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
Ori Idan <ori(a)helicontech.co.il> asks today:
>> Pascal compiler written in Pascal? how can I compile the compiler it I
>> don't yet have a pascal compiler? :-)
You compile the code by hand into assembly language for the CDC
6400/6600 machines, and bootstrap that way: see
Urs Ammann
On Code Generation in a PASCAL Compiler
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380070311
Niklaus Wirth
The Design of a PASCAL Compiler
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380010403
It has been a long time since I read those articles in the journal
Software --- Practice and Experience, but my recollection is that they
wrote the compiler in a minimal subset of Pascal needed to do the job,
just to ease the hand-translation process.
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On 2016-06-30 21:22, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
>
> but when Moto came out with a memory management chip it had some
>> > severe flaws that made paging and fault recovery impossible, while the
>> > equivalent features available on the 8086 line were tolerable.
> Different issues...
>
> When the 68000 came out there was a base/limit register chip available,
> who's number I forget (Moto offered to Apple for no additional cost if they
> would use it in the Mac but sadly they did not). This chip was similar
> to the 11/70 MMU, as that's what Les and Nick were used to using (they used
> a 11/70 running Unix V6 has the development box and had been before the
> what would become the 68000 -- another set of great stories from Les, Nick
> and Tom Gunter).
Clem, I think pretty much all you are writing is correct, except that I
don't get your reference to the PDP-11 MMU.
The MMU of the PDP-11 is not some base/limit register thing. It's a
paged memory, with a flat address space. Admittedly, you only have 8
pages, but I think it's just plain incorrect to call it something else.
(Even though noone I know of ever wrote a demand-paged memory system for
a PDP-11, there is no technical reason preventing you from doing it.
Just that with 8 pages, and load more physical memory than virtual, it
just didn't give much of any benifits.)
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
> Ronald Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com>
>
>>
>> On the other hand, there was
>> no excuse for a Pascal compiler to be either large, buggy, or slow, even before Turbo Pascal.
>>
> I remember the Pascal computer on my Apple II used to have to use some of the video memory while it was running.
UCSD Pascal, the Apple Pascal base, would grab the video memory as space to write the heap when compiling. When the Terak system was in use at UCSD the video memory would display on the screen so you could watch the heap grow down the screen while the stack crawled up when compiling. If it ever hit in the middle, you had a crash. Exciting times.
Terak systems were 11/03 based, IIRC. (http://www.threedee.com/jcm/terak/)
David
> On Jun 30, 2016, at 10:27 AM, schily(a)schily.net (Joerg Schilling)
> Marc Rochkind <rochkind(a)basepath.com> wrote:
>
>> Bill Cheswick: "What a different world it would be if IBM had selected the
>> M68000 and UCSD Pascal. Both seemed
>> to me to better better choices at the time."
>>
>> Not for those of us trying to write serious software. The IBM PC came out
>> in August, 1981, and I left Bell Labs to write software for it full time
>> about 5 months later. At the time, it seemed to me to represent the future,
>> and that turned out to be a correct guess.
>
> I worked on a "Microengine" in 1979.
>
> The Microengine was a micro PDP-11 with a modified micro code ROM that directly
> supported to execute p-code.
>
> The machine was running a UCSD pascal based OS and was really fast and powerful.
>
> Jörg
Very likely one of the Western Digital products. They were the first to take UCSD Pascal and burned the p-code interpreter into the ROM. Made for a blindingly fast system. I worked with the folks who did the port and make it all play together. Fun days.
I worked on the OS and various utility programs those days. Nothing to do with the interpreters.
When the 68000 came out SofTech did a port of the system to it. Worked very well; you could take code compiled on the 6502 system write it to a floppy, take the floppy to the 68k system and just execute the binary. It worked amazingly well.
David
