TUHS

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A nice review of a retrospective paper on the PDP-11

by Arnold Robbins

https://dave.cheney.net/2017/12/04/what-have-we-learned-from-the-pdp-11 Arnold

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] how do I unsubscribe

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

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

7 years, 7 months

ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by Dave Horsfall

The ARPAnet reached four nodes on this day in 1969 (anyone know which?); at least one "history" site reckoned the third node was connected in 1977 (and I'm still waiting for a reply to my correction). Well, I can believe that perhaps there were only three left by then... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 7 months

looking for a quote

by ron minnich

A long time ago, dmr wrote about something that IIRC BSD had done he did not like: unlimited length identifiers in C, maybe? His argument was that being too general was not a good thing. Can't quite find the quote, anyone remember it? Would have been ca. 1980. ron

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > it's direct predecessor (UNIX/TS) which was not officially released made > its way to number of places ... heavily hacked systems that were combo's > of V6, PWB [1.0], UNIX/TS plus local additions. UNIX/TS had a newer > kernel, updated FS and the compiler that was released with troff - > a.k.a. 'Typesetter C' I'm not sure quite what the MIT system was. 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. (If we ever do find V6+ USG source, it should be easy to verify - that document is pretty detailed.) 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); but I don't recall withough careful checking, what was done where. Perhaps the MIT system really was /TS, and I didn't know that - I've always described it as a hacked PWB1, but I might be wrong there. Did the later USG versions takeup some of the PWB work, does anyone know? (My thinking is 'if I find traces of PWB, would that be from /TS, or could it be a later USG version' - I think there were 1-3, from something I saw online.) I initially got /TS mixed up with /RT, which is the system I'd _really_ like to find - well, MERT, actually. I think that's a really early micro-kernel system (although I haven't done any research to confirm that), a direction I think is important. (I think the 'THE Multiprogramming System' may be the earliest work in that direction, although I'd be interested to hear of anything else.) I actually got contact info for some of the original MERT people, and was going to contact them to see if they still retained anything, but I never got a 'round tuit'... too many other projects. :-( Noel

7 years, 7 months

how do I unsubscribe

by Deborah Scherrer

Could someone please tell me how to get off this list? I was rather appalled at the rudeness in the previous conversation... Deborah

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > an altruistic person trying to make things better. They aren't all bad. I would echo that. During my time on the IESG, I'd say the vast majority of the people in the IETF really did want to make things better for everyone. Of course, that statement covers a vast range of subtle variations, from people who had nothing at all to gain personally, and thus really were pushing what they thought was best; through people who did stand to gain, but truly thought that what they were advocating was in everyone's interest; etc. But the people who I felt were deliberately and knowingly putting their own interests before the community's, i.e. recommending something they knew to be harmful because it was good for them - they were very rare. My recollection is now somewhat dim (too much was happening, at too high a pace) of the details of those later days (well, 'later' only in that they were considerably later than the very early days :-), but my sense is that people like that didn't last long in the community; I have the distinct impression that people figured them out, and as an eventual result, they tended to fade from the scene. The IETF culture was not welcoming to that kind of thinking. I dunno, maybe I'm just being naive (and I would certainly welcome correction if I'm wrong), but that's how I saw it. Noel

7 years, 7 months

Misguided standsads (was What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?)

by Doug McIlroy

> Standards committees are not filled with altruistic folks working to > make something great. Not only in big ways, such as to sway the market. An example from Posix is the undefined meaning of malloc(0). As I understand it, just one committee member held out for malloc(0) to be an optional error, thus confounding a harmless corner case with a fatal error. This nit has burdened conscientious programmers ever since, all so one company's easily fixable variant could be grandfathered into compliance. Doug

7 years, 7 months

Early Xenix source code (was: What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?)

by Paul Ruizendaal

> They might actually. Gates isn’t in charge, and there has been a major effort to being Linux compatibility into the Windows 10 kernel. I agree that they might. Once there was strong commercial logic to disown their Unix history; that commercial logic may have reversed in the last decade. > The biggest issue will be the never ending tangle of licenses, if they had other stuff integrated into there. Let’s analyse that bit: - They could pick the Nokia solution, i.e. to simply make an undertaking not to sue and thus avoid taking a position on Unix ownership etc. - It would seem that Xenix 2 (no apparent version 1?) was more or less V7 and for internal use only (lacking a binary redistribution license, as Clem pointed out). Very little chance of 3rd party source code in there, but also of little interest for the historical record. - The first real ports occur with Xenix 2.x in 1981-83. This would appear to have been based on System III with the PDP-11, Z8000, 68000 and 8086 as targets. Considering the size of MS at the time and how busy they were with IBM and DOS I don’t think they would have had much time to do more than a basic port: they contracted out much of the work to SCO, a two man shop at the time. It would seem that MS owned the IP with SCO being a contractor & part-owned subsidiary. - This Altos manual https://web.archive.org/web/20170222131722/http://www.tenox.net/docs/xenix/… actually says that Xenix 2.x was still based on V7 and would seem to be a vanilla port, i.e. unlikely to include other stuff than V7, some 2BSD and of course MS' own stuff. - The next release, Xenix 3.0 in 83-84, still appears to be SysIII based and would remain easy from that perspective. However, given two years of polishing it may have picked up bits and pieces from the outside and the tool chains probably started to include MS’ own compilers, it would be harder to figure out what could be released. However, looking at this highly interesting leaflet http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IBM-Seminar-Proceedi… it would seem that it is still all SysIII, BSD and Microsoft code. In my opinion the real hurdle is finding a retired MS VP who’s interested in knocking on doors and making the case for this public relations move. Paul PS: There is scope for confusion over version numbers. It would seem that MS never directly sold Xenix, only via OEM’s. For example, IBM PC Xenix 1.0 would appear to be the same as MS Xenix 3.0

7 years, 7 months

standard types

by Larry McVoy

I have my own types.h that I carry around that has stuff like typedef unsigned char u8; typedef unsigned short u16; typedef unsigned int u32; typedef unsigned long long u64; typedef signed char i8; typedef signed short i16; typedef signed int i32; typedef signed long long i64; and I wonder why the original Unix authors didn't make something similar? Instead we have uint64_t and I don't see the added value of more chars. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

7 years, 7 months

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TUHS