(At the risk of being flamed because it's not strictly Unix...)
We gained Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on this day in 1906; known as "Amazing
Grace", she was a remarkable woman, both in computers and the Navy. She
coined the term "debugging" when she extracted a moth from a set of relay
contacts from a computer (the Harvard Mk I) and wrote "computer debugged"
in the log, taping the deceased Lepidoptera in there as well. She was
convinced that computers could be programmed in an English-like language
and developed Flow-Matic, which in turn became, err, COBOL... She was
posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by Barack
Obama.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
As promised :-)
Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron),
was born on this day in 1815; arguably the world's first computer
programmer and a highly independent woman, she saw the potential in
Charles Babbage's new-fangled invention.
J.F.Ossanna was given unto us on this day in 1928; a prolific programmer,
he not only had a hand in developing Unix but also gave us the ROFF
series.
Who'ld've thought that two computer greats would share the same birthday?
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Something's been bothering me for a while... I've just remembered that
our 11/40 with more peripherals than you could shake a stick at -- it had
just about everything except a DECtape -- also had, so help me, a card
reader! As I dimly recall, 'twas a slow CDC (?) model; we didn't have it
for long, either because it was on loan or because it was so unreliable, I
simply don't remember.
Anyway, our driver handled it in two modes: you either got a raw image of
each card (likely via DMA instead of column by column, but I could be
wrong) i.e. 80 words with each column of 12 holes fitting nicely into a
16-bit word, or there was a half-arsed attempt at converting EBCDIC to
ASCII, with trailing blanks replaced by a newline (i.e. think of it as a
line printer in reverse). Or was it converting from whatever KRONOS used
to ASCII?
Now, what I *distinctly* remember was writing two scripts: "/etc/cdc" and
"/etc/dec" which switched between the two modes, quite likely by patching
the in-core kernel!
I'd give a testicle to have that "CSU tape" back again (and no doubt so
would Warren), but can anyone else remember this (or dare to call me a
liar; yes, I'm still touchy about that)? The snag is, towards the end of
the CSU before they were about to be engulfed by the admin suits and
forced to support payroll programs in COBOL etc, I was the only senior
Unix bod left, so it's unlikely that the CSU source code followed someone
else home...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Hello everyone,
A few weeks ago, I merged my work-in-progress AT&T 3B2/400 emulator
into the main SIMH source tree, and I realized that I should mention
it here, where there may be particular interest.
The 3B2 and 3B5 were main porting platforms for AT&T System V Release
3, and when I realized how scarce the equipment has become to find, I
set out to write an emulator for the 3B2. It was rough going at points
due to lack of documentation, but I was able to reverse engineer quite
a bit of the system through reading the SVR3 source code, and of
course strapping my own 3B2/310 to a logic analyzer.
The emulator is fairly complete. It certainly works well as a
standalone, single-user UNIX system. Support for multiple terminals is
coming very soon (as soon as I find the time, that is) so it will soon
be possible to allow multiple users to telnet into virtual terminals,
similar to how the SIMH PDP-11 and VAX emulators work.
For now, information about the emulator lives here:
https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator/
Best Wishes,
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
web(a)loomcom.com
OK. I'm confused. Maybe people here can help me understand.
Looking at the V7 sources, it looks for all the world like they were
released Jan 10, 1979. This release was PDP-11 only. So far, so good.
32V, a port to the VAX, is listed as 'early 1979'. Dates in the files in
the archive suggest March 26th, 1979 (though there are dates as late as May
3rd and April 30th on two files that are trivial). The tape we have in the
archive has a date Feb 22, 1980 written on it. Given the dates, that's only
3 months after V7 was released. This seems very fast, but maybe it's OK
since it's a swapping release....
3BSD, The Berkeley 32V has file dates as late as Mar 22, 1980... This seems
reasonable for turning V7 from swapping into paging... about a year is fast
but not crazy fast.
My question is: did these three events really happen in this quick
succession? Did USDL folks get started with a preliminary V7 for V32 or was
the port really done in 2 and a half months? Likewise with UCB and 3bsd:
did they start early?
Warner
> Venix/86 and Venix/86R might be interesting... I have impure versions of
> both...
+1
Venix/86 is the first Unix to run on PC hardware that I’m aware of. It could
go together with Idris and Minix as examples of early PC Unix.
For more on Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, by one who knew her well, see
Jean Sammet's remembrance:
Farewell to Grace Hopper: end of an era!
https://doi.org/10.1145/129852.214846
A Ph.D. thesis about her:
The Contributions of Grace Murray Hopper to Computer Science and Computer Education
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278692/m2/1/high_res_d/100…
Books:
Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea
1-59114-978-9
Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
ISBN 0-262-51726-4
Grace Hopper: Computer Whiz
ISBN 0-7660-2273-0 [juvenile literature]
I've always found it amusing that she was a strong proponent of the
work ethic: "Act first, get permission later", which is in direct
opposition to the military chain of command, despite her rank as Rear
Admiral of the US Navy.
See also
ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
https://awards.acm.org/hopperhttps://awards.acm.org/hopper/award-winners
[Awarded to the outstanding young computer professional of the
year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical
or service contribution. This award is accompanied by a prize
of $35,000. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or
less at the time the qualifying contribution was
made. Financial support of the Grace Murray Hopper Award is
provided by Microsoft.]
Don Knuth of Stanford was the first GMHA winner, in 1971; other
well-known people include Steve Wozniak (1971), Bob Metcalf (1980),
Dan Bricklin (1981), Brian Reid (1982), Bill Joy (1986), John
Ousterhout (1987), Guy Steele (1988), Richard Stallman (1990), Bjarne
Stroustrup (1993), Vern Paxson (2007), Craig Gentry (2010), ...
There is also a 1983 interview on a popular US news broadcast that
celebrates its 50th anniversary this year:
The 60 Minutes interview with Grace Murray Hopper
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-60-minutes-interview-with-grace-murray-hop…
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- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
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> I've never seen a detailed description of UNIX/TS, although I have seen
> the "Unix Program Description" (January 1976) which documents the USG
> version, and of course PWB is described in the BSTJ issue, and UNIX/TS
> is supposedly a merge of those two.
> ...
> Did the later USG versions takeup some of the PWB work, does anyone
> know? (My thinking is 'if I find traces of PWB [in the MIT system],
> would that be from /TS, or could it be a later USG version' - I think
> there were 1-3, from something I saw online.)
So I seem to have stumbled on something interesting here (or maybe it's not,
and the history is just unclear - well, unclear to me at least, I'm sure
someone knows).
Looking at "Unix Program Description" (January 1976), it's clearly marked as
"Published by the UNIX Support Group". (I have an actual hardcopy, which I
don't recall how I came by, but for those who wish to follow along this
document is available in the TUHS archive, at:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/unix_program_description_jan…
and in other TUHS mirrors).
So, given the credit, I _assume_ that it documents some version of the USG
system. So I started looking at that, and the PWB version that's in the
archive:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/spencer_pwb.tar.gz
to see how they compare, and it turns out (somewhat to my surprise) that the
USG document describes what seems to be an older version of the system.
For example, in text.c, it doesn't cover xlock()/xunlock()/xexpand(), all in
the PWB system - just xalloc()/xccdec()/xfree()/xswap().
Even more telling, in sys1.c, the USG document describes the older version of
exec(), where arguments are collected in a disk buffer, not (as in the PWB
system) in swap space. (I had thought that this change was mentioned in the
PWB paper in the BSTJ issue, but on checking, it appears my memory was
incorrect. Many of the PWB changes appear to be to things like the shell, not
the OS.)
So it seems the USG document describes a system very close to the 'classic'
V6 - not what I had expected. This may also make it hard to recognize USG
source (at least, the early versions).
More generally, it would be good to try and elucidate the relationship among
all these early Bell/AT+T versions: Research, USG, PWB, etc. Clearly the two
latter (from what we know now) are descended from V6 - but was there any
interchange between USG and PWB?
And did either of them feed back into V7? Or, perhaps more likely, were the
improvements to text.c, exec() etc _Research_ improvements that got fed into
PWB?
More questions than answers, sadly... I'm not at all familiar with V7, I'll
have to go read it at some point, and compare it to PWB. Not that I expect it
will answer many (any?) of these questions, but maybe we'll get lucky and
there will e.g. be stuff in this PWB which isn't in V7.
Speaking of which, I seem to recall there's more than one PWB version. I
wonder which one we have (above). Although there's another 'PWB' tape in the
archive:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/bostic_pwb.tar.gz
(much larger than the other one), when I poked around a bit through that,
seeing what's there, and comparing it to the other one, the system sources I
looked at there all seemed to be the same as the one on the Spencer tape.
> I should look at the MIT kernel and see how much of it is USG, and see
> if I can find any traces of the changes described as done for PWB. I
> know the MIT version has provisions for longer exec() arguments, and
> text.c is considerably more complex than the one in V6 (and IIRC matches
> the description in the USG document)
So, my memory was in error here; the text.c matches the one from the PWB tape,
_not_ the USG document. In general, the parts of the MIT system seem to be a
close match to what's on the PWB tape, with the exception that the MIT one
seems to be slightly earlier (no 'register' argument types).
> Perhaps the MIT system really was /TS
Without a better understanding of what was really in /TS, this is totally
opaque.
> I've always described it as a hacked PWB1, but I might be wrong there.
And for once, I think I was right. The MIT system _does_ closely match the
one on the 'PWB' tapes - whatever that was!
Noel
So, I'm getting the impression, from the reactions about civility, etc, that
people aren't disagreeing with the characterization of "rudeness" (which can
only be meaning my posts). Can someone please point to text in my messages
which they consider "rude"? Thanks.
Noel
