Hi.
EFL was definitely a part of BSD Unix. But I don't see it in the V7
stuff in the TUHS archives. When did it first appear? Was it part
of 32V and I should look there?
It is definitely in the V8 and V10 stuff.
Did anyone actually use it? I have the feeling that ratfor had already
caught on and spread far, and that it met people's needs, and so
EFL didn't really catch on that much, even though it provided more
features on top of Fortran.
Thanks,
Arnold
> On Sun, Jul 3, 2022 at 1:33 PM Marc Donner wrote:
>
> I've been ruminating on the question of whether networks are different from
> disks (and other devices). Here are a couple of observations:
[...]
From my perspective most of these things are not unique to networks, they happen with disks and/or terminals. Only out-of-order delivery seems new. However, in many early networking contexts (Spider/Arpanet/Datakit/UUCP) this aspect was not visible to the host (and the same holds for a single segment ethernet).
To me, in some ways networks are like tty’s (e.g. completing i/o can take arbitrarily long, doing a seek() does not make sense), in other ways they are like disks (raw devices are organised into byte streams, they have a name space). Uniquely, they have two end-points, only one of which is local (but pipes come close).
Conceptually, a file system does two things: (i) it organises raw blocks into multiple files; these are the i-nodes and (ii) it provides a name space; these are directories and the namei routine. A network stack certainly does the first: a raw network device is organised into multiple pipe-like connections; depending on the network, it optionally offers a naming service.
With the first aspect one could refer to any file by “major device number, minor device number, i-node number”. This is not very different from referring to a network stream by “network number, host number, port number” in tcp/ip (and in fact this is what bind() and connect() in the sockets API do), or “switch / host / channel” in Datakit. For disks, Unix offers a clean way to organise the name spaces of multiple devices into a unified whole. How to do this with networks is not so easy, prior to the invention of the file system switch.
Early on (Arpanet Unix), it was tried to incorporate host names into a net directory by name (RFC 681) but this is not scalable. Another way would be to have a virtual directory and include only names for active connections. The simple way would be to use a text version of the numeric name as described above - but that is not much of an improvement. Better to have a network variant of namei that looks up symbolic names in a hosts file or in a network naming service. The latter does not look very performant on the hardware of 40 years ago, but it appears to have worked well on the Alto / PuPs network at Xerox PARC.
With the above one could do
open(“/net/inet/org.tuhs.www:80”, O_RDWR | O_STREAM)
to connect to the TUHS web server, and do
open(“/net/inet/any:80”, O_RDWR | O_STREAM | O_CREAT, 0600)
to create a ‘listening’ (rendez-vous) socket.
Paul
On Sun, Jul 03, 2022 at 05:55:15PM +1000, steve jenkin wrote:
>
> > On 3 Jul 2022, at 12:27, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > I love the early Unix releases because they were so simple, processors
> > were simple then as well.
>
>
> Bell???s Observation on Computer Classes has brought surprises
> - we???ve had some very popular new devices appear at the bottom end of the market and sell in the billions.
Yes, and they all run Linux or some tiny OS. Has anyone ported v7 to
any of these devices and seen it take off? Of course not, it doesn't
have TCP/IP.
On June 28 Rob Pike wrote:
"One of the reasons I'm not a networking expert may be relevant here. With
networks, I never found an abstraction to hang my hat on. Unlike with file
systems and files, or even Unix character devices, which provide a level of
remove from the underlying blocks and sectors and so on, the Unix
networking interface always seemed too low-level and fiddly, analogous to
making users write files by managing the blocks and sectors themselves."
I've been ruminating on the question of whether networks are different from
disks (and other devices). Here are a couple of observations:
1 - Two different packets may take two different paths from the sender to
the receiver.
1a - The transit time for one packet may vary widely from that of the other.
1b - The two packets may arrive in an order different from the order in
which they were transmitted.
(Note - recently I have been reading Bob Gezelter's monograph [and PhD
dissertation] and I've learned that modern high-performance disk systems
behave more like networks in 1a and 1b.)
2 - A packet may never arrive.
3 - Behavior 2 not a sign of hard failure for networks, whereas it is
generally considered so for other I/O devices.
There is probably more to why networks are weird, but these are some of the
big dissonances that seem to me to make Rob's comment resonate so loudly to
me.
Best,
Marc
=====
nygeek.netmindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
As part of some of simh work, I've been immersed in some licensing
discussions. Thanks for the V8-10, Plan-9 and Inferno notes - they are
relevant.
Anyway, WRT to TUHS, I'm thinking that at least in the case of the Unix
style bits, I propose a small change to Waren's top-level directory. Add
a new dir called something like 'Legal Docs' or 'Copyrights+Licenses'.
Then move the Caldera document and Warren's current note into that area.
Then add copies of anything we can collect like the Dan Cross's V8-10,
anything WRT to Plan9/Inferno or anything we from the UNIX world - such as
something Sun, DEC or HP or like might have added. Maybe add a
subdirectory with the AT&T/USL case details. And maybe add a
sub-directory with known FOSS licenses used by the UNIX community and add a
copy of the 3-clause BSD and maybe even the two GPLs.
Then update the README in the current top-level dir. Adding to the
contents something like "*the IP contained on this website is covered by
different licenses depending on the specific IP. Copies of these can be
found with the source code itself, but have also been all collected
together in the top-level directory: ...*."
I think these all have both historical values, as well as practical
values. As I said, I was not sure myself and I think other would be less
ignorant if they could find it all easily. In the case of the practical,
a for instance, in an email with some lawyers last week, I had pointed them
at the Caldera document. I'ld have loved to have been able to say look in
this directory. The Caldera and later Nokia Licenses are what we are
considering as examples.
Thoughts?
I've enjoyed reading this thread as networking has always been a passion of
mine. Lawrence Livermore had, at one time, their own networking system
they called Spider. Is this the same Spider technology that Sandy Fraiser
references in his Datakit notes?
Geoff
>> I don't know the answer to Ctrl-D.
The Unix command "man ascii" has the answer:
Oct Dec Hex Char Oct Dec Hex Char
------------------------------------------------------------------------
000 0 00 NUL '\0' 100 64 40 @
001 1 01 SOH (start of heading) 101 65 41 A
002 2 02 STX (start of text) 102 66 42 B
003 3 03 ETX (end of text) 103 67 43 C
004 4 04 EOT (end of transmission) 104 68 44 D
....
Ctrl-D signifies end of transmission. Some other O/Ses have used
Ctrl-Z for that purpose, presumably because Z is the final letter
of numerous alphabets.
There is a good book about the history of character sets (pre-Unicode)
in the book described at this URL:
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/master.html#Mackenzie:1980:CCS
Bob Bemer (1920--2004), known as Dr. ASCII to some of us, was a key
person in the standardization of character sets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- University of Utah -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What are the 1970’s & 1980’s Computing / IT skills “our grandkids won’t have”?
Whistling into a telephone while the modem is attached, because your keyboard has a stuck key
- something I absolutely don’t miss.
Having a computer in a grimy wharehouse with 400 days of uptime & wondering how a reboot might go?
steve j
=========
9 Skills Our Grandkids Will Never Have
<https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/06/9-skills-our-grandkids-will-never-have/>
1: Using record players, audio cassettes, and VCRs
2: Using analog phones [ or an Analog Clock ]
3. Writing letters by hand and mailing them
4. Reading and writing in cursive
5. Using manual research methods [ this is a Genealogy site ]
6. Preparing food the old-fashioned way
7. Creating and mending clothing
8. Building furniture from scratch
9. Speaking the languages of their ancestors
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
Warner Losh:
Alcatel-Lucent gave an official grant to V8, V9 and V10. See
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dan_Cross_v8/statement_…
====
Quite so. I believe this was announced on a mailing list called TUHS.
Those here who are interested in such things might want to subscribe;
I have and find it quite useful and interesting, with occasional
disappointment.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(typing this on a train in Texas)
