TUHS

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6476 discussions

by Doug McIlroy

What's the mnmonic significance, if any, of the u in the bash builtin read -u for reading from a specified file descriptor? Evidently both f and d had already been taken in analogy to usage in some other commands. The best I can think of is u as in "tape unit", which was common usage back in the days of READ INPUT TAPE 5. That would make it the work of an old timer, maybe Dave Korn?

8 years, 11 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

by Doug McIlroy

> Now we are hoping to get the Living Computer Museum people to bring it up on their real PDP-7. Truly a fantastic prospect! The only Unix the museum has running is on a 3B2--a curious byway perhaps, but of little historic interest. The PDP-7 version would be a tremendous coup. doug

8 years, 12 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

by Warren Toomey

On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 12:44:15AM +0300, Diomidis Spinellis wrote: > This would have found any code from the PDP-7 Unix that appeared in the > First Edition. (I was hoping that some PDP-7 instruction sequences might be > the same in PDP-11.) > Unsurprisingly, nothing came out. No, the instruction set is completely different. The PDP-11 ISA is a paradise compared to the spartan PDP-7 ISA. Cheers, Warren

8 years, 12 months

PDP-7 Unix Progress

by Warren Toomey

All, a status update on the PDP-7 Unix restoration project at https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix The system is pretty much complete now. We have as much of the original code working as we can. We have rewritten things like the shell and some other utilities (ls etc.). The ed editor and the native assembler both work. We also have written a user-mode PDP-7 simulator to test things and an assembler to make building things faster. The system boots up under SimH with a filesystem and you can see what things were like back in 1970. One big missing utility is roff. As of today, I've written a compiler that inputs a vaguely C-like language and outputs PDP-7 code. Using this, I've compiled a minimalist roff which is enough to format man pages. This is a separate project here: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/h-compiler Now we are hoping to get the Living Computer Museum people to bring it up on their real PDP-7. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a disk drive. The expected solution is to build a disk simulator with an FPGA and SD card. There is no time frame for this, but it is in the works. Thanks go to Phil Budne and Robert Swierczek for all their hard work in building and testing things, and also to Norman Wilson for supplying scans of the original documents. Cheers, Warren

8 years, 12 months

interesting but long article on Dave Cutler, of VMS and NT fame

by Aharon Robbins

https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-computer-industr… Some of the statements about him seem exaggerated, but that's not surprising. Anyone who's read "Showstopper!" will have a different picture of him than what's painted here. Arnold

8 years, 12 months

Portals in 4.4 BSD

by Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

Hello everyone! I had been lurking this list for long, this is my first post to this list. I read with a lot of interest, an old Usenix paper by the late Richard Stevens on a system called "Portals": <https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/neworl/steve…> It explores a lot of ideas that found itself in Plan 9, like a filesystem interface for sockets etc. Wondering if this survived in any existing, so called "modern" Unix. I have always felt the need to have something like this in Unix. Cheers -- Ramakrishnan

8 years, 12 months

Re: [TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

by Johnny Billquist

On 2016-04-02 04:00, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: > On Saturday, 2 April 2016 at 1:06:58 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: >> On Mon, 28 Mar 2016, scj(a)yaccman.com wrote: >> >>> ... and I once heard an old-timer growl at a young programmer "I've >>> written boot loaders that were shorter than your variable names!" >> >> Ah, the 512-byte boot blocks... We got pretty inventive in those days >> (and this was before secondary loaders!) with line editing etc. > > I was thinking more of the RIM loader on the PDP-8. 16 words or 24 > bytes. Bah! The RK8E bootloader for OS/8: 2 words... :-) 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

9 years

Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

by Aharon Robbins

Hi TUHSers, For a long time now, I have had a theory that I've never seen substantiated (or disproved) in print. After Steve Johnson's recollection of how hard it was to type on the Teletype terminals, I'm going to throw this thought out for consideration. One of Unix's signature hallmarks is its terseness: short command names like mv, ln, cp, cc, ed; short options (a dash and a single letter), programs with just a few, if any, options at all, and short path names: "usr" instead of "user", "src" instead of "source" and so on. I have long theorized that the reason for the short names is that since typing was so physically demanding, it was natural to make the command names (and all the rest) be short and easier to type. I don't know if this was a conscious decision, but I suspect it more likely to have been an unconscious / natural one. Today, I started wondering if this wasn't at least part of the reason for commands being simple, with few if any options. After all, if I have to type 'man foo' to remember how foo works, I don't want to wait for 85 pages of printout (at 110 characters per second!) to finally see what option -z does after wading through the descriptions of options -a through -y. I certainly think there's some truth to this idea; longer command names and especially GNU style long options didn't appear until the video terminal era when terminals were faster (9600 or 19200 baud!) and much less physically demanding to use. How MUCH correlation is there, I don't claim to know, but I think there's definitely some. For the record, I did use the paper teletypes some, mainly at a university where I took summer classes, connected to a Univac system. I remember how hard it was to use them. You could almost set your watch by when it would crash around noon time, as the load went up. :-) On Unix I only used VDTs, except if I was at a console DECwriter. Anyway, that's my thought. :-) Comments and or insights, especially from those who were there, would be welcome. Thanks, Arnold

9 years

Claim your early Unix contributions on GitHub

by Diomidis Spinellis

The Unix History repository on GitHub [1] aims to provide the evolution of Unix from the 1970s until today under Git revision control. Through a few changes recently made [2] it's now possible for individual contributors to have their GitHub profile linked to their early Unix contributions. Ken Thompson graciously made this move last week following a personal email invitation. I think it would be really cool if more followed. This would send a powerful message of continuity and tradition in computing to youngsters joining GitHub today. What you need to do is the following. - Create a GitHub profile (if you haven't already got one) - Click on https://github.com/settings/emails - Add the email address(es) associated with your early Unix commits (e.g. foo(a)research.uucp or bar(a)ucbvax.berkeley.edu) You can easily find an author's commits and email addresses recorded in the repository through the web search form http://www.spinellis.gr/cgi-bin/namegrep.pl - GitHub will tell you that a verification email has been sent to your (probably defunct) email address. Don't worry. Your account will be linked to the address even without the verification step. - Adding your photograph to your profile will increase the vividness of GitHub's revision listings. If you're in contact with Unix contributors who are not on this list, please forward them this message. Also, if your name isn't properly associated with the repository's commits, drop me an email message (or a GitHub pull request for the corresponding file [3]), and I'll add it. [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo [2] The modifications involved the change of UUCP addresses to use the .uucp pseudo-domain rather than a ! path and the listing of co-authors within the commit message. [3] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/author-path Diomidis - http://www.spinellis.gr

9 years

And a word from our sponsors ...

by Warren Toomey

Just a friendly word from the guy who runs the TUHS list. Historical details, with verifiable facts: OK. Questions and replies about old systems: OK. Semi-off-topic threads: mostly OK, they usually peter out. Comments about systems (good or bad): fine. Comments about individuals and their motivations/actions (especially if the comments are pejorative): not good at all. If you think a thread is going to devolve into a slanging match between people, then a) don't fuel the flames by posting replies, b) walk away and calm down, c) let me know. We've had a few threads recently which are coming close to the edge, and I hate acting as a censor/wet blanket, so please avoid saying things that will raise other people's hackles. Back to you regularly scheduled notalgia.... Warren

9 years

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