TUHS

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Bell Labs Computer Science Technical Reports

by Diomidis Spinellis

I was searching today to find where the Unix pipeline spell checking method "tr | sort | uniq | comm" was first published. I found it in a document by Brian Kernighan titled "UNIX for Beginners". "The pipe mechanism lets you fabricate quite complicated operations out of spare parts already built. For example, the first draft of the spell program was (roughly) [...]" http://www.psue.uni-hannover.de/wise2014_2015/material/Unix-Beginners.pdf#p… Then my problem became properly citing the document. Searching on Google, Google Scholar, and IEEE Xplore didn't help me. In the end I found the reference in a 1993 refer file of all Bell Labs Computer Science Technical Reports I had saved from my student days. %cstr 75 %report Comp. Sci. Tech. Rep. No. 75 %keyword CSTR OBS %author B. W. Kernighan %title UNIX for Beginners %date February 1979 %journal UNIX Programmer's Manual %volume 2 %other Section 3 %date January 1979 %type techreport obsolete I couldn't find the refer file online, so I'll send a copy to Warren for archiving. However, I'm wondering whether we should/could do something to also archive the actual pages of all the Bell Labs Computer Science Technical Reports. I think some are the only authoritative primary source for many Unix-related gems and a lack of an electronic archive means they will slowly fade into non-existence. I remember we had many of those at the library of Imperial College London. Any suggestions on what we can do to archive this material? Diomidis

8 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] [Uucp] News readers

by Dave Horsfall

On Wed, 15 Mar 2017, Warren Toomey wrote: > On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 10:24:22AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > > Then, perhaps a better news reader. Any preferences :-) > > So far I've though of (and found) [...] After going through several readers, I ended up with "trn". Also, Alpine has a passable reader. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

8 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, PDP-8!

by Atindra Chaturvedi

Brings back memories... Back in early 1981 I worked for a shipping line in Cranford NJ in their IT department. The company had just ordered 4 new super-wide cargo ships that just fit the Panama Canal and the Chief Marine Architect came to the IT department to ask for assistance in programming a PDP-8 to write a load distribution check program so that the ship would not keel over, or break in the middle - when being loaded 12 stack high containers. Had to take into account stress and strain - mathematical algorithms. My boss called me in to talk to him and he asked " if I knew how to determine the area under a curve..." - I knew my engineering math - Simpson's rule and also FORTRAN IV and was immediately drafted. What was needed also was a graphical way of entering the data, and displaying the results optionally graphically on the screen (tty ?). My friend Wayne Rawls knew BASIC - he wrote the front end - passed me the input on a large floppy - my FORTRAN IV program ran and did the stress/strain analysis for the ship - and I passed the output back to him on the floppy that he then displayed on-screen. A lot of grinding of the floppy drives for the FORTRAN compiler - no spinning hard disks as the PDP-8 would be installed on-board ship - and in those days of A/C computer rooms would be a non-starter. It all worked well - Wayne took the PDP-8 on a ship to Norfolk to get it checked out and the company used it for many years ! Atindra. -----Original Message----- >From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> >Sent: Mar 21, 2017 5:34 PM >To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> >Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, PDP-8! > >OT, but of interest to a few people here :-) > >The venerable PDP-8 was introduced in 1965 today (or tomorrow if you're on >the wrong side of the date line). It was the first computer I ever >used, back around 1970 (I think I'd just left school and was checking out >the local University's computer department, with a view to majoring in >Computer Science (which I did)). > >-- >Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

8 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

by shawn wilson

Maybe there's a generation / technology gap here. But from history, it doesn't seem like there was much free - though most did indeed to be open - I suppose much like the VMS model. At least not until the 80s (or maybe bash predates that trend). The C language might've been free, but I wonder if there were any free compilers until gcc (hell I remember pirating Borland). Even most copies of *BSD were mainly sold on CD vs downloaded until 10 years or so ago (even though it was technically free - not including BSDi) On Mar 20, 2017 7:28 PM, "Doug McIlroy" <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: > The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that > generation - including the computer nerds/hackers. I'm not sure what hippie attributes you had in mind, but one candidate would be "free and open". In software, though, free and open was the style of the late 50s. By the hippie heyday p p

8 years, 5 months

Were all of you.. Hippies?

by Doug McIlroy

> The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that > generation - including the computer nerds/hackers. I'm not sure what hippie attributes you had in mind, but one candidate would be "free and open". In software, though, free and open was the style of the late 50s. By the hippie heyday p p

8 years, 5 months

Uucp project: more sites?

by Warren Toomey

Ok, the nascent historical uucp network now has 11 sites: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DoctorWkt/4bsd-uucp/4.3BSD/uucp.png and the build software is quite stable: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/4bsd-uucp We'd like to get a few more sites up and running. If you've ever wanted to "be" an important uucp/Usenet site, here's your chance. E-mail me! Warren

8 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] who invented the email attachment?

by Mary Ann Horton

I was at Berkeley until July 1981. The oldest SCCS file I have is 4/1/81 (for my dissertation project) and that was clearly my first use of it. I wasn't using SCCS in 1980 when I wrote uuencode. uuencode got SCCS-ized later when they put all of 4.xBSD under SCCS. On 2017-03-20 03:27, schily(a)schily.net wrote: > Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote: > >> I'm under the impression that shar came later in the 1980s. Google's >> archive for net.sources only goes back to 1987 (unless I'm doing it >> wrong) and clearly shar was already well established by then. >> >> Can anyone put a date on shar, or at least before/after 6/1/1980? > > BTW: do you remember why you did not check in uuencode into the SCCS? > > /*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/ > ... > Wed Jul 6 11:06:51 1988 bostic > * uuencode.c 5.6 > * uudecode.c 5.4 > written by Mark Horton; add Berkeley specific copyrights > > Wed Feb 24 20:03:58 1988 rick > * uuencode.c 5.5 > use library fread instead of rolling your own > > Mon Dec 22 14:43:09 1986 bostic > * uuencode.c 5.4 > bug report 4.1BSD/usr.bin/2 and 4.1BSD/usr.bin/3 > > Wed Apr 10 15:22:23 1985 ralph > * uudecode.c 5.3 > more changes from rick adams. > > Tue Jan 22 14:13:07 1985 ralph > * uuencode.c 5.3 > * uudecode.c 5.2 > bug fixes and changes from Rick Adams > > Mon Dec 19 15:42:38 1983 ralph > * uuencode.c 5.2 > use a reasonable mode for encoding data piped in. > > Sat Jul 2 17:57:51 1983 sam > * uuencode.c 5.1 > date and time created 83/07/02 17:57:51 by sam > > Sat Jul 2 17:57:49 1983 sam > * uudecode.c 5.1 > date and time created 83/07/02 17:57:49 by sam > /*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/ > > In special, do you know why it has been checked in by Samuel Leffler and > whether it existed before July 1983? > > Jörg

8 years, 5 months

who invented the email attachment?

by Mary Ann Horton

I'd like the opinion of this August Group. Should I make a claim to be the inventor of the email attachment? (It would go on my web site, resume, the Wikipedia page, that sort of thing.) Here's my understanding of the time line on all of this. 1. Originally, our files were all plain text and we just included them in the email message body. The ~r command in Kurt Shoen's Mail program was typical. There was no name for this, we were just emailing files. 2. In 1980, I wrote uuencode. It's stated purpose was to "encode a binary file for transmission by email". I didn't use the term "attachment". It became part of 4.0BSD and later systems, and was widely used. 3. In 1985, Lotus created cc:Mail. It eventually included attachments, using a file store method. When they added an SMTP gateway later, it used uuencode as the format. I believe cc:Mail first used the term "attachment". 4. Microsoft did the same thing with MS Mail somewhat later, possibly in the 1990s. It also used uuencode in the SMTP gateway. 5. In 1992, Nathaniel Borenstein and Ned Freed invented MIME. It had a different (and IMHO much better) way to send attachments, and it became an Internet Standard sometime later, possibly in 1996. What do you all think? Mary Ann

8 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] 4.3BSD help: getty ignoring modem status

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > So, DCD and CTS are being dropped, but getty (or something) isn't > responding and (presumably) sending a HUP signal to the shell. > Is there anybody with some modem or getty knowledge that can help? I know very little of 4.x, but I did write a V6 DZ driver, back in the Cenozoic or some such time period... :-) Looking at the 4.3Tahoe (which particular 4.3 version is in question here, anyway?) DZ driver: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Tahoe/usr/src/sys/vaxub… I find it hard (without further digging) to figure out how it gets from where it should discover carrier has gone away (in dzrint(), from dztimer()) to the rest of the system; they have added some linesw[] thing I don't know about. Looking at the 4.2 driver: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.2BSD/usr/src/sys/vaxuba/dz.c it seems (in the same routine) to do the right thing: gsignal(tp->t_pgrp, SIGHUP); so in that version, it's sending a SIGHUP to the whole pgroup when the carrier goes away - which should be the right thing. Noel

8 years, 5 months

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

by Clem Cole

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 7:35 AM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote: > But the people who have spent 9-figure sums on all this > marginally-functional tin that the Unix vendors foisted on them don't > look at it that way: they just want something which is not Unix, and > which runs on cheap tin. > Fair enough -- but I think that this is really another way of describing Prof. Christiansen's disruption theory. The "lessor" technology wins over "better" technology because it's good enough. I'm curious for the Banks, in your experience - which were the UNIX vendors that were pushing 9-figure UNIX boxes. I'll guess, IBM was one of them. Maybe NCR. What HP, Sun, DEC in that bundle? > Linux is not Unix, and runs on cheap tin. > I believe that the point you are making is that "white box" PC's running a UNIX-like system - aka Linux could comes pretty close to doing what the highly touted AIX, NCR et al were doing and were "good enough" to get the job done. And that's not a statement about UNIX as much as a statement about, the WINTEL ecosystem, that Linux sat on top of and did an extremely impressive job of utilizing.

8 years, 5 months

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TUHS