TUHS

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6531 discussions

Re: BTL Involvement in Publication Imagery?

by Douglas McIlroy

Unix folk were barely involved in the branding or advertising of the system. I recall that we got to proofread and edit the first Unix ad, but essentially nothing later. Nor did we contribute to the cover designs of the 7th edition trade verson or the 8th-10th in-house versions of the manual. Doug

8 months, 3 weeks

BTL Involvement in Publication Imagery?

by segaloco

So in the course of AT&T's involvement with UNIX, a number of different images and motifs have graced advertisements and covers of literature, among them: - Letter Blocks (V7 HRW manuals, Release 4.0 Starter Packages) - Criss-crossing grid lines on a black background (Release 5.0/SVR1) - Variations on an image of earth with UNIX superimposed (SVR3/SVR4) - Covers mirroring publication motifs of other AT&T products and literature (SVR2/SVR3) Did the folks actually involved in the production of UNIX have any influence on the choice of design motifs for such materials, or would those sorts of decisions have been largely in the hands of marketing folks several layers removed from the Labs? My understanding is that this sort of visual branding started in the early 80s, with the earliest example of a printed piece of UNIX literature outside of generic Bell Laboratories covers I'm aware of being the "Starter Package" documents featuring UNIX spelled out on four letter blocks in primary colors. Everything I've seen branded predating these 1981 publications is either 8.5/11 pages in a Bell Labs or Western Electric report cover or the form factor of the Release 3.0 manual using generic Bell Labs covers. I'm certainly intrigued if anyone has any recollection of any sort of visual motifs in play prior to 1981. - Matt G.

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: groff_man.7.man.in: Some remarks and editorial changes for this man page

by Douglas McIlroy

The titled post reminds me of Ted Dolotta, a guru of PWB Unix, whose eye for editorial detail was unsurpassed. He could spot the difference between italic and roman periods at twenty paces. Bjarni is in good company. Doug

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

by Douglas McIlroy

> C's refusal to specify dynamic memory allocation in the language runtime > (as opposed to, eventually, the standard library) This complaint overlooks one tenet of C: every operation in what you call "language runtime" takes O(1) time. Dynamic memory allocation is not such an operation. Your hobbyhorse awakened one of mine. malloc was in v7, before the C standard was written. The standard spinelessly buckled to allow malloc(0) to return 0, as some implementations gratuitously did. I can't imagine that any program ever actually wanted the feature. Now it's one more undefined behavior that lurks in thousands of programs. There are two arguments for malloc(0), Most importantly, it caters for a limiting case for aggregates generated at runtime--an instance of Kernighan's Law, "Do nothing gracefully". It also provides a way to create a distinctive pointer to impart some meta-information, e.g. "TBD" or "end of subgroup", distinct from the null pointer, which merely denotes absence. Doug

8 months, 3 weeks

Why groff ms doesn't completely support historical documents

by G. Branden Robinson

Someone on the TUHS list mailed me privately, prompting me to write this lengthy apology (in the classical sense) of why groff doesn't make a certain application easier. I have slightly revised my response. This message also may serve as a summary of the challenges that need to be overcome if someone else wants to tackle the job, and potentially contribute it to groff. [person creates PDFs of historical Unix documents (many of which are written using the ms macros) and wishes groff ms made the task easier] I sympathize. I sometimes render historical documents, so I prescribed in groff ms's documentation the approach that I take myself. I decided against trying to support a "-matt" or "-msatt" option in groff because it's flatly impossible to know which definition of `UX` to use. Even a date declaration in the document sheds little light, as we then have to consider the question of whether we want fidelity to the actual state of the mark at the time of that declared date, or to what would have been rendered in the author's environment--and they may have been using an ms that wasn't "up to date" in the same respect. That information, too, is not recorded in the document.[1] Providing all the macros _except_ `UX` didn't seem likely to satisfy users since that's the most important one! It shows up in body text whereas all the others seldom do--if you can live without the cover page then, often, you're golden. Except for `UX`. Finally there is the name collision problem with Berkeley. 4.2BSD and later ms defined `CT` and `TM` macros (aspects of their "thesis mode") and once again there's no declarator within the document to tell you which dialect of ms is in use. This one can be heuristically figured out with pretty good odds, I suspect, but troff works as a filter--what was I going to do, write a preprocessor just for this? (Hmm, maybe grog(1) could do it, and that would be in its wheelhouse. But there's no point until and unless we reimplement support for Berkeley thesis mode in the first place [so that grog has an option argument to report], and that is an undertaking I have demurred.[2]) It seemed like a moderate amount of work for almost zero upside. It's also hard to validate/verify my work. The only historical troffs to which I have access are Seventh Edition Unix troff (1979, before Kernighan) and DWB 3.3 (early 1990s). It's a right pain in the butt to inspect typesetter output on V7 because I have nothing that emulates a C/A/T or translates it to device-independent troff output for a "ditroff"-style device description that Kernighan troff, DWB/Hierloom Doctools troff, or GNU troff could use. And even if I had either of those, they'd have to be vetted to a _high_ degree of quality before they'd be fit for purpose; else I wouldn't know whether I was chasing bugs in the groff ms macros or the C/A/T emulator/translator. So, to summarize, I confine my compatibility efforts to _nroff_ output, and rule the Bell Labs "site" macros out of scope. I feel there is not much more I can do, and have confidence my results, without resources that I'm lacking. I hope this sheds some light on my reasoning. Regards, Branden [1] Still, if someone wants to start, I'd start here. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/vol2/ms/tmac.s [2] One person, ever, has requested it, 20 years ago. And I have no specimens of input or corresponding model output rendered by an "authentic" BSD troff [formatter executable PLUS support files] against which to develop a reconstruction. (On the bright side, the Berkeley modifications to the once-encumbered AT&T "tmac.s" are, of themselves, presumably BSD-licensed.) https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64455

8 months, 3 weeks

30 days of awktober

by Rich Salz

Someone is trying to write something interesting about awk every day of this month. The thread starts here: https://mastodon.mit.edu/@eichin/113240121988228925

8 months, 3 weeks

Re: UNIX NEWS, volumes 1-7 out there?

by sjenkin＠canb.auug.org.au

In Sept 2019 Warner Losh was looking for copies of the first volumes of UNIX NEWS / Login. Clem Cole noted that the Usenix Archives were also looking. Kurt H Maier, noted he had pages from 1976, Volume 1, Number 4. Jeremy C. Reed pointed to multiple items available online. His email appears in a separate email thread on TUHS. <https://tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/thread/C2L346YQTFU2…> <https://tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/FMSC3426GK2…> I stumbled on UNIX NEWS Number 1 in the Internet Archive <https://archive.org/details/unix_news_july-30-1975> Which is from a near complete Usenix collection of ‘;login' from 1975 to 2000 <https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?tab=collection&sort=-date>. 1979 (Volume 4) is missing from the series [ as at Oct 2024 ] I wasn’t able to navigate the Usenix website to find the Archives Clem Cole mentioned, to confirm they also had copies. I also stumbled on a pointer to “John Gilmore’s original scans” from 1975 - 1978, presumably the base for the Usenix / Archive.org set. <http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/> It’s seems that the call for materials was pretty successful. -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

8 months, 4 weeks

Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

by Warren Toomey

All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link. Cheers, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp ----- I stumbled over this: https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ? ----- End forwarded message -----

9 months

Origins of "Unix Philosophy"

by Phil Budne

I'm wondering if there are places where people who were in the Unix Room wrote about the origins and evolution of what people (at least used to(*)) refer to as "Unix Philosophy", and since some are in THIS (TUHS) room, what they might have to say about it. How much was in reaction to the complexity of Multics, and how much was simply a response to the limited address spaces of available and affordable hardware? Eric S. Raymond wrote in "The Art of Unix Programming" quoting Doug McIlroy and Rob Pike: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html And I wonder if they care to comment on it? I have trouble taking ESR as authoritative, as, it seems to me that Research Unix was more a product of the "Cathedral" (or at least a contained community) than the "Bazaar" (at least the modern bazaar, where everyone needs to leave a new feature grafito on the town walls), and ESR A side question for Rob Pike, is the "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." quote accurate? Was it in reaction to BSD, GNU, or all of the above? (*) I say "used to", because, for the most part, minimalism seems to have left the building. I can't look at modern GNU utilities, and many, if not most open source packages and think they've gone WAY past classic Unix minimalism, especially since I remember hearing that Bell Research had happily stripped excess features (removal of "cat -s" sticks in my mind) from later day research Unix, and because Stallman is said to have coined the term "New Jersey" style as a synonym for what Richard P. Gabriel called "Worse is Better", which seems, an attack on minimalism (nothing less than "the right thing" is acceptable) Worse is.... readings: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/Files/IsWorseReallyBetter.pdf https://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf Anti-flamage disclainmers: Inclusion of links above does not imply any agreement on my part! My apologies in advance for any offense, misquote, or misunderstanding on my part.

9 months

Re: On computerese

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rik Farrow <rik(a)rikfarrow.com> > Was the brevity typical of Unix command names a function of the tiny > disk and memory available? Or more a function of having a Teletype 33 > for input? I'm not sure the answer was ever written down (e.g. in a memo); we will probably have to rely on memory - and memories that far back are now fairly thin on the ground by now. Perhaps Mr. McIlroy (or Mr. Thompson, if we're _really_ lucky) will humor us? :-) I have the impression that some of the names are _possibly_ inherited from Multics (which the early Unicians all used before Unix existed) - but maybe not. The command to list a directory, on Multics, is 'ls' (but see below) - but the Multics qcommand to remove a file is 'del' (not 'rm'); and change working directory is 'cwd'. So maybe ls' is just chance? Multics had a 'feature' where a segment (file) could have additional names (to the main name), and this is used to add short aliases to many commands, so the 'base name'' for the directory list command is 'list'; 'ls' is a short alias. A list of Multics commands (with short forms) is available here: https://www.multicians.org/multics-commands.html I'm not sure how early that alias mechanism came in, though; my copy of "Introduction to Multics" (February, 1974) doesn't have short names (or, at least, it doesn't use them). It won't have anything to do with disk and memory. Having used a Teletype, it would take noticeably longer to type in a longer name! It's also more effort and time. I would expect those are the reasons for the short names. Noel

9 months

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