Google was not the first place Rob and Dave had fun with names.
At one point, Rob had a duplicate entry in /etc/passwd,
with login name r, password empty, normal userid/groupid/home
directory, special shell. The shell program checked whether
it was running on a particular host and a particular hardwired
serial line: if yes, it ran the program that started the Research
version of the window system for our bitmapped terminals;
otherwise it just exited. The idea seemed to be to let him
log in quickly in his office.
I think that by the time I arrived at Bell Labs he'd stopped
using it, because it no longer worked, because we no longer
ran serial lines directly from computers to offices--everyone
was connected via serial-port Datakit instead.
While I was there, senior management bought a Cray X-MP/24 for
the research group. (Thank you for using AT&T.) Since it too
was accessible via Datakit (using a custom hardware interface
built by Alan Kaplan, but that's another story), it had to have
a hostname. It was either Dave or Rob, I forget which, who
suggested 3k, because (a) it was a supercomputer, so `big bang'
seemed to fit; (b) it was Arno Penzias, then VP for Research,
who got us the money, so `big bang' and 3K radiation seemed
even more appropriate; and, most important, (c) it was fun to
see whether a hostname beginning with a digit broke anything.
So far as I recall, nothing broke. Some people who were
involved with TCP/IP networking at the labs were frightened
about it; I don't remember whether that Cray was ever connected
to an IP network so I don't know whether anything went wrong
there. Of course such names are not a problem today, but
in those long-lost days when nobody worried much about buffer
overflows either, such bugs were much more common. Weren't they?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Time to start a new thread :-)
Back when Unix was really Unix and dinosaurs strode the earth, login names
were restricted to just 8 characters, so you had to be inventive when
signing up lots of students every term (ObUS: semester).
A wonderful Japanese girl, Eriko Kinoshita, applied for an account on some
box somewhere. Did I mention that login names defaulted to the first 8
characters of the surname?
Understandably annoyed, Plan B for assigning logins was applied, which was
the first name followed by the first letter of the surname.
Sigh...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
One gets used to login names. In the 80ish I got 'rubl' and I'm still using it.
Of course in this age of the World Wild Web that may make me easily
trackable. Nothing to hide though :-)
Gr[aeiou]g Lehey:
And I wanted greg@, but it was taken. So I ended up with grog@, and
I've had that for nearly 30 years.
=====
I was !norman for some years, but when I left Bell
Labs for the real world 26 years ago, I was forced
to switch to norman@.
That was part of the price I paid for trading suburban
New Jersey for downtown Toronto. On the whole it was
a more-than-satisfactory trade, and emerging to the
real world broadened my perspectives in many areas,
but being stuck with Hideous Naming was certainly a
minor disadvantage.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
research!norman no more
On Jul 14, 2016 7:01 PM, "Peter Jeremy" <peter(a)rulingia.com> wrote:
>
> On 2016-Jul-15 08:36:56 +1000, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
> >On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Clem Cole wrote:
> >And on the Mac and FreeBSD, they still are (as well as being builtins).
>
> FreeBSD provides a convenient list of what commands are (currently)
builtin
> to the provided shells and available externally:
> https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?builtin
>
Bash man page does as well along with command -v (and hash IIRC) letting
you know.
I've always been curious though - what was the reason behind implementing
/bin/[ ? IDK any shell where this isn't implemented - I always assumed it's
a POSIX compatibility stopgap older systems needed to stay compliant with
their shipped shell.
I remember hearing that originally the Unix shell had control structures
(e.g. if, while, case) implemented through external commands. However,
I can't see this reflected in the source code. The 7th Edition Bourne
shell has these commands built-in (usr/src/cmd/sh/cmd.c), while the 6th
Edition (usr/source/s2/sh.c) seems to lack them completely.
The only external command I found was glob, which performed wildcard
expansion.
Am I missing something? Was this implemented in a version that was
never released? If so, does anyone know how this implementation worked?
(Nested commands might require holding some sort of globally
accessible stack.)
> As far as I know, it [|] has always been used as 'or' on computers.
I was on the NPL (eventually PL/I) committee when IBM 'generously'
increased the 360 character set from 48 to 60. George Radin grabbed
| for OR, before IBM announced the character set. Previously
the customary use for | in logic was the "Scheffer stroke", which
we now know as NAND. So "always" is ever since it became available.
Was PL/I the first to adopt it?
Doug
Dave Horsfall:
I still remember when the pipe command was "^" (pointy hat).
====
I still remember--barely--when \136 was up-arrow, not carat!
I don't think pipe was ever only ^, but that ^ was a
synonym for | added to make it easier to use on older
upper-case terminals that had no |. Those (remaining
few) who were there at the time can perhaps clarify.
I still habitually quote shell arguments containing ^,
even though I haven't used a shell that required that
since late 1984 (Rob had removed the special meaning
from /bin/sh before I arrived at Bell Labs). On the
other hand, I still cannot be bothered to get used to
quoting arguments containing !; I just disable all
that history and editing bloatware whenever possible.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Ok, I hope this question isn't too off-topic...
I was looking through the X10R3 source tree trying to find the
earliest paint program for X. I wasn't able to see anything that
looked like a paint program.
Xpaint might be the oldest, wikipedia says the first version appeared in 1989.
Searching for xpaint on tuhs returned no matches, but I saw that
4.3BSD-Tahoe had some old X programs but nothing listed there seemed
to be a paint program.
Maybe xgedit? It's listed as a "simple graphic editor for the X window
system", but I don't know if it really qualifies as a paint program.
Mark
