Hey I'm at the hackers conference (having a blast, I thought I was too
retired and burned out and I'm apparently still somewhat OK with that
crowd, much to my surprise. Super fun bunch of nerds).
Steve Bourne is here and I mentioned this list and he didn't know
about it. His interest perked up a bit when I said Doug and Rob and
Ken are here, I think his comment was something like "if Ken is there
it must be something, Ken likes to do stuff more than talk about stuff".
Probably have that not quite right but it was something like that.
I'd love to have all of the Bell Labs alumni here, hearing history from
them is awesome.
So Warren, it's your list, Steve is srb(a)acm.org, you want to do an invite?
I can do it if you prefer that but I thought I'd ask first.
Cheers,
--lm
Perhaps someone can help me locate a very humorous short
essay from Dick Haight of PWB (I believe Dick was John Mashey's
boss at the time) work in Piscataway. I had a paper copy that Dick
gave me that has long since disappeared in many office moves over
almost 50 years.
*John "Jack" Lossin Adams*
*LinkedIn CV <http://lnkd.in/_Q_w7p>* and on *Facebook
<http://facebook.com/John.Lossin.Adams>*
*If God is your Co-Pilot, you're sitting in the wrong seat!*
Veritas per Scientiam - NJIT motto
*We live at a time when emotions and feelings **count more than **truth,
and there *
*is a vast ignorance of science. - James Lovelock*
*Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what *
*they **do not manage, and those who manage what they do not *
*understand. - Archibald Putt*
*We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in
which hardly *
*anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan*
*Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, *
*and I'm not sure about the former. - Albert Einstein*
-------- Original Message --------
From: Stephen Jones <StephenJo(a)livingcomputers.org>
Sent: 3 November 2019 3:05:31 am AEST
Subject: Re: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129
A couple of videos of the action this week:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pvaPaWyiuLA&t=18shttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L5MKwp2uj2k&t=119s
The JK09 turns out not to be an emulator but the newest storage device and driver for the pdp-7 and unix v0!
--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
The infamous Morris Worm was released in 1988; making use of known
vulnerabilities in Sendmail/finger/RSH (and weak passwords), it took out a
metric shitload of SUN-3s and 4BSD Vaxen (the author claimed that it was
accidental, but the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first). A
temporary "condom" was discovered by Rich Kulawiec with "mkdir /tmp/sh".
Another fix was to move the C compiler elsewhere.
-- Dave
ISBN 9781695978553, for anyone who wants to know that.
I see it for sale on amazon.com and amazon.ca, paperback, `Independently
published.' Does anyone know if it is likely to appear in bricks-and-mortar
bookshops any time soon?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Robert Clausecker <fuz(a)fuz.su> wrote:
> > I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF
> Nice find! It seems to use lcall to selector 7 for system calls. A
> similar choice was made in 386BSD all the way through FreeBSD 2.2.8
> where it was replaced with int $0x80 as in Linux.
Technically speaking
lcall $0x07,$0
uses selector 0 with RPL=3 (bit0 and bit1==1) and LDT (bit2==1)
It seems it's oldest way to call kernel from userspace on x86 architecture.
AT&T's programmers used this sycall convention for SysVR3 and
SysVR4 on i386 (not sure about SysVR2 on i286).
There are very few examples with lcall-type syscall i.e.
http://www.sco.com/developers/devspecs/abi386-4.pdf
(figure 3-26)
(and leaked SysVR4 i386 sources)
William Jolitz used this convention in his amazing articles about
porting BSD4.3 to the i386 (c)1991
http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix-source-code/research/1991/0101.html
(p."System Call Inteface"). See also 386BSD 0.0:
https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/blob/0.0/arch/i386/i386/locore.s#L361
(Did he run AT&T userspace on his kernel ???)
As you mentioned, most of early *BSD systems on i386 also used lcall.
Linus selected to use "DOS-style" call with INT 0x80.
More recent BSD on i386 also use INT.
https://john-millikin.com/unix-syscallshttp://asm.sourceforge.net/intro/hello.html
Solaris on x86 (ex. SysVR4) also uses lcall. See a
https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/sergey/cs258/solaris-on-x86.pdf
p.4.2.3
and Solaris (later OpenSolaris and later Illumos) sourcecode.
All, I just received this from Stephen Jones at the LCM+L.
----- Forwarded message from Stephen Jones <StephenJo(a)livingcomputers.org> -----
Subject: UNIX-7 boots on sn 129
Hello Folks .. you’ll hear through official channels along with videos
and pictures (hopefully soon) that we just got PDP-7 UNICS to boot on
a real PDP-7 (sn 129) using our newly designed “JK09” disk drive.
The recent posting of source is going to be great .. we’ve been using
the simh image that has been available for a while.
BTW, compiling the B Hello World on a real 7 is much more satisfying
than it is under simh …
More to come, please watch Living Computers for updates.
(PS sorry we’re late to the BTL party).
Stephen M. Jones
----- End forwarded message -----
> 10-36-55.pdf user-mode programs: pool game
This game, written by ken, used the Graphic 2. One of its
earliest tests--random starting positions and velocities on
a frictionless table with no collision detection--produced
a mesmerizing result. This was saved in a program called
"weird1", which was carried across to the PDP11.
Weird1 was a spectacular accidental demonstration of structure
in pseudo-random numbers. After several minutes the dots
representing pool balls would evanescently form short local
alignments. Thereafter from time to time ever-larger alignments
would materialize. Finally in a grand climax all the balls
converged to a single point.
It was stunning to watch perfect order emerge from apparent
chaos. One of my fondest hopes is to see weird1 revived.
Doug
Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T
assembler syntax. While I'm still not quite sure if everything in there
is correct, this explanation seemed plausible to me; the PDP-11
assembler being adapted for the 8086, then the 80386 and then ELF
targets, giving us today's convoluted syntax.
The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style
assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. Supposedly, it would get
away without % as a register prefix, thus being much less obnoxious to
use. Any idea if such an assembler ever existed and if yes where?
I suppose Xenix might have shipped something like that.
The only AT&T syntax assemblers I know today are those from Solaris,
the GNU project, the LLVM project, and possibly whatever macOS ships.
Are there (or where there) any other x86 AT&T assemblers? Who was
the first party to introduce this?
Yours,
Robert Clausecker
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501
--
() ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world
/\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments
Some time ago, I wrote a piece [1] about the design of the AT&T
assembler syntax. While I'm still not quite sure if everything in there
is correct, this explanation seemed plausible to me; the PDP-11
assembler being adapted for the 8086, then the 80386 and then ELF
targets, giving us today's convoluted syntax.
The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style
assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. Supposedly, it would get
away without % as a register prefix, thus being much less obnoxious to
use. Any idea if such an assembler ever existed and if yes where?
I suppose Xenix might have shipped something like that.
The only AT&T syntax assemblers I know today are those from Solaris,
the GNU project, the LLVM project, and possibly whatever macOS ships.
Are there (or where there) any other x86 AT&T assemblers? Who was
the first party to introduce this?
Yours,
Robert Clausecker
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42250270/417501
--
() ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world
/\ - against html email - against proprietary attachments
