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Several QD-600A Tapes from Bell Labs Circa Early 90s

by segaloco

Hello everyone, I'm just putting feelers out for a potential data recovery project that may have some UNIX history nuggets hiding somewhere. I just closed on this auction: https://www.ebay.com/itm/267254963191 After the link is an action for a set of 17 Sony QD-600A tapes featuring various backups from at least one machine named Zeus. The listing indicates they were property of a former Western Electric engineer. At least one tape has a label indicating a full /usr backup. My hope is that something downstream of the BTL internal version of System V might be living amongst these tapes, but either way I was wondering if anyone here with access to the correct tape drive would be willing to assist with ripping these tapes? I can also start hunting down a drive but figured I'd ask around first. I'm not currently spotting a drive on eBay but have a few other places I can ask around. Thanks for any input! - Matt G.

1 month

Re: Demise of AT&T

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Steve Jenkin > An unanswered question about Silicon Valley is: > Why did it happen in California and not be successfully cloned > elsewhere? One good attempt at answering this is in "Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970", by Christophe Lecuyer; it's also a very good history of the early Silicon Valley (before the mid-1960's). Most of it's available online, at Google: https://books.google.com/books?id=5TgKinNy5p8C I have neither the time nor energy to comment in detail on your very detailed post, but I think Lecuyer would mostly agree with your points. > It wasn't just AT&T, IBM & DEC that got run over by commodity DRAM & > CPU's, it was the entire Minicomputer Industry, effectively extinct by > 1995. Same thing for the work-station industry (with Sun being merely the most notable example). I have a tiny bit of second-hand personal knowldge in this area; my wife works for NASA, as a structural engineer, and they run a lot of large computerized mathematical models. In the 70's, they were using CDC 7600's; they moved along through various things as technology changed (IIRC, at one point they had SGI machines). These days, they seem to mostly be using high-end personal computers for this. Some specialized uses (various forms of CAD) I guess still use things that look like work-stations, but I expect they are stock personal computers with special I/O (very large displays, etc). So I guess now there are just supercomputers (themselves mostly built out of large numbers of commodity CPUs), and laptops. Well, there is also cloud computing, which is huge, but that also just uses lots of commodity CPUs. Noel

1 month

Is there a way to mirror Stevens' kohala.com ?

by Adam Koszek

Hi I recently noticed that some references from Richard Stevens’ website aren’t working: https://www.kohala.com/ - many links are broken, including links to the resources that worked before. I found some sub-directory there that appears to have copies of referenced files: http://www.kohala.com/start/ I’d be willing to chip in some $ to extend his domain + server to just work, in case anybody here knows the right people. I also wondered whether we could mirror his site on TUHS? Thanks, Adam

1 month

Re: Is there a way to mirror Stevens' kohala.com ?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Adam Koszek > Try to access his: > Stevens, W. R. 1989. "Heuristics for Disk Drive Positioning in > 4.3BSD," Computing Systems, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 251-274 (Summer). I'm getting the exact same error you are, so it's nothing specific to your side. There is another copy of that paper here: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1989/sum_stevens.pdf though. (Multiple copies of things are _somewhat_ common.) Noel

1 month

Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

by Aharon Robbins

I'm hoping that someone hear (*BSD folks?) might know what's happened with the PCC Revived project. The site and CVS server for it went offline in October 2023 or so, and I lost the email address for Ragge who was doing it. Thanks, Arnold

1 month

Re: shells, Re: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Noel Chiappa > the PWB shell (which I guess Massey worked on; hence the name) Someone pointed out to me that I needed to do a: 1,$s/Massey/Mashey/g The pitfalls of creating replies in editor buffers: typos get replicated! Noel

1 month

Re: shells, Re: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "John Levine" > I had heard that called the Mashey shell, also according to Wikipedia > the PWB shell. Wikipedia content is a little better than LLM output, but not much! (The best thing in Wikipedia is the referencs.) The changes to the Thompson shell to make the PWB shell (which I guess Massey worked on; hence the name) are laid out pretty well in "UNIX Time-Sharing System: The Programmer's Workbench" (of which Massey is a co-author): https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-2177 The projects which used PWB made extensive use of shell command files. So, PWB made two kinds of changes to the shell: i) flow-of-control commands used in shell procedures were made built-ins (which gave a huge decrease in fork() overhead), and ii) minor enhancements to shell command semantics (variables, evaluation of expressions, nestable control structure), which made shell command files much more powerful (and thus used a lot more). Minnie's 'version comparison tool' is useful to use to compare the 'Massey' shell: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1/sys/source/s2/sh.c with the vanilla V6 ('Thompson') shell. The PWB shell is definitely a tweaked version of the Thompson shell. Noel

1 month

Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum.

by Jackson Helie G

What program's source code is on pages 145 - 169 (assembly listings are t1 - t8) in the CHM release of UNIX BOOK II?

1 month

Re: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Adam Thornton > Maybe this is what "the shell" looked like before Bourne shell came > along. Huh? The Bourne shell was done in the late V6 era, and was included in the release, starting with V7. The classic shell (the Thompson shell, originally) was included starting with V1: http://squoze.net/UNIX/v1man/man1/sh That one was written in PDP-11 assembler: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/sh.s but by V5 it had been re-written in C: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s2/sh.c Mind, I'm not saying that your theory as to what the code being enquired about does is wrong; but the theory that 'this is what the shell was before the Bourne shell' does seem to be off base. Noel

1 month

Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum.

by Norman Wilson

I don't know what t1-t8 are, but they're not the shell. The shell, labelled sh, is pages 100-106 of the same book. LLMs are not search engines. They are bullshit generators. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 month

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