[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Warner Losh]

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On Fri, Jun 6, 2025, 12:10 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> As someone who has been quite attentive to the documentation situation
> with UNIX, I've managed to build out a pretty appreciable library of
> historic works.  Among my most treasured bits are my 3B20S Release 4.1
> manual and Bell Labs copies of the Lions's Commentary.
>
> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among
> your UNIX-y possessions?
>

My AIX yoyo. And a bootleg copy of lions.

Warner

>

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[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Cameron Míċeál Tyre via TUHS]

I don't know if it counts but my ninth printing of the first edition of 𝘋𝘰𝘤𝘶𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘛𝘺𝘱𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘕𝘐𝘟 𝘚𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮 - 𝘝𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘮𝘦 𝘐𝘐 - 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱, 𝘮𝘷, 𝘮𝘴 & 𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘧 is a favorite as it makes me remember being young and wanting to learn more about computers and is still useful today. 

It's a hardback copy with a very slightly damaged spine but that aside, looks almost new. As an art & design guy, I love the AT&T logo of the time which appears twice in the first few printed pages. It still has a McGraw Hill bookstore price sticker for $31.95 on the back cover. I love it anyway!

Cameron Tyre




-------- Original Message --------
On 06/06/2025 19:10, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

>  As someone who has been quite attentive to the documentation situation with UNIX, I've managed to build out a pretty appreciable library of historic works.  Among my most treasured bits are my 3B20S Release 4.1 manual and Bell Labs copies of the Lions's Commentary.
>  
>  What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions?
>  
>  - Matt G.
>

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[John Levine]

It appears that segaloco via TUHS <segaloco@protonmail.com> said:
>What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions?

The license plate

A photo of a UNIX brand fire extinguisher.

A first edition of "UNIX for Dummies" (no surprise there)

R's,
John

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Pete Wright via TUHS]

On 6/6/25 12:22, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that segaloco via TUHS <segaloco@protonmail.com> said:
>> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions?
> 
> The license plate
> 
> A photo of a UNIX brand fire extinguisher.
> 
> A first edition of "UNIX for Dummies" (no surprise there)
> 

A print of a draft of The Complete FreeBSD 4th ed. signed by Greg Lehey. 
  Still sitting in its original manila envelope by my desk.

A friend (thanks .ike!) got it and gifted it to me when I ended up in 
the hospital the night before I was supposed to attend BSDCan '05 and 
couldn't attend.  Lots of sentimental value for me in that one for me.

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete@nomadlogic.org

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Diomidis Spinellis]

For me the two-volume book "UNIX System Readings and Applications", 
published by Prentice Hall in 1987 and 1988, which are reprints of the 
two Unix special issues of the The Bell System Technical Journal:

- Vol. 57, No. 6, July-August 1978 (ISBN 0-13-939845-7),
- Vol. 63, No. 8, October 1984 (ISBN 0-13-939845-7).

They contain seminal papers describing Unix and its tools.

Diomidis - https://www.spinellis.gr/

On 06-Jun-25 21:09, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
 > As someone who has been quite attentive to the documentation 
situation with UNIX, I've managed to build out a pretty appreciable 
library of historic works.  Among my most treasured bits are my 3B20S 
Release 4.1 manual and Bell Labs copies of the Lions's Commentary.
 >
 > What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have 
among your UNIX-y possessions?
 >
 > - Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Tom Lyon]

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I made an album with pictures of my prized possessions:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/HLFW389a7AsxwYna9

On Fri, Jun 6, 2025 at 11:16 AM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> As someone who has been quite attentive to the documentation situation
> with UNIX, I've managed to build out a pretty appreciable library of
> historic works.  Among my most treasured bits are my 3B20S Release 4.1
> manual and Bell Labs copies of the Lions's Commentary.
>
> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among
> your UNIX-y possessions?
>
> - Matt G.
>

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[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Brantley Coile]

My tattered, original, blue BSTJ from 1978, the first UNIX issue would me my prized UNIX artifact.

I got it in 1980. The day after it arrived my wife and father-in-law went to some fancy shopping places in Atlanta as a treat, but I sat in the car reading the issue. 

I remember reading Ken's paper on how Unix worked internally and not understanding a thing. A few years later, after things like our Kernel Club, a meeting every Wednesday night of a few friends where we would read and discuss sections of the Seventh Edition source, I re-read the article and thought ti was clarity itself. Something the text doesn't change but we do.

I read it so much it fell apart. It now lives in a ring binder, its pages have been punched. I've not stopped using

Brantley Coile

> On Jun 6, 2025, at 2:09 PM, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> As someone who has been quite attentive to the documentation situation with UNIX, I've managed to build out a pretty appreciable library of historic works.  Among my most treasured bits are my 3B20S Release 4.1 manual and Bell Labs copies of the Lions's Commentary.
> 
> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions?
> 
> - Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Alexander Schreiber]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2025 at 02:45:21PM -0400, Dennis Boone wrote:
>  > I don't know if it counts but my ninth printing of the first edition
>  > of 𝘋𝘰𝘤𝘶𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘛𝘺𝘱𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘕𝘐𝘟 𝘚𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮 - 𝘝𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘮𝘦 𝘐𝘐
>  > - 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱, 𝘮𝘷, 𝘮𝘴 & 𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘧 is a favorite as it makes me remember being
>  > young and wanting to learn more about computers and is still useful
>  > today.
> 
> Is carefully typing the title in characters from the \u10000 moby of
> unicode the 21st century equivalent of rot-13 encoding the spoilers? :)

If so, then it only hides from those with bad font setups in their
terminals (or email clients for those preferring fancy GUI ones).

Perfectly readable here with mutt inside xterm. ;-)

Kind regards,
           Alex.
-- 
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
 looks like work."                                      -- Thomas A. Edison

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Cameron Míċeál Tyre via TUHS]

My apologies to anyone who received gobbledygook in my original message. It was only after I replied to Dennis, off group and thinking he somehow knew my "italics" weren't really italics, that I looked up the u10000 block, saw ancient runes and realized my shortcut had gone awry.

Full disclosure, I had ignored my teacher's advice from computing class 40 years ago, that ASCII 0x20 through 0x7E is mostly adequate, and pasted the book title into LingoJam's italics generator webpage and then pasted their italicized output into my email without considering how that worked even though I know.

For those who got the unintended gobbledygook, the book title was "Document formatting and typesetting on the UNIX system. Vol. 2: grap, mv, ms, & troff" by Narain Gehani and Steven Lally.

Best wishes to all,

Cameron Tyre


-------- Original Message --------
On 07/06/2025 16:30, Alexander Schreiber <als@thangorodrim.ch> wrote:

>  >
>  > Is carefully typing the title in characters from the \u10000 moby of
>  > unicode the 21st century equivalent of rot-13 encoding the spoilers? :)
>  
>  If so, then it only hides from those with bad font setups in their
>  terminals (or email clients for those preferring fancy GUI ones).
>  
>  Perfectly readable here with mutt inside xterm. ;-)
>  
>  Kind regards,
>             Alex.
>  --
>  "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
>   looks like work."                                      -- Thomas A. Edison
>

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

Just this week I passed on my late friend Rob Warnock’s first edition copy of “The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD” book to a FreeBSD user who was very happy to discover it was signed by Leffler & McKusick!
[I need to make an online list of all the tech books I want to give away….]

> On Jun 7, 2025, at 12:14 AM, Pete Wright via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 6/6/25 12:22, John Levine wrote:
>> It appears that segaloco via TUHS <segaloco@protonmail.com> said:
>>> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions?
>> The license plate
>> A photo of a UNIX brand fire extinguisher.
>> A first edition of "UNIX for Dummies" (no surprise there)
> 
> A print of a draft of The Complete FreeBSD 4th ed. signed by Greg Lehey.  Still sitting in its original manila envelope by my desk.
> 
> A friend (thanks .ike!) got it and gifted it to me when I ended up in the hospital the night before I was supposed to attend BSDCan '05 and couldn't attend.  Lots of sentimental value for me in that one for me.
> 
> -pete
> 
> -- 
> Pete Wright
> pete@nomadlogic.org
> 

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Rich Jensen via TUHS]

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[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Scot Jenkins via TUHS]

segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions?


The C Programmer's Handbook
AT&T Bell Laboratories, February 1984
spiral bound with yellow card stock covers

No ISBN printed on the book itself.
My copy is older than the one shown here:
https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/0131100734

I managed to get a "like new" copy about 15 years ago off half.com in
excellent condition.  Aside from being pre-ANSI C, the book still does 
a great job describing the language and the standard library.

It is also one of the few books I've found that includes both the
control character name and description in the included ASCII table.

scot

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Friday,  6 June 2025 at 12:47:30 -0700, The UNIX Heritage Society wrote:
>
> On 6/6/25 12:22, John Levine wrote:
>> It appears that segaloco via TUHS <segaloco@protonmail.com> said:
>>> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions?
>>
>> The license plate
>>
>> A photo of a UNIX brand fire extinguisher.
>>
>> A first edition of "UNIX for Dummies" (no surprise there)
>
> A print of a draft of The Complete FreeBSD 4th ed. signed by Greg
> Lehey.

I'm honoured.

> Still sitting in its original manila envelope by my desk.

Somehow this reminds me of another case, not really Unix-related: I
was (maybe still am) known for my long beard.  In fact I trimmed it
greatly over 20 years ago, in March 2004, and I put the cuttings up
for sale on eBay, where they sold for $5.50.  It was bought by Chris
Yeoh of IBM Ozlabs.  I had written "While the item is in clean
condition and free of obvious parasites, it has not been sterilized",
and for some reason Chris never opened the package.  Instead it was
pinned to the pinboard at Ozlabs.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog@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.php

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[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Warren Toomey via TUHS]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2025 at 06:09:57PM +0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have among your UNIX-y possessions?

Mine is the wonderful and amazing collection of people who have chosen
to join the TUHS mailing list, and the contributions they have made over
the past thirty years.

Sincerely, thanks to all of you!

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Henry Mensch]

On 8 Jun 2025, at 4:45, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> Segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> What do folks have around that you're particularly thrilled to have
>> among your UNIX-y possessions?
>
> The PDP-11 with the daemons on it T-shirt, from I think the USENIX 25th
> anniversary conference.

I had that shirt and mistakenly left it in a hotel room in Caracas. Somewhere in Venezuela it may live on in a thrift shop somewhere.

— Henry

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Henry Bent]

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On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:59, Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> wrote:

>
> My rare items are only Unix-adjacent.  I have a Digital “Beta” prototype,
> the first Alpha machine in a PC form factor. It runs OSF-1, or would if I
> can find the SIMMs I borrowed from it :).  I have some boards for a Digital
> Firefly, a research vax multiprocessor that ran a Modula-2 based OS that
> would run Ultrix binaries.
>

That's incredibly cool.  Do you know if any of the Firefly machines
survived?  I saw a VAXstation 3540 for sale at some point recently but it
was well out of my price range; I hope it found a good home.

-Henry

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[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Aron Insinga]

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Firefly
=>
https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/bitsavers_dectechrep_1102275/SRC-RR-23.pdf

(One of the papers Wikipedia references talks about M68010 CPUs, maybe 
early cache work was done with them.)

- Aron


On 6/9/25 19:37, Lawrence Stewart wrote:
>
> I’ve not heard of anyone having a complete Firefly.  Around 70 were 
> build I think.
>
> The Firefox was build as a product in the late ’80s by Workstation 
> Systems Engineering, which was down the street from us at the Systems 
> Research Center in Palo Alto.  It was maybe inspired by Firefly but 
> had an entirely different design.
>
> I see this topic came up once before here, in 2019: 
> https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2019-August/018389.html
>
>
>
>> On Jun 9, 2025, at 15:16, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:59, Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     My rare items are only Unix-adjacent.  I have a Digital “Beta”
>>     prototype, the first Alpha machine in a PC form factor. It runs
>>     OSF-1, or would if I can find the SIMMs I borrowed from it :).  I
>>     have some boards for a Digital Firefly, a research vax
>>     multiprocessor that ran a Modula-2 based OS that would run Ultrix
>>     binaries.
>>
>>
>> That's incredibly cool.  Do you know if any of the Firefly machines 
>> survived?  I saw a VAXstation 3540 for sale at some point recently 
>> but it was well out of my price range; I hope it found a good home.
>>
>> -Henry
>

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[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Al Kossow]

On 6/9/25 5:24 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
> On 6/9/25 4:37 PM, Lawrence Stewart wrote:
>>
>> I’ve not heard of anyone having a complete Firefly.  Around 70 were build I think.
>>
> 
> I don't think any survived, nor did any of the software for it.
> The only Firefly PCB I ever saw was the one Ed designed much later at General Magic.
> Some Firefox boards showed up on eBay last week and I grabbed pics of them for the 35x0 directory on bitsavers.
> 
> 

Nothing was saved from Titan that I know of either.
I've complained in the past that other than the published reports nothing was archived in the DEC
corporate archives from WRL, SRC or DEC West.
WRL was the best preserved of the bunch because of the work that got released to the world (or made
it to products)

[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Greg A. Woods]

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At Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:10:28 +1000, Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?
> 
> An original, hand-wire-wrapped Jerq board, later renamed Blit because of
> marketing. Also the original mouse, made by Prof Nicoud's lab and signed by
> him on the bottom.

The mice that came with the DMD-5620s, the Dépraz Mouse, "Made in
Switzerland" (one of mine says "Type D 85 / P") looks very similar.  I
have one in an original AT&T package too.

It's one of my favourite Unix-related possessions, along with the
DMD-5620 itself (or do I have 2?).  Not a real Jerq, but still very
nice!

I wish I had the 3B2/500 that I used the DMD with -- but it didn't have
an Ethernet card, and without TCP/IP it did not seem useful enough to
keep at the time I moved into working with full Internet things.

I do also still have a VT102 that reminds me of the PDP-11s I also once
had.

-- 
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>

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[TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Al Kossow]

On 6/11/25 3:29 PM, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> At Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:10:28 +1000, Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
> Subject: [TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?
>>
>> An original, hand-wire-wrapped Jerq board, later renamed Blit because of
>> marketing. Also the original mouse, made by Prof Nicoud's lab and signed by
>> him on the bottom.
> 

have the eproms been archived?