TUHS

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6412 discussions

Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

by John Foust

At 04:17 PM 5/2/2022, Dan Cross wrote: >I vaguely remember Metaware being somewhat religiously extreme, but again the details are fuzzy now. Was there some kind of ecclesiastical reference in the man page? I have the manuals around somewhere, and that rings a bell. I used Metaware High C and the Pharlap extender in the early 1990s in the odd 32-bit DOS enviroment to make 3D import/export plugins for Autodesk's 3D Studio. - John

2 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

by Ronald Natalie

We got in on the W4 from the IBM Federal Systems guy (later dealt out to Loral, Martin Marietta, and then Lockheed-Martin). I started with those guy doing a contract job to craft the second nework interface into Secure Xenix (Jacob Recter I think was responsible for the first) to provide a secure downgrading system for some government entity. Then Intel developed the i860- and IBM came up with the Wizard card. This was only designed to be.a coprocessor card and was done down in Boca Raton. The fun and games with that one is that we were on early steppings of the processor chips and spent a lot of time coding around chip bugs (mostly with regard to interrupts). IBM/Intel had developed this thing called hostlink that was supposed to be useful, but we decided to port AIX to it. When IBM Owego came up with the W4, we were asked to port AIX again to it. We had one non-functional W4 kicking around for demo purposes that had 4 “delidded” i860 chips in it. I swapped one for an early stepping (useless) chip and kept one of the delidded ones which I still have in a box somewhere.

2 years, 8 months

In case you haven't heard yet

by Wesley Parish

I went googling for "Thoth operating system source code" while reading the discussion on Unix-like OSes and found the following: https://securitronlinux.com/debian-testing/nextstep-operating-system-source… which led to https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=4690.0 which led to various NeXTStep fragments that might be of interest. Share and Enjoy! Wesley Parish

2 years, 8 months

2.9BSD with MSCP Support

by Warren Toomey

[ This also in from Peter Klapper. The files are at: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD_MSCP/ ] This is a 2.9BSD kernel with a backported MSCP driver from 2.10BSD I tried to make a clean integration of the driver into the 2.9BSD source tree in order to be able use the standard procedures to configure and build the kernel. To try it, rename the original directories /usr/include/sys and /usr/src/sys and unpack the two tar archives into your /usr directory. Then change into /usr/src/sys/conf and just do a ./config for the kernel you want. I made some configurations for: MSCP23 (MSCP enabled kernel for the PDP11/23) MSCP73 (MSCP enabled kernel for the PDP11/73) FLOP23 (MSCP enabled 11/23 kernel for a boot floppy) FLOP73 (MSCP enabled 11/73 kernel for a boot floppy) MSCPSH (MSCP enabled kernel for an extended SIMH environment) You may need to adapt the kernel configurations for the correct timezone and maybe the line frequency. This is probably the most recent BSD system which runs on the PDP11/23. Read the full story about this here: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/scientific-micro-systems-sms-1000… There is NO root password in this distribution. For installation on real hardware, at least a Maxtor XT-1085 (RD53) or larger is recommended. My SMS1000 system currently has a Maxtor XT-1140 installed. Original was an XT-1085 in the system. The disk layout for these two disks during installation is as follows: Maxtor XT-1085 / DEC RD53 ========================= 1024/8/18 interleave 1,4 --- layout --- root = ra(0,0), size 3200 swap = ra(0,6400), size 1920 usr = ra(0,10240), size 64180 Maxtor XT-1140 ============== 918/15/18 interleave 1,4 --- layout ---- root = ra(0,0), size 3200 swap = ra(0,6400), size 1920 usr = ra(0,10240), size 114880 I've split the data into 4 parts in order to not get too much when downloading: 1.) 29bsd-simh.tgz: A SIMH image including configuration file. "pdp11 sms1123.ini" 2.) 29bsd-smstape.tgz: A Linux dump of the QIC24 installation tape which was generated with my SMS1000 system. You can write this under Linux to a 60MB QIC tape with: "dd if=29bsd-sms-tape.dd of=/dev/st0" The SMS1000 generated format is not compatible with Linux, but the Linux dd'ed tape can be read by the SMS1000 system. 3.) 29bsd-tapefiles.tgz: The files to create a SIMH tape image, or real tape for another system. 4.) 29bsd-vtserver.tgz: The version of the vtserver and the corresponding configuration file with which I performed the successful initial installation. I worked with 19200bps, which is the maximum my SMS1000 supports on the console, under 2.9BSD only 9600bps works anyway. Have fun with it, if you find bugs, they may of course be mine. ;) I wish you and the community also a lot of fun with this version of 2.9BSD. // Peter

2 years, 8 months

Pro/Venix 2.0: reconstructed

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I just received this in the e-mail a few days ago: [ now at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/DEC/Venix/ProVenix_2.0/ ] From: Peter Klapper Subject: PRO/VENIX 2.0 reconstructed ... ... and tested, for your collection ;-) Probably the best OS for the Pro, see the benchmark: PRO380 - PRO/VENIX V2.0: ======================== pk$ dryr Dhrystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 86 This machine benchmarks at 581 dhrystones/second pk$ drynr Dhrystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 95 This machine benchmarks at 526 dhrystones/second The four additional floppy disks contain also the source code which I used to rebuild the missing binaries. I wish you and the community much fun with the "new" resurrected PRO/VENIX V2.0.

2 years, 8 months

whereis command

by ron minnich

can someone point me at the earliest version of whereis? I first saw it in 4.1, but maybe it came sooner. Also, if you've got a link to man pages, thanks in advance. I'm trying but failing to find it. My daughter says I suck at web search, which, given where I work, is a bid sad :-)

2 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Interesting commentary on Unix from Multicians.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rich Morin <rdm(a)cfcl.com> > I'd love to hear from some folks who have used both Multics and > Unix(ish) systems about things that differ and how they affect the > user experience. {This is a bit behind the flow of the conversation, because I wanted to ponder for a while what I was going to say on this, to me, important topic.} Technicaly, I don't quite qualify (more below), but I do have an interesting perspective: I was the very first Unix person in the 'Multics' group at MIT-LCS - the Computer Systems Group, which contained Corby and Jerry Saltzer. The interesting thing, which may surprise some people, is that I _never_ got any 'anti-Unix' static from anyone in the group, that I can remember. (Maybe one grad student, who was a bit abrasive, but he and I had a run-in that was mostly? caused by my fairly rapid assumption, as an un-paid undergrad, of a significant role in the group's on-going research work. So that may have bled across a bitt, to Unix, which was 'my' baby.) I'm not sure what _they_ all made of Unix. None of us knew, of course, where it was going to go. But I don't recall getting any 'oh, it's just a toy system' (an attitude I'm _very_ familiar with, since it was what the TCP/IP people got from _some_ members of what later became the ISO effort). Of course, our Unix was a tiny little PDP-11/40 - not a building-sized multi-processor 'information utility' mainframe - so they may well have not thought of it in the same frame as Multics. Also, by the time I arrived the group was doing nothing on Multics (except below); everyone was focused on networks. So OS's were no longer a topic of much research interest, which may also have contributed. Anyway, technically, I don't count for the above, because I never actualy wrote code on Multics. However, I had studied it extensively, and I worked very closely with Dave Clark (a younger Multics light, later a leading figure in the early TCP/IP work) on projects that involved Multics and my machine, so I got to see up close what Multics was like as a system environment, as he worked on his half of the overall project. I've also pondered Multics in the decades since; so here's my take. I really, really liked Unix (we were running what turns out to have been basicaly a PWB1 system - V6, with some minor upgrades). I learned about it the way many did; I read the manuals, and then dove into the system source (which I came to know quite well, as I was tasked with producing a piece that involved a major tweak - asynchronous 'raw' DMA I/O directly to user processes). Unfortunately, one of the two (to me) best things about Unix, is something it has since lost - which is its incredible bang/buck ratio - to be more precise, the functionality/complexity ratio of the early versions of the system. (Its other important aspect, I think, was that its minimal demands of the underlying hardware [unlike Multics, which was irretrievably bound to the segmentation, and the inter-segment data and code connection] along with its implementation in what turned out to be a fairly portable language (except for the types; I had to make up what amounted to new ones.) So, what was Multics' major difference from other systems - and why was it good? I'd say that it was Multics' overall structuring mechanisms - the single-level store, with the ability to have code and data pointers between segments - and what that implied for both the OS itself, and major 'applications' (some of them part of the OS, although not the 'kernel' - like networking code). Unix had (and still may have, I'm not up on Linux, etc) a really major, hard boundary beween 'user' code, in processes,and the kernel. There are 'instructions' that invoke system primitives - but not too many, and limited interactions across that boundary. So, restricted semantics. Which was good in that it helped keep the system simple and clear - but it limited the flexibilty and richness of the interface. (Imagine building a large application which had a hard boundary across the middle of it, with extremely limited interactions across the boundary. Just so with the interface in Unix between 'user' code, and the kernel.) Multics is very different. The interface to the OS is subroutine calls, and one can easily pass complex data structures, including pointers to other data, any of which can be in the 'user's' memory, as arguments to them. The _exact_ same _kind_ of interface was available to _other_ major subsystems, not just the OS kernel. As I've mentioned before, Dave's TCP/IP for Multics was not in the kernel - it was ordinary user code! And he was able to work on it, test and install new versions - while the system was up for normal useage! Dave's TCP/IP subsystem included i) a process, which received all incoming ackets, and also managed/handled a lot of the timers involved (e.g. retransmission timeouts); ii) data segment(s), which included things like buffered un-acknowledged data (so that if a retransmission timer went off, the process would wake up and retransmit the data); iii) code segment(s): iiia) some for use by the process, like incoming packet processing; iiib) some which were logically part of the subsystem, but which were called by subroutine calls from the _user_'s process; and iiic) some which were commands (called by the user's shell), which called those iiib) procedures. (There were issues in security because Multics didn't have the equivalent of 'set-user-id' on a cross-subsystem subroutine calls - although I think there had been plans early on for that. When Dave's code was taken over by Honeywell, for 'production' use, whole whole thing was moved into a lower ring, so the database didn't have to be world-writeable in the user ring.) This is typical of the kind of structure that was relatively easy to build in Multics. Yes, one can do similar application without all those underlying mechanism; but Turing-completeness says one doeesn't need stacks to compute anything - but would any of us want to work in a system that didn't have stacks? We have stacks because they are useful. True, simple user applications don't need all that - but as one builds more and more complex support subsytems, that kind of environment turns out to be good to have. Think of a window system, in that kind of environment. Those 'tools' (inter-segment subroutine calls, etc) were created to build the OS, but they turned out to be broadly useful for _other_ complicated subsystems. I'm not sure I've explained this all wel, but I'm not sure I can fully cover the topic with less than a book. Noel

2 years, 9 months

Sad News - we last two wonderful people in the past few weeks.

by Clem Cole

I personally lost two friends and former colleagues recently that these list probably wants to know about. I just heard from Lynne Jolitz, Bill's wife. It seems he passed away about a month ago after a long illness. Most of you know he was the original force behind the BSD 386 development. I know little more than what I have just reported at this time, but will pass on any info as I learn it. Also in other news, not Unix related, but PDP-11 and the computer graphics world. We lost Jack Burness a few weeks ago. Jack was the author of the original "Moonlander" for the PDP-11 with which many of us wasted many hours trying to pick up "a Big Mac with fries" at "Mare Assabet." [Note: There was no WWW/Wikipedia in those days to find it, but to look up Assabet River, so many people naively thought it was a legitimate lunar landmark - its the River that the DEC Maynard bldg sits]. He was a larger than life person [his joke's mailing list was a whos-who of the computer industry - it was an honor to be on it]. We all have a passel of stories about Jack. I have written separately about Jack a number of times and if you have never looked at the source to Moonlander, you own it yourself to read it. Remember he wrote it as a throw-away demo for the GT-40 for trade show [his integer transcendental funcs are quite instructive]. As one of the folks on the Masscomp Alumni list put it, 'Jack was someone that just does not deserve to die.' This is the announcement Maureen published in the DEC Alumni list. ************************** January 20, 2022 ******************************** Our sincere condolences to Maureen Burness and all friends in CXO and elsewhere on the passing of her husband, *Jack Burness*, 75, Colorado Springs, who left us on January 20, 2022. Maureen said: With his bigger than life personality, humor, and intellect, he was loved and respected by so many people, including his devoted family. Born in Brooklyn, NY in 1946, he received his Engineering Degree from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and was employed by DEC, Maynard in the early days and then here in Colorado Springs. Many of you knew he had a huge appetite for the outdoors of Colorado and Martha’s Vineyard and joined him in his sometimes-disastrous adventures.

2 years, 9 months

Interesting commentary on Unix from Multicians.

by Dan Cross

I came across this talk that, apparently, was meant to be part of a documentary about timesharing systems at MIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZPYBDA6XVo This "episode" features McCarthy, Corbato, Fano, Fredkin, and Philip Morse talking about Multics. Starting at ~12:15m they talk about the triumvirate of MIT, GE and Bell Labs and some of the challenges with distributed work. Around the 14 minute mark, they talk about Bell Labs exiting the project, and touch briefly on the development of Unix. Interesting quotes include Fano talking about different objectives from the different organizations, Corby saying, "they [Bell Labs] dropped out three-quarters of the way through the race" (referring to Multics), Fano asserting that BTL left after the _research_ part of the project was essentially completed, and Corbato talking about the influence of Multics on Unix design (Corby refers to Multics as Ken and Dennis's "prototype" and calls Unix a "second generation Multics"). This was all shot in the early 1980s. The rest is interesting, but mostly unrelated to Unix. - Dan C. (PS: As an aside, Fano lighting up a cigarette at about 19:20 was particularly striking: my, how times have changed.)

2 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Why does shell write to stderr?

by Douglas McIlroy

How would you wish to interact with /bin/bash >file Doug

2 years, 9 months

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