From cmhanson at eschatologist.net  Sun Nov  1 11:18:03 2020
From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson)
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2020 18:18:03 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Xinu in emulation, e.g. SIMH?
Message-ID: <2D81AE28-7163-4B52-BED9-3C5EBCBE5608@eschatologist.net>

Has anyone gotten Xinu running in SIMH? It seems like it should be straightforward to run the "support" utilities under BSD on an emulated VAX and then run Xinu itself on an emulated LSI-11. If anyone's done so, I'd be interested to learn what all you had to do to set it up and get it working.

  -- Chris
  -- who needs to figure out SIMH config file syntax to match the board set he wants to simulate


From lm at mcvoy.com  Sun Nov  1 11:58:58 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2020 18:58:58 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Xinu in emulation, e.g. SIMH?
In-Reply-To: <2D81AE28-7163-4B52-BED9-3C5EBCBE5608@eschatologist.net>
References: <2D81AE28-7163-4B52-BED9-3C5EBCBE5608@eschatologist.net>
Message-ID: <20201101015858.GS25151@mcvoy.com>

Is this Doug Comer's XINU?  I haven't talked to him for a while but he
was one of my heros like the Bell Labs guys.  I loved his code, it
was so simple like the Lions doc for v6.

I can try and drag him to be here, that would be cool.

On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 06:18:03PM -0700, Chris Hanson wrote:
> Has anyone gotten Xinu running in SIMH? It seems like it should be straightforward to run the "support" utilities under BSD on an emulated VAX and then run Xinu itself on an emulated LSI-11. If anyone's done so, I'd be interested to learn what all you had to do to set it up and get it working.
> 
>   -- Chris
>   -- who needs to figure out SIMH config file syntax to match the board set he wants to simulate

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

From cmhanson at eschatologist.net  Sun Nov  1 13:46:45 2020
From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson)
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2020 20:46:45 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Xinu in emulation, e.g. SIMH?
In-Reply-To: <20201101015858.GS25151@mcvoy.com>
References: <20201101015858.GS25151@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <24339552-7ABA-4387-9F62-56E12BBB07A2@eschatologist.net>

Yeah, Comer’s XINU book at Tannenbaum’s MINIX book are the books from which I learned C, so now that I have an LSI-11 I’d like to get the former running. (I ran MacMinix in the early 1990s, and even published a patch to flush the 68040 caches on context switch so you could leave them enabled…)

  — Chris

Sent from my iPad

> On Oct 31, 2020, at 6:58 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> Is this Doug Comer's XINU?  I haven't talked to him for a while but he
> was one of my heros like the Bell Labs guys.  I loved his code, it
> was so simple like the Lions doc for v6.
> 
> I can try and drag him to be here, that would be cool.
> 
>> On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 06:18:03PM -0700, Chris Hanson wrote:
>> Has anyone gotten Xinu running in SIMH? It seems like it should be straightforward to run the "support" utilities under BSD on an emulated VAX and then run Xinu itself on an emulated LSI-11. If anyone's done so, I'd be interested to learn what all you had to do to set it up and get it working.
>> 
>>  -- Chris
>>  -- who needs to figure out SIMH config file syntax to match the board set he wants to simulate
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy                     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 


From wkt at tuhs.org  Mon Nov  2 12:45:56 2020
From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 12:45:56 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] Xinu in emulation, e.g. SIMH?
In-Reply-To: <20201101015858.GS25151@mcvoy.com>
References: <2D81AE28-7163-4B52-BED9-3C5EBCBE5608@eschatologist.net>
 <20201101015858.GS25151@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <20201102024556.GA10850@minnie.tuhs.org>

On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 06:58:58PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Is this Doug Comer's XINU?  I haven't talked to him for a while but he
> was one of my heros like the Bell Labs guys.  I loved his code, it
> was so simple like the Lions doc for v6.
> I can try and drag him to be here, that would be cool.

Yes please. I learned C from the Xinu book when I translated Xinu into 6502
assembly to get it to run on an Apple ][+.

Cheers, Warren

From grog at lemis.com  Mon Nov  2 15:07:17 2020
From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 16:07:17 +1100
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
Message-ID: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>

Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John
Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System".
I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of
scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for
some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't
been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on
alt.folklore.computers in 1994.  But now it seems that the "book" had
been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was
the license revoked.  Does anybody have any insights?  What
restrictions were there on its distribution?  What was the format?
Was it a real book, or just bound notes?

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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From imp at bsdimp.com  Mon Nov  2 15:21:23 2020
From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2020 22:21:23 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>
References: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>
Message-ID: <CANCZdfpAkOXOc9eq49ci748Q5bcQ4dcDKRmmjO_XY_X4JciN0Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 10:16 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John
> Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System".
> I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of
> scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for
> some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't
> been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on
> alt.folklore.computers in 1994.  But now it seems that the "book" had
> been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was
> the license revoked.  Does anybody have any insights?  What
> restrictions were there on its distribution?  What was the format?
> Was it a real book, or just bound notes?
>

The pictures I've seen online are of a bound book, but lack photos of
what's inside. It contained a legend in the front saying you needed a 6th
edition license from AT&T to receive a copy.  Beyond that, I'd love to hear
what others know about this detail.

Warner
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From andrew at humeweb.com  Mon Nov  2 17:21:57 2020
From: andrew at humeweb.com (Andrew Hume)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2020 23:21:57 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>
References: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>
Message-ID: <AB114045-86E0-4FE5-93C1-4DCD6F2776C0@humeweb.com>

i was a TA for the course which used this as a textbook.
my memory is little faded on this (it was on the other side of my stroke),
but i believe they were perfect bound (cloth strip and glue) and had
two different colors for the covers (i want to say orange and red).
they might have been just stapled but they were thick enough that staples
might have been insufficient.

i certainly remember john printing them off on the DEC printer.

as for the permissions, i can’t recall anything at the time (this was about 45 years ago),
but do remember the fuss at the Labs when Bell Labs started printing their own
high security copies just a couple of years later.

	andrew hume

> On Nov 1, 2020, at 9:07 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> 
> Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John
> Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System".
> I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of
> scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for
> some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't
> been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on
> alt.folklore.computers in 1994.  But now it seems that the "book" had
> been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was
> the license revoked.  Does anybody have any insights?  What
> restrictions were there on its distribution?  What was the format?
> Was it a real book, or just bound notes?
> 
> Greg
> --
> Sent from my desktop computer.
> Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA


From davida at pobox.com  Mon Nov  2 17:59:23 2020
From: davida at pobox.com (David Arnold)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 18:59:23 +1100
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <AB114045-86E0-4FE5-93C1-4DCD6F2776C0@humeweb.com>
References: <AB114045-86E0-4FE5-93C1-4DCD6F2776C0@humeweb.com>
Message-ID: <359CCDCB-2739-4FDA-8404-16C1B88410EE@pobox.com>

The UNSW Library Appears to have a copy in their storage, accessible by special request.  It has a copyright date of “c1977” so it’s not the later “properly” published edition. 

https://primoa.library.unsw.edu.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay?vid=UNSWS&docid=UNSW_ALMA21116225050001731&query=any,contains,John%20lions&_ga=2.60871272.51366765.1604303632-102727300.1604303632



d


> On 2 Nov 2020, at 18:44, Andrew Hume <andrew at humeweb.com> wrote:
> 
> i was a TA for the course which used this as a textbook.
> my memory is little faded on this (it was on the other side of my stroke),
> but i believe they were perfect bound (cloth strip and glue) and had
> two different colors for the covers (i want to say orange and red).
> they might have been just stapled but they were thick enough that staples
> might have been insufficient.
> 
> i certainly remember john printing them off on the DEC printer.
> 
> as for the permissions, i can’t recall anything at the time (this was about 45 years ago),
> but do remember the fuss at the Labs when Bell Labs started printing their own
> high security copies just a couple of years later.
> 
>    andrew hume
> 
>> On Nov 1, 2020, at 9:07 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John
>> Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System".
>> I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of
>> scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for
>> some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't
>> been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on
>> alt.folklore.computers in 1994.  But now it seems that the "book" had
>> been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was
>> the license revoked.  Does anybody have any insights?  What
>> restrictions were there on its distribution?  What was the format?
>> Was it a real book, or just bound notes?
>> 
>> Greg
>> --
>> Sent from my desktop computer.
>> Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
>> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
>> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
> 
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From wkt at tuhs.org  Mon Nov  2 19:51:19 2020
From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 19:51:19 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfpAkOXOc9eq49ci748Q5bcQ4dcDKRmmjO_XY_X4JciN0Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>
 <CANCZdfpAkOXOc9eq49ci748Q5bcQ4dcDKRmmjO_XY_X4JciN0Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20201102095119.GA16921@minnie.tuhs.org>

On Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 10:21:23PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
>    The pictures I've seen online are of a bound book, but lack photos of
>    what's inside. It contained a legend in the front saying you needed a
>    6th edition license from AT&T to receive a copy.  Beyond that, I'd love
>    to hear what others know about this detail.

I have my copies here, and have just taken some photos:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org/wktcloud/index.php/s/2io7tpmTyn8WWeP

29.7cm by 21.0cm by about 7mm thick, each. They seem to be photocopied
sheets, stapled on the left, with coloured front and back pages, with a
brown cloth binding glued over the left-hand edge. One is magenta, the
other is dull orange. My photos make the orange one brighter than it
actually is, sorry it's artifical light (night-time) here.

Cheers, Warren

From egbegb2 at gmail.com  Mon Nov  2 20:26:29 2020
From: egbegb2 at gmail.com (Ed Bradford)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 04:26:29 -0600
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfpAkOXOc9eq49ci748Q5bcQ4dcDKRmmjO_XY_X4JciN0Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CANCZdfpAkOXOc9eq49ci748Q5bcQ4dcDKRmmjO_XY_X4JciN0Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AC706F01-BCC5-4A9B-8C9F-76FDA23E51F9@gmail.com>

I had the orange and red books but I sold them to a fellow in Europe who has a Unix Museum. He also bought one of UNIX lice eggs plates.

I took high resolution photos of each page before I sent them to Europe. I can send copies if that is legal and anyone is interested.

Ed Bradford
Pflugerville, TX

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 1, 2020, at 11:22 PM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 10:16 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>> Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John
>> Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System".
>> I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of
>> scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for
>> some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't
>> been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on
>> alt.folklore.computers in 1994.  But now it seems that the "book" had
>> been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was
>> the license revoked.  Does anybody have any insights?  What
>> restrictions were there on its distribution?  What was the format?
>> Was it a real book, or just bound notes?
> 
> The pictures I've seen online are of a bound book, but lack photos of what's inside. It contained a legend in the front saying you needed a 6th edition license from AT&T to receive a copy.  Beyond that, I'd love to hear what others know about this detail.
> 
> Warner 
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From arnold at skeeve.com  Mon Nov  2 21:04:21 2020
From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com)
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2020 04:04:21 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <AC706F01-BCC5-4A9B-8C9F-76FDA23E51F9@gmail.com>
References: <CANCZdfpAkOXOc9eq49ci748Q5bcQ4dcDKRmmjO_XY_X4JciN0Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <AC706F01-BCC5-4A9B-8C9F-76FDA23E51F9@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <202011021104.0A2B4LDw015231@freefriends.org>

Ed Bradford <egbegb2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had the orange and red books but I sold them to a fellow in Europe
> who has a Unix Museum. He also bought one of UNIX lice eggs plates.
> 
> I took high resolution photos of each page before I sent them to Europe. I
> can send copies if that is legal and anyone is interested.
>
> Ed Bradford
> Pflugerville, TX

Given that the Lions book was republished for anyone to purchase a few
years back (I bought a copy, as well as having a samisdat photocopy),
I see no reason why they couldn't be freely distributed. Maybe even
added to the archives, if Warren agrees.

From clemc at ccc.com  Tue Nov  3 00:26:51 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 09:26:51 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <AB114045-86E0-4FE5-93C1-4DCD6F2776C0@humeweb.com>
References: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>
 <AB114045-86E0-4FE5-93C1-4DCD6F2776C0@humeweb.com>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2OOYEJZ_REruZu-rEnQaamNriysaj4FVtFSG4T_1WVjpw@mail.gmail.com>

Andrew - can't speak for the original, but the BTL version was red and
orange and was perfect bound.  But, I was not on 11x17 - it must have been
printed on A3 paper, as copying was always a little funny (maybe it was on
traditional 'green bar' size 14 7/8 x 11 - I don't remember - but my copy
of the original was on US 11x17).

Ordering it originally was difficult.   I remember that we tried to order a
copy for Tektronix in the summer/fall of 1979 because I had my n-th
generation xerographic copy that I had brought from CMU and Tek wanted to
legitimate copy.  IIRC, I wrote the PO request and it bounced back from Tek
purchasing because it had been denied by somebody at AT&T.  We had to call
the right person (Al Arms if memory serves me), and then I had the restart
on the Tek side, but we did eventually get an official version - which
as on my desk for a few years [Of course, we immediately made more copies
-- I think I made them for Steve Glaser, Mike Zuhl, Ward Cunningham and
possibly Jon if he did not yet have a copy from his BTL days].

When I left Tek I gave the original Tektronix copy of the two books to
Terry Laskodi.  I have wondered what happened to that copy after he
tragically died in the early 1980s.  I fear it was tossed by someone that
had no idea what its value was.

Clem

On Mon, Nov 2, 2020 at 2:44 AM Andrew Hume <andrew at humeweb.com> wrote:

> i was a TA for the course which used this as a textbook.
> my memory is little faded on this (it was on the other side of my stroke),
> but i believe they were perfect bound (cloth strip and glue) and had
> two different colors for the covers (i want to say orange and red).
> they might have been just stapled but they were thick enough that staples
> might have been insufficient.
>
> i certainly remember john printing them off on the DEC printer.
>
> as for the permissions, i can’t recall anything at the time (this was
> about 45 years ago),
> but do remember the fuss at the Labs when Bell Labs started printing their
> own
> high security copies just a couple of years later.
>
>         andrew hume
>
> > On Nov 1, 2020, at 9:07 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> >
> > Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John
> > Lions' "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System".
> > I've been hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of
> > scan errors) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for
> > some years now, and my understanding had been that the book hadn't
> > been published, just photocopied, until Warren posted it on
> > alt.folklore.computers in 1994.  But now it seems that the "book" had
> > been published by UNSW when Lions held the course, and only later was
> > the license revoked.  Does anybody have any insights?  What
> > restrictions were there on its distribution?  What was the format?
> > Was it a real book, or just bound notes?
> >
> > Greg
> > --
> > Sent from my desktop computer.
> > Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
> > See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> > This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
> > reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
>
>
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From norman at oclsc.org  Tue Nov  3 02:25:53 2020
From: norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)
Date: Mon,  2 Nov 2020 11:25:53 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
Message-ID: <20201102162553.D5D884422E@lignose.oclsc.org>

There also exists a latter-day AT&T version of the Lions
book.  White cover with deathstar logo; standard US letter-
sized paper, perfect-bound along the short edge.  Two
volumes: one for the source code, one for the commentary.

I have a copy, and I bet Andrew does too: as I remember,
he got a handful of them from Judy Macor (who used to
handle licensing requests--I remember speaking to her
on the phone once in my pre-Labs days) when she was
clearing old stuff out of her office, and I nabbed one.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

From arnold at skeeve.com  Tue Nov  3 03:16:18 2020
From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com)
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2020 10:16:18 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <20201102162553.D5D884422E@lignose.oclsc.org>
References: <20201102162553.D5D884422E@lignose.oclsc.org>
Message-ID: <202011021716.0A2HGIeg005278@freefriends.org>

The 1996 reprint is available:

https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Commentary-Unix-John/dp/1573980137/ref=sr_1_1?crid=4GU9QHV2HJM&dchild=1&keywords=john+lions+unix&qid=1604337238&sprefix=john+lions%2Caps%2C295&sr=8-1

From dave at horsfall.org  Tue Nov  3 07:17:29 2020
From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 08:17:29 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>
References: <20201102050717.GG72955@eureka.lemis.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011030802090.6603@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On Mon, 2 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> Warner Losh and I have been discussing the early history of John Lions' 
> "A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System". I've been 
> hosting Warren Toomey's version (with some correction of scan errors) at 
> http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ for some years now, and 
> my understanding had been that the book hadn't been published, just 
> photocopied, until Warren posted it on alt.folklore.computers in 1994. 
> But now it seems that the "book" had been published by UNSW when Lions 
> held the course, and only later was the license revoked.  Does anybody 
> have any insights?  What restrictions were there on its distribution? 
> What was the format? Was it a real book, or just bound notes?

Nroff, in bound notes at the time; it did not come out in book format 
until later (I suppose that it depends upon your definition of "book" vs. 
"bound notes"...  I was involved in it (you'll see my name in the 
credits).

I helped to proof-read it, and I lent him our LA-100 for the draft copy.

He was one of the best Comp Sci lecturers that I ever had, along with Ken 
Robinson (no longer with us) and Graham McMahon (ditto).

-- Dave

From fuz at fuz.su  Tue Nov  3 07:32:54 2020
From: fuz at fuz.su (Robert Clausecker)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 22:32:54 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] Plan 9 assembly syntax design history?
Message-ID: <20201102213254.GA39017@fuz.su>

Ken's (?) Plan 9 assemblers are well known for their idiosyncratic
syntax, placing identical behaviour across platforms over a sense
of resemblance to people used to normal assemblers.  While I am
aware of Rob's talk [1] on the basic design ideas and have read both
the Plan 9 [2] and Go [3] assembler manuals, many aspects of the
design (such as the strange way to specify static data) are
unclear and seem poorly documented.

Is there some document or other piece of information I can read on
the history of these assemblers?  Or maybe someone recalls more bits
about these details?

Yours,
Robert Clausecker

[1]: https://talks.golang.org/2016/asm.slide
[2]: https://9p.io/sys/doc/asm.html
[3]: https://golang.org/doc/asm
-- 
()  ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world 
/\  - against html email  - against proprietary attachments

From grog at lemis.com  Tue Nov  3 11:16:48 2020
From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 12:16:48 +1100
Subject: [TUHS] Lions notes, early history
In-Reply-To: <202011021104.0A2B4LDw015231@freefriends.org>
References: <CANCZdfpAkOXOc9eq49ci748Q5bcQ4dcDKRmmjO_XY_X4JciN0Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <AC706F01-BCC5-4A9B-8C9F-76FDA23E51F9@gmail.com>
 <202011021104.0A2B4LDw015231@freefriends.org>
Message-ID: <20201103011648.GD49846@eureka.lemis.com>

On Monday,  2 November 2020 at  4:04:21 -0700, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> Ed Bradford <egbegb2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I had the orange and red books but I sold them to a fellow in Europe
>> who has a Unix Museum. He also bought one of UNIX lice eggs plates.
>>
>> I took high resolution photos of each page before I sent them to Europe. I
>> can send copies if that is legal and anyone is interested.
>>
>> Ed Bradford
>> Pflugerville, TX
>
> Given that the Lions book was republished for anyone to purchase a few
> years back (I bought a copy, as well as having a samisdat photocopy),
> I see no reason why they couldn't be freely distributed. Maybe even
> added to the archives, if Warren agrees.

Yes, it's freely available now, as of about 2002.  You can download it
from http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ .  My question
related to a discussion about its copyright status when it was
written, and how it was published.  Warren's photos conveniently show
the title page (with dedication by Lions himself) with the text

  This document may contain information covered by one or more
  licenses, copyright and non-disclosure agreements.  Circulation of
  this document is restricted to holders of a license for the UNIX
  Software System from Western Electric.  All other circulation or
  reproduction is prohibited.

Since the release of the Ancient Unix license in 2002, this no longer
applies, of course.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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From ron at ronnatalie.com  Wed Nov  4 01:40:37 2020
From: ron at ronnatalie.com (Ron Natalie)
Date: Tue, 03 Nov 2020 15:40:37 +0000
Subject: [TUHS] /usr/bin/1
Message-ID: <ema06dc50b-3a79-44ad-abdf-44b7c649a699@r1.local>

This memory just came back to me.     There was a UNIX disribution 
(PWB/UNIX?) that had a program called 1.
It printed tis quaint bit of propaganda.

One Bell System.  It works.

This was fine until one day I’m at work in a big bull pen computer room 
when Bernie, one of my co-workers, shouts.
“What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor?”

My reaction is, “Well, it’s all Bell System crud.”    I walk over to his 
terminal and find he is typing 1 repeatedly at the shell prompt and 
getting the above message.  (This was back in the old /bin/ed days where 
1 got you to the top of the file).     I had to point out he wasn’t in 
the editor.

Later that day, the program was changed to say:

You’re not in the editor, Bernie.

This I think made it into one of the BRL releases and occassionally got 
inquiries as to who Bernie is.
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From clemc at ccc.com  Wed Nov  4 01:53:16 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 10:53:16 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] /usr/bin/1
In-Reply-To: <ema06dc50b-3a79-44ad-abdf-44b7c649a699@r1.local>
References: <ema06dc50b-3a79-44ad-abdf-44b7c649a699@r1.local>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2PpV_YUnH+eYaNwTsHw3fiEsz3mc4K6jE=d7miLH09eBw@mail.gmail.com>

👍

On Tue, Nov 3, 2020 at 10:49 AM Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> This memory just came back to me.     There was a UNIX disribution
> (PWB/UNIX?) that had a program called 1.
> It printed tis quaint bit of propaganda.
>
> One Bell System.  It works.
>
> This was fine until one day I’m at work in a big bull pen computer room
> when Bernie, one of my co-workers, shouts.
> “What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor?”
>
> My reaction is, “Well, it’s all Bell System crud.”    I walk over to his
> terminal and find he is typing 1 repeatedly at the shell prompt and getting
> the above message.  (This was back in the old /bin/ed days where 1 got you
> to the top of the file).     I had to point out he wasn’t in the editor.
>
> Later that day, the program was changed to say:
>
> You’re not in the editor, Bernie.
>
> This I think made it into one of the BRL releases and occassionally got
> inquiries as to who Bernie is.
>
>
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From gak at pobox.com  Wed Nov  4 02:00:39 2020
From: gak at pobox.com (pobox.com)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 08:00:39 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] /usr/bin/1
In-Reply-To: <ema06dc50b-3a79-44ad-abdf-44b7c649a699@r1.local>
References: <ema06dc50b-3a79-44ad-abdf-44b7c649a699@r1.local>
Message-ID: <D2260C32-2BC0-47B4-AF8B-BAEAE4C0E107@pobox.com>

On Nov 3, 2020, at 7:40 AM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> This memory just came back to me.     There was a UNIX disribution (PWB/UNIX?) that had a program called 1.
> It printed tis quaint bit of propaganda.
> 
> One Bell System.  It works.
> 
> This was fine until one day I’m at work in a big bull pen computer room when Bernie, one of my co-workers, shouts.
> “What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor?”
> 
> My reaction is, “Well, it’s all Bell System crud.”    I walk over to his terminal and find he is typing 1 repeatedly at the shell prompt and getting the above message.  (This was back in the old /bin/ed days where 1 got you to the top of the file).     I had to point out he wasn’t in the editor.
> 
> Later that day, the program was changed to say:
> 
> You’re not in the editor, Bernie.
> 
> This I think made it into one of the BRL releases and occassionally got inquiries as to who Bernie is.

Yes, PWB/UNIX.

I seem to recall it also had /usr/bin/flog. You pass it a process ID as argument, and it was supposed to make the process work harder. (I can't remember the exact wording on the web page. In fact, I could be confused about it being in PWB.)


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From cowan at ccil.org  Wed Nov  4 06:56:21 2020
From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 15:56:21 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] /usr/bin/1
In-Reply-To: <ema06dc50b-3a79-44ad-abdf-44b7c649a699@r1.local>
References: <ema06dc50b-3a79-44ad-abdf-44b7c649a699@r1.local>
Message-ID: <CAD2gp_TQh6Q7FOWknqRNLA13YYf2bMBjwVqkndu1_vzoy6fQMA@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Nov 3, 2020 at 10:49 AM Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

One Bell System.  It works.
>

I was told, though I didn't see this for myself, that in a post-1982
release it was changed to read "One Bell System.  It used to work."
Googling turns up "One Bell System.  It used to work before they installed
the Dimension."  (I don't know what that means.)

Every day I type "1" (or sometimes "0") to get to the top of the file in
`ex`.  (I know, of course, that `ed` is the standard editor, but I'm
willing to trade off a little standardosity for a little more helpfulness.)

As for flog(1), there is a boring modern command called that: it writes
stdin to a specified log file and rotates it on receiving SIGHUP.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Yes, chili in the eye is bad, but so is your ear.  However, I would
suggest you wash your hands thoroughly before going to the toilet.
        --gadicath
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From ality at pbrane.org  Wed Nov  4 07:49:27 2020
From: ality at pbrane.org (Anthony Martin)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 13:49:27 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Plan 9 assembly syntax design history?
In-Reply-To: <20201102213254.GA39017@fuz.su>
References: <20201102213254.GA39017@fuz.su>
Message-ID: <20201103214927.GA1091@alice>

Robert Clausecker <fuz at fuz.su> once said:
> While I am aware of Rob's talk [1] on the basic design ideas
> and have read both the Plan 9 [2] and Go [3] assembler
> manuals, many aspects of the design (such as the strange way
> to specify static data) are unclear and seem poorly
> documented.
>
> [...]
>
> [1]: https://talks.golang.org/2016/asm.slide
> [2]: https://9p.io/sys/doc/asm.html
> [3]: https://golang.org/doc/asm

Note that the Plan 9 compilers do not actually generate
machine code. They build an intermediate abstract object
code that the linkers then translate into machine code.

The syntax used by the assemblers is essentially a textual
representation of that intermediate code. If you want to
understand the design and it's idiosyncrasies, focus on the
latter.

Cheers,
  Anthony

From coppero1237 at gmail.com  Fri Nov  6 08:10:06 2020
From: coppero1237 at gmail.com (Tyler Adams)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 00:10:06 +0200
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
Message-ID: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>

Fun read and it's totally wild that people's emotional comfort with *text*
drives a lot of their love or hate of unix.

http://theody.net/elements.html

 Tyler
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From kevin.bowling at kev009.com  Fri Nov  6 10:39:35 2020
From: kevin.bowling at kev009.com (Kevin Bowling)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2020 17:39:35 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAK7dMtAEHedbBd44rXT+UdaYBQty9V=8hrfrEvL43NTixbc6Sw@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 3:11 PM Tyler Adams <coppero1237 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fun read and it's totally wild that people's emotional comfort with *text*
> drives a lot of their love or hate of unix.
>
> http://theody.net/elements.html
>
>  Tyler
>
I would concur with the adaptation that the modern predictor of unix
aptitude is attention span (which is lessened for a number of societal
changes).  It takes a fair amount of delayed gratification to get
comfortable with unix. I was able to intuitively use Mac OS Classic at age
3, and I can see modern youth have the same young intuition for touch
devices. But unix takes a bit more discipline and only rewards those who
persevere.  I suspect that’s why modern tech employers like it.  They’ve
learned to pick up the cues for people that will perform well in roles that
require perseverance and holding a lot of mental context.
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From lm at mcvoy.com  Fri Nov  6 11:41:09 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2020 17:41:09 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>

That was a good read and a perspective on Unix that I've not seen before.
I sort of fit with the author's view, I like to read and I like to write.
I am much happier typing than clicking.

Don't get me wrong, I live on Linux and it has made some stuff pleasantly
clickable.  I use virtual desktops, I have 6 of them.  There are xterms 
in 5 out of 6, the last one has firefox.  I click but I mostly live in
terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because that's the right
width (I can go on and on about that).

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 12:10:06AM +0200, Tyler Adams wrote:
> Fun read and it's totally wild that people's emotional comfort with *text*
> drives a lot of their love or hate of unix.
> 
> http://theody.net/elements.html
> 
>  Tyler

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

From cowan at ccil.org  Fri Nov  6 15:04:28 2020
From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 00:04:28 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

I click but I mostly live in
> terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because that's the right
> width (I can go on and on about that).
>

Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes that IBM
could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size of the dollar
bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it could be stored in a
mechanical cash register is miraculously the Right Thing when it comes to
reading monospaced text on a screen?  I think that's asking a bit much of
ol' man Coincidence.



↓↓ 80-column .sig ↓↓

John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
MEET US AT POINT ORANGE AT MIDNIGHT BRING YOUR DUCK OR PREPARE TO FACE
WUGGUMS
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From usotsuki at buric.co  Fri Nov  6 15:16:43 2020
From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 00:16:43 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2011060014470.15043@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>

On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, John Cowan wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> I click but I mostly live in
>> terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because that's the right
>> width (I can go on and on about that).
>>
>
> Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes that IBM
> could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size of the dollar
> bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it could be stored in a
> mechanical cash register is miraculously the Right Thing when it comes to
> reading monospaced text on a screen?  I think that's asking a bit much of
> ol' man Coincidence.

I find 120x30 (the Windows 10 default) works a bit better, though I still 
consider 80x24/25 the "canonical" terminal size - because it's about the 
width of text on a printout (6.5" x 12 cpi = 78 characters).

-uso.

From robpike at gmail.com  Fri Nov  6 16:34:37 2020
From: robpike at gmail.com (Rob Pike)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 17:34:37 +1100
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAKzdPgx1Ptu=sahO3o5KYS-A=vnfXK-hs=QeVwO_Vd1cFfaeqw@mail.gmail.com>

https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
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From grog at lemis.com  Fri Nov  6 16:37:25 2020
From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 17:37:25 +1100
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>

On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  0:04:28 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> I click but I mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80
>> columns because that's the right width (I can go on and on about
>> that).
>
> Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes
> that IBM could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size
> of the dollar bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it
> could be stored in a mechanical cash register is miraculously the
> Right Thing when it comes to reading monospaced text on a screen?

I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
width for human eyes.  Your message adheres to the rule, presumably
not because you were thinking of punched cards.

Was the US $ bill really that big in those days?

> I think that's asking a bit much of ol' man Coincidence.

Arguably the coincidence was the other way round.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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From will.senn at gmail.com  Fri Nov  6 23:20:14 2020
From: will.senn at gmail.com (Will Senn)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 07:20:14 -0600
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAKzdPgx1Ptu=sahO3o5KYS-A=vnfXK-hs=QeVwO_Vd1cFfaeqw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAKzdPgx1Ptu=sahO3o5KYS-A=vnfXK-hs=QeVwO_Vd1cFfaeqw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <a588c934-e403-2a4e-4701-669b8c14e989@gmail.com>

On 11/6/20 12:34 AM, Rob Pike wrote:
> https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83 
> <https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83>
Hilarious. I use fixed font - Monaco 14. But, 80 columns? not on your 
life. I hate wrapped text output, if I can avoid it. That said, I set my 
soft word wrap in the text editor at 72 :). My convention comes from 
early email though, not punched cards.

Will

-- 
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF


From lm at mcvoy.com  Sat Nov  7 01:06:09 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 07:06:09 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
Message-ID: <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 05:37:25PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  0:04:28 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I click but I mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80
> >> columns because that's the right width (I can go on and on about
> >> that).
> >
> > Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes
> > that IBM could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size
> > of the dollar bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it
> > could be stored in a mechanical cash register is miraculously the
> > Right Thing when it comes to reading monospaced text on a screen?
> 
> I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
> characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
> width for human eyes.  

Exactly this.  I'm a very fast reader, easily 2-3x the average.  I read by
running my eyes down the middle of the page and get the left and right
from peripheral vision.  It's super fast but it doesn't work when you
get much bigger than 80 columns.

Even if you read normally, the wider it is, the more back and forth your
eyes do so less is more.

It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
movement.

I'm lazy.

From clemc at ccc.com  Sat Nov  7 01:07:21 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 10:07:21 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <a588c934-e403-2a4e-4701-669b8c14e989@gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAKzdPgx1Ptu=sahO3o5KYS-A=vnfXK-hs=QeVwO_Vd1cFfaeqw@mail.gmail.com>
 <a588c934-e403-2a4e-4701-669b8c14e989@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2PPw3Ua3-VpMYjh=NaC09=9Q528kqEvE7SvmO3Ly2JO0A@mail.gmail.com>

Will, I do still the same thing, but the reason for 72 for email being that
way is still card-based.  In FORTRAN the first column defines if the card
is new (a blank), a comment (a capital C), no zero a 'continuation' of the
last card.  But column 73-80 were 'special' and used to store sequence #s
(this was handy when you dropped your card deck, card sorters could put it
back into canonical order).  So characters in those columns were
typically ignored.   Thus when "Model 28 ASR" (a.k.a. ASR-28) created it
had 72 columns.  It's interesting that when its follow on the Model 33 was
created, it actually had 74, but most SW configured it to 72 [search for a
manual on bit savers or the like if you want the details].

IIRC, the original DEC 'Glass TTY' - the VT-05 was 72, but later
terminals like the VT-52 were 80 columns, as was the ADM 3A.

The one thing I will give the 'tyranny of 80-columns" is when I look at
code it starts to break that line size by a lot, I often think that is a
bell-weather of something that needs to be rewritten and simplified, and/or
the abstraction might not be right.   Like, most/many rules there >>are<<
often break exceptions, but when I do look code with really long lines, I
admit I am suspect.


Clem


On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 8:21 AM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/6/20 12:34 AM, Rob Pike wrote:
> >
> https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
> > <
> https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
> >
> Hilarious. I use fixed font - Monaco 14. But, 80 columns? not on your
> life. I hate wrapped text output, if I can avoid it. That said, I set my
> soft word wrap in the text editor at 72 :). My convention comes from
> early email though, not punched cards.
>
> Will
>
> --
> GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
>
>
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From bakul at iitbombay.org  Sat Nov  7 01:18:52 2020
From: bakul at iitbombay.org (Bakul Shah)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 07:18:52 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <7792C9F9-178F-42F0-AA4F-5C36342FB6B7@iitbombay.org>

On Nov 6, 2020, at 7:06 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 05:37:25PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>> On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  0:04:28 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>>> On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I click but I mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80
>>>> columns because that's the right width (I can go on and on about
>>>> that).
>>> 
>>> Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes
>>> that IBM could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size
>>> of the dollar bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it
>>> could be stored in a mechanical cash register is miraculously the
>>> Right Thing when it comes to reading monospaced text on a screen?
>> 
>> I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
>> characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
>> width for human eyes.  
> 
> Exactly this.  I'm a very fast reader, easily 2-3x the average.  I read by
> running my eyes down the middle of the page and get the left and right
> from peripheral vision.  It's super fast but it doesn't work when you
> get much bigger than 80 columns.
> 
> Even if you read normally, the wider it is, the more back and forth your
> eyes do so less is more.
> 
> It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
> displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
> movement.
> 
> I'm lazy.

In Acme almost always I use variable width font but I still adjust column
width to 80 (for a monospaced font). That way on a full screen on MBP
I get a number of regular width columns and one narrow one which I use
to keep my to do list or to note key points. 80 columns is a compromise
that allows  one to make better use of the screen real estate. I format text
or comments in narrower columns so that you can read straight down
instead of zigaziing down. Switching columns implies switching context.

Lazyness is the mother of invention!

Not sure what this has to do with "Unix as Literature"!

From will.senn at gmail.com  Sat Nov  7 01:40:52 2020
From: will.senn at gmail.com (Will Senn)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 09:40:52 -0600
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2PPw3Ua3-VpMYjh=NaC09=9Q528kqEvE7SvmO3Ly2JO0A@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAKzdPgx1Ptu=sahO3o5KYS-A=vnfXK-hs=QeVwO_Vd1cFfaeqw@mail.gmail.com>
 <a588c934-e403-2a4e-4701-669b8c14e989@gmail.com>
 <CAC20D2PPw3Ua3-VpMYjh=NaC09=9Q528kqEvE7SvmO3Ly2JO0A@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com>

Clem,

It figures. I should have known there was a reason for the shorter lines 
other than display. Conventions are sticky and there appears to be a 
generation gap. I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors 
used 2... who knows why? :).

Will

On 11/6/20 9:07 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Will, I do still the same thing, but the reason for 72 for email being 
> that way is still card-based.  In FORTRAN the first column defines if 
> the card is new (a blank), a comment (a capital C), no zero a 
> 'continuation' of the last card.  But column 73-80 were 'special' and 
> used to store sequence #s (this was handy when you dropped your card 
> deck, card sorters could put it back into canonical order).  So 
> characters in those columns were typically ignored.   Thus when "Model 
> 28 ASR" (a.k.a. ASR-28) created it had 72 columns. It's interesting 
> that when its follow on the Model 33 was created, it actually had 74, 
> but most SW configured it to 72 [search for a manual on bit savers or 
> the like if you want the details].
>
> IIRC, the original DEC 'Glass TTY' - the VT-05 was 72, but later 
> terminals like the VT-52 were 80 columns, as was the ADM 3A.
>
> The one thing I will give the 'tyranny of 80-columns" is when I look 
> at code it starts to break that line size by a lot, I often think that 
> is a bell-weather of something that needs to be rewritten and 
> simplified, and/or the abstraction might not be right.   Like, 
> most/many rules there >>are<< often break exceptions, but when I do 
> look code with really long lines, I admit I am suspect.
>
>
> Clem
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 8:21 AM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com 
> <mailto:will.senn at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 11/6/20 12:34 AM, Rob Pike wrote:
>     >
>     https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
>     <https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83>
>
>     >
>     <https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
>     <https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83>>
>     Hilarious. I use fixed font - Monaco 14. But, 80 columns? not on your
>     life. I hate wrapped text output, if I can avoid it. That said, I
>     set my
>     soft word wrap in the text editor at 72 :). My convention comes from
>     early email though, not punched cards.
>
>     Will
>
>     -- 
>     GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
>


-- 
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

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From torek at elf.torek.net  Sat Nov  7 01:19:24 2020
From: torek at elf.torek.net (Chris Torek)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 07:19:24 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <202011061519.0A6FJOAx034308@elf.torek.net>

>> I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
>> characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
>> width for human eyes.  

>Exactly this.

Yes -- this is the (or at least "an") argument for two-column text
on wide (8.5x11 or A4, or larger) paper pages.

>It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
>displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
>movement.

>I'm lazy.

I am too, but I still use a big screen: I just fit a lot of
smaller windows in it.  I'd like to have a literal wall screen,
especially if I'm in an interior, windowless (as in physical glass
windows) room, so that part of the wall could be a "window"
showing a view "outside" (real time, or the ocean, or whatever)
and other parts of the wall could be the text I'm working on/with,
etc.

(But I'll make do with these 27" 4k displays. :-) )

Chris

From torek at elf.torek.net  Sat Nov  7 01:46:57 2020
From: torek at elf.torek.net (Chris Torek)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 07:46:57 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net>

>I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors 
>used 2... who knows why? :).

Typewriters.

In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
we have "stretchy spaces" between words.  The space after end-of-
sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space.  Note that this is
all in the variable-pitch font world.

Since typewriters are fixed-pitch, the way to emulate the
1.5-space-wide gap is to expand it to 2.

Chris

From paul.winalski at gmail.com  Sat Nov  7 03:05:38 2020
From: paul.winalski at gmail.com (Paul Winalski)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 12:05:38 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
Message-ID: <CABH=_VQ+42wT5ao2F4K2aDuDC75cOnTNkxtb1r50pTASsg3+Ow@mail.gmail.com>

On 11/6/20, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>
> Was the US $ bill really that big in those days?

Yes, it was.  IIRC, the modern, smaller bills first went into
circulation in the 1930s.

There's an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies based on the old dollar
bill size.  Jed Clampett's uncle didn't trust banks and in the 1920s
had been burying mason jars full of dollar bills in his backyard.
Most were the old-style, punch card-size bills.  He tells Drysdale the
banker that his uncle has "big money".  Drysdale of course thinks that
if Jed Clampett the millionaire thinks it's big money, that uncle must
be very rich, indeed....

-Paul W.

From lm at mcvoy.com  Sat Nov  7 03:07:40 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 09:07:40 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CABH=_VQ+42wT5ao2F4K2aDuDC75cOnTNkxtb1r50pTASsg3+Ow@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
 <CABH=_VQ+42wT5ao2F4K2aDuDC75cOnTNkxtb1r50pTASsg3+Ow@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20201106170740.GS26296@mcvoy.com>

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 12:05:38PM -0500, Paul Winalski wrote:
> On 11/6/20, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> >
> > Was the US $ bill really that big in those days?
> 
> Yes, it was.  IIRC, the modern, smaller bills first went into
> circulation in the 1930s.
> 
> There's an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies based on the old dollar
> bill size.  Jed Clampett's uncle didn't trust banks and in the 1920s
> had been burying mason jars full of dollar bills in his backyard.
> Most were the old-style, punch card-size bills.  He tells Drysdale the
> banker that his uncle has "big money".  Drysdale of course thinks that
> if Jed Clampett the millionaire thinks it's big money, that uncle must
> be very rich, indeed....

That's hilarious, I missed that joke when watching as a kid.

From athornton at gmail.com  Sat Nov  7 03:13:19 2020
From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 10:13:19 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
Message-ID: <5BE1CBD5-C9EB-45D4-B135-E58BCCCBE38C@gmail.com>

I’m going to chime in on pro-80-columns here, because with the text a comfortable size to read (although this is getting less true as my eyes age), I can read an entire 80-column line without having to sweep my eyes back and forth.

I can’t, and never could, do that at 132.

As a consequence, I read much, much faster with 80-column-ish text blocks.

I also think there is something to the “UNIX is verbal” and “UNIX nerds tend to be polyglots often with a surprising amount of liberal arts background of one kind or another,” argument.  That may, however, merely be confirmation bias.

Adam

From imp at bsdimp.com  Sat Nov  7 03:25:07 2020
From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 10:25:07 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106170740.GS26296@mcvoy.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
 <CABH=_VQ+42wT5ao2F4K2aDuDC75cOnTNkxtb1r50pTASsg3+Ow@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106170740.GS26296@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <CANCZdfqsinUgNzZA-BpB-fpzsxH=rE8QH9O+TuwJz87Zjniaaw@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 10:08 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 12:05:38PM -0500, Paul Winalski wrote:
> > On 11/6/20, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Was the US $ bill really that big in those days?
> >
> > Yes, it was.  IIRC, the modern, smaller bills first went into
> > circulation in the 1930s.
> >
> > There's an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies based on the old dollar
> > bill size.  Jed Clampett's uncle didn't trust banks and in the 1920s
> > had been burying mason jars full of dollar bills in his backyard.
> > Most were the old-style, punch card-size bills.  He tells Drysdale the
> > banker that his uncle has "big money".  Drysdale of course thinks that
> > if Jed Clampett the millionaire thinks it's big money, that uncle must
> > be very rich, indeed....
>
> That's hilarious, I missed that joke when watching as a kid.
>

Wow! Me too! Google confirmed the size changed in th 20s as a cost cutting
measure.

Warner
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From sclark46 at earthlink.net  Sat Nov  7 03:26:13 2020
From: sclark46 at earthlink.net (Stephen Clark)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 12:26:13 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <5BE1CBD5-C9EB-45D4-B135-E58BCCCBE38C@gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
 <5BE1CBD5-C9EB-45D4-B135-E58BCCCBE38C@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <3c54b19d-e604-68eb-2b4b-0b65e9cfb896@earthlink.net>

On 11/6/20 12:13 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
> I’m going to chime in on pro-80-columns here, because with the text a comfortable size to read (although this is getting less true as my eyes age), I can read an entire 80-column line without having to sweep my eyes back and forth.
>
> I can’t, and never could, do that at 132.
>
> As a consequence, I read much, much faster with 80-column-ish text blocks.
>
> I also think there is something to the “UNIX is verbal” and “UNIX nerds tend to be polyglots often with a surprising amount of liberal arts background of one kind or another,” argument.  That may, however, merely be confirmation bias.
>
> Adam
May have had to do with the first terminal commonly used with UNIX.

The Model 33 printed on 8.5-inch (220 mm) wide paper, supplied on continuous 
5-inch (130 mm) diameter rolls and fed via friction (instead of, e.g., tractor 
feed). It printed at a fixed 10 characters per inch, and supported 74-character 
lines,[13] although 72 characters is often commonly stated.


From cowan at ccil.org  Sat Nov  7 04:24:14 2020
From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 13:24:14 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <3c54b19d-e604-68eb-2b4b-0b65e9cfb896@earthlink.net>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
 <5BE1CBD5-C9EB-45D4-B135-E58BCCCBE38C@gmail.com>
 <3c54b19d-e604-68eb-2b4b-0b65e9cfb896@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <CAD2gp_QD4bucOopm5U8+KtRcV=yA=8=CByy7h7cn89J=on+Gzg@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 12:26 PM Stephen Clark <sclark46 at earthlink.net>
wrote:


> May have had to do with the first terminal commonly used with UNIX.
>
> The Model 33
>

In fact the Labs had the more recent Model 37, which did lower case, unlike
the 33.  Consequently, Unix was (I think) the first case-sensitive
operating system.  However, it had to work on 33s as well; if you tried to
log in using an uppercase username, login would turn on the IUCLC and OLCUC
bits of /dev/tty, and if you needed an uppercase letter you had to escape
it (I think with \), which the tty driver processed.

Thanks to everyone for filling in all the gaps in the chain from dollar
bills to 80-column terminal windows that I had left implicit.  To clarify
my position, what I am opposed to is not the use of 80-column windows for
*reading* email.  I'm not happy with what happens to text that is
hard-wrapped at 80 columns when displayed in a narrower window, as often
happens to me now that I use larger fonts than I used to.  The
text/format-flowed MIME type was supposed to help with this problem, but
never really caught on.



"Well, I'm back."  --Sam        John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org>
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From jon at fourwinds.com  Sat Nov  7 04:51:11 2020
From: jon at fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart)
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2020 10:51:11 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <202011061851.0A6IpB7p555742@darkstar.fourwinds.com>

Larry McVoy writes:
> On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 05:37:25PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  0:04:28 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> > > On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> I click but I mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80
> > >> columns because that's the right width (I can go on and on about
> > >> that).
> > >
> > > Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes
> > > that IBM could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size
> > > of the dollar bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it
> > > could be stored in a mechanical cash register is miraculously the
> > > Right Thing when it comes to reading monospaced text on a screen?
> > 
> > I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
> > characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
> > width for human eyes.  
>
> Exactly this.  I'm a very fast reader, easily 2-3x the average.  I read by
> running my eyes down the middle of the page and get the left and right
> from peripheral vision.  It's super fast but it doesn't work when you
> get much bigger than 80 columns.
>
> Even if you read normally, the wider it is, the more back and forth your
> eyes do so less is more.
>
> It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
> displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
> movement.

We're getting into religion again here, and I've never found that to be a
sound basis for policy.  I'm going to quote liberally here from a screed
that I wrote (but have not published) when trying to understand parts of
the linux kernel.

I've always been willing to spend buckets of money on the monitors because
to me that's an area where bigger and higher resolution is always better.
I've been using 132 column terminal windows since sometime in the 90s when
I got myself a monster 24" Trinitron monitor from Sun.  I seem to recall
that it listed for $3,300, thanks to the unnamed person who got me the
employee discount :-)  I tried going to 160 columns but that was too wide
for the monitors that people I worked with had.

I hated Shakespeare in high school.  One of the big reasons was that I felt
that he made up a word whenever he didn't have a good one available.  The
flipping back and forth to the list of definitions completely interrupted
the cadence of reading.  The insistence on short line lengths in coding
standards and the contortions that people go through to meet them has the
same effect for me.

I've coined the phrase "mental locality of reference" to describe this; at
least I think that I'm the first one to use it.  Short lines and modern coding
styles ask the human brain to contort itself in ways that we are loath to ask
hardware to do.

As near as I can tell, the belief that people do best with line lengths between
50 and 75 characters long is the result of people repeating "wisdom" that they
heard from someone else that orginates from what I consider to be a misreading
of Emil Ruder's book "Typographie: A Manual of Design".  While Ruder does make
this statement about line length, it's in the context of normal typography.
It does not even remotely consider computer code where long lines are long
mainly due to leading whitespace.  To the best of my knowledge nobody has
studied this - does the line length when counting begin at the first column or
the first non-whitespace character?

While readers might "lose focus" part of the way through long lines, that has to
be balanced against the loss of focus that comes from 'mental carriage-returns"
when text is too narrow and broken across several lines.  Again, not studied as
far as I know.

The linux coding standard makes the unsubstantiated claim that having more than
three levels of indent is a problem.  And it's really hard to understand,
because on one hand, it says that you "should fix your program", and then says
that "nesting functions too deep" is a problem.  Sounds like a catch-22 to me;
how are you going to minimize indent if you can't nest functions?  I'm guessing
that someone typed this without reading what they wrote and really meant
"statements", not "functions".

We're back to the mental locality-of-reference thing that was mentioned earlier.
I'd much rather have a few more levels of indent and longer lines than have to
go chasing gratuitous function calls.  Think about every diversion from the
stuff in front of you as a cache miss.

When I look at the linux kernel code, I see incredibly bad contortions made in
attempts to meet the coding style.  I also observed that the code only loosely
follows its coding style.  How are people limiting their code to three indent
levels?  By including dozens of header files that contain static inline
functions.  Gak!  I feel that style rules should be observed in some sort of
priority order, and mental locality of reference, which isn't in anybody's
rules but mine, is at the top of the list.

I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.

Jon

From dave at horsfall.org  Sat Nov  7 07:10:22 2020
From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 08:10:22 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011070756260.6603@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On Thu, 5 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:

> Don't get me wrong, I live on Linux and it has made some stuff 
> pleasantly clickable.  I use virtual desktops, I have 6 of them.  There 
> are xterms in 5 out of 6, the last one has firefox.  I click but I 
> mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because 
> that's the right width (I can go on and on about that).

Almost all of my xterms are 80 cols for the same reason, but I do have one 
that is about 160 cols for things like "sdiff" etc.  Or if I'm feeling 
nostalgic I'll use 120 cols :-)

They are also mostly 24 rows, except for a couple of 40-row ones for email 
(more context) and source editing (ditto).

I was brought up on 80x24 (along with a status line which could be 
addressed either with an escape sequence or the "25th row") so it feels 
"right" for me (we'll ignore the 72x20 VT-05 for now).

-- Dave

From cowan at ccil.org  Sat Nov  7 08:09:19 2020
From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 17:09:19 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <202011061851.0A6IpB7p555742@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
 <202011061851.0A6IpB7p555742@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
Message-ID: <CAD2gp_RnZbUCahqfWzuyOBR8fpbZTNw5aQDQhNGdbQ1z4pfSRw@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 1:51 PM Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:


> I've always been willing to spend buckets of money on the monitors because
> to me that's an area where bigger and higher resolution is always better.
>

You'd hardly want one the size of a city block, or even of a room wall.

> I hated Shakespeare in high school.  One of the big reasons was that I felt
> that he made up a word whenever he didn't have a good one available.


Contrary to Internet opinion, Shakespeare probably never invented any
words.  At most he is the first person to record in writing a word whose
written works have survived (mostly).  Why would a commercial playwright
(and Shakespeare wrote for money) use a word his audience didn't
understand?   They'd boo the play off the stage, with or without rotten
fruit.  He did both invent and reuse a lot of phrases: see <
https://inside.mines.edu/~jamcneil/levinquote.html>, or google for "you are
quoting Shakespeare".

The
> flipping back and forth to the list of definitions completely interrupted
> the cadence of reading.
>

Pop-up translations would be much better, of course.  I studied R&J with
footnotes; my daughter, with an across-the-page translation into
Contemporary Modern English.  Of course, that meant I had to explain some
of the gallows humor to her, like Mercutio's dying words: "Seek for me
tomorrow, and you will find me a *grave* man."

> While readers might "lose focus" part of the way through long lines, that
> has to
> be balanced against the loss of focus that comes from 'mental
> carriage-returns"
> when text is too narrow and broken across several lines.  Again, not
> studied as
> far as I know.
>

Lispers, of course, have only one kind of bracket, and append as many
close-brackets to each line as are needed there.  (We don't count them,
Emacs and vi do the matching.)  Sure saves on vertical whitespace, which
means you typically can see a whole function in one screen.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa
good if I desire to see it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical,
epical or dramatic?  If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make
there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?
                --Stephen Dedalus
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From akosela at andykosela.com  Sat Nov  7 08:12:23 2020
From: akosela at andykosela.com (Andy Kosela)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 23:12:23 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <CALMnNGg=9KHCwqaqdFESBQr=Ru_qzM=x-S2fc=ewgJNf2zLRFQ@mail.gmail.com>

On 11/6/20, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
> displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
> movement.

Exactly.  I never understood all the fuss about those huge LCD screens
in front of your eyes.  A few years ago I used a real VT220 (12" in
size) for my daily job in the office and it was perfect for command
line work.

At home I use a lot of Digital text terminals and PC DOS era CRT
monitors and they are really great for what they were made for.  Text
mode can't get any better than 720x400 on 14" CRT monitor.  For
graphical mode I still love 640x480 -- everything is big enough for
me.  The 70s, 80s and 90s got a lot of things right.  The introduction
of widescreen LCD monitors around 2007 ruined a lot of things.

And of course the 80 columns output is the only right choice.  It
especially makes sense if you are still using text mode only CRT
monitors, like I do.

--Andy

From lm at mcvoy.com  Sat Nov  7 08:23:02 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 14:23:02 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CALMnNGg=9KHCwqaqdFESBQr=Ru_qzM=x-S2fc=ewgJNf2zLRFQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com>
 <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CALMnNGg=9KHCwqaqdFESBQr=Ru_qzM=x-S2fc=ewgJNf2zLRFQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20201106222302.GG26411@mcvoy.com>

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 11:12:23PM +0100, Andy Kosela wrote:
> The 70s, 80s and 90s got a lot of things right.  The introduction
> of widescreen LCD monitors around 2007 ruined a lot of things.

Yeah, I wasn't a fan of going wider.  I'm bucking the old school trend
and typing on an 80x44 terminal which is as tall as I can go on my X1
Carbon.  It's big enough.

For me, taller is more useful than wider, provided I can get about 162
columns so I can do side by side diffs.  More than that doesn't do much
for me.

But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and
asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur.  In the last year or so I reconnected
with Kirk and Eric and much to my surprise, and pleasure, I found that
Eric and I see things very similarly, I'd be happy to work with/for that
guy, we really agree.

One thing I will say about big monitors is they are great for photos.
I do a lot of digital photography and have no desire to go back to 
black & white or CRT terminals.

From dave at horsfall.org  Sat Nov  7 08:31:08 2020
From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 09:31:08 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2PPw3Ua3-VpMYjh=NaC09=9Q528kqEvE7SvmO3Ly2JO0A@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAKzdPgx1Ptu=sahO3o5KYS-A=vnfXK-hs=QeVwO_Vd1cFfaeqw@mail.gmail.com>
 <a588c934-e403-2a4e-4701-669b8c14e989@gmail.com>
 <CAC20D2PPw3Ua3-VpMYjh=NaC09=9Q528kqEvE7SvmO3Ly2JO0A@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011070928020.6603@aneurin.horsfall.org>

[ Getting into COFF territory here, I think ]

On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Clem Cole wrote:

> But column 73-80 were 'special' and used to store sequence #s (this was 
> handy when you dropped your card deck, card sorters could put it back 
> into canonical order).

We used to grab a wide felt-tip pen and draw a diagonal stripe across the 
top of the deck; at least that got you started.

-- Dave, who has dropped the occasional deck

From jon at fourwinds.com  Sat Nov  7 08:44:14 2020
From: jon at fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart)
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2020 14:44:14 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <CAD2gp_RnZbUCahqfWzuyOBR8fpbZTNw5aQDQhNGdbQ1z4pfSRw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
 <202011061851.0A6IpB7p555742@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
 <CAD2gp_RnZbUCahqfWzuyOBR8fpbZTNw5aQDQhNGdbQ1z4pfSRw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <202011062244.0A6MiEgX575756@darkstar.fourwinds.com>

John Cowan writes:
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 1:51 PM Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> > I've always been willing to spend buckets of money on the monitors because
> > to me that's an area where bigger and higher resolution is always better.
>
> You'd hardly want one the size of a city block, or even of a room wall.
>
> > I hated Shakespeare in high school.  One of the big reasons was that I felt
> > that he made up a word whenever he didn't have a good one available.
>
> Contrary to Internet opinion, Shakespeare probably never invented any
> words.  At most he is the first person to record in writing a word whose
> written works have survived (mostly).  Why would a commercial playwright
> (and Shakespeare wrote for money) use a word his audience didn't
> understand?   They'd boo the play off the stage, with or without rotten
> fruit.  He did both invent and reuse a lot of phrases: see <
> https://inside.mines.edu/~jamcneil/levinquote.html>, or google for "you are
> quoting Shakespeare".
>
> The
> > flipping back and forth to the list of definitions completely interrupted
> > the cadence of reading.
>
> Pop-up translations would be much better, of course.  I studied R&J with
> footnotes; my daughter, with an across-the-page translation into
> Contemporary Modern English.  Of course, that meant I had to explain some
> of the gallows humor to her, like Mercutio's dying words: "Seek for me
> tomorrow, and you will find me a *grave* man."
>
> > While readers might "lose focus" part of the way through long lines, that
> > has to
> > be balanced against the loss of focus that comes from 'mental
> > carriage-returns"
> > when text is too narrow and broken across several lines.  Again, not
> > studied as
> > far as I know.
>
> Lispers, of course, have only one kind of bracket, and append as many
> close-brackets to each line as are needed there.  (We don't count them,
> Emacs and vi do the matching.)  Sure saves on vertical whitespace, which
> means you typically can see a whole function in one screen.

As I said in my original post, we're getting into religion here.

So we have different views on monitors; I am contemplating replacing my 32"
UHD monitor with a 70" UHD TV.  Why?  Because I can keep everything on my
screen the same which will make everything bigger so I can put the monitor
farther away getting me out of my farsighted zone and into my 20-20 range
which would eliminate the need for glasses.

Not gonna rathole on the Shakespeare analogy - maybe I'm wrong but it's
not relevant to the point that I was making.  The books that we were given
in high school didn't have pop-up translations or footnotes.

In case I wasn't clear in my original posting, the topic was mental locality
of reference issues as related to terminal size and coding style.

Jon

From grog at lemis.com  Sat Nov  7 08:54:22 2020
From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 09:54:22 +1100
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net>
References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com>
 <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net>
Message-ID: <20201106225422.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com>

On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote:
>> I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors
>> used 2... who knows why? :).
>
> Typewriters.
>
> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
> we have "stretchy spaces" between words.  The space after end-of-
> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space.

FWIW, this is the US convention.  Other countries have different
conventions.  My Ausinfo style manual states

  There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the
  end of a sentence.

I believe that this also holds for Germany.  I'm not sure that the UK
didn't have different rules again.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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From steffen at sdaoden.eu  Sat Nov  7 09:29:01 2020
From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso)
Date: Sat, 07 Nov 2020 00:29:01 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106225422.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com>
References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com>
 <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net>
 <20201106225422.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com>
Message-ID: <20201106232901.AkY2I%steffen@sdaoden.eu>

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in
 <20201106225422.GD99027 at eureka.lemis.com>:
 |On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote:
 |>> I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors
 |>> used 2... who knows why? :).
 |>
 |> Typewriters.
 |>
 |> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
 |> we have "stretchy spaces" between words.  The space after end-of-
 |> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
 |> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
 |> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space.
 |
 |FWIW, this is the US convention.  Other countries have different
 |conventions.  My Ausinfo style manual states
 |
 |  There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the
 |  end of a sentence.
 |
 |I believe that this also holds for Germany.  I'm not sure that the UK
 |didn't have different rules again.

Yes, the DUDEN of Germany says for typewriters that the
punctuation characters period, comma, semicolon, colon, question-
and exclamation mark are added without separating whitespace.  The
next word follows after a space ("Leerschritt", "void step"). 
However, typewriters often place(d) those characters left in
a cell, so that the visual appearance is accordingly.

In novels around 66 characters is the recommendation i seem to
recall.  I have that in mails, 72 in other text modes, and 79 for
everything else.  (The latter lead to lots of ugly code once
i used tabulators, but different tabulator spacing would have
resulted in different look in $PAGER and $VISUAL, so ...)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

From wkt at tuhs.org  Sat Nov  7 09:41:52 2020
From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 09:41:52 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011070928020.6603@aneurin.horsfall.org>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAKzdPgx1Ptu=sahO3o5KYS-A=vnfXK-hs=QeVwO_Vd1cFfaeqw@mail.gmail.com>
 <a588c934-e403-2a4e-4701-669b8c14e989@gmail.com>
 <CAC20D2PPw3Ua3-VpMYjh=NaC09=9Q528kqEvE7SvmO3Ly2JO0A@mail.gmail.com>
 <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011070928020.6603@aneurin.horsfall.org>
Message-ID: <20201106234152.GA7183@minnie.tuhs.org>

On Sat, Nov 07, 2020 at 09:31:08AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> [ Getting into COFF territory here, I think ]

Yes all, we've drifted out of Unix and into old fart territory, so
please move over to coff at tuhs.org for future replies!

Thanks, Warren

From sclark46 at earthlink.net  Sat Nov  7 02:46:08 2020
From: sclark46 at earthlink.net (Stephen Clark)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 11:46:08 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <202011061519.0A6FJOAx034308@elf.torek.net>
References: <202011061519.0A6FJOAx034308@elf.torek.net>
Message-ID: <e2b11bab-d0f4-8ef9-2949-764883431baa@earthlink.net>

On 11/6/20 10:19 AM, Chris Torek wrote:
>>> I think you're jumping to conclusions. The importance of 80
>>> characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
>>> width for human eyes.
>> Exactly this.
> Yes -- this is the (or at least "an") argument for two-column text
> on wide (8.5x11 or A4, or larger) paper pages.
>
>> It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
>> displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
>> movement.
>> I'm lazy.
> I am too, but I still use a big screen: I just fit a lot of
> smaller windows in it. I'd like to have a literal wall screen,
> especially if I'm in an interior, windowless (as in physical glass
> windows) room, so that part of the wall could be a "window"
> showing a view "outside" (real time, or the ocean, or whatever)
> and other parts of the wall could be the text I'm working on/with,
> etc.
>
> (But I'll make do with these 27" 4k displays. :-) )
>
> Chris
Could the 72 characters come from the original terminal ASR 33 Teletype?

The Model 33 printed on 8.5-inch (220 mm) wide paper, supplied on continuous 
5-inch (130 mm) diameter rolls and fed via friction (instead of, e.g., tractor 
feed). It printed at a fixed 10 characters per inch, and supported 74-character 
lines,[13] although 72 characters is often commonly stated.

-- 


From dave at horsfall.org  Sat Nov  7 10:16:56 2020
From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 11:16:56 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <20201106222302.GG26411@mcvoy.com>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CALMnNGg=9KHCwqaqdFESBQr=Ru_qzM=x-S2fc=ewgJNf2zLRFQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106222302.GG26411@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011071111330.6603@aneurin.horsfall.org>

[ Moving to COFF (if your MUA respects "Reply-To:") ]

On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:

> But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and 
> asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur.

You've never experienced the joy of having your code suddenly working when 
inserting printf() statements?  Oh dear; time to break out GDB...

-- Dave

From ggm at algebras.org  Mon Nov  9 09:23:35 2020
From: ggm at algebras.org (George Michaelson)
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2020 09:23:35 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011071111330.6603@aneurin.horsfall.org>
References: <CAEuQd1AWs=jpHYk3nGpKsBV=qF4DZVXvXzynSeDK5S-r-hfryw@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CAD2gp_Q-wTvG2cAW5goJFYW3A6qF9zOuTh=Y4Kahh0nLBtof2Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com>
 <CALMnNGg=9KHCwqaqdFESBQr=Ru_qzM=x-S2fc=ewgJNf2zLRFQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <20201106222302.GG26411@mcvoy.com>
 <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011071111330.6603@aneurin.horsfall.org>
Message-ID: <CAKr6gn2bL4YP9v+ohCySJ-R5bE_Asd-MRzReTg22L_EopMcx1w@mail.gmail.com>

A lot of industrial design is based on inheritance. The nitrocellulose
filmstock was nominal 40mm, after cutting and sprockets it was 35. cut
it in half you have 16mm single sprocket. Original manufacture was 80
wide cut in half so undo that and you get 70mm. run the film sideways,
you now have 700 high for IMAX dimensions. Why was nitrocellulose film
stock coming in 80mm wide strips? Ask somebody who knows what George
Eastman was doing at the time... My guess is the tank emitted 100mm
but the edges were crinkly, and 80mm was what he got after slicing
ragged margins. The rest is inheritance down the stack working on 1/2
and 1/4 sizing consequences.

IBM was business machines. tabulators. The sheet stock it used for
things in business was defined by what it could source coming in,
reliably. The US census used hollerith cards, this is probably why the
fed reserve used hollerith cards. (My G/F got a 1978 tax cheque refund
from a camp school in the midwest on a hollerith-card-cheque, the last
time I saw one in anger outside of the computer labs where we were
still using them in anger, very anger)

the Banks first atm's used card stock for receipts. they were
mini-hollerith. I imagine because they understood how to do alignment
from a cut corner, and had machinery which worked.

I was told that fmt/72 is a post-hoc rationalisation to allow for 4-5
levels of indentation in >>>quoting. I think this is a post-hoc
rationalisation of a prompter hoc reality. If you go back into
teletype deep history, I bet you find 40/60/72 was coming out of some
combination of fixed-width typeface, mechanics, and paper stock sizes
available in the supply chain.

(Mike Lesk told me the TBL offset in the T/ROFF box drawing was
because of a highly specific throwback effect in the printer at Bell.
The code was adjusted to deal with this, and the rest of us had to
wear the top and bottom lines being misplaced without a patch to the
code. This kind of thing, its classic "because we could, and because
it works" decision logic)

On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 10:17 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> [ Moving to COFF (if your MUA respects "Reply-To:") ]
>
> On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> > But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and
> > asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur.
>
> You've never experienced the joy of having your code suddenly working when
> inserting printf() statements?  Oh dear; time to break out GDB...
>
> -- Dave

From dscherrer at solar.stanford.edu  Wed Nov 11 08:52:22 2020
From: dscherrer at solar.stanford.edu (Deborah K Scherrer)
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 14:52:22 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Mach386 manual
Message-ID: <99cca36a-af08-4cbf-7c16-8d37194085de@solar.stanford.edu>

Anybody want a little manual "Installing and Operating Mt Xinu Mach386?  
Will send (free).

Deborah

From clemc at ccc.com  Wed Nov 11 09:20:59 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 18:20:59 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Mach386 manual
In-Reply-To: <99cca36a-af08-4cbf-7c16-8d37194085de@solar.stanford.edu>
References: <99cca36a-af08-4cbf-7c16-8d37194085de@solar.stanford.edu>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2N2jurzp1AEL1sw7dgnnN5LBReRfcJV_resN1KWbCJ1og@mail.gmail.com>

I'd love it.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:09 PM Deborah K Scherrer <
dscherrer at solar.stanford.edu> wrote:

> Anybody want a little manual "Installing and Operating Mt Xinu Mach386?
> Will send (free).
>
> Deborah
>
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From clemc at ccc.com  Thu Nov 19 08:25:59 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 17:25:59 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
Message-ID: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>

A couple of my friends from UC Berkeley were musing on another email
thread.    The question from one of them came up: *"I'm teaching the
undergrad OS course this semester  ... Mention where ~ comes."*

This comment begets a discussion among the 4 of us at where it showed up in
the UNIX heritage and it if was taken from somewhere else.

Using the tilde character as a short cut for $HOME was purely a userspace
convention and not part of the nami() kernel routine when it came into
being.  We know that it was supported by Mike Lesk in UUCP and by Bill Joy
in cshell.  The former was first widely released as part of Seventh Edition
but was working on V6 before that inside of BTL.  Joy's cshell came out as
part of 2BSD (which was V7 based), but he had released "ashell" before that
and included it in the original BSD (*a.k.a.* 1BSD) which was for V6 [what
I don't remember is if it supported the convention and I can not easily un-
ar(1) the cont.a files in the 1BSD tar image in Warren's archives.

In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked it
up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, which were
popular at UCB [*i.e.* the reason hjkl are the movement keys on vi is the
were embossed on the top of those keys on the ADM3A].  It also was noted
that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its keyboard.  But Lesk definitely needed
something to represent a remote user's home directory because each system
was different, so he was forced to use something.

It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on as
students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have been BTL
to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether.

So two questions for this august body are:

   1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX?
   2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as
   CTSS, TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?
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From dave at horsfall.org  Thu Nov 19 08:41:29 2020
From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 09:41:29 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011190931000.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On Wed, 18 Nov 2020, Clem Cole wrote:

> In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked 
> it up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, which 
> were popular at UCB [i.e. the reason hjkl are the movement keys on vi is 
> the were embossed on the top of those keys on the ADM3A].  It also was 
> noted that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its keyboard.  But Lesk 
> definitely needed something to represent a remote user's home directory 
> because each system was different, so he was forced to use something.

The ADM-3A was one of the best terminals ever made.

> It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on as
> students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have been BTL
> to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether.
> 
> So two questions for this august body are:
>  1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX?

Gawd...  I think I saw it in PWB, but I'm likely wrong.

>  2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as CTSS,
>     TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?

No idea. but given that Unix inherited a lot of stuff....

-- Dave

From ggm at algebras.org  Thu Nov 19 10:44:34 2020
From: ggm at algebras.org (George Michaelson)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 10:44:34 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011190931000.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>
References: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
 <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011190931000.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>
Message-ID: <CAKr6gn2daDRmR=xWzDQRkrO0x9SoAq3NHnCK84-XWGUd3sK9rg@mail.gmail.com>

A related but different "thing" is when the cd activity became a
pushdown stack of 2 (is it more? I never bothered checking)

somebody realised going "there and back again" was innately useful.

(I will never forget working on systems which had cd-moral-equivalent
<down> and no cd-moral-equivalent <up> but having cd-moral-equivalent
$HOME making all directory traversals downward, or back to your
personal root)

sorry for thread hijack.

-G

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 8:42 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 18 Nov 2020, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> > In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked
> > it up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, which
> > were popular at UCB [i.e. the reason hjkl are the movement keys on vi is
> > the were embossed on the top of those keys on the ADM3A].  It also was
> > noted that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its keyboard.  But Lesk
> > definitely needed something to represent a remote user's home directory
> > because each system was different, so he was forced to use something.
>
> The ADM-3A was one of the best terminals ever made.
>
> > It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on as
> > students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have been BTL
> > to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether.
> >
> > So two questions for this august body are:
> >  1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX?
>
> Gawd...  I think I saw it in PWB, but I'm likely wrong.
>
> >  2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as CTSS,
> >     TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?
>
> No idea. but given that Unix inherited a lot of stuff....
>
> -- Dave

From jon at fourwinds.com  Thu Nov 19 11:29:22 2020
From: jon at fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 17:29:22 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS documents
Message-ID: <202011190129.0AJ1TM7v543138@darkstar.fourwinds.com>

Well, it's a very rainy day and since COVID is keeping me home I just
fed my 516-TSS notebooks into the scanner.  It's about 17MB of stuff.
Not sure what to do with it since I don't have a place to serve it and
since they're scanned images they're too big to post.  Here's the list
of documents; email me if you're wanting something in a hurry while the
archive stuff is figured out.  Note that the smell of mildew wasn't
preserved in the scanning process.

516-1-516-DOCUMENTATION.pdf
516-3-DDP-516-PRICE-LIST.pdf
516-4-Disk-Layout.pdf
516-5-System-Table-Formats.pdf
516-6-Segment-Format.pdf
516-8-Disk-Hole-Format.pdf
516-7-DMA-Mnemonics.pdf
516-9-Addresses.pdf
516-10-11-12-Ring-Formats.pdf
516-12-Specifications-For-The-Node-Modem-Interface.pdf
516-13-Trac-Character-Strings.pdf
516-14-GMAP-Assembler-for-the-Multi-Programmed-516.pdf
516-15-A-Suggested-Graphic-Display-with-Keyboard-for-Graphic-Terminals.pdf
516-16-516-Assembler-And-Post-Processor-For-Unsegmented-Programs.pdf
516-18-Format-For-Ring-Interrupt.pdf
516-19-Thread-Save-Blocks.pdf
516-20-Card-Reader-Bootstrap-and-Programs.pdf
516-21-Octal-Package.pdf
516-22-A-Repeater-For-The-Node-Modem.pdf
516-23-CLEAR-CORE-CARD.pdf
516-24-SOROBAN-CARD-READER-TEST-PROGRAM.pdf
516-25-IO-Table.pdf
516-26-Disk-DMA-Queue.pdf
516-27-GE-Disc-Files-For-516-Programming.pdf
516-27-Thread-Table.pdf
516-28-IO-Ring_Device-Codes.pdf
516-29-Five-Bit-Character-Codes.pdf
516-30-Text-Editor.pdf
516-31-Relocatable-Segment-Octal-Package.pdf
516-32-ASCII-Character-Mnemonics.pdf
516-34-Display-List-For-Glance.pdf
516-35-Internal-Megacycle-Clock.pdf
516-36-Node-Modem-Interface-For-Computer-Terminals.pdf
516-38-P8SYS.pdf
516-39-Resource-Monitor-Meters.pdf
516-40-SNAP-Time-Sharing-Calculator.pdf
516-41-516-Segment-Assembler.pdf
516-42-Memory-Service-Unit-Format.pdf
516-43-GEBKUP-and-FLOAD.pdf
516-44-FSNAP-Floating-Point-Time-Sharing-Calculator.pdf
516-45-516-316-Assembler-and-Binder.pdf
516-46-CALC-A-Desk-Calculator-Program.pdf
516-47-Remote-Data-Plotting.pdf
516-48-CODING-FOR-GLANCE-G-Graphics.pdf
516-49-516-Segment-Assembler.pdf
516-50-Use-Of-The-516-Segment-Assemblers-Macros-In-Application-Programs.pdf
516-51-FSNAP-Designers-Guide.pdf
516-51-FSNAP-Users-Guide.pdf
516-52-DESK-A-Desk-Calculator.pdf
516-53-FSEOF-Flag-End-Of-File.pdf
516-54-Context-Editing.pdf
516-55-One-Card-Core-Save-Program.pdf
516-56-PRIME-An-Integer-Factoring-Program.pdf
516-57-Format-For-The-516-Node-T-I-U-Spider-Interface.pdf
516-59-Calling-Procedures-For-Math-Routines.pdf
516-59-INITIALIZATION-OF-THE-516-TSS-SYSTEM.pdf
516-60-SORT-SUBR-FOR-SEGMENTED-PROGRAMS.pdf
516-61-516-TSS-SYSTEM-BOLTED-IN-CORE-SUBROUTINES.pdf
516-63-Display-Controller-Glance-G.pdf
516-65-SOME-DIGITAL-FILTER-APPLICATION-PROGRAMS.pdf
516-66-TSS-516-GE-Communication.pdf
516-67-Node-Format-For-PDP-11.pdf
516-68-DFILE-N-A-Program-for-TSS-516.pdf
516-69-GLANCE-G-COMMUNICATION-FORMAT-TSS-516-TO-SCOPE.pdf
516-70-Routines-to-Perform-Character-String-IO-in-a-FSNAP-Program.pdf
516-71-FSNAP-Debugging-Aids.pdf
516-72-Node-Test.pdf
516-73-Node-IO-Software.pdf
516-75-Display-Text-Editor-DTE.pdf
516-76-LOCAL-DATA-PLOTTING.pdf
516-77-GLANCE-PLOTTING-ROUTINES-GPLOT-GLANCE-CHRGEN.pdf
516-77-V2-GLANCE-PLOTTING-ROUTINES-GPLOT-GLANCE-CHRGEN.pdf
516-78-DUMP.pdf
516-79-New-File-Features-in-FSNAP.pdf
516-81-OPTION-CHANGING-IN-GPLOT.pdf
516-86-MODIFICATIONS-TO-201-DATAPHONE-SOFTWARE.pdf
DDP-516-PROGRAMMERS-REFERENCE-CARD.pdf
DDP-516-Instruction-Set-Summary.pdf
Index.pdf
README

From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net  Thu Nov 19 13:06:54 2020
From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 20:06:54 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS documents
In-Reply-To: <202011190129.0AJ1TM7v543138@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
References: <202011190129.0AJ1TM7v543138@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
Message-ID: <86e3c78e-bd28-7f1e-308d-a2a998e680f1@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>

On 11/18/20 6:29 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Well, it's a very rainy day and since COVID is keeping me home I 
> just fed my 516-TSS notebooks into the scanner.  It's about 17MB 
> of stuff.  Not sure what to do with it since I don't have a place to 
> serve it and since they're scanned images they're too big to post. 
> Here's the list of documents; email me if you're wanting something 
> in a hurry while the archive stuff is figured out.  Note that the 
> smell of mildew wasn't preserved in the scanning process.

Let me know if there is something I can do to help archive / host 
things.  Be that hosting, transferring, something else.

There are options.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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From silent700 at gmail.com  Thu Nov 19 14:54:30 2020
From: silent700 at gmail.com (Jason T)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 22:54:30 -0600
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS documents
In-Reply-To: <202011190129.0AJ1TM7v543138@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
References: <202011190129.0AJ1TM7v543138@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
Message-ID: <CAEfH1SEWz6Y2TyX11TXMinK94htWzk1A4SKFgL9UHut1+4jC3Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 7:30 PM Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> Well, it's a very rainy day and since COVID is keeping me home I just
> fed my 516-TSS notebooks into the scanner.  It's about 17MB of stuff.
> Not sure what to do with it since I don't have a place to serve it and
> since they're scanned images they're too big to post.  Here's the list
> of documents; email me if you're wanting something in a hurry while the
> archive stuff is figured out.  Note that the smell of mildew wasn't
> preserved in the scanning process.

Hi Jon - I'd be happy to host them at my site here:
http://vtda.org/docs.  I'd just need you to suggest the best
classification for the docs.  I can also OCR them if you have not done
so already.

-j

From ron at ronnatalie.com  Thu Nov 19 23:45:13 2020
From: ron at ronnatalie.com (Ron Natalie)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 08:45:13 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
In-Reply-To: <CAKr6gn2daDRmR=xWzDQRkrO0x9SoAq3NHnCK84-XWGUd3sK9rg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAKr6gn2daDRmR=xWzDQRkrO0x9SoAq3NHnCK84-XWGUd3sK9rg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <E813FBAE-22B3-4A52-BAF0-DAE4BE7672F4@ronnatalie.com>

 Not only were they embossed on the keys but I believe those control keys moved the cursor in those directions.   The Adm 1 and 3 were some of my first terminals.  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 18, 2020, at 19:46, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
> 
> A related but different "thing" is when the cd activity became a
> pushdown stack of 2 (is it more? I never bothered checking)
> 
> somebody realised going "there and back again" was innately useful.
> 
> (I will never forget working on systems which had cd-moral-equivalent
> <down> and no cd-moral-equivalent <up> but having cd-moral-equivalent
> $HOME making all directory traversals downward, or back to your
> personal root)
> 
> sorry for thread hijack.
> 
> -G
> 
>> On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 8:42 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Wed, 18 Nov 2020, Clem Cole wrote:
>>> 
>>> In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked
>>> it up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, which
>>> were popular at UCB [i.e. the reason hjkl are the movement keys on vi is
>>> the were embossed on the top of those keys on the ADM3A].  It also was
>>> noted that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its keyboard.  But Lesk
>>> definitely needed something to represent a remote user's home directory
>>> because each system was different, so he was forced to use something.
>> 
>> The ADM-3A was one of the best terminals ever made.
>> 
>>> It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on as
>>> students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have been BTL
>>> to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether.
>>> 
>>> So two questions for this august body are:
>>> 1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX?
>> 
>> Gawd...  I think I saw it in PWB, but I'm likely wrong.
>> 
>>> 2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as CTSS,
>>>    TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?
>> 
>> No idea. but given that Unix inherited a lot of stuff....
>> 
>> -- Dave

From imp at bsdimp.com  Fri Nov 20 01:50:28 2020
From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 08:50:28 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CANCZdfob0BPH97LVRKuQ6XnJ5E6sqNvUHU3ZortzQYrm66DNDA@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 3:27 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Joy's cshell came out as part of 2BSD (which was V7 based), but he had
> released "ashell" before that and included it in the original BSD (
> *a.k.a.* 1BSD) which was for V6 [what I don't remember is if it supported
> the convention and I can not easily un-ar(1) the cont.a files in the 1BSD
> tar image in Warren's archives.
>

Looking at the ashell sources on the 1BSD tuhs utree viewer suggests that ~
wasn't there yet, but that it was planned:

sh.c:
...

	Features remaining to be fixed up and/or implemented
	======== ========= == == ===== == === == ===========

...

 * Changes to glob to allow ~, prevent too long path, and prevent
 * perhaps running out of directories.

...

Looking at glob.c, there's no ~ nor 126/176/7e in the sources. Editing
the cont.a archive directly confirms no ~ or similar constant is
present.

By 2BSD, it was in sh.glob.c in the 'expand' function. Later versions
define TILDE as '~' and used that. V7 had no ~ in the shell, but as
you point out uucp there supported ~ for user home directories. V6
didn't have any of this included that I can find.


Warner
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From chet.ramey at case.edu  Fri Nov 20 02:16:47 2020
From: chet.ramey at case.edu (Chet Ramey)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 11:16:47 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
In-Reply-To: <CAKr6gn2daDRmR=xWzDQRkrO0x9SoAq3NHnCK84-XWGUd3sK9rg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
 <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011190931000.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>
 <CAKr6gn2daDRmR=xWzDQRkrO0x9SoAq3NHnCK84-XWGUd3sK9rg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <6da03a38-0645-f90c-1992-bfc99a51cfc9@case.edu>

On 11/18/20 7:44 PM, George Michaelson wrote:
> A related but different "thing" is when the cd activity became a
> pushdown stack of 2 (is it more? I never bothered checking)
> 
> somebody realised going "there and back again" was innately useful.

It was definitely in ksh by 1986. It never made it into any of the Bourne
shells, but POSIX adopted it because it was in ksh88. I don't know
whether it was in the 1983 ksh version.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

From mah at mhorton.net  Fri Nov 20 03:22:18 2020
From: mah at mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 09:22:18 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4f9b86c5-57e6-180f-6f07-6995763b07ff@mhorton.net>

I first saw ~ as part of csh. Bill had an adm3a at home (which is why 
HJKL in vi) but there was a variety of terminals at Berkeley. I assumed 
~ was Bill's idea.

     Mary Ann

On 11/18/20 2:25 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> A couple of my friends from UC Berkeley were musing on another email 
> thread.   The question from one of them came up: /"I'm teaching the 
> undergrad OS course this semester  ... Mention where ~ comes."/
>
> This comment begets a discussion among the 4 of us at where it showed 
> up in the UNIX heritage and it if was taken from somewhere else.
>
> Using the tilde character as a short cut for $HOME was purely a 
> userspace convention and not part of the nami() kernel routine when it 
> came into being.  We know that it was supported by Mike Lesk in UUCP 
> and by Bill Joy in cshell.  The former was first widely released as 
> part of Seventh Edition but was working on V6 before that inside of 
> BTL.  Joy's cshell came out as part of 2BSD (which was V7 based), but 
> he had released "ashell" before that and included it in the original 
> BSD (/a.k.a./ 1BSD) which was for V6 [what I don't remember is if it 
> supported the convention and I can not easily un-ar(1) the 
> cont.a files in the 1BSD tar image in Warren's archives.
>
> In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked 
> it up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, 
> which were popular at UCB [/i.e./ the reason hjkl are the movement 
> keys on vi is the were embossed on the top of those keys on the 
> ADM3A].  It also was noted that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its 
> keyboard.  But Lesk definitely needed something to represent a remote 
> user's home directory because each system was different, so he was 
> forced to use something.
>
> It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on 
> as students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have 
> been BTL to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether.
>
> So two questions for this august body are:
>
>  1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX?
>  2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as
>     CTSS, TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?
>
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From clemc at ccc.com  Fri Nov 20 04:43:51 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 13:43:51 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
In-Reply-To: <4f9b86c5-57e6-180f-6f07-6995763b07ff@mhorton.net>
References: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
 <4f9b86c5-57e6-180f-6f07-6995763b07ff@mhorton.net>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2MAhZvDP7dXeVVqV3FHGHi95VUSXYD3HBXYaiAHjKCxqQ@mail.gmail.com>

I had always thought that also until Pressotto pointed out the Lesk had
used it for UUCP which was running around Bell before Seventh Edition.  But
... given Bill talked about it for shell in his comments, as Warner points
out, that would have been before UUCP arrived at UCB -- so I don't think it
was from Lesk unless someone like Ken had mentioned it, or he knew about it
from another source (such as MTS from which Joy had learned/used as an
undergrad before UNIX).

As you said, Bill had an ADM3A at home (I had an H19 in those days), but as
you knew too well, there were a ton of different terminals at UCB --
whichever was cheapest usually had a run of popularity :-)  So the thought
HOME keycap = home directory also is quite possible.

Of course, Mike and Bill certainly could have come up with it
independently but to me, it seems like the chance of both using the same
char is really unlikely.   IIRC a tilde keycap was on the ASR-37 keyboard
but frankly, I don't remember, and can't find a pic of the keyboard detail,
plus the LCM+L is closed right now for CV-19 reasons so it's hard to check.



On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 12:23 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:

> I first saw ~ as part of csh. Bill had an adm3a at home (which is why HJKL
> in vi) but there was a variety of terminals at Berkeley. I assumed ~ was
> Bill's idea.
>
>     Mary Ann
> On 11/18/20 2:25 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> A couple of my friends from UC Berkeley were musing on another email
> thread.    The question from one of them came up: *"I'm teaching the
> undergrad OS course this semester  ... Mention where ~ comes."*
>
> This comment begets a discussion among the 4 of us at where it showed up
> in the UNIX heritage and it if was taken from somewhere else.
>
> Using the tilde character as a short cut for $HOME was purely a userspace
> convention and not part of the nami() kernel routine when it came into
> being.  We know that it was supported by Mike Lesk in UUCP and by Bill Joy
> in cshell.  The former was first widely released as part of Seventh Edition
> but was working on V6 before that inside of BTL.  Joy's cshell came out as
> part of 2BSD (which was V7 based), but he had released "ashell" before that
> and included it in the original BSD (*a.k.a.* 1BSD) which was for V6
> [what I don't remember is if it supported the convention and I can not
> easily un-ar(1) the cont.a files in the 1BSD tar image in Warren's
> archives.
>
> In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked it
> up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, which were
> popular at UCB [*i.e.* the reason hjkl are the movement keys on vi is the
> were embossed on the top of those keys on the ADM3A].  It also was noted
> that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its keyboard.  But Lesk definitely needed
> something to represent a remote user's home directory because each system
> was different, so he was forced to use something.
>
> It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on as
> students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have been BTL
> to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether.
>
> So two questions for this august body are:
>
>    1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX?
>    2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as
>    CTSS, TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?
>
>
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From michael at kjorling.se  Fri Nov 20 06:02:51 2020
From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 20:02:51 +0000
Subject: [TUHS] Where did the "~" come from
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2MAhZvDP7dXeVVqV3FHGHi95VUSXYD3HBXYaiAHjKCxqQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAC20D2N56ZE=gizt_wu_ujUn3B4_O=UgGH-HNBNgiCc_-9YTCg@mail.gmail.com>
 <4f9b86c5-57e6-180f-6f07-6995763b07ff@mhorton.net>
 <CAC20D2MAhZvDP7dXeVVqV3FHGHi95VUSXYD3HBXYaiAHjKCxqQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e1e6f4a6-e4ae-40eb-bc50-28e1fa67b064@localhost>

On 19 Nov 2020 13:43 -0500, from clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole):
> IIRC a tilde keycap was on the ASR-37 keyboard
> but frankly, I don't remember, and can't find a pic of the keyboard detail,
> plus the LCM+L is closed right now for CV-19 reasons so it's hard to check.

http://www.navy-radio.com/manuals-ttycorp.htm#m37 has a copy of "37
KEYBOARD SEND-RECEIVE (KSR) TELETYPEWRITER SET AND 37 AUTOMATIC
SEND-RECEIVE (ASR) TELETYPEWRITER SET FOR "DATA-PHONE®" SERVICE
GENERAL DESCRIPTION AND OPERATION", issue 1, dated June 1971
<http://www.navy-radio.com/manuals/tty/m37/574-301-100-iss1-7106.pdf>
which on page 7 has a keyboard layout diagram. It looks to me like the
second right, topmost key, at least on the illustrated layout, came
with ^ ~ RS.

Also 574-321-800TC, "37 Keyboard (YK) and Base (YB) Parts" (issue 1,
December 1967, linked from that same page), page 9 indicates that for
this you'd want key cap part number 314843, which is listed as ~ RS ^.
Judging by that same page, it looks like P/N 313040 might also apply.

This isn't as good as an in-person look at an actual unit, of course,
but it definitely looks like you at least could have a key cap with a
tilde on the 37.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
 “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”


From gnu at toad.com  Fri Nov 20 08:54:05 2020
From: gnu at toad.com (John Gilmore)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 14:54:05 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] UNIX NEWS and ; login: archives, particularly from 1975-1978
Message-ID: <1837.1605826445@hop.toad.com>

While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a
mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original
UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977.  It was renamed to ;login:
in 1977 and has continued publication to this day.  The envelope also
contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978).

I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here:

  http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/

These have not been OCR'd, and many of the pages were rotated by 90
degrees in the original publication, to fit two pages of typewritten
correspondence (or recipient address lists) into one page of newsletter.
Still, in a quick web search I was unable to find copies of these
anywhere else, so I invested a few hours to scan them in and post them
for historical interest.  As an example, Sixth Edition (v6) UNIX was
announced in issue number 1.

These are all free to publish nowadays.  USENIX was one of the first
technical organizations to establish an Open Access policy for its
publications, a step which distinguishes them from ACM and many academic
publishers who favor revenue for themselves over the progress of
science.  (I voted for this policy decades ago when I was a USENIX board
member.)  This page, for example, says:

  https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/schwarz

  "USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our
  events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once
  the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted
  after the event are also free and open to everyone."

The ;login: archives at USENIX.org are complete from October 1997 to today:

  https://www.usenix.org/publications/login  

Also, most but not all issues of ;login: from 1983 to 1997 have been
scanned by USENIX and uploaded to the Internet Archive here:

  https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?&sort=date

The USENIX Association apparently has paper copies of the stuff I
scanned in today, but they are still trying to locate ;login: issues
from 1979 and parts of 1980 and 1981.  In addition, they are backlogged
on scanning in their old materials (including copies of ;login: between
1978/09 and 1983/02).  If you have old copies of ;login: that you don't
see visible in these places, please scan them, or offer them to USENIX.

Also, if you have old proceedings of USENIX conferences, there are still
three that the USENIX staff do not have any copy of:

  XFree86 Technical Conference
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/xfree86/
  2001-11-08

  5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als01/tech.html
  2001-11-08

  WORLDS '04
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/worlds04/tech/
  2004-12-05

If you have any of these three, please let <info at usenix.org> know.  They
also lack about twenty more for which they have posted the academic
papers, but don't have the covers or front-matter, so if you have other
proceedings from between 1989 and 2004 that you'd be willing to part
with or scan, also let them know.  Thanks!

	John
	

From mah at mhorton.net  Sat Nov 21 03:14:02 2020
From: mah at mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton)
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2020 09:14:02 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] UNIX NEWS and ;
 login: archives, particularly from 1975-1978
In-Reply-To: <1837.1605826445@hop.toad.com>
References: <1837.1605826445@hop.toad.com>
Message-ID: <fd98d71e-1906-00c5-dacf-b44800e56ad7@mhorton.net>

John,

Does Usenix have online proceedings of the technical conferences from 
the 1980s?  I can't find them.

Thanks,

     Mary Ann

On 11/19/20 2:54 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
> While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a
> mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original
> UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977.  It was renamed to ;login:
> in 1977 and has continued publication to this day.  The envelope also
> contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978).
>
> I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here:
>
>    http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/
>
> These have not been OCR'd, and many of the pages were rotated by 90
> degrees in the original publication, to fit two pages of typewritten
> correspondence (or recipient address lists) into one page of newsletter.
> Still, in a quick web search I was unable to find copies of these
> anywhere else, so I invested a few hours to scan them in and post them
> for historical interest.  As an example, Sixth Edition (v6) UNIX was
> announced in issue number 1.
>
> These are all free to publish nowadays.  USENIX was one of the first
> technical organizations to establish an Open Access policy for its
> publications, a step which distinguishes them from ACM and many academic
> publishers who favor revenue for themselves over the progress of
> science.  (I voted for this policy decades ago when I was a USENIX board
> member.)  This page, for example, says:
>
>    https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/schwarz
>
>    "USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our
>    events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once
>    the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted
>    after the event are also free and open to everyone."
>
> The ;login: archives at USENIX.org are complete from October 1997 to today:
>
>    https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
>
> Also, most but not all issues of ;login: from 1983 to 1997 have been
> scanned by USENIX and uploaded to the Internet Archive here:
>
>    https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?&sort=date
>
> The USENIX Association apparently has paper copies of the stuff I
> scanned in today, but they are still trying to locate ;login: issues
> from 1979 and parts of 1980 and 1981.  In addition, they are backlogged
> on scanning in their old materials (including copies of ;login: between
> 1978/09 and 1983/02).  If you have old copies of ;login: that you don't
> see visible in these places, please scan them, or offer them to USENIX.
>
> Also, if you have old proceedings of USENIX conferences, there are still
> three that the USENIX staff do not have any copy of:
>
>    XFree86 Technical Conference
>    https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/xfree86/
>    2001-11-08
>
>    5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference
>    https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als01/tech.html
>    2001-11-08
>
>    WORLDS '04
>    https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/worlds04/tech/
>    2004-12-05
>
> If you have any of these three, please let <info at usenix.org> know.  They
> also lack about twenty more for which they have posted the academic
> papers, but don't have the covers or front-matter, so if you have other
> proceedings from between 1989 and 2004 that you'd be willing to part
> with or scan, also let them know.  Thanks!
>
> 	John
> 	

From clemc at ccc.com  Sat Nov 21 03:28:23 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2020 12:28:23 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] UNIX NEWS and ;
 login: archives, particularly from 1975-1978
In-Reply-To: <fd98d71e-1906-00c5-dacf-b44800e56ad7@mhorton.net>
References: <1837.1605826445@hop.toad.com>
 <fd98d71e-1906-00c5-dacf-b44800e56ad7@mhorton.net>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2PEYH8uR+4r3VrKc8iAQf1Cs8Sw3uEjk9pK3HpGGR74YA@mail.gmail.com>

Some,  the original ones that were printed and bound have not been
scanned. The directory: Publications <https://www.usenix.org/publications>
is where to start.  Some of the paper are online after scanning on a case
by case basis.  Talk to Casey if there is a specific request, although
since the Berkeley office is going to close in about 2 weeks, I don't
expect they can do much for a bit.  FYI:  The last printed edition of
*;login* went to bed last week and I believe mailed shortly thereafter.  It
will be electronic from now on.

Clem

On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 12:15 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:

> John,
>
> Does Usenix have online proceedings of the technical conferences from
> the 1980s?  I can't find them.
>
> Thanks,
>
>      Mary Ann
>
> On 11/19/20 2:54 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
> > While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a
> > mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original
> > UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977.  It was renamed to ;login:
> > in 1977 and has continued publication to this day.  The envelope also
> > contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978).
> >
> > I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here:
> >
> >    http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/
> >
> > These have not been OCR'd, and many of the pages were rotated by 90
> > degrees in the original publication, to fit two pages of typewritten
> > correspondence (or recipient address lists) into one page of newsletter.
> > Still, in a quick web search I was unable to find copies of these
> > anywhere else, so I invested a few hours to scan them in and post them
> > for historical interest.  As an example, Sixth Edition (v6) UNIX was
> > announced in issue number 1.
> >
> > These are all free to publish nowadays.  USENIX was one of the first
> > technical organizations to establish an Open Access policy for its
> > publications, a step which distinguishes them from ACM and many academic
> > publishers who favor revenue for themselves over the progress of
> > science.  (I voted for this policy decades ago when I was a USENIX board
> > member.)  This page, for example, says:
> >
> >
> https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/schwarz
> >
> >    "USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our
> >    events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once
> >    the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted
> >    after the event are also free and open to everyone."
> >
> > The ;login: archives at USENIX.org are complete from October 1997 to
> today:
> >
> >    https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
> >
> > Also, most but not all issues of ;login: from 1983 to 1997 have been
> > scanned by USENIX and uploaded to the Internet Archive here:
> >
> >    https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?&sort=date
> >
> > The USENIX Association apparently has paper copies of the stuff I
> > scanned in today, but they are still trying to locate ;login: issues
> > from 1979 and parts of 1980 and 1981.  In addition, they are backlogged
> > on scanning in their old materials (including copies of ;login: between
> > 1978/09 and 1983/02).  If you have old copies of ;login: that you don't
> > see visible in these places, please scan them, or offer them to USENIX.
> >
> > Also, if you have old proceedings of USENIX conferences, there are still
> > three that the USENIX staff do not have any copy of:
> >
> >    XFree86 Technical Conference
> >
> https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/xfree86/
> >    2001-11-08
> >
> >    5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference
> >
> https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als01/tech.html
> >    2001-11-08
> >
> >    WORLDS '04
> >    https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/worlds04/tech/
> >    2004-12-05
> >
> > If you have any of these three, please let <info at usenix.org> know.  They
> > also lack about twenty more for which they have posted the academic
> > papers, but don't have the covers or front-matter, so if you have other
> > proceedings from between 1989 and 2004 that you'd be willing to part
> > with or scan, also let them know.  Thanks!
> >
> >       John
> >
>
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From henry.r.bent at gmail.com  Sat Nov 21 07:32:34 2020
From: henry.r.bent at gmail.com (Henry Bent)
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2020 16:32:34 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
Message-ID: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>

Hello All,

I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new replies or
insight.  How did package management start?  Were sites keeping track of
packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god intended)
somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without significant
announcement?  At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to have a
central way to track additional software"?

I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the '80s.  What
was the mechanism before that?

-Henry
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From imp at bsdimp.com  Sat Nov 21 10:27:42 2020
From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2020 17:27:42 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] UNIX NEWS and ;
 login: archives, particularly from 1975-1978
In-Reply-To: <1837.1605826445@hop.toad.com>
References: <1837.1605826445@hop.toad.com>
Message-ID: <CANCZdfpDao044XGCz_498HENeCZKGN1hH7h81DUfr8j979nCTw@mail.gmail.com>

Thanks for doing this John....

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 4:06 PM John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:

> While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a
> mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original
> UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977.  It was renamed to ;login:
> in 1977 and has continued publication to this day.  The envelope also
> contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978).
>
> I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here:
>
>   http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/


I've started to recover the text from the special edition, if anybody is
interested. It's so badly faded, though, this may take some time...

Warner



>
> These have not been OCR'd, and many of the pages were rotated by 90
> degrees in the original publication, to fit two pages of typewritten
> correspondence (or recipient address lists) into one page of newsletter.
> Still, in a quick web search I was unable to find copies of these
> anywhere else, so I invested a few hours to scan them in and post them
> for historical interest.  As an example, Sixth Edition (v6) UNIX was
> announced in issue number 1.
>
> These are all free to publish nowadays.  USENIX was one of the first
> technical organizations to establish an Open Access policy for its
> publications, a step which distinguishes them from ACM and many academic
> publishers who favor revenue for themselves over the progress of
> science.  (I voted for this policy decades ago when I was a USENIX board
> member.)  This page, for example, says:
>
>   https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/schwarz
>
>   "USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our
>   events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once
>   the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted
>   after the event are also free and open to everyone."
>
> The ;login: archives at USENIX.org are complete from October 1997 to today:
>
>   https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
>
> Also, most but not all issues of ;login: from 1983 to 1997 have been
> scanned by USENIX and uploaded to the Internet Archive here:
>
>   https://archive.org/details/usenix-login?&sort=date
>
> The USENIX Association apparently has paper copies of the stuff I
> scanned in today, but they are still trying to locate ;login: issues
> from 1979 and parts of 1980 and 1981.  In addition, they are backlogged
> on scanning in their old materials (including copies of ;login: between
> 1978/09 and 1983/02).  If you have old copies of ;login: that you don't
> see visible in these places, please scan them, or offer them to USENIX.
>
> Also, if you have old proceedings of USENIX conferences, there are still
> three that the USENIX staff do not have any copy of:
>
>   XFree86 Technical Conference
>   https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/xfree86/
>   2001-11-08
>
>   5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference
>
> https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als01/tech.html
>   2001-11-08
>
>   WORLDS '04
>   https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/worlds04/tech/
>   2004-12-05
>
> If you have any of these three, please let <info at usenix.org> know.  They
> also lack about twenty more for which they have posted the academic
> papers, but don't have the covers or front-matter, so if you have other
> proceedings from between 1989 and 2004 that you'd be willing to part
> with or scan, also let them know.  Thanks!
>
>         John
>
>
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From reed at reedmedia.net  Sat Nov 21 10:55:53 2020
From: reed at reedmedia.net (Jeremy C. Reed)
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2020 18:55:53 -0600 (CST)
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
In-Reply-To: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.21.2011201848490.16168@t1.m.reedmedia.net>

See The SPMS Software Project Management System
documented in the new/spms for 4.3BSD
http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/43bsd/usr/src/new/spms/doc/
(I couldn't find link to this at TUHS.)
I don't know about it but maybe that will help 

From arnold at skeeve.com  Sun Nov 22 03:50:47 2020
From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2020 10:50:47 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
In-Reply-To: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <202011211750.0ALHolUI011814@freefriends.org>

Things were pretty much ad hoc.  Commercial software likely came
as tar/cpio tapes to install however the vendor wanted. Free software
was from USENET in source code, so again, however people wanted.

The AT&T Unix PC (7300 / 3B1) in the late 80s had a file format
for installing software from floppy and tracked what was installed,
but that was unique to it.

Package managers as we know them today really became a big thing
with Linux. Redhat's RPM was one of the earliest.

My two cents; I'm sure others remember it differently.

Arnold

Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new replies or
> insight.  How did package management start?  Were sites keeping track of
> packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god intended)
> somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without significant
> announcement?  At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to have a
> central way to track additional software"?
>
> I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the '80s.  What
> was the mechanism before that?
>
> -Henry


From wkt at tuhs.org  Sun Nov 22 06:53:12 2020
From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2020 06:53:12 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] UNIX NEWS and ;
 login: archives, particularly from 1975-1978
In-Reply-To: <1837.1605826445@hop.toad.com>
References: <1837.1605826445@hop.toad.com>
Message-ID: <20201121205312.GA7185@minnie.tuhs.org>

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 02:54:05PM -0800, John Gilmore wrote:
> While cleaning up a few shelves of old USENIX proceedings, I found a
> mysterious manila envelope full of xeroxed copies of all the original
> UNIX NEWS newsletters from 1975 thru 1977.  It was renamed to ;login:
> in 1977 and has continued publication to this day.  The envelope also
> contained ;login: issues v2n6 thru v3n8 (1977-1978).
> 
> I scanned those all in today and put them up on my website, here:
> 
>   http://www.toad.com/early-usenix-newsletters/

I've copied these into the Unix Archive here, with attributions to John:

https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Usenix/Early_Newsletters/

Thanks so much for finding and scanning them in, John!

Cheers, Warren

From clemc at ccc.com  Sun Nov 22 08:23:45 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2020 17:23:45 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
In-Reply-To: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2OUZ1eMr7oYWtrLD_=58g-kSn6DrMceGghNaM+pOsAZbQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 4:33 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:

> I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new replies or
> insight.  How did package management start?
>
Really good question.   I thought the PKG_ADD we had on Masscomp in '83 was
grabbed from PWB 3.0.  Unfortunately, Warren's stuff does not include, but
that is known to missing things (like SCCS which was first distributed as
part of PWB 1.0 and every version after).

So here is what I remember ...

When we did the '85 /usr/group standard, one of the things we argued about
was how would an ISV >>deliver<< a binary *I.e.* 'interchange' between two
systems to use the TOPS-10/TOPS-20 terminology (which is actually what we
were using since most of us were familiar with same).   By the time we got
to IEEE P1003, the whole reason USTAR was created was to solve that - which
begat the famous Tar Wars of the Research (TAR format) *vs*. CPIO (AT&T)
types [USTAR was a compromise and as I have said previously, was picked due
to the code in Ken's original implementation of the header CKSUM so it had
an unintended extension mechanism and as ASCII - cpio was binary in those
days AND could not be extended so older readers could at least read a new
tape).

The 'install' was left to each ISV and the assumption had been you would
use a USTAR tape (and eventually the PAX program) to read the bits, but
each ISV did their own 'installer.'  The idea of keeping a system-wide DB
on what was installed was still in the future.    PWB 3.0/System III
PKG_ADD was primitive, but my memory is it was the first attempt.  I do
remember it was on a number of System III based systems but was very much
tied to installing the AT&T supplied SW - which I suspect was leftover from
the AT&T external maneuver of trying to supply everything and was difficult
to use by ISVs and I don't remember many doing so.

As you point out, the first commercial UNIX I remember that really tried to
solve it, was Ultrix which had something for both their own use and for
their ISV's (setld) - which frankly sucked and I personally hated and
railed against.  But to DEC's credit, it was there.  It was modeled after a
similar tool for VMS.  Truth is, for a while it was the best.  The biggest
thing that setld did (which in practice it did poorly) was trying to keep a
DB of what you installed so that an admin could type a command and see what
had been loaded, and when and also what licenses were installed to run
purchased software.  Basically, it was driven by field service and SW
licensing.

When FreeBSD 1.0 came out, the big thing Jordan Hubbard did (and was much
better than Linux installs for a long time) was work on install >>for a new
system<<.  He also created the idea of 'packages' which were all of the
thousands of UNIX tools that people had ported to FreeBSD and could
optionally be installed.  I think it really was the first of the same name
and most of the features we know.  By today's measure, again it was crude,
my memory is that unlike setld, since it was not managing licenses, he
didn't think to add a DB/log of what was being installed.  He did not try
to solve the 'update' problem when a new version of FreeBSD was released
BTW.  Basically, you needed to do a new install.

Roll forward a couple of years and Linux eventually picked up Jordan's
basic installer framework which vastly improved the out-of-box for some of
the Linux distros.  But the important thing that RH did beyond FreeBSD was
to create RPM, which added a setld like DB to the scheme, not for licenses,
but so that you could easily do updates, add options, etc.  They combined
Jordans install ideas and packages ideas, which was cool for a system where
you got/get everything from the distro.

The truth is, none of the Research UNIX, FreeBSD nor Linux really put the
effort that DEC, Masscomp, Sun, IBM, HP did in how to update a system.
*i.e.* I'm currently running version 10.13.5 and I want to get to 10.14.2
-- what needs to be installed and how will it affect already installed and
running ISV codes.  [ IMO Microsoft is the worst and Apple is not much
better].

Linux is a weird one.  Because of the 'open source' thinking, the idea of
keeping old binaries running is not the high order bit.  DEC, IBM, HP,
Masscomp, and to some extent SUN and SGI, because they had a market for
commercial SW, have tried to keep old binaries going.

So ... now we have apt-get - which for what it is, works pretty well but,
it still does not solve a problem someone like my firm has that sells
commercial SW.    FWIW:  Since I actually wrote the spec for it inside
Intel, I can tell you what the design/goal/direction to tell the install
teams in that my employer distributes using RPM and >>is suppose<< to work
unmodified with an RPM-based install (*i.e.* be 'socially compliant' to the
norms of a more commercial-like Linux site).  The >>idea<< is that the RPMs
are supposed to be able to automatically converted to Yum and a few other
formats (check the specs here for each tool, however -- this is not a
warranty from me - YMMV -- just telling what I >>personal<< scream at the
team when I discover they did not test properly as sometimes they do break
that - which can cause big issues when trying to install on a
supercomputer).  The >>idea<< is that the current generation of package
tools, like setld of yesterday, will allow the admin to what's running on
the local system.

Clem
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From g.branden.robinson at gmail.com  Sun Nov 22 09:24:51 2020
From: g.branden.robinson at gmail.com (G. Branden Robinson)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2020 10:24:51 +1100
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2OUZ1eMr7oYWtrLD_=58g-kSn6DrMceGghNaM+pOsAZbQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAC20D2OUZ1eMr7oYWtrLD_=58g-kSn6DrMceGghNaM+pOsAZbQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20201121232448.mwxq4kjjvpth4c4b@localhost.localdomain>

At 2020-11-21T17:23:45-0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> Roll forward a couple of years and Linux eventually picked up Jordan's
> basic installer framework which vastly improved the out-of-box for
> some of the Linux distros.  But the important thing that RH did beyond
> FreeBSD was to create RPM, which added a setld like DB to the scheme,
> not for licenses, but so that you could easily do updates, add
> options, etc.  They combined Jordans install ideas and packages ideas,
> which was cool for a system where you got/get everything from the
> distro.

The complete lack of mention of dpkg and the Debian package format is an
error in your narrative.  According to rpm.org, the "first commit" to
the rpm package management software was on November 27, 1995[1].

By this time, dpkg had already been around for over a year; you can find
Ian Jackson's release announcement of dpkg 0.93.63 in July 1995[2], and
dpkg's own "ChangeLog.old" file in its source tree documents its history
back to August 1994.

> So ... now we have apt-get - which for what it is, works pretty well
> but, it still does not solve a problem someone like my firm has that
> sells commercial SW.

It is worth noting that apt also originated in Debian, largely developed
by Jason Gunthorpe but originally uploaded by Scott Ellis in April
1998[3].  Despite apt's popularity and obvious technical advantages in
upgrade management (a cycle-breaking dependency analyzer)--it drew
grudging admiration even from many in the community who abhorred
uttering the words "Debian", "GNU/Linux", or both--and a deliberately
package-format-agnostic architecture, RPM-based distributions resisted
adopting it for years until Conectiva, a commercial distribution from
Brazil, wrote the requisite back-end for rpm support (apt-rpm)[4].

> FWIW:  Since I actually wrote the spec for it inside Intel, I can tell
> you what the design/goal/direction to tell the install teams in that
> my employer distributes using RPM and >>is suppose<< to work
> unmodified with an RPM-based install (*i.e.* be 'socially compliant'
> to the norms of a more commercial-like Linux site).  The >>idea<< is
> that the RPMs are supposed to be able to automatically converted to
> Yum and a few other formats (check the specs here for each tool,
> however -- this is not a warranty from me - YMMV -- just telling what
> I >>personal<< scream at the team when I discover they did not test
> properly as sometimes they do break that - which can cause big issues
> when trying to install on a supercomputer).

These norms tend to be distribution-specific.  Even where technology is
the same, the norms that produce integration can differ.  Little about
Unix kernels prescribes any particular filesystem hierarchy, for
instance.

It has often been observed that what quality the Debian system enjoys is
less due to its technological advantages--though IMO these are clear in
package format (deb), source package format (dsc) and administration
tools--but in Debian's culture of writing prescriptions for a consistent
system configuration in its Policy Manual[5], of maintaining automated
checking tools for compliance with those prescriptions[6][7], and of
being willing to gate releases on the lack of such compliance.  The last
used to be a point of emphatic derision by rival distributions, most of
which were funded by venture capital and thus motivated to emphasize
cadence over technical quality, the former property being more easily
measured by non-specialists, deep-pocketed and otherwise.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://rpm.org/timeline.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1995/07/msg00009.html
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/1998/04/msg00140.html
[4] https://lwn.net/Articles/30728/
[5] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
[6] https://lintian.debian.org/
[7] https://piuparts.debian.org/
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From gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com  Sun Nov 22 09:30:45 2020
From: gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com (Gregg Levine)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2020 18:30:45 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
In-Reply-To: <202011211750.0ALHolUI011814@freefriends.org>
References: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
 <202011211750.0ALHolUI011814@freefriends.org>
Message-ID: <CAC5iaNGr6grWayq55iGAN7EJK22-5XWq79xM_1Ub3vnKLjVMpQ@mail.gmail.com>

Hello!
I, myself normally run Slackware Linux. It uses package management in
the form of compressed tar files, and a flat file store of the names.
It also has a tool which when run will show the user what's there, and
what they do if need be. In fact Slackware predates Red Hat by about
four years. (Pat and his CS professor introduced themselves to one
much earlier one, which was SLS. Neither liked it, and the Prof was
convinced that Pat could do better.)
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 1:54 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> Things were pretty much ad hoc.  Commercial software likely came
> as tar/cpio tapes to install however the vendor wanted. Free software
> was from USENET in source code, so again, however people wanted.
>
> The AT&T Unix PC (7300 / 3B1) in the late 80s had a file format
> for installing software from floppy and tracked what was installed,
> but that was unique to it.
>
> Package managers as we know them today really became a big thing
> with Linux. Redhat's RPM was one of the earliest.
>
> My two cents; I'm sure others remember it differently.
>
> Arnold
>
> Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hello All,
> >
> > I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new replies or
> > insight.  How did package management start?  Were sites keeping track of
> > packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god intended)
> > somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without significant
> > announcement?  At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to have a
> > central way to track additional software"?
> >
> > I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the '80s.  What
> > was the mechanism before that?
> >
> > -Henry
>

From clemc at ccc.com  Sun Nov 22 11:17:53 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2020 20:17:53 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
In-Reply-To: <CAC5iaNGr6grWayq55iGAN7EJK22-5XWq79xM_1Ub3vnKLjVMpQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
 <202011211750.0ALHolUI011814@freefriends.org>
 <CAC5iaNGr6grWayq55iGAN7EJK22-5XWq79xM_1Ub3vnKLjVMpQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2MFFSTVp0LRaoaDxMU6SSzNhPg-6S1VaPTyr0P=Xco5Sg@mail.gmail.com>

1) No intention to slight debian in any way.
2) dpkg was definitely an improvement over FreeBSds ports scheme. But... In
fact freebsd did have a pkg system for ports before that --- which was
basically similar to 1983 SysIII scheme
3) also as I understand (and larry feel free to correct me here as a better
chronicler of things Linux than I) but I believe that the big thing rpm
added was the DB like DEC's setld and system Sun had used which us what I
was refering too.

Pls remember that I was trying to chronicle the basic ideas and some of the
motivation which is what Henry asked.   And that the original driver was to
support ISVs installs.  So I was trying to explain the history of what we
did at the time.

The be fair one of the more vocal people in the early 80s was Heinz who
occasionally add color here.  I remember Heinz trying to push us to an ABI
and not stop at an API.

Today most of the ISVs have abandoned Unix except for the Mac. Msft and the
phones have taken that.  And the package mngr has been replaced by the app
store which has.much great use than any of the current Unix packaging
schemes.  Funny how the profit motive drove that.

Working for one of the few ISVS that do package SW for Unix we basically
support two schemes.  Apple Mac installs and RPM because that is were the
primary customer base has been.   I'd not about goodness or being better or
being first.  It's economic (Larry and I bemoan this a lot).

So pls don't take it as a comment about anything other than trying to
answer as much of the early history as I could.

Heinz, Jon, Larry you all lived this on the commercial side.   Care to add
anything?

Clem

On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 6:31 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello!
> I, myself normally run Slackware Linux. It uses package management in
> the form of compressed tar files, and a flat file store of the names.
> It also has a tool which when run will show the user what's there, and
> what they do if need be. In fact Slackware predates Red Hat by about
> four years. (Pat and his CS professor introduced themselves to one
> much earlier one, which was SLS. Neither liked it, and the Prof was
> convinced that Pat could do better.)
> -----
> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>
> On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 1:54 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
> >
> > Things were pretty much ad hoc.  Commercial software likely came
> > as tar/cpio tapes to install however the vendor wanted. Free software
> > was from USENET in source code, so again, however people wanted.
> >
> > The AT&T Unix PC (7300 / 3B1) in the late 80s had a file format
> > for installing software from floppy and tracked what was installed,
> > but that was unique to it.
> >
> > Package managers as we know them today really became a big thing
> > with Linux. Redhat's RPM was one of the earliest.
> >
> > My two cents; I'm sure others remember it differently.
> >
> > Arnold
> >
> > Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Hello All,
> > >
> > > I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new
> replies or
> > > insight.  How did package management start?  Were sites keeping track
> of
> > > packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god intended)
> > > somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without
> significant
> > > announcement?  At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to have
> a
> > > central way to track additional software"?
> > >
> > > I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the '80s.
> What
> > > was the mechanism before that?
> > >
> > > -Henry
> >
>
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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From imp at bsdimp.com  Sun Nov 22 11:39:08 2020
From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2020 18:39:08 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2MFFSTVp0LRaoaDxMU6SSzNhPg-6S1VaPTyr0P=Xco5Sg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
 <202011211750.0ALHolUI011814@freefriends.org>
 <CAC5iaNGr6grWayq55iGAN7EJK22-5XWq79xM_1Ub3vnKLjVMpQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAC20D2MFFSTVp0LRaoaDxMU6SSzNhPg-6S1VaPTyr0P=Xco5Sg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CANCZdfp=jvCL5KAB_u78Spi4iaCUZLrunE6LUSod+vm4MZD3Hg@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 6:19 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> 1) No intention to slight debian in any way.
> 2) dpkg was definitely an improvement over FreeBSds ports scheme. But...
> In fact freebsd did have a pkg system for ports before that --- which was
> basically similar to 1983 SysIII scheme
>

FreeBSD's ports/pkg system did keep track of what was installed on the
system. There was a database in /var/db so pkg_delete could remove things
and pkg_which to know what pkg a given file belonged to.

It was first-ish, but there was some package system for the early linux
root disks. I think this is how SLS started, but I might be misremembering.
But despite being early, and being ported to other BSDs, it sucked at
upgrading for 20-odd years until it was completely rewritten.... latter day
pkg is so much better, though its repo management has been a little weak
relative to the professional efforts in the linux world.

/usr/ports none the less was ground breaking because it handled both the
local patching, the build depends and the packaging under one umbrella.
It's been on the whole a good thing and has reinvented itself several times
over the years.

When I was managing SunOS systems it seemed like everyone rolled their own.
There was nothing like VMSINSTALL...

Warner

3) also as I understand (and larry feel free to correct me here as a better
> chronicler of things Linux than I) but I believe that the big thing rpm
> added was the DB like DEC's setld and system Sun had used which us what I
> was refering too.
>
> Pls remember that I was trying to chronicle the basic ideas and some of
> the motivation which is what Henry asked.   And that the original driver
> was to support ISVs installs.  So I was trying to explain the history of
> what we did at the time.
>
> The be fair one of the more vocal people in the early 80s was Heinz who
> occasionally add color here.  I remember Heinz trying to push us to an ABI
> and not stop at an API.
>
> Today most of the ISVs have abandoned Unix except for the Mac. Msft and
> the phones have taken that.  And the package mngr has been replaced by the
> app store which has.much great use than any of the current Unix packaging
> schemes.  Funny how the profit motive drove that.
>
> Working for one of the few ISVS that do package SW for Unix we basically
> support two schemes.  Apple Mac installs and RPM because that is were the
> primary customer base has been.   I'd not about goodness or being better or
> being first.  It's economic (Larry and I bemoan this a lot).
>
> So pls don't take it as a comment about anything other than trying to
> answer as much of the early history as I could.
>
> Heinz, Jon, Larry you all lived this on the commercial side.   Care to add
> anything?
>
> Clem
>
> On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 6:31 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello!
>> I, myself normally run Slackware Linux. It uses package management in
>> the form of compressed tar files, and a flat file store of the names.
>> It also has a tool which when run will show the user what's there, and
>> what they do if need be. In fact Slackware predates Red Hat by about
>> four years. (Pat and his CS professor introduced themselves to one
>> much earlier one, which was SLS. Neither liked it, and the Prof was
>> convinced that Pat could do better.)
>> -----
>> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
>> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 1:54 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Things were pretty much ad hoc.  Commercial software likely came
>> > as tar/cpio tapes to install however the vendor wanted. Free software
>> > was from USENET in source code, so again, however people wanted.
>> >
>> > The AT&T Unix PC (7300 / 3B1) in the late 80s had a file format
>> > for installing software from floppy and tracked what was installed,
>> > but that was unique to it.
>> >
>> > Package managers as we know them today really became a big thing
>> > with Linux. Redhat's RPM was one of the earliest.
>> >
>> > My two cents; I'm sure others remember it differently.
>> >
>> > Arnold
>> >
>> > Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > Hello All,
>> > >
>> > > I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new
>> replies or
>> > > insight.  How did package management start?  Were sites keeping track
>> of
>> > > packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god
>> intended)
>> > > somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without
>> significant
>> > > announcement?  At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to
>> have a
>> > > central way to track additional software"?
>> > >
>> > > I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the '80s.
>> What
>> > > was the mechanism before that?
>> > >
>> > > -Henry
>> >
>>
> --
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>
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From jon at fourwinds.com  Mon Nov 23 10:16:06 2020
From: jon at fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2020 16:16:06 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS Documents
Message-ID: <202011230016.0AN0G6K2158571@darkstar.fourwinds.com>

These are in Warren's hands now and he'll let us know where their permanent
home ends up being.  Since these are pretty much uncirculated unlike the UNIX
documents I wrote a README to go along with them which Heinz reviewed so it's
the best that two aging sets of memories can do.  Here it is:

- - -

516-TSS is a little-known but groundbreaking and influential operating system
that was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories.  I came across this system
because Carl Christensen and later Heinz Lycklama were major contributors to
it, and they were also advisors for the Bell Labs Explorer Scout Post at
Murray Hill.  I was a member of that post which allowed us to play with
computers on Monday evenings, and 516-TSS was what most of us used.  Through
a series of amazingly lucky events, I ended up working as a summer student
for Carl and Heinz and got to contribute to the system.  Long before the term
"code spelunking" was coined Carl and Heinz taught us both code and spelunking.

This is not a complete set of 516-TSS documents, it's a couple of notebooks
that I found in a box in the basement.  Probably my ancient work-at-home copy.

I don't know enough history to know if it was the first, but 516-TSS was an
early department-level time-sharing system.  It was built around a Honeywell
DDP-516.  While other time-sharing systems predate 516-TSS, they weren't
systems that one's department could afford.  CTSS certainly came earlier,
but it used a monster IBM 7090 mainframe.  In round numbers, a 7090 cost
$3,000,000 dollars, a DDP-516 cost $50,000.

516-TSS was also a virtual memory system; again not the first but a rarity
in that era.  My recollection is that it used the 516's index register as
the base address register, and there was some complicated mucking around
that a program had to do if it needed to use the index register including
disabling interrupts and eventually restoring the register from .PRESB
(present base address), one of those weird things stuck in my memory from
long ago.

I believe that the system's development predated UNIX although I remember
our department getting a PDP-11/45 running UNIX Version 3 in the summer of
1973. This machine was acquired so that Doug Bayer and Heinz Lycklama could
develop the MERT operating system.

The 516 was a testbed for a lot of novel technologies.  It had a local area
network called the ring which was later made to work on PDP-11s including
Ken and Dennis's machine up in the attic of building 2.  It was also used
to develop the GLANCE graphics terminals.  My recollection is that one of
the main drivers behind getting the ring to work on PDP-11s and UNIX was so
that Ken could get a GLANCE-G terminal for playing chess.  Sandy Fraser's
Spider network was developed there.  It supported a number of novel
applications including Dick Hause's DTE graphics editor; way ahead of its
time.  I remember that one GLANCE terminal was fitted with an array of LEDs
and photodiodes to make an early version of a touch screen.

While it wasn't exactly work related, a number of the people in the department
had purchased property up in Vermont for ski cabins.  An important use of the
516-TSS system and GLANCE-G terminals was to figure out survey closures.  The
property surveys were ancient, of the "from the big rock to the left of the
tree that's no longer there" sorts of things, so figuring out the actual
property lines was an interesting problem.

The 516 also had a wide area network which consisted of picking up the phone
and calling the computer center.  It had a monster GE-635 or maybe 645 left
over from the Multics project.  It may have been renamed to be a Honeywell
6070 with Honeywell's acquisition of GE's computer business.  The computer
center kept department costs down by hoarding all of the really expensive
peripherals.  For example, we didn't have a card punch; that was effectively
done via remote job entry.  We didn't have a graphics printer either, so when
I was working on GPLOT I'd submit remote jobs to the computer center for
printing.  Matter of fact, I don't think that we even had a printer in our
department; we sent stuff up to the computer center for printing.  Although,
in those days many terminals used paper.  The 516 console was an ASR-33.
There was also the ability to send jobs to the computer center and have it
call back with results.  This early approach to a WAN showed up as the tss
command in UNIX.

One of the missions of the department was the development of an all-digital
telephone exchange which is why some of the documents describe programs that
assist with digital filter design.  Both Jim Kaiser and Hal Alles were in the
department.  One of the side-effects of all this was Hal figuring out how to
use the filter hardware connected to a LSI-11/03 to make sound, followed by
Dave Hagelbarger building a very interesting keyboard for it, culminating in
a visit by Stevie Wonder trailed by a large number of screaming secretaries.
No sexism intended, it was a different world back then.  The LSI-11 was one
of the motivations for Heinz to create the LSX operating system.

My recollection is that on Dave's keyboard each key was an antenna, and that
there was strip of ribbon cable underneath where each wire was driven by a
different bit on a binary counter.  This allowed the position of each key to
be determined which I think was way ahead of its time.  I don't think that
any commercially available keyboards did this at the time, they were all just
on/off.  Dave also designed the GLANCE keyboard which spoiled me for life.
I don't remember how he did it, but the keys had a really good feel where once
they got pushed past a certain point they snapped down.  I do recall that there
was a small solenoid mounted on the circuit board so that the keys gave a
satisfying click that you could feel in your fingers.  Another of Dave's gizmos
was the chess board that he made for Ken.  My recollection is that there was a
tuned circuit in the base of each chess piece and an antenna grid in the board
so that the PDP-11 could read the position of each piece.

Some of the success of the 516 system was that other departments used it.  I
spent some time working an a 516-based integrated circuit test system where
the test equipment stations were on the ring.  Seems really dumb now, it's hard
to believe that there was a time in which a computer cost more than a wafer
stepper.

In addition to his work on 516-TSS, Carl Christensen was one of the people who
interviewed Ken Thompson for a job at the labs and gave a thumbs up.

The 516-TSS documents don't have author names, just initials.  Here's who they
are to the best of my recollection.

ADH	Dick Hause
CC	Carl Christensen
DJB	Doug Bayer
DRW	Dave Weller
EPR	?
HL	Heinz Lycklama
JCS	John Schwartzwelder
JES	Jon Steinhart
JFK	Jim Kaiser
JHC	Joe Condon
JVC	John Camlet
LIS	?
MAS	?
RFG	Rudy Garcia

There is one mysterious document in the collection about a "memory service unit".
I had this filed under "zapper".  To the best of my recollection it was the PROM
programmer that we used to burn the microcode PROMs for the GLANCE terminals.

Jon Steinhart, 11/20/2020

From fair-tuhs at netbsd.org  Mon Nov 23 12:18:24 2020
From: fair-tuhs at netbsd.org (Erik E. Fair)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2020 18:18:24 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS Documents
In-Reply-To: <202011230016.0AN0G6K2158571@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
Message-ID: <23147.1606097904@cesium.clock.org>

The Honeywell DDP-516 was the computer (running specialized software written by Bolt, Bernanek & Newman (BBN)) which was the initial model of the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMP).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor

	Erik Fair

From ggm at algebras.org  Mon Nov 23 13:10:30 2020
From: ggm at algebras.org (George Michaelson)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 13:10:30 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS Documents
In-Reply-To: <23147.1606097904@cesium.clock.org>
References: <202011230016.0AN0G6K2158571@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
 <23147.1606097904@cesium.clock.org>
Message-ID: <CAKr6gn3_auwGj46tkfz92F_R6SixriMkcKJJ2A7Tvy9HWhfdRA@mail.gmail.com>

https://photos.app.goo.gl/dS2d4sEJQ5oWx8bo7

-G

On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 12:28 PM Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs at netbsd.org> wrote:
>
> The Honeywell DDP-516 was the computer (running specialized software written by Bolt, Bernanek & Newman (BBN)) which was the initial model of the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMP).
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor
>
>         Erik Fair

From drb at msu.edu  Mon Nov 23 14:00:45 2020
From: drb at msu.edu (Dennis Boone)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2020 23:00:45 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS Documents
In-Reply-To: (Your message of Sun, 22 Nov 2020 16:16:06 -0800.)
 <202011230016.0AN0G6K2158571@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
References: <202011230016.0AN0G6K2158571@darkstar.fourwinds.com> 
Message-ID: <20201123040045.C732E18E749@yagi.h-net.msu.edu>

 > 516-TSS is a little-known but groundbreaking and influential
 > operating system that was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Can you put any dates to the creation / development of this system?
Even some estimate of its maturity when you first saw it would be of
interest.

There was a timeshared os for the Series 16 developed by a group at Tech
Square, I think the NASA center that was there, late '60s.  It involved
some custom memory mapping hardware.  The os became the basis of Prime's
offering in the early 70s.

De

From jon at fourwinds.com  Mon Nov 23 16:41:57 2020
From: jon at fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2020 22:41:57 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS Documents
In-Reply-To: <20201123040045.C732E18E749@yagi.h-net.msu.edu>
References: <202011230016.0AN0G6K2158571@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
 <20201123040045.C732E18E749@yagi.h-net.msu.edu>
Message-ID: <202011230641.0AN6fvoS194686@darkstar.fourwinds.com>

Dennis Boone writes:
>  > 516-TSS is a little-known but groundbreaking and influential
>  > operating system that was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
>
> Can you put any dates to the creation / development of this system?
> Even some estimate of its maturity when you first saw it would be of
> interest.
>
> There was a timeshared os for the Series 16 developed by a group at Tech
> Square, I think the NASA center that was there, late '60s.  It involved
> some custom memory mapping hardware.  The os became the basis of Prime's
> offering in the early 70s.
>
> De

This was also late 60s as far as I know.  The documents are dated, and the
first one is in June 1968.

It was a fully functional system when I first started using it.  Heinz may
be able to say more about it if he remembers.

In many respects it wasn't a hugely interesting system in itself as much
as it was a platform for the development of many other interesting
technologies.

Jon

From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu  Mon Nov 23 23:42:34 2020
From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 08:42:34 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS Documents
Message-ID: <20201123134234.8F52218C096@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

    > On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 12:28 PM Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs at netbsd.org> wrote:

    > The Honeywell DDP-516 was the computer (running specialized software
    > written by Bolt, Bernanek & Newman (BBN)) which was the initial model of
    > the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMP).

The IMPs had a lot of custom interface hardware; sui generis serial
interlocked host interfaces (so-called 1822), and also the high-speed modem
interfaces. I think there was also a watchdog time, IIRC (this is all from
memory, but the ARPANET papers from JCC cover it all).

       Noel

From stu at remphrey.net  Tue Nov 24 17:35:21 2020
From: stu at remphrey.net (Stuart Remphrey)
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 15:35:21 +0800
Subject: [TUHS] Package Management
In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfp=jvCL5KAB_u78Spi4iaCUZLrunE6LUSod+vm4MZD3Hg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAEdTPBcYUi61_5U3WiunnxphfbLw_xU+3_xLRAb2KSanwJwhBw@mail.gmail.com>
 <202011211750.0ALHolUI011814@freefriends.org>
 <CAC5iaNGr6grWayq55iGAN7EJK22-5XWq79xM_1Ub3vnKLjVMpQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAC20D2MFFSTVp0LRaoaDxMU6SSzNhPg-6S1VaPTyr0P=Xco5Sg@mail.gmail.com>
 <CANCZdfp=jvCL5KAB_u78Spi4iaCUZLrunE6LUSod+vm4MZD3Hg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAD0_1ckDULeCbZC8rhi=-jpCPr+Sav2KSiuwEXUVfZntHPqBuw@mail.gmail.com>

"When I was managing SunOS systems it seemed like everyone rolled their
own..."

Yep, IIRC, tarball or cpio tape, no tracking or update support. Lucky if
the ISV install script asked where to install it.


SunOS filesystem layout was thoughtfully designed though, when diskless &
diskfull systems were introduced supporting multiple architectures (2.5?
3.x?): CPU-architecture-specific and architecture-independent mount points,
directories for Sun, ISV and local apps, etc (/usr /opt /usr/local and
their variations), read-only /usr support (link writeables into /var).

Though, mostly just Sun used this flexibility/complexity, few ISVs: they
generally wanted their installs to be consistent across HP-UX, MIPS
RISC/os, Pyramid dualPort DC/OSx, Sequent (Dynix?), SunOS, (maybe-AIX??,)
etc; which made sense from a support training point of view.


Beyond ./configure; make; make install which I'd count as build but barely
packaging, I don't recall any packaging until Solaris pkgadd et al?

Unfortunately with pkgadd came patchadd & friends.
They did their level best to cross-patch random binaries and muddy the
patch/package interdependency-waters as much as humanly possible.

Partly as a result, the early OS/patch/firmware support matrices for
FibreChannel were horrible.
I'll probably have nightmares about that tonight...


On Sun, 22 Nov 2020, 09:40 Warner Losh, <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 6:19 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> 1) No intention to slight debian in any way.
>> 2) dpkg was definitely an improvement over FreeBSds ports scheme. But...
>> In fact freebsd did have a pkg system for ports before that --- which was
>> basically similar to 1983 SysIII scheme
>>
>
> FreeBSD's ports/pkg system did keep track of what was installed on the
> system. There was a database in /var/db so pkg_delete could remove things
> and pkg_which to know what pkg a given file belonged to.
>
> It was first-ish, but there was some package system for the early linux
> root disks. I think this is how SLS started, but I might be misremembering.
> But despite being early, and being ported to other BSDs, it sucked at
> upgrading for 20-odd years until it was completely rewritten.... latter day
> pkg is so much better, though its repo management has been a little weak
> relative to the professional efforts in the linux world.
>
> /usr/ports none the less was ground breaking because it handled both the
> local patching, the build depends and the packaging under one umbrella.
> It's been on the whole a good thing and has reinvented itself several times
> over the years.
>
> When I was managing SunOS systems it seemed like everyone rolled their
> own. There was nothing like VMSINSTALL...
>
> Warner
>
> 3) also as I understand (and larry feel free to correct me here as a
>> better chronicler of things Linux than I) but I believe that the big thing
>> rpm added was the DB like DEC's setld and system Sun had used which us what
>> I was refering too.
>>
>> Pls remember that I was trying to chronicle the basic ideas and some of
>> the motivation which is what Henry asked.   And that the original driver
>> was to support ISVs installs.  So I was trying to explain the history of
>> what we did at the time.
>>
>> The be fair one of the more vocal people in the early 80s was Heinz who
>> occasionally add color here.  I remember Heinz trying to push us to an ABI
>> and not stop at an API.
>>
>> Today most of the ISVs have abandoned Unix except for the Mac. Msft and
>> the phones have taken that.  And the package mngr has been replaced by the
>> app store which has.much great use than any of the current Unix packaging
>> schemes.  Funny how the profit motive drove that.
>>
>> Working for one of the few ISVS that do package SW for Unix we basically
>> support two schemes.  Apple Mac installs and RPM because that is were the
>> primary customer base has been.   I'd not about goodness or being better or
>> being first.  It's economic (Larry and I bemoan this a lot).
>>
>> So pls don't take it as a comment about anything other than trying to
>> answer as much of the early history as I could.
>>
>> Heinz, Jon, Larry you all lived this on the commercial side.   Care to
>> add anything?
>>
>> Clem
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 6:31 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello!
>>> I, myself normally run Slackware Linux. It uses package management in
>>> the form of compressed tar files, and a flat file store of the names.
>>> It also has a tool which when run will show the user what's there, and
>>> what they do if need be. In fact Slackware predates Red Hat by about
>>> four years. (Pat and his CS professor introduced themselves to one
>>> much earlier one, which was SLS. Neither liked it, and the Prof was
>>> convinced that Pat could do better.)
>>> -----
>>> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
>>> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>>>
>>> On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 1:54 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > Things were pretty much ad hoc.  Commercial software likely came
>>> > as tar/cpio tapes to install however the vendor wanted. Free software
>>> > was from USENET in source code, so again, however people wanted.
>>> >
>>> > The AT&T Unix PC (7300 / 3B1) in the late 80s had a file format
>>> > for installing software from floppy and tracked what was installed,
>>> > but that was unique to it.
>>> >
>>> > Package managers as we know them today really became a big thing
>>> > with Linux. Redhat's RPM was one of the earliest.
>>> >
>>> > My two cents; I'm sure others remember it differently.
>>> >
>>> > Arnold
>>> >
>>> > Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > > Hello All,
>>> > >
>>> > > I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new
>>> replies or
>>> > > insight.  How did package management start?  Were sites keeping
>>> track of
>>> > > packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god
>>> intended)
>>> > > somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without
>>> significant
>>> > > announcement?  At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to
>>> have a
>>> > > central way to track additional software"?
>>> > >
>>> > > I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the
>>> '80s.  What
>>> > > was the mechanism before that?
>>> > >
>>> > > -Henry
>>> >
>>>
>> --
>> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>>
>
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From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net  Thu Nov 26 03:14:55 2020
From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor)
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:14:55 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
Message-ID: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>

Hi,

As I find myself starting yet another project that that wants to use 
ANSI control sequences for colorization of text, I find myself -- yet 
again -- wondering if there is a better way to generate the output from 
the code in a way that respects TERMinal capabilites.

Is there a better / different control sequence that I can ~> should use 
for colorizing / stylizing output that will account for the differences 
in capabilities between a VT100 and XTerm?

Can I wrap things that I output so that I don't send color control 
sequences to a TERMinal that doesn't support them?



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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From ralph at inputplus.co.uk  Thu Nov 26 03:22:55 2020
From: ralph at inputplus.co.uk (Ralph Corderoy)
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 17:22:55 +0000
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
Message-ID: <20201125172255.83D252146F@orac.inputplus.co.uk>

Hi Grant,

> wondering if there is a better way to generate the output from
> the code in a way that respects TERMinal capabilites.

    tput setf 4; date; tput sgr0

See terminfo(5).

(BTW, I don't think the question is worthy of TUHS.)

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

From lm at mcvoy.com  Thu Nov 26 03:38:14 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 09:38:14 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
Message-ID: <20201125173814.GB9589@mcvoy.com>

man 1 tput

is what I use.

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 10:14:55AM -0700, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As I find myself starting yet another project that that wants to use ANSI
> control sequences for colorization of text, I find myself -- yet again --
> wondering if there is a better way to generate the output from the code in a
> way that respects TERMinal capabilites.
> 
> Is there a better / different control sequence that I can ~> should use for
> colorizing / stylizing output that will account for the differences in
> capabilities between a VT100 and XTerm?
> 
> Can I wrap things that I output so that I don't send color control sequences
> to a TERMinal that doesn't support them?
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
> 



-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

From steffen at sdaoden.eu  Thu Nov 26 04:00:48 2020
From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso)
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:00:48 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
Message-ID: <20201125180048.IvtOI%steffen@sdaoden.eu>

Grant Taylor wrote in
 <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c at spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>:
 |Hi,
 |
 |As I find myself starting yet another project that that wants to use 
 |ANSI control sequences for colorization of text, I find myself -- yet 
 |again -- wondering if there is a better way to generate the output from 
 |the code in a way that respects TERMinal capabilites.
 |
 |Is there a better / different control sequence that I can ~> should use 
 |for colorizing / stylizing output that will account for the differences 
 |in capabilities between a VT100 and XTerm?
 |
 |Can I wrap things that I output so that I don't send color control 
 |sequences to a TERMinal that doesn't support them?

  color_init() {
     [ -n "${NOCOLOUR}" ] && return
     [ -n "${MAILX_CC_TEST_NO_COLOUR}" ] && return
     # We do not want color for "make test > .LOG"!
     if (command -v stty && command -v tput) >/dev/null 2>&1 &&
           (<&1 >/dev/null stty -a) 2>/dev/null; then
        { sgr0=`tput sgr0`; } 2>/dev/null
        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
        { saf1=`tput setaf 1`; } 2>/dev/null
        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
        { saf2=`tput setaf 2`; } 2>/dev/null
        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
        { saf3=`tput setaf 3`; } 2>/dev/null
        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
        { b=`tput bold`; } 2>/dev/null
        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return

        COLOR_ERR_ON=${saf1}${b} COLOR_ERR_OFF=${sgr0}
        COLOR_WARN_ON=${saf3}${b} COLOR_WARN_OFF=${sgr0}
        COLOR_OK_ON=${saf2} COLOR_OK_OFF=${sgr0}
        unset saf1 saf2 saf3 b
     fi
  }

Is what i use for a make system.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

From steffen at sdaoden.eu  Thu Nov 26 06:03:08 2020
From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso)
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 21:03:08 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <20201125180048.IvtOI%steffen@sdaoden.eu>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <20201125180048.IvtOI%steffen@sdaoden.eu>
Message-ID: <20201125200308.Kc4ne%steffen@sdaoden.eu>

Steffen Nurpmeso wrote in
 <20201125180048.IvtOI%steffen at sdaoden.eu>:
 |Grant Taylor wrote in
 | <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c at spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>:
 ||As I find myself starting yet another project that that wants to use 
 ||ANSI control sequences for colorization of text, I find myself -- yet 
 ||again -- wondering if there is a better way to generate the output from 
 ||the code in a way that respects TERMinal capabilites.
 ||
 ||Is there a better / different control sequence that I can ~> should use 
 ||for colorizing / stylizing output that will account for the differences 
 ||in capabilities between a VT100 and XTerm?
 ||
 ||Can I wrap things that I output so that I don't send color control 
 ||sequences to a TERMinal that doesn't support them?
 |
 |  color_init() {
 |     [ -n "${NOCOLOUR}" ] && return
 |     [ -n "${MAILX_CC_TEST_NO_COLOUR}" ] && return
 |     # We do not want color for "make test > .LOG"!
 |     if (command -v stty && command -v tput) >/dev/null 2>&1 &&

Of course that subshell (..if it is one..) is not necessary, it
could be { ..; } or x&&y&&, whatever.
Must be a leftover, or whatever i have thought once i wrote this.

 |           (<&1 >/dev/null stty -a) 2>/dev/null; then
 |        { sgr0=`tput sgr0`; } 2>/dev/null
 |        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
 |        { saf1=`tput setaf 1`; } 2>/dev/null
 |        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
 |        { saf2=`tput setaf 2`; } 2>/dev/null
 |        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
 |        { saf3=`tput setaf 3`; } 2>/dev/null
 |        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
 |        { b=`tput bold`; } 2>/dev/null
 |        [ $? -eq 0 ] || return
 |
 |        COLOR_ERR_ON=${saf1}${b} COLOR_ERR_OFF=${sgr0}
 |        COLOR_WARN_ON=${saf3}${b} COLOR_WARN_OFF=${sgr0}
 |        COLOR_OK_ON=${saf2} COLOR_OK_OFF=${sgr0}
 |        unset saf1 saf2 saf3 b
 |     fi
 |}
 |
 |Is what i use for a make system.

A sh(1)-based test, to be exact.

Ciao,

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

From tytso at mit.edu  Fri Nov 27 00:51:34 2020
From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 09:51:34 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <20201125172255.83D252146F@orac.inputplus.co.uk>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <20201125172255.83D252146F@orac.inputplus.co.uk>
Message-ID: <20201126145134.GB394251@mit.edu>

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 05:22:55PM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Grant,
> 
> > wondering if there is a better way to generate the output from
> > the code in a way that respects TERMinal capabilites.
> 
>     tput setf 4; date; tput sgr0
> 
> See terminfo(5).
> 
> (BTW, I don't think the question is worthy of TUHS.)

To make this a bit more TUHS-focused, was there anything that had
similar functionality which pre-dated Bill Joy and termcap in late
70's?

(I'll note that in recent years, most people seem to have not bothered
with terminfo, given that all the world's a Vax^H^H^HSun^H^H^HLinux
^H^H^H^Hxterm.  :-)

						- Ted


From erc at pobox.com  Fri Nov 27 02:26:28 2020
From: erc at pobox.com (Ed Carp)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 09:26:28 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
Message-ID: <CACYmRNAtdJu0ui=CgrEcWH6J3uikCh0=aCLNvk0+V29rypDBAg@mail.gmail.com>

You could write something in C using curses/ncurses (which will do the
ANSI sequences for you automatically).

From cym224 at gmail.com  Fri Nov 27 04:26:30 2020
From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 13:26:30 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <CACYmRNAtdJu0ui=CgrEcWH6J3uikCh0=aCLNvk0+V29rypDBAg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <CACYmRNAtdJu0ui=CgrEcWH6J3uikCh0=aCLNvk0+V29rypDBAg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <71fdfa2e-1483-4985-3f55-6760b3a84ec0@gmail.com>

On 11/26/20 11:26, Ed Carp wrote:
 > You could write something in C using curses/ncurses (which will
 > do the ANSI sequences for you automatically).

True but I wonder whether curses would be bit heavy handed for this.

N.

From lm at mcvoy.com  Fri Nov 27 04:29:37 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 10:29:37 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <71fdfa2e-1483-4985-3f55-6760b3a84ec0@gmail.com>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <CACYmRNAtdJu0ui=CgrEcWH6J3uikCh0=aCLNvk0+V29rypDBAg@mail.gmail.com>
 <71fdfa2e-1483-4985-3f55-6760b3a84ec0@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20201126182937.GN9589@mcvoy.com>

Um, as has been stated multiple time, this is why tputs(1) exists.
Problem.  Solved.

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 01:26:30PM -0500, Nemo Nusquam wrote:
> On 11/26/20 11:26, Ed Carp wrote:
> > You could write something in C using curses/ncurses (which will
> > do the ANSI sequences for you automatically).
> 
> True but I wonder whether curses would be bit heavy handed for this.
> 
> N.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu  Fri Nov 27 04:37:46 2020
From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 13:37:46 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
Message-ID: <20201126183746.DD93218C087@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

    > From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o"

    > was there anything that had similar functionality which pre-dated Bill
    > Joy and termcap in late 70's?

Is your question purely in Unix, or more general?

If the latter, there's the terminal-independent support of video terminals in
ITS; that dates to the mid-1970's (i.e. circa V5 or so). User programs output
device-independent display control codes (I have this memory that they were
called P-Codes, but that could be my memory failing), and the OS translated
them to the appropriate screen-control characters.

One additional hack was that the number of terminal types supported in the OS
was limited; there was however a protocol called SUPDUP which sent (basically)
those device-independent codes over a remote login (originally over NCP) frm
the server machine to the client. The User SUPDUP client supported a lot more
terminal types; so people with odd-ball terminals used to log in, SUPDUP
_back_ to their machine, and away they went.

     Noel

From bakul at iitbombay.org  Fri Nov 27 04:50:23 2020
From: bakul at iitbombay.org (Bakul Shah)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 10:50:23 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <20201126183746.DD93218C087@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20201126183746.DD93218C087@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <7DBB40AE-259D-494E-8ABF-2FE4D47F4052@iitbombay.org>

RFC734

> On Nov 26, 2020, at 10:38 AM, jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>> From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o"
> 
>> was there anything that had similar functionality which pre-dated Bill
>> Joy and termcap in late 70's?
> 
> Is your question purely in Unix, or more general?
> 
> If the latter, there's the terminal-independent support of video terminals in
> ITS; that dates to the mid-1970's (i.e. circa V5 or so). User programs output
> device-independent display control codes (I have this memory that they were
> called P-Codes, but that could be my memory failing), and the OS translated
> them to the appropriate screen-control characters.
> 
> One additional hack was that the number of terminal types supported in the OS
> was limited; there was however a protocol called SUPDUP which sent (basically)
> those device-independent codes over a remote login (originally over NCP) frm
> the server machine to the client. The User SUPDUP client supported a lot more
> terminal types; so people with odd-ball terminals used to log in, SUPDUP
> _back_ to their machine, and away they went.
> 
>     Noel

From lars at nocrew.org  Fri Nov 27 05:02:22 2020
From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 19:02:22 +0000
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <7DBB40AE-259D-494E-8ABF-2FE4D47F4052@iitbombay.org> (Bakul
 Shah's message of "Thu, 26 Nov 2020 10:50:23 -0800")
References: <20201126183746.DD93218C087@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
 <7DBB40AE-259D-494E-8ABF-2FE4D47F4052@iitbombay.org>
Message-ID: <7wr1ogdjr5.fsf@junk.nocrew.org>

Noel Chiappa wrote:
> If the latter, there's the terminal-independent support of video
> terminals in ITS; that dates to the mid-1970's (i.e. circa V5 or
> so). User programs output device-independent display control codes (I
> have this memory that they were called P-Codes, but that could be my
> memory failing), and the OS translated them to the appropriate
> screen-control characters.

That's correct.  Or ^P-codes, from the character that signalled a
control code.  It would be interesting to figure out when they were
introduced.  They were not present in 1972; at this point ITS only
supported printing terminals, Datapoints, and Imlacs.

WAITS allegedly had an even better abstration of terminal control codes.

> One additional hack was that the number of terminal types supported in
> the OS was limited; there was however a protocol called SUPDUP which
> sent (basically) those device-independent codes over a remote login

Basically, but another set of equivalent codes internal to ITS.  SUPDUP
means super-duper image mode, which alludes to image mode.

> (originally over NCP) frm the server machine to the client. The User
> SUPDUP client supported a lot more terminal types; so people with
> odd-ball terminals used to log in, SUPDUP _back_ to their machine, and
> away they went.

See also CRTSTY.

From steffen at sdaoden.eu  Fri Nov 27 07:48:25 2020
From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 22:48:25 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <20201126145134.GB394251@mit.edu>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <20201125172255.83D252146F@orac.inputplus.co.uk>
 <20201126145134.GB394251@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <20201126214825.bDDjr%steffen@sdaoden.eu>

Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote in
 <20201126145134.GB394251 at mit.edu>:
 |On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 05:22:55PM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
 |>> wondering if there is a better way to generate the output from
 |>> the code in a way that respects TERMinal capabilites.
 |> 
 |>     tput setf 4; date; tput sgr0
 |> 
 |> See terminfo(5).
 |> 
 |> (BTW, I don't think the question is worthy of TUHS.)
 |
 |To make this a bit more TUHS-focused, was there anything that had
 |similar functionality which pre-dated Bill Joy and termcap in late
 |70's?
 |
 |(I'll note that in recent years, most people seem to have not bothered
 |with terminfo, given that all the world's a Vax^H^H^HSun^H^H^HLinux
 |^H^H^H^Hxterm.  :-)

ANSI escape sequences aka ISO 6429 came via ECMA-48 i have
learned, and that appeared first in 1976 (that via Wikidpedia).
I made a survey about twenty years ago over terminfo (source)
entries, and found it not worth the effort to care for anything
else, and not to padding, too.  (My experience with hardware does
not even cause a little cough in this audience, however.)

 |      - Ted
 |
 --End of <20201126145134.GB394251 at mit.edu>

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

From will.senn at gmail.com  Fri Nov 27 07:55:59 2020
From: will.senn at gmail.com (Will Senn)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:55:59 -0600
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
Message-ID: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>

Hi All,

So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly 
versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not 
aware of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know 
of any from back in the day?

It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's 
also pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about 
how to do stuff w/those slots.

Thanks,

Will

-- 
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

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From steffen at sdaoden.eu  Fri Nov 27 07:56:53 2020
From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 22:56:53 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <7DBB40AE-259D-494E-8ABF-2FE4D47F4052@iitbombay.org>
References: <20201126183746.DD93218C087@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
 <7DBB40AE-259D-494E-8ABF-2FE4D47F4052@iitbombay.org>
Message-ID: <20201126215653.INoK4%steffen@sdaoden.eu>

Bakul Shah wrote in
 <7DBB40AE-259D-494E-8ABF-2FE4D47F4052 at iitbombay.org>:
 |RFC734

Interesting!

Off-topic, but i have downloaded this via

  #!/bin/sh -
  
  FROM=https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/
  #FROM=https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/
  MYDIR=/x/doc/coding/rfc
  
  : ${WGET:=`command -v curl` --silent}
  #: ${WGET:=`command -v wget` -q -O -}
  
  ##
  
  cd "${MYDIR}" || {
  	echo >&2 'Cannot cd to '"${MYDIR}"
  	exit 21
  }
  
  xfiles= estat=0
  while [ ${#} -gt 0 ]; do
  	RFC=${1}
  	shift
  	[ -f "rfc${RFC}.txt" ] && {
  		echo 'RFC '${RFC}': a local copy of this RFC yet exists'
  		continue
  	}
  	printf 'Fetching RFC %s.txt ... ' "${RFC}"
  
  	if ${WGET} "${FROM}"rfc${RFC}.txt > rfc${RFC}.txt; then
  		xfiles="${xfiles} rfc${RFC}.txt"
  		printf 'ok\n'
  	else
  		printf 'failed!\n'
  		estat=1
  	fi
  done
  
  if [ -n "${xfiles}" ]; then
  	"${EDITOR}" INDEX.txt ${xfiles}
  fi
  
  exit ${estat}

and the file is contaminated with NULs.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

From dave at horsfall.org  Fri Nov 27 07:59:27 2020
From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 08:59:27 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <20201126145134.GB394251@mit.edu>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <20201125172255.83D252146F@orac.inputplus.co.uk>
 <20201126145134.GB394251@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011270850450.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On Thu, 26 Nov 2020, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> To make this a bit more TUHS-focused, was there anything that had 
> similar functionality which pre-dated Bill Joy and termcap in late 70's?

As I recall, one wrote code "knowing" that it was a VT-05 etc if you 
wanted escape sequences; I dimly recall using a getty-like file to get the 
terminal type.  Thus, /dev/tty8 was invariably (but not always) the 
dreaded VT-05 (one client used a Duckwriter as the console, because he 
wanted a hard-copy of everything; one day, the system went berserk (a bad 
sector smack on the error log) and so did the hard copy, as Unix 
faithfully tried to record each error).

-- Dave

From usotsuki at buric.co  Fri Nov 27 08:22:32 2020
From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 17:22:32 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2011261721230.11502@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>

On Thu, 26 Nov 2020, Will Senn wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly 
> versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not aware 
> of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know of any 
> from back in the day?
>
> It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's also 
> pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about how to do 
> stuff w/those slots.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Will
>
>

Big problem is there's no easy way to do preemptive multitasking without 
extra hardware.

The Apple //e and //c are basically the machine I cut my teeth on.

-uso.

From nikke.karlsson at gmail.com  Fri Nov 27 08:30:04 2020
From: nikke.karlsson at gmail.com (Niklas Karlsson)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 23:30:04 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAK6BEgeLhH+s_216HEe_rEuxbnrBzQPc-jrjF4x4yqzqFvM4kA@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

I seriously doubt there's a "real" Unix for such a small machine from that
era. There may be workalikes, of course. I know of a Unix workalike for the
Commodore 64 called LUnix, but it isn't really a full Unix. That's almost
(almost!) the same CPU, at least.

Best regards,
Niklas

Den tors 26 nov. 2020 kl 22:56 skrev Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com>:

> Hi All,
>
> So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly
> versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not aware
> of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know of any
> from back in the day?
>
> It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's also
> pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about how to do
> stuff w/those slots.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Will
>
> --
> GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
>
>
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From dave at horsfall.org  Fri Nov 27 08:47:40 2020
From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 09:47:40 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011270944540.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On Thu, 26 Nov 2020, Will Senn wrote:

> So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly 
> versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not 
> aware of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know 
> of any from back in the day?

I'm not aware of any, but I would start with something like Mini-Unix (a 
really cut-down Unix).

You'd have to do the assembler stuff yourself, of course.

-- Dave

From clemc at ccc.com  Fri Nov 27 09:00:22 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 18:00:22 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2Oa2n5sD8uDzF2sVGTF9gWwnUKtkiCU=HKw-0vnqAOpcw@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 4:56 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly
> versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not aware
> of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know of any
> from back in the day?
>
> It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's also
> pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about how to do
> stuff w/those slots.
>
My favorite 8-bit processor, maybe my favorite all around.  So simple, one
accumulator and two index registers but it is only 64K of total address -
although with bank switching more memory could be added in 4K banks on a
number of Apple II's, but you have 16 address bits and worked a register
that switched in and out the 4K banks. and there is of course no protection
hardware nor the concept of user/kernel in the hardware.  The size of the
Apple Floppy disk was rather small, and your need 3 to run things like the
UCSD Pascal system to have any experience other than constantly switching
disks.

There are a number of C compilers available but with its limited and fixed
stack (8 bits only), so it is difficult to run programs of any size (in any
language - automatics are often managed off the stack).

Running a full UNIX on it was not really possible although a few of the
Unix style utilities were moved to it and a number of simple monitors were
written that swapped programs in and out DOS style.   At one time, I had a
fairly good version of the Bourne (V7) syntax shell we got running, but it
had to be swapped in and out slowly.  That is; you run the shell, type a
command, when exec is done, the shell is tossed out and the new program
installed in memory.
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From erc at pobox.com  Fri Nov 27 09:14:13 2020
From: erc at pobox.com (Ed Carp)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 16:14:13 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <20201126182937.GN9589@mcvoy.com>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <CACYmRNAtdJu0ui=CgrEcWH6J3uikCh0=aCLNvk0+V29rypDBAg@mail.gmail.com>
 <71fdfa2e-1483-4985-3f55-6760b3a84ec0@gmail.com>
 <20201126182937.GN9589@mcvoy.com>
Message-ID: <CACYmRNC_CXg=p-FzU_7cMUyW-nGGY+niSt7Ch1WvxC3ezExE3Q@mail.gmail.com>

Larry, as was stated in the original post (and multiple times in the
replies), I believe they were looking for another solution.

On 11/26/20, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Um, as has been stated multiple time, this is why tputs(1) exists.
> Problem.  Solved.

From katolaz at freaknet.org  Fri Nov 27 09:07:55 2020
From: katolaz at freaknet.org (Vincenzo Nicosia)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 23:07:55 +0000
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011270944540.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
 <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011270944540.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>
Message-ID: <20201126230755.GC48281@wontolla.jungle>

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 09:47:40AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Nov 2020, Will Senn wrote:
> 
> > So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly
> > versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not
> > aware of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know
> > of any from back in the day?
> 
> I'm not aware of any, but I would start with something like Mini-Unix (a
> really cut-down Unix).
> 
> You'd have to do the assembler stuff yourself, of course.
> 
> -- Dave

There is FUZIX by Alan Cox: 

  https://www.fuzix.org
  https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

which is a blend of V7+BSD userland plus a mix of different UZI
implementations from the '80s and a lot of new code. It runs on a
variety of "small" CPUs, including pdp-11, Z80/Z180/Z280, 8080, 8085,
8086, 6502, 6803, 6809, 68k, and a few dozens platforms. 

There is some initial support for Apple IIe there. 

I have used it myself on several retrobrew Z80/Z180 systems, but not on
an Apple IIe, so I can't tell it will work for sure. It's worth trying
it out though.

HTH

Enzo

-- 

From lm at mcvoy.com  Fri Nov 27 09:23:40 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:23:40 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Seeking wisdom from Unix Greybeards
In-Reply-To: <CACYmRNC_CXg=p-FzU_7cMUyW-nGGY+niSt7Ch1WvxC3ezExE3Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <9c1595cc-54a1-8af9-0c2d-083cb04dd97c@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <CACYmRNAtdJu0ui=CgrEcWH6J3uikCh0=aCLNvk0+V29rypDBAg@mail.gmail.com>
 <71fdfa2e-1483-4985-3f55-6760b3a84ec0@gmail.com>
 <20201126182937.GN9589@mcvoy.com>
 <CACYmRNC_CXg=p-FzU_7cMUyW-nGGY+niSt7Ch1WvxC3ezExE3Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20201126232340.GE9609@mcvoy.com>

Did I miss a reason for the alternative?   Because if you add a caching
layer this approach has been working for me for decades.  I rewrote
dired in perl just because perl was everywhere and I could.  I've been
dragging the perl one around since at least 1990 and it worked for me
on pretty much any version of Unix.  I think MacOS isn't supported but
I'm sure it could be.

To avoid calling tput over and over again, I cached the output for each
terminal and then just evaled the cache which sets a bunch of variables
to the escapes I needed.

It performed just fine on 20mhz SPARCstations so I'm sort of wondering
why the solution for the problem isn't good enough.

# Dig out all the terminal info so we know the escape chars for this terminal.
sub terminal_init
{
	local($term) = "$ENV{'HOME'}/.term/$ENV{'TERM'}";
	local($i) = 0;

	$| = 1;
	@pids = ();
	$SIG{TERM} = sub { exit(0); };
	$SIG{PIPE} = 'IGNORE';
	# RedHat 5.0 seems to get this wrong somehow.
	#chop($tc_rows = `tput lines`);
	#chop($tc_cols = `tput cols`);
	open(STTY, "stty -a|");
	while (defined($_ = <STTY>)) {
		last if /rows = \d/ || /\d rows/ || /rows \d/;
	}
	close(STTY);
	#speed 9600 baud; rows 58; columns 80; line = 0;
	#speed 9600 baud; 47 rows; 80 columns;
	#rows = 66; columns = 80
	$tc_cols = 0;
	if (/rows (\d+); columns (\d+);/) {
		$tc_rows = $1;
		$tc_cols = $2;
	} elsif (/(\d+) rows; (\d+) columns;/) {
		$tc_rows = $1;
		$tc_cols = $2;
	} elsif (/rows = (\d+); columns = (\d+)/) {
		$tc_rows = $1;
		$tc_cols = $2;
	}
	if ($tc_cols == 0) {
		die "Can't get terminal settings.\n";
	}
	$half_of_screen = int($tc_rows / 2);

	# it's cached, go grab it.
	if (-f $term) {
		open(T, $term);
		@t = <T>;
		close(T);
		eval "@t";
		&ttyraw;
		return unless $i < $tc_rows;
	}

	print "Getting terminal info just this once and saving it...";
	mkdir("$ENV{'HOME'}/.term", 0755);
	open(T, ">$term");
	$tc_smcup = `tput smcup`;
	$tc_rmcup = `tput rmcup`;
	$tc_bold = `tput bold`;
	$tc_normal = `tput sgr0`;
	$tc_clear = `tput clear`;
	$tc_clreos = `tput ed`;
	$tc_clreol = `tput el`;

	if ($tc_cols < 60) {
		die "$0: needs 60 columns";
	}
	if (length($tc_clreos) == 0) {
		die "$0: needs clear to end of screen";
	}
	if (length($tc_clreol) == 0) {
		die "$0: needs clear to end of line";
	}

	print T "\$tc_smcup = \"$tc_smcup\";\n";
	print T "\$tc_rmcup = \"$tc_rmcup\";\n";
	print T "\$tc_bold = \"$tc_bold\";\n";
	print T "\$tc_normal = \"$tc_normal\";\n";
	print T "\$tc_clear = \"$tc_clear\";\n";
	print T "\$tc_clreol = \"$tc_clreol\";\n";
	print T "\$tc_clreos = \"$tc_clreos\";\n";

	for ($i = 0; $i < $tc_rows; ++$i) {
		$left[$i] = `tput cup $i 0`;
		print T '$left[' . "$i] = \"" . $left[$i] . "\";\n";
		if ($i < $half_of_screen) {
			$middle[$i] = `tput cup $i 44`;
			print T
			    '$middle[' . "$i] = \"" . $middle[$i] . "\";\n";
		}
	}
	print T '$i = ' . "$i;\n";
	close(T);
	print "done\n";
	&ttyraw;
}

From jason-tuhs at shalott.net  Fri Nov 27 09:22:56 2020
From: jason-tuhs at shalott.net (jason-tuhs at shalott.net)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:22:56 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.2.23.453.2011261510050.14253@waffle.shalott.net>


> So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly 
> versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not 
> aware of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know 
> of any from back in the day?

I don't think there are any for the 8-bit Apple IIs, but for the 16-bit 
Apple IIgs, there's GNO/ME unix: http://www.gno.org/gno/

I actually ran this on my IIgs; it was cute, and quite usable considering 
the limitations of the hardware.  I don't know anything about its 
provenance, though.

Anyone else run GNO/ME?  Anyone know if it was based on some previous 
source base or distribution?  Or know the folks behind it?


  -Jason


From drsalists at gmail.com  Fri Nov 27 10:24:39 2020
From: drsalists at gmail.com (Dan Stromberg)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 16:24:39 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <CAK6BEgeLhH+s_216HEe_rEuxbnrBzQPc-jrjF4x4yqzqFvM4kA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
 <CAK6BEgeLhH+s_216HEe_rEuxbnrBzQPc-jrjF4x4yqzqFvM4kA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAGGBd_phTTX9TnQTAWYyGk4u6hERa3673avtwws+cMSa-JG0iQ@mail.gmail.com>

There was also Kix for the Atari 800 - also a 65*02 processor system.  It
felt a little bit *ixy, but wasn't really.

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 2:31 PM Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I seriously doubt there's a "real" Unix for such a small machine from that
> era. There may be workalikes, of course. I know of a Unix workalike for the
> Commodore 64 called LUnix, but it isn't really a full Unix. That's almost
> (almost!) the same CPU, at least.
>
> Best regards,
> Niklas
>
> Den tors 26 nov. 2020 kl 22:56 skrev Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com>:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly
>> versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not aware
>> of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know of any
>> from back in the day?
>>
>> It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's
>> also pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about how
>> to do stuff w/those slots.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Will
>>
>> --
>> GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
>>
>>
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From athornton at gmail.com  Fri Nov 27 10:47:48 2020
From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 17:47:48 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2Oa2n5sD8uDzF2sVGTF9gWwnUKtkiCU=HKw-0vnqAOpcw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
 <CAC20D2Oa2n5sD8uDzF2sVGTF9gWwnUKtkiCU=HKw-0vnqAOpcw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9BEF7600-93F3-4EE0-8A1C-0AA4CF3DD0C0@gmail.com>

I too am a big 6502 fan.

XINU was a thing …. buuuuut it was written for a clone with weird bankswitching.  https://comp.sys.apple2.programmer.narkive.com/xN2z7e8K/fixing-xinu-for-apple-ii

As mentioned somewhere in this thread, Fusix might work or be workable with a little elbow grease but I haven’t tried it myself.  Doesn’t look like there’s a boot disk set for it.  https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

I mean, it’s not going to feel like a modern Unix or even 211bsd if you get it working, but it might be comparable to a Mini-Unix or v6 on a small PDP-11.

Adam


> On Nov 26, 2020, at 4:00 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 4:56 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com <mailto:will.senn at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not aware of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know of any from back in the day?
> 
> It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's also pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about how to do stuff w/those slots.
> My favorite 8-bit processor, maybe my favorite all around.  So simple, one accumulator and two index registers but it is only 64K of total address - although with bank switching more memory could be added in 4K banks on a number of Apple II's, but you have 16 address bits and worked a register that switched in and out the 4K banks. and there is of course no protection hardware nor the concept of user/kernel in the hardware.  The size of the Apple Floppy disk was rather small, and your need 3 to run things like the UCSD Pascal system to have any experience other than constantly switching disks.
> 
> There are a number of C compilers available but with its limited and fixed stack (8 bits only), so it is difficult to run programs of any size (in any language - automatics are often managed off the stack).
> 
> Running a full UNIX on it was not really possible although a few of the Unix style utilities were moved to it and a number of simple monitors were written that swapped programs in and out DOS style.   At one time, I had a fairly good version of the Bourne (V7) syntax shell we got running, but it had to be swapped in and out slowly.  That is; you run the shell, type a command, when exec is done, the shell is tossed out and the new program installed in memory. 
> 
> 

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From wkt at tuhs.org  Fri Nov 27 12:02:13 2020
From: wkt at tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 12:02:13 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS documents
In-Reply-To: <202011190129.0AJ1TM7v543138@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
References: <202011190129.0AJ1TM7v543138@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
Message-ID: <20201127020213.GA27387@minnie.tuhs.org>

On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 05:29:22PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Well, it's a very rainy day and since COVID is keeping me home I just
> fed my 516-TSS notebooks into the scanner.  It's about 17MB of stuff.
> Not sure what to do with it since I don't have a place to serve it and
> since they're scanned images they're too big to post.  Here's the list
> of documents; email me if you're wanting something in a hurry while the
> archive stuff is figured out.  Note that the smell of mildew wasn't
> preserved in the scanning process.

All, with Jon's permission I've placed a copy of these documents at
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Other/516-TSS/

Cheers, Warren

From clemc at ccc.com  Fri Nov 27 12:13:05 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 21:13:05 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] 516-TSS documents
In-Reply-To: <20201127020213.GA27387@minnie.tuhs.org>
References: <202011190129.0AJ1TM7v543138@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
 <20201127020213.GA27387@minnie.tuhs.org>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2OOgdLKHQOa=D=MF2TSP-=ghcueVSPhQ-BKzExt2PLirQ@mail.gmail.com>

Thanks Warren   This is great stuff

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 9:03 PM Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 05:29:22PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > Well, it's a very rainy day and since COVID is keeping me home I just
> > fed my 516-TSS notebooks into the scanner.  It's about 17MB of stuff.
> > Not sure what to do with it since I don't have a place to serve it and
> > since they're scanned images they're too big to post.  Here's the list
> > of documents; email me if you're wanting something in a hurry while the
> > archive stuff is figured out.  Note that the smell of mildew wasn't
> > preserved in the scanning process.
>
> All, with Jon's permission I've placed a copy of these documents at
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Other/516-TSS/
>
> Cheers, Warren
>
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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From rdm at cfcl.com  Fri Nov 27 12:23:36 2020
From: rdm at cfcl.com (Rich Morin)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 18:23:36 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] free dead trees, to the best possible home
Message-ID: <B53281FF-6843-4B90-BB05-F8B6C5D165F9@cfcl.com>

Back in mid-January, I posted a note saying:

> TL; DR.  I'm trying to find the best possible home for some dead trees.  ...


A lot (far too much, IMNSHO!) has happened since then.  In any case, I thought folks here might appreciate an update.  In brief, Iain Maoileoin offered to pay for shipping a largely unknown amount of technical (mostly computer-related) books to his repurposed missile sile (!) near Inverness, Scotland.

Early this Fall, I packed up 16 cardboard boxes (designated 0-F, of course :-) and the shippers hauled them off.  Dunno when they'll arrive, let alone in what condition, but trying to save them from recycling seemed worth the effort.  FYI, the total weight was a bit over a ton.

Meanwhile, my spouse and I gave away and/or packed up the rest of our things and drove ourselves and five cats up to Seattle, WA, USA.  Somewhere in a shipping container, there is still a cubic foot or so of historical Unix papers from Jim Joyce; when it surfaces, I'll post again about rehoming it.

-r


From usotsuki at buric.co  Fri Nov 27 13:16:52 2020
From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 22:16:52 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2Oa2n5sD8uDzF2sVGTF9gWwnUKtkiCU=HKw-0vnqAOpcw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
 <CAC20D2Oa2n5sD8uDzF2sVGTF9gWwnUKtkiCU=HKw-0vnqAOpcw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2011262213300.11847@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>

On Thu, 26 Nov 2020, Clem Cole wrote:

> My favorite 8-bit processor, maybe my favorite all around.

Ditto.

<snip>

> Running a full UNIX on it was not really possible although a few of the
> Unix style utilities were moved to it and a number of simple monitors were
> written that swapped programs in and out DOS style.   At one time, I had a
> fairly good version of the Bourne (V7) syntax shell we got running, but it
> had to be swapped in and out slowly.  That is; you run the shell, type a
> command, when exec is done, the shell is tossed out and the new program
> installed in memory.

One would have better luck with the Apple IIgs except I don't think 
there's a good free C compiler for 65816.  There's GNO which is very BSD, 
but obviously cut back for the necessity of running on top of GS/OS (and 
the shell is written in asm, it's not a true Bourne shell AFAIK).

-uso.

From usotsuki at buric.co  Fri Nov 27 13:18:47 2020
From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 22:18:47 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LRH.2.23.453.2011261510050.14253@waffle.shalott.net>
References: <c2d6b3fa-df83-5efe-03a7-77b09bc82667@gmail.com>
 <alpine.LRH.2.23.453.2011261510050.14253@waffle.shalott.net>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2011262217350.11847@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>

On Thu, 26 Nov 2020, jason-tuhs at shalott.net wrote:

>> of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know of any 
>> from back in the day?
>
> I don't think there are any for the 8-bit Apple IIs, but for the 16-bit Apple 
> IIgs, there's GNO/ME unix: http://www.gno.org/gno/
>
> I actually ran this on my IIgs; it was cute, and quite usable considering the 
> limitations of the hardware.  I don't know anything about its provenance, 
> though.
>
> Anyone else run GNO/ME?  Anyone know if it was based on some previous source 
> base or distribution?  Or know the folks behind it?

I know that a lot of the code bears the 4-clause BSD license.  So maybe 
it's based on 4.4BSD, but with some parts rewritten?

-uso.

From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu  Fri Nov 27 21:54:44 2020
From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 06:54:44 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
Message-ID: <20201127115444.E581018C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

    > From: Steve Nickolas

    > there's no easy way to do preemptive multitasking without extra
    > hardware.

Perhaps you're using some idiosyncratic definition of "preemptive" and
"multitasking", but to me that statement's not accurate.

Let's take the "multitasking" part first: that just means 'two or more
computations can run at the same time, sharing the machine' - and that's not
hard to do, without special hardware, provided there's some way (in the
organization of the software) to save the state of one when the other is
running. Many simple systems do this; e.g. the MOS system that I used on
LSI-11's, BITD.

"Preemptive" is a bit trickier, because things have to be organized so that
one 'task' can be temporarily stopped arbitrarily (i.e. without it explicitly
giving up the processor, which is what e.g.MOS did) to let another run. There
does need to be some asynchronous way of inciting the second 'task' to run,
but interrupts (either clock, or device) do that, and pretty much every
machine has those. MINI-UNIX, for example, has premptive multitasking.

The thing that takes special hardware is _protecting_ one task from a bug in
another - a bug which could trash the first tasks's (or the system's!)
memory. One has to have memory management of some kind to do that.


    > From: Dave Horsfall

    > I would start with something like Mini-Unix

MINI-UNIX would be a good place to start if one wanted to bring up a system on
a machine without memory management; there's nothing in the kernel which is
PDP-11 dependent that I can think of (unlike V6, which had a fairly heavy
dependency on the PDP-11 memory management hardware - although one could of
course rip that all out, as MINI-UNIX did).

However, one's still looking at a fair amount of work, both to get rid of any
traces of PDP-11isms (e.g. stack growth direction), and translate the
assembler part (startup, and access to non-C operations). Something like FUZIX
might be an easier option.

       Noel

From usotsuki at buric.co  Fri Nov 27 22:20:38 2020
From: usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 07:20:38 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <20201127115444.E581018C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20201127115444.E581018C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2011270713470.14072@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>

On Fri, 27 Nov 2020, Noel Chiappa wrote:

>    > From: Steve Nickolas
>
>    > there's no easy way to do preemptive multitasking without extra
>    > hardware.
>
> Perhaps you're using some idiosyncratic definition of "preemptive" and
> "multitasking", but to me that statement's not accurate.
>
> Let's take the "multitasking" part first: that just means 'two or more
> computations can run at the same time, sharing the machine' - and that's not
> hard to do, without special hardware, provided there's some way (in the
> organization of the software) to save the state of one when the other is
> running. Many simple systems do this; e.g. the MOS system that I used on
> LSI-11's, BITD.

That's cooperative multitasking, though.  And there's actually a program 
for the Apple //e that lets you do it from *BASIC*, "Extra.Apple" from 
Beagle Bros (they did a ton of "enhancement" utilities like this).

> "Preemptive" is a bit trickier, because things have to be organized so that
> one 'task' can be temporarily stopped arbitrarily (i.e. without it explicitly
> giving up the processor, which is what e.g.MOS did) to let another run. There
> does need to be some asynchronous way of inciting the second 'task' to run,
> but interrupts (either clock, or device) do that, and pretty much every
> machine has those. MINI-UNIX, for example, has premptive multitasking.

You'd at least need interrupts, but a stock Apple //e literally doesn't 
have any way to generate a hardware interrupt.

I do believe the //c (which has a built-in mouse controller which is 
interrupt-driven) can be programmed to do that, but without something like 
a 6522 card, a //e can't.  It's pretty primordial, really.

-uso.

From hans at hanshq.net  Fri Nov 27 22:59:06 2020
From: hans at hanshq.net (Hans Wennborg)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 13:59:06 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] Why do compress(1) and pack(1) use the .Z / .z extension?
Message-ID: <b69e0e88-ed76-da93-12e7-4d36144327c3@hanshq.net>

I'm trying to find out why compress(1) uses .Z as filename extension.

My theory is that it was inspired by pack(1), which uses the .z extension.

However, I haven't been able to find any info on why pack(1) uses that 
extension. Does anyone here know?

Some searching led me to [1] which is a man page for pack from AUSAM. 
It's written by Steve Zucker in 1975, so perhaps the extension is z for 
Zucker?

Was Zucker's pack(1) the first, though? This message [2] talks about a 
Bell version.

Does anyone here have any information about this?

Cheers,
Hans

1. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM/doc/man/man1/pack.1
2. https://tech-insider.org/unix/research/1984/0319.html

From lm at mcvoy.com  Sat Nov 28 01:01:44 2020
From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 07:01:44 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] W. Richard Stevens wife's email?
Message-ID: <20201127150144.GA25974@mcvoy.com>

I was making coffee into the cup I've had for decades that talks about
his networking books.  I realized I might have something that would
help his wife a bit.  I had her email but long since lost it.  Anyone
have it?

--lm

From cowan at ccil.org  Sat Nov 28 01:57:43 2020
From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 10:57:43 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Why do compress(1) and pack(1) use the .Z / .z extension?
In-Reply-To: <b69e0e88-ed76-da93-12e7-4d36144327c3@hanshq.net>
References: <b69e0e88-ed76-da93-12e7-4d36144327c3@hanshq.net>
Message-ID: <CAD2gp_T7ZbT-aVMtB0G7KJngnynNh6XsSeV4QoeFEJ0pQsSVjg@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 8:07 AM Hans Wennborg <hans at hanshq.net> wrote:

I'm trying to find out why compress(1) uses .Z as filename extension.
>
> My theory is that it was inspired by pack(1), which uses the .z extension.
>
I think that connection is plain.  As for the .z extension, I'd guess (and
it's nothing better than that, just a conclusion I jumped to long ago) that
it makes compressed files sort after files that share the same root name.

IIRC, compress(1) used to be able to unpack files as well as uncompressing
them.  I don't know if that's still true.




John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
May the hair on your toes never fall out!  --Thorin Oakenshield (to Bilbo)
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From cowan at ccil.org  Sat Nov 28 02:22:00 2020
From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 11:22:00 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <20201127115444.E581018C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20201127115444.E581018C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <CAD2gp_S0ZotZ+0bZKdCSSFc1W6VGH3wJRtBxHA6r=BG-3dZbLw@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 6:55 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:


> The thing that takes special hardware is _protecting_ one task from a bug
> in
> another - a bug which could trash the first tasks's (or the system's!)
> memory. One has to have memory management of some kind to do that.
>

Actually, a modified version of the * approach will also work.  When
switching processes, swap the whole process out to your fastest device (on
* this was a single write to the drum) and swap in the new process.  *
hardware had a bounds register, so it was only necessary to swap out enough
of the previous process to fit the smaller process in.  So after a while,
core started to look like an onion, with the current process at the bottom
and pieces of larger non-current processes above that.

(I thought that * was MIT CTSS, but I can't confirm that.)

As for interrupts, the stock 2e has both IRQ and NMI lines. Erann Gat aka
Ron Garret explains in <
https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue9/030_1_THE_25C_APPLE_II_REAL_TIME_CLOCK.php>
how to make an external clock and hook it to the NMI pin for 25 cents in
1981 dollars (about $1.67 today; h/t measuringworth.com).



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
A mosquito cried out in his pain,
"A chemist has poisoned my brain!"
The cause of his sorrow / Was para-dichloro-
Diphenyltrichloroethane.                                (aka DDT)
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From clemc at ccc.com  Sat Nov 28 03:16:01 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 12:16:01 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Why do compress(1) and pack(1) use the .Z / .z extension?
In-Reply-To: <b69e0e88-ed76-da93-12e7-4d36144327c3@hanshq.net>
References: <b69e0e88-ed76-da93-12e7-4d36144327c3@hanshq.net>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2MyMz7FFwQMRm-vUDjhLnZ-R+ZyL00EthVWqcqqr=Heng@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 8:08 AM Hans Wennborg <hans at hanshq.net> wrote:

> I'm trying to find out why compress(1) uses .Z as filename extension.
>
> My theory is that it was inspired by pack(1), which uses the .z extension.
>
Yes.



>
> However, I haven't been able to find any info on why pack(1) uses that
> extension. Does anyone here know?
>
No idea - but yes, Zucker used a .z at Rand when he wrote.

>
> Some searching led me to [1] which is a man page for pack from AUSAM.
> It's written by Steve Zucker in 1975, so perhaps the extension is z for
> Zucker?
>
> Was Zucker's pack(1) the first, though? This message [2] talks about a
> Bell version.

Zucker wrote it at Rand - early/mid 1970s. IIRC, It was later included in
the original Harvard USENIX tape in the 'Rand' directory.  I believe that
Rand Pipes (named pipes) are in the same directory. Although some of the
Rand stuff was being shared by folks on the ArpaNet before USENIX existed
and I think it made it to the wild before the first USENIX tape.

It was really important back in the day.  Remember RK05's are only 2.5M
bytes - source archiving and packing files was pretty important given the
cost / byte of disk.

I think there may have been an early version @ BTL - PWB may have
distributed it also, but I'm fairly sure it was the Rand code that started
it.  Noel might remember more than I.  I'm 90% sure we had it at CMU before
we got either PWB 1.0 or UNIX/TS from Ted -- I want to say it we had it on
5th edition but maybe not.

One of the PDP-10 folks will need to chime in here.  My memory is there was
something like pack(1) on the CMU PDP-10s and 20s that I saw before I saw
the UNIX tool [not sure why I think this, but it may have been SAIL program
- I remember looking at a number of simple tools when I learn SAIL years
and years ago - 74/75-ish].  IIRC they were not exactly the same format as
the 10's were 36-bit words, stored 5 chars in a word, but it was the same
idea.
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From imp at bsdimp.com  Sat Nov 28 05:00:25 2020
From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 12:00:25 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Why do compress(1) and pack(1) use the .Z / .z extension?
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2MyMz7FFwQMRm-vUDjhLnZ-R+ZyL00EthVWqcqqr=Heng@mail.gmail.com>
References: <b69e0e88-ed76-da93-12e7-4d36144327c3@hanshq.net>
 <CAC20D2MyMz7FFwQMRm-vUDjhLnZ-R+ZyL00EthVWqcqqr=Heng@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CANCZdfobjCvum4H8J_MKF73j9iCTFCU3QrSswQ2i2yLdmfzRKw@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 10:17 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 8:08 AM Hans Wennborg <hans at hanshq.net> wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to find out why compress(1) uses .Z as filename extension.
>>
>> My theory is that it was inspired by pack(1), which uses the .z extension.
>>
> Yes.
>
>
>
>>
>> However, I haven't been able to find any info on why pack(1) uses that
>> extension. Does anyone here know?
>>
> No idea - but yes, Zucker used a .z at Rand when he wrote.
>
>>
>> Some searching led me to [1] which is a man page for pack from AUSAM.
>> It's written by Steve Zucker in 1975, so perhaps the extension is z for
>> Zucker?
>>
>> Was Zucker's pack(1) the first, though? This message [2] talks about a
>> Bell version.
>
> Zucker wrote it at Rand - early/mid 1970s. IIRC, It was later included in
> the original Harvard USENIX tape in the 'Rand' directory.  I believe that
> Rand Pipes (named pipes) are in the same directory. Although some of the
> Rand stuff was being shared by folks on the ArpaNet before USENIX existed
> and I think it made it to the wild before the first USENIX tape.
>
> It was really important back in the day.  Remember RK05's are only 2.5M
> bytes - source archiving and packing files was pretty important given the
> cost / byte of disk.
>
> I think there may have been an early version @ BTL - PWB may have
> distributed it also, but I'm fairly sure it was the Rand code that started
> it.  Noel might remember more than I.  I'm 90% sure we had it at CMU before
> we got either PWB 1.0 or UNIX/TS from Ted -- I want to say it we had it on
> 5th edition but maybe not.
>
> One of the PDP-10 folks will need to chime in here.  My memory is there
> was something like pack(1) on the CMU PDP-10s and 20s that I saw before I
> saw the UNIX tool [not sure why I think this, but it may have been SAIL
> program - I remember looking at a number of simple tools when I learn SAIL
> years and years ago - 74/75-ish].  IIRC they were not exactly the same
> format as the 10's were 36-bit words, stored 5 chars in a word, but it was
> the same idea.
>

Regardless of the early history, this is why gzip files end in .gz and not
.z. The pack'd files were considered too prevalent at the time to crowd
into that name space, even though this happened maybe 12 years after
compress started to displace pack.

Warner
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From clemc at ccc.com  Sat Nov 28 05:17:44 2020
From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 14:17:44 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Why do compress(1) and pack(1) use the .Z / .z extension?
In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfobjCvum4H8J_MKF73j9iCTFCU3QrSswQ2i2yLdmfzRKw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <b69e0e88-ed76-da93-12e7-4d36144327c3@hanshq.net>
 <CAC20D2MyMz7FFwQMRm-vUDjhLnZ-R+ZyL00EthVWqcqqr=Heng@mail.gmail.com>
 <CANCZdfobjCvum4H8J_MKF73j9iCTFCU3QrSswQ2i2yLdmfzRKw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAC20D2NMkdXRqtS88nkVHEoMt2m5ejc-jNwB6i+cq2oefy+0XA@mail.gmail.com>

I thought the gz was because dos voilf not tell the difference between Z
and z which was strange of course since it stored it on 8 bits unlike rt11
which used RAD50 (5bits)  sigh.

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 2:00 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 10:17 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 8:08 AM Hans Wennborg <hans at hanshq.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm trying to find out why compress(1) uses .Z as filename extension.
>>>
>>> My theory is that it was inspired by pack(1), which uses the .z
>>> extension.
>>>
>> Yes.
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> However, I haven't been able to find any info on why pack(1) uses that
>>> extension. Does anyone here know?
>>>
>> No idea - but yes, Zucker used a .z at Rand when he wrote.
>>
>>>
>>> Some searching led me to [1] which is a man page for pack from AUSAM.
>>> It's written by Steve Zucker in 1975, so perhaps the extension is z for
>>> Zucker?
>>>
>>> Was Zucker's pack(1) the first, though? This message [2] talks about a
>>> Bell version.
>>
>> Zucker wrote it at Rand - early/mid 1970s. IIRC, It was later included in
>> the original Harvard USENIX tape in the 'Rand' directory.  I believe that
>> Rand Pipes (named pipes) are in the same directory. Although some of the
>> Rand stuff was being shared by folks on the ArpaNet before USENIX existed
>> and I think it made it to the wild before the first USENIX tape.
>>
>> It was really important back in the day.  Remember RK05's are only 2.5M
>> bytes - source archiving and packing files was pretty important given the
>> cost / byte of disk.
>>
>> I think there may have been an early version @ BTL - PWB may have
>> distributed it also, but I'm fairly sure it was the Rand code that started
>> it.  Noel might remember more than I.  I'm 90% sure we had it at CMU before
>> we got either PWB 1.0 or UNIX/TS from Ted -- I want to say it we had it on
>> 5th edition but maybe not.
>>
>> One of the PDP-10 folks will need to chime in here.  My memory is there
>> was something like pack(1) on the CMU PDP-10s and 20s that I saw before I
>> saw the UNIX tool [not sure why I think this, but it may have been SAIL
>> program - I remember looking at a number of simple tools when I learn SAIL
>> years and years ago - 74/75-ish].  IIRC they were not exactly the same
>> format as the 10's were 36-bit words, stored 5 chars in a word, but it was
>> the same idea.
>>
>
> Regardless of the early history, this is why gzip files end in .gz and not
> .z. The pack'd files were considered too prevalent at the time to crowd
> into that name space, even though this happened maybe 12 years after
> compress started to displace pack.
>
> Warner
>
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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From dave at horsfall.org  Sun Nov 29 09:12:52 2020
From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 10:12:52 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?
In-Reply-To: <20201127115444.E581018C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20201127115444.E581018C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2011291000010.48674@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On Fri, 27 Nov 2020, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> > I would start with something like Mini-Unix
>
> MINI-UNIX would be a good place to start if one wanted to bring up a 
> system on a machine without memory management; there's nothing in the 
> kernel which is PDP-11 dependent that I can think of (unlike V6, which 
> had a fairly heavy dependency on the PDP-11 memory management hardware - 
> although one could of course rip that all out, as MINI-UNIX did).

Yeah, that's why I suggested it; I did play with it on one those PDT 
thingies some decades ago (just to see if I could; the thing was on loan).

> However, one's still looking at a fair amount of work, both to get rid 
> of any traces of PDP-11isms (e.g. stack growth direction), and translate 
> the assembler part (startup, and access to non-C operations). Something 
> like FUZIX might be an easier option.

Hadn't heard of FUZIX, but after looking at the web page then I concur; 
I'll keep it in mind should I ever get a tiny machine :-)  I did have a 
fine collections of Microbees (Aussie Z-80 box) once, but they're long 
gone, along with enough bits to make an Applix 1616 (Aussie 68000 box).

-- Dave

From j at tllds.com  Mon Nov 30 13:10:17 2020
From: j at tllds.com (Joachim)
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 19:10:17 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)
Message-ID: <8b580c46-ecfb-9383-ed43-08108b3ee7bf@tllds.com>

Apologies if this has already been linked here.

"The UNIX Command Languageis the first-ever paper published on the Unix 
shell. It was written by Ken Thompson in 1976."

https://github.com/susam/tucl


Joachim
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From thomas.paulsen at firemail.de  Mon Nov 30 18:30:03 2020
From: thomas.paulsen at firemail.de (Thomas Paulsen)
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:30:03 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)
In-Reply-To: <8b580c46-ecfb-9383-ed43-08108b3ee7bf@tllds.com>
References: <8b580c46-ecfb-9383-ed43-08108b3ee7bf@tllds.com>
Message-ID: <a5551776aee570315edf2b1b722fe839@firemail.de>

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From brantley at coraid.com  Mon Nov 30 23:36:58 2020
From: brantley at coraid.com (Brantley Coile)
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2020 13:36:58 +0000
Subject: [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)
In-Reply-To: <8b580c46-ecfb-9383-ed43-08108b3ee7bf@tllds.com>
References: <8b580c46-ecfb-9383-ed43-08108b3ee7bf@tllds.com>
Message-ID: <FAFA695C-A8F8-4F16-967A-DBF678D678F9@coraid.com>

Thank you very much! I've been looking for where Ken used the "much needed gap" phrase.

  Brantley

> On Nov 29, 2020, at 10:10 PM, Joachim via TUHS <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> Apologies if this has already been linked here.
> 
> "The UNIX Command Language is the first-ever paper published on the Unix shell. It was written by Ken Thompson in 1976."
> 
> https://github.com/susam/tucl
> 
> 
> Joachim