TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

24 participants
6415 discussions

Western Electric "Research Unix" License Contacts

by David C. Brock

Dear All: I was wondering if anyone had any first-hand information about the early decisions at Western Electric to make an education license for Unix that was both royalty-free and with an extremely modest “service charge”/delivery fee, or if anyone knows the names of key people who made these decisions. Best wishes, David .............. David C. Brock Director and Curator Software History Center Computer History Museum computerhistory.org/softwarehistory<http://computerhistory.org/softwarehistory> Email: dbrock(a)computerhistory.org Twitter: @dcbrock Skype: dcbrock 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94943 (650) 810-1010 main (650) 810-1886 direct Pronouns: he, him, his

5 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arnold Robbins > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too. And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin, courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site once, whereupon hilarity ensued. Noel

5 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Western Electric "Research Unix" License Contacts

by Norman Wilson

Clem Cole: Al Arms wrote and administer the license BTW. ==== Aside for entertainment purposes: at one point, the root password for the UNIX systems I ran in the Caltech High Energy Physics group was derived from Al's name, but through a level of punning indirection. I believe Mark Bartelt came up with it. Later we decided to change it. I believe I chose the successor, which continued the UNIX-licensing scheme, but in a different direction: *UiaTMoBL The systems that had either of these passwords are long- since turned off. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 1 month

Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

by Kevin Bowling

This stuff is extremely poorly preserved. No time like the present to fix that. I was reading Tom's blog https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart3/ and have been aware of Amdahl UTS a couple of the other ports for a while. I've got an HP 88780 quad density 9-track and access to a SCSI IBM 3490. Can fit them in air cargo and bring a laptop with a SCSI card. Tell me where to go. Regards, Kevin

5 years, 1 month

edx prize

by Doug McIlroy

Tangential, but interesting: https://blog.edx.org/congratulations-edx-prize-2019-winners/ Where would you expect a MOOC about C to originate? Not, it turns out, in a computer-science department. Professor Bonfert-Taylor is a mathematician in the school of engineering at Dartmouth. Doug

5 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Dave Horsfall

On Tue, 19 Nov 2019, Tony Finch wrote: > Amusingly POSIX says the C standard takes precedence wrt the details of > gets() (and other library functions) and C18 abolished gets(). I'm > slightly surprised that the POSIX committee didn't see that coming and > include the change in the 2018 edition... Didn't know that gets() had finally been abolished; it's possibly the most unsafe function (OK, macro) on the planet. I've long been tempted to remove gets() and see what breaks... -- Dave

5 years, 1 month

buffer overflow (Re: Happy birthday Morris worm

by Norman Wilson

Bakul Shah: Unfortunately strcpy & other buffer overflow friendly functions are still present in the C standard (I am looking at n2434.pdf, draft of Sept 25, 2019). Is C really not fixable? ==== If you mean `can C be made proof against careless programmers,' no. You could try but the result wouldn't be C. And Flon's Dictum applies anyway, as always. It's perfectly possible to program in C without overflowing fixed buffers, just as it's perfectly possible to program in C without dereferencing a NULL or garbage pointer. I don't claim to be perfect, but before the rtm worm rubbed my nose in such problems, I was often sloppy about them, and afterward I was very much aware of them and paid attention. That's all I ask: we need to pay attention. It's not about tools, it's about brains and craftmanship and caring more about quality than about feature count or shiny surfaces or pushing the product out the door. Which is a good bit of what was attractive about UNIX in the first place--that both its ideas and its implementation were straightforward and comprehensible and made with some care. (Never mind that it wasn't perfect either.) Too bad software in general and UNIX descendants in particular seem to have left all that behind. Norman Wilson Toronto ON PS: if you find this depressing, cheer yourself up by watching the LCM video showing off UNICS on the PDP-7. I just did, and it did.

5 years, 1 month

UNIX v0 on a PDP7 - behind the scenes (Living Computers)

by Royce Williams

I hadn't seen this yet - apologies if it's not news: https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/Restoring-UNIX-v0-on-a-PDP-7-A-look-behind… Quoting: "I recently sat down with Fred Yearian, a former Boeing engineer, and Jeff Kaylin, an engineer at Living Computers, to talk about their restoration work on Yerian’s PDP-7 at Living Computers: Museum + Labs." [...] Up until the discovery of Yearian’s machine, LCM+L’s PDP-7 was believed to be the only operational PDP-7 left in the world. Chuckling to himself, Yearian recalls hearing this history presented during his first visit to LCM+L. “I walked in the computer museum, and someone said ‘Oh, this is the only [PDP-7] that’s still working’. And I said, ‘Well actually, I got one in my basement!’” [end quote] Fun story - and worthy work. Nicely done. -- Royce

5 years, 1 month

History of m6?

by Arnold Robbins

Hi. Doug McIlroy is probably the best person to answer this. Looking at the V3 and V4 manuals, there is a reference to the m6 macro processor. The man page thereof refers to A. D. Hall, The M6 Macroprocessor, Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1969 1. Is this memo available, even in hardcopy that could be scanned? 2. What's the history of m6, was it written in assembler? C? 3. When and why was it replaced with m4 (written by DMR IIRC)? More generally, what's the history of m6 prior to Unix? IIRC, the macro processor in Software Tools was inspired by m4, and in particular its immediate evaluation of its arguments during definition. I guess I'll also ask, how widespread was the use of macro processors in high level languages? They were big for assembler, and PL/1 had a macro language, but I don't know of any other contemporary languages that had them. Were the general purpose macro processors used a lot? E.g. with Fortran or Cobol or ... I'm just curious. :-) Thanks, Arnold

5 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday Morris worm

by Norman Wilson

I think I recall an explicit statement somewhere from an interview with Robert that the worm was inspired partly by Shockwave Rider. I confess my immediate reaction to the worm was uncontrollable laughter. I was out of town when it happened, so I first heard it from a newspaper article (and wasn't caught up in fighting it or I'd have laughed a lot less, of course); and it seemed to me hilarious when I read that Robert was behind it. He had interned with 1127 for a few summers while I was there, so I knew him as very bright but often a bit careless about details; that seemed an exact match for the worm. My longer-term reaction was to completely drop my sloppy old habit (common in those days not just in my code but in that of many others) of ignoring possible buffer overflows. I find it mind-boggling that people still make that mistake; it has been literal decades since the lesson was rubbed in our community's collective noses. I am very disappointed that programming education seems not to care enough about this sort of thing, even today. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

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