> From: Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl>
>> I have this distinct memory of Dave Clark mentioning the Liza Martin
>> TCP/IP for Unix in one of the meeting report publihed as IENs
> It may be mentioned in this report:
> http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/rfc/csr-rfc-228.pdf
Yeah, I had run across that in my search for any remnants of the Martin
stuff.
> Would you know if any of its source code survived?
As I had mentioned, I had found some old dump tapes, and had one of them read;
it had some bad spots, but we've just (this morning) succeeding in having a
look as to what's there, and I _think_ all of the source is OK (including the
kernel code, as well as applications like server Telnet and FTP). No SCCS or
anything like that, so it's a bit hit or miss doing history - the file write
dates were preserved, but of course a lot of them would have been edited over
time to fix bugs, add features, etc.
The tape appears to contains a _lot_ of other historic material, and it's
going to take a while to sort it all out; it includes a Version 6 with NCP
from NOSC/SRI, some Unix from BBN; a BCPL compiler; a 'bind' for .rel format
files (produced by MACRO-11 and probably BCPL) written in BCPL; programs to
convert from .rel to a.out and back; an early verion of Montgomery EMACS;
another Unix from 'TMI' (whoever that might be); another UNIX that's somehow
associated with TRIX; someone's early kernel overlay stuff; an early 68K C
compiler, and also an early 8080 C compiler - just a ton of stuff (that's just
a few items that grabbed my eye as I scrolled by).
Algol, alas, appears not to be there (we probably didn't add it, because of
space reasons). The copy of LISP on this tape seem to be damaged; I do have 3
other tapes, and between them, I hope we'll be able to retrieve it.
Noel
> From: Nick Downing
> This is a wonderful find
Yes, I was _very_ happy to find those tapes in my basement; up till that, I
was almost sure all those bits were gone forever.
Thanks to Chuck Guzis, whose old data recovery service made this possible - he
actually read the tape.
> is it possible for you to read the other tapes also?
Alas, they're all of the same system. So the most we're going to get is the
files that are missing on this one due to bad spots on the tape.
Noel
> some Unix from BBN
This one is from 1979, it includes Mike Wingfield's TCP. The 'Trix UNIX' is a
port to the 68K, probably started with something V7ish (I see "setjmp.h" in
there). Bits of the Montgomery EMACS appear to date from 1981, but the main
source files seem to be from 1984. I also have the source to 'vsh' (Visual
Shell), whatever that is.
Noel
Just stumbled over another early TCP/IP for Unix:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/3Com/3Com_UNET_Nov80.pdf
It would seem to be a design similar to that of Holmgren's (NCP-based) Network Unix (basic packet processing in the kernel, connection management in a user space daemon). In time and in concept it would sit in between the Wingfield ('79, all user space) and the Gurwitz ('81, all kernel) implementations.
I think it was distributed initially as a mod versus V7 and later as a mod versus 2BSD.
Would anybody here know of surviving source of this implementation?
Thanks,
Paul
The recent discussion of Solaris made me think - what was the first Unix to
have centralized package management as part of the OS? I know that IRIX
had it, I think from the beginning (possibly even for the GL2 releases) but
I imagine there was probably something before that.
-Henry
guess it is the beginning of the end of Solaris and the Sparc CPU:
'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was
planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with major
layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others
speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired
with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the
Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its
demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for
the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a
future.
The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12— has
apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap.
Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version is
apparently the only update planned for the operating system through
2021.
With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has
been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it
attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed
bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown
significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community revolt.
Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated
expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version
of the software platform. '
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confir…
--
Kay Parker
kayparker(a)mailite.com
--
http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be
Now that we have quite a few ex-Bell Labs staff on the list, and several
other luminaries, and with the Unix 50th anniversary not far off, perhaps
it is time to form a working group to help lobby to get 8th, 9th and 10th
Editions released.
I'm after volunteers to help. People who can actually move this forward.
Let me know if and how you can help out.
Thanks, Warren
I'm a bit puzzled, but then I only ever worked with some version of
Ultrix and an AT&T flavour of UNIX in Philips, SCO 3.2V4.2 (OpenServer
3ish), DEC Digital UNIX, Tru64, HP-UX 1123/11.31 and only ever used
"mkdir -p".
Some differences in the various versions are easily solved in scripts,
like shown below. Not the best of examples, but easy. Getting it to
work on a linux flavour wouldn't be too difficult :-)
OS_TYPE=`uname -n`
case "${OS_TYPE}" in
"OSF1")
PATH=".:/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/xyz/shell:/xyz/appl/unix/bin:/xyz/utils:"
TZ="THA-7"
;;
"HP-UX")
PATH=".:/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/contrib/bin:/xyz/field/scripts:/xyz/shell:/xyz/appl/unix/bin:/xyz/utils:"
TZ="TST-7"
;;
*)
echo "${OS_TYPE} unknown, exit"
exit 1
;;
esac
> From: Doug McIlroy
> Perhaps the real question is why did IBM break so completely to hex for
> the 360?
Probably because the 360 had 8-bit bytes?
Unless there's something like the PDP-11 instruction format which makes octal
optimal, octal is a pain working with 8-bit bytes; anytime you're looking at
the higher bytes in a word, unless you are working through software which
will 'interpret' the bytes for you, it's a PITA.
The 360 instruction coding doesn't really benefit from octal (well,
instructions are in 4 classes, based on the high two bits of the first byte,
but past that, hex works better); opcodes are 8 or 16 bits, and register
numbers are 4 bits.
As to why the 360 had 8-bit bytes, according to "IBM's 360 and Early 370
Systems" (Pugh, Johnson, and Palmer, pp. 148-149), there was a big fight over
whether to use 6 or 8, and they finally went with 8 because i) statistics
showed that more customer data was numbers, rather than text, and storing
decimal numbers in 6-bit bytes was inefficient (BCD does two digits per 8-bit
byte), and ii) they were looking forward to handling text with upper- and
lower-case.
Noel