TUHS

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6464 discussions

by Norman Wilson

Jim "wkt" Moriarty: > Anybody who mentions 80 cols will be forced to use either a Hazeltine or > an ADM3 (not 3a) for a month. ===== So who has a modern emulator for either of those terminals? Norman Wilson Toronto ON (Still not really in Toronto, but no longer in Texas)

7 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Dennis's V6 root tape

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > I then extracted 101 blocks from the image (tmrk, a bootblock, and who > knows what else, but seriously what else is on those first 100 blocks?) http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_UNIX_Sixth_Edition#Installation_tape_con… > I thought the Ken Wellsch tape was basically the same as the Dennis > Ritchie disks, but now I'm not so sure http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html#Initial > Makes me curious to see what else is different. Nothing. Noel

7 years, 4 months

Dennis's V6 root tape

by Will Senn

Does anyone know if the image http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v6/v6root.gz is somehow bootable as-is? I wasn't able to figure out how to get it to boot, so I went on a quest to make it bootable. Here's what I did - let me know if this was overkill or misguided. Basically, I downloaded the known bootable v6 distribution tape from Wellsch directory in TUHS. I then extracted 101 blocks from the image (tmrk, a bootblock, and who knows what else, but seriously what … [View More]

7 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] 80 columns ...

by Norman Wilson

Nemo: And for that reason, I have never used Python. (I have a mental block about that.) ==== I used to feel the same way. A few years ago I held my nose and jumped in. I'm glad I did; Python is a nifty little language that, now I know it, hits a sweet spot twixt low-level C and high-level shell and awk scripts. Denoting blocks solely by indentation isn't at all bad once you do it; no worse than adapting from do ... end to C's {}. What still bugs me about Python: -- It is … [View More]

7 years, 4 months

80 columns ...

by ron minnich

So, 80 column folks, would you find this a(b, c, d) more readable than a(b,c,d) (this is a real example, with slightly shortened names) would you have code review software that automatically bounces out lines that are 82 columns wide? How far does this go? I do recall 80 column monitors, but I started on 132 column decwriter IIs and hence have never had sympathy for 80 columns. It's weird that so many punched-card standards are required in our code bases now (see: Linux). moving away from … [View More]

7 years, 4 months

finding help in v7 in 1980

by Will Senn

Hi, Everyone on the list is well aware that running V7 in a modern simulator like SIMH is not a period realistic environment and some of the "problems" facing the novice enthusiast are considerably different from those of the era (my terminal is orders of magnitude faster and my "tape" is a file on a disk). However, many of the challenges facing someone in 1980, remain for the enthusiast, such as how to run various commands successfully and how devices interoperate with unix. Of course, … [View More]we have do resources and some overlapping experience to draw on - duckduckgo (googleish), tuhs member experience, and exposure to modern derivatives like linux, macos, bsd, etc. We also have documentation of the system in the form of the Programmer's Guide - as pdfs and to some degree as man pages on the system (haven't found volume 2 documentation on the instance). My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing perspective. What resources did you consult in your early days and what did the workflow look like in practical terms. As an example - today, when I want to know how to accomplish a task in modern unix, I: 1. Search my own experience and knowledge. If I know the answer, duh, I know it. 2. Decide if I have enough information about the task to guess at the requisite commands. If I do, then man command is my friend. If not, I try man -k task or apropos task where task is a one word summary of what I'm trying to accomplish. 3. If that fails, then I search for the task online and try what other folks have done in similar circumstances. 4. If that fails, then I look for an OS specific help list (linux-mint-help, freebsd forums, etc), do another search there, and post a question. 5. If that fails, or takes a while, and I know someone with enough knowledge to help, I ask them. 6. I find and scan relevant literature or books on the subject for something related. Repeat as needed. Programming requires some additional steps: 1. look at source files including headers and code. 2. look at library dependencies 3. ask on dev lists but otherwise, is similar. In V7, it's trickier because apropos doesn't exist, or the functional equivalent man -k, for that matter and books are hard to find (most deal with System V or BSD. I do find the command 'find /usr/man -name "*" -a -print | grep task' to be useful in finding man pages, but it's not as general as apropos. So, what was the process of learning unix like in the V7 days? What were your goto resources? More than just man and the sources? Any particular notes, articles, posts, or books that were really helpful (I found the article, not the book, "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Mashey, to be enlightening https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1981/04/01667315.pdf)? Regards, Will [View Less]

7 years, 4 months

Version 8 will never come out!

by Will Senn

Reading in the AUUGN vol 1 number 4, p. 15 in letter dated April 5, 1979, from Alistair Kilgour, Glasgow writing to Ian Johnstone, New South Wales about a Unix meeting in the U.K. at University of Kent at Caterbury (150 attended the meeting) with Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan... Two paragraphs that I found interesting and fun: Most U.K. users were astonished to hear that one thing which has _not_ changed in Version 7 is the default for "delete character" and "… [View More]

7 years, 4 months

origins of void*

by Paul Ruizendaal

I’m trying to understand the origins of void pointers in C. I think they first appeared formally in the C89 spec, but may have existed in earlier compilers. Of course, as late as V7 there wasn’t much enforcement of types and hence no need for the void* concept and automatic casting. I suppose ‘lint’ would have flagged it though. In the 4BSD era there was caddr_t, which I think was used for pretty much the same purposes. Did ‘lint’ in the 4BSD era complain about omitted casts to and fro’ … [View More]

7 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > what was it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? ... What > resources did you consult in your early days Well, I started by reading through the UPM (the 8-section thing, with commands in I, system calls in II, etc). I also read a lot of Unix documentation which came as larger documents (e.g the Unix Intro, C Tutorial and spec, etc). I should point out that back then, this was a feasible task. Most man pages were really _a_ page, and often a short … [View More]

7 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] margins and indenting, and arbitrary c rules

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> I'd been moving in this direction for a while Now that I think about it, I may have subconciously absorbed this from Ken's and Dennis' code in the V6 kernel. Go take a look at it: more than one level of indent is quite rare in anything there (including tty.c, which has some pretty complex stuff in it). I don't know if this was subconcious but deliberate, or concious, or just something they did for other reasons (e.g. typing long lines took too long on their TTY's :-), but it's very … [View More]

7 years, 4 months

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