Clem Cole:
I do not remember ever using, much less
needed to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap
that the folks in Redmond forced on the industry.
=====
Oh, come on. You programmed in C. You probably used
UNIX back when @ was the default kill character (though
I doubt you're odd enough still to use that kill character,
as I do). You surely used troff, LaTeX, or both, and have
doubtless sworn at regular expressions more often than
most of the young Linux crowd have had chocolate bars.
I think you've just forgotten it out of PBSD (post-backlash
stress disorder, nothing to do with Berkeley).
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
UNIX\(tm old fart who swore at a regexp just yesterday
Greg Lehey:
And why? Yes, the 8088 was a reasonably fast processor, so fast that
they could slow it down a little so that they could use the same
crystal to create the clock both for the CPU and the USART. But the
base system had only 16 kB memory, only a little more than half the
size of the 6th Edition kernel. Even without the issue of disks
(which could potentially have been worked around) it really wasn't big
enough for a multiprogramming OS.
=====
Those who remember the earliest UNIX (even if few of us have
used it) might disagree with that. Neither the PDP-7 nor the
PDP-11/20 on which UNIX was born had memory management: a
context switch was a swap. That would have been pretty slow
on floppies, so perhaps it wouldn't have been saleable, but
it was certainly possible.
In fact Heinz Lycklama revived the idea in the V6 era to
create LSX, a UNIX for the early LSI-11 which had no
memory management and a single ca. 300kiB floppy drive.
It had more memory than the 8088 system, though: 20kiW,
i.e. 40kiB. Even so, Lycklama did quite a bit of work to
squeeze the kernel down, reduce the number of processes
and context switches, and so on.
Here's a link to one of his papers on the system:
https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1977/5085/00/50850237.pdf
I suspect it would have been possible to make a XENIX
that would have worked on that hardware. Whether it
would have worked well enough to sell is another question.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
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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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 -----
