TUHS

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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

9 years, 2 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

9 years, 2 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, 3 months

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, 3 months

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, 3 months

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, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Claim your early Unix contributions on GitHub

by Norman Wilson

Marc Rochkind: BSD is the new kind on the block. I don't think it came along until 1977 or so. Research UNIX I don't think picked up SCCS ever. SCCS first appeared in the PWB releases, if you don't count the earlier version in SNOBOL4 for the IBM mainframes. ===== Correct. We never needed no stinkin' revision control in Research. More fairly, early systems like SCCS were so cumbersome that a community that was fairly small, in which everyone talked to everyone, and in which there was no glaring need wasn't willing to adopt them. I remember trying SCCS for a few small personal projects back in 1979 or so (well before I moved to New Jersey), finding it just too clunky for the benefits it gave me, and giving up. Much later, I found RCS just as messy. One thing that really bugged me was those systems' inherent belief that you rarely want to keep a checked-out copy of something except while you're working on it. Another, harder to work around, is that in any nontrivial project there are often stages when I want to make changes of scope broader than a single file: factor common stuff out into a new file, merge things into a single file, rename files, etc. CVS was a big step forward, but not enough. Subversion was the first revision-control that didn't feel like a huge burden to me. None of which is to say that SCCS and RCS were useless; they were important pioneers, and for the big projects that originally spawned them I'm sure they were indispensible. But I can't imagine Ken or Dennis putting up with them for very long, and I'm glad I never had to. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

9 years, 3 months

Used punched cards. (was Early non-Unix filesystems?)

by Doug McIlroy

> These are USED cards. That's OK. No duty! Quite the opposite happened to me in Britain. I wanted to import an early computer-generated film to show. When I inquired whether there would be any customs implications, I was asked whether the film was exposed or not. Britain charged duty only on exposed film. With apologies for straying ever farther from Unix, Doug

9 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11/70 SPL (was: Early non-Unix filesystems?)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall > That makes sense, and someone forgot to document it... Or perhaps it was added precisely to get rid of the window, and then someone discovered that it could be used to freeze the system, so they decided they'd better not document it? If the system had MOS memory, and you had to power cycle the machine to get it out of this state, there wouldn't be any evidence left of who did the deed (unless the system was writing extensive audit trailing to disk), so it would be a great 'system assasin' (aka vandal) tool. Noel PS: I guess this is more PDP-11ish than UNIXish - apologies for the off-topic!

9 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems?

by Nemo

On 21 March 2016 at 17:43, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: > On Tuesday, 22 March 2016 at 1:11:07 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: >> >> Walking down the corridors of Comp Sci, a student in front of me >> dropped his entire deck of approx 2000 cards, all over the floor... >> I have no idea whether he got them sorted, but I sure as hell used >> rubber bands after that! > > But that's what the sequence numbers in columns 73 to 80 are for! I did that religiously, even with my small PL/C runs -- PL/C runs were free. One day, they decided to extend the code area to the entire card.... and so I learned another feature of the card punch. N. > > Greg > --

9 years, 3 months

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