Just to be clear: I don't pine at all for UUCP.
I do still think it's a mistake that e-mail addresses and
domain names run backwards from the way directories and
filenames run. That's what I miss about !norman vs
norman@.
But it's all a Beta-vs-VHS matter these days, like a lot
of unfortunate design decisions that have become standard
over the years. Like git winning out over hg, which is
sort of like the VAX/VMS command language winning out over
the Bourne shell. (To toss another pebble into the pond
to see what the ripples look like, rather in the manner
of Rob and Dave.)
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
I recently noticed that lpr has a symlink option ("-s") on Solaris but
not on Apple. Is there anything here historically except prudence and
small drives?
N.
> I heard that Bob Morris was asked for his initials, he said “rm”, they insisted on a middle initial, which he didn’t have, so he supplied “h”, hence “rhm”.
True in principle, but when it happened and who "they" were, is lore
beyond my ken. I presume it was before he joined Bell Labs. At the
labs, interoffice communications typically used initials, so the
DMR, JFO, RHM convention was well established. Only the affectation
of lower-case only was new--and that was the fault of unicase Model
33. Who wanted to SHOUT EVERYTHING they wrote, or litter it with escapes?
doug
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.)
