On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, reed@reedmedia.net wrote:
> Does anyone have scanned copies of early Lions commentary? (Not the 2000
> printing, unless it looks identical, please let me know.)
I got copied of the cover and front page off-list. Thank you!
> I will try to share my slides to this list by end of this week. (I did
> look at an early draft of Warner's slides, but didn't look at his final
> slides nor watch his presentation yet. My presentation is from scratch
> for now.)
I have a rough draft of around 63 slides. I have a maybe around 10 more
to add. It is too much content for an hour. Temporarily they are at
http://reedmedia.net/~reed/pres/.tmp-ibu4txv873cv/
pdf is 63 slides at ~5MB
(please don't distribute as I didn't yet cite sources in it nor have
re-use statements for some images I borrowed.)
J.tex is the source for the pdf.
The real source is the notes in the .data file there. (It is a mess.)
I plan to add a few photos of the earliest participants (as named in
the research edition manuals.)
I will add a few pages about Berkeley Unix up to 3BSD. (Later will do
one hour talk just on BSD.)
Few questions:
If using a 4.5 inch diameter roll of paper for the TTY, how did you cut
the paper into 11 inch pages? Or did you just let it roll up?
Anyone have a pointer to the photo of a Graphic Systems (GSI)
phototypesetter (1973)? (for troff v3 slide)
Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971)
same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later?
(~1973)
Anyone have a pointer to a picture of GE 635 or 645 system? (for multics
slide)
You can find images at:
https://multicians.org/drv-bull.html (says its a GE-645 installed in Paris)
https://multicians.org/mulimg/radc-bldg3-a.jpg (ROME building 3 GECOS/Honeywell systems)
https://multicians.org/645artist.html (weird artist's conception)
In general, there's several images on the multicians page. In my talk I found one of a later Honeywell system that I mistakenly thought was a 645.
Great slides. Good detail on the bell-labs stream of innovation (better than my talk by far, I think). Great use of early manual artifacts to drive the story telling. It's clearly only slightly related to my talk and that it was done from scratch with at most an element or two from my talk that could easily have come from this list instead.
So some feedback:
The slide that has LSI-Unix is missing mini-unix. If you look at the AUUGN news letters, that's mentioned much more than LSI-Unix, so it was out in the wild.
CB-UNIX had its origins in SCCS Unix, which was derived from a ~1st edition Unix for a switch (SCCS here is Switch Control Center System) done by New Jersey Bell in 1972. It took in snapshots from research unix from time to time. After V6, CB-Unix 1.0 was done based on it, with its additions in the areas of IPC and enhancements for production systems. After V7, there was a 2.x series. This was later merged with System III / Unix/TS 3.0 to produce what would become System V (I found conflicting accounts of whether this was done in Unix/TS 4.0 (never released outside of bell labs) or in Unix TS 5.0). The merges were what we'd call "cherry picks" today: the IPC features and some minor other things were re-done for the Unix/TS environment and would become what we call today System V IPC. CB-Unix had infrastructure to port to multiple CPUs, but really only ran on the 11/70. The IPC system was called maus (pronounced mouse, evidently). We gave man pages and source for it in PDF form in the TUHS archive. I'm slowly plowing through OCRing the sources... All this work was done in Columbus OH. Unix/TS targeted time sharing systems that developers, secretaries, etc used. CB-UNIX targeted call record collection systems and similar "production" systems.
MERT is interesting... It ported V4 Unix to run under a PDP-11 hypervisor... It was later called UNIX/RT and merged code from V5 and/or V6 (the recollections differ), but not V7 as the system call ABI changed for that. It was cancelled in favor of Unix/TS, but hung on to life, was ported to the 3B2 and later systems to become DMERT... There's hints of this scattered in the different bell labs technical journals and in the TUHS archive of recollections of early unix from the 80s on usenet.
I'll have to go through the PWB stuff in more detail than I have time right now.
I'm unsure the thing you labeled as DISPLAY-2 is the DISPLAY-2 or the standard Option 340 display. I know people on this list said it was a display-2 (maybe my early slides did as well). Based on pictures in the PDP-7 manuals, I think it was the 340...
Where are you giving it?
Warner
