All, I've been working with Peter Salus (author of A Quarter Century of Unix)
to get the book published as an e-book. However, the current publishers have
been very incommunicative.
Given that the potential readership may be small, Peter has suggested this:
> I think (a) just putting the bits somewhere where they could
> be sucked up would be fine; and (b) let folks make donations
> to TUHS as payment.
However, as with all the Unix stuff, I'm still concerned about copyright
issues. So this is what I'm going to do. You will find a collection of
bits at this URL: http://minnie.tuhs.org/Z3/QCU/qcu.epub
In 24 hours I'll remove the link. After that, you can "do a Lions" on
the bits. I did the scanning, OCR'ing and proofing, so if you spot any
mistakes, let me know.
I'm not really interested in any payment for either the book or TUHS
itself. However, if you do feel generous, my e-mail address is also
my PayPal account.
Cheers, Warren
Thanks, Warren, for the (brief) posting of the ePub file for Peter
Salus' fine book, A Quarter Century of Unix.
I have a printed copy of that book on my shelf, and here is a list of
the errata that I found in it when I read it in 2004 that might also
be present in the ePub version:
p. 23, line 7:
deveoloped -> developed
p. 111, line 5:
Dave Nowitz we'd do -> Dave Nowitz said we'd do
p. 142, line 7:
collaboaration -> collaboration
p. 144, line -4 (i.e., 4 from bottom):
reimplemeted -> reimplemented
p. 160, line 10:
the the only -> the only
p. 196, line 17:
develope JUNET -> develop JUNET
p. 221, running header:
Berkley -> Berkeley
p. 222, line 11:
Mellon Institue -> Mellon Institute
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since a few people here are Bell Labs veterans, I'd to ask if someone
can explain a bit about that place. Sometimes I hear about work done
there that I'd like to follow up on, but I have no idea where to start.
For starters, I assume that everybody had to write up periodical reports
on their work. Was that stuff archived and is it still accessible
someplace? What about software that got to the point that it actually
had users beyond the developers? I know that major commercial projects
like UNIX are tied up in licensing limbo, but does that apply to
absolutely everything made there?
There is the AT&T Archives and History Center in Warren, NJ. Is it worth
asking if they have old tech reports?
--
http://www.fastmail.com - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love email again
Steve Bourne tried hard to interest us in A68, and I personally liked some
features of it (especially the automatic type morphing of arguments into
the expected types). But the documentation was a huge barrier--all the
familiar ideas were given completely new (and unintuitive) names, making
it very difficult to get into.
I may be biased in my view, but I think one fatal mistake that A68 made
was that it had no scheme for porting the language to the plethora of
computers and systems around at that time. (The Bliss language from CMU
had a similar problem, requiring a bigger computer to compile for the
PDP-11). Pascal had P-code, and gave C a real run, especially as a
teaching language. C had PCC.
Nowadays, newer languages like Python just piggyback on C or C++...
On recent visit to the Living Computer Museum in
Seattle I got to play with Unix on a 3B2--something
I never did at Bell Labs. Maybe next time I
go they'll offer a real nostalgia trip on
the PDP-7, thanks to Warren's efforts.
doug
Hello,
I want to complete my local ML archive (I deleted a few emails and I
wasn't subscribed before 2001 or so I think). After downloading the
archives and hitting them a few times to get somewhat importable mboxes,
I ended with 8699 emails in a maildir (in theory that should be a
superset of the 5027 emails in my regular TUHS maildir. I will merge
them next.). Two dozens mails are obviously defective (can be repaired
manually maybe) and some more might be defective (needs deeper
checking). So, has anybody more ;)?
Regards
hmw
> AFAIK the later ESS switches include a 3B machine but it only handles
> some administrative functions, with most of the the actual call
> processing being performed in dedicated hardware.
That is correct. The 3B2 was an administrative appendage.
Though Unix itself didn't get into switches, Unix people did
have a significant influence on the OS architecture for
ESS 5. Bob Morris, having observed some of the tribulations of
that project, suggested that CS Research build a demonstration
switch. Lee McMahon, Ken Thompson, and Joe Condon spearheaded
the effort and enlisted Gerard Holzmann's help in verification
(ironically, the only application of Gerhard's methods to
software made in his own department). They called the system,
which was very different from Unix, TPC--The Phone Company. It
actually controlled many of our phones for some years. The
cleanliness of McMahon's architecture, which ran on a PDP-11,
caught the attention of Indian Hill and spurred a major
reworking of the ESS design.
Doug
All, I've been asked by Wendell to forward this query about C
interpreters to the mailing list for him.
----- Forwarded message from Wendell P <wendellp(a)operamail.com> -----
I have a project at softwarepreservation.org to collect work done,
mostly in the 1970s and 80s, on C interpreters.
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c
One thing I'm trying to track down is Cin, the C interpreter in UNIX
v10. I found the man page online and the tutorial in v2 of the Saunders
book, but that's it. Can anyone help me to find files or docs?
BTW, if you have anything related to the other commercial systems
listed, I'd like to hear. I've found that in nearly all cases, the
original developers did not keep the files or papers.
Cheers,
Wendell
----- End forwarded message -----
All, I was invited to give a talk at a symposium in Paris
on the early years of Unix. Slides and recording at:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/Z3/Hapop3/
Feel free to point out the inaccuracies :-)
For example, I thought Unix was used at some point
as the OS for some of the ESS switches in AT&T, but
now I think I was mistaken.
That's a temp URL, it will move somewhere else
eventually.
Cheers, Warren
On 2016-07-01 15:43, William Cheswick <ches(a)cheswick.com> wrote:
>
>>> >>...why didn't they have a more capable kernel than MS-DOS?
> >I don't think they cared. or felt it was needed at the time (I disagreed then and still do).
>
> MS-DOS was a better choice at the time than Unix. It had to fit on floppies, and was very simple.
>
> “Unix is a system administrations nightmare” — dmr
>
> Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite the last two letters of its name.
> This is a term of art lost to antiquity.
Strangely enough, the definition I have of a runtime system is very
different than yours. Languages had/have runtime systems. Some
environments had runtime systems, but they have a somewhat different
scope than what MS-DOS is.
I'd call MS-DOS a program loader and a file system.
> Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a crappy, built-in shell,
> I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc. No multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly). DEC had several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy: they were getting operating-ish.
Uh? RSX and RSTS/E are full fledged operating systems with multiuser
proteciton, time sharing, virtual memory, and all bells and whistles you
could ever ask for... Including networking... DECnet was born on RSX.
And RSTS/E offered several runtime systems, it had an RT-11 runtime
system, an RSX runtime system, you also had a TECO runtime system, and
the BASIC+ runtime system, and you could have others. You could
definitely have had a Unix runtime system in RSTS/E as well, but I don't
know if anyone ever wrote one.
In RSX, compilers/languages have runtime systems, which you linked with
your object files for that language, in order to get a complete runnable
binary.
Johnny
