TUHS

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6556 discussions

Re: Sam and Late BTL Work (was End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference))

by segaloco

On Thursday, July 17th, 2025 at 10:44 PM, Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Sam had it, acme took it (and much else) from Sam. > > -rob > > > On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 3:22 PM Noel Hunt <noel.hunt(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > But that is far less useful than having two windows into the same > > > file where the mods to each window go to the same file. Think > > > looking at code that has the structs at the top of the file and you > > > need to wack a struck and wack the code that uses that struct. > > > Quite pleasant. > > > > > > You will find that this is exactly what 'Zerox' in acme does. Sam is indeed nice but I have not quite gotten to the point of using it daily. For my hobby projects I rarely launch an X session, opting to simply work from the framebuffer console instead. I don't have a graphical editor of choice these days though so Sam is certainly on the docket whenever I start using a windowing environment heavily outside of web browsing again. End of the day though I like being able to do the bulk of what I do sitting at any given computer from the console. I have a VT100 that I've finally restored to perfect health I plan on setting up in my bedroom as a true terminal (routed through my Dataphone modems down to my office machine). To hopefully inspire some interesting discussion, was Sam ever formally supported by AT&T as an editor in System V, either OpenLook or X environments? Or did it never escape Plan 9 as far as AT&T's commercial UNIX offerings go? In a more general sense I find the later genetic flow from BTL et. al. to USL intriguing since the Labs were already onto things so far ahead of what System V was in the commercial scene. - Matt G.

1 month

Re: End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference)

by norman＠oclsc.org

Cameron_M��e��l_Tyre_via_TUHS: I got obsessed with getting ed running on every device I have including my phones and then the big rabbit hole off that first one was learning how to use it properly and to the fullest of its abilities. == Of course. ed(1) is the standard editor. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 month

troff, Gremlin terminals, and the grn preprocessor

by G. Branden Robinson

Hi folks, I'm trying to clear up a historical matter. In reviewing groff's "LICENSES" file, I find myself stuck on the following paragraph. >grn, written by Barry Roitblat <barry(a)rentonww.com> and David >Slattengren <slatteng(a)Xinet.COM>, was part of the Berkeley >troff distribution. The files contain no AT&T code >and are in the public domain. Historically, the original package could >be found at <http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/misc/grn.tar.Z>. I'm not sure about that reference to "Berkeley troff". I already deleted the modifier "device-independent" from that sentence because I've never seen even a whisper of evidence that the CSRG ever distributed Kernighan's device-independent troff; that was locked up behind AT&T's revenue-seeking aims. But also, I can't find evidence that "grn" was distributed by Berkeley at all. At Warren's "Unix Tree",[1] I see what looks superficially like evidence of support for Gremlin terminals in "libplot", but that's not the same thing. However there is evidence of support for grn, the troff preprocessor, in other unquestionable BSD artifacts, like Eric Allman's "me" package. Can someone clear up my misconceptions or suggest non-misleading alternative wording? Was the grn preprocessor one of these "USENIX tape" things, like nethack and jove? Regards, Branden [1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl

1 month, 1 week

Toronto's Numerical Turing compiler

by Adam Sampson

Hi TUHS, A poster on the Stardot Acorn forum asked whether the Numerical Turing compiler had survived. I figure this is probably the best place to ask. Numerical Turing was a mid-80s variant of the University of Toronto's Turing programme language that provided arbitrary-precision decimal float arithmetic, developed by Tom Hull and others. It's described in this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1057947.1057949 It ran on Toronto's ai VAX under 4.2BSD. The paper mentions the compiler ntc and its man page, the demo program ntdemo.x, and the standard include directory /usr/include/nt. There are a few references to it in the utzoo Usenet archive but it looks like it was distributed upon request. Has anybody seen a surviving copy? Thanks, -- Adam Sampson <ats(a)offog.org> <http://offog.org/>

1 month, 1 week

Other implementations of Alef?

by Skip Tavakkolian

In the 2nd Edition Plan 9, in the Alef Language Reference Manual by Phil Winterbottom, the title of section 7 is "The Plan 9 Implementation". Were there other implementations?

1 month, 1 week

Old UNIX newsletters?

by Tom Lyon

Anyone sitting on piles of old UNIX newsletters? I find they make for fascinating reading. I haven't found any online archives. If you have a pile, I can scan them. I'm going to scan my 3 copies of commUNIXations, the /usr/group newsletter, and 4 copies of "UNIQUE - Your independent UNIX and C Advisor" - all from 1983/4. Warren can hopefully find a home for these.

1 month, 2 weeks

xview and open motif files

by arnold＠skeeve.com

Hi All. I found the following files recently: $ ls -l total 8748 -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 5661471 Oct 1 2007 openmotif-2.3.0.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 4888 Jan 18 1999 xvfc.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold ftpusers 3281277 Jan 18 1999 xview3.2.tar.gz They can be retrieved under https://www.skeeve.com/X11/. I have sent them to Warren, who currently has them in his hidden archive. I also have a copy of the OpenLook CDROM, but I notice it's available from GitHub: https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM. Enjoy, Arnold

1 month, 2 weeks

Texas UNIX Users Conference 1981

by norman＠oclsc.org

This note gets a bit COFF-y; please redirect any replies to that list. USENIX Summer 1981, in Austin TX. First USENIX conference I ever attended, and the first to which I travelled by train-- mostly. I was somewhat shy about travelling in those days, but my Caltech colleague Mark Bartelt talked me into going, and suggested going by train. Except by the time I booked the trip there was space available only from Los Angeles to San Antonio and back, not onward from San Antonio to Austin. But in those days I did a bit of cycle touring, often in the company of my friend Brian Foster. Brian was also a co-worker at the time, and was interested in attending too. So we decided to travel together by train (in coach) to San Antonio, arriving around 05h30, and spent the rest of that day cycling, mostly up the frontage roads beside I-35, to Austin. After the conference we cycled back, mostly at night, which was somewhat spooky (I remember seeing a thunderstorm off on the horizon but we didn't get rained on) but saved us a second dose of sunburn. They checked into a motel for a day and a night until the return train came through at 02h55. I have gone by train to nearly every other conference I've attended since, but never again have I cycled. It was a fun ride but a harder one than expected. In those days of paper mapes, we visited the Caltech geography department and plotted out what looked like a fairly smooth route, with a slow but steady climb. The topo map we used had a resolution of 50' altitude. Evidently the constant, sometimes steep hills between San Antonio and Austin are all no more than 49' tall. It was a good conference too. One memory that sticks in my head was Jim Joyce using Tinker Toys as a metaphor for connecting Unix tools together. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

1 month, 4 weeks

Re: X.25 stacks on Unix

by Rudi J. Blom

Greg, a long time a go while still working for Computer Division of Philips Electronics I used X.25 and X.21 extensively on various proprietary O.S.-es. X.25/X.21 (or PSDN/CSDN) was used for Teletex (CCITT T series, TTX, better than telex but lost to FAX which was easier, cheaper and legally acceptable). I still have some dedicated boards which Philips used for X.25, X.21 and SDLC. At a customer side in a test environment with SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2 SDLC links are still used, X.25 was phased out a few years ago. Same with DEC Tru64, a multi-port SYNC-2000 with appropriate DEC software could support both X.25 and SDLC. AlphaServer DS25 with SDLC links still in production. I still have all the applicable software for SCO UNIX and DEC Tru64. Cheers, uncle rubl -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing. 24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration. 24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration 24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration 24 x 7 is not enough but my request for 25 x 8 is still under consideration

1 month, 4 weeks

Texas UNIX Users Conference 1981

by Tom Lyon

I just discovered that this issue of the Australian UNIX User Group Newsletter contains summaries of all the talks and sessions from the Usenix Texas UNIX Users Conference - Summer 1981. https://vtda.org/pubs/AUUGN/AUUGN-V03.4.pdf In what I believe was my first public speaking role I presented "UNIX vs Godzilla -- UNIX in an IBM Environment" Lots of other familiar names in those notes too.

1 month, 4 weeks

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