Don Hopkins <don(a)DonHopkins.com> wrote: Nice. OpenFirmware was also used in PowerMacs and in IBM POWER systems. I thought it was a great shame that Intel didn't adopt OpenFirmware but instead created EFI. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h punycode Lundy, Fastnet: Variable 3 or 4, becoming east or southeast 5 or 6. Moderate or rough, occasionally slight. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.

The OLPC XO-1 also used OpenFirmware! Mitch Bradley ported and extended Forthmacs to support secure auto-boot, power management, and used it for debugging the OLPC’s unique hardware and operating system. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OFW_FAQ <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OFW_FAQ> OpenFirmware also has its own song to the tune of the Jetson’s theme, and Mitch’s rendition is much more mellifluous than RMS singing his Free Software song: https://web.archive.org/web/20060213143046/http://bananajr6000.apple.com/12… <https://web.archive.org/web/20060213143046/http://bananajr6000.apple.com/1275/misc/ofwsong.au> I used the 68K and SPARC versions of Mitch’s “Forthmacs” system under SunOS. It had a re-targetable meta-compiler, portably supported targets targets with 16 bits, 32 bits, different byte orders, could dynamically link and call C libraries, also ran in stand-alone mode, could be burnt into ROM and run in framebuffer memory, and and which he later developed into OpenFirmware). I worked with Mitch as a summer intern at Sun in ’87, integrating his other pure C “CForth" system into a circuit editor called “CADrioid”. At the University of Maryland, I used Forthmacs to develop a dynamic memory allocator (which I would run diagnostics on in mmap'ed framebuffer memory as a screen saver), a FORTH extensible X10 window manager with pie menus called “piewm” (kind of like NeWS for X10 with FORTH instead of PostScript), a hypermedia brower for NeWS called “HyperTIES”, and a cellular automata machine simulator compatible with Toffoli and Margolus’s CAM6 hardware and Forth rule definitions published in their book (which I’ve since rewritten in JavaScript). Forthmacs: http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/forthmacs-doc/ <http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/forthmacs-doc/> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/allocate.f.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/allocate.f.txt> http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/forth.html <http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/forth.html> piewm: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/Xlib.forth.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/Xlib.forth.txt> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/fuwm-main.forth.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/fuwm-main.forth.txt> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/hacks.forth.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/hacks.forth.txt> HyperTIES: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/fmt.f <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/fmt.f> CAM6: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/cam.f.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/cam.f.txt> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/compile.f.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/compile.f.txt> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/rules.f.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/rules.f.txt> https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L41 <https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L41> Here’s an old post extolling the virtues of CForth and Forthmacs, that I posted in response to a question on comp.lang.forth back in ’89. -Don https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.forth/cAFn_jDDu50/t8wEQeCe4… <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.forth/cAFn_jDDu50/t8wEQeCe4pYJ> From: don(a)brillig.umd.edu (Don Hopkins) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Forth for VAX, Sun Summary: Bradley Forthware: 4444 is the number of the best! Keywords: sun, unix, cforth Date: 10 May 89 11:06:40 GMT Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction Lab In article &lt;24...(a)agate.BERKELEY.EDU&gt; w...(a)garnet.berkeley.edu (William Baxter) writes: I used a version of CForth when I was working for Mitch, summer before last at Sun. It's a very nice Forth system, and quite portable. You can define your own Forth primatives in C, by adding them to this big switch statement! We linked CForth together with a schematics CAD system (CADroid), so you could call the CADroid commands from Forth, and then we wrote a user-friendly extension language in Forth. It accepted postfix commands, and prompted for arguments in English. You could interactivly define macros for laying out circuit bodies and wiring them up, by typing commands, pointing with the mouse, selecting from menus, pressing function keys, putting in your own prompts for arguments, bindings macros to keys, etc. It also supported interactive loops and conditionals. Mitch came up with a really neat unified syntax for them: condition? [ <stuff to do if true> ] condition? [ <stuff to do if true> ][ <stuff to do if false> ] count [ <stuff to do in a loop> ] count [ <stuff to do in a loop> ][ <stuff to do if count is 0> ] The last one (the loop-with-an-else-clause) was particularly useful because it could be used instead of the otherwise common construct: count 0= [ <stuff to do if count is 0> ][ count [ <stuff to do in a loop if count isn't 0> ] ] The way these constructs worked interactivly (and during macro definition) was that you started a loop by typing a count and a [, and it would execute commands as you typed them in, the first time through the loop, and once you typed the matching ] (they nested!), it would re-execute the now-compiled loop count-1 more times, real fast. The conditional form had just the same behavior: It would either execute what you typed as you typed it, or ignore your commands, according to the condition (|-1| or 0). So when we carefully consider all of these facts, we are forced to ask ourselves the following question: What was today's topic again? Wait, I remember: Bradley Forthware. Sun Forth is an excellent, rich, fast, fantastic Forth system! I've used it for all kinds of things, on the Sun-2, the Sun-3 (68K), and the Sun-4 (SPARC). It also runs on the Atari ST, and the Mac, I think. (I haven't used those versions) On the Sun-2, I had a good time using Sun Forth to figure out how to frob the CG1 color graphics card, by printing out the cg1reg.h file, mmap'ing in the device registers, and frobbing around with them. (I finally discovered that you could only write to the color table during vertical retrace, when I got mad and frustrated that my unsucessful attempts at loading the color table were taunting me by kinda sorta working occasionaly, and I decided to punish it by running it in an infinite loop. My color table slowly faded into view!) It's got a kick-ass decompiler, that pretty prints forth code and disassembles primatives! Who needs manuals or source code? (But you get them anyway! ;-) There are a lot of other nice features, like an emacs-like command line editor, with history, and command completion over your Forth vocabularies. It's very well interfaced with Unix. It also runs stand-alone without Unix. Mitch uses it in the hardware lab at Sun to debug decadent wayward hardware, by dropping in a Forth ROM, talking to it through a serial port, and running it in the framebuffer memory! [It looks real neat munching away on the screen, and it can work even when the main memory is fried!] The list of features goes on and on... The ability to dynamicly load in C object files makes Sun Forth useful for a whole lot of things you'd normally never think of (or at least admit to thinking of) using Forth for! On the Sun-3, I linked in a version of the X10 "uwm" window manager I had modified to do pie menus. I could call all the window manager functions from Forth, passing them arguments on the stack, and I could bind mouse actions and menu selections to Forth functions. I moved the main control loop that dispatched events into Forth, so I had a crack at the events before passing them on to uwm. Forth could could respond to window system events, track the mouse, pop up menus, change the cursor, move windows around, etc... It had complete access to all the window manager function and data structures. One thing I used this system for was to implement an experiment that Jack Callahan designed, comparing pie menus with linear menus. (A paper describing the experiment is in the CHI'88 conference proceedings.) The Forthified window manager administered the experiment by randomizing the order in which the menus were presented, prompting the test subject to select a certain item from each menu, and recording the menu selections made and the time each took, etc... The Forth system was very useful for prototyping different mouse tracking techniques for pie menus -- it would have been very painful to have to go through the old edit-compile-link cycle every time I wanted to tweak something! NeWS is an example of how useful it is to have a window manager with an interactive extension language! (But I didn't have NeWS yet.) X window managers are big messy programs (even in the X10 days!), but I was able to plug X10 uwm right into Sun Forth, and start hacking away -- instant extension language! (Though uwm wasn't exactly /designed/ for that kind of abuse!) I've also used Sun Forth for other projects, like prototyping a hypertext markup language interpreter (NeWS HyperTIES), and as a Cellular Automata Machine rule compiler. I cloned Tom Tofoli's CAM rule language in Sun Forth, and wrote a tool for computing and displaying them in NeWS. Not anything like as fast as the real CAM hardware [256x256 cells @ 60 frames/sec], but if you feed it the right rules and initial conditions, and wait a while, it will make lots of pretty patterns that take up lots of disk space. Mitch swears the PO box number was totally coincidental! Disclamer: Of course I'm quite biased, since I worked with Mitch for a summer, and I just love his Forth system. But so does Mitch, or it wouldn't have so many great features! -Don

Clem Cole writes: I have a similar and maybe even more extreme position. When I was a manager I placed restrictions on the tools and customizations for members of my team. My goal was to make sure that any team member could go over to any other team member's desk and get stuff done. I strongly pushed vi as an editor because it was "standard"; as Clem said every emacs seemed to be different. I prohibited the redefinition of the vi key bindings and also any shell aliases that replaced standard commands. Nothing worse for productivity than going to help out a colleague and then discovering that they the redefined "ls" as "rm"! Jon

Ian Zimmerman writes: Emacs is a lot more "stable" these days; there aren't as many versions floating around. No way to answer your question about keystrokes; it really depends on what you're doing. I would guess that it's a wash. Of course, this depends on your point of view. I remember a big argument decades ago with Ed Post of Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal fame. He was claiming that emacs was superior because it was "modeless". Someone else in the car stumped him by asking the question "Isn't holding down the meta key a mode?" So vi may require hitting escape, but emacs is very heavy on the shift key usage so as I said, it's likely a wash. I didn't prohibit people from creating their own tools and shortcuts. I prevented them from using existing utility names for their tools and shortcuts. That meant that when they asked someone else in the group to take a look at a problem that that person could actually do so instead of causing damage. And yes, I would prohibit you making a program called perl-rename if it did something different than perl-rename. I wouldn't care if it was identical. Not sure why you wouldn't set your path to find it wherever it was or just make a link. Jon

From Andy Glew’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyglew/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyglew/> UNIX lab manager Company Name: McGill Dates Employed: 1982 – 1985 Employment Duration: 3 yrs McGill University EE UNIX lab systems administration, PDP-11 running UNIX version 2*pi (>6, <7, irrational) -Don

One of my predecessors at JHU decided 6.06 was a nice symmetrical number and stuck the version there through many kernel changes. When he left, our release numbers started forward again. The BRL/JHU kernel was based on V6. It had a kludge to allow more that 256 users but eventually, we widened the UID/GID to 16 bits each. We then added a the ability to mount either V6 or V7 file systems (we had a lot of removable V6 FS media). -----Original Message----- From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:09 AM To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Subject: Re: UNIX version 2*pi On Tue, 17 Oct 2017, Don Hopkins wrote: Sounds like the one I was maintaining at UNSW: Edition 6, with the bits of Edition 7 that would fit on an 11/40 and 11/60, plus local AUSAM stuff. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

JHU ownership was a bit more of a kludge. If your GID was less than 200, then everything worked the normal UNIX way. If your GID was greater than 200, then it was also taken to be part of the UID. The student accounts would have a GID based on the class that they were in. Of course, newgrp, setuid, setgid (and their related bits) had to be changed to avoid secuirty fun and games. I spent a lot of time trying to break that when I was just a student. When I became one of the system programmers, I spent a lot of time trying to fix those holes. -----Original Message----- We dropped the GID (nobody used them) and glued it onto the UID, thus making it 16-bit. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."