Hunting around through my ancient stuff today, I ran across a 5.25"
floppy drive labeled as having old Usenet maps. These may have
historical interest.
First off, I don't recognize the handwriting on the disk. It's not mine.
Does anyone recognize it? (pic attached)
I dug out my AT&T 6300 (XT clone) from the garage and booted it up. The
floppy reads just fine. It has files with .MAP extension, which are
ASCII Usenet maps from 1980 to 1984, and some .BBM files which are ASCII
Usenet backbone maps up to 1987.
There is also a file whose extension is .GRF from 1983 which claims to
be a graphical Usenet map. Does anyone have any idea what GRF is or
what this map might be? I recall Brian Reid having a plotter-based
Usenet geographic map in 84 or 85.
I'd like to copy these files off for posterity. They read on DOS just
fine. Is there a current best practice for copying off files? I would
have guessed I'd need a to use the serial port, but my old PC has DOS
2.11 (not much serial copying software on it) and I don't have anything
live with a serial port anymore. And it might not help with the GRF file.
I took some photos of the screen with the earliest maps (the ones that
fit on one screen.) So it's an option to type things in, at least for
the early ASCII ones.
Thanks,
Mary Ann
... of the pdp7 unix restoration activities. I could find the old unix72
ones at tuhs, but not the unix v0 archives. Can someone point me in the
right direction? A google search or 4 has turned up nothing. Has it been
archived somewhere?
Warner
Well I checked out Kirk’s site, and found out that he has a DVD to go along with the old 4 disc CD-ROM sets:
In the 20 years since the release of the CSRG CD-ROM Set (1998-2018) I have continued collecting old software which I have put together in two historic collections. The first is various historic UNIX distributions not from Berkeley. The second is programs and other operating systems that shipped on or influenced BSD. The distribution is contained on a single DVD that contains all the original content from the original 4-CD-ROM distribution, these two collections of historic software, and a copy of John Baldwin's conversion of the SCCS database contained on the original disk4 to a Subversion repository. Unlike most write-once technology which remains readable for less than ten years, this DVD is written using M-Disc technology which should last for centuries. The price for the DVD is $149.00.
I know the $150 USD may sound pricy but the historic2 archive does contain a couple additional copies of Mach!
And a bunch of other stuff in there as well, it’s gigabytes of stuff to go through.
Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multics mailing list. Fernando
Corbató has passed away at 93.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/fernando-corbato-dead.html
Clem organized the wonderful Unix 50 event at the LCM two days ago, where
we saw a working 6180 front panel on display (backed by a virtual DPS-8m
running Multics!).
This is our heritage and our history, let us not forget where we came from.
- Dan C.
Interactive Systems. Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in many a year. Heinz Lycklama went there.
The did a couple of things, a straight UNIX port to various things (PDP-11, 386) and also there “UNIX running under VMS” product.
They also had their own version of the Rand Editor called “INed” that was happiest on this hacked version of a Perkin Elmer terminal.
Early versions were PWB UNIX based if I recall.
My first job out of college was working with IS Unix on an 11/70 playing configuration management (essentially all the PWB stuff). I also hacked the line printer spooler and the .mm macro package to do classification markings (this was a part of a government contract).
A few years later I was given the job of porting Interactive Systems UNIX that was already running on an i386 (an Intel 310 system which had a Multibus I) to an Intel Multibus II box. Intel had already ported it once, but nobody seemed to be able to find the source code. So with a fresh set of the source code for the old system from IS, I proceeded to reverse engineer/port the code to the Message Passing Coprocessor. (Intel was not real forthcoming for documentation for that either). Eventually, I got it to work (the Multibus II really was a pleasant bus and worked well with UNIX). I went on to write drivers for a 9-track tape drive (which sat in my living room for a long time), a Matrox multibus II framebuffer (OK, that had problems), and a SCSI host adapter that was talking to this kludge device that captured digital data from a FLIR on uMatic cassettes (but that’s a different story).
In honor of the Unix 50 party tomorrow, I wrote an analysis of the
available data to conclude the first PDP-7 that Ken and Dennis used to
bring up Unix on was serial number 34. I've not seen this result elsewhere,
but if it's common place, please let me know.
https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-pdp-7-where-unix-began.html
One surprise from the analysis: there was only one pdp-7 in the world that
could have run the original v0 unix. It's the only one that had the RB09
hard drive (though the asset list referenced in the article listed a RC09
on that system).
I hope you enjoy
Warner
Back in the day I had the pleasure of firing up what was possibly
the last North American BITNET node (certainly the last one on
NetNorth), on a Sun 3/xxx deskside server running SunOS 3.5(+).
(AUCS, at Athabasca U.)
I'm curious to know if the UREP source code that drove that link
ever escaped. I recall it being licensed code at the time, but
from academia vs. a commercial product. I don't know if that also
applied to the bisync serial driver.
--lyndon
> From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe"
> In our PDP-10 TOPS-20 archive of what was then utah-science .. I find
> these files:
Thanks very much for doing that search, and congratulations on finding them!
Not that I have the slightest interest/use in the results, but it's so good to
see historical software being saved.
Noel
Postal mail today brought me the latest issue of the IEEE Computing
Edge magazine, which presents short articles from other recent IEEE
publications. In it, there is an article with numerous mentions of
Doug McIlroy, early Unix, software tools, and software modularization:
Gerard J. Holzmann
Software Components
IEEE Computing Edge 5(7) (July 2019) 38--40
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8354432
[republished from IEEE Software 35(3) (May/June 2018) 80--82]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wouldn't call it an error, merely a misleading sentence. .EX/.EE is,
after all, an extension in Gnu, albeit not original to Gnu. And I
didn't intend to impugn anybody. The sentence, "Ingo Schwarze stated
incorrectly" was apparently slipped into the quotation to provide
missing context. I do appreciate, however, how quickly the
inexactness was repaired.
Doug
| Doug McIlroy wrote on Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 11:17:32PM -0400:
| > Ingo Schwarze stated incorrectly:
|
| >> EE This is a non-standard GNU extension. In mandoc(1), it does the
| >> same as the roff(7) fi request (switch to fill mode).
|
| >>
| >> EX This is a non-standard GNU extension. In mandoc(1), it does the
| >> same as the roff(7) nf request (switch to no-fill mode).
|
| > "Gnu extension" should be read as "extension adopted by Gnu".
| > .EX/.EE was introduced in 9th Edition Unix.
|
| Thank you for pointing out the error, i corrected the manual page
| in OpenBSD and in portable mandoc, see the commit below.
