A great read Greg and so true too. Thanks for posting that.
I particularly liked the bit about the overheard conversation in Palo Alto
"there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let me
see...cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10..." though not syntactically
correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a diner from an NT shop
probably couldn't have expressed himself as casually.
This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in Starbucks in
Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a heated
debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It seemed
to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to the other
party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their conversation.
Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all ushered out of
Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was.
Cheers,
Berny
A somewhat different view on the Starbucks story:
A friend of mine moved here from New Mexico (which is a fantastic place to
live, amazing, I used to live there) and she said "It's unbelievable - you
can watch people and realize that they are actually thinking before they
are talking".
Indeed. I'd rather be in the midst of rude people thinking than any sort
of people not thinking.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.comhttp://www.bitkeeper.com
Berny:
This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in Starbucks in
Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a heated
debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It seemed
to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to the other
party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their conversation.
Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all ushered out of
Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was.
=======
The Linux crowd is indeed ruder and more argumentative than the
hackers of my youth.
Maybe it's because they hang out in Starbucks, rather than in
all-night terminal rooms with Coke machines down the hall.
Or maybe it's just my memory.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Somewhat more than 30 years into the disease
Hi,
I know that this mail is going to hit moderation.
May work email address has changed from
P.A.Osborne(a)ukc.ac.uk
to
P.A.Osborne(a)kent.ac.uk
Consequently my posts are getting moderated.
Can you update the list please?
Many thanks
Paul
>
> 1. Re: Unix, eunuchs? (dmr(a)plan9.bell-labs.com)
> 2. Unix V6 man pages (Wolfgang Helbig)
>
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 22:32:46 -0400
> From: dmr(a)plan9.bell-labs.com
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Message-ID:
>
<49d52b2057749338fb3bb8d01ec2ca7d(a)plan9.bell-labs.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
> Andrzey wrote:
>
> >I have taken my info about unics from
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics .
> >
> >Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your
> person is mentioned there.
> >
>
> Don't believe everything in a (or the) wiki.
>
> >BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and
> Computer System" as
> >UNIACS .
>
> One could, but wouldn't.
>
> Dennis
>
>
Thanks for clearing it up Dennis.
John
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On Jun 8 2006, 17:15, asbesto wrote:
>
> 1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the
> schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required,
> so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS
> backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this?
Is it missing or just not working? It's hard to imagine a BA11-N box
like the one in your picture without the PSU, since the screws that
hold the front panel onto the backplane go through the PSU cover. If
it's simply not working, it's not usually hard to repair.
You will need to ensure that the BDCOK H (Bus DC OK, active high)
signal is held high, also the BPOK H (Bus Power OK, active high, from
the AC input) signal or the CPU won't run -- the normal PSU does this.
"High" means tied to no less than 3.5V DC. The PSU also provides a
mains-frequency square-wave at about 3.5V-4V which drives the BEVENT L
line for a real-time clock interrupt, which Unix needs. One of the
switches on the front panel can be configured to control this (there
are times when you might want to switch it off). Note that devices
that turn off BEVENT, including the switch on the front panel, or the
DIP switch on the CPU card, do it by shorting that line to ground! The
same switch that can be configured to stop the BEVENT signal, is also
often used to control the rack's power controller via a 3-wire cable
with a 3-pin AMP Mate-N-Lok connector on each end.
The front panel with the three switches also has a flip-flop controlled
by one of the switches, connected to the BHALT L line, and another
connected by a flip-flop to BINIT L. The first halts the CPU when
enabled (active low), the other provides a pulse to start it.
The RUN light on the panel is driven by the SRUN L signal on the first
slot in the backplane.
Most of the signals I've mentioned are carried between the backplane
and the panel by a narrow ribbon cable. The backplane pinout is shown
in a PostScript file called QBusConnsBig.ps on my web page at
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/PDP-11/
QBusConns.ps is the same file, but actual size, if you want to hold it
up against the backplane.
> 2) what kind of UNIX can be run on an 11/23 using a RL02 disk
> drive? (just one, unfortunately :!)
Nothing later than about 7th Edition, because BSD needs separate I&D
space, which an 11/23 doesn't have (2.9 BSD might work, I can't
remember). BSD (any version) is much too big for a single RL02 anyway.
7th Edition works; my original PDP-11 Unix system is my second 11/23,
still in its original condition, which looks rather like yours, except
it has two RL02s and a slightly earlier front panel. Be aware that the
RL11/RLV11/RLV12 driver was not a standard feature of 7th Edition,
though.
You ought to do an inventory of the cards. 7th Edition wants at least
256K of memory. You might also want to see what version of the CPU you
have.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
asbesto <asbesto(a)freaknet.org> wrote:
> 1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the
> schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required,
> so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS
> backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this?
Off the top of my head, two thoughts:
1. You need the DCOK and POK signals.
2. Do the math and make sure that your power supply provides enough
amps -- a real computer needs quite a bit more juice than a sleazy
PeeCee.
MS
Hi dudes,
We recovered an almost working pdp-11/23 and some other stuff
for our computer museum. Some images are online at
http://dyne.org/museum :)
well, 2 questions:
1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the
schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required,
so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS
backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this?
2) what kind of UNIX can be run on an 11/23 using a RL02 disk
drive? (just one, unfortunately :!)
that's all folks! *:)
--
[ asbesto : IW9HGS : freaknet medialab : radiocybernet : poetry ]
[ http://freaknet.org/asbestohttp://papuasia.org/radiocybernet ]
[ NON SCRIVERMI USANDO LETTERE ACCENTATE, NON MANDARMI ALLEGATI ]
[ *I DELETE* EMAIL > 100K, ATTACHMENTS, HTML, M$-WORD DOC, SPAM ]
This recently went round the FreeBSD-chat mailing list. I rather like
it, and tend to agree with the opinions. Unfortunately, the URL
appears mutilated, and the site itself is "under maintenance", but
Google points me at what appears to be the same article at
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/staff/tres/elements.html
I haven't resisted the temptation to re-wrap the paragraphs :-)
Greg
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 19:55:31 -0400
From: Allen <slackwarewolf(a)comcast.net>
this is somewhat long... But some of you may have already read it, and
probably liked it:
[ From http://www.performancecomputing.com...s/9809of1.shtml ]
The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come
so many were liberal-arts majors? It's the love of words
that makes UNIX stand out.
Thomas Scoville
In the late 1980s, I worked in the advanced R&D arm of the Silicon
Valley's regional telephone company. My lab was populated mostly by
Ph.D.s and gifted hackers. It was, as you might expect, an all-UNIX
shop.
The manager of the group was an exception: no advanced degree, no
technical credentials. He seemed pointedly self-conscious about it. We
suspected he felt (wrongly, we agreed) underconfident of his education
and intellect.
One day, a story circulated through the group that confirmed our
suspicions: the manager had confided he was indeed intimidated by the
intelligence of the group, and was taking steps to remedy the
situation.
His prescription, though, was unanticipated: "I need to become more of
an intellectual," he said. "I'm going to learn UNIX."
Needless to say, we made more than a little fun out of this. I mean,
come on: as if UNIX could transform him into a mastermind, like the
supplicating scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz." I uncharitably imagined
a variation on the old Charles Atlas ads: "Those senior engineers will
never kick sand in my face again."
But part of me was sympathetic: "The boss isn't entirely wrong, is he?
There is something different about UNIX people, isn't there?" In the
years since, I've come to recognize what my old manager was getting
at.
I still think he was misguided, but in retrospect I think his belief
was more accurate than I recognized at the time.
To be sure, the UNIX community has its own measure of technical
parochialism and nerdy tunnel vision, but in my experience there
seemed to be a suspicious overrepresentation of polyglots and
liberal-arts folks in UNIX shops.
I'll admit my evidence is sketchy and anecdotal. For instance, while
banging out a line of shell, with a fellow engineer peering over my
shoulder, I might make an intentionally obscure literary reference:
if test -z `ps -fe | grep whom`
then
echo ^G
fi
# Let's see for whom the bell tolls.
UNIX colleagues were much more likely to recognize and play in a way
I'd never expect in the VMS shops, IBM's big-iron data centers, or DOS
ghettos on my consulting beat.
Being a liberal-arts type myself (though I cleverly concealed this in
my resume), I wondered why this should be true.
My original explanation--UNIX's historical association with university
computing environments, like UC Berkeley's--didn't hold up over the
years; many of the UNIX-philiacs I met came from schools with small or
absent computer science departments.
There had to be a connection, but I had no plausible hypothesis.
It wasn't until I started regularly asking UNIX refuseniks what they
didn't like about UNIX that better explanations emerged.
Some of the prevailing dislike had a distinctly populist
flavor--people caught a whiff of snobbery about UNIX and regarded it
with the same proletarian resentment usually reserved for highbrow
institutions like opera or ballet.
They had a point: until recently, UNIX was the lingua franca of
computing's upper crust. The more harried, practical, and
underprivileged of the computing world seemed to object to this aura
of privilege.
UNIX adepts historically have been a coddled bunch, and tend to be
proud of their hard-won knowledge. But these class differences are
fading fast in modern computing environments.
Now UNIX engineers are more common, and low- or no-cost UNIX
variations run on inexpensive hardware. Certainly UNIX folks aren't as
coddled in the age of NT.
There was a standard litany of more specific criticisms: UNIX is
difficult and time-consuming to learn. There are too many things to
remember. It's arcane and needlessly complex.
But the most recurrent complaint was that it was too
text-oriented. People really hated the command line, with all the
utilities, obscure flags, and arguments they had to memorize. They
hated all the typing.
One mislaid character and you had to start over. Interestingly, this
complaint came most often from users of the GUI-laden Macintosh or
Windows platforms. People who had slaved away on DOS batch scripts or
spent their days on character-based terminals of multiuser non-UNIX
machines were less likely to express the same grievance.
Though I understood how people might be put off by having to remember
such willfully obscure utility names like cat and grep, I continued to
be puzzled at why they resented typing.
Then I realized I could connect the complaint with the scores of
"intellectual elite" (as my manager described them) in UNIX shops. The
common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my
UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort
and fluency with text and printed words.
They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those
strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the
overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious
readers in the UNIX community didn't seem so mysterious, and pointed
the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image
culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture
of the word.
UNIX programmers express themselves in a rich vocabulary of system
utilities and command-line arguments, along with a flexible, varied
grammar and syntax.
For UNIX enthusiasts, the language becomes second nature.
Once, I overheard a conversation in a Palo Alto restaurant:
"there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let
me see...cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10..." though not
syntactically correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a
diner from an NT shop probably couldn't have expressed himself as
casually.
With UNIX, text--on the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR--is the
primary interface mechanism: UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego
construction set for word-smiths.
Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows
invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the
utility set is literally a word dance.
Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted
by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths
(especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or
electric typewriters).
It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require
composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and
syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression.
At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also
suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a
coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice.
It doesn't take much exposure to UNIX before you realize that the UNIX
core was the creation of a very few well-synchronized minds.
I've never met Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, or Ken Thompson, but
after a decade and a half on UNIX I imagine I might greet them as
friends, knowing something of the shape of their thoughts.
You might argue that UNIX is as visually oriented as other OSs. Modern
UNIX offerings certainly have their fair share of GUI-based OS
interfaces.
In practice though, the UNIX core subverts them; they end up serving
UNIX's tradition of word culture, not replacing it.
Take a look at the console of most UNIX workstations: half the windows
you see are terminal emulators with command-line prompts or vi jobs
running within.
Nowhere is this word/image culture tension better represented than in
the contrast between UNIX and NT. When the much-vaunted UNIX-killer
arrived a few years ago, backed by the full faith and credit of the
Redmond juggernaut, I approached it with an open mind.
But NT left me cold. There was something deeply unsatisfying about
it. I had that ineffable feeling (apologies to Gertrude Stein) there
was no there there.
Granted, I already knew the major themes of system and network
administration from my UNIX days, and I will admit that registry
hacking did vex me for a few days, but after my short scramble up the
learning curve I looked back at UNIX with the feeling I'd been demoted
from a backhoe to a leaf-blower.
NT just didn't offer room to move. The one-size-fits-all,
point-and-click, we've-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT
had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k.
I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my
ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world
of Microsoft Foundation Classes.
NT was definitely much too close to image culture for my comfort:
endless point-and-click graphical dialog boxes, hunting around the
screen with the mouse, pop-up after pop-up demanding my attention.
The experience was almost exclusively reactive. Every task demanded a
GUI-based utility front-end loaded with insidious assumptions about
how to visualize (and thus conceptualize) the operation.
I couldn't think "outside the box" because everything literally was a
box. There was no opportunity for ad hoc consideration of how a task
might alternately be performed.
I will admit NT made my life easier in some respects. I found myself
doing less remembering (names of utilities, command arguments, syntax)
and more recognizing (solution components associated with check boxes,
radio buttons, and pull-downs).
I spent much less time typing. Certainly my right hand spent much more
time herding the mouse around the desktop.
But after a few months I started to get a tired, desolate feeling,
akin to the fatigue I feel after too much channel surfing or
videogaming: too much time spent reacting, not enough spent in active
analysis and expression. In short, image-culture burnout.
The one ray of light that illuminated my tenure in NT environments was
the burgeoning popularity of Perl. Perl seemed to find its way into NT
shops as a CGI solution for Web development, but people quickly
recognized its power and adopted it for uses far outside the scope of
Web development: system administration, revision control, remote file
distribution, network administration.
The irony is that Perl itself is a subset of UNIX features condensed
into a quick-and-dirty scripting language. In a literary light, if
UNIX is the Great Novel, Perl is the Cliffs Notes.
Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The
price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute.
Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped,
pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I'm hoping that as IT folks become more
seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense
of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and
responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill
the need.
Thomas Scoville has been wrestling with UNIX since 1983. He currently
works at Expert Support Inc. in Mountain View, CA.
--
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