hi all,
maybe of interest, in the early 1990s i worked at UNSW and met several people in the computer science dept who knew John Lions.
i *was* the character on the cover of the reprint, i have a photocopy of the original pamphlet, complete with hand written annotations by someone who attended Lyons course.
perhaps everyone on tuhs has their own photocopy, but if anyone wants this one, give me a shout.
-Steve
No, sorry, there hasn't been a new edition, just corrections. The
original version contained a number of scan errors, and thanks to
Conway Yee I have now applied a number of corrections. You can find
the document in various forms at
http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/.
I've scanned through the output, and it seems correct. If you find
any further errors, please let me know.
Also thanks to Brian Foley, who sent me similar corrections 10 years
ago, but which I never got round to incorporating.
Greg
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> From: Douglas McIlroy
> The union table of man pages in "A Research Unix Reader', CSTR 139,
> marks with "L" local man pages that were not distributed outside of
> research. Does anyone have a copy of those pages? ... would love to get
> them all
The CB-UNIX manual has a bunch of xL "Local" pages, e.g. the Section 3 ones here:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/CB_Unix/man/man3/
I know this is CB-UNIX, but perhaps they are the same?
Noel
The union table of man pages in "A Research Unix Reader', CSTR 139,
marks with "L" local man pages that were not distributed outside of
research. Does anyone have a copy of those pages? I'm particularly
interested in galloc(3), but would love to get them all, which I
unwittingly trashed when I retired.
Doug
> You didn't say, but I reckon this is a survey of man(7) macros that
> might be considered extensions?
My presentation was too cute for my own good. I pointed out the
consistency of xS/xE for various x. I apologized for EX/EE, which
varied from that form (as UR/UE did more recently), and I
questioned OQ/CQ, which utterly breaks it.
The intended point was that one should have a strong rationale
for deviating from established custom, and thereby fostering
mental overload.
Doug
I omitted one crucial fact from my post about Joe Ossanna's influence
on the TTY 37. That happened not in connection with Unix, but with
Multics. When Unix came on the scene, model 37 was already in
production.
Doug
I haven't known when or how to bring up this project idea, but figure I might as well start putting feelers out since my Dragon Quest project is starting to slow down and I might focus back on UNIX manual stuff.
So something painfully missing from my and I'm sure plenty of other folks' libraries is a nice, modern paper UNIX manual that takes the past few decades into consideration. The GNU project, BSDs, etc. ship manpages of course, and there's the POSIX manpages, but I'm a sucker for a good print manual. Something I'm thinking of producing as a "deliverable" of sorts from my documentation research is a new-age UNIX manual, derived as closely as possible from the formal UNIX documentation lineages (so Research, SysV, and BSD pages), but:
1. Including subsequent POSIX requirements
2. Including an informational section in each page with a little history and some notes about current implementations, if applicable. This would include notes about "dead on the vine" stuff like things plucked from the CB-UNIX, MERT/PG, and PWB lines. The history part could even be a separate book, that way the manual itself could stay tight and focused. This would also be a good place for luminaries to provide reflections on their involvement in given pieces.
One of the main questions that I have in mind is what the legal landscape of producing such a thing would entail. At the very least, to actually call it a UNIX Programmer's Manual, it would probably need to pass some sort of compliance with the materials The Open Group publishes. That said, the ownership of the IP as opposed to the trademarks is a little less certain, so I would be a bit curious who all would be involved in specifically getting copyright approval to publish anything that happened the commercial line after the early 80s, so like new text produced after 1982. I presume anything covered by the Caldera license at least could be published at-cost, but not for a profit (which I'm not looking for anyway.)
Additionally, if possible, I'd love to run down some authorship information and make sure folks who wrote stuff up over time are properly credited, if not on each page ala OWNER at least in a Acknowledgements section in the front.
As far as production, I personally would want to do a run with a couple of different cover styles, comb bound, maybe one echoing the original Bell Laboratories UNIX User's Manual-style cover complete with Bell logo, another using the original USENIX Beastie cover, etc. but that also then calls into question more copyrights to coordinate, especially with the way the Bell logo is currently owned, that could get complicated.
Anywho, anyone know of any such efforts like this? If I actually got such a project going in earnest, would folks find themselves interested in such a publication? In any case I do intend to start on a typesetter sources version of this project sometime in the next year or so, but ideally I would want it to blossom into something that could result in some physical media. This idea isn't even half-baked yet by the way, so just know I don't have a roadmap in place, it's just something I see being a cool potential project over the coming years.
- Matt G.
I got to wondering, based on the sendmail discussions, how many shell
escapes have appeared over the years?
uucp
sendmail
xdvi : "The "allowShell" option enables the shell escape in PostScript specials"
There must be a lot of them, however.
When looking at old xmodem code I noticed that it calculated its CRC bit-by-bit, switching to byte-wise using a table in the late 80’s. It never seems to have used the byte-wise, “on-the-fly” algorithm. This seems to match a pattern: I often come across bit-wise and table implementations, but rarely on-the-fly implementations if any. The on-the-fly algorithm was known at least since 1983, following a paper by Perez: http://www.bitsavers.org/components/fairchild/_appNotes/Byte-wise_CRC_Jun83…
The paper was noted, for example it is on the citation list of RFC1134, describing the PPP protocol. Today, a wikipedia page gives implementations for various polynomials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computation_of_cyclic_redundancy_checks#Paral…
Now, it would seem to me that on memory constrained personal computers and PDP-11’s the “on-the-fly” algorithm would have been a good choice, being just a few lines of code and maybe 30-50% slower than table lookup. The tables aren’t big, but a kilobyte is a lot when you only have 64.
Any suggestions as to why the on-the-fly algorithm did not catch on more in the 1980’s? Maybe it was simply less well known than I think?
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
> Any suggestions as to why the on-the-fly algorithm did not catch on
> more in the 1980's? Maybe it was simply less well known than I think?
I can't answer that directly, but I will point you at IEN-56, "CRC Checksum
Calculation", by Dave Reed (11-Sep-78):
https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien56.pdf
Dave wanted the INWG to use a more powerful (in terms of detecting errors)
CRC, instead of the simple summation eventually adopted, in TCP and IP. So he
produced code to implement a particular CRC, to show people that it would not
be particularly expensive (whether in time, or space, I don't alas recall
definitively; speed would have been an important consideration, when
competing with the summation, though).
This would have been close to the leading edge of our knowledge at the time;
Dave liked playing around with math, and at about that time he did a very
fast DES implementation.
Noel
