[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[Michael Sokolov]

Hi there,

I remember seeing in the Unix Archive a few years ago (back when the $100
licenses just came out and it was called PUPS Archive) some Russian Ancient
UNIX stuff, some things contributed to the UNIX community by the early Russian
UNIX users (on Soviet PDP-11s). However, I am now looking for it and cannot
find it. Would anyone have a pointer?

I am trying to russify my flagship UNIX (4.3BSD-Quasijarus) and I'm adding/
fixing 8-bit support in various parts of the system, and I got stuck on ex/vi.
The sucker just won't handle 8-bit chars. Since my job is to maintain Ancient
UNIX (my flavor thereof) rather than replace it, replacing the original ex/vi
with one of the modern reimplementations is not an option. I need to massage
8-bit support into the existing original Berkeley ex/vi with as few changes as
possible.

A friend of mine told me that Back in The Days the first UNIX users in the then
USSR were running patched (russified) 2.xBSD on Soviet PDP-11s and had KOI-8
for Russian. Since the flagship editor on <any>BSD is ex/vi, this makes me
think that those early Russian users used it and thus their patches
accomplished just what I need. And so I'm looking for those patches. TIA for
any help,

MS

[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[Warren Toomey]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 11:18:15AM -0800, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> I am trying to russify my flagship UNIX (4.3BSD-Quasijarus) and I'm adding/
> fixing 8-bit support in various parts of the system, and I got stuck on ex/vi.
> The sucker just won't handle 8-bit chars. Since my job is to maintain Ancient
> UNIX (my flavor thereof) rather than replace it, replacing the original ex/vi
> with one of the modern reimplementations is not an option. I need to massage
> 8-bit support into the existing original Berkeley ex/vi with as few changes as
> possible.
> 
> A friend of mine told me that Back in The Days the first UNIX users in the then
> USSR were running patched (russified) 2.xBSD on Soviet PDP-11s and had KOI-8
> for Russian. Since the flagship editor on <any>BSD is ex/vi, this makes me
> think that those early Russian users used it and thus their patches
> accomplished just what I need. And so I'm looking for those patches. TIA for
> any help,
> MS

I have a thing called Demos in a hidden section of the archive, which is
a modified 7th Edition (plus other things?) from Russia. I've hidden it as
the legal status is unclear :-) I'm happy to hand it out to individual
requestors, though. However, I can't find a vi(1) in there:

/usr/Hidden_PUPS/Miscfiles/Russian: du -a | grep vi
1       ./cmd/TUVWXYZ/vipw.sh,v.gz
1       ./cmd/comint/Environment/README.gz
2       ./cmd/comint/Environment/termcap.gz
2       ./cmd/comint/Environment/tuner.gz
3       ./cmd/comint/Environment/minihelp.DEMOS.gz
9       ./cmd/comint/Environment
1       ./cmd/uucp/L-devices.gz
11      ./sys/dev/RCS/video.c,v.gz
6       ./sys/dev/RCS/vikey.c,v.gz
7       ./sys/dev/video.c.gz
1       ./sys/include/video.h.gz
3       ./sys/stand/libsa/RCS/video.c,v.gz
2       ./sys/stand/libsa/video.c.gz

and a grep on `ex' gives nothing either.

	Warren

[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[Sven Mascheck]

Warren Toomey wrote:
> Michael Sokolov wrote:

>> I'm adding/fixing 8-bit support in various parts of the system, and
>> I got stuck on ex/vi.
>
> I have a thing called Demos in a hidden section of the archive, which
> is a modified 7th Edition (plus other things?) from Russia. [...]
> However, I can't find a vi(1) in there

Then the following might be an option, /UnixArchive/Applications/Ritter_Vi/

"This is basically ex/vi 3.7, 6/7/85, from the 2.11BSD distribution"
"A larger addition is the ability to handle ISO character sets."

(recent development continued on <http://ex-vi.berlios.de/>)

Sven

[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[SZIGETI Szabolcs]

> A friend of mine told me that Back in The Days the first UNIX users in the
then
> USSR were running patched (russified) 2.xBSD on Soviet PDP-11s and had
KOI-8
> for Russian. Since the flagship editor on <any>BSD is ex/vi, this makes me
> think that those early Russian users used it and thus their patches

Hi,

I've got a story about this, which happened in the early '80s, int the then
communist Hungary. A friend of mine worked at the university as a sysadmin,
they were using Russian and Hungarian made PDP 11 clones, and mostly 6th ed.
Unix. (Incidentally, I wish once someone wrote the history of how the
Eastern Block countries managed to clone western machines and get software
for it. I've heard a lot of fascionating stories, involving some really
genious work, which of course the Western countries didn't appreciate at all
then.)

One day, some really important and secret people come from the interior
ministry, or military, with a tape, which they wanted to transfer to an
other tape, and only the university had such a tape drive which could read
the original. Well, the sysadmins realized, that this is some important
stuff (BOFHs existed here also :-), so while one kept the officials
occupied, the other went into the machine room, and hacked the device
driver, so that the tape would secretly be copied to disk.

They started the transfer, under close supervision, so that no other tape
copies were done, and so on. When the people left, they examined what they
had. It was a Russian port of the 7th edition, only maybe a couple of years
after 7th ed. were created. So they concluded that all the COCOM and other
export control regulations weren't really effective :-)

Szabolcs

[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[Andreas Krennmair]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 09:12  Uhr, SZIGETI Szabolcs wrote:
> Unix. (Incidentally, I wish once someone wrote the history of how the
> Eastern Block countries managed to clone western machines and get 
> software
> for it. I've heard a lot of fascionating stories, involving some really
> genious work, which of course the Western countries didn't appreciate 
> at all
> then.)

I think the "Communications of the ACM" had some articles about 
computing in the Eastern Block in June 1991.

> had. It was a Russian port of the 7th edition, only maybe a couple of 
> years
> after 7th ed. were created. So they concluded that all the COCOM and 
> other
> export control regulations weren't really effective :-)

Are you aware of the "KGB hackers" case in Germany? German hackers 
broke into systems, downloaded all data they could get, went to East 
Berlin, and sold it to the Russians. There's a nice German movie about 
the whole case, called "23". I don't know if it's been synchronized to 
other languages, but that movie is really worth watching. Full of 
historic hardware. :-)

Regards,
Andreas
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[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[Sven Mascheck]

Andreas Krennmair wrote:

> Are you aware of the "KGB hackers" case in Germany? German hackers 
> broke into systems, downloaded all data they could get, went to East 
> Berlin, and sold it to the Russians. There's a nice German movie about 
> the whole case, called "23".

...just based on The Cockoo's egg from Clifford Stoll.
One might argue about the amount of truth in the movie version.
And: AFAIK nobody knows what they had found/sold exactly...

> Full of historic hardware. :-)

That's another point certainly.

[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[Sven Mascheck]

Michael Sokolov wrote:
> Sven Mascheck wrote:

> > /UnixArchive/Applications/Ritter_Vi/
>
> [..] in the UNIX Archive Applications/Ritter_Vi contains only
> a tiny README file pointing to http://ex-vi.berlios.de/.
> Where are the old 2000 versions?

Interesting, a desynchronization: ftp.tuhs.org only lists that README,

ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/bsd/UnixArchive still also lists
README.NEW . . . . . . . .  May 31  2000      2k
READ_ME. . . . . . . . . .  Dec 10  1994      1k
ex-010521.tar.gz . . . . .  Jul 26  2001    186k
ritter_vi.tar.gz . . . . .  Jun  9  2000    207k

(And in ritter_vi the 8bit changes are surrounded by "#ifdef ISO".)

Sven

[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[Warren Toomey]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 12:25:30PM -0800, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> And all the newer stuff up to late 2002 is porting to "modern UNIX". But I
> don't want "modern UNIX", I'm running the original UNIX in its virgin form, I
> just want the 8-bit fix. The only files downloadable from ex-vi.berlios.de are
> 2002 releases and in the UNIX Archive Applications/Ritter_Vi contains only a
> tiny README file pointing to http://ex-vi.berlios.de/. Where are the old 2000
> versions?
> MS

I have ritter_vi.tar.gz, size 211579, date 2000/06/09 on a backup CD of the
Unix archive at work. I'll put it back into the Unix Archive in the
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Ritter_Vi  directory when I get
in to work in a few hours.

	Warren

[TUHS] Russian Ancient UNIX stuff in the Archive

[Michael Sokolov]

Sven Mascheck <sven.mascheck at student.uni-ulm.de> wrote:

> Then the following might be an option, /UnixArchive/Applications/Ritter_Vi/
>
> "This is basically ex/vi 3.7, 6/7/85, from the 2.11BSD distribution"
> "A larger addition is the ability to handle ISO character sets."
>
> (recent development continued on <http://ex-vi.berlios.de/>)

Where can I get the early versions of this effort?
http://ex-vi.berlios.de/Changes lists at the very bottom:

: Release 31/05/00
: * String extraction using mkstr and xstr is not longer be done.
: * An ANSI C preprocessor may be used.
: * Changes of symbol names due to collisions on newer systems.
: * Fixed a null pointer reference in ex_tty.c.
: * Included the 2.11BSD termcap in a subdirectory. Ex could use any
:   termcap library, however, that does not use malloc().
: * Support of eight bit characters excluding the range 0200 to 0237 is
:   enabled with -DISO8859_1. It does not include the regular expression code,
:   but otherwise works well in practice with the ISO-8859-1 character set.

And all the newer stuff up to late 2002 is porting to "modern UNIX". But I
don't want "modern UNIX", I'm running the original UNIX in its virgin form, I
just want the 8-bit fix. The only files downloadable from ex-vi.berlios.de are
2002 releases and in the UNIX Archive Applications/Ritter_Vi contains only a
tiny README file pointing to http://ex-vi.berlios.de/. Where are the old 2000
versions?

MS