I found 3 tubes of posters I'd been hoarding since college (well, since my
first job after college).
There's the usual 18-year-old-boy stuff (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc),
but mixed in are a bunch of OSI/ISO network stack posters (thank goodness
that didn't become standard, woof!), a couple movie posters, an 10th
Anniversary poster for RT-11.
The ones that will interest this group, maybe, are the Unix Feuds poster
with the wizard among the waring armies, A 20th Anniversary of Unix poster
by Tenon Intersystems which has a nice picture of Unix through 1990 or so
(with Tenon's Mach^ten 1.0 for Macintosh derived from BSD 4.3 and Mach) on
it. It's in decent share, but not in collector ready shape.
Oh, and I have a Eunice poster that mixes the best of VMS and BSD 4.1 into
a seamless environment.
Is there any interest from this group in photos of any of these?
Warner
> I have tried to OCR program listings before, with rather
> poor results.
I OCR'd a sizable manuscript written on a pretty shabby portable typewriter.
I scanned each page twice, making sure to move the paper between scans.
Then I ran both diff (by words, not lines) and spell to smoke out trouble.
The word list for a program listing is quite short and easy to generate.
(Print a list of all the apparent words and visually eliminate the nonsense.)
And a spell check is an easy pipeline of standard utilities.
doug
Hi All.
I had a bad commit message in the qed-archive I mentioned here a few weeks
ago. I fixed it with a 'git push --force' (even though that's not
recommended) since I expect it to be a read-only archive going forward,
and I wanted it to be right.
In short, if you cloned it, please remove your copy and reclone.
Thanks!
Arnold
Time for a new thread :-)
As today is Knuth's birthday (posted over in COFF), I was wondering (in
the cesspool that is my mind) how much of Unix would have been influenced
by Knuth? We have qsort() of course (which Hoare actually wrote, based on
one of Knuth's algorithms), but I'm guessing that Ken and Dennis would
have been familiar with his work?
Or am I spreading fake news again? :-) Look, I love being corrected if I
make a mistake on a technical mailing list, so fire at will if need be...
-- Dave
> Where did you find the BBN TCP/IP stack?
Easiest place to find it is the TUHS Unix Tree page:
https://www.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP
Several tapes of it survived in the CSRG archives, currently held by the Bancroft Library at Berkeley.
A late version of the tcp/ip routines survived at the Stanford SAIL archives, currently online here:
https://www.saildart.org/[IP,SYS]/
(mixed in with sources for WAITS).
A much evolved version is in the BSD SCCS history:
https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/tree/master/sys/deprecated/bbnnet
Note that the location ‘deprecated’ is where the code ended up. Back in 1985 it would have been in the normal build path, but SCCS does not preserve that.
Paul
All, I just found out in the past few days that Kirk McKusick has added another
two CDs in his set of CSRG Archives CD-ROM set. Some details of these CDs
can be found here:
https://www.mckusick.com/csrg/index.html
I've purchased the two additional CDs, and I've put a file listing and
set of checksums for all files on all six CDs here:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/CSRG_CDs/
Cheers, Warren
I've been on a Data General Aviion restoration binge lately and
re-familiarizing myself with DG/UX. In my case 5.4R3.1 running on a
MC88100 based AV/300 and MC88110 dual core AV/5500. The more I
experience, the more I am impressed. There are a few things about the
system that seem impressive.
- Despite coming from a System V core, there is a lot of BSD influx -
especially on the networking side. This is a personal taste issue as
other ports have tried to mix the best of both worlds. But after a
prior month-long Sun/Solaris restoration binge of similar era hardware
(Super/Hyper/Ultra SPARC) and software (SunOS 4 through Solaris 9),
DG/UX is a welcome and refreshing change! Especially out of the box.
- It has a system of file security that seems unique for that era - at
least in my experience - of explicit and implicit directory tags with
inheritance. There is even a high security extended version of the OS.
- It has a built-in logical volume manager supporting multiple virtual
to physical disk mappings, striping, mirroring, and even archiving -
something several entire sub-industries were created for in other ports.
I am guessing this contributed to EMC's purchase of Data General for
the Clariion disk storage product lines.
- It leveraged open-source tools early. The default m88k compiler
installed with the system is GNU C 2.xx.
- It was among the earliest of operating systems to support NUMA aware
affinity on MP versions of the MC88110. (IRIX, Solaris, BSD, Linux, and
Windows support all came much later).
- Many others.
It does have it's quirks. However I get the overall impression the
folks working at DG were on their game and were a leader in the industry
in many areas. It is unfortunate a) the fate of the Motorola 88K was
tied to Data General's place in the UNIX world, and b) by the time they
migrated to IA86, enterprise business was more interested in Microsoft
NT & SQL server or Linux than an expensive vendor's UNIX port.
That being said, I don't see DG/UX mentioned much in UNIX history. In
fact, I am researching an exhibit I'm putting together for the Vintage
Computer Festival Southeast 7.0, and DG/UX isn't mentioned on any of the
'UNIX Family Tree' diagrams I can find so far. It doesn't even make
Wikipedia's 'UNIX Variants' page. It's own Wikipedia page is also
rather sparse. Like John Snow in season 1, there is a junk of missing
and plot impacting history here - centered around the people involved.
To a lesser degree, IRIX is also a red-headed step-child. It's omitted
from half the lists I can find. It just seems the importance, even if
it's an importance by being the 'first' rather than # of users, of these
ports are pretty significant.
Just curious of others' thoughts. And I wondering if anyone has
first-hand knowledge of Data General's efforts or knows of others that
can illuminate the shadows of what I'm discovering is a pretty exciting
corner of the UNIX world.
Thanks,
-Alan H.
Forgive me if this is a duplicate. My original message appears to have bounced.
On 1/16/19, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote:
> I’ve heard and personally seen a lot of technical arrogance and
> incompetence out of the Masshole area. Was DEC inflicted? In
> “Showstopper” Cutler fled to the west coast to get away from this kind of
> thing.
>
Having worked at DEC from February 1980 until after the Compaq
takeover, I would say that DEC may have exhibited technical arrogance
from time to time, but certainly never technical incompetence. DEC's
downfall was a total lack of skill at marketing. Ken Olsen believed
firmly in a "build it and they will come" philosophy. Contrast this
with AT&T's brilliant "Unix - consider it a standard" ad campaign.
DEC also suffered from organizational paralysis. KO believed in
decisions by consensus. This is fine if you can reach a consensus,
but if you can't it leads to perpetually revisiting decisions and to
obstructionist behavior. There was a saying in DEC engineering that
any decision worth making was worth making 10 times. As opposed to
the "lead, follow, or get out of the way" philosophy at Sun. Or
Intel's concept of disagree and commit. DEC did move towards a
"designated responsible individual" approach where a single person got
to make the ultimate decision, but the old consensus approach never
really died.
Dave Cutler was the epitome of arrogance. On the technical side, he
got away with it because his way (which he considered to be the only
way) was usually at least good enough for Version 1, if not the best
design. Cutler excelled in getting V1 of something out the door. He
never stayed around for V2 of anything. He had a tendency to leave
messes behind him. A Cutler product reminded me of the intro to "The
Peabodys" segment of Rocky & Bullwinkle. A big elaborate procession,
followed by someone cleaning up the mess with a broom.
Cutler believed in a "my way or the highway" approach to software
design. His move to the west coast was to place himself far enough
away that those who wanted to revisit all his decisions would have a
tough time doing so.
On the personal side, he went out of his way to be nasty to people, as
pointed out elsewhere in this thread. Although he was admired
technically, nobody liked him.
-Paul W.
Tsort was a direct reference to Knuth's recognition and
christening of topological sort as a worthy software component.
This is a typical example of the interweaving of R and D
which characterized the culture of Bell Labs. Builders
and thinkers were acutely aware of each other, and often
were two faces of one person. Grander examples may be
seen in the roles that automata theory and formal languages
played in Unix. (Alas, these are the subjects of projected
Knuthian volumes that are still over the horizon.)
Doug
