Steve Jenkin:
I've never heard of a Computer Science or Software Engineering program
that included a `case study' component, especially for Software
Development & Projects.
[...]
Creating Unix V6, because it profoundly changed computing & development,
would seem an obvious Case Study for many aspects of Software, Coding
and Projects.
====
How about the course for which John Lions wrote his famous
exegesis of the 6/e kernel?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
David Rosenthal reflects on his involvement with the development
of the X Window System:
> Although most of my time was spent developing NeWS, I rapidly
> ported X version 10 to the Sun/1, likely the second port to
> non-DEC hardware. It worked, but I had to kludge several areas
> that depended on DEC-specific hardware. The worst was the
> completely DEC-specific keyboard support.
>
> Because it was clear that a major redesign of X was needed to
> make it portable and in particular to make it work well on Sun
> hardware, Gosling and I worked with the teams at DEC SRC and WRL
> on the design of X version 11. Gosling provided significant
> input on the imaging model, and I designed the keyboard
> support. As the implementation evolved I maintained the Sun port
> and did a lot of testing and bug fixing. All of which led to my
> trip to Boston to pull all-nighters at MIT finalizing the
> release.
>
> My involvement continued after the first release. I was the
> editor and main author of the X Inter-Client Communications
> Conventions Manual (ICCCM) that forms Part III of Robert
> Scheifler and Jim Gettys' X Window System.
-- https://blog.dshr.org/2024/07/x-window-system-at-40.html
Alexis.
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-museum-logs-off-for…
These folks hosted the UNIX 50th Celebration and had a physical PDP-7 that
was used to bring up UNIX V0 (after first getting it running on SIMH). That
later was not easy because the original PDP-7s (like the one Ken had access
to) did not have disk storage. BTL had paid DEC's Custom Special Systems
(CSS) to splice a Burrough's disk that DEC was selling using for the 15 and
later the PDP-9. It started with splicing reverse engineering that code
to build a simulation of that disk into the simh, so we could ensure that
UNIX ran—finally, modeling that HW with a custom microprocessor-based board
with an SD card with a functional replica of a PDP-7 I/O interface on one
side obeying the device registers and operations that UNIX expected to see.
The LCM-L folks were incredibly gracious and generous. I am so sad to see
their collection go away. In particular, I hope the PDP-7s and the CDC-6500
find new homes.
Clem
Hi
Out of curiosity, what would be considered the most direct descendent of Unix available today? Yes, there are many descendants, but they've all gone down their own evolutionary paths. Â
Is it FreeBSD or NetBSD? Something else? I don't think it would be Minix or Linux because I remember when they came along, and it was well after various Unix versions were around.
Does such a thing even exist anymore? I remember using AT&T Unix System V and various BSD variants back in college in the 1980's. System V was the "new thing" back then but was eventually sold and seems to have faded. Maybe it is only available commercially, but it does not seem as prominent as it once was.
Any thoughts?
Thanks, Andrew Lynch
> The lack of a monospaced font is, I suspect, due either to
> physical limitations of the C/A/T phototypesetter[1] or fiscal
> limitations--no budget in that department to buy photographic
> plates for Courier.
Since the C/A/T held only four fonts, there was no room for
Courier. But when we moved beyond that typesetter, inertia
kept the old ways . Finally, in v9, I introduced the fixed-width
"literal font", L, in -man and said goodbye to boldface in
synopses. By then, though, Research Unix was merely a
local branch of the Unix evolutionary tree, so the literal-font
gene never spread.
Doug
All, I've decided to bring the ANSI C/POSIX thread to a close. While
initially the thread was informative, it's recently become host to
comments which are inappropriate and certainly well out of scope for
a mailing list about UNIX and its history.
If someone wants to resurrect a thread about standards, feel free to
use the COFF list. But please, keep the conversation on-topic.
Thanks, Warren
I have a directory, t:
ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ ls -li
total 0
23801442 -rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a
23801443 -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b
23801443 -rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c
note that b and c are the same inode.
let's make a cpio.
ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -o >../t.cpio
a
b
c
^D
1 block
what's in it?
ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -ivt < ../t.cpio
-rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a
-rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b
-rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b
"c link to b"? wtf? Who thought that was a good idea? because ...
ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ touch 'c link to b'
ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a
-rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b
-rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c
-rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b
and
ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -o >../t.cpio
a
b
c
c link to b
^D
ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ cpio -ivt < ../t.cpio
-rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a
-rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b
-rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b
-rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b
so ... it looks like a file is there twice, because somebody thought it was
a good idea to confuse a file name and file metadata. And, anyway, it's
just as accurate to have it say
-rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 a
-rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 b link to c
-rw-r--r-- 2 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:21 c link to b
-rw-r--r-- 1 rminnich wheel 0 Jun 26 20:22 c link to b
Right? :-)
From the same people who brought you this:
ronsexcllentmbp:t rminnich$ bc
>>>
Somebody needs to get the osx folks a unix manual set :-)
> From: Aron <aki(a)insinga.com>
> Now if only his family would take those wishes of his into account and
> tell the lawyers to finish the job.
I suspect that was his real mistake; he trusted that his family would do what
he wanted (perhaps so that instead of putting the final bow on this, he could
pay attention to something else that was more important to him) after he was
gone - and they decided not to.
My suspicion is that there is something else that is more important to his
sister (probably political), and she decided that the pittance she'd get from
flushing the LCM would be better put towards her project(s).
I've just been re-reading Thucydides' extraordinarily outstanding meditation
on the revolution on Corcyra (which is really a meditation on the death of
the Greek polei - and is a pre-epitaph on the death of many democracies
since), and if my pupposition is correct, it applies to this too
I wonder what'll happen to all the less-valuable stuff that was given to the
LCM? A PDP-10 will fetch 10K's of $, but a lot of the rest is worth pennies.
I hope they don't scrap it for pennies, or throw it in the trash. I'm sure
that someone who would ignore her brother's wishes about important pieces
of history that meant a lot to him would have no qualms about doing either.
Noel
Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1. Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead? Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in publishers? In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
- Matt G.
