TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

29 participants
6557 discussions

by Larry McVoy

On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 08:00:55PM +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > |On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 07:06:51PM -0500, Ron Natalie wrote: > |> 1977 marks my entry into the world of UNIX. I've always stated there was > |> only one person who truly understood nroff and he was dead. > |> I mourn the fact that of all the UNIX greats I've met, I missed out on > |> Ossanna. > > |I think one could argue that James Clark … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Unix on PDP8?

by Will Senn

All, Was Unix ever ported to a PDP8, or any other 12 bit environment, for that matter? If not, why not? My understanding, such as it is, is that Unix was created on the PDP7 - btw, thank you very much, Ken Thompson, you definitely changed my world :), which is an 18bit machine, and that it soon found its first real home on the 16 bit PDP11 series of machines (an 11/20), and from there, ever upward or at least ever onward. I'm curious about it for historical reasons, of course, but also … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] UNIX on S/370

by Larry McVoy

So tape I can see being more weird, but isn't raw disk just "don't put it in buffer cache"? >From what I've been able to gather early tape in Unix was dicey, something about the driver doing seek. Was there more to it than that? On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 02:33:55AM +0000, Clem Cole wrote: > It???s not so much that they don???t mix, it???s not quite the same. Some > coprocessor ideas work really well into the Unix I/O model, others don't. > Raw disk and tape I/O ala a PDP11 or … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Dash options

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Charles Anthony > Entry points are usually defined as "foo$bar", where "foo" is the > segment name, and "bar" an entry point in the segment symbol table. I > believe that the degerate case of "foo$" is treated as "foo$foo" by the > shell. So I'm curious about how this, and additional names, interact. (For those who aren't familiar with Multics, a segment [file, sort of] can have multiple names. This is sort of like 'hard links' in Unix, except that in … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Dash options

by Jon Steinhart

Does anybody know the history of dash options? Were they a UNIX thing or did UNIX borrow them from something earlier? Jon

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Dash options

by Doug McIlroy

Early on, when multics was understood to have one big, segemented address space, it was expected that PL/I name qualification ($) would serve to address segments. I do not know whether that idea was actually implemented. Doug

7 years, 8 months

/bin/true (was [TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix)

by Ron Natalie

My favorite reduction to absurdity was /bin/true. Someone decided we needed shell commands for true and false. Easy enough to add a script that said "exit 0" or exit 1" as its only line. Then someone realized that the "exit 0" in /bin true was superfluous, the default return was 0. /bin/true turned into an empty, yet executable, file. Then the lawyers got involved. We got a version of a packaged UNIX (I think it was Interactive Systems). Every shell script got twelve lines of … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Dash options

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> Multics had some kind of `attach' and `detach' of I/O streams, well > known to Ossanna, so perhaps dup(2), and a Thompson-shell syntax to go > with it meant `>' was earmarked early on. According to "The Evolution of the Unix Timesharing System", full path names arrived later than I/O redirection, so by they time they needed a separator, '>' and '<' were gone. '/' also has the advantage of being a non-shift character! Noel PS: Re-reading that, I see that early … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Dash options

by Paul Ruizendaal

> On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 2:36 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > >> MS/DOS patterned its command line >> >> syntax after RT-11 and inherited the slash as a command option >> introduction from there. > > Minor correction... To do a CDC style patient zero history ;-) RT11 took > it from DOS/8, CP/M took it from RT11, then finally DOS-86 which became > PC-DOS ney MS/DOS took it from CP/M. I think Gary Kildall was … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Harvard and Von Neumann Architectures and Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Doug McIlroy > But if that had been in D space, it couldn't have been executed. Along those lines, I was wondering about modern OS's, which I gather for security reasons prevent execution of data, and prevent writing to code. Programs which emit these little 'custom code fragments' (I prefer that term, since they aren't really 'self-modifying code' - which I define as 'a program which _changes_ _existing_ instructions) must have some way of having a chunk of memory into … [View More]

7 years, 8 months

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TUHS