I emailed Jim Gettys on ancient X Window System code and this is his reply.
(I asked him if it was okay to pass this on to the TUHS list, and he said
yes.)
He's after someone who knows ClearCase, so if there's anyone on this list
who's knowledgable, or knows someone else who's knowledgeable, feel free to
get in touch with him.
Thanks
Wesley Parish
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Re: X Windows preX10R3 releases
Date: Wednesday 17 October 2007 01:53
From: Jim Gettys <jg at laptop dot org>
To: Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise dot net dot nz>
Yup. I have bits back to the very beginning of X, and slightly
before.... I have snapshots of our RCS pool back into 1984 or so;
unfortunately, I did not copy the RCS pool itself which would have every
commit.
I also have copies of the X Consortium backups; in there are ClearCase
databases which the RCS pool was imported into, and may have the commit
by commit history back to the beginning for many files; but it will take
someone with ClearCase expertise to retrieve things from that.
I've been meaning to do something with these for the last couple years,
but have been too busy with OLPC to follow up.
Regards,
- Jim Gettys
On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 21:19 +1300, Wesley Parish wrote:
> Hi. I'm a part of TUHS, The (amorphous ;) Unix Heritage Society, and was
> wondering on the mail list about the X Window System releases prior to
> X11Rx, in relation to a Groklaw article on Yet Another Stupid Lawsuit aimed
> at Red Hat and Novell:
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071011205044141
> referencing some basic aspects of X Window architecture. I was referred to
> google, and the presence of the X10R[3 4] which apparently were the first
> public release.
>
> I then wondered about the existence of the releases even earlier than
> X10R3, and Paul Jones, formerly of the DEC Systems Research Center, advised
> me to contact you in relation to this. He also says to say "Hi".
>
> Thanks for any help you can give on this question.
>
> Wesley Parish
--
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child
-------------------------------------------------------
--
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
Gaul is quartered into three halves. Things which are
impossible are equal to each other. Guerrilla
warfare means up to their monkey tricks.
Extracts from "Schoolboy Howlers" - the collective wisdom
of the foolish.
-----
Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui?
You ask, what is the most important thing?
Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.
Is any such creature available? X11 is >10 years old; apparently the last X10
release was in 1986.
Does that source code exist anywhere now? Or has it vanished into the Great
Bit-Bucket in the Sky?
Thansk
Wesley Parish
--
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
Gaul is quartered into three halves. Things which are
impossible are equal to each other. Guerrilla
warfare means up to their monkey tricks.
Extracts from "Schoolboy Howlers" - the collective wisdom
of the foolish.
-----
Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui?
You ask, what is the most important thing?
Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.
>
>> I have X10R3 and X10R4 archives.
>> I have found it somewhere in google some years ago, I do not remember
>> now where, probably MIT or so. If it is allowed to upload it I can
>> upload it to TUHS.
>> But perhaps they are still available .
>>
>
> I've just run through a quite search of X[1 10]R[1 3] and X10R[3 4] seems to
> be the only members of that vintage. One fragment on google said that that
> was because it was the first example of the code to be released outside of
> MIT.
>
Have you tried contacting Jim Gettys? His home page
(http://www.handhelds.org/People/jg.html) says: "jg" can be sent mail at
freedesktop dot org.
Paul
groklaw has some details about Yet Another SCO-Group-ism:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071011205044141
that appears to be about windowing systems.
I'm wondering, would Sun's NeWS be of any value or interest in this situation?
And if so, does anyone have suitably detailed SDKs, DDKs, whathaveyou, of
NeWS? (It would be nice if Sun would release it plus source code to TuHS
under a suitable license ... but though dreams are free, they don't fill the
belly ;)
Wesley Parish
--
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
Gaul is quartered into three halves. Things which are
impossible are equal to each other. Guerrilla
warfare means up to their monkey tricks.
Extracts from "Schoolboy Howlers" - the collective wisdom
of the foolish.
-----
Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui?
You ask, what is the most important thing?
Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.
I don't know if anyone would be interested in this...
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204974&package_id=245…
I've hacked up a copy of simh to include slirp (usermode networking from
qemu), and packed up a copy of 4.3RENO.
It should be pretty easy for Windows users to just install & hit the "run
4.3BSD-RENO" icon...
The download is just under 90 megabytes, and I've included nearly 80 pdf's..
Unfortunatly not all of the converted cleanly..
At any rate I'm sure the base install needs more tweaking, and I should load
more software onto the /usr/local drive (which I've made a seperate disk to
allow for easy updating..)
As always feel free to download & give it a test. At the least it should be
a painfee install & run.
Jason
I was wondering with 32v being released, does anyone have all the mach
source?
As you probably know CMU released 3.0, but I was wondering about 1.0 & 2.0.
Additionally does anyone have NeXTSTEP source? I've read that they did make
it available to universities, I'd just hate to see it die... Or even old
copies of Darwin, which seem to have dissapeared from Apple (or I'm just
searching wrong)...
Thanks!
A new port of UNIX Version 7 to the x86 (IA-32) based PC is now
available. The port, called V7/x86, was originally done around
1999: "as something to do with the UNIX source code", when the $100
source licences first became available. Over the last year or so,
I've been working intermittently at preparing it for release.
In classic porting style, the port includes a 16- and 32-bit
UNIX-style x86 assembler written from scratch, though the next step
of conjuring pcc to emit 32-bit x86 code was not done. Originally,
the system used the TenDRA C compiler, but TenDRA is huge and this
was never a good match. (Without demand paging, and with restrictions
on the size of the buffer cache, there is a definite limit to how
big you want much-used binaries to be.) However, since the Amsterdam
Compiler Kit was released as open source, the ACK K&R compiler,
with a backend revised to speak "as" rather than "ACK assembler",
works very well.
V7/x86 currently supports ATA (IDE) hard drives, ATAPI CD drives,
a 1.44M floppy drive, and standard serial ports, in addition to the
usual PC screen and keyboard. For easier installation and setup,
supplied utilities allow access to CD (ISO 9660) and FAT (MS-DOS)
filesystems. Boot code uses the PC BIOS. At present, there is no
SCSI support.
Overall, the system is stable and quite generally usable. For
instance, it is an easy-ish task to build the V7/x86 distribution
on V7 itself, including packaging it as a small CDROM image. When
using the C shell, together with contemporary versions of vi and
more, one even tends to forget this is V7. (Given the absence of
X and TCP/IP, the overall "feel" of the system is something like
an early SCO System V release: though possibly not so unreliable.)
The port was originally done more for the sheer pleasure of getting
to grips with the V7 source code than for any good reason. But
I've since spent a bit of effort trying to put together a fairly
usable release -- though there will be plenty of rough edges -- in
the hope that, for instance, some school or college might eventually
take the thing up as a vehicle for students to get practical
experience on. After all, it really is possible to write (say) a
device driver from scratch and get it working in the course of only
one or two evenings. Of course, the PDP-11 original can be (and I
hope still is) used for that purpose, but presumably PC architecture,
and devices, and assembly language, would all be part of a modern
curriculum, anyway, leaving fewer layers of obscurity for the
student.
Anyway, if any of you would like to take a look at the thing (even
if only to point out some of the more egregious of the remaining
errors) the link is
http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/
Apart from actually installing the system on some suitable PC, it
is also possible to boot from the CDROM or floppy image and then
simply quit out of the install utility to the shell prompt.
Alternatively, the system can be fairly readily run under Bochs or
some other emulator, using the available "demo" image.
There is a short user-oriented introductory document, with examples,
here
http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/doc/v7x86intro.pdf
What is presently lacking is a document containing a more technical
description of the port, but I hope this will be available before
too long.
As far as the web pages are concerned, these were originally set
up before the 10 August 2007 Judge Kimball ruling in favour of
Novell. No changes have been made (to copyright notices, licence
information, etc.) in the light of that ruling, though of course I
will willingly make changes if and when I know what they should be.
Incidentally, there's been mention, here, in the past, of one or
two projects to port V7 or 32V to the PC. For all I know, these
may still be ongoing: V7/x86 is an unrelated effort.
--
Robert Nordier
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Nordier & Associates rnordier(a)nordier.com Telephone: +27 31 261-4895
PO Box 11266, Marine Parade, 4056, South Africa Mobile : +27 72 265-2390
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
> Awesome work. I notice that you require at least a 486 to run this
> though. Is there any technical reason, or could this be moved to a 386
> by means of a simple recompile? Also, how 32-bit IS the port? Would it
> be hard to build a 286 version or even 8086/8088 version to give a
> real OS to the old XT/AT in the basement?
No offense intended, but why waste time on 386 (or even way more time on
286)? I can't imagine that anyone has any of those machines anymore.
And if anyone is so broke that they do and can't afford a newer machine
I have piles of celeron boxes looking for a home. 300-500mhz with 64-128M
and probably a broken disk but maybe it works. You pay shipping and they
are yours. If you are doing interesting work and you are really broke
I'll pay shipping.
But 286? Come on. Let it go, it sucked. I can almost see the point of
386 except that nobody has one.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.comhttp://www.bitkeeper.com
> From: "Michael Kerpan" <madcrow.maxwell(a)gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2007 14:44:27 -0400
>
> Awesome work. I notice that you require at least a 486 to run this
> though. Is there any technical reason, or could this be moved to a 386
> by means of a simple recompile? Also, how 32-bit IS the port? Would it
> be hard to build a 286 version or even 8086/8088 version to give a
> real OS to the old XT/AT in the basement?
8086 lacks the required protected mode. don't remember how xenix over
came this problem when it was first released. no one even has to think
about this problem today
