> From: Jacob Goense <dugo(a)xs4all.nl>
> Mills's 1983 RFC889[2] calls the original PING Packet InterNet Groper.
I have a strong suspicion that Packet-etc is a 'backronym' from Dave Mills.
Note that the use of the term "echo" for a packet returned dates back quite a
while before that, see e.g. IEN 104, "Minutes of the Fault Isolation
Meeting", from March 1979:
"ability to echo packets off any gateway"
When ICMP was split from GGP (see IEN-109, RFC-777), the functionality
migrated from GGP to ICMP, and was generalized so that all hosts provided the
capability, not just routers.
Noel
Personally, I lean away from listing the nine billion debunked
names of cron. It's like adding a disclaimer to cat(1) to
explain that cat just copies data to standard output, it doesn't
transform it or compute how long it would take to send the data
over UUCP.
But it probably shows that I have been trying to write a couple
of manual pages lately (for some personal stuff, plus some docs
for work that are not technically manual pages but deserve the
same sort of conciseness).
Maybe Wikipedia-page format should admit an optional BUGS section.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
PS: seriously, though I wouldn't bother including the debunking
text myself, save perhaps on the Talk page to encourage editors
to delete any future attempts to revive the un-names, I have no
problem with Grog doing it. More power to him if he has the
energy!
Hello all!
While I was reading the article "A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts
from the Programmer's Manual" from Douglas McIlroy, I learnt of a set of
utilities for designing electronic circuits. Here is a brief quote of this
article:
"CDL (v7 pages 60-63)
Although most users do not encounter the UNIX Circuit Design System, it has long
stood as an important application in the lab. Originated by Sandy Fraser and
extended by Steve Bourne, Joe Condon, and Andrew Hume, UCDS handles circuits
expressed in a common design language, cdl. It includes programs to create
descriptions using interactive graphics, to lay out boards automatically, to
check circuits for consistency, to guide wire-wrap machines, to specify
combinational circuits and optimize them for programmed logic arrays (Chesson
and Thompson). Without UCDS, significant inventions like Datakit, the 5620 Blit
terminal, or the Belle chess machine would never have been built. UCDS appeared
in only one manual, v7."
I looked it up on the 7th Edition's Manual and I haven't found references of
this system. I also searched a v7 system image downloaded from TUHS and got no
results. However I got some references of this system in USENET archives. In
particular, two hierarchies, net.draw and after net.ucds were dedicated to it.
Apparently two of the binaries of the system were called "draw" and "wrap". I
also found a manual of a similar system which I suppose is the UCDS descendant
in the 1st Edition of Plan 9. This is the link of the document:
http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/cda/
However that edition of Plan 9 is not publicly released and I could not find
it in following editions. But since v7 Unix is available, I hope it may
be possible to get hold of an older release at least.
Does anyone have any information?
Thank you in advance!
--- Michele
I was going through the old AUUG newsletters at
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/
looking for wiki material. They are a mine of information!
I've sent an e-mail off to the UKUUG folk to see if they have any
on-line newsletters. Does anybody know what happened to EUUG, especialy
if any of their newsletters have been digitised?
And Usenix ;login, are any of their old newsletters available?
If not, who can I lobby to get this done? There's only 3 1/2 years
left before the 50th anniversary!
Cheers, Warren
> From: Wolfgang Helbig
> The HALT instruction of the real PDP11 only stops the CPU
I have this bit set that on at least some models of the real machine, when
the CPU is halted, it does not do DMA grants? If so, on such machines, the
trick of depositing in the device registers directly would not work; the
device could not do the bus cycles to do the transfer to memory. Anyone know
for sure which models do service DMA requests while halted?
Noel
Something of a tangent:
In my early days with UNIX, one of the systems I helped look
after was an 11/45. Normally we booted it from an SMD disk
with a third-party RP-compatible contorller, for which we
had a boot ROM. Occasionally, however, we wanted to boot it
from RK05, usually to run diagnostics, occasionally for some
emergency reason (like the root file system being utterly
scrambled, or the time we ran that system, with UNIX, on a
single RK05 pack, for several days so our secretaries could
keep doing their troff work while the people who had broken
our air-conditioning system got it fixed--all other systems
in our small machine room had to stay shut down).
There was no boot ROM for the RK05, but it didn't matter:
one just did the following from the front-panel switches:
1. Halt/Enable to Halt
2. System reset (also sends a reset to the UNIBUS)
3. Load address 777404
4. Deposit 5.
(watch lights blink for a second or so)
5. Load address 0
6. Halt/Enable to Enable
7. Continue
777404 is the RK11's command register. 5 is a read command.
Resetting the system reset the RK11, which cleared all the
registers; in particular the word count, bus address, and
disk address registers. So when the 5 was deposited (including
the bit 01, the GO bit), the RK11 would read from address 0 on
the disk to address 0 in physical memory, then increment the
word-count register, and keep doing so until the word count
was zero after the increment. Or, in higher-level terms, read
the first 65536 words of the disk into the first 65536 words
of memory.
Then starting at address 0 would start executing whatever code
was at the beginning of memory (read from the beginning of the
disk).
Only the first 256 words (512 bytes) of the disk was really
needed, of course, but it was harmless, faster, and easier to
remember if one just left the word-count at its initial zero,
so that is what we did.
The boot ROM for the SMD disk had a certain charm as well.
It was a quad-high UNIBUS card with a 16x16 array of diodes,
representing 16 words of memory. I forget whether one inserted
or removed a diode to make a bit one rather than zero.
It's too bad people don't get to do this sort of low-level stuff
these days; it gives one rather a good feel for what a bootstrap
does when one issues the command(s) oneself, or physically
programs the boot ROM.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Hi all, thanks for the wiki suggestions so far.
Does anybody have any lists of good Unix websites that I can add in to
the wiki at http://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:websites
Also, any suggestions on how to organise the page, as I can see we will
end up with hundreds of links!
Cheers, Warren
Someone off-list today asked about an annotated list of Unix papers which
might be good to add to the new wiki.
I've just uploaded my own short list of Unix papers, in BibTeX format, on
the wiki at:
http://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:wkt_reflist.bib
If you have your own list of references in whatever format, could you
upload them into the wiki also?
Once you have registered and have write permissions, go to:
Media manager -> publications -> Upload. Select your file and upload.
The dokuwiki can deal with references in BibTeX format, I just don't know how
to do it yet. Once I do, I'll decorate links to papers with a reference.
Cheers & thanks, Warren
P.S I just uploaded some of the BSTJ papers into
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Papers/BSTJ/
I decided that, given that we have a few years until the 50th anniversary,
that I would set up a wiki for Unix in a similar vein to the Multicians one.
So I've made a start at http://wiki.tuhs.org (if/when the A record propagates).
I'd love to get some other people to help out, but I'll keep adding stuff
and we will see how it goes. Any good anecdotes about Unix are most welcome!
If you want to get edit status, register and then e-mail me so I can
manually mark you as having edit status.
Cheers, Warren
> > Louis wrote a disk loaded program called RUNCOM that read command
> > lines from a file,
> Hence, presumably, the .foorc files of Unix and the rc shell.
Yes, rc files were named for runcom, but did not adhere to runcom's
curious limit of 6 commands.
Doug
