TUHS

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6534 discussions

Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code

by Doug McIlroy

> 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

5 years, 8 months

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Robert Clausecker

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

5 years, 8 months

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Robert Clausecker

5 years, 8 months

Design of the AT&T assembly syntax

by Alexander Voropay

Robert Clausecker <fuz(a)fuz.su>wrote: > The one thing in this chain I have never found is an AT&T style > assembler for x86 before ELF was introduced. There were alot of AT&T codebase ports to x86 architecture except Xenix: Microport, INTERACTIVE, Everex, Wyse e.t.c. using AT&T x86 syntax. I've tried Microport SystemV /386 (SysV R3.2). It uses COFF as format for executables: See: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?67736-History-behind-the-disk-ima… (Rather interesting kernel ABI/Call convention) and https://gunkies.org/wiki/Unix_SYSVr3 There were also SystemV R2 to i286 ports i.e.: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Microport_System_V with a.out binary format.

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is

by Norman Wilson

Bother: Here's a good pictore of G R herself, with what I believe to be at least a second-generation badge. Forgot to paste in the URL. Here it is: http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/g-r-emlin/

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is

by Norman Wilson

Mary Ann Horton: I'm enjoying bwk's book very much, but it has me wondering. There are two stories I've heard that supposedly occurred at Murray Hill, but he didn't include them. ==== You can't expect every story to be there. The book would be too heavy to lift! Could the `monkey picture on a badge' story be that of G. R. Emlin's badge? She was a gremlin doll, not a monkey, but it would be reasonable to mistake the former for the latter. Here's a good pictore of G R herself, with what I believe to be at least a second-generation badge. The original badge was an old-style Bell Labs one with a green border; I forget whether that meant contractor or something else, but a regular MTS badge was blue-bordered at the time. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 8 months

UNIX Backslash History

by Doug McIlroy

> What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And \ as the escape character. \ came from Multics. The first day Multics ran at Bell Labs Bob Morris famously typed backslash-newline at the login prompt and crashed the system. Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how pathnames were punctuated. Doug

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Charles Anthony >> I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? > user_dir_dir>Project>User Oh, right. Too many years spent on Unix! :-) > "Names" are aliases, similar to soft links I feel like they are more similar to hard links; they belong to a segment, and if the name is given to another segment, and the original segment has only that name, it goes away. (See the discussion under "add_name" in the MPM 'Commands and Active Fuinctions'). Also, Multics does real soft links (too), so names can't be soft links! :-) Noel

5 years, 8 months

My EuroBSDCon talk

by Warner Losh

My talk has been posted. https://youtu.be/FTlzaDgzPY8 Thanks to everyone who helped make it better. Warner P.s. this may be a duplicate email... I had domain issues when I sent it before...

5 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Charles Anthony > /home/CAnthony I think it was >user_dir_dir>Group>User, wasn't it? I seem to remember my homedir on MIT-Multics was >udd>CSR>JNChiappa? And I wonder if the 'dd' directory on PDP-7 Unix owe anything to 'udd'? Getting back to the original query, I'm wondering if '/' was picked as it wasn't shifted, unlike '>'? Noel

5 years, 8 months

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