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What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

by Jeffry R. Abramson

I've been using some variant of Linux (currently Debian 12) as my primary OS for daily activities (email, web, programming, photo editing, etc.) for the past twenty years or so. Prior to that it was FreeBSD for nearly ten years after short stints with Minix and Linux when they first came out. At the time (early/mid 90's), I was working for Bell Labs and had a ready supply of SCSI drives salvaged from retired equipment. I bought a Seagate ST-01A ISA SCSI controller for whatever 386/486 I owned at the time and installed Slackware floppy by floppy. When I upgraded to a Pentium PC for home, Micron P90 I think, I installed a PCI SCSI controller (Tekram DC-390 equipped with an NCR53c8xx chip) to make use of my stash of drives. Under Linux it was never entirely stable. I asked on Usenet and someone suggested trying the other SCSI driver. This was the ncr driver that had been ported from FreeBSD. My stability problems went away and I decided to take a closer look at FreeBSD. It reminded me of SunOS from the good old pre- System V era along with the version of Unix I had used in grad school in the late 70's/early 80's so I switched. I eventually reverted back to Linux because it was clear that the user community was getting much larger, I was using it professionally at work and there was just a larger range of applications available. Lately, I find myself getting tired of the bloat and how big and messy and complicated it has all gotten. Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering what do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs? Jeff

9 months, 2 weeks

What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

by Douglas McIlroy

Because I sometimes use ArcMap, I run Windows. Cygwin plus the sam editor make me feel at home. The main signs of Microsoft are the desktop, Bing, File Explorer and Task Manager.

9 months, 2 weeks

Might Have a DMERT SCSI Disk, Need Help Preserving

by segaloco

Hello everyone, I reach out in my time of need regarding a potential source of DMERT materials. I've recently come into possession of a hard disk unit from a 5ESS switch, presumably the 5ESS-2000 variant, part UN 375G: https://i.imgur.com/yQzY5Hs.jpeg The actual disk itself appears to be a Ultra320 SCSI disk, which I unfortunately do not have the tools to do anything with myself. After looking into various solutions, I'm not getting the warm fuzzies about finding the necessary hardware on my first shot, these sorts of hardware specifics are not my strong suit. The story I got is it is from a working system, so could possibly have artifacts, but at the same time, I've already sunk a little over $1,000 into getting this, I'm hesitant to drop more on hardware I'm not 100% confident is correct for the job. Does anyone have any recommendations, whether a service, hardware, anything, that I could use to try and get at what is on this disk? Even if it's just sending it off to someone along with enough storage for them to make me a dd image of the thing, I just feel so close yet so far on finally figuring out if I've managed to land a copy of DMERT. Thanks in advance for any advice, I'm really hoping that the end of this story is I find DMERT artifacts to get archived and preserved, that would be such a satisfying conclusion to all this 3B20/5ESS study as of late. I wish I had the resources to see the rest through myself but this is getting into an area I have quite a bit of trepidation regarding. What I don't want to do is inadvertently damage something by getting it wrong. - Matt G.

9 months, 2 weeks

who was that unmasked man

by ron minnich

[image: unnamed.png] CCA EMACS? That's a name I have not heard in a long time ... I forgot if I'm not allowed to load images, sorry if I just made a mistake.

9 months, 2 weeks

Interesting post on BSD history (in the comments)

by George Michaelson

Normally I wouldn't cross the beams like this but a comment thread John Nagle posted on this HN story is well written and for me was a great read. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630457

9 months, 2 weeks

Re: Honor declined

by segaloco

On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 3:55 PM, Ken Thompson <kenbob(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 1:45 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote: > > > On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 11:53 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > > > > After Multics, I ran interference to keep our once-burned higher management from frowning too much on further operating-system research. > > > > > > Doug > > > > This alone is an all-too-valuable skill that contributes to the cultural success of countless projects. Great ideas can too often die on the vine when the upper echelons have quite different opinions of where time and effort should be placed, and I am glad that in my own career I likewise work with understanding immediate supervisors and business analysts that go to bat for our needs and concerns. The importance of a supportive workplace culture in which work is genuinely valued and defended cannot be understated. > > > > - Matt G. > > unix was written in c, c was written in b, b was written in tmg,and doug wrote tmg. it is all his fault. > > Ken, your modesty is showing :) I feel the same way about big things I'm working on in my day job. No matter how much folks try to laud me as our architect, nothing I did would exist without what my supervisor years and years ago handed me to start with before he moved on to greener pastures. Invention will always be a group effort, I'm just so glad this particular group effort (re: UNIX) has and continues to have the impact that it does. A former manager (and respected colleague) would often say "I'm rubber, you're glue, what you bounce off me sticks to you." and it took me a little bit to appreciate what I thought he meant, but even longer to realize that saying encompassed the good as well. - Matt G. P.S. Hey Dave, I Bcc'd you, discussions with folks here often remind me of your good advice and management. Hope you're well, would love to hear from you if you see this!

9 months, 3 weeks

Re: SysV* on a PDP-11

by segaloco

Just to bring it full circle, after a bit of discussion it looks like what Henry is working with is the initial System V release for PDP-11/70, not some fabled PDP-11 SVR2, so the documentation I linked as well as some material on squoze.net concerning System V in SimH all apply directly. Subject adjusted accordingly. - Matt G. On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:55 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 at 16:51, segaloco <segaloco(a)protonmail.com> wrote: > >> On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:16 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hello all, >>> >>> I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user. >>> >>> ... >>> >>> I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks! >>> >>> -Henry >> >> First off I didn't know SVR2 made it to the PDP-11, I thought they cut it off after the initial System V release, is what you have AT&T or some derivative version? >> >> Second, this is the setup instructions for DEC processors for the initial release of System V which included the PDP-11/70: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-administrators-guide-5-0/04%20Setti… >> >> Additionally, here is the Operator's Guide which details bootstrapping the system among other things: https://archive.org/details/unix-system-operators-guide-release-5-0/mode/2up >> >> While not SVR2, hopefully the differences are minimal enough that you can use those. Good luck! >> >> Also regarding finding more documentation, sadly AT&T stripped out the /usr/doc materials with System V, so these critical pieces of documentation actually can't be found in a typical system distribution, rather, you had to get the paper copies. I'm not aware of any discovery of TROFF sources for any of this stuff past System III, I do have it on my long-term list to eventually synthesize copies of said documents from available scans so they can be more easily diff'd, but my current focus is much, much earlier. > > Thank you, this is a wonderful starting point. I often forget that sometimes archive.org will have documentation that is not duplicated in other sources, so this is a welcome reminder. I'll read through all of this and report back. > > -Henry

9 months, 3 weeks

SVR2 on a PDP-11

by Henry Bent

Hello all, I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get booting into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user. The root dump boots on a simulated 11/70 with an RP06: -- sim> boot rp #0=unixgdtm UNIX/sysV: unixgdtm real mem = 3145728 bytes avail mem = 3068864 bytes INIT: SINGLE USER MODE -- I'm mostly a BSD person but I'm familiar enough with some later SysV systems. That being said, the initialization procedure here is completely foreign to me. I have cpio files for the entire system and I know in theory how to extract them, but I'm stuck at the basics of creating /usr, setting up /etc and the like. I have a fully extracted filesystem from the cpio files that I can browse but I can't find enough information in the manpages. I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on Bitsavers, and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks! -Henry

9 months, 3 weeks

Honor declined

by Douglas McIlroy

> When Rudd, Doug, Ken, Dennis, *et al* start to develop UNIX Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I was not one of those who "start[ed] to develop it". Doug

9 months, 3 weeks

Re: Honor declined

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> > Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I was not one of > those who "start[ed] to develop it". http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/pipes/ Dennis wrote that "UNIX is a very conservative system. Only a handful of its ideas are genuinely new." (And quite right he was, too!) Among the ones that are new, pipes, although less important now than they used to be, were a major part of the constellation of things that drove its adoption, early on. And I can't see how pushing pipes was not "developing UNIX"! I'm afraid you'll just have to live with it! :-) Noel

9 months, 3 weeks

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