https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP?hl=en
I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr)
died at home this weekend. I have no more information. I trust
there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his
contributions and mourn his passing appropriately. He was a quiet
and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague,
and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.
- Pob Pike
With great thanks and appreciation to him,
Warren
That is kind of what I'd imagine... In 1983 I thought 160kb was infinate
storage.. lol
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX) [SMTP:lyndon@orthanc.ca]
> Sent: Friday, September 09, 2011 6:23 PM
> To: jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com; dave(a)horsfall.org; tuhs(a)tuhs.org
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX V 6.9999999 ?
>
> > It is insteresting reading about people haveing
> > 600MB of storage back in 1981
>
> You mean both of them?
Ah that makes sense, I could totally see that happening.. Esp with the cost
of hardware back then! It is insteresting reading about people haveing
600MB of storage back in 1981.. I can only imagine how much it'd have cost!
Thanks again!
Jason
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Horsfall [mailto:dave@horsfall.org]
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 11:36 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX V 6.9999999 ?
On Wed, 7 Sep 2011, Jason Stevens wrote:
> What is UNIX V 6.9999999?? I suspect it's v6 with a bunch of patches,
> but not quite v7? I've seen from some Russian stuff that they prefered
> v6 on pdp-11's as it "ran faster" than v7 and needed far less ram/disk
> space... I know it's 30 years too late to ask them what it is but I
> figure someone may have actually ran/used 6.9999999...
Back in the V6 days, I was known as Mr Unix 6-and-a-half, because I'd
spliced all sorts of V7 features into V6 - notably XON/XOFF, and there was
no way that V7 would run on the 11/40,
I rewrote the Calcommp and Versatec plotter drivers to use the block
interface, and they went like a bat out of hell.
Sigh... We had fun in those days.
-- Dave
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> > Interesting. I've taken a look at the sources from the CD set and
> found that the text there (in /usr/src/sys/sys/machdep.c) is the same
> > as above. Looking further, the entire directory has the same files in
> > 4.0 and 4.1, with the same modification dates. So it looks as the 4.0
> > sources accidentally got replaced by the 4.1 sources.
>
Hmmm, no, I don't have anything useful to add.
I suspect you could check the modification dates on the files, and the file
SCCS IDs, against the source-code revision logs to figure this out for sure.
--keith
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Keith Bostic
keith(a)bostic.com
While cruising olduse.net I came across this puzzling entry in net.general
Department of Computer Engineering and Science
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
We would like to announce our connection to Usenet. We are a
private university located in Cleveland, vacation spot of the midwest.
The department's primary facilities consist of:
VAX 11/780: hardware: RM05's, TU77, DZ-11, DH-11 (able), 2.5 Mbytes.
software: 4.1 BSD
PDP 11/45: hardware: RM02, DS330 (RP04), RK05, RX02, RS04(solid
state)
cache45 (able), DH-11
software: UNIX V 6.9999999
What is UNIX V 6.9999999?? I suspect it's v6 with a bunch of patches, but
not quite v7? I've seen from some Russian stuff that they prefered v6 on
pdp-11's as it "ran faster" than v7 and needed far less ram/disk space... I
know it's 30 years too late to ask them what it is but I figure someone may
have actually ran/used 6.9999999...
Thanks
Jason Stevens
All, IEEE Spectrum have asked me to write a paper on Unix to celebrate the
40th anniversary of the release of 1st Edition in November 1971. I'm after
ideas & suggestions!
I think my general thrust is that Unix is an elegant design, and the
design elements are still relevant today. The implementation is mostly
irrelevant (consider how much the code has changed from assembly -> C,
from the simple data structures in V7 through to current BSD), but the
original API is classic. Note that about 28 of the 1st Ed syscalls are
retained in current BSDs and Linux, and with the same syscall numbers.
I'm having some trouble thinking of the right way to explain what is
an elegant design at the OS/syscall level, so any inspirations/ideas
would be most welcome. I might highlight a couple of syscall groups:
open/close/read/write, and fork/exec/exit/wait.
If you have any references/URLs you think I should look at, please
pass them on to me.
I'm also trying to chase down some quotes; my memory seems to be failing me
but I'm sure I've seen these somewhere:
- in a paper, I think by Thompson & Ritchie, where they assert that the
kernel should provide no more than the most minimal services to the
userland programs. I thought this was the CACM paper, but I can't spot
this bit. Maybe it's in Thompson's preface to the Lions Commentary,
of which my copy is elsewere at present.
- I'm sure I remember someome (Kernighan?) say that Ritchie encouraged
them to espouse the use of processes as context switching was cheap,
but later measurements showed that in fact it wasn't that cheap in
the early versions of Unix.
Anyway, if you can think of good ideas/references about the elegance of
Unix, especially from the design perspective, I would much appreciate them.
Cheers,
Warren
Hi all,
As part of my IEEE Spectrum article on 40 years since 1st Edition
Unix, I've been asked for some suitable imagery/photos. Has anybody brought
1st Edition up on a real PDP-11/20, and if so, could they take some photos
of the system?
I think they would even be happy with photos of PDP-11s running V6 or V7.
Anything that you can supply would be great - there is not a lot of
photos from the early days of Unix.
Thanks in advance,
Warren
I was looking at Tom Yam's 4.0 BSD 'starunix' restoration project, and I had
a question about the version number that is reported vs the dates... I'm
using wikipedia as a source (I know I know..)
Anyways Tom's 4.0 boots up like this:
: hp(0,0)vmunix
87844+15464+130300 start 0x530
VM/UNIX (Berkeley Version 4.1) 11/10/80
But the wiki page lists 4.1 being from June of 1981, and 4.0 being from
November of 1980.. Did 4.0 BSD ship reporting itself as 4.1? I guess there
is the possibility that the kernel may include patches to bring it up to
4.1?
Does anyone have tape dumps of 4.0 & 4.1 ...?
I did find some iso image that has various levels of BSD but they are not in
tape dumps but rather extracted to the filesystem.. the 4.0 & 4.1 from there
seem identical Or at a minimum they use the same kernel that reports itself
as 4.1 ...
Anyways I'm just wondering....
Jason Stevens
