TUHS

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6541 discussions

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

The Xerox Alto and CP/M are not Unix-derived, but the first in particular influenced the design of Unix workstations and the X11 Window System in the 1980s, so this story may be of interest to list readers: Exposed: Xerox Alto and CP/M OS source code released The Computer History Museum has made the code behind yet more historic software available for download http://www.itworld.com/article/2838925/exposed-xerox-alto-and-cp-m-os-sourc… ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

10 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] 11/40E and 11/60 (was: speaking of early C compilers)

by Johnny Billquist

On 2014-10-28 13:42, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > yes: > http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3241&context=compsci Cool. I knew CMU did a lot of things with 11/40 machines. I didn't know they had modified them to be able to write their own microcode, but thinking about it, it should have been obvious. As they did multiprocessor systems based on the 11/40, they would have had to modify the microcode anyway. > I had a 60 running v7 years later. we also toyed with adding CSV/CRET > but never did it because we got an 11/70 >> >On Oct 27, 2014, at 9:09 PM, Dave Horsfall<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: >> > >>> >>On Mon, 27 Oct 2014, Clem Cole wrote: >>> >> >>> >>[...] because the CMU 11/40E had special CSV/CRET microcode which we >>> >>could not use on the 11/34. >> > >> >The 40E had microcode whilst the vanilla 40 didn't? I thought only the 60 >> >was micro-programmable; I never did get around to implementing CSV/CRET on >> >our 60 (Digital had a bunch of them when a contract with a publishing >> >house fell through). DEC actually made two PDP-11s that were micro programmable. The 11/60 and the 11/03 (if I remember right). DEC never had microprogramming for the 11/40, but obviously CMU did that. Ronald Natalie<ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: >> >On Oct 27, 2014, at 10:06 PM, Clem Cole<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: >> > >> >yes:http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3241&context=comp… <http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3241&context=compsci> >> > >> >I had a 60 running v7 years later. we also toyed with adding CSV/CRET but never did it because we got an 11/70 > Problem with the 60 was it lacked Split I/D (as did the 40's). We kind of relied on that for the kernels towards the end of the PDP-11 days, > We struggled with the lack of I/D on the 11/34 and 11/23 at BRL but finally gave up when TCP came along. We just didn't have enough segments to handle all the overlaying needed to do. I recycled all the non split-I/D machines into BRL GATEWAYS. > > Of course, there was the famous (or imfamous) MARK instruction. This thing was sort of a kludge, you actually pushed the instruction on the stack and then did the RTS into the stack to execute the MARK to pop the stack and jump back to the caller. I know of no compiler (either DEC-written or UNIX) that used the silly thing. It obviously wouldn't work in split I/D mode anyhow. Years later while sitting in some DEC product announcement presentation, they announced the new T-11 chip (the single chip PDP-11) and the speaker said that it supported the entire instruction set with the exception of MARK. Me and one other PDP-11 trivia guy are going "What? No mark instruction?" in the back of the room. Yurg... The MARK instruction was just silly. I never knew of anyone who actually used it. Rumors have it that DEC just came up with it to be able to extend some patent for a few more years related to the whole PDP-11 architecture. Clem Cole<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: >> >Problem with the 60 was it lacked Split I/D (as did the 40's). > > ?A problem was that it was 40 class processor and as you says that means it > was shared I/D (i.e. pure 16 bits) - so it lacked the 45 class 17th bit. > The 60 has went into history as the machine that went from product to > "traditional products" faster than any other DEC product (IIRC 9 months). > I'm always surprised to hear of folks that had them because so few were > actually made. I picked up four 11/60 machines from a place in the late 80s. I still have a complete set of CPU cards, but threw the last machine away about 10 years ago. > I've forgotten the details nows, but they also had some issues when running > UNIX. Steve Glaser and I chased those for a long time. The 60 had the HCM > instruction sequences (halt a confuse microcode) which were some what > random although UNIX seemed to hit them. DEC envisioned it as a commercial > machine and added decimal arithmetic to it for RSTS Cobol.? I'm not sure > RSX was even supported on it. RSX-11M supports it. So do RSTS/E and RT-11. RSX-11M-PLUS obviously don't, since it have a minimal requirement of 22-bit addressing. The microcode specific instructions are interesting. But in general shouldn't crash things, but of course kernel is a different story. :-) Johnny

10 years, 8 months

speaking of early C compilers

by Jason Stevens

has anyone ever tried to compile any of the old C compilers with a 'modern' C compiler? I tried a few from the 80's (Microsoft/Borland) and there is a bunch of weird stuff where integers suddenly become structs, structures reference fields that aren't in that struct, c01.c register int t1; .... t1->type = UNSIGN; And my favorite which is closing a bunch of file handles for the heck of it, and redirecting stdin/out/err from within the program instead of just opening the file and using fread/fwrite.. c00.c if (freopen(argv[2], "w", stdout)==NULL || (sbufp=fopen(argv[3],"w"))==NULL) How did any of this compile? How did this stuff run without clobbering each-other? I don't know why but I started to look at this stuff with some half hearted attempt at getting Apout running on Windows. Naturally there is no fork, so when a child process dies, the whole thing crashes out. I guess I could simulate a fork with threads and containing all the cpu variables to a structure for each thread, but that sounds like a lot of work for a limited audience. But there really is some weird stuff in v7's c compiler.

10 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

by Jason Stevens

Wow BSD on a supercomputer! That sounds pretty cool! http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1986/3445600639931.pdf >From here it mentions it could scale to 16 process execution modules (CPU's?) while here http://ftp.arl.mil/mike/comphist/hist.html it mentions 4 PEMs which each could run 8 processes. It still looks like an amazing machine. -----Original Message----- From: Ronald Natalie To: Noel Chiappa Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: 10/27/14 11:09 PM Subject: Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers We thought the kernels got cleaned up a lot by the time we got to the BSD releases. We were wrong. When porting our variant of the 4 BSD to the Denelcor HEP supercomputer we found a rather amusing failure. The HEP was a 64 bit word machine but it had partial words of 16 and 32 bits. The way it handled these was to encode the word size in the lower bits of the address (since the bottom three weren't used in word addressing anyhow). If the bottom three were zero, then it was the full word. If it was 2 or 6, it was the left or right half word, and 1,3, 5, and 7 yielded the four quarter words. (Byte operations used different instructions so they directly addressed the memory). Now Mike Muuss who did the C compiler port made sure that all the casts did the right thing. If you cast "int *" to "short *" it would tweak the low order bits to make things work. However the BSD kernel in several places did what I call conversion by union: essentially this: union carbide { char* c; short* s; int* i; } u; u.s = ...some valid short* ... int* ip = u.i; Note the compiler has no way of telling that you are storing and retrieving through different union members and hence the low order bits ended up reflecting the wrong word size and this led to some flamboyant failures. I then spent a week running around the kernel making these void* and fixing up all the access points to properly cast the accesses to it. The other amusing thing was what to call the data types. Since this was a word machine, there was a real predisposition to call the 64 bit sized thing "int" but that meant we needed another typename for the 32 bit thing (since we decided to leave short for the 16 bit integer). I lobbied hard for "medium" but we ended up using int32. Of course, this is long before the C standards ended up reserving the _ prefix for the implementation. The afore mentioned fact that all the structure members shared the same namespace in the original implementation is why the practice of using letter prefixes on them (like b_flags and b_next etc... rather than just flags or next) that persisted long after the C compiler got this issue resolved. Frankly, I really wish they'd have fixed arrays in C to be properly functioning types at the same time they fixed structs to be proper types as well. Around the time of the typesetter or V7 releases we could assign and return structs but arrays still had the silly "devolve into pointers" behavior that persists unto this day and still causes problems among the newbies. _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

10 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> > What, as opposed to spelling creat() with an "e"? Actually, that one never bothered me at all! I tended to be more annoyed by _extra_ characters; e.g. the fact that 'change directory' was (in standard V6) "chdir" (as opposed to just plain "cd") I found far more irritating! Why make that one _five_ characters, when most common commands are two?! (cc, ld, mv, rm, cp, etc, etc, etc...) Noel

10 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Norman Wilson writes today: >> ... >> -- Dennis, in one of his retrospective papers (possibly that >> in the 1984 all-UNIX BLTJ issue, but I don't have it handy at >> the moment) remarked about ch becoming chdir but couldn't >> remember why that happened. >> ... The reference below contains on page 5 this comment by Dennis: >> (Incidentally, chdir was spelled ch; why this was expanded when we >> went to the PDP-11 I don't remember) @String{pub-PH = "Pren{\-}tice-Hall"} @String{pub-PH:adr = "Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458, USA"} @Book{ATT:AUS86-2, author = "AT{\&T}", key = "ATT", title = "{AT}{\&T UNIX} System Readings and Applications", volume = "II", publisher = pub-PH, address = pub-PH:adr, pages = "xii + 324", year = "1986", ISBN = "0-13-939845-7", ISBN-13 = "978-0-13-939845-2", LCCN = "QA76.76.O63 U553 1986", bibdate = "Sat Oct 28 08:25:58 2000", bibsource = "http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/master.bib", acknowledgement = ack-nhfb, xxnote = "NB: special form AT{\&T} required to get correct alpha-style labels.", } That chapter of that book comes from this paper: @String{j-ATT-BELL-LAB-TECH-J = "AT\&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal"} @Article{Ritchie:1984:EUT, author = "Dennis M. Ritchie", title = "Evolution of the {UNIX} time-sharing system", journal = j-ATT-BELL-LAB-TECH-J, volume = "63", number = "8 part 2", pages = "1577--1593", month = oct, year = "1984", CODEN = "ABLJER", DOI = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1984.tb00054.x" ISSN = "0748-612X", ISSN-L = "0748-612X", bibdate = "Fri Nov 12 09:17:39 2010", bibsource = "Compendex database; http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1980.bib", abstract = "This paper presents a brief history of the early development of the UNIX operating system. It concentrates on the evolution of the file system, the process-control mechanism, and the idea of pipelined commands. Some attention is paid to social conditions during the development of the system.", acknowledgement = ack-nhfb, fjournal = "AT\&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal", topic = "computer systems programming", } Incidentally, on modern systems with tcsh and csh, I use both chdir and cd; the long form does the bare directory change, whereas the short form is an alias that also updates the shell prompt string and the terminal window title. I also have a personal alias "xd" (eXchange Directory) that is short for the tcsh & bash sequence "pushd !*; cd .", allowing easy jumping back and forth between pairs of directories, with updating of prompts and window titles. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 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/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

10 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jason Stevens > has anyone ever tried to compile any of the old C compilers with a > 'modern' C compiler? > ... > How did any of this compile? How did this stuff run without clobbering > each-other? As Ron Natalie said, the early kernels are absolutely littered with all sorts of stuff that, by today's standards, are totally unacceptable. Using a variable declared as an int as a pointer, using a variable declared as a 'foo' pointer as a 'bar' pointer, yadda-yadda. I ran (tripped, actually :-) across several of these while trying to get my pipe-splicing code to work. (I used Version 6 since i) I am _totally_ familiar with it, and ii) it's what I had running.) For example, I tried to be all nice and modern and declared my pointer variables to be the correct type. The problem is that Unix generated unique ID's to sleep on with code like "sleep(p+1, PPIPE)", and the value generated by "p+1" depends on what type "p" is declared as - and if you look in pipe.c, you'll see it's often declared as an int pointer. So when _I_ wrote "sleep((p + 1), PPIPE)", with "p" declared as a "stuct file pointer", I got the wrong number. I can only speculate as to why they wrote code like this. I think part of it is, as Brantley Coile points out, historical artifacts due to the evolution of C from (originally) BCPL. That may have gotten them used to writing code in a certain way - I don't know. I also expect the modern mindset (of being really strict about types, and formal about coverting data from one to another) was still evolving back then - partly because they often didn't _have_ the tools (e.g. casts) to do it right. Another possibility is that they were using line editors, and maintaining more extensive source is a pain with an editor like that. Why write "struct file *p" wnen you can just write "*p"? And of course everyone was so space-concious back then, with those tiny disks (an RK05 pack is, after all, only 2.5MB - only slightly larger than a 3.5" floppy!) every byte counted. I have to say, though, that it's really kind of jarring to read this stuff. I have so much respect for their overall structure (the way the kernel is broken down into sub-systems, and the sub-systems into routines), how they managed to get a very powerful (by anyone's standards, even today's) OS into such a small amount of code... And the _logic_ of any given routine is usually quite nice, too: clear and efficient. And I love their commenting style - no cluttering up the code with comments unless there's something that really needs elucidation, just a short header to say, at a high level, what the routine does (and sometimes how and why). So when I see these funky declarations (e.g. "int *p" for something that's _only_ going to be used to point to a "struct file"), I just cringe - even though I sort of understand (see above) why it's like that. It's probably the thing I would most change, if I could. Noel

10 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

by Norman Wilson

Noel Chiappa: > I tended to be more annoyed by _extra_ characters; e.g. the fact that > 'change directory' was (in standard V6) "chdir" (as opposed to just > plain "cd") I found far more irritating! Why make that one _five_ > characters, when most common commands are two?! (cc, ld, mv, rm, cp, > etc, etc, etc...) In the earliest systems, e.g. that on the PDP-7, the change-directory command was just `ch'. Two vague memories about the change: -- Dennis, in one of his retrospective papers (possibly that in the 1984 all-UNIX BLTJ issue, but I don't have it handy at the moment) remarked about ch becoming chdir but couldn't remember why that happened. -- Someone else, possibly Tom Duff, once suggested to me that in the earliest systems, the working directory was the only thing that could be changed: no chown, no chmod. Hence just ch for chdir. I don't know offhand whether that's true, but it makes a good story. Personally I'd rather have to type chdir and leav off th trailing e on many other words than creat if it let me off dealing with pieces of key system infrastructure that insist on printing colour-change ANSI escape sequences (with, so far as I can tell, no way to disable them) and give important files names beginning with - so that grep pattern * produces an error. But that happens in Linux, not UNIX. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

10 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

by Jason Stevens

Thanks for clearing that the whole members out of nowhere thing. I had thought (ha ha) that since I don't have a working fork, I could just rebuild CC as a native executable, and then just call apout for each stage, but I never realized how interdependent they all are, at least C0 to C1. It's crazy to think of how much this stuff cost once upon a time. And now we live in the era of javascript pdp-11's http://pdp11.aiju.de/ -----Original Message----- From: Brantley Coile To: Jason Stevens Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: 10/27/14 9:03 PM Subject: Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers Early C allowed you to use the '->' operator with any scaler. See early C reference manuals. This is the reason there is one operator to access a member of a structure using a pointer and another, '.', to access a member in a static structure. The B language had no types, everything was a word, and dmr evolved C from B. At first it made sense to use the '->' operator to mean add a constant to whatever is on the left and use as an l-value. You will also find that member names share a single name space. The simple symbol table had an bit in each entry to delineate members from normal variables. You could only use the same member name in two different structs if the members had the same offsets. In other words, it was legal to add a member name to the symbol table that was already there if the value of the symbol was the same as the existing entry. Dennis' compilers kept some backward compatibility even after the language evolved away from them. This really shows the value of evolving software instead of thinking one has all the answers going into development. If one follows the development of C one sees the insights learned as they went. The study of these early Unix systems have a great deal to teach that will be valuable in the post Moore's law age. Much of the worlds software will need to a re-evolution. By the way, did you notice the compiler overwrites itself? We used to have to work in tiny spaces. Four megabytes was four million dollars. Sent from my iPad > On Oct 27, 2014, at 6:42 AM, Jason Stevens <jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote: > > has anyone ever tried to compile any of the old C compilers with a 'modern' > C compiler? > > I tried a few from the 80's (Microsoft/Borland) and there is a bunch of > weird stuff where integers suddenly become structs, structures reference > fields that aren't in that struct, > > c01.c > register int t1; > .... > t1->type = UNSIGN; > > > And my favorite which is closing a bunch of file handles for the heck of it, > and redirecting stdin/out/err from within the program instead of just > opening the file and using fread/fwrite.. > > c00.c > if (freopen(argv[2], "w", stdout)==NULL || > (sbufp=fopen(argv[3],"w"))==NULL) > > > How did any of this compile? How did this stuff run without clobbering > each-other? > > I don't know why but I started to look at this stuff with some half hearted > attempt at getting Apout running on Windows. Naturally there is no fork, so > when a child process dies, the whole thing crashes out. I guess I could > simulate a fork with threads and containing all the cpu variables to a > structure for each thread, but that sounds like a lot of work for a limited > audience. > > But there really is some weird stuff in v7's c compiler. > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

10 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: random832(a)fastmail.us > Did casting not exist back then? No, not in the early V6 compiler. It was only added as of the Typesetter compiler. (I think if you look in those 'Recent C Changes' things I sent in recently {Oct 17}, you'll find mention of it.) Noel

10 years, 8 months

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TUHS