In S.S. Pirzada's 1988 paper[1], page 35, section 3.3.2, he writes:
"Some operating telephone companies and the switching control center system (SCCS) group in Holmdel, NJ decided to use UNIX to collect maintenance data from their switches and for administration purposes. Other departments also started building applications on top of UNIX, some part of turnkey systems licensed by Western Electric (WECo)."
This is describing the situation before the establishment of USG in September 1973. I'm curious, does anyone recall what some of these pre-USG WECo "turnkey systems" were?
The things that come to mind when I think of that phrase don't come about for several years, such as the 5ESS and other work surrounding Bellmac stuff. The SCCS UNIX connection describes what becomes CB-UNIX if I understand the situation correctly, but that stays a bit afield from the more conventional pool that is dipped into for WECo needs. Switching and UNIX all kinda come back together with DMERT on 1A/3B-API and 5ESS, but again that's late 70s R&D, early 80s deployment, not this time period, leaving me terribly curious what WECo would've been bundling UNIX with and shipping out to telcos. The famous early use of UNIX in the Bell System is typography, and WECo did have involvement with Teletype equipment, so perhaps something along those lines?
If it helps set the scene, a binder I recently picked up from ~1972 describing Western Electric test sets distributed to telcos describes the following additional classes of such documents:
Shop Services - Special non-standard products
Public Telephones - System standard public telephone equipment
Data Communications - Teletypewriter and Data Sets
Subscriber Products - System standard PBX's, station equipment and special services
Non-Subscriber Products - Microwave, cable, power equipment, etc.
Non-Bell Equipment Index - Non-Bell System manufactured communication equipment
Unfortunately haven't seen any of the other binders yet but I've been keeping an eye out, one or another might describe something WECo was shipping around that had some UNIX up in it. Nothing in this binder seems computer-y enough to run an operating system, just lots of gauges, dials, and probes. Luckily it is quite clear what data test sets are designed for 103-data set maintenance so I have fodder for seeking Dataphone tools...
Anywho, happy soon to be new year folks, I'm excited to see what turns up next year!
- Matt G.
[1] - https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/7942/1/Shamim_Sharfuddin_Pi…
Hi. I am trying to compile cron for the 3b2-400 and 3b2-700
and am apparently missing required libraries. The reason is
on the 3b2-400 after boot up it complains there is corruption
in the crontab for every user lp, sysadm, root and so on.
# make cron
cc -O cron.c -o cron
undefined first referenced
symbol in file
el_add cron.o
el_delete cron.o
el_empty cron.o
el_first cron.o
el_init cron.o
xmalloc cron.o
el_remove cron.o
num cron.o
days_in_mon cron.o
days_btwn cron.o
ld fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to cron
*** Error code 13
Stop.
Does anyone have these libraries? Thanks.
--
WWL 📚
As I messed with making a custom cron in the late 80s,
remembered the the el_ functions are for event list processing.
But you didn't specify the source of your source, by the hardware
it needs to be of System V heritage. And a lot of that source is hard
to offically come by due to licensing. Good way to view old SVR4 is
to look at OpenIndiana, Illumos, or OpenSolaris code bases that you can
find. You're in luck, as TUHS has a copy, see -- https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/cron/elm.c
Look at the Makefile for the other files you need to compile into it too.
-Brian
KenUnix wrote:
> Hi. I am trying to compile cron for the 3b2-400 and 3b2-700
> and am apparently missing required libraries. The reason is
> on the 3b2-400 after boot up it complains there is corruption
> in the crontab for every user lp, sysadm, root and so on.
>
> # make cron
> cc -O cron.c -o cron
> undefined first referenced
> symbol in file
> el_add cron.o
> el_delete cron.o
> el_empty cron.o
> el_first cron.o
> el_init cron.o
> xmalloc cron.o
> el_remove cron.o
> num cron.o
> days_in_mon cron.o
> days_btwn cron.o
> ld fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to cron
> *** Error code 13
>
> Stop.
Good time of day folks, I often ponder on people's attachments to pixels on the screen that come about by clicking *this* icon and typing in a box surrounded by blue and with an icon in position <xyz> vs pixels on the screen that come about instead by opening that application that is a black border with a little paper airplane button in the bottom right vs....etc.
To make it more clear, I find myself often confused at people treating email different from SMS different from social media DMs different from forum posts different from some other mechanism that like literally all the others is pixels arranged into glyphs on a screen conveying an approximation of human speech. This difference among these different ways to send said pixels to people has eluded me all my life despite working with technology since I was a tot.
What this has me curious on is if in the early days of UNIX there were attempts at suggesting which provided communication mechanisms were appropriate for what. For instance something that smells of:
It is appropriate to use mail(1) to send a review of a piece of work vs it is appropriate to use write(1) to ask Jim if he wants to take a lunch break before the big meeting. Did this matter to people back then like it seems to now? To me it's just pixels on a screen that are there when I look at them and aren't when I don't.
Truth be told I am hoping to learn something from this because I only do a couple email lists and web forums, my social life generally does not involve SMS, phone calls, nor social media. Where it has become tedious is someone I meet who seems to want to communicate over pixels on screens is then put off when I provide them an email address, usually asking instead if I have a Facebook or whatever the kids are calling Twitters today. The few times I've tried to explain email will be me transmitting you communication as pixel glyphs on a screen just like anything else would be me transmitting you communication as pixel glyphs on the screen, this doesn't diffuse their concerns any, they then just think there is something wrong with me for comparing words as pixels on a screen to words as pixels on a screen. Granted, I've probably avoided plenty of vapid people this way, but it feels like it's becoming more and more expected that "these pixels on the screen in *this* program are only for this and those pixels on the screen in *that* program are only for that".
Is this a recent phenomenon? Has communication over electronic means always had these arbitrary limitations hoisted on it by the humans that use it? Or did people not give a hoot what you sent over what program and actually cared more about the words you're saying than the word you typed at a terminal to then be able to transmit words? I doubt what I learn is going to royally change my approach to allowing technology in my irl social life, but it would be nice to at least have more mental ammo when someone asks to be friends online and then gives me mad sideeye when I go "sure here's my email address!"
- Matt G.
Are there any documented or remembered instances PDP-7 or Interdata 8/32 UNIX being installed on any such machines for use in the Bell System aside from their original hosts? Along similar lines, was the mention of PDP-7 UNIX also supporting the PDP-9 based solely on consistencies in the architecture or did this early version of UNIX actually get bootstrapped on a real PDP-9 at some point?
My understanding of the pre-3B-and-VAX landscape of UNIX in the Bell System is predominantly PDP-11 systems, but there was also work in the late 70s regarding 8086 hosts as evidenced in some BSTJ and other publications, and there is the System/370 work (Holmdel?) which I don't know enough about to say whether it technically starts before or after UNIX touches the VAX.
Thanks for any info!
- Matt G.
Hi All.
This is a bit off-topic, but people here are likely to know the answer.
V7 had a timzone function:
char *timezone(int zone, int dst);
that returned a timezone name. POSIX has a timezone variable which is
the offset in seconds from UTC.
The man pages for all of {Net,Free,Open}BSD seem to indicate that both
are available on those systems.
My question is, how? The declarations for both are given as being in <time.h>.
But don't the symbols in libc.a conflict with each other? How does a programmer
on *BSD choose which version of timezone they will get?
Feel free to reply privately.
Thanks,
Arnold
> Paul -- you left out the other "feature" -- the noise, which was still
deafening even with a model N1 and its cover.
It was indeed loud, but GE out-roared them with a blindingly fast card
reader. The machine had a supposedly gentle touch; it grabbed cards with
vacuum rather than tongs. But the make-and-break pneumatic explosions
sounded like a machine gun. A noise meter I borrowed from the Labs' tool
crib read 90db 6 feet away.
Doug
I have been working with a VAX780 sim running
Unix System V r2 VAX780 and am having strange
issues.
TERM is defined at vt100
When firing up vi at times the cursor is positioned
in the wrong place or when inserting text it over
writes areas on the screen.
I have tried vt100, vt100-am, vt100-nam and none
work as expected.
Any ideas? Thanks
-Ken
Happy holidays
--
WWL 📚
Thanks Ken! I hadn't, even considered the PDP-15. Looks like SimH supports it, that could make for an interesting project...
- Matt G.
On Monday, December 18th, 2023 at 6:12 PM, Ken Thompson <kenbob(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> the pdp-7 was run on the almost compatible
> pdp-9 and pdp-15 computers.
> i dont think that version of unix ever made
> it out of the research department.
>
> On Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 5:54 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> Are there any documented or remembered instances PDP-7 or Interdata 8/32 UNIX being installed on any such machines for use in the Bell System aside from their original hosts? Along similar lines, was the mention of PDP-7 UNIX also supporting the PDP-9 based solely on consistencies in the architecture or did this early version of UNIX actually get bootstrapped on a real PDP-9 at some point?
>>
>> My understanding of the pre-3B-and-VAX landscape of UNIX in the Bell System is predominantly PDP-11 systems, but there was also work in the late 70s regarding 8086 hosts as evidenced in some BSTJ and other publications, and there is the System/370 work (Holmdel?) which I don't know enough about to say whether it technically starts before or after UNIX touches the VAX.
>>
>> Thanks for any info!
>>
>> - Matt G.
