TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6418 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Running 4.3 BSD on x86 hardware? Suggestions?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Noel Chiappa > I'll update the page as well. I have to do it since, after severe issues with spam, a login is required to make changes. If anyone is interested in adding content (please, we need more in just about every area - I've done a lot of PDP-11's, but that's a fairly small corner overall :-), please drop me a short line, and I'll set you up (just let me know the account name you want, and what email address to associate with it). > From: William Pechter > Just a plug for the 4.3+University of Wisconsin version on Simh. I don't think I see that in the TUHS repository that Clem just pointed to? Got a URL? Any chance I can convince you to add a bit of content about it? :-) Noel

6 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Running 4.3 BSD on x86 hardware? Suggestions?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rares Aioanei > gunkies.org works. The URL for getting the sets doesn't Ah, OK. Link-rot; sigh. The bane of the Web! If someone can provide a working alternative for you to use, I'll update the page as well. Noel

6 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Running 4.3 BSD on x86 hardware? Suggestions?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rares Aioanei > Link doesn't seem to work, I get "Connection reset". Which link - the gunkies.org (Computer History Wiki) one? It's working for me at the moment. Does your browser accepts non-HTTPS URLs? (There's apparently a craze on to denigrate them at the moment.) Noel

6 years, 4 months

C++ / Kernel

by ron＠ronnatalie.com

> Has anyone experimented with building Unix using C++, to take > advantage of strong typing? My guess is no--it would be a Herculean task likely to introduce more bugs than it would fix. I'm not sure what "strong typing" gain you expect to find. With the exception of the void* difference, C++ isn't much more "type strong" than C. A lot of the type issues you can find on the Kernel just by turning up the compiler warnings (or use lint). The biggest issue we had was BSD didn't use void* at all. Had they converted pointers to void*, which is in implementation necessarily the same as char*, C would have done the right thing. The problem is they did what I call "Conversion by union." They would store a char* into one element of a union and read it out of another typed pointer. This works fine for a VAX where all pointers are the same format, but fails on word address machines (notably in our case the HEP where the target size is encoded in the low order bits of the pointer). Still, running around and fixing those was only a few hours work. The DevSwitch is the beginnings of an object oriented philosophy. Alas, the original UNIX used it only for mapping major dev numbers to functions. It got some later use for other things like multi filesystemsupport. The scary supportability thing in the kernel, isn't so much typing, but the failuer to "hide" implementation details of one part of the kernel from the other.

6 years, 4 months

Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

by Norman Wilson

Seth Morabito: After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong. ===== I never heard of anyone doing such a thing. Had they ported the kernel I would almost certainly have heard about it, because they'd have asked me a question or two. Much VAX-specific structure inside there that I'd love to have had the time and energy to clean up. It's possible that someone did a semi-port, moving a lot of the user-mode tools like the shell and the Jerq software. Dave Kapilow did something like that for early SunOS, including a mux-like X11 terminal program called sux, built atop a library that did a simple mapping from Jerq graphics-library calls to X11. Certainly nobody inside 1127 ever did either of those things. A few of us played with 3B1 or 3B2 systems (I remember Tom Duff had a 3B1 at home at one point), but never very seriously. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] changes in C compilers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Looking at the v6 distribution tape I have, the assembler versions of > roff and nroff was there Whoa! The standard V6 distribution tape, as in the one there are a couple of copies of in the repository, does not have that. Do you have that in machine-readable form? If so, can you get it to Mr. Toomey ASAP? > The order I remember is this ... V5, V6, Patches, Typesetter C, TS, V7 Where do USG and PWB fit into that? The repository has PWB (or, what is _claimed_ to be PWB), which is how I know the MIT system is PWB. But there is nothing of the others (except the kernel manual for USG, which shows that the version described in it is basically V6). If anyone has TS in _any_ form (including hardcopy listings, please speak up! Those 'early' PDP-11 versions are very poorly documented now, and I'd love to get more on them. Noel

6 years, 4 months

changes in C compilers

by arnold＠skeeve.com

My two cents, ... > From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> > Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 20:30:19 -0400 > To: ron(a)ronnatalie.com > Subject: Re: [TUHS] C++ / Kernel > > Yep. Im pretty sure I remember void being in typesetter C also. IIRC the > differences between that version of Dennis???s compiler and what was included > in 7th Edition was mostly in the libraries ie stdio was first released as > part of the typesetter compiler but it was still a work in progress. K&R 1 did not have void or structure assignment. Those came later, although I'm not sure when. They may have been mentioned in an appendix; my copy isn't handy to check. At what point did each struct become its own namespace? I think around the time of K&R1. > From: Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> > Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 22:52:24 -0400 > To: Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > Subject: Re: [TUHS] C++ / Kernel > > ... > > The big changes to the language were between 6th Edition and Typesetter > which were done in concert if not to support Brian???s work on the troff > rewrite. Plus the first draft of book was being written around then also. The troff rewrite was later, circa '81 or so. Definitely NOT in the V6/V7 timeframe. Arnold

6 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] changes in C compilers (Typesetter C)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jaap Akkerhuis > I've been told that when troff was rewritten from assembler to C Was TROFF ever in assembler? I'm pretty sure NROFF was, as of V6; the source is not in the V6 distro, and the binary is stripped, but looking at the object code, it doesn't look like C compiler output. As of the PWB system that MIT had (or maybe it was TS - how can one tell the difference, does anyone know?), NROFF and TROFF were generated from the same C source (which I have, if anyone wants to look at it). > the compiler needed some rework and thus typesetter C was born. I heard he needed features (e.g. longs and unsigned), but... looking at the N/TROFF source, there are _no_ 'unsigned's, and only a handful of 'long' variables! There also don't seem to be any bit fields, typedefs, etc. There is _one_ initialized structure (array of structures, to be precise). (Although there are a lot of places were an int is initialized with a double-character constant!) About the only features in "C Changes" that it uses are i) register types on arguments, and the 'static' storage class. So now I'm wondering about that meme... Noel

6 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Details and Dates (was C++ / Kernel)

by Clem Cole

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 10:02 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > It's my subjective impression, based largely on what I read here on TUHS, > that there was quite a lot of activity and cross-pollination in and out of > Bell Labs at the time, so I'm not surprised that the details here are fuzzy. > Amen - The Ritchie compiler in particular, as well as the Research Kernel and BSD releases are examples a continuous development and express specific points in time. The *people and thus knowledge were fluid* (*a.k.a.* 'open source ;-) and features within the system followed the people. The reasons, order and local politics for many things are sometimes forgotten. Different actions feed back and forth and things get cloudy in the history. For instance, while people give BSD credit for the Unix networking because it was widely released with BSD 4.2 and 4.3 as the vehicle, it was actually BBN did the original IP and TCP stack that Eric Cooper added to 4.1 and Joy would eventually create sockets in 4.1A. All of MIT with ChaosNet, UofI and Rand's work on the ArpaNet NCP predates that work and was used by BBN -- as did the 3Com UNET code for V7, much less things like Rashid's Accent work, Mike Malcom and Cheridon's Thoth and later V Kernel. This is why I try to use other information that we can precisely date, as well as constants like trying code on old V7 releases like Dan just did. To me 'other information' is like when some of us matriculated at which schools or moved jobs, *i.e.* when Ted show up at CMU for his original OYOC year, Noel's time in Tech Sq, me at CMU or UCB, the summer the V6 patch tape 'accidentally' found its way to the Arpanet community can be dated by Ken's trip to California/visit to see Chesson who was finishing up at UofI ; or big outside actions like the need to support to big unmovable (and thus otherwise datable) items such as the APS5 or addition of the Vax VM support at UCB , dvk and my going on strike to force CMU to get a commercial Unix license summer of '78, when UCB got its own C70 IMP instead of the VDHI to LBL for Ing70; *etc* . Dates of different USENIX conferences, which were were a lot of ideas (and code) moved back and forth. Clem

6 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] C++ / Kernel

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Ron Natalie > The BSD kernel looks as if it requires such a later compiler (it uses > bit fields which the earlier compilers didn't support). Umm, minor nit: bit fields were added to/as of 'Typesetter C', which I gather was intermediate between V6 and V7. Noel

6 years, 4 months

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