TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

17 participants
6470 discussions

Re: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10

by Doug McIlroy

> Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971) > same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later? > (~1973) No. The former was the BTL legal and patent department. The latter was at AT&T (or perhaps Western Electric). Doug

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > Unfortunately it's very small. There's a larger version hiding 'behind' it. There are very few 645 images. There's the large painting of a 645, which for many years hung in the hallway on the 5th floor of Tech Sq: https://multicians.org/645artist.html Noel

5 years, 6 months

Recovered /etc/passwd files

by Finn O'Leary

Hi, I remember that someone had recovered some ancient /etc/passwd files and had decrypted(?) them, and I remember reading that either ken or dmr's password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely punctuation characters, was around three different characters in total, and was pretty damn short). I've tried to find this since, as a friend was interested in it, and I cannot for the life of me find it! Do any of you remember or have a link? :) Thanks! -- "Too enough is always not much!"

5 years, 6 months

My EuroBSDcon talk (preview for commentary)

by Warner Losh

OK. I've shared my slides for the talk. Some of the family trees are simplified (V7 doesn't have room for all its ports, for example) Some of it is a little cheeseball since I'm also trying to be witty and entertaining (we'll see how that goes). Please don't share them around until after my talk on the September 20th I'd like feedback on the bits I got wrong. Or left out. Or if you're in this and don't want to be, etc. All the slides after the Questions slide won't be presented and will likely be deleted. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/177KxOif5oHARyIdZHDq-OO67_GVtMkzIAlD… Please be kind (but if it sucks, please do tell). I've turned on commenting on the slides. Probably best if you comment there. I have a video of me giving this talk, but it's too rough to share... Thanks for any help you can give me. Warner

5 years, 6 months

eqn

by Larry McVoy

So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him what troff can do. For the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program chair for Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant was I had the job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big deal but I pushed people towards troff and the few people that took the push came back and said "holy crap is this easy". My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output that they can share? Thanks, --lm

5 years, 6 months

RFC formatting

by ron minnich

"why is the formatting so weird" someone asked me. I am guessing, looking at RFC 1, that it was formatted with an ancestor of runoff but ... anyone? ron

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Poll: good location for Unix documentation?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > All, I'm just musing where is the best place to store Unix > documentation. My Unix Archive is really just a filesystem, so it's not > so good to capture and search metadata. > Is anybody using archive.org, gunkies or something else BitSavers seems to be the canonical location for old computer documentation. The CHWiki (gunkies.org) isn't really the best place to put original documentation, but that's where I'd recommend putting meta-data. As for searching meta-data, are you speaking of something more powerful than Google? Noel PS: Speaking of old Unix documentation, I recently acquired a paper copy of the PDP-11 V6 Unix manual. Is that something I should scan? I don't know if you already have it (I know where to find sources in the archives, but I don't know where documentation scans live.)

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] lowercase vs. uppercase PDP-7?

by Doug McIlroy

> The scans for v0 code are in lowercase. I assume printed on TTY 37. > But why is the early PDP-7 code in lowercase? Once you've used a device with lower case, upper case looks as offensive as a ransom note. I went through this in moving "up" from Whirlwind to IBM's 704. By 1969, we'd all had lower-case terminals in our homes for several years. So Unix was ASCII from the start. Upper-case from a TTY 33 was converted to lower. On the PDP-11, at least, there was an escape convention for upper case. I believe the lower-case convention was explained in the introduction. In particular if you logged in with an upper-case user name, the terminal driver was set to convert everything to lower. Remember, too, that 33's used yellow paper. For printing on white we had use other machines that had full ASCII support. Doug

5 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] eqn

by Doug McIlroy

> does anyone have some eqn input and output that they can share? I have a quite elaborate document that uses eqn, pic, and tbl. In fact one table contains both pic and eqn entries (but not subtables; Latex beats roff in being recursive). Take a look at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/wallpaper.pdf. If you think you'd like to see the source, just holler. > he maybe should do Latex Sadly, math journals often demand Latex, but I've also run into journals that require Word. I wanted to submit the document above to a cartography journal until I found out they were in the Word camp. I was, however, able to convert it to Latex. At one point the American Instutute of Physics took only roff (and retypeset other manuscripts--in roff). I don't know what their practice is q now. > Maybe v0 didn't have any manuals? > I understand they weren't in roff anyways. No manuals, true. But if there had been they would have been in some version of roff, just as all Research Unix manuals were. Doug

5 years, 6 months

lowercase vs. uppercase PDP-7? (was Re: Recovered /etc/passwd files)

by reed＠reedmedia.net

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote: > no, it was tty model 33. Changing the topic slightly ... The scans for v0 code are in lowercase. I assume printed on TTY 37. But why is the early PDP-7 code in lowercase? I do see the B language code for "lcase" which converts to lowercase. Maybe something like that was used? (I think I saw a scan mistake showing a "B" which is probably an "8" due to that. See pdp7-unix/src/cmd/bc.s "dab B i".) I didn't see anything in historical login code or manuals about upper versus lowercase. Any experiences about upper versus lower case to share? When did stuff get rewritten to have both cases in code? Jeremy C. Reed echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \ tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy"

5 years, 6 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