All, w.r.t. FD 2, if your e-mail doesn't mention file
descriptors, can you please change the subject line?
And this, in general, for all TUHS discussions :-)
Thanks! Warren
Some folks here might be interested in this. I haven't read this (not gonna
subscribe), I know nothing about the author (Bradford Morgan White), but I
saw Steve Sinofsky tweet good things about it.
The Network is the Computer
The story of Sun Microsystems and the Java programming language
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-network-is-the-computer
> * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
> the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
Certainly integration is critical. The display should be integral to the
terminal, not simply an available device.
Without that stipulation Ken's original single-user PDP-7 system would
count (unless, perhaps, the system had not yet been christened "Unix").
Doug
Another of Ron’s historical diversions that came to mind.
Most of you probably know of various exploits that can happen now with
setuid programs, but this was pretty loose back in the early days. I
was a budding system programmer back in 1979 at Johns Hopkins. Back
then hacking the UNIX system was generally considered as sport by the
students. The few of us who were on the admin side spent a lot of time
figuring out how it had happened and running around fixing it.
The first one found was the fact that the “su” program decided that if
it couldn’t open /etc/passwd for some reason, things must be really bad
and the invoker should be given a root shell anyhow. The common
exploit would be to open all the available file descriptors (16 I think
back then) and thus there wasn’t one available. That was fixed before
my time at JHU (but I used it on other systems).
One day one of the guys who was shuffling stuff back and forth between
MiniUnix on a PDP-11/40 and our main 11/45 UNIX came to me with his RK05
file system corrupted. I found that the superblock was corrupted.
With some painstaking comparison to another RK05 superblock, I
reconstituded it enough to run icheck -s etc.. and get the thing back.
What I had found was that the output of the “mount” command had been
written on the superblock. WTF? I said, how did this happen.
Interrogating the user yielded the fact that he decided he didn’t want
to see the mount output so he closed file descriptor one prior to
invoking mount. Still it seemed odd.
At JHU we had lots of people with removable packs, so someone had
modified mount to run setuid (with the provision of only allowing
certain devices to be mounted certain places). At his point we had
started with the idea of putting volume labels in the superblock to
identify the pack being mounted. Rather than put the stuff in the
kernel right away, Mike Muuss just hacked reading it from the super
block in the usermode mount program so that he could put the volume
label in /etc/mtab. Now you can probably see where this is headed.
It opens up the disk, seeks to the pack label in the superblock and
reads it (for somereason things were opened RW). Then the output goes
to file descriptor 1 which just happens to be further in the superblock.
I figured this out. Fixed it and told Mike about it. I told him
there were probably other setuid programs around that had the problem
and asked if it was OK if I hacked on things (at the time I yet was not
trusted with the root password). He told me to go ahead, knock
yourself out.
Well I spent the evening closing various combinations of file
descriptors and invoking setuid programs. I found a few more and noted
them. After a while I got tired and went home.
The next day I came in and looked through our paper logbook that we
filled out anytime the machine was shutdown (or crashed). There was a
note from two of the other system admins saying they had shut the system
down to rebuild the accounting file (this was essentially the shadow
password file and some additional per-user information not stored in
/etc/passwd). The first 8 bytes were corrupted. Oh, I say, I think
I might know how that happened. Yeah, we thought you might. Your
user name was what was written over the root entry in the file. The
passwd changing program was one of the ones I tested, but I hadn’t
noticed any ill-effects for it at the time.
Notably: 32v_usr.tar.gz and sys3.tar.gz. I’ve not unpacked the tar files. If someone would like more detail about the contents I’ll produce a TOC offline for them.
David
As a result of the recent discussion on this list I’m trying to understand the timeline of graphical computing on Unix, first of all in my preferred time slot ’75 -’85.
When it comes to Bell Labs I’m aware of the following:
- around 1975 the Labs worked on the Glance-G vector graphics terminal. This was TSS-516 based with no Unix overlap I think.
- around the same time the Labs seem to have used the 1973 Dec VT11 vector graphics terminal; at least the surviving LSX Unix source has a driver for it
- in 1976 there was the Terak 8510; this ran primarily USCD pascal, but it also ran LSX and/or MX (but maybe only much later)
- then it seems to jump 1981 and to the Blit.
- in 1984 there was MGR that was done at Bellcore
Outside of the labs (but on Unix), I have:
- I am not sure what graphics software ran on the SUN-1, but it must have been something
- Clem just mentioned the 1981 Tektronix Magnolia system
- Wikipedia says that X1 was 1984 and X11 was 1987; I’m not sure when it became Unix centered
- Sun’s NeWS arrived only in 1989, I think?
Outside of Unix, in the microcomputer world there was a lot of cheap(er) graphics hardware. Lot’s of stuff at 256 x 192 resolution, but up to 512 x 512 at the higher end. John Walker writes that the breakout product for Autodesk was Interact (the precursor to AutoCAD). Initially developed for S-100 bus systems it quickly moved to the PC. There was a lot of demand for CAD at a 5K price point that did not exist at a 50K price point.
> From: Lars Brinkhoff
> It's my understanding it was started by Bob Scheifler of the CLU group.
Yes, that's correct. (Bob's office was right around the corner from me -
although I had very little knowledge of what his group was up to; I was too
busy with other things.)
I have this vague memory that his version was actually written in CLU? Can
that be correct? It would make sense, since that group was so focused on CLU
- but maybe not, see below.
X must have been done after LCS got the 750 farm (on which we ran 4.1c, to
start with) - although I don't know what kind of terminals they were using to
run X on - we didn't have any bit-mapped displays on them, I'm pretty sure.
Although maybe it was later, once Micro-Vaxes appeared?
I have this vague memory that it was based (perhaps only in design, not code
re-use) on a window system done at Stanford {looks}; yes, W (hence 'X'):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System
The X paper listed there:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/22949.24053
doesn't say anything about the implementation, so maybe that vague
memory/assumption that I had that it was originally written in CLU is wrong.
Liskov's 'History of CLU' paper, which lists things done in CLU, doesn't
mention it, so I must have been confused?
Do any of the really early versions of X (and W) still exist?
Noel
Hi.
I've been using trn for decades to read a very few USENET groups. Until recently I've
been using aioe.org as my NNTP server but it seems to have gone dark. Before that
I used eternal-september.org, but when I try that I now get:
| $ NNTPSERVER=news.eternal-september.org trn
| Connecting to news.eternal-september.org...Done.
|
| Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: comp.sys.3b1
|
| Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: comp.sources.bugs
|
| Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: comp.misc
|
| Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: comp.compilers
| ....
And those all are (or were!) valid groups. If anyone has suggestions for a good
free NNTP server, please let me know. Privately is fine. I'm at a bit of
a loss otherwise.
Thanks,
Arnold
i worked for some years on video and film archive restoration.
baking old, badly stored magnetic tapes prior to reading them is a common practice.
my favourite was a story of a rock band (i think the stones) who wanted to play an old 24 track master tape but discovered it seemed to be stuck together.
there is a nasty affliction of mag tapes called sticky vinegar syndrome, so they did the right thing and sent a section of tape for analysis.
the results came back: the tape had suffered impregnation with “vodka and coke”.
some things never change.
-Steve
Hi All,
I just wanted to let y'all know that tesseract ocr has significantly
improved and is much easier to use that it used to be. I have been using
it with my workflow for a bit and it's crazy how much better it is than
it was back when I tried it last (admittedly 5-6 years ago). For those
of you doing your own scans, or those of you finding sad little pdfs
without ocr, the process is fairly simple.
Let's say you find "The Master Manual of Fortran.pdf" out there in the
wild (or scan it). Here's how to turn it into a glorious ocr'd version:
Export your pdf as a multi-image tiff - it'll be ginormous, but you can
delete it later (on Mac, this is just export from preview and select
tiff, but gs will do it to, if I remember correctly) and then:
tesseract The\ Master\ Manual\ of\ Fortran.tiff out -l eng PDF
et voila, I nice, if large pdf, called out.pdf or somesuch will appear
with ocr text that actually matches your scan (it seems to have caught
up to adobe's ocr, or is quite close in my view, ymmv).
I speak English, so I installed tesseract and tesseract-eng, but it
supports a bunch of other languages if you need them. Apparently
google's been supporting and developing it for while now and if my
results are any indicator, it's paying off (boy do I remember all the
gobbledegook it used to produce).
tesseract will import from different image types, multiple images, etc.
I just like the simplicity of tiff->pdf.
Anyhow, thought y'all might like to know as many of you live off the
scans :).
Will