you're not wrong, but the other take on this is that the AT&T licensing and some other things tended to make the circle of people who could "see" this code significantly smaller than those feeding off Unix 32V/v7 -> BSD -> Solaris. this isn't meant to imply you did anything "wrong" -It was probably a huge distraction having randoms begging for a tape of v8/9/10 with low to no willingness to "give back" -G On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 9:06 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Excited as I was to see this history of Unix code in a single repository: > > https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo > > it continues the long-standing tradition of ignoring all the work done at Bell Labs after v7. I consider v8 v9 v10 to be worth of attention, even influential, but to hear this list talk about it - or discussions just about anywhere else - you'd think they never existed. There are exceptions, but this site does reinforce the broadly known version of the story. > > It's doubly ironic for me because people often mistakenly credit me for working on Unix, but I landed at the Labs after v7 was long dispatched. At the Labs, I first worked on what became v8. > > I suppose it's because the history flowed as this site shows, with BSD being the driving force for a number of reasons, but it feels to me that a large piece of Unix history has been sidelined. > > I know it's a whiny lament, but those neglected systems had interesting advances. > > -rob >

Sockets (which btw, totally SUCK PUS) were coded into things and even (YECHH) made POSIX and IETF spec status. Streams didn't stand a chance.

On Jun 16, 2022, at 4:44 PM, George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote: The stream abstraction is a nice (c)lean abstraction but it doesn't quite work for things like multicast or datagrams in general. Plan9 doesn't have sockets but the way it deals with UDP is not simple either. The complexity is in the protocols themselves. Even at layer 2 (below the IP layer) the amount of complexity is mind boggling (though I suppose high-speed backbone switches do all this in hardware!).

It is indeed problematic that the Unix history repository is missing the Research Editions. At the time I created it, the source code of the Research Unix Eighth and Ninth Editions wasn't openly available. I'm now discussing with another member of this list for a pull request to add them. Incorporating them properly isn't trivial, because various mappings are needed to establish authorship information and to allow git-blame to work across snapshots of moved files. Diomidis - https://www.spinellis.gr/ On 17-Jun-22 2:06, Rob Pike wrote:

To make people more aware of post-v7 Research UNIX it would be great if you could actually run all of them in a simulator and have the manuals available. V8 is working perfectly in simh and there's blit (jerq) emulation as well. DMD 5620 emulation should be possible as well with Seth Morabito's emulator, but as far as I understand it needs a different ROM that we don't have a dump of. (I've had a real 5620 connected to my laptop running v8 in simh, it worked perfectly) V9 exists as a port to Sun-3 and it can actually be booted apparently. The source seems incomplete, but the VAX kernel source seems to be included as well. Maybe it could be gotten to run in simh on a VAX in some form or another? V10 exists but not as anything that boots. I think getting this to work would be the holy grail but also requires quite a bit of effort. I don't know if the V8 and V10 file systems are compatible, but if that is the case one could probably start by bootstrapping from V8. It also includes the multilevel-secure IX system and software for the 630 MTG terminal. As for the manual... The V8 files have the man pages but not much of the documents. The V9 files seem to have neither. The V10 files have both the man pages and the documents but I have not yet tried to troff any of this. Since I know at least the V10 manual to be a work of art and beauty I think it should be available to everyone. I have not seen the physical V8 and V9 manuals, but if they look anything like the V10 one, they too deserve to be available to the public. Does anyone have a plan of attack? I'd gladly join some effort to make the research systems more visible or available again (but probably don't have the motivation to do so alone). Angelo/aap

I wasn't talking about Plan 9, but it's interesting to know that there was an attempt at a VAX kernel. On 19/06/22, Rob Pike wrote: CPUs

It brings up one other question for me though: rsc made a repo of the plan 9 kernel source code (https://9p.io/sources/extra/9hist/) (which can now be found in git format too: https://github.com/0intro/9hist) But what about the non-kernel parts of the system? Is there a chance of getting the user space stuff as well? Does it even still exist? aap On 19/06/22, Rob Pike wrote: > Aha, yes, my mistake, sorry about that. I bet I misread that mail because > of the mention of a Sun port, which put me in a nostalgic (read: resentful) > mood. > > Anyway, knowing about the Plan 9 VAX kernel might be interesting, but the > kernel itself was not. > > -rob > > > On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 6:17 PM Angelo Papenhoff <aap(a)papnet.eu> wrote: > > > I wasn't talking about Plan 9, but it's interesting to know that there > > was an attempt at a VAX kernel. > > > > On 19/06/22, Rob Pike wrote: > > > The VAX Plan 9 kernel isn't worth anything. It never worked, was never > > > used, and was abandoned completely when better SMP machines started > > > appearing. The VAX code wasn't even ported, as I remember it; Ken and I > > > started over from scratch with a pair of 4-core SGI machines with MIPS > > CPUs > > > and wackadoo synchronization hardware. > > > > > > -rob > >

That's only the releases. I meant the earlier pre-1e code. aap On 19/06/22, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > See https://plan9foundation.org/ and https://p9f.org/dl/ in particular > to download the sources. > > Arnold

Aha, yes, my mistake, sorry about that. I bet I misread that mail because of the mention of a Sun port, which put me in a nostalgic (read: resentful) mood. Anyway, knowing about the Plan 9 VAX kernel might be interesting, but the kernel itself was not. -rob On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 6:17 PM Angelo Papenhoff <aap(a)papnet.eu> wrote:

Just chiming in a bit.. Rob, it might be interesting to old geezers like me as well as newbies entering the field to get a perspective on Plan 9 and its evolution. The motivations behind it. What your group was trying to accomplish, the approach, pitfalls and the entire decision making process as things went along. Even things that went horribly wrong and what happened etc.

On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 2:33 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote: Agreed. A retrospective would be a very welcome addition to the canon. - Dan C. (PS: I _had_ heard of the VAX effort before, but I don't think I'd known quite how nascent it was before it was abandoned in favor of MIPS and 68k.)

On Tue, Jun 21, 2022 at 05:56:02PM -0600, Jacob Moody wrote: Pretty sure datakit predated Plan 9, didn't Greg Chesson work on that? He was my mentor at SGI, my memory is datakit was sort of early on in his career and then he did XTP, which nobody knows about but I believe is still used by the military. Unless the early Bell Labs datakit and the Plan 9 datakit are different things.

On Jun 21, 2022, at 6:55 PM, George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote: There was this persisting story that Ken got permission from somebody like CBS or Sony to have a very large amount of classical music on a 400MB drive, for research purposes. No, really: he was doing some psycho-acoustic thing comparing compressed to uncompressed for somebody, or improving on the fraunhoffer algorithms which became MP3. The point was, the rest of us had to listen to CDs and Ken had the complete works of Bach (or something) on a hard drive, which we were told he kept in the office, and played at home over a landline of some horrendously high bandwidth, un-imaginable speeds like a megabit, imagine, a MILLION of those suckers. How dare he. Thats more than the whole of queensland. I imagine the truth is much less interesting, and there was no major IPR fraud going on at the labs coding stuff as MP3 like we imagined, under the table. I imagine this would also have been a Datakit T-1. But surely that was a 1.44mbit carrier? T1 was smaller than E1 because europeans and asians learned to count to 32 not 24. -G On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 10:48 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Plan 9 used Datakit as its network for quite a while. The Gnot terminals had an INCON interface, a megabit (approximately) twisted pair adjunct to Datakit. I had an INCON link running over a T-1 link to my house - great excitement back in the day. (The kernel downloaded over the line and booted the machine up to the window system - there was no local disk - from power up, in 7 seconds.) NJ Bell needed to install a new nitrogen-pressurized 26-pair cable, supported by a new telephone pole, to set it up, because I had already used up all available pairs on the existing line to my house. All included at no extra cost. (You pay for the service, not its construction.) > > When the internet became unavoidable, we used Plan 9's import mechanism to import the single external TCP/IP interface from our gateway machine, over Datakit, to the Gnots. We did the same, but importing now over IL (an ethernet protocol built by Phil Winterbottom) when our terminals became PCs. > > That's how I remember it, at least, but I might have got some details wrong. I think much of this is covered in http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/ > > -rob > > > On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 10:13 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: >> >> On Tue, Jun 21, 2022 at 05:56:02PM -0600, Jacob Moody wrote: >>> I recently stumbled across the existence of datakit >>> when going through the plan9foundation source archives. >>> Would be curious to hear more about its involvement >>> with plan9. >> >> Pretty sure datakit predated Plan 9, didn't Greg Chesson work on that? >> He was my mentor at SGI, my memory is datakit was sort of early on in >> his career and then he did XTP, which nobody knows about but I believe >> is still used by the military. >> >> Unless the early Bell Labs datakit and the Plan 9 datakit are different >> things.

On Jun 21, 2022, at 7:14 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote: George Michaelson writes: This reminds me of a Ken story from the late '90s. I was at a conference that I won't name where Ken gave a talk about his compression work; if I remember correctly his goal was to fit all of the Billboard Top 100 songs of all time onto a single CD. He showed us the big stack of disks that he made to give to us, but then said that to his surprise the the lawyers refused to give permission. At that point he became very focused on messing with his slides while everyone got up, got in line, and took a disc. After the pile was gone Ken looked up and nonchalantly continued his talk. That might also have been the conference at which Ken showed us videos of him in a MIG. Jon

On Tue, Jun 21, 2022 at 05:56:02PM -0600, Jacob Moody wrote: Pretty sure datakit predated Plan 9, didn't Greg Chesson work on that? He was my mentor at SGI, my memory is datakit was sort of early on in his career and then he did XTP, which nobody knows about but I believe is still used by the military. Unless the early Bell Labs datakit and the Plan 9 datakit are different things.