Possibly the most time consuming install I did was installing Xenix on a
bunch of Intel i310 systems. Xenix was a "secondary" OS for these
systems, the main OS being iRMX. Xenix for these systems was distributed
on 5.25" floppies. Lots and lots of floppies... They came in a 3-ring
binder, many pages of floppies... We also had a couple of i380 systems,
Xenix for those came on 8" floppies... That was time consuming, but it
was just manual labor.
The most unpleasasnt install I can recall was AIX 2.2.1 on the IBM-PC/RT.
Which also was really (under the covers) Interactive UNIX, with some other
stuff mixed in. Not only was this also time-consuming with a binder full
of 5.25" floppies, but my recollection is that there were too many
opportunities to make a tiny little mistake during the install and have to
start all over again.
--Pat.
Apropos of Steve Johnson's evocative description of JCL and other
pre-Unix OS interfaces, doing legwork for Multics I ran the following
experiment on a lot of then-current time-sharing systems.
As a model of creating and installing a new compiler, I used a very
short Fortran program that simply copied its input to its output,
stopping after finding END in column 7 of the input. The drill was
compile the program
run it, using its own source as input
compile the freshly made output file
This failed on every system I tried it on, though local
experts could intervene with magic to overcome the
gratuitous file-type distinctions that typically
got in the way. Dartmouth's DTSS came closest, but
inexplicably, even to the gurus, it had a special
prohibition against a program reading the source
from which it was compiled.
Incidentally, my favorite manifestation of JCL-like mumbo jumbo
was the ironically named FUTIL control card in GECOS.
Doug
> From: Doug McIlroy
> doing legwork for Multics I ran the following experiment on a lot of
> then-current time-sharing systems.
Fascinating; you don't happen to remember the ones you tried, do you?
Also, when you say "legwork for Multics", was this something done during
the planning stages (so, say '64-'65), or later on?
Noel
I wrote a UNIX shell based on Python the other night in case anyone's
interested: https://github.com/terrycojones/daudin Apologies for a modern
instead of an historic subject...
Terry
FYI. I sent this to one of the lead DOC people from the old days to see if she knew. Here is her answer.
Begin forwarded message:
> From: "Janet Egan"
> Date: October 11, 2019 at 7:53:16 PM EDT
> To: "'Clem Cole'"
> Subject: RE: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC
>
> Hi Clem,
>
> Hmm, I don’t remember whether the style guide addressed that. In the docs for RSX-11M and such I always wrote it “PDP-11”, that is upper case with the dash. I do remember the logo on the machine as always lower case with no dash. The PDP-8 had the same style logo. And you’re right about seeing the lower case on the cover of the handbooks. I have never seen the lower case with the dash or the upper case without it. I don’t think I still have my copy of the style guide. Maybe I’ll take a look around my archives for it.
>
> What a fun question to be thinking about .
> Janet
>
>
> From: Clem Cole
> Sent: Friday, October 11, 2019 9:47 AM
> To: Janet Egan
> Subject: Curious Question from the Ether about use of Upper and Lower case at DEC
>
> Janet,
> I'm part of The Unix Historical Society (TUHS) mailing list and a topic came up that I thought you might be able to shed some light on. The observation was that 'DEC seemed to have a schizophrenic attitude to wrt to use of upper and lower case WRT to the PDP-11 brand,' i.e. sometimes using "PDP-11" and sometimes "pdp11" (but I note rarely if ever PDP11 or pdp-11) . For instance, the logo on the system itself was all lower: PDP-11/40 but DEC documentation mostly used uppercase in the text; but when used on the places like the cover could be either e.g. the "pdp11 peripherals handbook" to transcribe the cover exactly but it uses upper case "PDP-11" several times on pg 1-1 and the same on the binding. But I could not find examples of pdp-11 or PDP11, i.e. if all lower it was with the dash or all upper without.
>
> Do you remember if there were rules or guidelines and if so what they might have been?
>
> Thanks,
> Clem
I was reminded of this by Larry's comment:
> I miss Brian on this list. I've interacted with him over the years, the
> one I remember the most was I was trying to do an awk like interface to a
> key/value "database".
Recently I've had to deal with a lot of data in CSV
(comma-separated-value) format. Awk is *almost* prefect for this, but
of course doesn't handle the quoting of fields that contain commas.
One can usually work around it by finding a character that doesn't
occur in the data and converting the CSV file to use that as the
separator, but it's not ideal.
Awk's input could easily be modified to handle CSV files, but output
would be a bit more difficult, because you don't specify field
boundaries explicitly on output. One possibility would be a printf()
format specifier that takes a field and quotes it appropriately.
-- Richard
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