TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6532 discussions

by Doug McIlroy

> Joe sold the (not really existent) UNIX system to the patent department of AT&T, > which in turn bought the urgently needed PDP11. Without that there would be no > UNIX. Without Joe there would be no UNIX. That one's an urban legend. The PDP-11 was indeed a gift from another department, thanks to a year-end budget surplus. Unix was up and running on that machine when Joe corralled the patent department. Nevertheless the story is consistent with Joe's talent for playing (or skirting) the system to get things done. After Joe, the talent resurfaced in the person of Fred Grampp. Lots of tales await Grampp's popping up from Dave Horsford's calendar. > 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." Morris did one port and called it roff. I did the BCPL one, adding registers, but not macros. Molly Wagner contributed a hyphenation algorithm. Ken and/or Dennis redid roff in PDP-11 assembler. Joe started afresh for the grander nroff, including macros. Then Joe bought a phototypesetter ... > Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the time ... I wanted to go there and had > to work at it a bit but I got there. Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that? Yes, in desirability. But Bell Labs had far more diverse interests. Telephones, theoretical physics, submarine cables, music, speech, fiber optics, Apollo. Wahtever you wanted to know or work on, you were likely to find kindred types and willing management. > was that voice synthesizer a votrax or some other thing? Yes. Credit Joe again. He had a penchant for hooking up novel equipment. When the Votrax arrived, its output was made accessible by phone and also by loudspeaker in the Unix lab. You had to feed it a stream of ASCII- encoded phonemes. Lee McMahon promptly became adept at writing them down. After a couple of days' play in the lab, Lee was working in his office with the Votrax on speakerphone in the background. Giving no notice, he typed the phonemes for "It sounds better over the telephone". Everyone in the lab heard it clearly--our own "Watson, come here" moment. But phonemes are tedious. Believing that it could ease the task of phonetic transcription, I wrote a phonics program, "speak", through which you could feed English text for conversion to phonemes. At speak's inaugural run, Bob Morris typed one word, "oarlock", and pronounced the program a success. Luckily he didn't try "coworker", which the program would have rendered as "cow orker". Max Matthews from acoustics research called it a breakthrough. The acoustics folks could synthesize much better speech, but it took minutes of computing to synthesize seconds of sounds. So the Unix lab heard more synthetic speech in a few days than the experts had created over all time. One thing we learned is that people quickly get used to poor synthetic speech just like they get used to foreign accents. In fact, non-native speakers opined that the Votrax was easier to understand than real people, probably due to the bit of silence that the speak program inserted between words to help with mental segmentation. One evening someone in the Unix room playing with the synthesizer noticed a night janitor listening in from the corridor. In a questionable abuse of a non-exempt employee, the Unix person typed, "Stop hanging around around and get back to work." The poor janitor fled. AT&T installed speak for the public to play with at Epcot. Worried that folks would enter bad words that everybody standing around could hear, they asked if I could filter them out. Sure, I said, just provide me with a list of what to delete. Duly, I received on letterhead from the VP for public relations a list of perhaps twenty bad words. (I have always wondered about the politics of asking a secretary to type that letter.) It was reported that girls would try the machine on people's names, while boys would discover that the machine "didn't know" bad words (though it would happily pronounce phonetic misspellings). Alas, I mistakenly discarded the infamous letter in cleaning house to leave Bell Labs. Doug

6 years, 7 months

In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna

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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 months

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