TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

34 participants
6418 discussions

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> But don't forget Clarke's Third Law! Ooops. Read my Web search results wrong. (Should have taken the time to click through, sigh.) Meant 'Clarke's First Law'. Noel

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > This is a really poor place for a younger person to come in and make > loud points, that is frowned upon. It's a fantastic place for a younger > person to come in and learn. But don't forget Clarke's Third Law! And maybe you can remember what it's like when you're young... :-) But Ted does have a point. 'Distributed' != 'parallel'. Noel

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > the MTA part is not there That system was using the MMDF MTA: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/mmdf written by David Crocker while he was at UDel (under Farber). Noel

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] core

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

The discussion of the last few days about the Colossus is getting somewhat off-topic for Unix heritage and history, but perhaps this list of titles (truncated to 80 characters) and locations may be of interest to some TUHS list readers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Papers and book chapters about the Colossus at Bletchley Park Journal- and subject specific Bibliography files are found at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/NAME.bib and author-specific ones under http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/N/ where N is the first letter of the bibliography filename. The first line in each group contains the bibliography filename, and the citation label of the cited publication. DOIs are supplied whenever they are available. Paragraphs are sorted by filename. adabooks.bib Randell:1976:C The COLOSSUS annhistcomput.bib Good:1979:EWC Early Work on Computers at Bletchley https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1979.10011 annhistcomput.bib deLeeuw:2007:HIS Tunny and Colossus: breaking the Lorenz Schl{\"u}sselzusatz traffic https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978044451608450016X babbage-charles.bib Randell:1976:C The COLOSSUS cacm2010.bib Anderson:2013:MNF Max Newman: forgotten man of early British computing https://doi.org/10.1145/2447976.2447986 computer1990.bib Anonymous:1996:UWI Update: WW II Colossus computer is restored to operation cryptography.bib Good:1979:EWC Early Work on Computers at Bletchley cryptography1990.bib Anonymous:1997:CBP The Colossus of Bletchley Park, IEEE Rev., vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 55--59 [Book Revi https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1997.560758 cryptography2000.bib Rojas:2000:FCH The first computers: history and architectures cryptography2010.bib Copeland:2010:CBG Colossus: Breaking the German `Tunny' Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated His cryptologia.bib Michie:2002:CBW Colossus and the Breaking of the Wartime ``Fish'' Codes debroglie-louis.bib Homberger:1970:CMN The Cambridge mind: ninety years of the booktitle Cambridge Review, 1879--1969 dijkstra-edsger-w.bib Randell:1980:C The COLOSSUS dyson-freeman-j.bib Brockman:2015:WTA What to think about machines that think: today's leading thinkers on the age of fparith.bib Randell:1977:CGC Colossus: Godfather of the Computer ieeeannhistcomput.bib Anonymous:1997:CBP The Colossus of Bletchley Park, IEEE Rev., vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 55--59 [Book Revi https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1997.560758 lncs1997b.bib Carter:1997:BLC The Breaking of the Lorenz Cipher: An Introduction to the Theory behind the Oper lncs2000.bib Sale:2000:CGL Colossus and the German Lorenz Cipher --- Code Breaking in WW II master.bib Randell:1977:CGC Colossus: Godfather of the Computer mathcw.bib Randell:1982:ODC The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61812-3 rutherford-ernest.bib Homberger:1970:CMN The Cambridge mind: ninety years of the booktitle Cambridge Review, 1879--1969 rutherfordj.bib Copeland:2010:CBG Colossus: Breaking the German `Tunny' Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated His sigcse1990.bib Plimmer:1998:MIW Machines invented for WW II code breaking https://doi.org/10.1145/306286.306309 turing-alan-mathison.bib Randell:1976:C The COLOSSUS von-neumann-john.bib Randell:1982:ODC The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

by Johnny Billquist

On 2018-06-22 20:01, Clem Cole<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > One of the other BI people, who's name now escapes me, although I can see > his face in my mind, maybe I'll think of it later), would go on to do the > PCI for Alpha a couple of years later. As I said, DEC did manage to get > that one public, after the BI was made private as Erik points out. Clem, I think I saw you say something similar in an earlier post. To me it sounds as if you are saying that DEC did/designed PCI. Are you sure about that? As far as I know, PCI was designed and created by Intel, and the first users were just plain PC machines. Alpha did eventually also get PCI, but it was not where it started, and DEC had no control at all about PCI being public. Might you have been thinking of Turbobus, Futurebus, or some other thing that DEC did? Or do you have some more information about DEC being the creator of PCI? Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

6 years, 6 months

Masscomp Engineering Mailing List, Custom Products Engineering and the Manatee

by Clem Cole

Semi-Unix History.... Dave's "this date in history stuff" has reminded me of a great Masscomp story that really needs to be written down and not lost to Unix history. I'm hoping Warren can forgive me a little as the Unix history is the Masscomp part and people involved; but I think it is fun and should be more widely known. Some of you may know who Jack Burness is (and even be part of his humor mailing list - which is one of the most amazing who-is-who of the industry). Jack is probably most infamous for his being the author of RT-11 Moonlander <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre)>. Some of his stunts over his career are legends, as our old friend and colleague Mike Leibensperger once said, I want to be like Jack, when he grows up (at ~70, I can assure you that he still has not). After Jack left DEC, he became the original one man Masscomp Graphics group. While the year really does not matter, at some point, Jack had been given a tear off desk calendar as a Christmas present from his girfriend called the 'Sex Fact of the Day Calendar.' Like Dave's daily reminders to us on TUHS, every morning he typed in the one line factiod and passed it on to the Masscomp Engineering Mailing List. This is important because the VCs had just given us a straight laced ex-IBM guy as a president named Gus Klein (aka Mr. Potatohead), who did not read email, and of course did not read the engineering mailing list. He wants to workspace to be 'professional' and look like his idea of an 'office' and his 'memos' were amazing as you can imagine. The other important note to the story is that the late Roger Gourd, our direct boss, had just created Masscomp's new Custom Product Engineering (CPE) group; to be the analog to DEC's CSS. When Roger had left DEC for Gould he had of course, moved to south Florida where they were based and become quite a fisherman and protector of natural resources. When he was recruited to come move back to New England to take on the reins in development at Masscomp be brought some of south Florida back with him. Well from Jack we had learn two important facts and from those facts realized that mediterranean fisherman were liars: at some time in March it was reported that fisherman in the med that caught a female manatee in their nets and brought it into their boat considered it bad luck unless they sodomized them because the manatee were thought to be mermaids; and some time in May we learned that the Roman Catholic Church would excommunicate any fisherman if it was discovered that said fisherman had caught a manatee and that manatee had been used as a sex toy. Upon learning this interesting catch-22, Gourd immediately sponsors the "Save the Manatee Society in South Florida" and makes it the Group Mascot for CPE. Well, manatees start popping up all over engineering. Mr. Potatohead is clueless of the significance of course. At his memorial I gave Roger's widow a stuffed manatee I still had from my desk from those days, she knew and laughed and laughed knowing that Roger would have approved. BTW: I do however, still keep 'Darth Tater, on my desk at Intel'.

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > I may have the the original Rand MH release somewhere. There's this: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/mh Not sure how modified from the formal release this is, it may be pretty much the original (it's certainly quite old - pre-TCP/IP). Noel

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> On 06/23/2018 04:38 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > Others like DNS are pretty perfect and scale fantastic. It's perhaps worth noting that today's DNS is somewhat different from the original; some fairly substantial changes were made early on (although maybe it was just in the security, I don't quite recall). (The details escape me at this point, but at one point I did a detailed study of DNS, and DNS security, for writing the security architecture document for the resolution system in LISP - the networking one, not the language.) Noel

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

by Norman Wilson

Paul Winalski: That was the VAXstation-11/RC. === Yep, that's the name. My first batch of discarded MicroVAX IIs were the original backbone routers for a large university campus, installed ca. 1990. That backbone ran over serial-line connections, at 56Kbps, which was quite impressive for the day given the physical distances involved. Either they had a bunch of Qbus backplanes lying around, or someone computed that the cost of an 11/RC plus a backplane was appreciably less than a system with an unobstructed backplane. In any case, they swapped most of the backplanes themselves. The one I got that still had the glue in was an anomaly; maybe it was a spare chassis. The MicroVAX routers ran Ultrix, and some of them had uptimes of five years when they were finally shut down to be discarded. All the hardware I rescued tested out fine, and some of it is still running happily in my basement. I've had a few disk failures over the years, and I think lost one power supply back around Y2K and maybe had a DZV11 fail, but that's it. We don't make hardware like that any more. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

by Norman Wilson

Paul Winalski: Rather than design a new CPU, they just put NOPs in the Skipjack microcode to slow it down. The official code name for this machine was Flounder, but within DEC engineering we called it "Wimpjack". Customers could buy a field upgrade for Flounder microcode that restored it to Skipjack performance levels. ==== As I remember it, once it came out that the upgrade merely removed gratuitous nops, customers raised sufficient fuss that the denopped microcode was made available for free (perhaps only to those with service contracts) and Flounder (VAX 8500) was no longer sold. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

6 years, 6 months

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

TUHS