Hi all, Edouard asked me to pass this e-mail on to both TUHS and COFF lists.
Cheers, Warren
----- Forwarded message from Edouard Klein <edouardklein(a)gmail.com> -----
Subject: History tract during the next IWMP9 in Paris next May
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 22:46:30 +0200 (1 week, 4 days, 19 hours ago)
Dear Unix history enthusiasts,
The 11th International Workshop on Plan 9 will be held in Paris on May
22-24 2025.
One of the focus area this year will be Plan 9's history and its
influence on later computer science and industry trends.
The history team at the CNAM (where the conference will be held) has
agreed to help us prepare for the event and stands ready to record oral
histories, or any other format that would make the participants happy.
They had organized in 2017 a "colloque" at which Clem spoke (and I
listened somewhere in the audience) on UNIX:
https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-europe-ent…
I will keep the list posted as our efforts pan out, but I thought I'd
get the word out as soon as possible.
I you have historical resources on Plan 9 or Inferno, or are reminded of
any interesting tidbits, you can also share them here, as this list is
already recognized by historians as a legitimate source.
The program committee members, many (if not all) of whom roam this very
list, would welcome any proposal or contributions in this area :)
The CfP is at:
http://iwp9.org/
Looking forward to read what you care to share, or to seeing you in
person in Paris,
Cheers,
Edouard.
----- End forwarded message -----
> From: Kevin Bowling
> https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 and the parent page on seem to suggest
> it originated off Net/2 directly.
I wouldn't be putting too much weight on what that page says; most of the
*BSD pages were done by people I don't know well, and who might have gotten
details wrong
I myself later just tried to quickly, without much effort, work out roughly
what the relationship was between those *BSD systems, based on what other
people had written. E.g the now-'BSD/OS' page was originally at '386/BSD',
and I seem to have worked out that it's correct name was BSD/OS and moved it
there. The BSD/386 page is probably roughly correct, since it contains a scan
of a contemporary ad for it.
(So confusing that '386BSD' is something different from 'BSD/386'. Was there ever
actually a '386/BSD'?)
Someone who knows the early history of all the *BSD systems (as in, you lived
through all that) is welcome, nay invited, to fix any errors therein.
Noel
So I was flipping through a System V software catalog from Fall 1984 and among
the many AT&T Bell Laboratories items is the "COBOL Syntax Checker".
From the text:
---QUOTE---
The COBOL Syntax Checker allows programmers to edit and check the syntax of COBOL
programs before they are transmitted to mainframes for compilation and execution.
The software increases the chances of a 'clean' compilation and execution and
reduces the chance of a program being rejected due to syntax and simple semantic
errors. As a result, expensive mainframe CPU time is reduced.
The COBOL Syntax Checker processes a COBOL source program and produces three
listings:
1. a diagnostic listing,
2. a cross-reference listing,
3. a source listing.
---END QUOTE---
There are two distributions listed, a C binary distribution for SVR2 for the
3B20 for $2000 and a C source distribution for SVR2 for the VAX 11/780 for $7500,
both listed as released 2Q84.
Some quick Googling only offers up additional catalog and magazine mentions.
To me this sounds like a linter with some extra bits. Does anyone have any
recollections of this software or know if there's much likelihood of the software
itself or any documentation surviving?
Thanks for any insights!
- Matt G.
> From: Noel Chiappa
> Was there ever actually a '386/BSD'?
I decided (for not particular reason) to take a quick read through Marshall
Kirk McKusick's "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely
Redistributable":
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.html
and he refers to Jolitz's system as "386/BSD" (apparently incorrectly). (So
there's a lesson there; even people who '_were_ there' can occasionally get it
wrong - something that professional historians are well aware of. I have a
funny story of my learning that lesson, here:
http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/nontech/tmlotus.html
in a totally different technical area.)
I have yet to see a _scan_ of contemporary documentation (I believe nothing
that isn't a contemporary _physical artifact_) that confirms it was actually
named "386BSD", but that does seem to be the name as given in the Dr. Dobbs
series on it. That series confirms that it was based directly on the 'Net/2'
BSD release (although 'diff's on the sources are probably the most reliable
proof).
Noel
I have been playing around a bit with this in VirtualBox.
Maybe due to the backing company, I had assumed it was a commercial FreeBSD
variant. But looking a bit harder, it seems like it was a distinct strain
of 386bsd like NetBSD and FreeBSD. There seems to be scant information
about it online. Does anyone know if its story is told somewhere?
Regards,
Kevin
hello everyone,
i recently came across a little window manager, written in Alef, that
i've had in my /tmp folder
for the last five years. it's called Y (probably as a response to X),
and i grabbed it from
9gridchan's public griddisk; run by the late mycroftiv until 2022.
i think it must've been an experimental project by Pike, Rosenthal or
Tom Duff, but i can't find
any documentation about it anywhere. i'd love to know if any of you
remembers this, and if so,
would you share the story behind it?
i uploaded the source code here: http://antares-labs.eu/isometric/Y.tgz
and it runs on 2nd ed plan 9 without issue (see the attached screenshot.)
cheers!
-rodri
> From: Kevin Bowling
> I wonder if we should collect resources like this on a wiki page or
> something?
My habit on the CHWiki is to have the articles on subjects where there is a
lot of documentation online is to have the articles mostly be 'executive
summeries', and corral the links to the stuff online to a section at the end,
so that people who want to see the gory details can look at the original
documentation. See, for example:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7
That works well, even for material that later goes 404, because with the URL,
one can generally find it later in the Internet Archive (things like Google
won't find things that are only there).
Don't ask me to add them, though; I still haven't found time to add the links
to the BSD/OS stuff you found!
Noel
> From: Rodrigo Lopez
>> Google tells me: https://www.y-windows.org/
> from .. the code, that one has nothing to do with this.
It actually makes sense that there are two separate ones called 'Y'. The X
Window System was a descendant of the W window system, so if someone wanted
to do another one, 'Y' was the obvious namee to pick. All it needs now is two
separate people who decide they want to do a window system... voila!
Noel

On Aug 31, 2024, at 11:16 AM, Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna(a)xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
>> On 31 Aug 2024, at 20:09, Angel M Alganza <ama(a)ugr.es> wrote:
>>
>> On 2024-08-31 11:59, Rodrigo G. López wrote:
>>
>>> i'd love to know if any of you remembers this, and if so, would you share the story behind it?
>
> Google tells me: https://www.y-windows.org/
This is likely a different Y window sys than what Rodrigo found,
which is written in Alef and runs on 2nd ed plan9. Rodrigo may
want to trawl through 9fans mailing list/usenet group archives
or ask there.
