TUHS

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6557 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> > Just think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze, > and thinking it's wonderful. It's actually worse than that. We'd be running a Windows even worse than current Windows (which has managed to pick up a few decent ideas from places like Unix). Noel

7 years, 11 months

Move completed: slowly bringing stuff back up

by Cory Smelosky

Evening, Okay - now that I've completed moving and settling in, I am slowly bringing some stuff back up. UCBVAX should come back in the next few weeks (now much closer to Berkeley...). One advantage of the new location: cheaper power so my PBX runs all the time now. ;) Once I acquire a second modem I will accept UUCP at 115200 and 2400 baud via telephone :) -- Cory Smelosky b4(a)gewt.net

7 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Line Terminators in Text Files

by Doug McIlroy

> does anyone know anything about the 1961 DoD 8-bit > character set standard it refers to? > > This does not appear to say anything about LF vs "Newline" (as either a > name or a function), though the 1986 version of ASCII deprecates it, so > was most likely acknowledged in versions between these in response to > practices on OSes such as Multics. ECMA-6:1973 acknowledges it I wouldn't say the "practices" of Multics influenced the recognition of NL in the ASCII standard, for Multics didn't go into use until 1970, while NL was specified by 1965 (see below) with direct reference to the properties of equipment, not operating systems. Just what equipment, I don't know. IBM Selectric perhaps? I recall Multics discussions that specifically cited the standard, in particular Joe Ossanna's liaison between Multics and the TTY 37 design team at Western Electric, circa 1967. Thus it is my understanding that Multics was an early adopter of ASCII's NL convention, not an influencer of it. Quotation from "Proposed revised American standard for information interchange", CACM 8 (April 1965) 207-214: The controls CR and LF are intended for printer equipment which requires separate combinations to return the carriage and feed a line. As an alternative, for equipment which uses a single combination for a combined carriage-return and line-feed operation (called New-Line), NL will be coded at FE 2 [LF]. Then FE 5 [CR] will be regarded as Backspace BS. If the latter type of equipment has to interwork with the former, it may be necessary to take steps to introduce the CR character. One might read the preceding paragraph as advice not only to writers of driver software but also to a future standards committee to undo the curious notion of regarding CR as BS. Unix effectively took it both ways, and kept the original meaning of CR. doug

7 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

by Doug McIlroy

> troff has a substantial history. Significant changes in troff could invalidate most of the old documents leaving troff with no usage base, and a poor tool at rendering all of the troff documents out there. As a living example, I have troff files from as far back as 1975 that still work, and perhaps some even older that have lost their dates due to careless copying. The only incompatibility with groff is easy to fix: inserting a space before the arguments of a troff request. The few other incompatibilities I've encouuntered have been graciously corrected by groff maintainers. You get no such help for old Word files. doug

7 years, 11 months

looking for UNIX News (July 1975 through 1977)

by Jeremy C. Reed

Anyone have UNIX News newsletters from 1975/1976 and ;login: from 1977? For details see https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_apr15_16_unix_news… I don't know if is a complete transcription of the July 20, 1975 issue. That article suggests others will be reprinted, but I only found: Number 4, March 19, 1976 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_june_11_unix_news.… Number 10, October 1976 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_aug15_10_unix_news… Volume 2, Number 5, May--June 1977 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_oct15_12_unix_news… (webpage wrongly says Number 10) Volume 2, Number 7, August 1977 https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/login_aug77.pdf excerpts: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_dec15_11_history_l… Do you know of others? In an article, Salus wrote Number 2 is October 8, 1975 and Number 3 is February 10, 1976. Thanks Jeremy C. Reed p.s. I have read many AUUGN issues over the past few years. Thanks for hosting those.

7 years, 11 months

Line Terminators in Text Files [Was: Re: Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed!]

by Nemo

On 02/09/2017, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > On Thu, 31 Aug 2017, Nemo wrote: > >> (By the way, why all the ^M is the files?) > > Err, because CR/LF was the line terminator? Hhhmmm... This begs the historical question: When did LF replace CR/LF in UNIX? N. > > -- > Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will > suffer." >

7 years, 11 months

RIP Solaris

by Diomidis Spinellis

In case you missed the news, it seems that Oracle is effectively shutting down the development of Solaris. You can read an eloquent obituary written by Bryan Cantrill at http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of…. Diomidis

7 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Line Terminators in Text Files

by Doug McIlroy

> When did LF replace CR/LF in UNIX? Never. Unix always took LF as newline--an interpretation blessed by the ASCII standard. The convention was inherited from Multics. Interpolation of CRs was the business of drivers, not file formats. As far as I know, the only CR/LF terminal that original Unix dealt with was the model 33 console. That was identified by the fact that the login name was received in all caps. IIRC the TTY 37 conformed to Multics practice on the advice of Joe Ossanna. Because of the model 33, login names were case-insesitive. Come to think of it, I don't know whether they still are in general, though they must be for email to be delivered by login name. Doug

7 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Line Terminators in Text Files [Was: Re: Why Pascal isNot My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed!]

by Richard Tobin

> As I recall, the original definition of ASCII suggested that the > LF character was either "line feed" or "new line", and that if it > *was* new-line, it would be stand-alone. I have put a copy of the original ASCII standard (scanned images) at http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~richard/ascii.tar I don't remember where I got it from. -- Richard -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

7 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] Future Languages

by Richard Tobin

> So we have some source (that you can have as well, Apache license) > that handles not strings but vectors of strings (or structs or whatever). > > I need to write up how it works, it's sort of clever. It stores both > the size of the vector (always a power of 2) in part of the bits of the > first entry and the actual length in the other part. Because we can > express powers of two in very little space we can support both values > in a 32 bit unsigned with a max length of used space of around 134M. I have something similar. It allocates space for two ints (number allocated and used) at ((int *)array)[-1] and [-2]. Typical use is LTVectorAndInit(char *, names); while(...) LTVectorPush(names, s); for(i=0; i<LTVectorCount(names); i++) ... names[i] ...; LTVectorFree(names); -- Richard -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

7 years, 11 months

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TUHS