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6557 discussions

by Paul Ruizendaal

Many thanks for on and off list replies to my query. I happened to stumble across a paper by Krik McKusick (right here in the THUS archives) that has some more background: http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Unix_Review/Berkeley_Unix_History… and in particular on page 38 of the magazine (page 6 of the PDF). It says (with some reformatting for clarity): "The contract called for major work to be done on the system so the DARPA research community could better do its work. Based on the needs of the DARPA community, goals were set and work began to define the modifications to the system. In particular, the new system: - was expected to include a faster file system that would raise throughput to the speed of available disk technology, - would support processes with multi-gigabyte address space requirements, - would provide flexible interprocess communication facilities that would allow researchers to do work in distributed systems, - would integrate networking support so that machines running the new system could easily participate in the ARPAnet.” So, IPC facilities to support distributed systems were apparently an explicit goal, and that helps explain the composition of the committee. It continues: "To assist in defining the new system, Duane Adams, Berkeley's contract monitor at DARPA, formed a group known as the "steering committee” to help guide the design work and ensure that the research community's needs were addressed. This committee met twice a year between April, 1981 and June, 1983, and included [name list as before]. Beginning in 1984, these meetings were supplanted by workshops that were expanded to include many more people.” This shift in membership after 4.2BSD shipped had already been noted. The committee seems to have had a productive start: "An initial document proposing facilities to be included in the new system was circulated to the steering committee and other people outside Berkeley in July, 1981, sparking many lengthy debates.” I would assume that those initial discussions included debates on what would become the socket API. I’ve asked Kirk McKusick if he still remembered that initial discussion document. The reply was: "The document to which you refer became known as the "BSD System Manual". The earliest version that I could find was the one distributed with 4.2BSD in July 1983 which I have attached.” If anyone knows of earlier versions of that document (prior to 1982), I’d be highly interested. The paper also notes: "During the summer, Joy concentrated on implementing a prototype version of the interprocess communication facilities.” I’ll scan the early (partial) SCCS logs for remnants of that (a long shot, but worth a try). Paul

7 years, 10 months

Re: stty erase '^?' in v7

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Will Senn > 1. How do you escape # in order to write a C program if # is the erase > character in the terminal? "Use the source, Luke!" V7 is simple enough that it's pretty quick to find the answers to things like this. E.g. http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/sys/dev/tty.c> will answer this question (in "canon()"). > 3. Is there a way to echo the ascii value of a keypress in v7? A quick look through tty.c suggests this doesn't exist in V7 - without running a user program that puts the TTY in 'raw' mode and prints out what it sees. Not sure if there is one off the rack, or if you'd have to whip up a 20-line program to do it. Noel

7 years, 10 months

help building kernel after fresh install of V7

by Will Senn

After installing a fresh simh V7 instance with 2 RP06's and a TU10, I tried building the kernel and running it. I got a panic. I didn't mess with the defaults, so I'm at a loss as to how the stock kernel is different from the one I built. I tried building as root, then sys, same effect. Here's what I did: nboot.ini contents: set cpu 11/70 set cpu 2M set cpu idle set rp0 rp06 att rp0 rp06-0.disk set rp1 rp06 att rp1 rp06-1.disk boot rp0 pdp11 nboot.ini boot hp(0,0)unix (actually renamed hptmunix) mem = 2020544 CTRL-D login: root cd /usr/sys/conf make allsystems ... build stuff, no errors or warnings mv hptmunix / sync sync CTRL-E quit the sim pdp11 nboot.ini boot hp(0,0)hptmunix mem = 2021696 err on dev 0/0 bn=1 er=100000,4507 err on dev 0/0 bn=1 er=100000,4521 err on dev 0/0 ... etc. Am I doing something wrong or missing an important configuration step. I am just trying to rebuild the stock kernel before I try any reconfigurations. -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 10 months

New PDF version of Installing and Using Research Unix Version 7 In the SimH PDP-11/45 and 11/70 Emulators

by Will Senn

Hi all, I just finished creating an updated PDF version of a blog post I did a couple of years back, describing how to install and use Unix v7 in SimH. It's updated for 2017 and MacOS High Sierra 10.13. I started the update because I was wanting to do some research in v7 and thought it would be good to have a current set of instructions but really because I was interested in learning a bit about LaTeX and creating prettier, more useful documents. The notes still work fine as originally written, but I organized things a little differently and tweaked some of the language. I thought somebody else might like having a PDF version around so I uploaded the result, call it revision 1.1, and made it publicly accessible (the blog still needs updating, somebody oughta do something about link impermanence, but that's all for another day). Feel free to comment or complain. I added a section in honor of dmr at one commenter's suggestion. Here's the link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1_Jn6Hlzym-Zmx1TjR3TENDQTA Later, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 10 months

SGI Software Usability II (IRIX 5.1 memo)

by Michael-John Turner

Hi, I came across this on Lobsters[1] today and thought it may be of interest to the list: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html It appears to be an internal SGI memo that's rather critical of IRIX 5.1. Does anyone know if it's true? [1] https://lobste.rs/ Cheers, MJ -- Michael-John Turner * mj(a)mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/

7 years, 10 months

Re: SGI Software Usability II (IRIX 5.1 memo)

by Don Hopkins

When I was working at UniPress in New Jersey, we had an SGI Iris named pink on which we developed the 4Sight versions of NeWS Emacs (NeMACS). Speaking of SGI leaks: Those things are fucking heavy! It was raining torrentially outside and the UniPress office started to flood, so we had to keep taking shelves down off the wall and wedging them underneath the Iris to jack it up above the water, as it kept getting deeper and deeper. Ron will remember the emergency bailing technique MG and I developed of repeatedly filling the shop vac with water then flushing it down the toilet. The Indigos were another story entirely: They couldn't touch the raw graphics performance of an Iris, since the rendering was all in software, but you could actually stuff one of them in the overhead compartment on an airplane! And then there was the SGI Indy... They made up for being small on the outside, by being HUGE and BLOATED in the inside: "Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'". -- Mark Hughes (?) This legendary leaked SGI memo has become required reading for operating system and programming language design courses: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/irix-bloat.txt <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/irix-bloat.txt> -Don > On 12 Oct 2017, at 15:16, Don Hopkins <SimHacker(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDnPiXyME0 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDnPiXyME0> > >> On 12 Oct 2017, at 15:04, Michael-John Turner <mj(a)mjturner.net <mailto:mj@mjturner.net>> wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >> I came across this on Lobsters[1] today and thought it may be of interest to the list: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html <http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html> >> >> It appears to be an internal SGI memo that's rather critical of IRIX 5.1. Does anyone know if it's true? >> >> [1] https://lobste.rs/ <https://lobste.rs/> >> >> Cheers, MJ -- >> Michael-John Turner * mj(a)mjturner.net <mailto:mj@mjturner.net> * http://mjturner.net/ <http://mjturner.net/> >

7 years, 10 months

RIP Dennis Ritchie

by Dave Horsfall

We lost co-inventor of Unix and sheer genius Dennis Ritchie on this day in 2011; there's not really much more that I can say... Sic transit gloria mundi. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 10 months

4.2BSD steering committee members

by Paul Ruizendaal

According to the Unix Tree web pages, the development of 4.2BSD was at the request of DARPA guided by a steering committee consisting of: Bob Fabry, Bill Joy and Sam Leffler from UCB Alan Nemeth and Rob Gurwitz from BBN Dennis Ritchie from Bell Labs Keith Lantz from Stanford Rick Rashid from Carnegie-Mellon Bert Halstead from MIT Dan Lynch from ISI Gerald J. Popek of UCLA Although I can place most people on the list, for some names I’m in the dark: * Alan Nemeth - apparently the designer of the BBN C-series mini’s (I think the C30 was designed to replace the 316/516 as IMP). It is hard to find any info on the C-series, but I understand it to be a mini with 10 bit bytes, 20 bit words and 20 bit address space, more or less modeled after the PDP11 and an instruction set optimised to be an easy target for the C compilers of the day. Any other links to Unix? * Keith Lantz - apparently specialised in distributed computing. No clear links to Unix that I can find. * Rick Rashid - driving force behind message passing micro-kernels and the Accent operating systems. Evolved into Mach. Link to Unix seems to be that Accent was an influential design around 81/82 * Bert Halstead - seems to have built a shared memory multiprocessor around that time, “Concert”. * Dan Lynch - ISI program manager for TCP/IP and the switch-over from NCP on Arpanet. * Gerald Popek - worked on a secure version of (Arpanet enabled) Unix and on distributed systems (LOCUS) at the time. Next to networking, the link between these people seems to have been distributed computing — yet I don’t think 4.2BSD had a goal of being multiprocessor ready. All recollections about the steering committee, its goals and its members welcome. Paul

7 years, 10 months

Re: 4.2BSD steering committee members

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal > * Alan Nemeth - apparently the designer of the BBN C-series mini's ISTR him from some other context at BBN; don't recall off the top of my head, though. > (I think the C30 was designed to replace the 316/516 as IMP). They _did_ replace the Honeywell's. At MIT, they eventually came and took away the 516 (I offered it to the MIT Museum, but they didn't want it, as the work on it hadn't been done by MIT - idiots!), and replaced it with a C/30. (Actually, we had a couple of C/30 IMPs - the start was adding a C/30, to which the MIT Internet IP gateway was connected - the other two IMPs were full, and the only way to get another port for the gateway was to get another IMP - something which caused a very long delay in getting MIT connected to the Internet, to my intense frustration. I seem to recall DARPA/DCVA had stopped buying Honeywell machines, and the C/30 was late, or something like that.) > It is hard to find any info on the C-series, but I understand it to be a > mini with 10 bit bytes, 20 bit words and 20 bit address space, more or > less modeled after the PDP11 and an instruction set optimised to be an > easy target for the C compilers of the day. Yes and no. It was a general microprogrammed machine, but supported a daughter-board on the CPU to help with instruction decoding, etc; so the C/30 and C/70 had different daughter-boards, specific to their function. There's a paper on the C/70, I don't recall if I have a copy - let me look. > Any other links to Unix? I think the C/70 was intended to run Unix, as a general-purpose timesharing resource at BBN (and did). > * Bert Halstead - seems to have built a shared memory multiprocessor > around that time He was, as a grad student, a member of Steve Ward's group at MIT, the ones who did the Nu machine Unix 68K port. (He wrote the Unix V6/PWB1 driver for the Diva controller for the CalChomps they had on their -11/70, the former of which I eventually inherited.) After he got his PhD (I forget the topic; I know he did a language called 'D', the origin of the name should be obvious), he became a faculty member at MIT. > * Dan Lynch - ISI program manager for TCP/IP and the switch-over from > NCP on Arpanet. He was actually their facilities manager (or some title to that effect; he was in charge of all their TENEX/TWENEX machines, too). He was part of the early Internet crowd - I vividly remember him at a bar with Phill Gross and I in the DC suburbs, at a _very_ early IETF meeting, discussing how this Internet thing was going to reallly take off, and the IETF had got to get itself organized to be ready for that. > Next to networking, the link between these people seems to have been > distributed computing That wasn't really the tie - the tie was they were all part of the DARPA-funded circle. Now, as to why whomever at DARPA picked them - I think they probably looked for people with recognized competence, who had a need for a good VAX Unix for their research/organization. Noel

7 years, 10 months

Unix witticisms

by Wesley Parish

I've just visited Slashdot and found this little gem at the bottom of the page: Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the front cover of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them? Wesley Parish "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor, Method for Guitar "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

7 years, 10 months

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