 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