> From: Arnold Robbins
> CCI made the Tahoe that 4.4 ran on, but I'm guessing it's a different
> architecture than the Interdata?
I think so. Almost all documentation on the Tahoe has been lost in the mists
of time (if ANYONE retains ANY hardcopies of ANY hardware documentation for
the Tahoe, PLEASE let me know), but I recently managed to work out a bit
about it from the instruction decoding/printing routines in the debuggers
from 4.3 BSD Tahoe:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/Power_6/32
and it seems to be fairly different from the Interdata:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/interdata/32bit/29-365R01_32BitRefMan_Jun74.pdf
Also, 'CCI' is 'Computer Consoles Incorporated', not "Concurrent Computer
Corp".
Noel
http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_origin_of_dot_filename.html says
> I'm not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite
.. was there from the beginning. The v1 man page directory(v) says,
> By convention, the first two entries in each directory are for "." and "..".
Doug
> From: Rich Salz
> The PC/IP software from MIT included a port of the "Portable C
> Compiler" to generate 8086-era code. It ran on a Unix machine and built
> binaries that you downloaded to the PC. ... So you need an ATT source
> license to get the full PCIP dev kit.
That makes sense. The 'MIT license' (about which Jerry Saltzer did a note for
the October-December 2020 issue of the 'IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing', available here:
https://www.mit.edu/~Saltzer/publications/MITLicense.pdf
and which mentions that it was initially done for the MIT PC/IP code) only
applied to the MIT-written applications, not a 'derived work' (to use the
intellectual property law 'term of art') based on Bell code.
Noel
Hi everyone,
I'm here with a Unix/Bell Labs history question at the suggestion of
BWK. I have a bit of a computing mystery on my hands...
_Conquest_ is an old game that apparently came to life in Bell Labs, but
no one seems to know anything more about it, including who the
author is.
The instructions for the game[1] contain the following text at the
bottom:
Amiga port by Bob Shimbo, orginal author unknown.
This game started life on a UNIX system at Bell Labs. It was ported
to CP/M 80 by a Scott Kamin. The manual was thrown together in an
afternoon. (Typos and corrections welcome).
You can reach me through Compuserve (UID 70260,231) or TBBS of
colorado (303)-693-4735.
The LHA archive for the Amiga was packaged in 1986.
I did get in touch with Bob Shimbo, but he writes:
You can imagine how long ago I did that port given I referenced my
Compuserve account. I don't recall where I found the code originally.
Sorry. We've been through 3 house moves since then and I don't know
where any references might have gotten to.
Scott Kamin--I found a reference to someone by his name in the CP/M
world in the 80s in New Jersey. (Internet Archive has lots of old
computer magazine scans and his name showed up in the classified ads.)
And a search turned up a snail mail address for someone in the right age
range living a few miles from the business listed in the ad. A Hail Mary
snail mail got no reply.
Does any of it ring a bell, by any chance? I've begun the work of
getting it to run on modern systems[2], and it would be great to be able
to include more history in the man page.
Cheers,
-Beej
[1] https://github.com/beejjorgensen/conquest/blob/master/instructions.txt
[2] https://github.com/beejjorgensen/conquest/
--
Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall
beej(a)beej.us https://beej.us/
Not UNIX, but adjacent...
With the permission of John Chambers, I'm sharing a scan of "S - A Language
and System for Data Analysis" by Richard Becker and John Chambers, January
1981.
Enjoy:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14ijVPw1DihydXFqTzj-wgl3C5LYEJdKX?us…
I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
Hi All.
The V7 ls.c ignores `.' and `..', unless given the -a option.
The V1 - V6 ls ignores all files that start with `.', unless given -a,
and this is the default for all modern versions of ls.
BWK tells me there's a story about the V7 behavior but he doesn't
remember what it is. Does anyone here know?
Thanks,
Arnold
Mark Seiden writes:
> the display updating code, as i recall, had a skull and crossbones on it
> i remember there was a bit of a kerfuffle when richard stallman introduced
> that code into gnu emacs
This is true. Gosling Emacs from 1984 and GNU Emacs 13 from 1985 both
have the skull and crossbones comment.
I see in many places the 1973 Symposium on Operating System Principles mentioned
as one of the earliest if not the earliest discussion of UNIX in the public eye.
This would be around the time of the Fourth Edition and the rewrite of the
system for the PDP-11/45 in C.
Well, I recently picked up Aho and Ullman's The Theory of Parsing, Translation,
and Compiling. The very last sentence of the preface in Volume 1 reads:
> The use of UNIX, an operating system for the PDP-11 computer designed by
> Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson, expedited the preparation of certain
> parts of this manuscript.
Given that this text was published in 1972, would this have been a completely
esoteric reference to the general target audience of these books or was
knowledge of UNIX already well circulated in the computing community by then?
What other sorts of notoriety/publicity did UNIX get out in the general public
prior to its presentation in 1973 and subsequent publication of the paper in
CACM?
- Matt G.
