22 Sep
2022
22 Sep
'22
8:26 a.m.
Greetings,
I was looking at the various Usenix tapes we have in the TUHS archive,
trying to sort them all out.
In looking at ug091377.tar.gz in Applications/Usenix_77, I found this
paragraph at the end of its read_me
" Finally, if we have an executed Harvard License on file and
if there is room on your tape, the directory "h" contains the
newest (July 1977) release of the HRSTS system. We have also in-
cluded the old Toronto release in the directory "t" if it was re-
quested from a Toronto licensee."
This tape had the 'h' directory, so I'll be playing around with the HRSTS
system to see if I can get it booting in TUHS (I didn't know we had this
til now)... This tape did not have the 't' directory, however.
What is 'the old Toronoto release'? I've not seen references to it so far
in the other histories of this early period I've encountered. And does
anybody have a copy of it?
Warner
22 Sep
22 Sep
8:42 a.m.
For those of us not involved with Unix in 1977, what was the
HRSTS system?
Thanks,
Arnold
(Who first met Unix in 1980 :-)
Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
Greetings,
I was looking at the various Usenix tapes we have in the TUHS archive,
trying to sort them all out.
In looking at ug091377.tar.gz in Applications/Usenix_77, I found this
paragraph at the end of its read_me
" Finally, if we have an executed Harvard License on file and
if there is room on your tape, the directory "h" contains the
newest (July 1977) release of the HRSTS system. We have also in-
cluded the old Toronto release in the directory "t" if it was re-
quested from a Toronto licensee."
This tape had the 'h' directory, so I'll be playing around with the HRSTS
system to see if I can get it booting in TUHS (I didn't know we had this
til now)... This tape did not have the 't' directory, however.
What is 'the old Toronoto release'? I've not seen references to it so far
in the other histories of this early period I've encountered. And does
anybody have a copy of it?
Warner
9 a.m.
Hi Arnold,
For those of us not involved with Unix in 1977, what
was the
HRSTS system?
‘The Harvard/Radcliffe Student Time-sharing System Terminal Users Guide,
1st edition, September 10, 1974, Center for Research in Computing
Technology, Harvard University’.
Tucker Taft was involved back then.
https://www.adahome.com/Rogues/taft.html
https://twitter.com/sttaft
--
Cheers, Ralph.
4:13 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 3:00 AM Ralph Corderoy <ralph(a)inputplus.co.uk>
wrote:
Hi Arnold,
These are the same folks that also did the LISP that appeared in various
2BSD
distributions as well.
I had a bit of a sleepless night last night... So I took a look at it and
I'm less hopeful
about being able to rebuild the system.
There's a special C compiler. We have the binaries for it and instructions
on how
to build the source. But those instructions refer to files that aren't in
the system
and not in the few historic unix distributions from around that time. At
least there's
a binary.
Next, the kernel lacks the makefiles / build scripts, but so does v6, so
maybe
that's par for the course.
There's a lot of userland changes (for libh and libg), but other than the
libraries and a few special progarms (pl1, macro11, link11, etc), so I'm
assuming
that most of the stock 6th edition could be used.
Finally, how do I bootstrap? Is this a "Install v6, and then build our cool
stuff"
or is that also a missing piece.
So there's a number of challenges here.... This was definitely not the era
of
fully integrated reproducible build systems...
Warner
For those of us not involved with Unix in 1977,
what was the
HRSTS system?
‘The Harvard/Radcliffe Student Time-sharing System Terminal Users Guide,
1st edition, September 10, 1974, Center for Research in Computing
Technology, Harvard University’.
Tucker Taft was involved back then.
https://www.adahome.com/Rogues/taft.html
https://twitter.com/sttaft
--
Cheers, Ralph.
5 p.m.
Warner Losh wrote:
I found a description in a Usenix paper[1], and it really seems to be a
lot of "Harvard specials" in there. MACRO-11, LINK-11, DDT, TECO,
FILCOM, shell with TENEX file completion, even ECL[2]. To me it looks
like a layer of PDP-10 on top of Unix.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_june_11_unix_news.…
[2] https://github.com/PDP-10/harvard-ecl
For those of
us not involved with Unix in 1977, what was the
HRSTS system?
‘The Harvard/Radcliffe Student Time-sharing System Terminal Users Guide,
1st edition, September 10, 1974, Center for Research in Computing
Technology, Harvard University’.
These are the same folks that also did the LISP that appeared in
various 2BSD distributions as well. There's a special C compiler. 
5:49 p.m.
New subject: Berkeley 11/70 (was Re: Strange Reference on Usenix_77 tape)
On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 1:00 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote:
Warner Losh wrote:
I found a description in a Usenix paper[1], and it really seems to be a
lot of "Harvard specials" in there. MACRO-11, LINK-11, DDT, TECO,
FILCOM, shell with TENEX file completion, even ECL[2]. To me it looks
like a layer of PDP-10 on top of Unix.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_june_11_unix_news.…
[2] https://github.com/PDP-10/harvard-ecl
Thanks, that was very interesting. Indeed, it sounds like at attempt
to bring a TENEX-style user experience to Unix.
Also interesting was the short article about, "the Berkeley 11/70 System"
with notes from Ken. The description of the UID scheme to separate
students from "regular" users and the note that "the group concept is
about to disappear" were particularly intriguing; clearly an evolutionary
dead end, but striking in that this must have yielded a much greater
level of isolation. Also, the note about per-directory quotas (as opposed
to per-user/group quotas) was interesting.
I wonder what other early attempts at hardening the system for
educational environments were made that similarly didn't make it
in the long haul, and to what extent such efforts have survived?
- Dan C.
For those
of us not involved with Unix in 1977, what was the
HRSTS system?
‘The Harvard/Radcliffe Student Time-sharing System Terminal Users Guide,
1st edition, September 10, 1974, Center for Research in Computing
Technology, Harvard University’.
These are the same folks that also did the LISP that appeared in
various 2BSD distributions as well. There's a special C compiler. 
24 Sep
24 Sep
3:54 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 2:39 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 1:00 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote:
That reminds me... anybody have a good in-process debugger like ddt that
can be linked in these days?
Warner
ᐧ
Warner Losh wrote:
lot of "Harvard specials" in there. MACRO-11, LINK-11, DDT, TECO,
I ran the macro-11, linker, ddt and teco back in the day,
586
days inactive
588
days old
7 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
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arnold＠skeeve.com -
Clem Cole -
Dan Cross -
Lars Brinkhoff -
Ralph Corderoy -
Warner Losh