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In memoriam: Dennis Ritchie

by Dave Horsfall

Co-inventor of Unix, we lost him in 2011. -- Dave

6 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] The origin of /home

by Norman Wilson

Dave Horsfall: Before I started using /home (Slowaris had yet to appear), I used /u/* instead (I didn't want to pollute /usr with home directories). === I'm late to the party, but I'll chime in too: The first UNIX system I ever used, ca. 1980, had users' home directories in /u. I suspect it was that way (as suggested in some earlier messages) just for storage management: separate file system from /usr. I've carried /u around with me ever since to other systems I've set up from scratch, except in my home environment where I've made a radical departure: everything that isn't part of the base OS is in a tree rooted at /con, so home directories are /con/u. /con was `constant,' inspired by /var, meaning stuff that should be preserved when the OS is reinstalled--everything else should come from installation media or configuration management. But in any case there's nothing especially novel about moving users' home directories out of /usr, and since it's UNIX, nothing that says there has to be any standard at all. On the systems I am currently paid to help run, most users have home-directory names like /h/u12/c4/00/c4ntest. There is no attempt to glue together a single name hierarchy; we have in excess of 17000 users so that would be something of a mess. (I guess enormous directories aren't the resource pigs they used to be, though symlinks are just as bad as they have ever been.) There's the ~user shell syntax for those who like that; I don't, but I have a little shell script in my personal bin directory so I can do things like ls `home c4ntest`; it all just works. I once thought of writing a paper entitled `/usr and /etc considered harmful,' in which I would have proposed: a. It no longer matters a whit whether the (real) root file system can fit into a 5MB slice of the disk or the like, so just merge everything that spilled into /usr in the tiny-disk days back into the root where it belongs. b. /etc is largely junk. Executables have long since moved into /sbin. Pretty much everything else that's there belongs (according to the original scheme, not the latter-day complications inflicted by those who didn't understand) in /lib. Unfortunately all the quick hacks and poorly-considered tweaks of the past have long since been cast in stone by widespread convention, so it's fruitless to try to clean any of this up. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Software Archeology: QED

by Norman Wilson

Leah Neukirchen: I tried contacting David Tilbrook several times and got no replies. I think some people around Toronto still use qed, but they seem to be very secretive about it. ==== David is likely well-retired by now, but I don't really know. Even though I walk within a block of his house fairly often, we've never really been consistently in touch. But he was responsible for a distinct branch of the qed that originated at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s (same one Rob supplied). Certainly worth tracking down. I don't know your definitions of `people around Toronto' or `secretive.' I still use qed daily; my copy is one I've been carrying around, and occasionally tweaking, since my time at Caltech (where I got it from Rob). I'll send Arnold a copy. I'm really tired both of having to recompile it (and deal with yet another bit of obsolete-C assumption that no previous compiler or C library has shown up) now and then, and with its private variant of regular expressions, so I keep threatening (mainly to myself) to rewrite it in Python, but I have no idea whether I'll ever get around to that. If I do I suspect I'll throw away some of the programmability hooks, which I never use, and perhaps extend it here and there (I really want nesting globals, and they're not that hard to do--I did them in my half-baked personal mail reader, which has an ed-like interface). I don't know offhand of anyone else around Toronto using my branch of qed. I do know of a couple of friends in California, one who left Caltech before I did but is now back there, another elsewhere in Los Angeles, who still use my version at least occasionally. It wouldn't surprise me if there were people around Toronto who use Tilbrook's branch, since it was part of his qef toolkit and he introduced several companies to it when consulting for them; but I don't know of any specifics. None of which is as archaeologically interesting as the non-UNIX qeds, of course. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 3 months

Cellular Irix

by Kevin Bowling

https://cug.org/5-publications/proceedings_attendee_lists/1998CD/S98PROC/AU… anyone know more about this? Seems like they were thinking about the interesting problems at the time Regards, Kevin

6 years, 3 months

The origin of /home

by Cág

Hi, The earliest I've found to be in the FHS from '94. Are there any earlier examples of a home directory being at /home instead of /usr/$(user)? Are there any current Unix systems that don't use /home by default (except OSX)? Does anybody here do it intentionally? Also, what was the rationale of moving the directory to /home? Thanks! -- caóc

6 years, 3 months

Unix source code archive in the news

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

I've just finished reading another article in the latest print issue of Communications of the ACM that arrived in my mailbox earlier this week: Jean-Fran{\c{c}}ois Abramatic, Roberto Di Cosmo, and Stefano Zacchiroli Viewpoint: Building the universal archive of source code Comm. ACM 61(20) 29--31 October 2018 https://doi.org/10.1145/3183558 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3281635.3183558 I draw it to your attention to it because it has favorable mention of the Computer History Museum, and of Diomidis Spinellis's work on the Unix source code archive, described in his article A repository of Unix history and evolution Empirical Software Engineering 22(3) 1372--1404 June 2017 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9445-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-016-9445-5 The project that Abramatic describe is impressive: a goal of a triplicated complete archive of the world's software history, including both open source and proprietary code. They report holding 200TB of data already, covering 80 million code projects. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6 years, 3 months

QED editor - thanks!

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Thanks to everyone who replied with tarballs, zip files, pointers to stuff in the archive, web links ... I will try (eventually) to thank everyone individually as well, but in the meantime please accept this broadcast. :-) This has now become Yet Another Back Burner Project; I hope putting things together into a reasonable github repo (or two) will happen without too much of a delay. This is a great group of people! Thanks, Arnold

6 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix source code archive in the news

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: jsteve > I'd say TripOS. There is some surce fragments but I never could get any > BCPL to cross build anything. I'm somewhat stunned to hear that, given that Martin Richards did both! What kind of things are the compilers complaining about? (And I'm also kind of amazed that Cambridge didn't make an effort to save Tripos.) Noel

6 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Software Archeology: QED

by Jeffrey H. Johnson

Might as well send this to the list: There are Multics QEDX sources, but I haven't run across QED - however, there is an overview of it's use and commands in the General Electric June 1969 Multics Condensed Guide (http://bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condensed-g…) I pulled the QEDX source at put it at https://ban.ai/~jhj/misc/qedx/ for easy access - this is the MR12.5 version and last modified in 1989, sadly, I don't ever recall seeing the BCPL QED. [ I'll be sure to remember now if I see it. ] [ Somewhat off-topic ] How about Yale 'Z' as long as we're talking editors? Or another editor (that I very much like) is the 'G' editor, which has a long history, originating on Honeywell 6000 GCOS/TSS, originally written in B: https://github.com/ascheepe/g-editor - works nicely today. There is also the Ecce editor, which includes versions in IMP, BASIC, C, BCPL, and FORTRAN at http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/apps/ecce/ - bringing Ecce up on Multics is an item on my todo list. -- Jeff - https://ban.ai/multics/

6 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix source code archive in the news

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" > a goal of a triplicated complete archive of the world's software > history, including both open source and proprietary code. They report > holding 200TB of data already, covering 80 million code projects. I should ask them if they have a copy of MERT! Now that we have Multics, ITS, PDP-7 UNIX and UNIX V0, etc MERT (which may have been the first micro-kernel - although perhaps THE gets that palm) is perhaps the most significant 'missing' OS. If not, what am I missing? The Berkeley Genie OS for the SDS? (Dunno if that's been saved.) The THE system? (Ditto - although I know someone has saved the last X8.) The Atlas OS? Noel

6 years, 3 months

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