TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

12 participants
6534 discussions

Re: [TUHS] who invented the email attachment?

by Doug McIlroy

> Should I make a claim to be the inventor of the email attachment? uuencode was critical to attaching arbitrary files, and I am sure one can find emails with uuencoded bits in them that read, "please find attached ...". But they would have said the same thing if what was being sent was source code. So attachment in that sense obviously predated uuencode. But to identify that kind of attachment with what mean by the word today is like identifying cat with tar. Doug

8 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] GNU vs BSD before the lawsuit and before Linux

by Doug McIlroy

> Many of the gnu tools started life as BSD code that was hacked on and > rebranded with the GPL. A small amount of code was likewise adopted from AT&T. Doug

8 years, 3 months

VAX SysVr2: tape /dev entries missing

by Cory Smelosky

All, Seems my SysVR2 simulation instance has at one point or another lost its /dev/mt/* and /dev/rmt/* device entries. Is there a script anywhere to regenerate these, or does anyone know the major/minor off hand for the SIMH TS device? -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects

8 years, 3 months

GNU vs BSD before the lawsuit and before Linux

by Doug McIlroy

> Many of the gnu tools started life as BSD code that was hacked on and > rebranded with the GPL. I have seen Gnu code likewise adopted from AT&T. Doug

8 years, 3 months

pathalias and sendmail experience?

by Warren Toomey

I know it's a long shot. Does anybody remember how to use the output of pathalias in sendmail.cf? Specifically, we have set up 4.3BSD with uucp-only e-mail, and we have a map file which pathalias digests and outputs fine. I can't find any useful documentation on putting this output into sendmail. There's part of a book in Google books, but two pages are hidden. I also threw out my old bat book ages ago. I have a PDF of Sendmail_4th_Edition_Oct_2007.pdf but it doesn't mention pathalias. Thanks in advance! Warren

8 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] X, Suntools, and the like

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ron Natalie" >>> I think most people will attribute the desktop metaphor to Xerox. >> Strictly speaking, to Smalltalk (from PARC) ^^^^ > I beg to differ. The Star not only pioneered the WISIWYG application > presentation PARC _was_ Xerox. The Star was a product based on the Alto, but much of the Star stuff was pioneered on the Alto. For instance, WYSIWYG was one of the modes that the Alto's Bravo editor could be run in; it definitely pre-dates the Star. > also the concept of the desktop. Depending on exactly what you mean by 'desktop', that also pre-dated the Star. I heard the multiple overlapping windows of Smalltalk (an Alto application) likened to a collection of sheets of paper on a desktop (which is where the term came from); clicking on one with the mouse brought it to the top, just like pulling a particular sheet of paper out from the ones on a physical desktop. > The whole conscept of dropping documents as icons on the desktop appears > to have orginated there. Yes, as I mentioned: >> things like Bravo, and the basic user command interface on the Alto >> [the Exec, my brain finally coughed up the name - can't find my Alto >> manual at the moment] didn't have any concept of windows/desktop The concept of having a graphical front end as the main user interface was not from the Alto, and the Alto didn't have icons either; both came later (I'll let the Lisa people and Star people argue that one out). Noel

8 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] X, Suntools, and the like

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ron Natalie" > I think most people will attribute the desktop metaphor to Xerox. Strictly speaking, to Smalltalk (from PARC); things like Bravo, and the basic user command interface on the Alto (I forget what its name was), didn't have any concept of windows/desktop (although Bravo did use the bitmap screen). Noel

8 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] System Economics

by Doug McIlroy

"Open" was certainly not a work heard in the Unix lab, where our lawyers made sure we knew it was a "trade secret". John Lions was brought into the lab both because we admired his work and because the lawyers wanted to reel that work back in-house. Out in the field, the trade secret was treated in many different ways. Perhaps the most extreme was MIT, whose lawyers believed it could not be adequately protected in academia and forbade its use there. I don't know what eventually broke the logjam. Doug

8 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX")

by Norman Wilson

William Pechter: VMS source fiche was very common of sites owned by large corporations. Their IT staff used it to research bugs... and as sample code for writing their own drivers etc... ===== Indeed, I used the VMS source microfiche to learn how to handle various sorts of errors (machine checks, memory errors) better in UNIX. Stock VAX systems at the time just crashed on any error, but it turned out that many of them admitted recovery: some errors were transient, others could be ridden over by disabling some piece of the hardware. This led to an amusing event on the VAX-11/750 that at the time handled e-mail as uucp node research!. (Its internal name on our datakit node was grigg.) People noticed that the system was running slowly. I checked and discovered that the CPU itself seemed to be a bit slower. Then I checked logs and discovered that a week earlier, there had been a cache error; my new recovery code had turned off the failing half of the cache, logged the error, and forged ahead. At the next convenient time, we took the system down and ran DEC's standalone diagnostics. (Contrary to the rude stories one hears, those diags were in fact pretty thorough.) The problem didn't show up, so we booted grigg back up again, secure in the knowledge that if the problem was persistent, my code would let us know without crashing. (I don't think it ever showed up again.) We also learned to pay more attention to console messages! Norman Wilson Toronto ON

8 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] System Economics

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Do you know the time frame of the banishment? Noel any memories of what > allowed it be used? Sorry, this is something I know nothing of; it must have happened while I was still an early undergrad. The first Unix I knew of at MIT was the one in the DSSR/RTS group in LCS, which arrived (I think) roughly around the start of my sophmore year (so early '76 or so) - I have a memory of one of my friends (who was an undergrad working in that group) telling me about it, and showing it to me. (I remember being totally blown away with the way you could write a command 'foo', compile it, and jut say 'foo' to run it...) Actually, it may have shown up well before that - perhaps they had it well before I first saw it. Certainly by the time I showed up at LCS (fall of '77) it had already spread to CSR; they had an 11/40 with Unix on it, cloned from the DSSR system. Again, I don't know if there was any paperwork that had to happen, or if that system was already covered under whatever license the DSSR machine was under. Of course, this was all DARPA-funded work, and there may have been something there that allowed it. We certainly passed Unix source around with other DARPA projects (e.g. at BBN) without, AFAICR, worrying much about paperwork. > we had a sign a document with the university stating something that we > understood it was AT&Ts IP I don't recall anything like that at MIT; maybe in the very early days, there was something, but certainly not by '77. If it's important to know what happened, I can ask (e.g. Prof. Ward, head of DSSR). Noel

8 years, 3 months

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