All, in the 25 years of running this list, generally things have gone
well and I've not had to make many unilateral decisions. But today I
have chosen to unsubscribe Joerg Schilling from the list.
I'm sending this e-mail in so that there is a level of transparency here.
I've sent Joerg an e-mail outlining my reasons.
Cheers, Warren
The Internet (spelled with a capital "I", please, as it is a proper noun)
was born in 1969, when RFC-1 got published; it described the IMP and
ARPAnet.
As I said at a club lecture once, there are many internets, but only one
Internet.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
> From: Mary Ann Horton
> What's the best way to transfer files in and out of the simh 4.3BSD Wisc
> version? I can do it with tape files, but it seems like FTP or ssh or
> NFS ought to be possible, and none is behaving at first blush.
Someone should add the equivalent of Ersatz-11's 'DOS' device to SIMH; it's a
pseudo-device that can read files on the host filesystem. (Other stuff too,
but that's the relevant one here.) A short device driver in the emulated OS,
and a program to talk to it, and voila, getting a file into the emulated
system is a short one line command, none of this hassle with putting the bits
on a virtual tape, etc, etc.
I found editing files with 'ed' on my simulated V6 system painful (although i
still have the mental microcode to do it), so I did my editing under Windows
(Epsilon), and then read the file down to the Unix to compile it. Initially I
was doing it by putting the file on a raw virtual pack, and doing something
similar to that tape kludge. Then I got smart, and whipped up a driver for the
DOS device in Ersatz-11, and a program that used it, to allow me to easily
read a file from the Windows filesystem down to the Unix. Going around the
compile-debug-edit loop is totally painless now.
Noel
In the 1980s an important resource for Sun users was the sun-spots
mailing list. I can't find an archive of it, though some digests were
posted to comp.sys.sun and are accessible (with some difficulty)
through Google Groups.
Does anyone know of a complete archive?
-- Richard
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> That's interesting that that sort of thing dates back (at least) to the Labs.
Research couldn't hold a candle to Development on making smooth transitions.
You don't take a telephone switch offline to change a file format or the like.
The development cycle used to be about three years: one year for design,
one for implementation, and one to build a hybrid to bridge the transition.
At 2AM on Sunday, you'd install the hybrid on one of the dual cross-checked
processors at a time, so the switch was never interrupted. Later you'd
dispense with the hybrid the same way.
Doug
> While going through papers recently we found what was I am reasonably
> sure the quote for the first Sun sold in Scotland which might be of some
> interest (inevitably I now don't know where it is, although we did not
> throw it away). We're not sure whether it is for that machine, but we
> are sure that my wife (who isn't on the list) ran it (a 2/120 we think).
> It started out with SunOS 1 (or perhaps before).
In 1984 the Programming Systems Groups in Edinburgh's AI department
was contracted by SERC to evaluate workstations for its "Common Base"
program. We had a Sun 2/120, a Whitechapel MG-1, an Apollo Domain
system, and I think we already had at least one PNX Perq.
We recommended Suns. I can't find the report we wrote anywhere
online, but I'm fairly sure I've seen it in the last couple of years.
Presumably we gave the evaluation 2/120 back to Sun and bought the one
mentioned by Tim (it was called "islay" unless I have become confused)
a bit later, in 1985.
-- Richard
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> On 7 Apr 2017, at 03:00, tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
>
> That's a good point Josh. I've been trying to find copies of UKUUG and
> EUUG newsletters to add to the archive, along with the AUUG newsletters.
>
> So if you're on this list and outside of the US, now is the time to
> speak up with anecotes etc. Oh, and if you have anything worth adding
> to the Unix Archive, please let me know
Sheesh! Where to begin....
When I lived in Aus my wife and I were very close friends with John and Marrion. When he passed away, Marrion asked me to clean up his office at UNSW and collect anything of importance. Suffice to say I collected an awful lot of extremely important Unix memorabilia including copies of his books and his first original copy with hand written editing and signed by both Ken and Dennis. There's also the original Unix licenses signed off by BWK. There is so much stuff I can't list it all here but it's boxes (emphasing plural). When I left Aus I brought all this stuff for safe keeping back to the UK. That was 1996. Some time ago, I think at leat 15 years past I was in contact with someone from AUUG (grog may recall) hoping that they would send to collect it all but nothing happened. I also spoke to Armando about all this stuff he suggested a few things but even USENIX group weren't interested. So here I am with all this important stuff.....I would dearly love to hand it off. However I want some sort of guarantee that it would be housed somewhere safe for prosperity and not eventually ending up on eBay...if you know what I mean.
As to AUUGN...well one of the boxes contains just about every copy of the newsletter that was published since issue 1 through to the 1996 editions.
Warren please email me if you want to discuss further.
Cheers
Berny
Sent from my iPhone
On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Wesley Parish <wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz>
wrote:
> The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread raises a
> question for me. How many
> Unix clones are there?
>
An interesting question.... I'll take a shot at this in a second, note
there is a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unix_variants that I don't fully
agree with.
The problem with all of this question is really depends where you place
which boundary on the following continuum:
non-unix add-unix ideas trying to be
unix might as well be unix research unix
stream
eg VMS eg Domain eg UNOS
eg Sys V, BSD/386 & Linux Vx & BSD VAX
Different people value different things. So here is my take from the
"cloned" systems I used/was basically aware....
Idris was a V6 clone for the PDP-11, which I saw 1978ish. I can say I was
able to recompile code from v6 and it "just worked" so from a user's
standpoint it might as well has been. But the compilers and assemblers
were different and I never tried anything "hard"
The first attempt to "clone" v7 that I knew about was in France, and
written in Pascal - I think at Ecole Tech in Paris? The name of the
project escapes me, but they presented the work in the 1979/80 winter
USENIX (Blackhole) conference in Denver. There were no proceedings in
those days. I believe it also ran on the PDP-11, but I never ran it so; so
I have no idea how easy it was to move things from Seventh Edition. But I
also don't think they were working binary compatibility, so I think it
landed more toward the center.
The Cruds folks (Goldberg) wrote UNOS shortly there after (early 80s)
It was definitely not UNIX although it tried to have be mostly. We had
CRDS box at Masscomp and before I arrived they plan had been to use it get
code working before the RTU was running. But the truth was it failed
because it was not UNIX. The 68000 vs Vax issues were far, far less of an
issue than UNOS != UNIX. To Goldberg's credit, he did have a couple of
cool things in it. I believe only system commercial systems that used
Kanodia & Reed's Sequences and Eventcounts, were UNOS, Apollo Doman, and
Stellar's Stellix (I'm not sure about DG - they might have also at one
point). But these were hidden in the kernel. Also the driver model he
had was different, so there was no gain writing drivers there.
Mike Malcom & Dave Cheriton at Waterloo developed Thoth (Thoth - Thucks),
which was written in B, IIRC. Ran on the PDP-11 and was very fast and
light. It was the first "ukernel" UNIX-like/clone system.. Moving code
from V7 was pretty simple and there was attempt to make it good enough to
make it easy to move things, but it was not trying to be UNIX so it was
somewhere in the middle.
The Tunis folks seem to have been next. This was more in the left side of
the page than the right. I think they did make run on the PDP-11, but I'm
not so sure how easy it was to move code. If you used their concurrent
Pascal, I suspect that code moved. But I'm not sure how easy it was to
move a raw K&R "White Book" C code.
CMU's Accent (which was redo of Rochester's RIG) came around the same time.
Like Tunis the system language was an extended Pascal and in fact the
target was the triple drip Perq (aka the Pascalto). The C compiler for it
was late, and moving code was difficult, the UNIX influence was clear.
Apollo's Aegis/Domain really came next - about 82/83 ish. Like Accent it
was written in hacked up Pascal and the command were in Ratfor/Fortran
(from the SW Tool User's Group). C showed up reasonably early, but the
focus did not start trying to be UNIX. In fact, they were very
successfully and were getting ISV's to abandon VMS for them at a very good
clip. UNIX clearly influenced the system, but it was not trying to be
UNIX, although moving code from BSD or V7 could be done fairly easily.
Tannebaum then did MINIX. Other than 8086 vs PDP-11-ism, it was a pretty
darned good clone. You could recompile and most things pretty much "just
worked." He did not support ptrace and few other calls, but as a basic V7
system running on a pure PDP PC, it was remarkably clean. It also had a
large number of languages and it was a great teaching system - which is
what Andy created it be. A problem was that UNIX had moved on by the
time Andy released it. So BSD & V8 were now pretty much the definition of
"UNIX" - large address spaces were needed. As were the BSD tools
extensions, such as vi, csh. Also UUCP was now very much in the thing,
and while it was a pure v7 clone, it was the lack of "tools" that made it
not a good system to "use" and it's deficiencies out weighed the value.
Plus as discussed elsewhere, BSD/386 would appear.
Steve Ward's crew at MIT created TRIX, which was a UNIX-like, although
instead of everything being a file, everything was a process. This was
supposed to be the system that rms was originally going to use for GNU, but
I never knew what happened. Noel might. I thought it was a cool system,
although it was a mono-kernel and around this time, most of the OS research
had gone ukernel happy.
Coherent was announcement and its provenance is questioned, although as
discussed was eventually released from the AT&T official inquiry and you
can look it your self. It was clearly a V7 clone for the PC and was more
complete than Minix. I also think they supported the 386 fairly quickly,
which may have made it more interesting from a commercial standpoint. It
also had more of the BSD tools available than Minix did when it was first
released.
CMU rewrites Accent to create Mach, but this time splices the BSD kernel
inside of it so that the 4.1BSD binaries "just work." So it's bit UNIX
and a new system all in one. So which is it? This system would begat
OSF/1 and eventually become Apple's Mac OS? I think its UNIX, but one can
claim its not either....
By this point in time the explosion occurs. You have Lion's book, Andy's
and Maury Bach's book on the street. he genie is clearly out of the bottle,
and there is a ton of code out there and the DNS is getting all mixed up.
Doug Comer does Xinu, Sheraton does V-kernel, Thoth is rewritten to become
QNX, and a host of others I have not repeated. BSD's CSRG group would
break up, BSDi would be created and their 386 code come out. It was
clearly "might as well be" if it was not. Soon, Linus would start with
Minix and the rest is history on the generic line.
Clem
Ah, so someone rattled our cages… I see Alec has already chimed in so I guess it is time for the others to admit culpability.
I’m Italian, born & raised in Milan and first touched Unix in 1978 on my father’s TTY via an acoustic coupler into the “Unix machine” at the University of Milan. It was actually a completely “illegal” venture because the acoustic coupler was not the official one from the Italian monopoly telco, SIP (now Telecom Italia), but one which my dad had imported from the US as he used to work for Honeywell.
Not only, the Unix machine was another amazing story because it belonged to the “Cybernetics” group of the Physics Department as the proper Computer Science department did not yet exist (it would be later born as an offspring of the Physics department as “Scienze dell’ Informazione”, Information Sciences aka dsi.unimi.it when “the Internet” arrived) and was run out of God knows who’s funds (Italian academic funding is particular in that you get handed pots of money under generic titles and then what you do with them is your problem). I distinctly remember being asked to change a disk pack aged 8 and causing quite a kerfuffle when I switched the wrong pack. I *think* it was a Vax but cannot remember (age…). At some point I was handed my first Unix book, an Italian translation of a McGraw-Hill book which contained a series of exercises. I ended up following them faithfully, including e-mailing root at the time who was a lady called Anna who’s password was “favola” (fable) and, er, it actually worked when I tested by copying straight out the book. I assume that they thought the readership would not have access to the exact machine the book was written on!
At home we eventually landed a string of fancy kit plus access to my father’s GECOS & other Honeywell kit including a Western Digital Pascal uEngine (gorgeous), Apple ][e, etc. but my first “home Unix” was an Onyx C8002, a Z8000-based system with a 40Mb disk and “my" lovely ADM 3a serial terminal on which I learned C on Unix Version 7. That was 1980.
After the Onyx we “upgraded" to a series of disastrous Xenix systems but eventually *the* machine came into our house: a gorgeous Data General Aviion pizza box followed by an even more powerful “radiator” later model. Cue: learn X11 :)
In parallel by then I was also managing a set of Sun workstations (both Sun3 & Sun4) and a Silicon Graphics at the University of Milan for a professor researching “eidomatics”. I had a memorable joust, my first security gig, with the guy running “idea” (name censored as he turned out to be exactly who he was predicted to be in his youth).
Shifted myself to the UK for uni and landed at Imperial College where within a few months I was root on the RS/6000 cluster which had just been purchased and, as they say, the rest is history including running SunOS, installing the first three DEC Alpha workstations in the UK (tera, the server, giga and mega, the “clients”) along with a slew of Ultrix MIPS DECstations which were then upgraded to Alpha via the, then available, “upgrade kit”. Ended up running Alphas & Suns a bit everywhere in Imperial plus a few HPs for the Aeronautical Engineering bunch. I hate HP/UX, for reference.
Following Imperial ended up at the now defunct London Parallel Applications Centre where I had an Alpha farm, several Alpha workstations and “my” MasPar plus a rarity, an AMT DAP. Cue: HPF, MPI, etc. etc. plus Tandem K10000. Then Mathematics again where it was Linux & Sun Solaris. At some point I ended up on IPv6 & 6BONE with my very own 3FFE:: prefix.
Startup time because it was the dot.com thing and K2 Defender was born (http://www.k2defender.com/) as a co-founder, a gigantic distributed NIDS based around a Tandem S-series (Cue: more TACL) and then ported “down” to a simple Unix database.
Then death of the startup because the product was far too early for the world and the only customers would not readily buy from an Italian & South-African/German combo.
Since then independent security consultant with an eternal adoration for old Unix systems, in particular Motorola 88K-based.
Machines owned in various ways:
* VAX w/ Unix
* Onyx C8002
* Data General Aviion with System V
* tons of PCs running whatever Unix I could lay my hands on
* Sun3
* Sun4 until my Ultra & SS10 died
* SGI Irix on different machines
* Apollo DN10000
* A/UX 1.0 (yes, that too…)
* RS/6000 w/ AIX
* RIOS with RISCOS (I think…)
* Linux since 0.12 booting off a floppy in the Mathematics undergrad PC room :)
* OpenBSD since 2.2
* FreeBSD since forever
* NetBSD only occasionally
* HP/UX
* OSF/1 since T1.0 until the bitter end (I still have a gorgeous PWS 600au with the Evans & Sutherland 3D graphics card)
* Ultrix
* WD9000 w/ Pascal
* Xenix
* Tandem Unix layer
* Convex
* other absurd Unix variants I have forgotten…
Arrigo
