TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6478 discussions

Fwd: [SIGCIS-Members] Need help identifying a photo

by Al Kossow

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

9 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: [SIGCIS-Members] Need help identifying a photo

by Doug McIlroy

No question about it. That is Ken Thompson. I saw him just like that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times in that very seat. doug

9 years, 3 months

And, contacts in the UK or Europe?

by Warren Toomey

[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

9 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Scan of "Edition 0" manual

by Doug McIlroy

> 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

9 years, 3 months

"Edition 0" manual

by Doug McIlroy

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

9 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions

by Doug McIlroy

> 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

9 years, 3 months

PDP-11 questions

by Mark Longridge

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

9 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions

by Doug McIlroy

> 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

9 years, 3 months

PC-bootable PDP-11 Unix

by arnold＠skeeve.com

FYI folks: Sanos PDP-11 Simulator with UNIX V7 http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm Arnold

9 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions

by Norman Wilson

Noel Chiappa: I'd lay good money that the vast majority of PDP-11's never ran Unix. And UNIX might have happened on some other machine - it's not crucially tied to the PDP-11 - in fact, the ease with which it could be used on other machines was a huge part of its eventual success. ======= I have to disagree in part: the PDP-11 is a big part of what made UNIX so widespread, especially in university departments, in the latter part of the 1970s. That wasn't due so much to the PDP-11's technical details as to its pricing. The PDP-11 was a big sales success because it was such a powerful machine, with a price that individual departments could afford. Without a platform like that, I don't think UNIX would have spread nearly the way it did, even before it began to appear in a significant way on other architectures. Save for the VAX, which was really a PDP-11 in a gorilla suit, that didn't really happen until the early 1980s anyway, and I'm not convinced it would have happened had UNIX not already spread so much on the PDP-11. It worked both ways, of course. I too suspect that a majority (though I'm not so sure about `vast') of PDP-11s never ran UNIX. But I also suspect that a vast majority of those that did might not have been purchased without UNIX as a magnet. I don't think those who weren't around in the latter 1970s and early 1980s can appreciate the ways in which UNIX captured many programmers and sysadmins (the two were not so distinct back then!) as no other competing system could. It felt enormously more efficient and more pleasant to work on and with UNIX than with any of the competition, whether from DEC or elsewhere. At the very least, none of the other system vendors had anything to match UNIX; and by the same token, had UNIX not been there, other hardware vendors' systems would have had better sales. Sometime around 1981, the university department I worked at, which already had a VAX-11/780 and a PDP-11/45 running UNIX, wanted to get another system. Data General tried very hard to convince us to buy their VAX-competitor. I remember our visiting their local office to run some FORTRAN benchmarks. The code needed some tweaking to work under their OS, which DG claimed was better than UNIX. Us UNIX people had trouble restraining our chuckles as we watched the DG guys, who I truly believe were experts in their own OS, taking 15 or 20 minutes to do things that would have taken two or three with a few shell loops and ed commands. DG did not get the sale. We bought a second-hand VAX. Blame UNIX. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

9 years, 3 months

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