Two remarks about Plan 9, one about an antecedent and the other about the
limits of its influence.
"Communication files" in the Dartmouth Time Sharing System have been cited
as a predecesssor of Unix pipes, although we at Bell Labs were unaware of
the DTSS feature when pipes were first implemented. In fact, communication
files more directly foreshadow Plan 9 than they do Unix.
Unlike Unix processes, which need not be aware that they are talking to
pipes, the process at one end of a communication file, designated as
"master", must be aware that it is a communication file. The master end
controls the semantics of reads, writes and seeks(!) issued at the other
end. Because of this asymmetry, a communication file cannnot serve as a
pipe between pairs of unprepared processes. A pipe could be simulated in
DTSS by a master process that relays flow between communications files
connected to arbitrary end processes, but that seems never to have been
done.
Communication files are a closer antecedent to Plan 9. A master process's
controls correspond to the part of Plan 9's foundational 9P protocol that
handles open files. Though I don't think there's an actual ancestral
connection, this likeness strengthens DTSS's claim to fame and extends
their lead to nearly a quarter century.
Linux has adopted surface features of Plan 9 like union directories,
append-only files and system data access via file interfaces. Meanwhile
Plan 9's revolutionary realization of what Vic Vyssotsky called
distributable computing has not caught on. In distributable computing, the
physical location of processes does not affect their logical interaction.
In today's distributed computing, though, there is a world of difference
between how processes interact remotely and locally. When will the crevasse
between the possible and the normal be bridged?
Doug
Having recently read about the playful literary consortium, Oulipo, I am
reminded of their term for little-known antecedents of their revolutionary
works: "anticipatory plagiarism".
Long before there was Markdown, there was a similar Unix tool. I remember
reading about it before the Internet was popular, probably mid-to-late
1980s. I may have read about it in “Communications of the ACM”.
It was designed to let secretaries compose memos, without learning the dot
commands of troff or nroff. If you indented a space or two, it started a
new paragraph. If you indented several spaces, it centered the line; very
similar to Markdown in concept. It generated a file that could be fed into
troff.
I was thinking it might have been part of the System V Documentors
Workbench, but I read through the doc for it and could not find anything
like that.
Does anyone remember this?
Thanks!
Hi all, Edouard asked me to pass this e-mail on to both TUHS and COFF lists.
Cheers, Warren
----- Forwarded message from Edouard Klein <edouardklein(a)gmail.com> -----
Subject: History tract during the next IWMP9 in Paris next May
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 22:46:30 +0200 (1 week, 4 days, 19 hours ago)
Dear Unix history enthusiasts,
The 11th International Workshop on Plan 9 will be held in Paris on May
22-24 2025.
One of the focus area this year will be Plan 9's history and its
influence on later computer science and industry trends.
The history team at the CNAM (where the conference will be held) has
agreed to help us prepare for the event and stands ready to record oral
histories, or any other format that would make the participants happy.
They had organized in 2017 a "colloque" at which Clem spoke (and I
listened somewhere in the audience) on UNIX:
https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-europe-ent…
I will keep the list posted as our efforts pan out, but I thought I'd
get the word out as soon as possible.
I you have historical resources on Plan 9 or Inferno, or are reminded of
any interesting tidbits, you can also share them here, as this list is
already recognized by historians as a legitimate source.
The program committee members, many (if not all) of whom roam this very
list, would welcome any proposal or contributions in this area :)
The CfP is at:
http://iwp9.org/
Looking forward to read what you care to share, or to seeing you in
person in Paris,
Cheers,
Edouard.
----- End forwarded message -----
> From: Kevin Bowling
> https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 and the parent page on seem to suggest
> it originated off Net/2 directly.
I wouldn't be putting too much weight on what that page says; most of the
*BSD pages were done by people I don't know well, and who might have gotten
details wrong
I myself later just tried to quickly, without much effort, work out roughly
what the relationship was between those *BSD systems, based on what other
people had written. E.g the now-'BSD/OS' page was originally at '386/BSD',
and I seem to have worked out that it's correct name was BSD/OS and moved it
there. The BSD/386 page is probably roughly correct, since it contains a scan
of a contemporary ad for it.
(So confusing that '386BSD' is something different from 'BSD/386'. Was there ever
actually a '386/BSD'?)
Someone who knows the early history of all the *BSD systems (as in, you lived
through all that) is welcome, nay invited, to fix any errors therein.
Noel
So I was flipping through a System V software catalog from Fall 1984 and among
the many AT&T Bell Laboratories items is the "COBOL Syntax Checker".
From the text:
---QUOTE---
The COBOL Syntax Checker allows programmers to edit and check the syntax of COBOL
programs before they are transmitted to mainframes for compilation and execution.
The software increases the chances of a 'clean' compilation and execution and
reduces the chance of a program being rejected due to syntax and simple semantic
errors. As a result, expensive mainframe CPU time is reduced.
The COBOL Syntax Checker processes a COBOL source program and produces three
listings:
1. a diagnostic listing,
2. a cross-reference listing,
3. a source listing.
---END QUOTE---
There are two distributions listed, a C binary distribution for SVR2 for the
3B20 for $2000 and a C source distribution for SVR2 for the VAX 11/780 for $7500,
both listed as released 2Q84.
Some quick Googling only offers up additional catalog and magazine mentions.
To me this sounds like a linter with some extra bits. Does anyone have any
recollections of this software or know if there's much likelihood of the software
itself or any documentation surviving?
Thanks for any insights!
- Matt G.
> From: Noel Chiappa
> Was there ever actually a '386/BSD'?
I decided (for not particular reason) to take a quick read through Marshall
Kirk McKusick's "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely
Redistributable":
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.html
and he refers to Jolitz's system as "386/BSD" (apparently incorrectly). (So
there's a lesson there; even people who '_were_ there' can occasionally get it
wrong - something that professional historians are well aware of. I have a
funny story of my learning that lesson, here:
http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/nontech/tmlotus.html
in a totally different technical area.)
I have yet to see a _scan_ of contemporary documentation (I believe nothing
that isn't a contemporary _physical artifact_) that confirms it was actually
named "386BSD", but that does seem to be the name as given in the Dr. Dobbs
series on it. That series confirms that it was based directly on the 'Net/2'
BSD release (although 'diff's on the sources are probably the most reliable
proof).
Noel
I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox.
Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial FreeBSD
variant. But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct strain
of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD. There seems to be scant information
about it online. Does anyone know if its story is told somewhere?
Regards,
Kevin
hello everyone,
i recently came across a little window manager, written in Alef, that
i've had in my /tmp folder
for the last five years. it's called Y (probably as a response to X),
and i grabbed it from
9gridchan's public griddisk; run by the late mycroftiv until 2022.
i think it must've been an experimental project by Pike, Rosenthal or
Tom Duff, but i can't find
any documentation about it anywhere. i'd love to know if any of you
remembers this, and if so,
would you share the story behind it?
i uploaded the source code here: http://antares-labs.eu/isometric/Y.tgz
and it runs on 2nd ed plan 9 without issue (see the attached screenshot.)
cheers!
-rodri
> From: Kevin Bowling
> I wonder if we should collect resources like this on a wiki page or
> something?
My habit on the CHWiki is to have the articles on subjects where there is a
lot of documentation online is to have the articles mostly be 'executive
summeries', and corral the links to the stuff online to a section at the end,
so that people who want to see the gory details can look at the original
documentation. See, for example:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7
That works well, even for material that later goes 404, because with the URL,
one can generally find it later in the Internet Archive (things like Google
won't find things that are only there).
Don't ask me to add them, though; I still haven't found time to add the links
to the BSD/OS stuff you found!
Noel
