On Sun, 13 Jul 2014, Mark Longridge wrote:
I'm interested in comparing notes with C
programmers who have written
programs for Unix v5, v6 and v7.
I'll try and remember, but this was about 40 years ago...
Also I'm interested to know if there's
anything similar to the scanf
function for unix v5. Stdio and iolib I know well enough to do file IO
but v5 predates iolib.
Not a chance; about all it had were the system calls. Portable I/O came
with either Edition 6 or PWB, then Standard I/O replaced it. I could be
wrong, of course... Ed5 may have had getc()/putc() - I dunno.
Back in 1988 I tried to write a universal rubik's
cube program which I
called unirubik and after discovering TUHS I tried to backport it to v7
(which was easy) and v6 (which was a bit harder) and now I'm trying to
backport it to v5. The v5 version currently doesn't have the any file IO
capability as yet. Here are a few links to the various versions:
http://www.maxhost.org/other/unirubik.c.v7
http://www.maxhost.org/other/unirubik.c.v6
http://www.maxhost.org/other/unirubik.c.v5
Hmmm... I must have a peek at them, and for laughs port the v7 one to
BSD/Linux/Mac.
[...]
My initial impression of Unix v5 was that it was a
primitive and almost
unusable version of Unix but now that I understand it a bit better it
seems a fairly complete system. I'm a bit foggy on what the memory
limits are with v5 and v6. Unix v7 seems to run under simh emulating a
PDP-11/70 with 2 megabytes of ram (any more than that and the kernel
panics).
Well, complete for the day... Memory limits were basically 64kw for each
space (I'm not even sure whether Ed5 had sep/id space). The irony of the
PDP-11 was that it could support virtual memory in theory, but simply
didn't have enough address registers. Or am I thinking of some other box?
Also I'd be interested in seeing the source code
for Ken Thompson's APL
interpreter for Unix v5. I know it does exist as it is referenced in the
Unix v5 manual. The earliest version I could find was dated Oct 1976 and
I've written some notes on it here:
http://apl.maxhost.org/getting-apl-11-1976-to-work.txt
Gawd; I'd love to see APL again! I used it on the IBM-360.
Ok, that's about it for now. Is there any chance
of going further back
to v4, v3, v2 etc?
Very little; Ed5 was the first public release, so unless an old-timer has
them squirreled away somewhere...
-- Dave