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
Norman is right. The Seattle museum has a 5620. Having seen "5620" in
the subject line, I completely overlooked the operative words
"real blit or jerq" in Seth's posting.
Doug
Seth Morabito:
I'd love to see a real Blit or jerq in person some day, but I don't even
know where I'd find one (it looks like even the Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, CA doesn't have a 68K Blit -- it only has a DMD 5620)
Doug McIlroy:
The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has one. Ad like most things
there, you can play with it.
===
It's a couple of years since I was last in Seattle, but
I remember only a DMD 5620 (aka Jerq); no 68000-based Blit.
Though of course they are always getting new acquisitions,
and have far more in storage than on display. (On one of
my visits I was lucky enough to get a tour of the upper
floor where things are stored and worked on.)
Whether they have a Blit or only a Jerq, it's a wonderful
place, and I expect any member of this list would enjoy a
visit.
I plan to drop in again this July, when I'm in town for
USENIX ATC (in suburban Renton).
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
> I'd love to see a real Blit or jerq in person some day, but I don't even know where I'd find one
The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has one. Ad like most things
there, you can play with it.
Doug
We've been recovering a 1980s programming language implemented using a
mix of Pascal and C that ran on 4.1 BSD on VAX.
The Makefile distributed to around 20+ sites included these lines for
the C compiler.
CC= occ
CFLAGS= -g
It seems there was a (common?) practice of keeping around the old C
compiler when updating a BSD system and occ was used to reference it.
Anyone care to comment on this observation? was it specific to
BSD-land? how was the aliasing effected, a side-by-side copy of the
compiler pieces? As at 4.1 BSD the C compiler components were in /lib
(Pascal though was in /usr/lib).
# ls -l /lib
total 467
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 25600 Jul 9 1981 c2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 89088 Jul 9 1981 ccom
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 19456 Jul 9 1981 cpp
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 199 Mar 15 1981 crt0.o
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 40960 Jul 9 1981 f1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 62138 Jul 9 1981 libc.a
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 582 Mar 15 1981 mcrt0.o
