TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6534 discussions

by Doug McIlroy

> [a] case where AT&T attempted to see whether its Unix code had been stolen > Coherent? I doubt it. The only access to Coherent that I am aware of was Dennis's site visit (recounted in Wikipedia, no less). Steve's Yacc adventure probably concerned another company. Besides the affairs of Coherent and Yacc, there was a guy in Massachusetts who sold Unix-tool lookalikes; I don't remember his name. We were suspicious and checked his binaries against our source--bingo! At the same time, our patent lawyer happened to be negotiating cross-licenses with DEC. DEC had engaged the very plagiarist as an expert to support their claim that AT&T's pile of patents didn't measure up to theirs. After a day of bargaining, our lawyer somehow managed to bring casual conversation around to the topic of stolen code and eventually offered the suspect a peek at a real example. He readily agreed that the disassembled binary on the one hand must have been compiled from the source code on the other. In a Perry Mason moment, the lawyer pounced: "Would it surprise you if I told you that this is ours and that is yours?" The discredited expert didn't appear at next day's meeting. The lawyer returned to Murray Hill aglow about his coup. The product soon disappeared from the market. Doug

8 years, 4 months

UUCP History [was Re: Help request: uucp, mail on 4.2BSD]

by Dan Cross

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > On Tue, 7 Mar 2017, Dan Cross wrote: > > > One or more microcomputer BBS (Bulletin Board System) platforms had UUCP > > support to bridge their store-and-forward messaging networks to USENET > > and send email, etc. The implementation I remember off the top of my > > head was Waffle, written by Tom Dell. [...] > > Was this the UUCP that was available for CP/M? I found it on the old > Walnut Creek CD, moved it over to my CP/M box via SneakerNet (I ran CP/M > for years, carefully avoiding DOS/WinDoze) and it worked; it was overlaid > to hell and back hence really slow, but it worked. > Maybe? Though I tend to doubt it. It looks like Waffle originally ran on the Apple II, but was fairly quickly ported to DOS and then Unix/Xenix. I believe it was written in C, but the source code is not generally available. More information on it is here: http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/WAFFLE/ As I mentioned before, the BBS thing was kind of interesting. What strikes me, however, is how closely the timing lines up with developments in the Unix world. As Jacob mentions earlier, UUCP was "published" in February 1978 and an improved version distributed with 7th Edition in October of that year. The first BBS was announced via an article in the November 1978 edition of Byte magazine (available online, with some information here: https://www.wired.com/2010/02/0216cbbs-first-bbs-bulletin-board/) For those that don't know, the whole idea behind a BBS was that a person with a computer (usually a microcomputer), a modem, and a POTS phone line (usually into the person's house) would run software on the machine that answered the phone when called (assumed the remote caller was using a modem, of course) and presented the remote user with an interface for interacting with the local machine: most often, this was menu based. Most often, the BBS only had one phone line and the functionality was limited: sending and receiving simple messages, uploading and downloading files using protocols like x- y- and zmodem (or kermit!) and maybe playing specially written games. However, some BBSs became quite sophisticated supporting multiple lines, interactive chat, multiplayer games and so forth. Early software was mostly homebrew (the Byte article talks about software *and* hardware), but eventually packaged systems emerged. There was even a commercial marketplace for BBS software. Around 1984, they developed a messaging "network" called Fidonet for routing email and sending files around; the goal was to minimize long-distance telephone charges by relaying things through nodes in the network that were geographically "close" to the next calling region and transmitting things in batch. Think USENET (which predated it by several years) but much smaller in scope. The Internet killed it for the most part, of course, but these things developed quite the following; some are even still running, though most are now accessible via telnet/ssh. Somewhat confusingly, some of the operators seem to think they are some kind of alternative to the "Internet" instead of just another application of the net. It's sort of an odd viewpoint, but I think it comes from not being altogether all that savvy: it was mostly a hobbyist thing. But in the BBS heyday, there was something like 100,000 of them in North America alone. Sorry for the wall of text, but I think the parity between the rise of BBSs and UUCP/USENET is interesting. - Dan C.

8 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Help request: uucp, mail on 4.2BSD

by Warren Toomey

Warren wrote: > > I might call for participation > > in a uucp/Usenet reconstruction with people running simulated nodes on > > the Internet. On Wed, Mar 08, 2017 at 07:47:30AM +0100, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > Are modern systems welcome? I always wanted a bang path address! I can't see why not, as long as you can simulate a serial connection with a TCP connection, and can speak uucp. Cheers, Warren

8 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Early Unix manuals (Was: fortran compiler, in assembly, for pdp-11)

by Paul McJones

This scanned version includes all the cited manuals: A Research UNIX Reader Annotated Excepts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986 M. Douglas McIlroy https://archive.org/details/a_research_unix_reader > From: jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu <mailto:jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (Noel Chiappa) > >> From: Paul Ruizendaal > >> The "Research Unix Reader" > > Thanks for mentioning that; I'd never heard of it. Very interesting. > > > A query: it seems to have been written with access to a set of manuals for the > various early versions of Research Unix. The Unix Tree: > > http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl <http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl> > > has the manual pages for V3 and V4, and V6 and later, but not the other > ones. Do the manuals used for the preparatio of that note still exist; and, if > so, is there any chance of getting them scanned?

8 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Early Unix manuals (Was: fortran compiler, in assembly, for pdp-11)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal > The "Research Unix Reader" Thanks for mentioning that; I'd never heard of it. Very interesting. A query: it seems to have been written with access to a set of manuals for the various early versions of Research Unix. The Unix Tree: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl has the manual pages for V3 and V4, and V6 and later, but not the other ones. Do the manuals used for the preparatio of that note still exist; and, if so, is there any chance of getting them scanned? (I have a auto-page-feed scanner, and volunteer to do said scanning. Someone else is going to have to do the OCR, and back-conversion to NROFF source, though... :-) Noel

8 years, 4 months

fortran compiler, in assembly, for pdp-11

by ron minnich

I spent a year or so working on this in 1977. I was wondering who wrote it. Funny but: I once had a compile fail on Motorola's MPL compiler, which was written in fortran. It had so many continued comment lines that the 16-bit column number went negative, and I got a fairly obscure error. Anyone remember who wrote it?

8 years, 4 months

Source code abundance?

by Arthur Krewat

Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ? Google it with: site:vetusware.com unix source Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?

8 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] communication files: interprocess IO before pipes

by Rudi Blom

On SCO UNIX 3.2V4 pipes where simulated as follows int fd[2] struct strfdinsert ins; /* * First open the stream clone device "/dev/spx" twice, * obtaining the two file descriptors. */ if ( (fd[0] = open(SPX_DEVICE, O_RDWR)) < 0) { gen_trace(gtr_flag, "-gen_pipe(): -open(fd[0]): %s\n", strerror(errno)); break; } if ( (fd[1] = open(SPX_DEVICE, O_RDWR)) < 0) { gen_trace(gtr_flag, ">gen_pipe(): -open(fd[1]): %s\n", strerror(errno)); close(fd[0]); break; } /* * Now link these two streams together with an * I_FDINSERT ioctl. */ ins.ctlbuf.buf = (char *) &pointer; /* no ctl info, just the ptr */ ins.ctlbuf.maxlen = sizeof(queue_t *); ins.ctlbuf.len = sizeof(queue_t *); ins.databuf.buf = (char *) 0; /* no data to send */ ins.databuf.len = -1; /* magic: must be -1, not 0, for stream pipe */ ins.databuf.maxlen = 0; ins.fildes = fd[1]; /* the fd to connect with fd[0] */ ins.flags = 0; /* nonpriority message */ ins.offset = 0; /* offset of pointer in control buffer */ if (ioctl(fd[0], I_FDINSERT, (char * ) &ins) < 0) { gen_trace(gtr_flag, ">gen_pipe(): -ioctl(I_FDINSERT): %s\n", strerror(errno)); close(fd[0]); close(fd[1]); break; } /* * reset close_on_exec flag */ gen_trace(gtr_flag, ">gen_pipe(): +fcntl()\n"); if ((rc = fcntl(fd[0], F_SETFD, 0)) == -1) gen_trace(gtr_flag, ">gen_pipe(): -fcntl(fd0, close_on_exec): %s\n", strerror(errno)); if ((rc = fcntl(fd[1], F_SETFD, 0)) == -1) gen_trace(gtr_flag, ">gen_pipe(): -fcntl(fd1, close_on_exec): %s\n", strerror(errno)); rc = 0; break;

8 years, 4 months

Need your help for 2019

by Warren Toomey

Mid-year 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the creation of Unix and I've been quietly agitating for something to be done to celebrate this. Up to now, there's been little response. The original Unix user's group, Usenix, will hold its Annual Technical Conference on the west coast of the US at this time, so it would make sense to do something in conjunction with this conference. Some suggestions: - a terminal room with a bunch of period terminals: ASR-33s, -37s, VT100s, VT102s, VT220s - these connected to real/emulated Unix systems either locally or via a terminal server and telnet to remotely emulated systems - some graphical terminals: Sun pizza boxes, a Blit would be great - if possible, some actual real PDP-11s, VAXen - emulated systems: V1 to V7 Unix, 32V, the BSDs etc. In fact there are plenty of Unix versions that we could run in emulated mode. - Unix of course was one of the systems used to implement the Arpanet protcols, so it would be interesting to get some of the real/emulated systems networked together - how about an emulated UUCP network with Usenet on top of it, and some mail/news clients on the emulated systems. - retro workshops/tutorials: how to edit with ed, using nroff, posting a Usenet article, dealing with bang paths. I'm proposing to gather a bunch of people to start the ball rolling on the technical/demonstration side. We'd need people: - with terminals, portable PDP-11s and VAXen, Sun boxen - prepared to set up emulated systems - who can help bring the networking (UUCP, Usenet, Arpanet) back to life - willing to write and run workshops that show off this old technology - to help set up terminal servers and all the RS-232 to telnet stuff Some of this we can start doing now, e.g. rebuild an emulated Arpanet, UUCP, Usenet, get emulated systems up, build front-end telnet interfaces. Is there anybody willing to sign up for this? I think once we have some momentum, we can tell the Usenix people and get some buy-in from them. Post back and/or e-mail me if you can help. Thanks, Warren

8 years, 4 months

[TUHS} communication files: interprocess IO before pipes

by Doug McIlroy

It's not really Unix history, but Dartmouth's "communication files" have so often been cited as pipes before Unix, that you may like to know what this fascinating facility actually was. See http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf

8 years, 4 months

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TUHS