On 2/20/18, Donald ODona <mutiny.mutiny(a)india.com> wrote:
> since '86 he was working on an operating system, named Mica, which failed.
>
> At 19 Feb 2018 18:13:59 +0000 (+00:00) from Paul Winalski
> <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>:
>> Dave Cutler was in the VMS group only for VMS version 1. He rarely
>> stayed on around for version 2 of anything. Hustvedt's and Lipman's
>> contributions for VMS were more extensive and longer-lasting than
>> Cutler's.
Cutler had already left the VMS OS group by the time I joined DEC in
February of 1980. After VMS he led the team developing PL/I and C
compilers for VMS. These shared a common back end called the VAX Code
Generator (VCG). The other VMS compilers at the time (Fortran,
Pascal, Cobol) had their own separate optimizers and code generators.
The VAX Ada compiler would also use VCG.
When version 1 of VAX PL/i and VAX C shipped, Cutler worked on
subsetting the VAX architecture so that a single chip implementation
could be done, and led the team that produced the MicroVAX I. The
MicroVAX architecture emulated expensive instructions such as packed
decimal. All of the later, single-chip VAXes used this architecture.
When the MicroVAX I shipped, Cutler devised a microkernel-based
real-time operating system for the VAX called VAXeln.
After VAXeln, Cutler led the team developing a RISC architecture
follow-on to the VAX called PRISM, and an operating system for it
called Mica. Mica had a VAXeln-like microkernel, and the plan was to
layer personality modules on top of that to implement VMS and
Unix-style ABIs and system calls.
Alpha was chosen instead of PRISM as the VAX successor, and that is
when Cutler left DEC for Microsoft. Windows NT has a lot of design
concepts and details previously seen in PRISM and VMS.
-Paul W.
At Rutgers Newark, we had VMS system that had Whitesmith's C on it. At one point, Whitesmiths decided to "fight piracy" by sending you a sticker you were supposed to stick on the front of your computer to show that you had a licensed copy. I suppose I might have been in trouble if the Whitesmiths police came to my machine room. I was a bit miffed when one of the other employees actually stuck the thing to the machine.
Years later I was loosely affiliated with Unipress. I did some consulting for them when I was between jobs. I went out to dinner with their principal, a man named Mark Krieger. After a bit of conversation it occurred to me. "Didn't you get booed off the stage at the University of Delaware UNIX users group meeting." He admitted he had, he was half of Whitesmiths with Paul Plauger. It then came back to me about Idris and the software stamps. I mentioned the stamps and he said he was gone by then but that was his sign that Plauger had gone over the edge. I carefully peeled our sticker off the Vax and gave it to him the next time I saw him.
Let's see how much thread-drift I can generate this time...
Dick Hustvedt was born on this day in 1946; an architect of RSX-11 and
VMS, he also had a weird sense of humour which he demonstrated by
enshrining the "microfortnight" into VMS.
Sadly, we lost him in a car accident in 2008.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
I've send a couple of you private messages with some more details of why I
ask this, but I'll bring the large question to debate here:
Have POSIX and
LSB lost
their
usefulness/relevance? If so, we know ISV’s like Ansys are not going to go
‘FOSS’ and make their sources available (ignore religious beliefs, it just
is not their business model); how to we get that level of precision to
allow
the part of the
market
that will be 'binary only' continue to
create applications?
Seriously, please try to stay away from religion on this
question. Clearly, there are a large number of ISVs have traditionally
used interface specifications. To me it started with things like the old
Cobol and Fortran standards for the languages. That was not good enough
since the systems diverge, and /usr/group then IEEE/ANSI/ISO did Posix.
Clearly, Posix enabled Unix implementations such a Linux to shine, although
Linux does not doggedly follow it. Apple was once Posix conformant, but
I'd not think they worry to much about it. Linux created LSB, but I see
fewer and fewer references to it.
I worry that without a real binary definition, it's darned hard (at least
in the higher end of the business that I live day-to-day) to get ISV's to
care.
What do you folks think?
Clem
As an aside about Wolfram and SMP (and one that actually has
something to do with UNIX):
I ran the VAX on which Wolfram et al (and it was very much et al)
developed SMP. It started out running UNIX/TS 1.0. I know how
that system was snuck out of Bell Labs, but if I told you I'd have
to terminate you with extreme prejudice. (I wasn't involved
anyway.)
SMP really needed dynamic paging; the TS 1.0 kernel had only
swapping. We had quite a few discussions about what to do.
Moving wholesale to 3BSD or early 4BSD (this was in 1981)
would have been a big upheaval for our entire user community.
Those systems were also notorious at the time for their delicate
stability: some people reported that they ran well, others that
they crashed frequently. Our existing system was pretty solid,
and I had already put some work into making it more so (better
handling of low-level machine errors, for example).
Somehow we ended up deciding that the least-painful path was
to lift the VM code out of 4BSD and shoehorn it into our
existing kernel, creating what we called Bastardized Paging
UNIX. I did most of the work; I was younger and more energetic
back then. Also considerably grumpier. In the heart of the
page-in (I think) code, the Berkeley guys had written a single
C function that stretched to about ten printed pages. (For those
too young to remember printers, that means about 600 lines.)
I was then and still am adamant that that's the wrong way to
write anything, but I didn't want to take the time to rewrite
it all, so (being young and grumpy) I relieved my feelings by
adding a grumpy comment at the top of the source file.
I also wrote a paper about the work, which was published in
(of all places) AUUGN. I haven't read it in years but it was
probably a bit snotty. It nevertheless ended up causing a
local UNIX-systems-software company to head-hunt me (but at
the time I had no interest in leaving Caltech), so it must
not have been too rude.
What days those were, when a single person could understand
enough of the OS to do stuff like that in only a month or two,
and get it pretty much right too. I did end up finding some
interesting race-condition bugs, probably introduced by me, but
fascinating to track down; e.g. something that went wrong only
if a page fault happened at exactly the right time with respect
to something else.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Donald ODana:
already 20 years ago I met a guy (masters degree, university) who never
freed dynamically allocated memory. He told me he is 'instantiating
a object', but had no idea what an heap is, and what dynamically
allocated memory means.
====
This is the sort of programmer for whom garbage collection was named:
his programs are a collection of garbage.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(In 1127-snark mode this evening)
>Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 17:47:22 +1100 (EST)
>From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
>To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
>Subject: [TUHS] Of birthdays etc
>Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.1802171649520.798(a)aneurin.horsfall.org>
>Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII
>
>...
>Harris' Lament? Look it up with your favourite search engine (I don't use Google).
>
probably early 1995 I dabbled a bit in AltaVista Search. So even now
still using Yahoo somehow :-)
Keep it coming Dave, it's appreciated, at least by me.
>From a former DECcie,
uncle rubl
Blimey... How was I to know that a throw-away remark would almost develop
into a shitfight? It would help if people changed the Subject line too,
as I'm sure that Ken must've been a little peeved... It would also help
if users didn't bloody top-post either, but I suspect that I've lost that
fight.
Anyway, this whole business started when I thought it might be a good idea
to post reminders of historical events here, as I do with some of the
other lists that I infest^W infect^W inhabit. I figured that the old
farts here might like to be reminded of (IMHO) significant events, and
similarly the youngsters might want to be reminded that there was indeed
life before Linux (which, by the way, I happen to loathe, but that's a
different story).
I'm glad that some people appreciate it; and don't worry, Steffen, you'll
soon catch up, as they should all be in the archives :-) A long-term goal
(if I live that long) is to set up one of those "this day in history"
sites, but it looks like Harris' Lament[*] has already applied :-(
I've had a number of corrections (thanks!), some weird comments on
pronunciation (an Englishman can probably pick my ancestry from me saying
"castle" as "c-AH-stle" and "dance" as "d-A-nce" etc), but oddly enough no
criticism (well, unless I'm talking about mounting a magtape as a
filesystem; no, I will not forget the implication that I was a liar), and
Warren has yet to spank me...
For the morbidly curious I keep these events in Calendar on my MacBook
(which actually spends most of its time in Terminal, and I don't even know
how to use the Finder!), and am always noting things which interest me and
therefore possibly others.
Anyway, thanks all; it is an honour and a privilege to share a mailing
list with some of the people who wrote the software that I have both used
in the past and still use to this day.
[*]
Harris' Lament? Look it up with your favourite search engine (I don't use
Google).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
> On Feb 14, 2018, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> Computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth was born on this day in 1934; he basically
> designed ALGOL, one of the most influential languages ever, with just
> about every programming language in use today tracing its roots to it.
Wirth designed many languages, including Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon, but he did not design Algol; more specifically, he did not design Algol 60. Instead, a committee (J. W. Backus, F. L. Bauer, J. Green, C. Katz, J. McCarthy, P. Naur, A. J. Perlis, H. Rutishauser, K. Samelson, B. Vauquois, J .H. Wegstein, A. van Wijngaarden, and M. Woodger) designed it, and Peter Naur edited the remarkable Algol 60 specification. A few others, including Edsgar Dijkstra, who completed the first implementation, participated in meetings leading up to the final design.
From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
> Like PL/I, it also
> borrowed the indispensable notion of structs from business languages
> (Flowmatic, Comtran, Cobol).
That is an interesting insight. I always thought that structs were
inspired by the assembler DORG construct, and hence the shared namespace
for members.
The above insight goes some way to explain why PDP11 “as” did not have
a DORG construct, but early C did have ‘struct'.
Paul
