TUHS

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6471 discussions

by Dave Horsfall

We lost J.F. Ossanna on this day in 1977; he had a hand in developing Unix, and was responsible for "roff" and its descendants. Remember him, the next time you see "jfo" in Unix documentation. -- Dave

6 years, 4 months

Chaosnet for 4.1BSD

by Lars Brinkhoff

Hello, For your information (and to reduce my guilt for posting off topic sometimes), I have 4.1BSD running with Chaosnet patches from MIT. I'm adding a Unibus CH11 network interface to SIMH. It's not working fully yet, but it's close. Best regards, Lars Brinkhoff

6 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > (*) I know that nroff was "new run off" and it came from somewhere, MIT? > Some old system ... I've never seen docs for the previous system and I > kinda think Joe took it to the next level. Definitely! The original 'runoff' was on CTSS, written by Jerry Saltzer. It had a companion program, 'typset', which was an editor for preparing runoff input. A memo describing them is available here: http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/ctss/AH.9.01.html >From the look of things, it didn't have any macro capability. Runoff was moved to Multics fairly early: here's its entry from the Multics glossary: A Multics BCPL version of runoff was written by Doug McIlroy and Bob Morris. A version of runoff in PL/I was written by Dennis Capps in 1974. ... Multics documentation was transitioned from the Flexowriters to use of runoff when the system became self-hosting about 1968. runoff was used for manuals, release bulletins, internal memos and other documentation for most of the 70s. To support this use, Multics runoff had many features such as multi-pass execution and variable definition and expansion that went far beyond the CTSS version. Multics manuals were formatted with complex macros, included by the document source, that handled tables of contents and standard formatting, and supported the single sourcing of the commands manual and the info files for commands. So the BCPL version would have been before Bell exited the project. I'm not sure if the 'macros' comment refers to the BCPL version, or the PL/I. Here's the Multics 'info' segment about runoff: http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/doc/info_segments/runoff.… which doesn't mention macros, but lists a few things that might be used for macros. It refers to "the runoff command in the MPM Commands" volume (a reference to "Multics Programmer's manual: Commands and Active Functions") for details; this is available on bitsavers, see page 3-619 in "AG92-03A", February 1980 edition. Noel

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > Emacs is very much divorced from the Unix philosopy. However, it's > perfectly in synch with how things are done in ITS. Hmm. It is complicated, but... the vast majority of my keystrokes are typed into Epsilon (a wonderful, small, fast EMACS-type editor for Windows, etc which one can customize in C) - especially since I started, very early on (V6) to run my shell in an EMACS window, so I could edit commands, and thus I was pretty much always typing to EMACS. So, it makes sense to me to have it be powerful - albeit potentially a bit complex. I say 'potentially' because one could after all restrict oneself to the 4 basic motion commands, and 'delete character'; you don't have to learn what CRTL-ALT-SHIFT-Q does. > Stallman .. developing GNU Emacs (from Gosling's version) Err, I'm not sure how much influence Gosling's was. He had, after all, done the original EMACS on ITS; I got the impression he just set off on his own path to do GNU Emacs. (Why else would it be implemented in LISP? :-). Noel

6 years, 5 months

C game

by Caipenghui

Hello, everyone: Recommend a few c language to write on the computer that do not have a network, best can compile to run with GCC. This will kill my time. I like to play with greedy snake written in c language, which is really interesting. Thank you very much! Caipenghui Nov 17, 2018

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Actually I blame the VAX and larger address spaces for much of that and > no enough real teaching of what I refer to as 'good taste.' When you > had to think about keeping it small and decomposable, you did. ... > Truth is, it is a tough call, learning when 'good enough' is all you > need. ... The argument of course is - "well look how well it works and I > can do this X" -- sorry not good enough. Exactly; the bloat in the later Unix versions killed what I feel was the _single best thing_ about early Unix - which was its awesome, un-matched bang/buck ratio. _That_ is what made me such a huge fan of Unix, even though as an operating system person, I was, and remain, a big fan of Multics (maybe the only person in the world who really likes both :-), which I still think was a better long-term path for OSes (long discussion of why elided to keep this short). I mean, as an operating system, I don't find Unix that memorable; it's (until recently) a monolithic kernel, with all that entails. Doing networking work on it was a total PITA! When I looked across as what Dave Clark was able to do on Multics, with its single-level memory, and layered OS, doing TCP/IP, I was sky-blue pink with envy. Noel

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 36, Issue 21

by Steve Simon

re: learning unix i started using Mike Lesk’s learn(1). -Steve

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] man-page style

by Doug McIlroy

Sorry about the recent post. It may seem peripherally connected to tuhs, but it got there due to overtrained fingers (or overaged mind). It was intended for another list. Doug

6 years, 5 months

Request for the story: Unix on the Cray 1 at Bell Labs

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs&feature=youtu.be Rob Pike mentions that DMR and Norman Wilson ported Unix to the Cray 1 and that it was not straightforward. This sounds interesting. Norman: would you be kind enough to elaborate on this? Thanks, Arnold

6 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Article on the history of cat(1)

by Dave Horsfall

On Wed, 14 Nov 2018, Warren Toomey wrote: >> Hell, I wish I still had that "CSU Tape"; it was Edition 6 with as much >> of Edition 7 (and AUSAM) that I could shoe-horn in, such as XON/XOFF >> for the TTY driver. I was known as "Mr Unix 6-1/2" at the time... > > Definitely look at the UNSW tapes I have: > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM > and https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UNSW/ > in case any of these are what you are looking for. I think I did before, but I confess I didn't spend much time on it. My pride and joy was certainly the rewritten ei.c driver (implementing the 200-UT batch protocol), and the clever workaround to an egregious KRONOS bug where it would get stuck in a POLL/REJECT loop (I merely sent a dummy command viz "Q,I" -- discarding the response -- because KRONOS was expecting a command instead of the correct REJECT being nothing to send from the batch emulator). At the time, Unix got blamed because the smaller non-Unix /40s (running a standalone program) worked fine for some reason; my guess is that it implemented the broken protocol somehow. -- Dave

6 years, 5 months

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