TUHS

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6470 discussions

by Doug McIlroy

> Does anybody have or know of a list of system calls that describes > when and what version of UNIX (and descendents) they were added? Hardly a week goes by in which I don't refer to the attached condensed listing of all the man pages in v1-v9, taken from my "Research Unix Reader". It casts a much narrower net than Diomedes Spinelli's repository. but it takes no clicking to look thing up--just a quick grep. Doug

5 years, 2 months

System Call History

by Jon Steinhart

Does anybody have or know of a list of system calls that describes when and what version of UNIX (and descendents) they were added? Thanks, Jon

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

by Dave Horsfall

[ Getting into COFF territory, I think ] On Thu, 30 Jan 2020, Clem Cole wrote: > BTW: Dave story is fun, but I think a tad apocryphal. He's right that > DEC marketing was not happy about people using it, but it was well > spec'ed if you had CPU schematics. They way they tried to control it > was to license the bus interface chips (made privately by Western > Digital for them IIRC but were not available on the open market). IIRC > if you did not use DEC's chips, you could have issues if you >>similar<< > function chips from National Semi. I remember Ken O'Munhundro giving a > talk at a USENIX (while he was CEO of Able) talking about 'be careful > with foreign UNIBUS implementations.' If I recall it was the analog > characteristics that were tricky with something like the BUS acquisition > for DMA and Memory timing, but I admit I've forgotten the details. Ah; the chips could explain it. I can't remember where I heard the story, but it was likely in ";login:" or some place. Hey, if the DEC marketoids didn't want 3rd-party UNIBUS implementations then why was it published? > I think you are confusing VAX's SBI with UNIBUS. With the Vax, unlike > PDP-11, the systems did not come with complete schematics for all > boards. So to design for the SBI you had to reverse engineer the CPU > and Memory boards. DEC having successfully won the CalData suit, went > after Systems Industries who was the first to build SBI controllers. > DEC lost, but the truth was that because they had work had been reverse > engineering, SI was close but not 100% right and they had a number of > issues when the boards first hit the street, particularly with UNIX > which did a better job of overlapped I/O than VMS did. At UCB we had a > logic analyzer in one of the 780s at all times, and the phone number of > the SI engineers. We eventually helped them put out a couple ECO's > that make the original boards work in practice much better. No; it was definitely UNIBUS (I wasn't aware of the SBI at the time). As for overlapped seeks, when they were implemented in Unix it broke the RK-11 controller, and DEC pointed the finger at Unix (of course) since their own gear worked. To cut a long story short, they were forced to use some fancy diagnostic (DECEX?) which hammered everything at the same time, and the problem showed up. Turned out that their simpler diagnostics did not test for overlapped seeks, because they knew that it didn't work; out same the FE to modify the controller... > BTW: My friend Dave Cane lead the BI at DEC after finishing up the > VAX/750 project (he had designed the SBI for 780 before that). In > fact, the BI was >>supposed<< to be 'open' like Multibus and VME and all > chips were supposed to be from the merchant market. But at the last > minute, DEC marketing refused and locked down the specs/stopped shipping > schematics with the new systems destined to use BI. Dave was so pissed, > he left DEC to found Masscomp and design the MC500 (using the > Multibus). Yet another reason why DEC went under, I guess... -- Dave

5 years, 2 months

1984 AT&T Bell Labs Unix Edition

by Warner Losh

Greetings, Is this issue online? I may have a copy buried in my boxes of books, and am on the road. I'd like to read the article on portability and/or the one on performance. One of those has a table of internal vs external release names / dates. archive.org and elsewhere only has through 83. I discovered I might have it this morning 20 minutes before I had to leave for the airport for another talk. :( Thanks for any help you can provide.... Warner

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix quix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > this predates everything except Whirlwind which I can't find a paper for. Given the 'Whirlwind is a ringer' comment, I asssume this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I< is what they mean. Pretty interesting machine, if you study its instruction set, BTW; with no stack, subroutines are 'interesting'. Noel

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > So WD designs and builds a few LSI-11 as a sales demo of what you could > do > ... > he put it on the QBUS which DEC could not lock up because they did not > create it as WD had. Wow! WD created the QBUS? Fascinating. I wonder if DEC made any changes to the QBUS between the original demo WD boards and the first DEC ones? Are there any documents about the WD original still extant, do you know? (FWIW, it seems that whoever did the QBUS interrupt cycle had heard about the metastability issues when using a flop to do the grant-passing arbitrations; see here for more: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Bus_Arbitration_on_the_Unibus_and_QBUS#QBUS_Interr… DEC had previously bent themselves into knots trying to solve it on the UNIBUS: https://gunkies.org/wiki/M782_Interrupt_Control#Revisions so it would be interesting to know if it was WD or DEC who did the DIN thing to get rid of it on the QBUS.) Noel

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] man pages, defensive programming, and bibliographic

by Doug McIlroy

> Always use '\&' (a non-printing, zero width character) to > make it clear to the software, that the _function_ of the > character next to it, is neither a sentence-terminating nor > a control one. It is unfortunate that such advice has to be given. One should not have to defend against stupid AI. This is one of only two really unfortunate design choices (in my opinion) in original [nt]roff. (The other is beginning a new page when the vertical position reaches--as distinct from definitively passing--the bottom of a page.) If AI is used, it should be optional. I happen not to like double-width intersentence space, but it keeps getting foisted on me essentially at random. Instead of fattening the manual with annoying duties like that quoted above, I suggest fattening it with a new request, "turn on/off doubling of spaces between apparent sentences", or "put at least the specified space between apparent sentences". One can still use \&, but then it's for a chosen purpose, not just defense against gremlins. Incidentally, "next to" in the quoted advice must be read with care. Sometimes it means before, sometimes after. ------------------------------------------------------------ In this old AI-induced trouble I see a cautionary lesson for paragraph-based line breaking. fmt(1) is an existing program that tries to do this. On unjustified text (i.e. all text handled by fmt) it produces paragraphs of different "optimal" widths, which can be even more distracting than unusually ragged right margins. Doug

5 years, 2 months

Fwd request: Text of Caldera's free licenses for UnixWare/OpenServer

by Warren Toomey

All, I was asked by Max to pass this query on to the TUHS list. Can you e-mail back to Max directly. Thanks, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Maximilian Lorlacks <maxlorlax(a)protonmail.com> ----- Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2020 19:46:38 +0000 From: Maximilian Lorlacks <maxlorlax(a)protonmail.com> To: "wkt(a)tuhs.org" <wkt(a)tuhs.org> Subject: Fwd request: Text of Caldera's free licenses for UnixWare/OpenServer Hi Warren, Could you please forward this to the TUHS list? I'm not a subscriber to the list, but I perhaps someone there might know something about this. In 2001 and early 2002 (I can't believe it's already been almost two decades), Caldera Systems, Inc. offered non-commercial licenses at no cost for OpenServer 5.0.6, UnixWare 7.1(.1?) and Open UNIX 8. However, the web archive could not to capture the actual agreement hidden behind the entrypoint form. I failed to get a license during that time since I wasn't really interested in UNIX at that point, but in the interest of historical preservation, I'm interested if anyone got those licenses from back then and if so, if they've saved the actual license agreement text. I'm interested in what it reads. I'm also curious about whether the license keys from back then still work with Xinuos's new registration platform, but it's probably too much to ask for people to test that. Please note that I am *not* trying to revive the trainwreck that is the issue of the validity and scope of the Ancient UNIX license. The only way to properly resolve that would be a letter signed from Micro Focus's legal department, but they've made it exceedingly clear that they will persistently ignore any and all attempts to elicit any kind of response regarding Ancient UNIX. Cheers, Max ----- End forwarded message -----

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} More Spider

by Doug McIlroy

> It might be worth mentioning that the Cambridge Ring (in the UK) used a very > similar idea: a head end circulated empty frames which stations could fill in. I'm quite sure the similarity is not accidental. Fraser began the Spider project almost immediately upon moving from Cambridge to Bell Labs. Doug

5 years, 3 months

Screen editors

by Paul Ruizendaal

> > On Jan 26, 2020, at 11:28 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote: > > > > "Jose R. Valverde via TUHS" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: > > > >> Talking of editors... > >> > >> On ancient UNIX, my editor of choice was 's' from Software Tools, its > >> main advantage being that it didn't require curses. > > > > That editor was from "A Software Tools Sampler" by Webb Miller, not > > "Software Tools" by Kernighan and Plauger. > Well, that would explain why I couldn’t find it. Do you have softcopy of the editor source? I’d really like a screen editor for v7…. Adam So do I. Editor source seems to be here: https://github.com/udo-munk/s If you are doing a build for V7, I’d be interested in hearing the results.

5 years, 3 months

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