> From: Douglas McIlroy
> Typo, in v3 through v6 ...
> 26^3 16-bit trigram counts didn't fit in the PDP-11 memory
Being mildly curious, I fed '26 3 ^p' into 'dc' to see just how big it was -
and got "17576", a 16-bit word array of which would fit into a PDP-11 64KB
address space.
I think the answer is in the first line - V3 didn't use the PDP-11 memory
management, so the kernel _and_ the application had to fit into 56KB. So
there may well have not been 36KB available to hold a 26^3 array of 16-bit
words.
The other possible explanation is that it was perfectly possible to run UNIXes
of that era (V4 on) on machines without enough main memory to hold the kernel
and a 'full-sized' process simultaneously. (Our original machine, an -11/40,
started out without a lot of memory; I don't recall exactly how much, though.
It had, I'm pretty sure, 3 banks of core; I was thinking it was 3 MM11-L core
units, which would be 3x16KB, or only 48KB, but my memory must be wrong;
that's not really enough.)
Noel
> From: Clem Cole wrote:
> It had more colorful name originally - fsck (pronounced as fisk BTW)
> was finished. I suspect the fcheck name was a USG idea.
I dunno. I don't think we at MIT wold have gratuitously changed the name to
'fcheck'; I rather think that was its original name - and we pretty
definitely got it from CMU. 'fsck' was definitely descended from 'fcheck'
(below).
> From: Jonathan Gray
>> (are 'fsck' and 'fcheck' the same program?)
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7addenda/fsck
Having looked the the source to both, it's quite clear that 'fcheck' is a
distant ancestor of 'fsck' (see below for thoughts on the connection(s)). The
latter has been _very_ extensively modified, but there are still some traces
of 'fcheck' left.
A lot of the changes are to increase the portability, and also to come into
compliance with the latest 'C' (e.g. function prototypes); others are just to
get rid of oddities in the original coding style. E.g.:
unsigned
dsize,
fmin,
fmax
;
Perfectly legal C, but nobody uses that style.
> From: Jonathan Gray
> fcheck is from Hal Pierson at Bell according to
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/CB_Unix/readme.txt
Hmm. "the major features that were added to UNIX by CB/UNIX ... Hal Person
(or Pierson?) also rewrote the original check disk command into something
that was useful by someone other than researchers."
I poked around in CB/UNIX, and found 'check(1M)':
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/CB_Unix/cbunix_man1_01.pdf
(dated November 1979). Alas, the source isn't there, but it's clearly in the
fheck/fsck family. (CB/UNIX also has chkold(1M), which looks to me like it's
'icheck'.)
So now we have a question about the ancestry of 'check' and 'fcheck' - is one
an ancestor of the other, and if so, which - or are they independent
creations? Without the source, it's hard to be definitive, bur from the
messages (as given in the manual), they do seem related.
Clem's message of 3 Mar, 14:35 seems to indicate the the original was from
CMU, authored by Ted Kowalski; he also:
https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=anecdotes:clem_cole_student
says "Ted Kowalski shows up for his OYOC year in the EE dept after his summer
at Bell Labs ... He also brought his cool (but unfinished) program he had
started to write originally at U Mich - fsck". So maybe the CB/UNIX 'check' is
descended from a version that Ted left behind at Bell Labs?
Is anyone in touch with Hal Pierson? He could surely clear up these questions.
Noel
> From: KenUnix
> So is it safe to say there is no fsck or similar for v7?
There was a version of 'fcheck' (are 'fsck' and 'fcheck' the same program?)
for V7, but I don't know if it's available. It would be really easy to
convert the 'fcheck.c' that I put up to a V7 version; the V6 and V7 file
systems are almost identical, except for the block size, I think.
> From: Dan Cross
> I believe you posted a link to end(3) here back in 2018
Yes, but that does't talk about '_end' not being defined if there
are missing externals, either! All it says is:
"Values are given to these symbols by the link editor 'ld' when, and only
when, they are referred to but not defined in the set of programs loaded."
Now that I think about it, I have this vague memory we had to look at the
source for 'ld.c' to verify what was going on!
> From: Jonathan Gray
> That is close, but slightly different to the PWB fcheck.c
Interesting. I wonder how 'fcheck' made it from CMU to Bell? Clem and I
discussed how it made it from CMU to MIT, and we think it was via Wayne
Gramlich, who'd been an undergrad at CMU, and then went to grad school at MIT.
I'm pretty sure the reason we liked it was not any auto-repair capabilities,
but ISTR it was somewhat faster than icheck/dcheck. (Interesting that they were
separate programs in V6; V5 seems to have only had check:
http://squoze.net/UNIX/v5man/man8/checkhttps://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/check.c
which contained the functionality of both. I wonder why they were split?
Space?)
> From: Rich Salz
> But the amazing point was it worked regardless of bit order.
I forgot to mention thast, but yes, its input was the number in bit-serial
form. I suspect there's a connection between the property he mentioned, and
the fact that the grad student could design something which would work with
binary numbers fed in from either end, but I can't bring myself to devote the
brain cells to figure it out.
> From: John Cowan
> I didn't know that one was done at MIT.
Yes; see:
https://www.hactrn.net/sra/alice/alice.intro
There's a really funny story at the end of that about the real Ann Marie
Finn. In Rob's version, she took the role of KAREN in the earlier one. That
would be Karen Prendergast, Patrick Winston's admin; why we used her I don't
know, since I didn't really know her, but I guess she had a reputation as a bit of
a 'tough cookie'.
>> I think that the person fails their oral. I have no idea if it's a
>> true story.
> That's vicious.
Hey, this _is_ the school that used to tell incoming freshpeople, at the
welcoming picnic 'look at the person to your left, and to your right; at
graduation, one of you won't be here'. I don't remeber if they said the same
thing at mine, or if the story had just been passed down from class to class.
Noel
In looking at the first AUUGN today, I noticed the following at the end of
a letter John Lions sent home when he spent a sabbatical at Bell Labs
[image: image.png]
I've seen the first patent, but not the second one... That's got to be a
joke or inside joke, right? Anybody know anything else about it?
There was a well known ftp site in the early 1990s called
simtel20.army.mil. It was mostly known as a repository for ms-dos
utilities, but it also had a collection of source code to various
user-contributed unix utilities. I just uploaded those to the Internet
Archive: https://archive.org/details/oak-unix-c--full-mirror-1999.12.14
So in working on an unrelated 6502 project, I got to wondering about UNIX on it and other 8-bits. Did some Googling, and while I was able to turn up some attempts at UNIX-likes on 6502 as well as Z80, the only one I found that might have some Bell connection is "uNIX" as documented here: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/uNIX/uNIX_Jan82.pdf
A forum post I read suggested those involved were some former Bell folks from NJ. In any case, this begs the question for me: Were there ever any serious attempts at an 8-bit UNIX in the labs or Bell System at large? Certainly it would've provided quite the challenge without much return compared with 16 and 32-bit efforts, but does anyone know if, say, an LSX/Mini-UNIX-ish attempt was ever made at the 6502, Z80, or other 8-bits? Thanks all!
- Matt G.
Hi,
I am trying to use the 'dump' program but it references rmt1.
My system only has rmt0. I have been unable to find how to
create this device. I have looked over the reference material
but it only references rmt0.
Is there any way to redirect a dump to use rmt0?
Any help is appreciated.
# ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 root 336 Mar 1 16:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 8 root 288 Feb 21 17:18 ..
crw--w--w- 1 root 0, 0 Mar 2 07:47 console
crw-r--r-- 1 bin 8, 1 Jan 10 1979 kmem
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bin 775 Jan 10 1979 makefile
crw-r--r-- 1 bin 8, 0 Jan 10 1979 mem
*brw-rw-rw- 1 root 3, 0 Mar 1 20:42 mt0*
crw-rw-rw- 1 root 12,128 Dec 31 1969 nrmt0
crw-rw-rw- 1 bin 8, 2 Dec 31 1969 null
*crw-rw-rw- 1 root 12, 0 Feb 23 15:55 rmt0*
brw-r--r-- 1 root 6, 0 Mar 2 07:47 rp0
brw-r--r-- 1 root 6, 15 Dec 31 1969 rp3
crw-r--r-- 1 root 14, 0 Dec 31 1969 rrp0
crw-r--r-- 1 root 14, 15 Dec 31 1969 rrp3
brw-r--r-- 1 root 6, 1 Dec 31 1969 swap
crw-rw-rw- 1 bin 17, 0 Mar 1 19:39 tty
crw--w--w- 1 root 3, 0 Mar 1 19:41 tty00
crw--w--w- 1 root 3, 1 Feb 23 16:47 tty01
crw--w--w- 1 root 3, 2 Feb 21 16:56 tty02
crw--w--w- 1 root 3, 3 Feb 21 16:56 tty03
Not only that but when attempting to use dump it creates
a file and consumes all the space on rp0
In dev it creates:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root 174080 Mar 2 09:20 rmt1
Sample run:
# dump
date = Thu Mar 2 09:20:16 2023
dump date = the epoch
dumping /dev/rrp3 to */dev/rmt1*
I
II
estimated 24870 tape blocks on 0 tape(s)
III
IV
*no space on dev 6/0*
no space on dev 6/0
no space on dev 6/0
no space on dev 6/0
Thanks,
Ken
--
WWL 📚
> This one, perhaps:
> https://patents.google.com/patent/US3964059A/en
Yes, that's the Typo patent. Notice that it features "method and
apparatus". The bizarre idea of doing it in hardware was a figment of
the patent department's imagination. This was a dance to circumvent
the belief at the time that software could not be patented. Software
was smuggled in by stating that it was one way to realize the
apparatus in the patent disclosure.
The now obsolete belief was fallout from Gottsschalk v Benson, in
which the Supreme Court invalidated another Bell Labs patent, on a
trick to save a few cycles in converting integers between BCD and
binary. The grounds for rejection were roughly that software was math
(a "mental step") and therefore not patentable.
The Benson decision, written by William O. Douglas, makes ludicrous
reading: it argues, though the patent does not claim, that a patent on
this narrow method could be enforced against any program that converts
BCD to binary. Apparently Douglas thought that all black-box programs
for a given purpose were the same, although the patent office did not
so conflate different mechanical or electrical apparatuses that have a
common purpose.
Doug
