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
Hello all!
Thanks Warren for accepting / inviting me!
Old timer of computing... Did and contributed the port of PGP 2.6.3i
to MIPS RC/3230 in 1993-1994 (cause I needed that to order a
Munititions T-Shirt from Adam Back).
Yeah... I was running crypto on my corporate server, in France, while
it was illegal. But I wanted the T-Shirt...
In effect, I can say "been there... done that... got the t-shirt" :)
Gilles
All, I'm trying to build a split I/D kernel for V7M. I've installed
the system following my notes at
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/DEC/Jean_Huens_v7m/simh_notes.txt
Reading the setup.txt document in the same place, I should be able to do:
cd /sys/conf
make all44 (build the kern & dev components split I/D)
mkconf < hptmconf (set up for hp and tm devices)
make unix44 (link the kernel)
cp unix_id /nunix (copy it to the root)
However, when I try to boot the kernel:
PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 24f1c06d
#nunix
Trap stack push abort, PC: 071752 (BIS #1,(R3))
Thanks in advance for any help.
Warren
The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread raises a question for me. How many
Unix clones are there?
(My interest in Unix was the result of a local computer magazine, Bits'n'Bytes in the late 80s and early 90s
discussing two clones, Minix and Coherent in its Unix column. Then came Linux ...)
We've got a timeline (in several forms, in the 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD books and The Magic Garden, on Groklaw,
and elsewhere) for Unix and its developments; has anyone done one for the clones?
Thanks
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
I suppose that it would make sense that all of AT&T's leading edge projects would use research Unix. I've always heard of the original C++ to C translator but this is the first time I've actually seen it.
It doesn't look like it had the wide scale following that C or Fortan had at this point.
Sadly my experience with C++ was mostly tied to Borland on the micro in early 90's, which makes it look mature compared to these early versions.
It's great finding stuff like this in the tree hiding in plain sight, if only you know what to look for. (http://unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/researchv9/cmd/cfron…)
Or that emacs was in the v9 tree, in the religious wars I always imagined NJ being more vi.
Thanks again for making this release happen!
--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
On Thu, 30 Mar 2017, Warren Toomey via Uucp wrote:
> On 03/29/2017 11:09 PM, Dave Horsfall via Uucp wrote:
> > Let the cancel/rmgroup/flame wars begin :-)
>
> :-P
And I still bear the scars from the aus.bizarre war... And I'll bet that
not many people remember that little episode :-)
> > (Been too busy to set up "utzoo" yet, so if anyone is desperate for it
> > then they can have it instead; my long-term goal is to run SimH on a
> > RasbPi but first I have to afford one...)
>
> What's your address? I've got an unused Raspberry Pi that I'll send you
> (or anyone else). ;-) First come, first serve.
To be sent privately...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
wow thats perfect, thanks!
> ----------
> From: Paul McJones
> Sent: Thursday, April 6, 2017 10:42 AM
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Cc: Jason Stevens
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] I just noticed all the cfont aka C++ in research
>
> I suppose that it would make sense that all of AT&T's leading edge
> projects would use research Unix. I've always heard of the original C++
> to C translator but this is the first time I've actually seen it.
>
>
>
> In case you're interested, Bjarne Stroustrup has been helping me collect
> early versions of cfront here:
>
>
> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/#cfront
>
>
> Previously we had located a listing of Release E (which we scanned),
> source for Release 1.0 of 10/10/85, and source for Release 3.0.3. From
> these 9th and 10th edition snapshots, cfront 1.2.2 6/10/87, AT&T C++
> Translator 2.00 06/30/89, AT&T C++ Translator 2.1.0+ 04/01/90, and AT&T
> C++ Translator 2.1++ 08/24/90 join the list.
>
> I suppose that it would make sense that all of AT&T's leading edge projects would use research Unix. I've always heard of the original C++ to C translator but this is the first time I've actually seen it.
In case you’re interested, Bjarne Stroustrup has been helping me collect early versions of cfront here:
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/#cfront
Previously we had located a listing of Release E (which we scanned), source for Release 1.0 of 10/10/85, and source for Release 3.0.3. From these 9th and 10th edition snapshots, cfront 1.2.2 6/10/87, AT&T C++ Translator 2.00 06/30/89, AT&T C++ Translator 2.1.0+ 04/01/90, and AT&T C++ Translator 2.1++ 08/24/90 join the list.
Joerg Schilling:
BTW: UNOS has been sold to real customers from it's beginning. Was UNIX V8
available outside AT&T?
=====
I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Which
of your body parts is so small as to make you insecure,
and which UNIX distributions are your body parts drawn
from?
To answer the question seriously, though: as I think I've
already explained here, Eighth Edition UNIX was available
under special per-site licensing (a letter agreement) to
educational institutions. I'm not sure what the official
criterion was: I helped make the tape, but wasn't involved
in the paperwork. I believe the total was about a dozen
places. A few of them did interesting work with the
system that was published e.g. at USENIX conferences
(Princeton comes to mind), but most I think never even
booted the system up. By then there were other members
of the UNIX family that were more comfortable for general
use, and people were more interested in the ideas than
in the code.
And of course we were a research group. We weren't making
things for customers. We were sharing our work, to the
extent the laywers and our own limited resources allowed.
That was the last time the Computing Science Research
Center attempted anything like a formal distribution.
Any `distributions' after that are just snapshots of
a constantly-evolving system.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Body parts not available on github. Sorry.)
> > Can you characterize what the 3rd-party material might be?
>
> Me personally, no. But there are others on the list who can help do this.
> Hopefully they will chime in!
Here's a list, gathered from the manuals, of stuff that Bell Labs
may not have the right to redistribute, with some (uncertain)
attributions of origin. I did not check to see which of them appear in
the TUHS archives; I doubt that /usr/src fully covered /bin and /usr/bin.
This list is at best a first draft. Please weigh in with corrections.
Doug
Kernel internet code. BSD
Imported commands
esterel INRIA
lisp, liszt, lxref MIT
icont, iconc Arizona
macsyma MIT
maple Maplesoft
Mail BSD
matlab Mathworks
more BSD (From the manpage: "More, a paginator that lives up to its name, has
too many features to describe." Its prodigality has been eclipsed by "less".)
netnews Duke
ops5 CMU
pascal, pc BSD
pxp BSD
readnews, checknews, postnews Duke
sdb BSD
smp Wolfram
spitbol IIT
telnet BSD
tex Stanford
tset BSD
vi, ex, edit BSD
Commands I'm not sure about, could be from Bell Labs
cyntax
news
ropy
strings
Library functions
termcap BSD
Imported games
adventure, zork, aarvark, rogue
atc
doctor MIT
mars
trek, ogre, sol, warp, sail
Games I'm not sure about
back
boggle, hangman
cribbage, fish
ching
gebam
imp
mille
pacman
pengo
swar
tso
