Rob:
I rewrote cat to use just read and write, as
nature intended. I don't recall if my version is in any of v8 v9 v10 ...
====
It is. It was /bin/cat when I arrived at Murray Hill in 1984.
I remember being delighted with the elegant way to get rid of
a flag I had never really liked either.
I never knew Dennis had dragged his heels at it. It was (to me)
so obviously the right answer that I never asked!
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
really appreciate videos of talks like this as someone who wasn't lucky
enough to be around to experience this in person but benefits from the
things your generation built for us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs&feature=youtu.be
thanks rob!
-pete
--
Pete Wright
pete(a)nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA
All, for a while now there have been some weird multi-hour long delays
between e-mail arriving at TUHS and being forwarded on. I've just removed
a pile of queued messages which I think were causing mailman to have
palpitations. If you posted something on TUHS in the last few hours,
could you re-send it. Apologies for this.
Thanks, Warren
> SunOS 4 definitely had YP.
SunOS 2.0 had YP.
-- Richard
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> My favorite anecdote that I've read regarding Belle was when Ken
> Thompson took it out of the country for a competition. Someone,
> I'm assuming with customs, asked him if Belle could be
> classified as munitions in any way. He replied, "Only if you
> drop it out the window."
That's not the half of it. Ken had been invited by Botvinnik,
a past world champion, to demonstrate Belle in Russia. Customs
spotted it in baggage and impounded it without Ken's knowledge.
When he arrived empty-handed in Moscow, his hosts abandoned
him to his own devices.
Late that fateful Friday afteroon, customs called Bell Labs
security, which in turn called Ken's department head--me. That
evening I called Bill Baker, the Labs' presi7, at home,
hoping he might use his high-level Washington connections
to spring Belle. No luck. Ken was in the dark about the whole
affair until Joe Condon managed to reach him at his hotel.
Customs kept the machine a month and released it only after the
Labs agreed to pay a modest fine. I believe Ken's remark about
the military potential of Belle was made in reply to a reporter.
Doug
I was wondering, what was the /crp mount point in early UNIX used for?
And what does "crp" mean? Does it mean what I think it does?
It is only mentioned in V3 it seems:
./v4man/manx/unspk.8:unspk lives in /crp/vs (v4/manx means pre-v4)
./v3man/man6/yacc.6:SYNOPSIS /crp/scj/yacc [ <grammar ]
./v3man/man4/rk.4:/dev/rk3 /crp file system
I suppose scj, doug or ken can help out.
aap
Peter Adams, who photographed many Unix folks for his
"Faces of open source" series (http://facesofopensource.com/)
found trinkets from the Unix lab in the Bell Labs archives:
http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/unix-folklore/.
One item is more than a trinket. Belle, built by
Ken Thompson and Joe Condon, won the world computer
chess championship in 1980 and became the first
machine to gain a chess master rating. Physically,
it's about a two-foot cube.
Doug
Spurred by the recent discussion of NIS, NIS+, LDAP et al, I'm curious what
the landscape was like for distributing administrative information in early
Unix networks.
Specifically I'm thinking about things like the Newcastle Connection, etc.
I imagine that PDP-11's connected to the ARPAnet running Unix would (e.g.,
RFC 681 style) would have adapted the HOSTS.TXT format somehow. What about
CHAOS? Newcastle? Datakit?
What was the introduction of DNS into the mix like? I can imagine that that
changed all sorts of assumptions about failure modes and the like.
NIS and playing around with Hesiod are probably the earliest such things I
ever saw, but I know there must have been prior art.
Supposedly field 5 from /etc/passwd is the GECOS username for remote job
entry (or printing)? How did that work?
- Dan C.
