[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Deborah Scherrer

    > On 2/25/17 11:25 AM, Cory Smelosky wrote:

    >> MtXinu is something I really want.

    > I worked there for 10 years (eventually becoming President).  I'll try 
    > to dig up a tape.

Say what you will about RMS, but he really did change the world of software.
Most code (except for very specialized applications) just isn't worth much
anymore (because of competition from open source) - which is part of why all
these old code packages are now freely available.


Although I suppose the development of portabilty - which really took off with
C and Unix, although it had existed to some degree before that, q.v. the tools
collection in FORTRAN we just mentioned - was also a factor, it made it
possible to amortize code writing over a number of different types of
machines.

There were in theory portable languages beforehand (e.g. PL/1), but I think it
probably over-specified things - e.g. it would be impossible to port Multics
to another architecture without almost completely re-writing it from scratch,
the code is shot through with "fixed bin(18)"'s every other line...

	Noel

[TUHS] Portability (was: BSDi Imaging)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Sunday, 26 February 2017 at  7:50:50 -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>
> There were in theory portable languages beforehand (e.g. PL/1), but
> I think it probably over-specified things - e.g. it would be
> impossible to port Multics to another architecture without almost
> completely re-writing it from scratch, the code is shot through with
> "fixed bin(18)"'s every other line...

That may be coloured by your perspective.  C was never designed to be
portable, while much older languages like Algol and Cobol were.  There
were quite different reasons for C's success.

To quote "The Programmer's ABC's” from Datamation, April 1976:

  C is for Cobol
  What a pity
  It was designed
  By a committee

Greg
--
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[TUHS] Portability (was: BSDi Imaging)

[Steve Johnson]

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I couldn't disagree more.  Here is some background.

I didn't have much experience with COBOL or Algol -- Bell Labs was a
FORTRAN shop.  And we had a strong need to run FORTRAN programs on
many different kinds of computers.  So the portability of FORTRAN
programs was very important.  Barbara Ryder built a program (in
FORTRAN!) called the PFORT verifier that verified that a FORTRAN
program could be run on any of the six dominant machines of the day
(this was an inspiration for Lint, by the way).  It was incredible
what differences she found in this "portable" language when different
implementations encountered the programs.  My favorite was a bug in
one compiler that would cause a program that began with 50 comment
cards to abort.  The FORTRAN program produced a title line on the
listing (remember those?) that was printed out, and it used the first
function name to get the title.  50 lines => new page, no title =>
blam.   The subtle bugs caused by copy-in/copy-out argument passing
were especially icky.

So portability was much in our minds in the late sixties and early
seventies.  As Unix began to catch on, there was a desire to move
some utilities to other systems.  Neither B nor the original C was
really up to the job.  Remember that machines of the day had
different character sets, different floating point implementations,
and different byte and word sizes, word address vs. byte addressed,
and with different word orders.  It was a zoo.  Moving programs in
any language was difficult, not least because the operating systems
were so different (remember JCL?).

Late in 1974, as I recall, Dennis mused "You know, I think it would be
easier to move Unix to a new machine than to change a large
application to run on another operating system."  I thought about
this for a few minutes, and then offered to write a portable C
compiler.  I had already moved B and/or C from the PDP-11 to the
Honeywell (36-bit words, 9 bit bytes, word addressed) and the IBM/360
(32-bits, byte addressed, but bizarre difficulties accessing memory in
a reasonable fashion), so I had some idea what I was getting into.  
We also persuaded the company to buy us a 32-bit minicomputer (the
Interdata 4/32) with the goal of porting C and Unix to it.

With so many different kinds of opcodes and data formats, Dennis made
what I think was an inspired solution.   + meant "add" on whatever
computer it was running on.   int was the natural word size.  etc.
This had three very good properties:
1) it kept the language simple.   In particular, it kept us from
having to specify bit widths for everything, which would then need to
be changed when the program was ported to avoid inefficiency.
2) It kept the compiler simple.  This was essential on the small
PDP-11.
3) It turned out that with the addition of Lint, many problems that
could result from porting could be found, without preventing the
program from running well on the host system.

So C was indisputably intended to be portable, at least in that
sense.  And in practice it was highly portable while sacrificing
little in performance on different systems (unlike some other
languages).

There were drawbacks -- it wasn't perfect.  Cross compiling from one
machine to a much different one still had its challenges.  Adopting
the target machine's byte order made networking code harder to
write.  And machines that considered character constants to be signed
produced a lot of irritation (and a lot of Lint messages).  But it
wasn't from lack of trying...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@lemis.com>
To:"Noel Chiappa" <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Cc:<tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:Mon, 27 Feb 2017 07:49:00 +1100
Subject:[TUHS] Portability (was: BSDi Imaging)

 On Sunday, 26 February 2017 at 7:50:50 -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote:
 >
 > There were in theory portable languages beforehand (e.g. PL/1), but
 > I think it probably over-specified things - e.g. it would be
 > impossible to port Multics to another architecture without almost
 > completely re-writing it from scratch, the code is shot through
with
 > "fixed bin(18)"'s every other line...

 That may be coloured by your perspective. C was never designed to be
 portable, while much older languages like Algol and Cobol were. There
 were quite different reasons for C's success.

 To quote "The Programmer's ABC'sâ from Datamation, April 1976:

 C is for Cobol
 What a pity
 It was designed
 By a committee

 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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[TUHS] Portability (was: BSDi Imaging)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Sunday, 26 February 2017 at 17:08:39 -0800, Steve Johnson wrote:
> I couldn't disagree more.

I think you could have :-) But thanks for the followup and the
details.

> Late in 1974, as I recall, Dennis mused "You know, I think it would
> be easier to move Unix to a new machine than to change a large
> application to run on another operating system."  I ... offered to
> write a portable C compiler.

By that time C on the PDP-11 had been round for a couple of years,
right?  And then you go on to be portable.  On the other hand, my
understanding of Algol and Cobol is that they didn't start with any
specific architecture in mind.  And it was that difference that I was
thinking of when I said that C wasn't designed to be portable.  A
matter of viewpoint, maybe.

I'm not belittling the design of C, nor your or Dennis' work, but
there's nothing you've said here that suggested that C was designed
from the outset to be portable.

> So C was indisputably intended to be portable, at least in that
> sense.  And in practice it was highly portable while sacrificing
> little in performance on different systems (unlike some other
> languages).

That certainly applied to the difference between C and Algol.  In
defence of Algol, it had no prior art to build on.

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
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[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[Ron Natalie]

I've got a USB floppy drive that is kind of worthless for the purpose I bought it for.   If someone wants it for historical research purposes, I'd be glad to send it along.

-----Original Message-----
From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Cory Smelosky
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2017 10:54 PM
To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] BSDi Imaging



On Fri, Feb 24, 2017, at 19:52, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> All,
> 
> I'm dumping as much BSD/OS stuff as I can tonight. This includes: 
> SPARC, sources, and betas.
> 
> Unable to dump any floppies, however.

I never found my USB floppy drive, unfortunately. Nothing else with a floppy drive is currently happy.

> 
> -- 
>   Cory Smelosky
>   b4 at gewt.net


--
  Cory Smelosky
  b4 at gewt.net

[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[Deborah Scherrer]

I worked there for 10 years (eventually becoming President).  I'll try 
to dig up a tape.
Deborah

On 2/25/17 11:25 AM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> Argh!
>
> MtXinu is something I really want.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Feb 25, 2017, at 10:57, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
>>
>> MtXinu w NFS is still on the most wanted list.
>> Unforunately, they used really bad magtape for distribuition which remains sticky
>> no matter what I try to do to make it readable.
>>
>>> On 2/24/17 7:52 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>>> All,
>>>
>>> I'm dumping as much BSD/OS stuff as I can tonight. This includes: SPARC,
>>> sources, and betas.
>>>
>>> Unable to dump any floppies, however.
>>>

[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[Cory Smelosky]

Argh!

MtXinu is something I really want.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 25, 2017, at 10:57, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
> 
> MtXinu w NFS is still on the most wanted list.
> Unforunately, they used really bad magtape for distribuition which remains sticky
> no matter what I try to do to make it readable.
> 
>> On 2/24/17 7:52 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>> All,
>> 
>> I'm dumping as much BSD/OS stuff as I can tonight. This includes: SPARC,
>> sources, and betas.
>> 
>> Unable to dump any floppies, however.
>> 
> 

[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[Al Kossow]

MtXinu w NFS is still on the most wanted list.
Unforunately, they used really bad magtape for distribuition which remains sticky
no matter what I try to do to make it readable.

On 2/24/17 7:52 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> All,
> 
> I'm dumping as much BSD/OS stuff as I can tonight. This includes: SPARC,
> sources, and betas.
> 
> Unable to dump any floppies, however.
> 

[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[Cory Smelosky]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017, at 19:53, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Feb 24, 2017, at 19:52, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> > All,
> > 
> > I'm dumping as much BSD/OS stuff as I can tonight. This includes: SPARC,
> > sources, and betas.
> > 
> > Unable to dump any floppies, however.
> 
> I never found my USB floppy drive, unfortunately. Nothing else with a
> floppy drive is currently happy.
> 
> > 
> > -- 
> >   Cory Smelosky
> >   b4 at gewt.net
> 
> 
> -- 
>   Cory Smelosky
>   b4 at gewt.net

Snagged it all - it's 19G.

Now I can get the documentation to the CHM.

-- 
  Cory Smelosky
  b4 at gewt.net

[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[Cory Smelosky]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017, at 19:52, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> All,
> 
> I'm dumping as much BSD/OS stuff as I can tonight. This includes: SPARC,
> sources, and betas.
> 
> Unable to dump any floppies, however.

I never found my USB floppy drive, unfortunately. Nothing else with a
floppy drive is currently happy.

> 
> -- 
>   Cory Smelosky
>   b4 at gewt.net


-- 
  Cory Smelosky
  b4 at gewt.net

[TUHS] BSDi Imaging

[Cory Smelosky]

All,

I'm dumping as much BSD/OS stuff as I can tonight. This includes: SPARC,
sources, and betas.

Unable to dump any floppies, however.

-- 
  Cory Smelosky
  b4 at gewt.net