TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

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6532 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Happy New Year and an amusing story from the past

by norman＠oclsc.org

Dave Horsfall: > At yet another, we had a Sun 3/50 window connected to a Convex, and acted > all innocent when various dweebs did the old "echo 99k2vp..." etc trick. John Cowan: High-precision approximation to sqrt(2). What's the trick? ====== Not really a trick, just a hoary old zero-order CPU benchmark: echo 99k2vp | time dc You can see why letting people type that on a Convex thinking it was a Sun 3/50 might have entertainment value. Modern systems are far too fast for that to be worth while, though. I still use a variant of it: a shell script called dc-N, containing dc <<! 99k[2vszla1-dsa0<b]sb${1-500}salbx ! meant to be invoked as time dc-N 10000 or the like. (The internal default of 500 has long since gone stale too, of course.) Norman Wilson Toronto ON

10 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] I swear! I rtfm'ed

by Johnny Billquist

On 2014-12-31 21:14, Clem Cole<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > > Jake - you have lots of help from others and using curses(3) is definitely > the right way to program. > > But to answer your specific question about printf(string), according to > Chapter 3 (Programmer's Info) of my old VT-100 user's guide, I think what > is you are doing wrong is that "\033c" is not the ANSI clear to end of > screen command. Right... > When I saw your message on my iPhone last night, the cache said - wait that > can't be correct. But I could not remember why. So I had to wait until > I got back home today to look in my basement. > > As I suspected, it's not an ANSI sequence. So are you running in VT-100 > (ANSI) mode or VT52 mode? I ask because it is close to the VT52 cursor > right command which is actually: "\033C" but I do not remember is case > mattered. Case do matter. > In VT52 mode you need to send the terminal: "\033H\033J" to clear the > screen. > > In ANSI mode, it becomes: "\033[1;1\033[0J" Shorter form: "\033[H\033[J" > A few things to remember: > 1.) Clear takes the current cursor position and clears from there to end of > X (where X depends on mode, and type of clear). So you need to move the > cursor to home position (aka 1,1). Not really. It's way more advanced than that. If we start with the generic clear screen, it is CSI Pn J Where CSI can be expressed as ESC [ (or "\033[" in the same parlance as above.) Pn, then is an argument to the function, while J is the actual function (clear screen in this case). Now, Pn can cause many things: 0 Clear from cursor to end of screen 1 Clear from cursor to end of screen 2 Clear from beginning of screen to cursor 3 Clear whole screen If no argument is given, the default is 0. > 2.) VT-100's did not implement the full ANSI spec like Ann Arbor, Heathkit, > Wyse etc. So there are a number of things that those terminals did > better. A really good reason to you curses(3) because all the knowledge is > keep in the termcap and as a programmer you don't need to worry about it. Probably true. However, I'm not sure Ann Arbor or Heathkit did much better. As far as I can remember, they were always more "weird", but I might just be confused. However, curses(3) is definitely a good way of not having to care about different terminal oddities. > 3.) I saw sites were VT52 mode was sometimes preferred because it was good > enough for most editing, and needed fewer chars to do manipulation. On > slow serial lines, this sometimes was helpful. That said, give me an AAA > any day. Like others, I still miss that terminal.:-) Yeah, the VT52 was simpler, and had shorter control strings. But of course, with the additional limitations that came with that. Personally, I'd give an AAA or a Heathkit away if one was dropped on me. A VT100 I would keep. :-) 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

10 years, 6 months

I swear! I rtfm'ed

by Jacob Ritorto

, but I can't see how you're supposed to clear the screen on a vt100 in 2.9BSD. I guess printf'ing ("\033c") would do the trick, but I assumed there was a more proper way; something that leverages the vt100 termcap entry and does the right thing. Anyone? thx jake

10 years, 6 months

HP300/4.4BSD stuff

by Cory Smelosky

Evening all, Am I correct in my guess that 4.4BSD was built cross on an HP300? I have never found a binary dist of anything other than HP300 4.4...and my attempts to build 4.4 on ULTRIX/SunOS have so far not succeeded...it had to have been built SOMEHOW. I picked up an HP300 to help me get somewhere...but it seems to only have a 68010. :( I either need to find a definitive 68020-minimum one on ebay...someone with one available...or some tips of actually cross-building 4.4 for MIPS or SPARCv7 (I have physical hardware for either) I am very determined to run pure 4.4 on something bigger than a PIC32. ;) -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects

10 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] I swear! I rtfm'ed

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> > I loved my Ambassador! Ditto! > Still have one. Argh! Now you've made me want one for my vintage -11's! Alas, I don't see one on eBay.... :-( Noel

10 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] I swear! I rtfm'ed

by Johnny Billquist

The information give is correct. You could possibly argue that you shouldn't be using those functions, but should be using the curses(3) library instead, which in turn uses this stuff... But it's all up to how complex you want to be. :-) Johnny On 2014-12-31 07:16, Jacob Ritorto<jacob.ritorto(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Mary, this is exactly what I needed -- good to go now; thank you! > > As a side note: Man, what an intimidating can of braindamage I've opened!:) > > thanks all! > jake > > P.S. if anyone's bored enough, you can check out what we're up to at > https://github.com/srphtygr/dhb. I'm trying to get my 11yo kid to spend a > little time programming rather than just playing video games when he's near > a computer. He'a actually getting through this stuff and is honestly > interested when he understands it and sees it work -- and he even spotted a > bug before me this afternoon! Feel free to raise issues, pull requests, > etc. if you like -- I'm putting him through the git committing and pair > programming paces, so outside interaction would be kinda fun:) > > P.P.S. We're actually using 2.11bsd after all.. > > > On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 9:33 PM, Mary Ann Horton<mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote: > >> >This is the right info. Be sure to scroll up to see how to use tgetent, >> >tgetstr, and tputs. You aren't likely to need any padding. >> > >> >Essentially: >> > tgetent using getenv("TERM") gets you the whole entry from >> >/etc/termcap >> > tgetstr of "cl" gets you the "clear" >> >sequence >> > tputs outputs the "clear" >> >sequence >> > >> > >> >On 12/30/2014 06:22 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote: >> > >>> >>Check outhttps://www.gnu.org/software/termutils/manual/termcap-1.3/ >>> >>html_mono/termcap.html#SEC30 >>> >>- especially the "cl" entry. >>> >> >>> >>ISTR the database being at /etc/termcap normally. -- 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

10 years, 6 months

Bell Works

by Andy Kosela

This was brought to my attention on another mailing list. "Marking a new chapter for one of the country’s most architecturally and historically significant buildings, Somerset Development has announced a new name for the iconic former Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, N.J. The two-million-square-foot building – now named Bell Works – is currently undergoing a more than $100-million adaptive reuse redevelopment that will transform the facility into a dynamic mixed-use center.” http://patch.com/new-jersey/holmdel-hazlet/somerset-development-unveils-bel… http://bell.works/

10 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] What's with the DZ-11?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> > a 9-track tape followed me home, but even if I knew where it was now it > ain't gonna be readable after over 30 years... Umm, don't be too sure! I have several sets of backup tapes from one of the V6 machines at MIT, and those are also roughly 30 years old, and they are not in the best shape (they sat in my basement for most of that time). I sent one off to someone who specializes in reading old tapes, and he's gotten almost all the bits off of it (a few records had unrecoverable read errors, but the vast majority were OK - like roughly 15 read errors in around 1500 records). So do look for that tape (unless the material is all already online). I hope to annouce a vast trove of stuff soon from my tapes (once I figure out how to interpret the bits - they are written by a sui generis application called 'saveRVD', and the _only_ documentation of how it did it is... on that tape! :-) That includes a lot of code written at MIT, as well as stuff from elsewhere. Coming sbould be BCPL, Algol, LISP and some other languages; MACRO-11 and the DEC linker (which I guess are also available from UNSW tapes),but _also_ programs to convert back and forth from .REL to a.out format, and to .LDA format; and a whole ton of other applications (I have no idea what all is there - if anyone is interested, I can make a pass through my manuals and try and make a list). Noel

10 years, 7 months

What's with the DZ-11?

by Dave Horsfall

I've seen a couple of less than flattering references here; what was the problem with them? At UNSW, we couldn't afford the DH-11, so ended up with the crappy DJ-11 instead (the driver for the DH-11 had the guts ripped out of it in an all-nighter by Ian Johnston as I recall), and when the DZ-11 came along we thought it was the bees' knees. Sure, the original driver was as slow as hell, but the aforesaid IanJ reworked it and made it faster by at least 10x; amongst other things, I think he did away with the character queues and used the buffer pool instead, getting 9600 on all eight channels simultaneously, possibly even full-duplex. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server." http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there)

10 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] BerkNet

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole A few comments on aspects I know something of: > BTW: the Arpanet was not much better at the time The people at BBN might disagree with you... :-) But seriously, throughout its life, the ARPANET had 'load-dependent routing', i.e. paths were adjusted not just in response to links going up or down, but depending on load (so that traffic would avoid loaded links). The first attempt at this (basically a Destination-Vector algorithm, i.e. like RIP but with non-static per-hop costs) didn't work too well, for reasons I won't get into unless anyone cares. The replacement, the first Link-State routing algorithm, worked much, much, better; but it still had minor issues damping fixed most of those too). > DH11's which were a full "system unit" Actually, two; they were double (9-slot, I guess?) backplanes. > The MIT guys did ARP for ChaosNet which quickly migrated down the street > to BBN for the 4.1 IP stack. Actually, ARP was jointly designed by David Plummer and I for use on both TCP/IP and CHAOS (which is why it has that whole multi-protocol thing going); we added the multi-hardware thing because, well, we'd gone half-way to making it totally general by adding multi-protocol support, so why stop there? As soon as it was done it was used on a variety of IP-speaking MIT machines that were connected to a 10MBit Ethernet; I don't recall them all, but one kind was the MIT C Gateway multi-protocol routers. > Hey it worked just fine at the time. For some definition of 'work'! (Memories of wrapping protocol A inside protocol B, because some intervening router/link didn't support protocol A, only B...) Noel

10 years, 7 months

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TUHS