Ken Thompson has famously said that the only thing he'd do
differently if he were to do Unix afresh would be to spell
"create" with a final e. The BSTJ cameo (or product placement?)
reveals another example: he'd spell Unix as an ordinary proper
name. Once the marketers had glommed onto "UNIX" as a trademark,
we were regularly badgered when when we tried to naturalize
the name. References to "Unix" in internal documents were
scrubbed to "UNIX" for external consumption. I'd like to think
that by exhibiting "Unix" in an image Netravali et al
intentionally cocked a snook at corporate orthodoxy.
Incidentally, the online BSTJ is complete. A new publication,
the AT&T Technical Journal took its place after 1983, with
a new format and quite different content. The replacement
publication was a house organ, not a research journal.
Doug
All, I got this interesting e-mail from Poul-Henning a few days ago.
Warren
----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp <phk(a)phk.freebsd.dk> -----
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 13:27:27 +0000
From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk(a)phk.freebsd.dk>
To: wkt(a)tuhs.org
Subject: A cameo by UNIX in BSTJ
Some months ago I faced a flight from Denmark to NZ and back again,
so I bought a Kobo eBook reader and reformatted the entire BSTJ to fit
the screen.
That gave me about 100k "pages" to read, plenty for my NZ-flights
and a large number of otherwise wasted moments since then. Highly
recommeded.
Recently I came over what I belive is the first mention of UNIX in BSTJ.
We all know about the v57i6, July-August 1978 "UNIX Time-Sharing System"
issue, but it transpires that UNIX made a cameo two years earlier
in an article about compression-schemes for TeleFax:
www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol55-1976/articles/bstj55-10-1539.pdf
Enjoy,
Poul-Henning
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk(a)FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
----- End forwarded message -----
My apologies if some find this as spam, but I suspect this group might
also find this a worth while read.
Full discloser, I have known John since 1983 or 1984 (I do not remember
when we were co-worked at the firm he talks about in
the article [Masscomp]. I have also read of number of his books and liked
them. In my role as President of USENIX, I allowed John to hawk his books
at some of our conferences, but other than buying his books, I have
never given him $s.
http://my-thoughts-exactly.wetmachine.com/the-meme-hustler-hustler-evgeny-m…
Clem
Note: I predated John at Masscomp (and I think he left for Sun before I
left for Stellar).
Many of you know that MSCP
was an early 1980s a start up with a lot of ex-VMS/VAX guys (that
predated Sun and actually did $20M in business the year Sun did it's first
$1M).. Tim, Janet and I shared a card table as our first desk. I think
John and Steve did get hired until we expanded to the 2 bldg in Littleton
and kicked SW out. Everything in the piece WRT to Masscomp I will valid
as true, and like John; when I have run into Tim in the past few years I'm
not sure he recognized me either [although unlike John, I do still exchange
christmas cards with Steve Talbot and just two weeks ago got an email from
Tim about something else].
I completely agree with John's point about about Eric Raymond too BTW. And
John makes a side bar, that "open source" being co-opted from the 60s.
He's stumbled on that right. I have always said the "father" of Open
Source was the late Prof Donald O. Peterson (aka dop) from what he did in
the late 1960s. But that's a story for another time.
I fear a sad part of this slide show is that many of us remember and were
part of it all. Some of us programmed these machines (I admit that I
still have some of these pieces in my basement). I was disappointed they
did not show a "stinger tap." The picture of the Alto shows the first mouse
– the Hawley Labs mechanical mouse (which I miss for its feel). Check out
the picture of the first Cisco router using Intel Multibus (with a Motorola
68k in it) looking so awkward.
http://www.eweek.com/networking/slideshows/ethernet-marks-40-years-linking-…
Larry McVoy said:
On Apr 28, 2013, at 7:00 PM, tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
> We build source management systems and we still drop into assembler for
> some stuff. For example, we want to give ourselves a stack traceback
> when something dies. Another example is inner loops that are performance
> critical, we stare at the assembler.
I don't mind staring at the assembly, I just don't want to hand crank it any longer. :-/
I'll spend quite some time fussing with the compiler and optimization flags to get loops to run at maximum speed before I'll take the assembly in hand to 'make it right.'
For stack traces, I've found the GNU compiler support for stack tracing quite handy and for my company it works quite well.
On the discussion of x86 assembly, I have to agree that it is horrific. I'll take ARM (and I have done context switchers and trap handers in ARM) any time.
David Barto
/my name in your iPhone, it is more likely than you think.
About two queries on the topic.
Yes, L. L. Cherry is Lorinda Lillian Cherry.
Rudd Canaday was in on building the foundation, but not the
ground floor. When the Thompson/Ritchie/Canaday (and independently
Strachey/Stoy) file system came to be built, Rudd had completed
his visiting assignment in Computing Science Research. When he
did get a login, he was rhc, but his UID was not among the
single-digit set.
Doug McIlroy
rudd canaday?
> From: tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Subject: TUHS Digest, Vol 102, Issue 1
> Date: March 31, 2013 9:00:01 PM EDT
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Reply-To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
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> 1. Login names of early Unix contributors (Doug McIlroy)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:44:11 -0400
> From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Subject: [TUHS] Login names of early Unix contributors
> Message-ID: <201303311444.r2VEiBjR027109(a)stowe.cs.dartmouth.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>> Does anyone have a record or pointer regarding the login names of the
>> early Unix contributors?
> [...]
>> In particular I'm interested in the login names of following people:
>> S. R. Bourne
>> D. Haight
>> S. C. Johnson
>> J. F. Maranzano
>> L. E. McMahon
>> S. I. Feldman
>> J. F. Ossanna
>> M. E. Lesk
>> R. H. Morris
>> D. A. Nowitz
> [...]
>
> Your correspondents have done a good job of reconstructing the
> old list. Alas, I can't remember the only missing entry, Dick
> Haight's login. The above list, however, wants one small
> correction. Robert Morris did not have a middle name, the
> "h" was a figment for filling in forms that wanted a middle
> initial.
> Another important name is
> L. L. Cherry llc
>
>
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