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Re: Do you have any historical UNIX computers?

by H.J.Thomassen

I still have two 19" racks with the main components of the PDP-11/45, built in 1972, on which we started using UNIX 5th Edition in late summer 1974. Later it ran 6th and 7th Ed. CPU with front panel w. switches and lamps, RK03 cartridge disk (2.5Mb!), floating point processor board (serial number 1), several core memory banks among which 8K ones, DEC-tape, ASR33-TTY, dozens of mini-lightbulbs, not a single LED. Its hour-meter has clocked 122532: that's 13,97 years. It is complete but doesn't run. I remember from the days when I administered it during its productive life that it required .5 day of maintenance per six weeks, by a qualified service engineer: tuning power supplies, adjusting the disk head with the help of a special "alignment" disk cartridge, checking the fans (25+ in just those two racks), etc. etc. The CPU consists of 17 large PCBs. The combined MTBF of these PCBs was 1.5 years approx. Then the service engineer came with his box with exchange boards and swapped until the machine was up&running again. Without a maintenance contract such a board had a 5-figure exchange fee..... Hendrik-Jan Thomassen

2 weeks, 3 days

Re: Do you have any historical UNIX computers?

by Vicente Collares

Hello Milo, On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 13:38:54 -0400 Milo Velimirović <milovelimirovic(a)gmail.com> wrote: > What’s your budget and what’s your level of hardware technical skill? If budget is no concern, there are occasional complete pdp11 or vaxen on eBay. Or, you could get CPU cards and interfaces to piece together a system. If you go that route a Unibone or Qbone is highly recommended for both debugging and filling in hardwar gaps via emulation. Alternatively, there are several FPGA projects to emulate -11s. Buying a complete PDP-11 or VAX is the dream, but it's not what I'm aiming for to start. I was thinking of something like a UNIX workstation. I haven't thought about the possibility of piecing together a system using various cards. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll have to look into it. Budget is a concern for me. So ideally I would like to spend around $500 USD on the actual computer. Is that realistic for the type of computer I mentioned above? I'm not hardware savvy, so I would have a limited ability to do repairs on the electronics. I do know someone who is though, so I might be able to get some help on this project. I wish you an excellent week, Vicente vicente(a)collares.ca

2 weeks, 3 days

Re: Do you have any historical UNIX computers?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Vicente Collares > I'm more interested in its historical signaficance. If that's your interest, PDP-11's are absolutely _the_ way to go. The PDP-11 is _the_ machine that made UNIX. That choice has good points, and a very bad point, though. Good points are that QBUS PDP-11's are pretty easy to find, pretty small (desktop PC-sized), and not very expensive. They're pretty robust, too - I have a large stack of PDP-11 QBUS CPUs, and none of them had failed, as of the last time that I powered them on. The very bad point is that working mass storage for them is very hard to find. The controllers are around, but not the drives. Does anyone know if anyone is making a QBUS mass storage clone? Bridgham and I were going to produce QBUS RK11/RP11 clone that used SD cards to hold the bits. We got the prototype working, and it booted UNIX, but then I came down with COVID and post-COVID myalgic encephalomyelitis, and that was the end of that. Noel

2 weeks, 5 days

Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

by Paul McJones

> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 15:16:08 -0400, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com <mailto:henry.r.bent@gmail.com>> wrote: > > On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:59, Lawrence Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com <mailto:stewart@serissa.com>> wrote: > >> My rare items are only Unix-adjacent. ... I have some boards for a Digital >> Firefly, a research vax multiprocessor that ran a Modula-2 based OS that >> would run Ultrix binaries. > > That's incredibly cool. Do you know if any of the Firefly machines > survived? I saw a VAXstation 3540 for sale at some point recently but it > was well out of my price range; I hope it found a good home. > > -Henry I have a set of Firefly boards (I worked on the Taos operating system for the Firefly). But as far as I can tell, no software survives. Charles P. Thacker and Lawrence C. Stewart. 1987. Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation. In Proceedings of the second international conference on Architectual support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS II). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1145/36206.36199 Paul McJones and Garret Swart. Evolving the UNIX system interface to support multithreaded programs. Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference, December 1989. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/evolving.pdf Also available as Part I of SRC Research Report 21 (https://mcjones.org/paul/SRC-RR-21.pdf) Part II of which is the Taos Programmer's Manual. Paul McJones and Andy Hisgen. The Topaz system: Distributed multiprocessor personal computing. Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems. IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Operating Systems, November 1987. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/wwospos.pdf (Topaz was the name for the Modula-2+ programming environment, which also ran on VAX Ultrix.) Paul

2 weeks, 5 days

Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

by norman＠oclsc.org

I have a number of old Unix artifacts that I value. If I had to pick one (or one set) top one, it would be the complete set of Research Unix manuals, 1/e through 10/e. Other contenders include the AT&T-branded copy of the Lions commentary (with deathstar on the cover), a signed copy of The Unix Programming Environment, several unix-branded plastic containers (not to do with the OS, but bought from a Korean supermarket a few blocks from where I've lived for 30 years), and a plastic-slide Spin Out puzzle from Binary Arts (later ThinkFun but not part of IBM), an educational puzzle/game company founded in the 1980s by Bill Ritchie (Dennis's brother) and his wife Andrea Barthello. (I remember a prototype Spin Out, hand-made of wood, spending some time in the Unix Room.) But far more than any of that, I prize the memories and friendships I've had with fellow Unix people over the decades, particularly (but not exclusively) from my six years as sysadmin-hack in 1127. I'm very disappointed that I won't be at the last-ever USENIX Technical Conference in Boston in a few weeks. A show-and-tell there of prized artifacts sounds like a great idea. I hope those who do make it bring plenty of artifacts and memories to share. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

2 weeks, 6 days

Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

by Douglas McIlroy

A complete set of manuals,v1-v10. The 8-volume History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System--not really a Unix artifact but an impressive memento of the Bell Labs experience. Unix rates several pages in it. A mock license plate, generously given to me by Jon Hall. A polyomino puzzle that I solved with the help of Gerard Halzmann's Spin model-checker. The opportunity for such an "abuse of tools" illuminates Unix and CSRC as a productive meeting place for disparate disciplines, occupations, and pastimes. Doug

2 weeks, 6 days

No Further LLM messages on TUHS

by Warren Toomey

All, the LLM conversation is no longer Unix-related. Please take it to COFF if you wish to continue it. Thanks, Warren

4 weeks

Re: On the unreliability of LLM-based search results (was: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum)

by norman＠oclsc.org

G. Branden Robinson: That's why I think Norman has sussed it out accurately. LLMs are fantastic bullshit generators in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense,[1] wherein utterances are undertaken neither to enlighten nor to deceive, but to construct a simulacrum of plausible discourse. BSing is a close cousin to filibustering, where even plausibility is discarded, often for the sake of running out a clock or impeding achievement of consensus. ==== That's exactly what I had in mind. I think I had read Frankfurt's book before I first started calling LLMs bullshit generators, but I can't remember for sure. I don't plan to ask ChatGPT (which still, at least sometimes, credits me with far greater contributions to Unix than I have actually made). Here's an interesting paper I stumbled across last week which presents the case better than I could: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 To link this back to actual Unix history (or something much nearer that), I realized that `bullshit generator' was a reasonable summary of what LLMs do after also realizing that an LLM is pretty much just a much-fancier and better-automated descendant of Mark V Shaney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 weeks

Re: 1972 UNIX V2 "Beta" Resurrected

by Thalia Archibald

Yufeng Gao wrote: > The s1 tape is a UNIX INIT DECtape containing the kernel, while s2 includes > most of the distribution files. [https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-February/031420.html] Hello Yufeng, Do you have more details on the format of the s1 tape? I want to reproduce your work. The s2 tape is in the tap format, which was easy to decode, and I assumed that s1 was similar, just with its file headers on an earlier tape. I’ve been able to fairly accurately segment s1 into files by observing that blocks duplicate the tail of the previous block when they are not a full 512 bytes. I’ve written a tool for this and have segmented all the text files and some of the binaries, but I’m floundering on the rest. What you say seems to suggest that s1 actually does have file metadata. Thalia

4 weeks, 1 day

Open source "code" for books typeset in troff

by Adam Koszek

Hello, troff.org <http://troff.org/> maintains a nice list of UNIX/networking books typed in troff: https://troff.org/pubs.html#advctt https://troff.org/books.html#strong There’s one book that’s been released out of the publisher’s copyright, transcribed, and the source is available: https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing Are there any other other long text/books that have the source code available? The only thing that I can think or are the manuals present in source trees of the current BSD systems. Thanks, Adam

4 weeks, 1 day

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