Kevin Bowling:
The conference looks supremely uninteresting outside one WAFL talk to me.
====
That is, of course, a matter of opinion. Just from skimming
titles I see about two dozen talks of at least some interest
to me in the ATC program. And that's just ATC; I'm planning
to attend the Hot* workshops on Monday and Tuesday as well.
Of course I won't attend every one of those talks--some coincide
in time, some I'll miss because I get stuck in the hallway track.
And some will prove less interesting in practice, though others
that don't seem all that interesting in the program will likely
prove much better in person.
I've been attending USENIX ATC for decades, and although some
conferences have been meatier than others, I've never ended up
feeling the trip was a waste of time.
Perhaps us old farts just aren't as discriminating as you
youngsters.
That said, I think Kevin's question
Is there a way to participate [on the UNIX50 event] without attending Usenix ATC?
is a good one.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Bud Lawson, long an expat living in Sweden, died yesterday. Not a
Unix person, he was, however, the originator of a characteristic Unix
programmer's idiom.
Using an idea adapted from Ken Knowlton, Bud invented the pointer-
chasing arrow operator that Dennis Ritchie adopted for C. I played
matchmaker. When Bud first proposed the "based storage" (pointer)
facility for PL/I, he used the well-established field(pointer)
notation. I introduced him to the pointer-chasing notation Knowlton
devised for L6. Knowlton, however, had no operator because he had only
single-letter identifiers. What we now write as a->b->c, Knowlton wrote
as abc. Appreciating the absence of parentheses, Bud came up with the
wonderfully intuitive pointer->field notation.
Doug
I came across Scott Taylor’s site which mentions his adventure with MtXinu (https://www.retrosys.net/) I had asked a few years ago (February 2017?) about locating a set
Of this to no avail, but thanks to Scott the binary set is now available.
ftp://ftp.mrynet.com/operatingsystems/Mach2.5/MtXinu-binary-dist/floppies/M…
There is some additional documentation to be found here.
ftp://ftp.mrynet.com/operatingsystems/Mach2.5/MtXinu-binary-dist/docs
The floppy drive like 386BSD is super weak and I had no luck with Qemu. VMWare worked fine to install. The VMDK will run on Qemu as low as 0.90 just fine.
I haven’t tried the networking at all, so I don’t know about adapters/protocol support. I’ve been using a serial line to uuencode stuff in & out but it’s been stable.
We are all thrilled and thankful for the generosity of SDF and LCM+L by
sponsoring and providing a celebration of Internet History with their UNIX
at 50 Event for the USENIX ATC Attendees. We understand not all of you
can participate in the conference, but would still like to be part of the
celebration. Our hosts have graciously opened the event to the community
at large, as I said in my previous message, it should be an evening of
computer people being able to be around and discussing computer history.
However, if you are not planning to attend the conference but wish to
attend the evening's event, we wish that you would at least consider
joining one or more of the organizations to help support them all in the
future. All three organizations are members supported and need all our help
and contributions to function and bring their services to everyone today
and hopefully 50 years from now. Membership details for each can be found
at Join SDF <https://sdf.org/join>, LCM+L Memberships
<https://livingcomputers.org/Join/Memberships.aspx>, and USENIX Association
Memberships <https://www.usenix.org/membership-services>
ᐧ
I've been playing with simh recently, and there is a nonzero chance I will
soon be acquiring a PDP/11-70.
I realize I could run 2.11BSD on it, and as long as I stay away from a
networking stack, I probably won't see too many coremap overflow errors.
But I think I'd really rather run V7.
However, there's one thing that makes it a less than ideal environment for
me. I grew up after cursor-addressable terminals were a thing, and, even
if I can eventually make "ed" do what I want, it isn't much fun. I've been
an Emacs user since 1988 and my muscle memory isn't going to change soon
(and failing being able to find and build Gosmacs or an early GNU Emacs,
yes, I can get by in vi more easily than in ed; all those years playing
Nethack poorly were good for something).
So...where can I find a curses implementation (and really all I need in the
termcap or terminfo layer is ANSI or VTxxx) that can be coerced into
building on V7 pretty easily?
Also, I think folks here might enjoy reading a little personal travelogue
of some early Unix systems from my perspective (which is to say, a happy
user of Unix for 30+ years but hardly ever near core development (I did do
the DIAG 250 block driver for the zSeries port of OpenSolaris; then IBM
pushed a little too hard on the price and Sun sold itself to (ugh) Oracle
instead; the world would have been more fun if IBM had bought the company
like we were betting on)). That's at
https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14340.html ; that in turn references a
review I did about a year ago of The Unix Hater's Handbook, at
https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14272.html .
Adam
> From: Mary Ann Horton
> Warren's emacs would have been part of the Bell Labs 'exptools'
> (experimental tools) package ... it's possible that's what you have.
I don't think so; Warren had been a grad student in our group, and we got it
on that basis. I'm pretty sure we didn't have termcap or any of that stuff.
Noel
I'm reminded since Erik brought this up...
Is Warren Montgomery's emacs available, like, anywhere... I used it long
ago on V7m, and I had it on my AT&T 7300 (where it was available as a
binary package).
It's the first emacs I ever used. I don't recall where we got it for the
PDP-11. On our system, we had it permission-restricted so only certain
trusted users could use it - basically, people who could be trusted not to
be in it all the time, and not to use it while the system was busy. We
had an 11/40 with 128K, and 2 or 3 people trying to use Mongomery emacs
would basically crush the system...
In the absence of that, I've always found JOVE to be the next best thing,
as far as being lightweight and sufficently emacs-like. I actually
install it on almost all of my Linux systems. Did JOVE ever run on V7?
--Pat.
> From: Pat Barron
> Is Warren Montgomery's emacs available, like, anywhere...
I've got a copy on the dump of the MIT PWB system. I'm actually supposed to
resurrect it for someone, IIRC, (the MIT system was .. idiosyncratic, so it'll
take a bit of tweaking), but haven't gotten to it yet.
Does anyone else have the source, or is mine the only one left?
Noel
Sorry for the long delay on this notice, but until this weekend there were
still a few things to iron out before I made a broad announcement.
First, I want to thank the wonderful folks at the Living Computers Museum
and Labs <https://livingcomputers.org/> who are set up to host an event at
their museum for our members on the evening of July 10, which is during the
week of USENIX ATC. To quote an email from their Curator, Aaron Alcorn: "*an
easy-going members events with USENIX attendees as their special invited
guests.*" As Aaron suggested, this event will just be computer people
and computers, which seems fitting and a good match ;-)
Our desire is to have as many of the old and new 'UNIX folks' at this event
as possible and we can share stories of how our community got to where we
are. Please spread the word, since we want to get as many people coming
and sharing as we can. BTW: The Museum is hoping to have their
refurbished PDP-7 running by that date. A couple of us on this list will
be bringing a kit of SW in the hopes that we can boot Unix V0!!
Second, USENIX BOD will provide us a room at ATC all week long to set up
equipment and show off some things our community has done in the past. I
have been in contact with some of you offline and will continue to do so.
There should be some smaller historical systems that people will bring
(plus connections to the LCM's systems via the Internet, of course) and
there will be some RPi's running different emulators.
I do hope that both the event and the computer room should be fun for all.
Thanks,
Clem Cole
