Hello,
on de.comp.os.unix.shell there is a recent thread about bc(1) which
turned into a discussion about why it is called "bc". dc(1) is pretty
clearly "desk calculator" as by the man page, but the etymology of bc
seems to be unclear.
I've heard the following plausible theories:
- basic calculator (Wikipedia)
- beauty calculator (some people apparently dislike RPN)
- better calculator
- bench calculator (Wikipedia)
- b is the letter d mirrored (RPN vs algebraic)
- bundle calculator (the word "bundle" appears 97 times in bc.y of V6)
...but nobody had a really conclusive argument. Perhaps someone here
remembers the real story?
Thanks,
--
Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen(a)gmail.com> http://chneukirchen.org
> From: Mark Longridge <cubexyz(a)gmail.com>
> I have a version of Unix v6 that has a file called /usr/doc/bc that
> describes bc at length
Oh, right, I missed that. I'm a source kind of person... :-)
Speaking of using a pipe to an existing command, I originally mis-read the
code to think there was only _one_ process involved, and that it was buffering
its output into the pipe before doing the exec() itself - something like this:
pipe(p);
write_stuff(p[1]);
close(0);
dup(p[0]);
close(p[0]);
close(p[1]);
execl("/bin/other", "other", arg, 0);
Which is kind of a hack, but... it does avoid using a second process, although
the amount of data that can be passed is limited. (IIRC, a pipe will hold at
most 8 blocks, at least on V6.) Did this hack ever get used in anything?
Noel
Traffic this evening on the pcc compiler list <pcc.lists.ludd.ltu.se>
alerted me to the existence of the Software Preservation Group, a
branch of the Computer History Museum, with a Web site at
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/
I do not recall hearing of it before today, and perhaps a few TUHS
list readers have not either. It may be desirable to add a link to it
from the Unix block of the http://minnie.tuhs.org/ site.
I think that it could also be good to record a link to the Bitsaver's
site at
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/
and to make a list of TUHS mirrors more prominent (e.g., we have one
at
http://www.math.utah.edu/mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/
).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi folks,
I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
appeared in Unix v7. It would be interesting to know if one could pass
a file from one Unix v5 machine to another without having to store it
on a magnetic tape.
There's some reference to a mysterious "Spider Interface" in the Unix
v5 manual. It seems to have something to do with DR-11B (which is a
general purpose direct memory access interface to the PDP-11 Unibus).
There's also reference to the "Spider line-printer" :)
Mark
> From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed(a)reedmedia.net>
> Later, they considered an LNI, an early token ring (if I understand
> correctly), device
Yes. See:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/history/RingMIT.txt
for more - that's a pre-print version of an article just published in the
_IEEE Annals of the History of Computing_; slight differences with the final
version, but nothing significant.
Thumbnail: There were two versions; V1 was 1MBit/second, produced in very
limited numbers (~10 or so) at MIT, most used there, although IIRC correctly
at pair (at least - one would be of no use :-) went to UCLA (I remember flying
out to LA to help them get them going). V2 was 10Mbit/second, produced as a
commercial product by Proteon in cooperation with MIT, large numbers sold.
Noel
The 3b1 emulator now kind of boot!..
There is some issues with stuff, but for the most part, it works
http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=4149
-----Original Message-----
From: arnold(a)skeeve.com [mailto:arnold@skeeve.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 2:17 PM
To: lyndon(a)orthanc.ca; lm(a)mcvoy.com
Cc: rob(a)bolabs.com; tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] networking on unix before uucp
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 01:00:45PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> > It was quite astounding to see the wide range of performance impacts
> > this had on various systems. 3B* systems would tip over and die, except
> > for the (built by Convergent Tech) 3B1.
>
> Sheesh, you people keep bringing up stuff from my past. My buddy Rob
> Netzer (used to be a prof at Brown, now works on BitKeeper with me)
> had one of those 3B1s. Neat machine. Sort of like a desktop VAX.
I had one too. (Also a trailblazer and then a worldblazer.) The 3B1 ran
SVR2; the BSD networking was available as an add-on with the ethernet
card.
I spent many happy hours working on that box, developing gawk and its
documentation; it was slow enough that you could see algorithmic
differences, e.g. standard diff vs. GNU diff.
It had one of those great AT&T keyboards (as did the blit). The UI
wasn't anything special to write home about though.
For a while there was a separate 3b1.* set of newsgroups and an
archive of stuff at Ohio State; there remains a comp.sys.3b1 group
that still has some activity as new people try to revive some of
these machines and others who had them help out. Someone was writing
an emulator, but I don't think it ever got finished.
Ah, the memories .... :-)
Arnold
_______________________________________________
TUHS mailing list
TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org
https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 08:42:53AM -0600, emanuel stiebler wrote:
> On 2014-08-23 22:59, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 03:32:45PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> >> BEGIN - old guy's memories ....
> >
> > I see your old guy memories and "raise" my sort of old guy memories.
> > This is a bell labs blit story. It relies heavily on 7 bit clean stuff.
> > I'm not entirely sure this ever worked reliably but here is what we did.
> >
> > I was a grad student at UW Madison and shared an office with
> another guy. We
> > had a serial line to the computing center across the street. We
> had a blit,
> > loved it. We wanted two.
>
> Any chance, you still have any software for the BLIT?
Nope, all we were doing was muxing a serial line and that was 8051 assembler.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.comhttp://www.mcvoy.com/lm
Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
>
> Right from the time Unix came up on the PDP-11 it was
> networked in the sense that it had dial-in and dial-out
> modems. Fairly early on, when Unixes appeared in other
> Bell Labs locations, Charlie Roberts provided a program
> for logging into another machine. It had an escape for
> file transfer, so it covered the basic functionality
> of rsh and ftp. It was not included in distributions,
> however, and its name escapes me. Maybe scj can add
> further details.
>
> Doug
Are you thinking of the cu (call unix) command? But that was included in v7,
and don't think it was part of uucp. The escape was ~ So a ~. to hangup,
~%put to send a file to the remote and ~%take to get one, and ~~ to send a ~
later on, there was a ct (call terminal) command, expecting a terminal at the end
of phone line instead of another machine.
On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 07:01:40AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> > If anyone wants the stuff we use, the stuff mentioned above, I can put
> > it up on the web.
>
> Pretty please! For private use only, of course.
You'all can use it anywhere you like.
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/tcp.shar
It's not that big a deal (other than 20 years of bug fixes :)
Somewhere I have a bigger deal, at least I think it is, I made a library
to talk to Sun RPC servers in parallel. I called it rpc vectors and Ron
Minnich used it to put a bunch of nfs servers together, he called that
bigfoot. Paper below, if someone wants that code I can ship that too.
It was pretty neat, back in the days of 10Mbit ethernet I was querying
thousands of machines in a single call. The code dealt with the fact
that you had to start eating the replies before you were done sending
the question :)
http://wenku.baidu.com/view/797c4ac62cc58bd63186bd1c.html
or for old school people
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/bigfoot.ps
The code was pretty small, pretty clever, it's a shame it didn't catch on.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.comhttp://www.mcvoy.com/lm
> I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
Right from the time Unix came up on the PDP-11 it was
networked in the sense that it had dial-in and dial-out
modems. Fairly early on, when Unixes appeared in other
Bell Labs locations, Charlie Roberts provided a program
for logging into another machine. It had an escape for
file transfer, so it covered the basic functionality
of rsh and ftp. It was not included in distributions,
however, and its name escapes me. Maybe scj can add
further details.
Doug
