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6557 discussions

Fwd: How did Bell Labs start to work on Project MAC?

by Dan Cross

[Bcc: to TUHS as it's not strictly Unix related, but relevant to the pre-history] This came from USENET, specifically, alt.os.multics. Since it's unlikely anyone in a position to answer is going to see it there, I'm reposting here: From Acceptable Name <metta.crawler(a)gmail.com>: >Did Bell Labs approach MIT or was it the other way around? >Did participating in Project MAC come from researchers requesting >management at Bell Labs/MIT or did management make the >decision due to dealing with other managers in each of the two >organizations? Did it grow out of an informal arrangement into >a format one?" These are interesting questions. Perhaps Doug may be in the know? - Dan C.

2 years, 7 months

Release 5.0 Vs. System V

by segaloco

Good morning all, currently trying to sort out one matter that still bewilders me with this documentation I'm working on scanning. So I've got two copies of the "Release 5.0" User's Manual and one copy of the "System V" User's Manual. I haven't identified the exact differences, lots of pages...but they certainly are not identical, there are at least a few commands in one and not the other. Given this, and past discussion, it's obvious Release 5.0 is the internal UNIX version that became System V, but what I'm curious about is if it was ever released publicly as "Release 5.0" before being branded as System V or if the name was System V from the moment the first commercial license was issued. The reason I wonder this is some inconsistencies in the documentation I see out there. So both of my Release 5.0 User's Manuals have the Bell logo on the front and no mention of the court order to cease using it. Likewise, all but one of the System V related documents I received recently contain a Bell logo on the cover next to Western Electric save for the Opeartor's Guide which curiously doesn't exhibit the front page divestiture message that other documents missing the Bell logo include. Furthermore, the actual cover sheet says "Operator's Guide UNIX System Release 5.0" so technically not System V. In fact, only the User's Manual, Administrator's Manual, Error Message Manual, Transition Aids, and Release Description specifically say System V, all the rest don't have a version listed but some list Release 5.0 on their title page. Furthering that discrepancy is this which I just purchased: https://www.ebay.com/itm/314135813726?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110… Link lives as of this sending, but contains a closed auction for an Error Message Manual from the "Release 5.0" documentation line but no Bell logo. Until the Operator's Guide and this auction link, I haven't seen any "Release 5.0" branded stuff without a Bell logo, and before I bought the System V gold set, I hadn't seen System V branded stuff *with* the Bell logo. This shatters an assumption that I had made that at the same time the documentation branding shifted to System V was the same time the removal of the Bell logo happened, given that divestiture was what allowed them to aggressively market System V, but now this presents four distinct sets of System V gold documentation: Release 5.0 w/ Bell logo Release 5.0 w/o Bell logo System V w/ Bell logo System V w/o Bell logo I'm curious if anyone would happen to know what the significance here is. The covers are all printed, I can't see any indication that a bunch of 5.0 manuals were retroactively painted over nor that any System V manuals got stamped with a Bell post-production. What this means is "Release 5.0" documentation was being shipped post-divestiture and "System V" was being shipped pre-divestiture. If Release 5.0 was publicly sold as System V, then what explains the post-divestiture 5.0 manuals floating around in the wild, and vice versa, if USG couldn't effectively market and support UNIX until the divestiture, how is it so many "Release 5.0" documents are floating around in well produced commercial-quality binding, both pre and post-divestiture by the time the name "System V" would've been king. Were they still maintaining an internal 5.x branch past System V that warranted its own distinct documentation set even into the commercial period? This period right around '82-'83 is incredibly fascinating and I feel very under-documented. - Matt G.

2 years, 7 months

Three New Scans (Sys V User and Admin Guides, TS 4.0 Programmer's Package)

by segaloco

Good day everyone, just emailing to notify of three more documents I've uploaded to archive.org since my last slew of them: https://archive.org/details/unix-programming-starter-package - Up first is the UNIX Programming Starter Package. This is one of a pair of manuals that saw publication in the Bell system around the time of UNIX/TS 4.0. The documents here appear to be a subset of those which shipped with Documents for UNIX 4.0. Nothing particularly new here. There is a companion manual, UNIX Text Editing & Phototypesetting Starter Package, which I also have but haven't hit the scan bench with yet. Like this one, that is just a subset of papers from the Documents for UNIX collection. Based on the TOC, this second one also shipped with one of those PWB/MM multi-fold pamphlets, but didn't receive one when I got this. Luckily that was also scanned as part of the 4.0 collection. So nothing really new here, save that these are 1st generation scans vs the scans of photocopies for the 4.0 release. That said, I've seen this set with the same cover motif except with an AT&T death star logo in the upper right. Didn't look into it too much at the time, but I'd be curious if anyone might have those and if they have the programming one, if it still refers to Release 4.0 in the documentation roadmap. https://archive.org/details/unix-system-users-guide-release-5-0 - This is the User's Guide that shipped with Release 5.0/System V. This covers the usual suspects as well as some notes on RJE and SCCS from a user's perspective. https://archive.org/details/unix-system-administrators-guide-5-0 - And this is the Administrator's Guide likewise from SysV era. This one contains setup and maintenance notes for both DEC (PDP & VAX) and 3B20(S) machines, as well as papers on accounting, LP printing, RJE, filesystem checking, and the System Activity Package. Additionally, the guide includes the original Modification Request form. - Matt G.

2 years, 7 months

interesting case of not getting the point: dc on a mac

by ron minnich

dc >>> it prompts with '>>> ' wonder where that came from? First time I've seen it. Seems to have a certain lack of understanding attached to it.

2 years, 7 months

v8 shell

by Rob Pike

Found this tweetstream, here folded together, when looking for something else (now lost) in my twitter archive: ========== Things I miss from the v8 shell. 1) All shell output was valid shell input. 2) Typing dir/cmd would find the command $PATH/dir/cmd. Subdirectories of your bin, in other words. 3) Functions were exportable. For one brief shining POSIX meeting, that was true in POSIX too but then... 4) The implementation was lovely and easy to understand. (No, it wasn't shalgol. Bourne fixed that for us.) 5) That I could learn things from it, like how to write a recursive descent parser.* 6) It ran in cooked mode. As expected, all that work making it a great shell is lost to history. https://t.co/IzApAUSmzN is silent. Well, the code is released now. ========== -rob * elegantly.

2 years, 7 months

AIX moved into maintainance mode

by arnold＠skeeve.com

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/ FYI. Arnold

2 years, 7 months

The death of general purpose computers -> COFF

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, can we move "The death of general purpose computers" to COFF now as it's not directly relevant to Unix. Thanks, Warren

2 years, 7 months

Managers/architects (was: AIX moved into maintainance mode)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> > At least 30 years ago I said "He's good programmer, a good architect, > and a good manager. I've never seen that in one person before". Corby? Although he was just down the hall from me, I never saw him operating in any of those roles; maybe some of the old-time Unix people have some insight. Saltzer is about off-scale in #2; probably good as a manager (although I had a monumental blow-up with him in the hallway on the 5th floor, but I was pretty close to unmanageable when I was young ;-); he took over Athena when it was stumbling, and got it going. Dave Clark is high on all three - he could manage me! :-) Bob Taylor? PARC did some _incredibly_ important stuff in his time. Yes, I know a lot of the credit goes to those under him (Butler Lampson, Alan Kay - not sure if he was in Taylor's group, Boggs, Metcalfe, etc) but he had to manage them all. Not sure what his technical role was, though. Vint Cerf? Again, A1*** as a manager, but had some failings as a architect. I think the biggest share of the blame for the decision to remove the variable size addresses from TCP/IP3, and replace them with 32-bit addresses in TCP/IPv4, goes to him. (Alas, I was down the hall, not in the room, that day; I wasn't allowed in until the _next_ meeting. I like to think that if I'd been there, I could/would have pointed out the 'obvious' superior alternative - 'only length 4 must be supported at this time'.) Noel PS: ISTR that about a month ago someone was asking for management papers from that era (but I was too busy to reply); two good ones are: - F. J. Corbat��, C. T. Clingen, "A Managerial View of the Multics System Development" https://multicians.org/managerial.html - F. J. Corbat��, C. T. Clingen, and J. H. Saltzer, "Multics -- the first seven years" https://multicians.org/f7y.html

2 years, 7 months

Re: Managers/architects (was: AIX moved into maintainance mode)

by Douglas McIlroy

> My guess is that Ivan Sutherland probably qualified back when he still > programmed ... I mean, after all, he invented the linked list in order to > implement his thesis program (Sketchpad) in about 1960. I don't know whether Sutherland invented the linked list, but if he did, it had to be before he worked on sketchpad. I attended a lecture about Lisp in 1959 in which McCarthy credited list-processing to IPL-V, whose roots Newell places in 1954. Sketchpad ran on TX 0, which became operational in 1956. My nomination for a triple-threat computer guy is Vic Vyssotsky. A great programmer, he invented the first stream-processing language (BLODI) and bitwise-parallel dataflow analysis. As an architect, he invented the single underlying address space for multics. As a manager, he oversaw the building of and later ran the lab that became AT&T Research. Finally he founded the DEC Cambridge Lab. He was a subtle diplomat, too, who more than once engineered reversals of policy without ruffling feathers. Relative to linked lists, I remember Vic perceptively touting the then startling usage J=NEXT(J).in Fortran. Doug

2 years, 7 months

Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode (fwd)

by Steve Nickolas

Accidentally sent this only to the person I was replying to. > I am getting some grief on Twitter too for "omitting" FreeBSD. I > didn't, but the BSDs don't fit either definition of "Unix". The > pre-1993 one being "based on AT&T code" -- after all, BSD (4.4 Lite r2 > was it? Before my time!) -- went to a lot of effort to eliminate AT&T > code. From what I've seen it's very much a gradual transition; 4.3-Tahoe starts to have the new code and UCB copyright notices with the predecessor of what we call the "BSD License" appearing in some of the source files. Then with Reno, a majority of the userland is open-sourced, and Net/2 is fairly complete. (Net/2 and 4.4BSD-Lite / Lite/2 were lacking a few things.) But even right up until the end things were in a state of flux. A few things weren't finished until much later by the FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD people. -uso.

2 years, 7 months

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