Of interest to the old farts here...
At 22:30 (but which timezone?) on this day in 1969 the first packet got as
far as "LO" ("LOGIN"?) then crashed. More details, anyone?
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Chris Torek:
You're not perpendicular to your own surface? :-)
===
I'm not as limber as I used to be.
Besides, I'm left-handed, so what use would I have for
right angles?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(I don't wish to know that)
> From: Steve Nickolas
> I personally believe a lot of code in modern operating systems is larger
> than the task requires.
The "operating" is superfluous.
Noel
George Michaelson:
wish I hadn't read "Norman Wilson" as "Norman Wisdom" (british
prat-fall comedian in the style of Jerry Lewis)
===
It's much better than the more-common typo in which
people call me normal. Neither accurate nor an
aspiration.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
I've always enjoyed this paper; recently I found occasion to thumb
through it again. I thought I'd pass it on; I'm curious what some on
the list think about this given their first-hand knowledge of relevant
history (Larry, I'm looking at you; especially with respect his
comments on the VM system).
- Dan C.
http://www.terzarima.net/doc/taste.pdf
As an admirer of minimalism, who has given talks that extol
Norman Wilson's streamlining of research Unix, I naturally
like Forsythe's thesis.
I noticed unintended irony in one more or less throw-away remark:
"It is dangerous to place too much hope in any improvement coming from just
following new fashions, if we lack insight into what really went wrong
before. Without that insight, I suspect that rewriting UNIX in C++,
for example, could easily become an excuse for increasing complexity
(because by using C++ `we can handle more complexity')."
Bjarne Stroustrup's avowed reason for building cfront, which
evolved into C++, was to have a tool for building an operating
system in object-oriented style. The tool took on a life of
its own, and arguably became more complex than the old-fashioned
Unix he aspired to improve on.
Doug
On Oct 22, 2017 1:39 AM, "Will Senn" <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
What is the last bootable and installable media, officially distributed by
Berkeley?
Is that image currently publicly accessible?
What is the closest version, that is currently available, that would match
the os described in "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating
System"?
Probably one of the best ways to get questions about installation media
answered is to simply email Kirk McKusick. He's a really nice guy and will
probably give you an answer pretty quickly.
That said, of the three distributions you mentioned, bootable/installable
media only existed for 4.4BSD (also called the "encumbered" distribution).
-Lite and -Lite2 were "reference distributions." It didn't take *too* much
work to get -Lite working, but it wasn't something that ran out of the box
(or more properly, off of the tape). The original idea was to release
4.4BSD-encumbered to Unix source licensees, and at the same time publish
4.4BSD-Lite sans the redacted bits as an open source distribution. These
were to be the final BSD releases from UCB, but the CSRG found they had
some coin left in the coffers a few months later, so they did -Lite2 as
something of a final hurrah snapshotting some ongoing maintenance work (and
possibly some research?) before officially shutting down.
At one point, I had a copy of a bootable exabyte tape with 4.4-encumbered
installation and source images for SPARC, specifically sun4c machines, that
I had liberated from somewhere. My understanding was that the reference
hardware at Berkeley was 68030- and 68040-based HP 9000 machines, and the
SPARC bits were a contribution from Chris Torek. I got -Lite running on an
older SPARCstation 1, but it wasn't particularly reliable (the compiler
would segfault, and it panic'ed once a day or so), so we put SunOS back on
it pretty quickly.
Hope that helps.
- Dan C.
I'm wondering, with 80s and 90s era Unix being discussed, if there are
any copies of the 80s and 90s era CAD software extant in some form or
other? (Preferably free to good archive?)
IIRC it was a major driver of graphics capabilities in Unix
workstations around that time.
Wesley Parish
> macOS requires you to have a data section aligned to 4K, even if you
> don't use it. The resulting binary is a little over 8K; again, mostly
> zeros.
Not quite. The classic empty executable file for /bin/true works
on OS X. That is not just a clever trick;it's a natural consequence
of Kernighan's ancient prrecept: do nothing gracefully. Conceivably
the 4K data section is, too--if the page has no physical presence
until it is accessed.
Doug
> From: Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com>
> Hope that helps.
I don't have anything to add to this discussion, but may I point out that this
is _exactly_ the kind of thing we'd like to make available at the Computer
History Wiki:
http://gunkies.org/wiki/Main_Page
I'm too busy with other tasks to add it all myself, but I hope you all will be
able to add your pearls there, where it will be available in an organized way,
rather than having to hope Google/Bing/etc can find it in the list archives
among the megatons of other dross on the Internet.
If anyone would like an account there (due to spam issues, anon editing has
been disabled), please let me know, and I'll get you set up right away - just
send me the account name you like (a lot of us use our old time-sharing system
account names :-), and the email address you'd like associated with it.
Noel