TUHS

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6418 discussions

by Warren Toomey

We do have ken on the list, so I won't be presumptious to ask for ken-related anecdotes, but would anybody like to share some dmr anecdotes? I never met Dennis in person, but he was generous with his time about my interest in Unix history; and also with sharing the material he still had. Dennis was very clever, though. He would bring out a new artifact and say: well, here's what I still have of X. Pity it will never execute again, sigh. I'm sure he knew that I would take that as a challenge. Mind you, it worked, which is why we now have the first Unix kernel in C, the 'nsys' kernel, and the first two C compilers, in executable format. Any other good anecdotes? Cheers, Warren

6 years, 6 months

Happy birthday, Maurice Wilkes!

by Dave Horsfall

As I continue to push the boundaries of subjective topicism, I'd like to mention that today was when Sir Maurice Wilkes FRS FReng was born way back in 1913. He had a bit to do with EDSAC, microprogramming, and that sort of thing. And dmmmit, I missed Alan Turing's birthday last Saturday (23rd June, 1912), and Komrad Zuse's back in 22nd June, 1910, along with the Qwerty keyboard being patented by one Christopher Sholes back in 1868 (long story). -- Dave

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Any Good dmr Anecdotes?

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. Kudos to Warren for helping me track down the original USENET postings that make up a fun DMR story. In October of 1985, a guy from Teklabs posted a long rant against both Unix and the people at USENIX conferences. The original rant is available here (thanks Warren!): > https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.org.usenix/1985-October/000163.html > and in this text file: > https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.org.usenix/1985-October.txt.gz Dennis replied - the relevant part of what he was replying to is in his message available here: > https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.unix/1985-October/005952.html Here is the full text of Dennis's note: | Groupies | | dmr at dutoit.UUCP dmr at dutoit.UUCP | Wed Oct 9 15:30:04 AEST 1985 | |------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | tekadg!davidl writes, at considerable length and with widespread distribution: | | > ... Socially, Usenix is like a | > spherical glob, with a handful of original software authors at the center (the | > ones who wrote the original code, like the developers of Unix, C, etc. - the | > ones whose names are always being bandied about). Around these, there's a | > surrounding shell of what has been aptly called "Unix groupies" trying to | > associate themselves, both logically and physically, with the "illuminati" | > at the center. Typically, these loathsome little insects are system | > administrators and hackers who spend their time either on the net or | > endlessly rewriting UUCP or NROFF or, or, or... And, I'm told, there are | > even some real, honest-to-goodness groupies (of the rock-star variety) who | > spend their time trying get near the "inner circle" for - never mind... | > it's believable, though - it's certainly consistent with the demeanor of | > the rest of the proceedings. | | Usenix conventions, which are undeniably and appropriately narrow-minded | and introverted, sport more than a few bores, but are notable for absence | of loathsome insects. Even the irascible Rob Pike remarked after Portland, | "Goodness, there were very few loathesome insects there." | | They are also marked by a lack of honest-to-goodness rock-star-variety | groupies. Believe me on this. The free cocaine was nowhere in evidence, | I consumed no cigar-sized hash bombers, the insistent, complaisant | lovelies were elsewhere by the time I got back from dinner. Indeed, the | plaster of Paris I had obtained in case anyone wanted a cast of my genitals | went entirely unused. | | Still, I understand the party that AT&T threw in Washington | was pretty wild. Too bad I missed it. | | DMR All this was in October 1985. At the Atlanta USENIX in the summer of 1986, there was some kind of contest (I don't remember what) and they announced (undoubtedly as a joke) that one of the prizes was "a plaster cast of Dennis Ritchie's genitals." It got a good laugh. Arnold

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] ATT Hardware

by Norman Wilson

Ron Natalie: My favorite 3B2ism was that the power switch was soft (uncommon then, not so much now). I seem to recall that if the logged in user wasn't in a particular group, pushing the power button was a no-op. You didn't have sufficient privs to operate the power. ==== Surely you mean the current user didn't have sufficent power. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Any Good dmr Anecdotes?

by Paul Ruizendaal

Not quite a dmr anecdote, but maybe this list can clear up a statement that dmr reputedly made: “streams means something different when shouted”. I think the claim goes back to around the turn of the millennium and as far as I know it is not disputed that dmr either said this or could have said this. Now, from reading this list over the years my understanding of the above statement is that dmr designed streams as a mechanism to clean up the kernel handling of line disciplines in a context of access via a terminal and/or modem, and that STREAMS developed this into a way to integrate network stacks with the kernel — hence streams meant something different when shouted. The original dmr paper (1984) on streams (http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/st.html) seemed to support this understanding, focussing on terminal handling in its discussion. Also, near the end it says: "Streams are linear connections; by themselves, they support no notion of multiplexing, fan-in or fan-out. [...] It seems likely that a general multiplexing mechanism could help in both cases, but again, I do not yet know how to design it.” This seemed to exclude usage for networking, which is typically multiplexed. However, now that the V8 sources are available it is clear that the streams mechanism was used (by dmr?) to implement TCP/IP networking. He explains how that tallies with the above quote on multiplexing in a 1985 usenet post: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/net.unix-wizards/subject$3A… (if the post by dmr does not immediately appear, click on the 8-10-85 post by 'd...(a)dutoit.xn--uucp-y96a to make it fold out: this is the message I refer to). The way I read this usenet post, dmr was actually reasonably content with implementing a network stack on top of (lowercase) streams. This then implies that he was alluding to something else when saying “streams means something different when shouted” (or maybe he never said it). Any opinions on what he might have meant?

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] AT&T Hardware

by Doug McIlroy

Anent 3B's: Last time I visited Paul Allen's Living Computer Museum the only working Unix on display was running on a 3B2. Apparently the machine was robust if nothing else. doug

6 years, 6 months

Horrific AT&T Hardware

by Lyndon Nerenberg

I'm not sure if I should ask this, but here goes ... Have any of you had the misfortune of dealing with that wonder that was the 3B4000? --lyndon

6 years, 6 months

A New Mail List for TUHS chat

by Warren Toomey

All, I've removed the moderation on the TUHS list. Given that you would like to chat about non-TUHS stuff, I've made a new list: coff(a)tuhs.org E-mail me if you want to subscribe. I'll be in the road until the weekend but I will process requests daily. Cheers! Warren

6 years, 6 months

Rivers, the ragged right, and BCPL roff (was: Spooky action at a distance in line adjustment...sometimes)

by Doug McIlroy

> I was poking around on the Unix v7 man page archive the other day, and > discovered to my delight that BCPL roff's request list was documented > there. Yes, it's the same spec, though reimplementated; there was no BCPL compiler for the PDP-11. > Unfortunately, it was marked up in...BCPL roff embedded within > a man page, which hopelessly confused groff. I edited the v7 manual and I believe I proofread every man page. How could I have overlooked the misbehavior of the .li request*, which was even then not in the reference manual's list of n/troff requests? On closer examination, .li does appear in a condensed alphabetical list of requests--and it appears in the source. But if Joe never described it, it's no surprise that groff dropped it. It is totally unnecessary--a bit of special pleading rendered obsolete by Joe's elegant invention of \&. doug * .li causes the next line to be read literally, even if it begins with a dot.

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Any Good dmr Anecdotes?

by Norman Wilson

Greg Lehey: No, that was Peter Weinberger, as dmr confirmed. There's quite a story behind what happened to the stencil. I'll let Warren tell it, but if you want to cheat, check http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-oct2002.php#17 ==== There are many stories behind the use and abuse of Peter's face. The canonical source is http://spinroot.com/pico/pjw.html spinroot.com belongs to Gerard Holzman, who was involved with many creative uses of digitized photography during my time at the Labs. (Also much work on software reliability, which he now pursues at JPL.) The org chart with every face replaced by Peter's was on the wall of the UNIX Room when I first visited 1127 in February 1984. I suspect it appeared not long after Peter became a department head, but I don't know just when that was. Peter didn't really take the alleged glory of being a department head all that seriously, just the responsibilities. One of the official glories was that Department Heads were supposed to get carpet in their offices, atop the standard linoleum tiles. Peter didn't want it, and (as he told me the story later) had to argue with Facilities a lot not to get it. Somehow this resulted in a trophy: a small square of carpet stuck to the wall outside his office. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 6 months

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