> That photo is not Belle, or at least not the Belle machine that the article
is about.
The photo shows the piece-sensing (by tuned resonant circuits)
chess board that Joe Condon built before he and Ken built the
harware version of Belle that reigned as world computer chess
champion for several years beginning in 1980 and became the
first machine to earn a master rating.
Doug
> From: "John P. Linderman"
> Brian interviewing Ken
Ah, thanks for that. I had intended going (since I've never met Ken), but
alas, my daughter's family had previously scheduled to visit that weekend, so
I couldn't go.
The 'grep' story was amusing, but historically, probably the most valuable
thing was the detail on the origins of B - DMR's paper on early C ("The
Development of the C Language") mentions the FORTRAN, but doesn't give the
detail on why that got canned, and B appeared instead.
Noel
Decades ago there was an interpreted C in an X10 or X11 app, I believe it
came from the UK. And maybe it wasn't X11, maybe it was Sunview?
Whatever it was the author didn't like the bundled scrollbars and had
their own custom made one.
You could set breakpoints like a debugger and then go look around at state.
Does anyone else remember that app and what it was called?
Bakul Shah:
This could've been avoided if there was a convention about
where to store per user per app settings & possibly state. On
one of my Unix machines I have over 200 dotfiles.
====
Some, I think including Ken and Dennis, might have argued
that real UNIX programs aren't complex enough to need
lots of configuration files.
Agree with it or not, that likely explains why the Research
stream never supplied a better convention about where to
store such files. I do remember some general debate in the
community (e.g. on netnews) about the matter back in the
early 1980s. One suggestion I recall was to move all the
files to subdirectory `$HOME/...'. Personally I think
$HOME/conf would have been better (though I lean toward
the view that very few programs should need such files
anyway).
But by then BSD had spread the convention of leaving
`hidden' files in $HOME had spread too far to call
back. It wouldn't surprise me if some at Berkeley
would rather have moved to a cleaner convention, just
as the silly uucp-baud-rate flags were removed from
wc, but the cat was already out of the bag and too
hard to stuff back in.
On the Ubuntu Linux systems I help run these days, there
is a directory $HOME/.config. The tree within has 192
directories and 187 regular files. I have no idea what
all those files are for, but from the names, most are
from programs I may have run once years ago to test
something, or from programs I run occasionally but
have no context I care about saving. The whole tree
occupies almost six megabytes, which seems small
by current standards, but (as those on this list
certainly know) in the early 1980s it was possible
to run a complete multi-user UNIX system comfortably
from a single 2.5MB RK05 disk.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Dennis's `The UNIX I/O System' paper in Volume 2 of the 7/e
manual is basically about how drivers work. Is that near
enough, possibly as augmented by Ken's `UNIX Implementation'
paper in the same book?
Those were my own starting point, long ago, for understanding
how to write device drivers. Along with existing source code
as examples, of course, but (unlikely many who hack on device
drivers, I'm afraid) I have always preferred to have a proper
statement of rules, conventions, and interfaces rather than
just reading code and guessing.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Greetings,
I'm trying to find the predecessor to "Writing a UNIX Device Driver, J.
Egan & T. Teixeira, 1st ed, 1988". In the preface, it says:
"This book is based on a MASSCOMP manual, Guide to Writing a Unix Device
Driver. The first version that MASSCOMP published as part of the
documentation set for the MC-500 was based on preliminary drafts prepared
for MASSCOMP by Cliff Cary and Tom Albough of Creare R&D."
I checked bit keepers and found nothing.
I was wondering if people on this list know of this manual, have a copy,
etc. In general, I'm looking for pre-SysV driver manuals. I can find all
kinds of SysV driver books (some of which cover 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD as well),
but nothing for System III or V7 unix. There were a lot of early systems
that were based on ports of V7 to different architectures that were then
updated to System III or System V (at least according to the big chart of
unix history and some wikipedia entries, which may be just repeating
marketing schlock and not reflect actual reality).
As part of a talk I'm putting together on the 40th anniversary of V7, I
wanted to have a bit of history for things we still have in unix today
(like strategy) and things that successors to unix have added or left
behind (like the packet mux in V7 that was tossed aside for either STREAMS
or netinet from BSD, though packet muxing to userland is back with DPDK).
Warner
>From at least V2 to V6, the ls(1) command would not
show directory entries whose names began with a '.'
unless the -a flag was supplied.
This was changed in V7: only the directory entries
for "." and ".." would be skipped by default.
All further versions of Research Unix retain the
convention of V7 and Plan 9 ultimately made it
unnecessary. However, BSD and its descendants did
not follow suit. Instead, they continued behaving
like V6 with an additional -A flag to emulate V7.
Was the initial behavior intentional or just a
matter of expediency?
Who made the change and what was their motivation?
Was it a reaction to the intentional hiding of what
came to be known as "dot files"?
Thanks,
Anthony
