All, I'll be moving house sometime in the next few months, so I thought
I would start scanning in the paper documents that I've got. I've just
completed the scan of the CB/UNIX manuals that Larry Cipriani sent in
a while back. You can find them here:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/other/CB_Unix/
and here is the blurb I put in there.
Cheers,
Warren
CB/UNIX was a variant of the UNIX operating system internal to Bell
Labs. It was developed at the Columbus, Ohio branch and was little-known
outside the company. CB/UNIX was developed to address deficiencies
inherent in Research Unix, notably the lack of interprocess communication
and file locking, considered essential for a database management
system. Several Bell System operation support system products were
based on CB/UNIX such as Switching Control Center System. The primary
innovations were power-fail restart, line disciplines, terminal types,
and IPC features similar to System V's messages and shared memory.
So far we have a scanned copy of the CB/UNIX manuals which were donated
to TUHS by Larry Cipriani. Copies of the binaries and source code would
be much appreciated. There were two volumes of manuals. The first volume
held cbunix_intro, cbunix_man1 and cbunix_man1L. The second volume held
the remaining sections. The 'L' in the scans indicates local sections of
the manuals, i.e. those elements created and maintaned at Columbus.
In an e-mail from Larry, he asked a retired CB/UNIX developer about the
major features that were added to UNIX by CB/UNIX. Was it primarily messages,
semaphores, named pipes, shared memory? The developer replied:
Other things that immediately come to mind that we added first
in Columbus Unix were power-fail restart (myself and Jim McGuire did the
initial work) and line-disciplines and terminal types (Bill Snider did
the initial work). Hal Person (or Pierson?) also rewrote the original
check disk command into something that was useful by someone other than
researchers. Bill Snider and Hal Pierson were really instrumental in
taking UNIX from research and applying it to SCCS (Switching Control
Center System). I worked with them when I first hired on. When we
first used UNIX on an 11/20 with core memory it was written in assembler
(1974). It quickly went through "B" and we started using the C version
in early 1975 as I recall. We also did some enhancements to the scheduling
algorithms in UNIX to make them more "real-time" capable.
On Jul 24, 2013, at 7:00 PM, tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
> What parts are missing from the archive mentioned by Poul-Henning Kamp?
>
> http://www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/
>
> It has 1922 to 1983. I was assuming that missing issues like 1942 issues 2
> through 4 were not ever published.
I've got Vol 68, No. 8 October 1984, the second 'Unix System' edition of the BLTJ.
Additional articles on all things Unix:
Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing system
Program Design in the UNIX System Environment
The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal
Debugging C programs with the Blit
UNIX Operation System Security
File Security and the UNIX System Crypt Command
The Evolution of C - Past and Future
Data Abstration in C by B. Stroustrup - The first C++ mention that I know of in the Journal
Multiprocessor UNIX Systems
A UNIX System Implementation for System/370
UNIX Operating System Porting Experiences
The evolution of UNIX System Performance
Cheap Dynamic Instruction Counting
Theory and Practice in the Construction of a Working Sort Routine
The Fair Share Scheduler
The Virtual Protocol Machine
A Network of Computers Running the UNIX System
A Stream Input-Output System (D M Richie) - SYS V streams implementation description
David
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.
