Hi all, does anybody know of on-line historical Usenet archives that
I can link to, especially if they have unpacked articles (visible
subject lines would be better)?
What newsgroups are relevant? net.v7bugs, comp.sources.unix,
comp.sources.misc, net.sources, mod.sources, comp.sources.bugs?
What about platform or system-specific newsgroups?
I'll put the links here: http://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:newsgroups
Thanks, Warren
P.S A good history of the legal side of Unix is here:
http://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:theses
Does anybody have a working e-mail address for Henry Spencer? I've
tried his "zoo.utoronto..." address but the box is refusing SMTP
connections (from me, at least). Alternatively, could someone e-mail
him and see if he would be interested in joining the TUHS list?
And ditto for any other old Unix users!
Cheers, Warren
Can someone here ID the mystery person?
Embarrassingly, CHM has the person misidentified as well.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Need help identifying a photo
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2016 16:46:45 +0000
From: Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP(a)si.edu>
To: members(a)lists.sigcis.org <members(a)lists.sigcis.org>
There is a famous photo on Wikimedia commons, of what purports to be Ken
Thompson & Dennis Ritchie in front of a PDP-11, presumably working on
UNIX. The problem is that the seated person doesn’t look like either of
them. And he is clean-shaven. Could it be Bjarne Stroustrup? Does anyone
recall seeing T&R w/o facial hair? Any help in tracking this down would
be much appreciated! The photo has been reprinted in many places, and
I’d like to track this down before I inadvertently propagate an error.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ken_Thompson_(sitting)_and_Dennis_R…
Paul E. Ceruzzi
Curator, Division of Space History
National Air and Space Museum
MRC 311, PO Box 37012
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC 20013-7012
www.ceruzzi.com <http://www.ceruzzi.com>
ceruzzip(a)si.edu <mailto:ceruzzip@si.edu>
202-633-2414
[I feel like I'm spamming my own list]
I've tried to make contact with people in the UK that might have
copies of the UKUUG and EUUG newsletters: Peter Collinson,
Sunil Das, Bruce Anderson. No luck with this.
There are newsletters back to 1992 at http://www.ukuug.org/newsletter/
but I'm after the ones in the 1970s and 1980s. The current secretary
doesn't know about the earlier newsletters.
Who else can I contact?
Cheers, Warren
> we can probably substitute part of the db(1) man page from 1st
> Edition Unix for the missing page A7
That would be appropriate--properly documented, of course.
doug
Among the papers of the late Bob Morris I have found a
Unix manual that I don't remember at all--a draft by
Dennis Ritchie, in the style of (but not designated as)
a technical report with numbered sections and subsections.
It does not resemble the familiar layout of the numbered
editions. Besides the usual overview of kernel and shell,
it describes system calls and some commands, in a layout
unrelated to the familiar man-page style. Detailed
reference/tutorial manuals for as, roff, db and ed
are included as appendices.
The famous and well-justified claim that "UNIX contains a numer
of features very seldom offered even by larger systems"
appears on page 1.
A little poking around tuhs.org didn't reveal a copy of
this document. Does anybody know of one somewhere else?
Doug
> Dr. Wang invented the core memory at IBM BTW
Wang did make a magnetic-core storage device (a 2-core-per-bit
shift register) but Jay Forrester's core memory, first installed
on MIT's Whirlwind computer in 1953, is the one that actually
saw use and very quickly dominated the market.
Doug
Ok, I got a few questions about PDP-11.
First, I was wondering when Bell Labs got that first PDP-11/20 what
software (if any) came with it? I assume when one bought a PDP-11/20
you would get some type of OS with it.
According to the folks at alt.sys.pdp11 the PDP-11 computer doesn't
have anything equivalent to a PC's BIOS. But I know a bit about what a
PC's BIOS does and that includes RAM Initialization. Wouldn't the DRAM
on the PDP-11/something need to be initialized too? Perhaps an older
PDP-11 doesn't have DRAM but surely the later models did?
Now the last question has to do with what made the PDP-11 architecture
so great. Part of that had to be the relatively affordablility of the
PDP-11 and of course it was the machine that made Unix possible. It
seems though that there should have been a PDP-11 based desktop and as
far as I can tell that didn't happen. Instead we got a bunch of micros
with 8080, z80 and 6502 cpus, but nothing that could run Unix, at
least not a Unix v7 with source code.
Mark
> First, I was wondering when Bell Labs got that first PDP-11/20 what
software (if any) came with it?
> I have this bit set that they didn't get anything, they wrote a
cross-assembler on another machine. I know that when it came, it didn't have a
disk (wasn't ready yet), so it ran a chess problem (memory only) for quite a
while until the disk came.
That is exactly right. Unix was up and running as a time-sharing
system with remote access before a primitive DOS emerged from DEC.
The chess problem was enumeration of closed knight tours.
Doug
_and_Dennis_Ritchie_at_PDP-11_(2876612463).jpg){kind=link}