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! *:)
--
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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.
--
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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
First, my apologies if this message looks awful.
The pun might have stemmed from another variant. Like
EUNICE.
The original poster was certainly not much aware of
UNIX history, so
it might as well come to him from an also less
knowledgeable user who
got it from a vendor of a EUNI* variant.
>From memory, I seem to remember at least a company
named EUNICE involved
with UNIX, and a UNIX-like environment for the VAX
(under VMS).
So, may be one of these later was actually named with
the 'eunuchs' pun
intended (perhaps as a castrated down UNIX system on
top of VMS)
and the pun circulated among some customers. For a
newcomer buying it,
it would be easy to assimilate *his* variant with
standard UNIX and extend
the pun. We just saw a similar confussion of LINUX
with UNIX from a poster
asking for LINUX v5, 6 o 7.
It makes sense as well to have a similar pun
circulated later, when other
operating systems which were arguably better (and I DO
NOT want to start
that discussion) or more extensive had to deploy
support for POSIX/UNIX
due to market needs.
To me it certainly has no sense having such an
association in a time like
the early 70s when it would have had a much stronger
emotional charge and
at a time when UNIX was still in its early
development.
j
On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 23:41:06 -0400
dmr(a)plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> Michael Welle originally asked,
>
> > last week a work mate told us a tale about how
Unix came to its
> > name. He believes that Unix is named after the
term eunuch (a
> > homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One
can see Unix as a
> > castrated successor of Multics.
>
> The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's
mind,
> but the original explanation was "one of whatever
> Multics was many of." I think the quip about
> "castrated Multics" came from MIT.
>
> Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever
occurred
> in print, though I could be proved wrong.
>
> Dennis
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Michael Welle originally asked,
> last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its
> name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a
> homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a
> castrated successor of Multics.
The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's mind,
but the original explanation was "one of whatever
Multics was many of." I think the quip about
"castrated Multics" came from MIT.
Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred
in print, though I could be proved wrong.
Dennis
Interesting thread. The Jargon file only says:
[In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was "UNICS"]
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/U/Unix.html
It never occurred to me that the pun might not be recognized, even to
people whose first language is not English. Americans sometimes forget
that not everyone is American.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Cowan" <cowan(a)ccil.org>
> To: "Andrzej Popielewicz" <vasco(a)icpnet.pl>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?
> Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 11:02:26 -0400
> English has always had an appetite for borrowed words, ever since we
> replaced huge amounts of our native vocabulary with borrowed French,
> Latin, and Greek words.
I would rather say "augmented" than "replaced", and of course one should
not neglect the other languages from which there have been significant
borrowings, such as Hindi, which are not, of course, as extensive as from
the languages you mention.
> (There is, however, just to get *completely* off-topic, the curious
> case of the English word "spruce", which means any of various coniferous
> evergreen trees of the genus _Picea_. Most of this word is unquestionably
> from "Pruce", the older English name for Prussia, now obsolete.
> But Wikipedia suggests, perhaps rightly, that the initial s- comes
> from a misinterpretation of the Polish phrase _z Prus_ 'from Prussia'.
> English dictionaries are not conclusive.)
Well, the definition of Spruce in the OED has several quotations from
the 17th century and before, which seem to indicate that one of the
names for Prussia was in fact "Spruce", which suggests that the
Wikipedia article may not be in fact accurate. The "z Prus" etymology,
without any supporting evidence, is tenuous...
1378 Durh. Acc. Rolls (Surtees) 47 In xxiiij piscibus de sprws empt.,
ijs. 14.. Chaucer's Dethe Blaunche 1025 (MS. Bodl. 638), She wolde
not..send men yn-to Walakye, To Sprewse & yn-to Tartarye. 1521 in
Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser. II. I. 292 The expedition of the Gentlemen
of Spruce. c1550 BALE K. Johan (Camden) 9 In Sycell, in Naples, in
Venys and Ytalye, In Pole, Spruse and Berne. 1639 FULLER Holy War
V. iii. 233 They busied themselves in defending of Christendome,..as
the Teutonick order defended Spruce-land against the Tartarian.
1656 G. ABBOT Descr. World 69 On the east and north corner of Germany
lyeth a country called Prussia, in English Pruthen or Spruce.
Greetings Hellwig
Mine Brooder in Unix Dast ist!
I have noticed something about your v7 creation. When I try to use the C
compiler to compile fp support or any system structures(not structs but
components) I get an error /lib/c0 so there's something wrong with the c0
pass in libc. It was probably that way when the tapes were recovered. I have
managed to compile and assemble all the c source in the /usr/src/cmd/c
directory into object files so the assembler works. What should I do
manually with all these .o files? I need a working compiler.
Bill
I have I V7 system Warren that runs on PDP-11 that was created from some
of Keith Bostics's fileblock fragments. I can get this system up and running
but the C compiler seems to be broke. I get ***error 8 which I don't know
what that means but it's probably a pdp11 error code. I'm still trying to
learn about the pdps but do you know how I might regenerate this C compiler
from v7 that will fix c0? When I try to add floating point number emulation
to the C compiler and regen things I always get an error at c0. How could I
regenerate the c0 pass file? That seems to be the only thing that's stopping
me from going further. I don't know if the compiler can be rebuilt from
scratch if something like lib/c0 is broken.
Bill
