TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

6 participants
6479 discussions

update on Bell System Technical Journal family archives

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

In late 2010, I released decade-specific bibliographies of the Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ) at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1920.bib ... http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj2010.bib (change .bib to .html for versions with live hyperlinks). I get weekly status reports for the hundreds of bibliographies in the archives to which the bstj*.bib files belong, and until recently, I'd been puzzling about the apparent cessation of publication of the Bell Labs Technical Journal (its current name) in March 2014. I now understand why: according to the Wiley Web site for the journal, ownership and the archives have been transferred to IEEE, effective with volume 19 (2014). The bstj2010.bib file has accordingly been updated today with coverage of (so far, only four) articles published by IEEE in volume 19. [The first of those is a 50-year retrospective on the discovery of the Cosmic Microware Background that provided some of the first solid evidence for the Big Bang theory of the origin and evolution of the universe, and led to the award of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics to Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. The article also includes a timeline of important Bell Labs developments, and Unix is listed there.] Older list readers may remember that a lot of the early research publications about Unix appeared in the BSTJ issues, so this journal should have considerable interest for TUHS list users, and the move of the archives from Wiley to IEEE may make the back issues somewhat more accessible outside those academic environments that have library subscriptions for Wiley journals in electronic form. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9 years, 7 months

where the docs have gone

by Doug McIlroy

The disappearance of some troff-related documents that had been on line at Bell Labs was recently reported on this list. That turns out to have been a bureaucratic snafu. Plan 9 and v7 are back now. It is hoped that CSTRs will follow. Doug

9 years, 7 months

getting nroff to underline in v6,v5

by Mark Longridge

It seems that nroff had the ability to show underlined text very early on, possibly as early as v3 according to the v3 manual. I haven't managed to get this to work right under simh but I was thinking maybe there's a way to do it. It needs an 'underline font' but the mechanism of how this worked in the old days is a bit of mystery to me. The output device would have to have the ability to either display or print underlined text. Maybe someone can remember which terminal devices supported this in the old days which worked "out of the box" in the v5,v6 era. Maybe there was the ability to use overstrike characters on the teletype? In bash I can use: echo -e "\e[4munderline\e[0m" Shouldn't be too hard to hack up something that works in emulated v5. Mark

9 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] getting nroff to underline in v6,v5

by Doug McIlroy

> It seems that nroff had the ability to show underlined text very early Pre-Unix roff had the .ul request. Thus I expect (but haven't checked) that it was in Unix roff. It would be very surprising if nroff, which was intended to be more capable that roff, didn't have some underlining facility right from the start. Doug

9 years, 7 months

Re {TUHS} Synchronous vs Asynchronous IO in Unix

by Doug McIlroy

Unix was what the authors wanted for a productive computing environment, not a bag of everything they thought somebody somewhere might want. One objective, perhaps subliminal originally, was to make program behavior easy to reason about. Thus pipes were accepted into research Unix, but more general (and unruly) IPC mechanisms such as messages and events never were. The infrastructure had to be asynchronous. The whole point was to surmount that difficult model and keep everyday programming simple. User visibility of asynchrony was held to a minimum: fork(), signal(), wait(). Signal() was there first and foremost to support SIGKILL; it did not purport to provide a sound basis for asynchronous IPC. The complexity of sigaction() is evidence that asynchrony remains untamed 40 years on. Doug

9 years, 7 months

From BWK on contributor names

by Aharon Robbins

Hi All. Here is BWK's contribution. | Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 17:28:21 -0400 (EDT) | From: Brian Kernighan <bwk(a)cs.princeton.edu> | To: arnold(a)skeeve.com | Subject: Re: please get out your flash light... | | Some answers interpolated, but lots remain mysteries... | | On Thu, 24 Sep 2015, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: | | > Hi. Can you shed some light? | > | >> From: Diomidis Spinellis <dds(a)aueb.gr> | >> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org | >> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 12:27:03 +0300 | >> Subject: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors | >> | >> I found out that the book "Life with Unix" by Don Libes and Sandy | >> Ressler has a seven page listing of Unix notables, and I'm using that to | >> fill gaps in the contributors of the Unix history repository [1,2]. | >> Working through the list, the following questions came up. | >> | >> - Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction. But diction.c first appears | >> in 4BSD and 2.10BSD. Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley? | | Nina Macdonald, maybe? Lorinda worked with people in that group. | | >> - Is Chuck Haley listed in the book as the author of tar the same as | >> Charles B. Haley who co-authored V7 usr/doc/{regen,security,setup}? He | >> appears to have worked both at Bell labs (tar, usr/doc/*) and at | >> Berkeley (ex, Pascal). Is this correct? | | I think so. | | >> - Andrew Koenig is credited with varargs. This is a four-line header | >> file in V7. Did he actually write it? | >> | >> - Ted Dolotta is credited with the mm macros, but the document "Typing | >> Documents with MM is written by by D. W. Smith and E. M. Piskorik. Did | >> its authors only write the documentation? Did Ted Dolotta also write | >> mmcheck? | | I don't think Ted wrote -mm; he might have been the manager of that | group? Ask him: ted(a)dolotta.org | | >> Also, I'm missing the login identifiers for the following people. If | >> anyone remembers them, please send me a note. | >> | >> Bell Labs, PWB, USG, USDL: | | ark | | >> Andrew Koenig | >> Charles B. Haley | >> Dick Haight | | Maybe rhaight, but don't quote me. Last address I have is from | long ago: rhaight(a)jedi.accn.org | | >> Greg Chesson | | Can't remember whether it was grc or greg | | >> Herb Gellis | >> Mark Rochkind | | You probably mean Marc J Rochkind. I think it was mmr, but | ask him: rochkind(a)basepath.com | | >> Ted Dolotta | >> | >> BSD: | >> Bill Reeves | >> Charles B. Haley | >> Colin L. Mc Master | >> Chris Van Wyk | | Was Chris ever part of BSD? He was at Stanford, then Bell Labs, | where he was cvw. | | >> Douglas Lanam | >> David Willcox | >> Eric Schienbrood | >> Earl T. Cohen | >> Herb Gellis | >> Ivan Maltz | >> Juan Porcar | >> Len Edmondson | >> Mark Rochkind | | See above | | >> Mike Tilson | >> Olivier Roubine | >> Peter Honeyman | | honey (remember honeydanber? | | >> R. Dowell | >> Ross Harvey | >> Robert Toxen | >> Tom Duff | | td | | >> Ted Dolotta | >> T. J. Kowalski | | frodo | | >> Finally, I've summarized all contributions allocated through file path | >> regular expressions [3] into two tables ordered by author [4]. (The | >> summary is auto-generated by taking the last significant part of each | >> path regex.) If you want, please have a look at them and point out | >> omissions and mistakes. | >> | >> I will try to commit all responses I receive with appropriate credit to | >> the repository. (You can also submit a GitHub pull-request, if you prefer.) | >> | >> [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo | >> [2] | >> http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.pdf | >> [3] | >> https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/author-path | >> [4] http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr/~dds/contributions.pdf | >> | >> Diomidis | >> _______________________________________________ | >> TUHS mailing list | >> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org | >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

9 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Doug McIlroy

I can assure you that Lorinda Cherry wrote most of the important code in WWB, including style and diction. The idea for them came from Bill Vesterman at Rutgers. Lorinda already had parts, a real tour de force, which assigned parts of speech to words in a text. Style was the killer app for parts and was running within days of his approach to the labs wondering whether such a thing could be built. Lorinda also wrote deroff, which these tools of course needed. WWB per se was packaged by USDL; I am sorry I can't remember the name of the guiding spirit. So Lorinda's code detoured through there on its way into research Unix. Chris van Wyk was cvw. He was at Bell Labs, not BSD. Chuck Haley is indeed Charles B. Haley. Andy Koenig was ark.

9 years, 7 months

Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Norman Wilson

A few scattered answers, some redundant with those of others: -- Lorinda Cherry (llc) worked at Bell Labs. She wrote diction (and the rest of the Writer's Workbench tools) there, in the early 1980s; if some people saw it first in BSD releases that is just an accident of timing (too late for V7) and exposure (I'm pretty sure it was available in the USG systems, which weren't generally accessible until a year or two later). Lorinda is one of the less-known members of the original Computer Science Research Center who nevertheless wrote or co-wrote a lot of things we now take for granted, like dc and bc and eqn and libplot. Checking some of this on the web, I came across an interesting tidbit apparently derived from an interview with Lorinda: http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/precis/cherry2.htm I wholly endorse what she says about UNIX and the group it came from. One fumble in the text: `Bob Ross' who liked to break programs is surely really Bob Morris. -- So far as I know, Tom Duff (td) was never at Berkeley. He's originally from Toronto; attended U of T; was at Lucasfilm for a while (he has a particular interest in graphics, though he is a very sharp and subtle programmer in general); started at Bell Labs in 1984, not long before I did. He left sometime in the 1990s, lives in Berkeley CA, but works neither at UCB nor at Google but at Pixar. -- T. J. Kowalski (frodo) was at Bell Labs; when I was there he worked in the research group down the hall (Acoustics, I think), with whom Computer Science shared a lot of UNIX-releasted stuff. Ted is well-known for his work on fsck, but did a lot of other stuff, including being the first to get Research UNIX to work on the MicroVAX II. He also had a high-quality mustache. -- Andrew Koenig (ark) was part of the Computer Science group when I was there in the latter 1980s. He was a early adopter of C++. asd, the automatic-software distributor we used to keep the software in sync on the 20-or-so systems that ran Research UNIX, was his work. -- Mike Tilson was, I think, one of the founders of HCR (Human Computing Resources), a UNIX-oriented software company based in Toronto in the early 1980s. The company was later acquired by SCO, in the days when SCO was still a technical company rather than a den of lawyers. -- Peter Honeyman (honey) was never, I think, at Berkeley, though he is certainly of the right character. In the 1980s he was variously (sometimes concurrently?) working for some part of AT&T and at Princeton. For many years now he has been in Ann Arbor MI at the University of Michigan, where his still-crusty manner appears not to interfere with his being a respected researcher and much-liked teacher. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (Bell Labs Computing Science Research, 1984-1990)

9 years, 7 months

Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by Diomidis Spinellis

I found out that the book "Life with Unix" by Don Libes and Sandy Ressler has a seven page listing of Unix notables, and I'm using that to fill gaps in the contributors of the Unix history repository [1,2]. Working through the list, the following questions came up. - Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction. But diction.c first appears in 4BSD and 2.10BSD. Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley? - Is Chuck Haley listed in the book as the author of tar the same as Charles B. Haley who co-authored V7 usr/doc/{regen,security,setup}? He appears to have worked both at Bell labs (tar, usr/doc/*) and at Berkeley (ex, Pascal). Is this correct? - Andrew Koenig is credited with varargs. This is a four-line header file in V7. Did he actually write it? - Ted Dolotta is credited with the mm macros, but the document "Typing Documents with MM is written by by D. W. Smith and E. M. Piskorik. Did its authors only write the documentation? Did Ted Dolotta also write mmcheck? Also, I'm missing the login identifiers for the following people. If anyone remembers them, please send me a note. Bell Labs, PWB, USG, USDL: Andrew Koenig Charles B. Haley Dick Haight Greg Chesson Herb Gellis Mark Rochkind Ted Dolotta BSD: Bill Reeves Charles B. Haley Colin L. Mc Master Chris Van Wyk Douglas Lanam David Willcox Eric Schienbrood Earl T. Cohen Herb Gellis Ivan Maltz Juan Porcar Len Edmondson Mark Rochkind Mike Tilson Olivier Roubine Peter Honeyman R. Dowell Ross Harvey Robert Toxen Tom Duff Ted Dolotta T. J. Kowalski Finally, I've summarized all contributions allocated through file path regular expressions [3] into two tables ordered by author [4]. (The summary is auto-generated by taking the last significant part of each path regex.) If you want, please have a look at them and point out omissions and mistakes. I will try to commit all responses I receive with appropriate credit to the repository. (You can also submit a GitHub pull-request, if you prefer.) [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo [2] http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.pdf [3] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/author-path [4] http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr/~dds/contributions.pdf Diomidis

9 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > Eric Schienbrood > .. Noel might remember his MIT moniker No, alas; and I tried 'finger Schienbrood(a)lcs.mit.edu' and got no result. Maybe he was in some other part of MIT, not Tech Sq? > From: Arnold Skeeve > Here too I think stuff written at ATT got out through Berkeley. (SCCS) That happened at MIT, too - we had SCCS quite early (my MIT V6 manual has it), plus all sorts of other stuff (e.g. TROFF). I think some of it may have come through Jon Sieber, who, while he was in high school, had been part of (IIRC) a Scout troop which had some association with Bell Labs, and continued to have contacts there after he became an MIT undergrad. Noel

9 years, 7 months

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

TUHS