“soldering iron…”
i do remember the fun of changing the baud rate of an async line on the Honeywell level 66 mainframe at college. This required shutting the whole machine down, removing one of the cards, and the (very careful) use of a wire wrap tool.
-Steve
Good evening folks, I'm doing some research lately into the typesetting style apparent in the various UNIX System V guides I've scanned to archive.org. Their typesetting style is unlike that of the MM papers published with 3.0 and 4.0, but the contents seem to have continuity with the text in these collections.
Well, in my searches sometimes telecom documents from the Bell System come up too and in materials from the 70s and 80s I started noticing that familiar typesetting in telecom stuff such as that hosted here https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/bsps-bell-system/bsp-…
The earliest example I could find is 1969, so certainly at least a publication style that predates UNIX, but what I can't tell from my searches alone is if this style implies some non-UNIX typesetting system through and through or if there was a macro package dreamed up at some point between 1969 and 1982 that was in place by the time of the System V documentation.
Just to detail specifics of the publication style, the commonalities I've found are the use of specifically bold numbers for page numbers, having the doc title and call number in the outer upper corner of pages, and just the fonts themselves look very similar. As an added note, the fonts used in the telecom documents and System V guidance documentation also resemble those in the copyright statement pasted on the cover of the extant PDF of the fifth edition UNIX manual. There is also some resemblance to the visual style observable in USG Program Generic and adjacent documentation (for instance the 1976 kernel description of PG 2 or the MERT 0 documents). This typesetting style is not seen in known research, CB, nor PWB until 5.0. Was there some separate typesetting system used in the broader System that, say, WECo may have taken up when they took over documentation between 3.0 and SVR2?
- Matt G.
Hi folks, sharing another project that I've been tinkering on for a little bit since I like having a lot of irons in the fire: https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v2src
After the link is a repository which over time will be accumulating the results of disassembly and analysis of files found in the s2-bits.tar.gz file in the archive. Details of my process are contained in the repository's readme. The short of it is I'm disassembling the binaries one by one, and where possible am comparing them with known sources to massage these into a pretty close restoration of the original sources.
A few discoveries I've made in the process thus far:
- These binaries appear to represent a version between the first and second editions. The binaries themselves are a mix of "naked" binaries as well as V1 and V2 a.out formats. Where it matters, things are much closer in character to V2 than V1.
- All section 1 content that would be gone by V2 is removed here. Curiously, mount(1), type(1), and umount(1) which are in both V1 and V2 are absent from the s2-bits.
- The sources marked "V2" in the UNIX source tree may be a bit closer in character to V3. Notable examples are that, while string references to /etc/uids remain, all data references have been updated to /etc/passwd, and several mathematical operations in the disassembled binaries map to KE-11 Extended Arithemtic Element registers where in the sources labeled "V2" in the tree have instead shifted to doing these calculations differently, presumably as these sources target the 11/45, not the 11/20. Additionally, the cat.s in "V2" on the tree contains the '-' stdin option, which was first documented in V3. The most likely story is that they're somewhere between, just like the s2-bits are between V1 and V2, but all of these observed differences thus far have aligned the sources with their descriptions in the third edition manual.
Anywho, as usual, if anyone spots anything amiss or that could be done better, happy to accept contributions, or fork it and tinker away. Also, if anyone has already done this, speak up and tell me now so I don't double up on something so involved =P
- Matt G.
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
> something like a boot rom only became the norm in the late
> 70's. Before that, one keyed in two dozen words with a tiny program to
> load the first boot stage.
A little wrong on that date. Even the PDP-11/20 (the first -11) had a boot
ROM:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/BM792_ROM
which appreared in mid-1971 (about a year after the release of the /20). DEC
sold them pre-programmed, but one could 'program' one onself, if one wanted -
with a soldering iron! (Check out the image! I actually did that to one that
I was given, that had been eviscerated by someone.) From then on (follow the
category link), the rest used PROM chips.
> From: Warner Losh
> Oftentimes, the interrupt vector was in the lowest core addresses
It's worth remembering that in the early period, that restriction to low
addresses was built into the hardware (in an amusing way :-).
Take the DL11:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/DL11_asynchronous_serial_line_interface
which was sort of mandatory as the 'console' serial interface on most early
-11's (until the DL11-W appeared; more on its big improvement in a second).
It set the interrupt vector with _jumpers_. (You want to change the interrupt
vector? Dig out your soldering iron! :-) There were only 6 jumpers - one each
for address bits 3 through 8. So the largest vector you could set was 0770.
The DL11-W was a big step forward - it replaced the jumpers with a DIP
switch! :-) Still only six bits, though. :-)
Noel
Hi Matt,
I’ve responded on list about the early unix development process as I understand it, but I want to avoid discussing things that are not directly related to the history of Unix. Hence this PM as well.
> Where I'm trying to put this sort of knowledge into use is I'm starting to spec out a kernel bootstrap for the RPi Pico and Pine64 Ox64 boards (ARM32 and RISCV64 respectively) that is not only sufficient to start a V7-ish kernel on each, but that are ultimately based on the same design, varying literally only where the hardware strictly necessitates it, but similar enough that reading the two assembly files side by side yields essentially the exact same discrete operations.
I have a similar interest, working with early Unix and modern RiscV hardware for a compare and contrast experience.
- My development targets are (i) an FPGA based RV32 SoC implementation, (ii) a Sipeed D1 RV64GC board and shortly (iii) a Pine64 Pinetab-V.
- My software targets are: (a) xv6-rv, (b) SysIII, (c) Linux, (d) experiments around SysIII
Linux is for me a secondary target, just for comparison and to see if ideas are “Linux capable”. I’m not overly interested in Arm at the moment.
My ideas are still evolving, but currently more or less along the below lines:
- Boot rom loads SPL, this is custom in each case and set by the SoC's designers.
- SPL initialises DRAM system and loads next stage. Unfortunately, this too would seem to be quite system specific, but the BSP should provide the baseline for this. As BSP’s are often a mess, milage may vary.
- The next stage is a hybrid of BBL, OpenSBI and Virtio. The idea is to provide a standard abstraction layer that all of my software targets can work with. This idea is used for the FPGA target and allows booting a Linux kernel with just the generic Virtio device drivers (so far just disk and console).
- The last layer is the classical OS layer. If I get it right, each OS can run on all h/w targets without customisation.
At the moment I’m playing with USB, and how that might layer into the structure of V7, SysIII or 8th Edition -- and also the above.
> Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2023 18:27:51 +0000
> From: segaloco
> ... or was there no single guiding principle and each machine came up, at that level at least, in a relative vacuum, with only the machine interface to UNIX being the guiding principle?
I stumbled into the same question last year, when doing my SysIII to RV64 port. I managed to turn that into a somewhat chaotic discussion, mixing old and new, and history with ideas. From that chaotic discussion I got the impression that it was indeed mostly ad hoc. In context, hardware was much easier to boot and drive back then -- it probably was not seen as complex enough to warrant much research into layering and abstraction.
Also bear in mind that something like a boot rom only became the norm in the late 70’s. Before that, one keyed in two dozen words with a tiny program to load the first boot stage.
That said, there is an implicit layering in v7 and beyond:
- “low.s" does hardware setup, incl. such stuff as setting up interrupt tables. As this is closely tied to the hardware, it would have been a custom job in each case.
- “mch.s” (later also mch.c) has the basic routines that are hardware dependent (switching stacks, changing priority levels and modes, etc.). It also has emulation for ‘missing’ instructions, such as floating point ops where this is not available in hardware. Same as above, I think. Maybe h/w related memory protection operations should live here as well, but the hardware was still quite divergent in this area in the 70’s and early 80’s.
- low-level device drivers live in the ‘dmr’ or (later) ‘io’ directory. Here there is some standardisation, as all device drivers must conform to the (char/block) device switch APIs. It seems to me that most of these drivers were written by taking one that was similar to what needed to be written and to start from there. Maybe this is still how it works in Linux today.
- To the extent that there is such a thing as 'high-level device drivers’ in early Unix, the structure is less clearly visible. The file system (and there was only one at the time of v7) is placed between the block device switch and the mount table so to speak. This was structured enough that splicing in other file systems seems to have been fairly easy in the early 80’s (the splicing in, not the writing of the file system itself, of course). Starting with 8th edition, the ‘file system switch’ created a clear API for multiple file systems. Arguably, the ‘tty’ subsystem is also a ‘high-level device driver’, but this one lives as custom code together with the serial port device drivers. Also in 8th Edition, ‘streams' were introduced. One could think of this as a structured approach to high-level device drivers for character mode devices, incl. the ’tty’ subsystem.
- I don’t think there was ever anything in early Unix that merged ’streams’ and the 'file system switch' into a single abstraction (but maybe 9P did?).
> Where I'm trying to put this sort of knowledge into use is I'm starting to spec out a kernel bootstrap for the RPi Pico and Pine64 Ox64 boards (ARM32 and RISCV64 respectively) that is not only sufficient to start a V7-ish kernel on each, but that are ultimately based on the same design, varying literally only where the hardware strictly necessitates it, but similar enough that reading the two assembly files side by side yields essentially the exact same discrete operations.
I have a similar interest, but to avoid the same chaos as I created before, I’ll respond to this with a pm.
> Does anyone know of any of the tools, formats, practices, etc. used in producing the actual graphical covers of various published UNIX manuals?
The Bell Labs publication department at Whippany did the physical
design for the bound versions of the Research Unix manual--from v7 as
a trade brook through v10, also a trade book.. They did the cover
designs for v8-v10 in house. I am not sure whether they did the v7
cover, farmed it out, or left it up to Holt Rinehart. Whippany handled
the printing of v8 and v9. Saunders College Publishing did it for v10.
Unfortunately, I do not remember whom I dealt with in Whippany, and my
records of the interactions are long gone.
Doug
Good evening, I'd like to share a listing I've taken of the various extra pages present in the BTL version of the SVR2 User's Manual I picked up a little while ago.
https://pastebin.com/18uTzyfS
Like the Release 5.0 BTL version before it, many of the added pages are DIV 452 standard pages for Writer's Workbench as well as the Basic-16/BELLMAC-4/BELLMAC-8 development environments.
To quote the preface:
"This manual was designed through a cooperative effort of the BTL Computer Centers in Division 452. It represents a collection of nearly all the commands that are running on any Computer Center UNIX machine.
...
The header of each manual page identifies the classification of the command along with any machine or site dependencies.
...
Any page marked LOCAL indicates the sites that are running that command.
...
Pages marked DIV 452 STD are from the collection of Computer Center standard commands, and are available on machines administered by Division 452 Computer Centers. The pages that are designated as INTERIM or 5.0 are those commands which are scheduled to be included in a separate WECo software add-on package."
This manual is just sections 1 and 6, presumably 1m, 7, and 8 are in a corresponding administrator's manual and 2, 3, 4, 5 are in a programmer's manual, making SVR2 the start of the user's manual being further subdivided. I seem to recall one or the other of this same issue of manuals show up on eBay at some point, I'm kicking myself for not springing for it at the time, but hopefully one or the other (or both) turn up again to be documented someday.
Additionally included in the above listing is a list of references from various "SEE ALSO" sections throughout the manual, as well as some other odds and ends from the text. Finally, there is a short listing of teach(1) classes as provided by a couple variants of the application.
If any particular page piques an interest, let me know and I can scan it for you, otherwise this one is a ways away on my scan backlog.
- Matt G.
Good day everyone, I'm in search of a bit of esoteric information regarding published UNIX works. Does anyone know of any of the tools, formats, practices, etc. used in producing the actual graphical covers of various published UNIX manuals?
Some that come to mind:
The alphabet blocks cover of the HRW V7 Manuals
The simple 70's Bell-style cover of the UNIX System III manual
The nice 3B-20 picture on the UNIX 4.1 manual
The grid patterns design on the UNIX System V documentation
The blue "big V" SVR4 manuals (given the time disparity, these could have totally different underpinnings)
Where I'm particularly curious is how these covers were actually set, defined, the image data to print on them stored, formatted, etc. In other words, <???>:troff::covers:manpages where ??? may also represent more than just the specific tools/formats. Anyone have the scoop on the actual raw materials and technologies used for preparing the covers and/or if any of those original assets, in their raw form, would potentially still exist somewhere? To be honest, I am particularly interested in the original, highest fidelity possible image of the 3B-20 from the corresponding manual (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Unix_Manuals#/media/File:UNIX4.…) but am happy with any info illuminates what went into the actual physical production. Thanks all!
- Matt G.
P.S. If it provides any leads, the closest thing I've found in actual document sources to material related to these aspects of physical publication are the files M.folio and M.tabs here: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/man/tools
I figure it won't cost me much more than $5 to ship domestically, which
I'll pay for. International is more hassle so let's discuss.
BSTJJuly-August 1978 ("the" issue)
Elements of Programming Style 2nd Ed, Kernighan and Plauger
The UNIX Programming Environment, Kernighan and Pike
The C Programming Language 2nd Ed, Kernighan and Ritchie (includes printout
of errata posted by dmr(a)alice.JUCP "5 Jun 89")
