> From: KatolaZ
> I remember a 5MB quota at uni when I was an undergrad, and I definitely
> remember when it was increased to 10MB :)
Light your cigar with disk blocks!
When I was in high school, I had an account on the school's computer, a
PDP-11/20 running RSTS, with a single RF11 disk (well, technically, an RS11
drive on an RF11 controller). For those whose jaw didn't bounce off the floor,
reading that, the RS11 was a fixed-head disk with a total capacity of 512KB
(1024 512-byte blocks).
IIRC, my disk quota was 5 blocks. :-)
Noel
----- Forwarded message from meljmel-unix(a)yahoo.com -----
Warren,
Thanks for your help. To my amazement in one day I received
8 requests for the documents you posted on the TUHS mailing
list for me. If you think it's appropriate you can post that
everything has been claimed. I will be mailing the Unix TMs
and other papers to Robert Swierczek <rmswierczek(a)gmail.com>
who said he will scan any one-of-a-kind items and make them
available to you and TUHS. The manuals/books will be going
to someone else who very much wanted them.
Mel
----- End forwarded message -----
> 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
