TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6470 discussions

by Paul Ruizendaal

I noted with much pleasure that the main bitsavers site is back up, and that at some point it has added a full set of scans of “Datamation”. The Feb 1975 issue contains an article from Dr. Fraser about Spider and the network setup in Murray Hill early in 1975: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/datamation/197502.pdf For ease of reference I have also temporarily put the relevant 4 pages of the issue here: https://gitlab.com/pnru/spider/blob/master/spider.pdf I find the graphic that shows how Spider connected machines and departments the most interesting, as it helps understand how the pro’s and con’s of Arpa Unix might have been perceived at that time. The more I read, the more confused I become whether the “Pierce loop” was a precursor to “Spider” or a parallel effort. The facts appear to be that John Pierce (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Pierce) submitted his paper to BSTJ in December 1970, essentially describing a loop network with fixed size short datagrams, suggesting T1 frames. It is quite generic. In February 1971 W.J. Kropfl submits a paper that describes an implementation of the ideas in the Pierce paper with actual line protocols and a TIU. In October 1971 C.H. Coker describes in a 3rd paper how to interact with this TIU from a H516 programming perspective. Several Spider papers mention that the project was started in 1969 and that the first Spider link was operational in 1972. The team appears to be entirely different: the h/w is credited to Condon and Weller, and the s/w to Frazer, Jensen and Plaugher. The Spider TIU is much more complex (200 TTL chips vs. 50 in the Kropfl TIU). The main reason for that - at first glance - appears to be that in the Spider network the TIU handled guaranteed in order delivery (i.e managed time outs and retransmissions), whereas in the Kropfl implementation this was left to the hosts. It would seem logical that the latter was an evolution of the former, having been developed at the same site at the same time. A 1981 book seems to take that view as well: “Local Computer Network Technologies” by Carl Tropper includes the text "Spider Spider is an experimental data communications network which was built at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey) under the direction of A. G. Fraser. A detailed description of the network is given by Fraser [FRAS74]. This network was built with the notion of investigating Pierce's idea of ...” The chapter is titled “The Pierce loop and its derivatives”. This is a much as Google will give me - if somebody has the book please let me know. On the other hand, the Spider papers do not mention the Kropfl network or Pierce’s paper at all. The graphic in Datamation appears to show two Kropfl loops as part of the network setup. Yet, this is described in the accompanying text as "4. Honeywell 5l6: Supports research into comunications techniques and systems. The machine has a serial loop I/O bus threaded through several labs at Murray Hill. Equipment under test is connected either directly to the bus or to a minicomputer which is then connected to the bus. Also avail- able are graphics display terminals and a device that can write read-only memory chips.” Maybe this is a different bus, but if it is the same as the Kropfl loop, to call it a “serial loop I/O bus” suggests it was a parallel effort unrelated to Spider. Does anybody on the list recall whether Spider was a parallel effort or a continuation of the earlier work?

5 years, 3 months

A Dennisism

by Doug McIlroy

The anecdote below came from Nils-Peter Nelson, who as a manager in the computer center bought and installed the Labs' biggest Unix machine, a Cray 2. He also originated the string.h package. Doug Dennis told me he was going to a class reunion at Harvard. Me: "I guess you're the most famous member of your class." dmr: "No, the Unabomber is.

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] More Spider

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal > a loop network with fixed size short datagrams 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 think it started slightly later, though. Material about it is available online. Noel

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Spider

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Ugh. Memory lane has a lot of potholes. This was a really long time ago. Many thanks for that post - really interesting! I had to look up "Pierce Network", and found it described in the Bell Journal: https://ia801903.us.archive.org/31/items/bstj51-6-1133/bstj51-6-1133_text.p… In my reading the Spider network is a type of Pierce network. However, the network that you remember is indeed most likely different from Spider: - it was coax based, whereas the Spider line was a twisted pair - there was more than one, whereas Spider only ever had one (operational) loop Condon and Weller are acknowledged in the report about Spider as having done many of its hardware details. The report discusses learnings from the project and having to tune repeaters is not among them (but another operational issue with its 'line access modules’ is discussed). All in all, maybe these coax loops were pre-cursors to the Spider network, without a switch on the loop (“C” nodes in the Pierce paper). It makes sense to first try out the electrical and line data protocol before starting work on higher level functions. I have no idea what a GLANCE G is...

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix quix

by Doug McIlroy

The first edition ran on pdp-11, not pdp-7. Tukey buttered parsnips at the labs, but Brits did so several centuries before. Contrary to urban legend, patent was not invoked to justify the Unix pdp-11; word-processing was. The quiz does not make this mistake. The phototypesetter did not smell. The chemicals for (externally) devoloping photo paper did. Shahpazian is Dick Shahpazian; Maranzano is Joe Maranzano. cagbef addresses out of bounds. I appreciate Rob's discretion about the Waterloo theft. Doug

5 years, 3 months

[TUHS/groff] Provenance of .SB macro in man pages

by G. Branden Robinson

Hi folks, I've been adding a history subsection to the groff_man(7) page for the next groff release (date TBD) and thanks to the TUHS archives I've been able to answer almost all the questions I had about the origins of the man(7) language's macros and registers (number and string). I'm inlining my findings in rendered and source form below, but there's one feature I haven't been able to sort out--where did .SB (small bold) come from? The oldest groff release I can find online is 1.02 (June 1991), and .SB is already there, but I can't find it anywhere else. Is it a GNUism? Did it perhaps appear in a proprietary Unix first? I'm aware of Kristaps Dzonsons's history of Unix man pages[1], but unfortunately for me that is more of a history of the *roff system(s), and does not have much detail about the evolution of the man(7) macro language itself. If you can shed any light on this, I'd appreciate it! History Version 7 Unix (1979) supported all of the macros described in this page not listed as extensions, except .P, .SB, and the deprecated .AT and .UC. The only string registers defined were R and S; no number registers were documented. .UC appeared in 3BSD (1980) and .P in AT&T Unix System III (1980). 4BSD (1980) added lq and rq string registers. 4.3BSD (1986) added .AT and AT&T's .P. DEC Ultrix 11 (1988) added the Tm string register. .\" ==================================================================== .SS History .\" ==================================================================== . Version\~7 Unix (1979) supported all of the macros described in this page not listed as extensions, except .BR .P , .BR .SB , .\" .SS was implemented in tmac.an but not documented in man(7). and the deprecated .BR .AT and .BR .UC . . The only string registers defined were .B R and .BR S ; no number registers were documented. . .B .UC appeared in 3BSD (1980) and .B .P in AT&T Unix System\~III (1980). . 4BSD (1980) added .\" undocumented .VS and .VE macros to mark regions with 12-point box .\" rules (\[br]) as margin characters, as well as... .B lq and .B rq string registers. . 4.3BSD (1986) added .\" undocumented .DS and .DE macros for "displays", which are .RS/.RE .\" wrappers with filling disabled and vertical space of 1v before and .\" .5v after, as well as... .B .AT and AT&T's .BR .P . . DEC Ultrix\~11 (1988) added the .B Tm string register. . .\" TODO: Determine provenance of .SB. Regards, Branden [1] https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix quix

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

On 1/22/20, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > Pretty interesting machine, if you study its instruction set, BTW; with no > stack, subroutines are 'interesting'. Another machine family like that was the CDC 6x00 and 7x00 machines of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I worked on a CDC 6400 for a few years. A call was done by storing the return address in the first word of the called routine, and jumping to its second word. The return was done with an indirect jump through the first word. That was fine for Fortran, which at the time had no concept of recursion. However, Urs Ammann implemented a compiler for Niklaus Wirth's Pascal language on a CDC 6400 (or 6600) in Zurich, and he had to simulate a stack. See On Code Generation in a PASCAL Compiler Software --- Practice and Experience 7(3) 391--423 May/June 1977 https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380070311 I have read that article in the past, but don't have download access from our academic library to get a copy to refresh my memory. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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, 3 months

More oldies but goodies available if anyone wants them

by Jon Steinhart

Kind of scary what's in my basement. For those of you building UNIX workstations in the early days, I have a big fat notebook full of Weitek floating point chip specs, many of which are marked as preliminary. Also a set of CORBA specs. Again, low-hanging fruit that's getting recycled unless anyone has a use for them. In the not completely sure that I want to part with them yet for some strange reason, I have a set of SunOS manuals. Also, if anyone collects old hardware I have a SparcStation 20 with a slightly modified SunOS sitting around and an Ultra 60 Solaris box. Jon

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Spider (and back to quiz)

by Paul Ruizendaal

There is more in that issue of BSTJ, and indeed it seems this was a precursor. https://ia801905.us.archive.org/25/items/bstj51-6-1147/bstj51-6-1147_text.p… https://ia801603.us.archive.org/0/items/bstj51-6-1167/bstj51-6-1167_text.pdf The first paper makes mention of repeaters starting to self oscillate, and a redesign being underway. There is a possibility that a Unix PDP11 was connected to this earlier network prior to Spider existing, in which case the accepted quiz answer would be wrong. >> Ugh. Memory lane has a lot of potholes. This was a really long time ago. > > Many thanks for that post - really interesting! > > I had to look up "Pierce Network", and found it described in the Bell Journal: > https://ia801903.us.archive.org/31/items/bstj51-6-1133/bstj51-6-1133_text.p… > > In my reading the Spider network is a type of Pierce network. > > However, the network that you remember is indeed most likely different from Spider: > - it was coax based, whereas the Spider line was a twisted pair > - there was more than one, whereas Spider only ever had one (operational) loop > > Condon and Weller are acknowledged in the report about Spider as having done many of its hardware details. The report discusses learnings from the project and having to tune repeaters is not among them (but another operational issue with its 'line access modules’ is discussed). > > All in all, maybe these coax loops were pre-cursors to the Spider network, without a switch on the loop (“C” nodes in the Pierce paper). It makes sense to first try out the electrical and line data protocol before starting work on higher level functions. > > I have no idea what a GLANCE G is...

5 years, 3 months

Another oldie but goodie available if anyone wants it [ DECNET ]

by Jon Steinhart

Was looking for my DomainOS manuals and came across a fat notebook containing the DECNET Phase III spec. Anyone want it? Not anything that I need to keep and low-hanging fruit on the decluttering list. Jon

5 years, 3 months

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TUHS