[TUHS] History of top

[TUHS] History of top

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > Tops-20 or TENEX (aka Twin-Ex).

ISTR the nickname we used was 'TWENEX'?

BTW, the first 20 at MIT (MIT-XX) had a 'Dos Equis' label prominently stuck to
it... :-)

      Noel

[TUHS] History of top

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 2:55 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Clem Cole
>
>     > Tops-20 or TENEX (aka Twin-Ex).
>

​Right -- Brain freeze...​



>
> ISTR the nickname we used was 'TWENEX'?
>
> BTW, the first 20 at MIT (MIT-XX) had a 'Dos Equis' label prominently
> stuck to
> it... :-)

​Cute....​

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[TUHS] History of top

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 2:55 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Clem Cole
>
>     > Tops-20 or TENEX (aka Twin-Ex).
>
> ISTR the nickname we used was 'TWENEX'?
>
> BTW, the first 20 at MIT (MIT-XX) had a 'Dos Equis' label prominently
> stuck to
> it... :-)


"I don't always use computers, but when I do, I prefer PDP-10s."

        - Dan C.

ObRef: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYdwe3ArFWA
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[TUHS] History of top

[Arthur Krewat]

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On 5/29/2018 4:11 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> "I don't always use computers, but when I do, I prefer PDP-10s."
>
>         - Dan C.
Write-in for President in 2020.

[TUHS] History of top

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Noel Chiappa wrote:
> BTW, the first 20 at MIT (MIT-XX) had a 'Dos Equis' label prominently
> stuck to it... :-)

I recently learned that XX's MINITS gateway was called XI.

[TUHS] History of top

[Norman Wilson]

Arthur Krewat:

On 5/29/2018 4:11 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> "I don't always use computers, but when I do, I prefer PDP-10s."
>
> B  B  B  B  - Dan C.

  Write-in for President in 2020.

===

Only if he's Not Insane.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] History of top

[Arthur Krewat]

On 5/29/2018 5:35 PM, Norman Wilson wrote:
> "prefer PDP-xx"
By definition, not insane.

[TUHS] History of top

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> reports on Mon, 28 May 2018 10:31:56 +0000:

>> But apparently the inspiration came from VMS:
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20170527120123/http://www.unixtop.org:80/about.shtml

That link contains the statement

>> The first version of top was completed in the early part of 1984.

However, on TOPS-20, which was developed several years before VMS, but
still from the same corporation, we had the sysdpy utility which
produced a similar display as top does.  

From my source archives, I find in score/4-utilities/sysdpy.mac the
ending comments:

	;462 -  DON'T DO A RLJFN AFTER A CLOSF IN NEWDPY
	;<4.UTILITIES>SYSDPY.MAC.58,  2-Jun-79 14:15:54, EDIT BY DBELL
	;461 -  START USING STANDARD TOPS-20 EDIT HISTORY CONVENTIONS, AND
	;       REMOVE OLD EDIT HISTORY.
	...
	;COPYRIGHT (C) 1976,1977,1978,1979 BY DIGITAL EQUIPMENT \
         CORPORATION, MAYNARD, MASS.

I therefore expect that there was 460-entry list of log messages that
predated 2-Jun-1979, and likely went back a few years.  Two other
versions of sysdpy.mac in my archives have also dropped log messages
before 461.

Even before TOPS-20, on the CDC 6400 SCOPE operating system, there was
a similar tool (whose name I no longer recall) that gave a
continuously updated display of system-wide process activity. That was
available in at least late 1973.

I suspect that top-like displays were added to most other interactive
operating systems, as soon as screen terminals made updates convenient
without wasting console paper.  One of the first questions likely to
be asked by interactive users is "what is my job doing?".  

In a TOPS-20 terminal window, you could type Ctl-T to get a one-line
status report for the job that was currently running from your
terminal.  For many users, that was preferable to sysdpy, and it was
heavily used.



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[TUHS] History of top

[Clem cole]

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Below

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On May 28, 2018, at 6:43 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe at math.utah.edu> wrote:
> ....
> I suspect that top-like displays were added to most other interactive
> operating systems, as soon as screen terminals made updates convenient without wasting console paper.  One of the first questions likely to be asked by interactive users is "what is my job doing?".  
Absolutely true - all interactive systems had something like it that I remember. Certainly the 10s but as you point out CDC.  I remember  In the early - mid 1970s CMU had a display outside of the computer center and in the terminal room on a ‘large screen display’ connected to the 360/67 system which ran TSS - IBM’s timesharing system - systat ran constantly. 

As I said before there were lots of versions that were hacks off of ps in the Unix world.  Top as we know it was just a matter of time. 

Clem

[TUHS] History of top

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

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> On May 28, 2018, at 5:16 PM, Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> I remember  In the early - mid 1970s CMU had a display outside of the computer center and in the terminal room on a ‘large screen display’ connected to the 360/67 system which ran TSS - IBM’s timesharing system - systat ran constantly.

MTS had something similar.  At the U of Alberta, it displayed the HASP batch and print queues on a monitor in the "I/O" room  on the 2nd floor of the General Services Building, where you came to submit card decks and pick up print jobs.  My memory says that was part of the HASP system operator job.

I think there might have been a top-style variant of "$SYSTEMSTATUS <mumble>" that would run on the public 3270 (and AJ510) terminals.  But I would have to fire up Hercules to confirm that.

--lyndon

[TUHS] History of top

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> I therefore expect that there was 460-entry list of log messages that
> predated 2-Jun-1979, and likely went back a few years.  Two other
> versions of sysdpy.mac in my archives have also dropped log messages
> before 461.

The copyright notice goes back to 1976, which is about then TOPS-20 was
first released, right?

Is this a TOPS-10 version of SYSDPY?  It was copyrighted in 1970.

http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/bb-jr93e-bb/14/7,6/ap014/sysdpy.x14.html

> Even before TOPS-20, on the CDC 6400 SCOPE operating system, there was
> a similar tool (whose name I no longer recall) that gave a
> continuously updated display of system-wide process activity. That was
> available in at least late 1973.

I didn't mean to start a mine-is-older-than-yours, but anyway, PEEK
is documented in AI memo 169 from November 1968.

[TUHS] History of top

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 2:53 AM, Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:
>
> The copyright notice goes back to 1976, which is about then TOPS-20 was
> first released, right?
>
​Tops-20 or TENEX (aka Twin-Ex).   Tenex was earlier, and came in house to
DEC and was renamed Tops-20 when DEC released the DEC System20 series
(20/40 and 20/60 originally).​



>
> Is this a TOPS-10 version of SYSDPY?  It was copyrighted in 1970.
>
> http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/bb-jr93e-bb/14/7,6/ap014/sysdpy.x14.html

​Could be -- looks about right,  I do not have a running 10 in simh to
check it these days.  But that looks reasonable,​




>
> I didn't mean to start a mine-is-older-than-yours

​Sorry, did not mean to start that.  I just wanted to make sure people knew
that Top was not really a Unix-ism or anything new with VMS, or the PDP-10s
for that matter and clarify the origin.  The idea of displaying status was
pretty important in those days for the system as a whole.
As Lyndon pointed out, being able to monitor the batch systems was another
use of this type of display; but that was slightly different than dpy, peek
and the like.
​  This was really to tell the user, when the system would get to your
work.   BTW, ^T was cool on Tenex, because being interactive, it was just
your process and helped you know how where ​your 'active' process stood
relative to the other things the system was doing (i.e. was it running or
waiting and how busy was the system as a whole).

As terminals (paper and glass) became more the norm (*i.e.* interactive /
time sharing system​
s), both the operators of the system as well as the users wanted to keep
track of what was going on to the system -- i.e. processes that were in the
run queue.   In those days, most systems were in a 'computer room' and the
human operator could do much to keep the system running, from mounting mag
tapes to changing system priorities, assigning resources as needed.
Remember in late 1960s dollars, a 4Mbyte 360/67 like what CMU had at the
time, was valued in the $5M range, a PDP-10 was likely to be about $1.5M.
 So the cost of a human operator was valuable, you really wanted to get
100% out of that system - and the people who actually paid for computing
(like the business office or some research project) needed to get
priority.   A tool like this was needed for the operators to know what was
going on and adjust.

The CDC systems had a glass display as the console, that ran the tool
mentioned before.   The Univac, DEC and IBM systems tended to use paper
based consoles for commands and operator status, but often had some sort of
glass display near the console that the operators monitored (I have picture
of me in the CMU computer room from those days and the displays are on my
left).  I don't know how the the GE/Honeywell system were equipted for a
console, as while I was user of same early in my career, I was never an
operator/system admin - i.e. never behind the glass door with them.

Clem
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[TUHS] History of top

[Arthur Krewat]

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On 5/29/2018 10:18 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>
>     Is this a TOPS-10 version of SYSDPY?  It was copyrighted in 1970.
>
>     http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/bb-jr93e-bb/14/7,6/ap014/sysdpy.x14.html
>     <http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/bb-jr93e-bb/14/7,6/ap014/sysdpy.x14.html>
>
> ​Could be -- looks about right,  I do not have a running 10 in simh to 
> check it these days.  But that looks reasonable,​
>
>
This is definitely TOPS-10:

SYSDPY:	JFCL			;ALLOW FOR CCL ENTRY
	SETZB	0,ZER		;CLEAR OUT SCRATCH
	MOVE	A,[ZER,,ZER+1]
	BLT	A,LZER
	MOVEI	17,1		;CLEAR
	BLT	17,16		; ACS
	MOVE	P,[IOWD PDLEN,PDLST]  ;INITIALIZE PDL POINTER
	SETZ	F,		;NO FLAGS
	SETOM	.FRAJR		;AUTOMATIC ROLL FEATURE
	JUMPPT	A,,KA10		;SEE IF KI-10
	TRO	F,FR.KIX!FR.KIP	;YES--SET FLAG
KA10:	MOVE	A,[%CNVER]	;GET MONITOR VERSION
	GETTAB	A,		;GET MONITOR VERSION VIA UUO!!
	 SETZM	A		;VERY OLD!!
	MOVEM	A,MONVER	;  TESTS
	MOVX	A,%CNDJB	;ASK MONITOR FOR
	GETTAB	A,		;PJOBN/DEVJOB INFORMATION
	 MOVE	A,[POINT 9,20,35]  ;6-SERIES MONITORS
	HRRM	A,PJOBNO	;SAVE DEVJOB INDEX
	HLLM	A,PJOBNP	;AND POINTER TO JOB NUMBER IN SAME

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[TUHS] History of top

[Steve Nickolas]

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On Tue, 29 May 2018, Clem Cole wrote:

> ​  This was really to tell the user, when the system would get to your
> work.   BTW, ^T was cool on Tenex, because being interactive, it was just
> your process and helped you know how where ​your 'active' process stood
> relative to the other things the system was doing (i.e. was it running or
> waiting and how busy was the system as a whole).

I found ^T useful on FreeBSD, where it does more or less the same thing.

-uso.

[TUHS] History of top

[Paul Winalski]

On 5/28/18, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe at math.utah.edu> wrote:
>
> I suspect that top-like displays were added to most other interactive
> operating systems, as soon as screen terminals made updates convenient
> without wasting console paper.  One of the first questions likely to
> be asked by interactive users is "what is my job doing?".

And even to non-interactive operating systems.  Inspired by systat and
sysdpy on TOPS-10, I implemented similar functionality for DOS/VS on
the IBM System/370.  It did a continuously updating display of what
each partition was doing on a 3277 transaction terminal.  Very useful
for the system operator.  OS/VS1 had a similar utility.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] History of top

[Arthur Krewat]

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On my SIMH running TOPS-10 7.03:

.DIR SYS:SYSTEM.EXE


SYSTEM  EXE  1188  <155>   11-Oct-01    703(31042) DSKB:   [1,4]

.DIR SYS:SYSDPY.*


SYSDPY  EXE    56  <055>    7-Mar-86    703(634) DSKB:   [1,4]

 From a TOPS-10 6.03A system I managed to cobble together to boot on a KS10:

.DIR SYS:SYSDPY.*

SYSDPY  CTL     4  <000>   28-Feb-77    DSKC:   [1,4]
SYSDPY  EXE    40  <055>   30-Mar-77    433(550)
SYSDPY  MAC   192  <000>    6-Jul-76
SYSDPY  MEM     1  <000>    7-Dec-78
   Total of 237 blocks in 4 files on DSKC: [1,4]


 From SYSDPY.MAC:

SUBTTL  SYSTAT FOR DISPLAYS -- %433(550) -- 6 JUL 76
SUBTTL /TCK 11-JAN-74
VSYSDPY==433
VWHO==0
VMINOR==0
VEDIT==550
;*** COPYRIGHT 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 
DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORP., MAYNARD, MASS. ***

SEARCH jobdat,C
;EDIT HISTORY

;EDIT LEVEL 471 TO 472

;EDIT 1  SYSVBX DID NOT RUN WITHOUT A CORE ARGUMENT ,AS  CORE
;         EXPANSION WAS DONE AFTER A LOCK UUO

[TUHS] History of top

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Lars Brinkhoff

    > I'm surprised it appeared that late. Were there any other versions or
    > similar Unix programs before that?

The MIT ~PWB1 system had a thing called 'dpy', I think written at MIT based on
'ps' (and no doubt inspired by ITS' PEEK), which had similar functionality.
Seems like it never escaped, though. Man page and source here:

  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/man1/dpy.1
  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s1/dpy.c

The top of my hard-copy man page says 'November 1977', but I suspect it dates
back further than that.

     Noel

[TUHS] History of top

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 5:20 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Lars Brinkhoff
>
>     > I'm surprised it appeared that late. Were there any other versions or
>     > similar Unix programs before that?
>
> The MIT ~PWB1 system had a thing called 'dpy', I think written at MIT
> based on
> 'ps' (and no doubt inspired by ITS' PEEK), which had similar functionality.
> Seems like it never escaped, though. Man page and source here:
>
>   http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/man1/dpy.1
>   http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s1/dpy.c
>
> The top of my hard-copy man page says 'November 1977', but I suspect it
> dates
> back further than that.
>
>      Noel
>
> There were a bunch of these​ - originally mods off of ps(1) that kicked
around at different UNIX sites.   CMU's locally hacked ps was similar to
dpy and BSD's *stat programs (systatm vmstat, ...). The problem all of
these had was getting the data out of the OS.   The original scheme used by
ps being it ran setuid/gid, and then was able to opening /dev/kmem and
reading interesting data structures the kernel.  A big problem was that ps
and the OS had to be compiled with exactly the same headers and you really
had to know the layout and the obvious security concerns of using
setuid/gid to control things.

FreeBSD's sysctl and V8's /proc would finally clean that up by making a
formal interface to the OS and controlling what was available in a more
granular manner both from a data structure as well as security path.
 Although before /proc came to being (/proc was a UNIX innovation), the
sysctl(2) like interface was reinvented a few times, as it really was not
new with UNIX.   It's very much like a similar scheme that came from TOPS,
RSX and VMS (which the Masscomp system parroted being ex-DECies almost
exactly the same as VMS).  I believe that Sun had something also, but  I've
forgotten its name, Larry might remember.   But so did  DG-OS and many of
the other commercial UNIXs snd I would not be surprised if many University
hacks did it also.

My favorite of all of these was the one that George Gobble at Purdue built
when he did the Dual VAX.   He also spliced an PDP-11 on the UBA on the
their Dual Vax System and wrote a program that like top(1) refreshed itself
(at least as fast as once a sec IIRC).  It would read the VAX memory and
then display what the OS was doing in real time.   He did a neat talk in a
mid-1980's USENIX with a movie from it.   They found an interesting bug in
the BSD scheduler which had been there since 6th edition, which had never
really been noticed until people could visually watch what as happening and
actually get enough information about how processes were being handled.
[This was also around the time one of the first '0-day' issues with UNIX
was found by ghg and team which is now a cute story but at the time was
quite worrisome].


​The best I remember, the popularity of top(1) started because it was first
released as USENET came of age; and thus it got wide distribution.  By that
point, ​ *BSD was the 'standard' in most places, and this the *stat
commands were pretty well known. The top(1) program consolidated these into
a single one, plus it used the curses library so it could be left running
on a glass TTY.   As Vaxen were being used as large timesharing systems for
Universities to teach with, such a program was handy for the sys admins to
keep an eye on what was happening.

Clem

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[TUHS] History of top

[Ronald Natalie]

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I remember George’s Unibus monitoring hack.    It was noted at the time that he didn’t have any bus terminators.   The SBI had CPUs on both ends and the Unibus had the monitoring 11/23 at the far end.

We built one of the Dual vaxes at BRL (BRL-VGR).   It was pretty straight forward, just needed to obtain (well we had it fabbed) a new cardcage and redo a special set of SBI cables to be an mirror image.
It was amazing how cheap this was compared to the 782 abomination (not to even mention the VaxCluster and it’s horrendous HSC50 that I ended up administering later at RU).

[TUHS] History of top

[Lars Brinkhoff]

> The MIT ~PWB1 system had a thing called 'dpy', I think written at MIT
> based on 'ps' (and no doubt inspired by ITS' PEEK)

Indeed my hidden agenda was to find a link between top and PEEK.
But apparently the inspiration came from VMS:

http://web.archive.org/web/20170527120123/http://www.unixtop.org:80/about.shtml

[TUHS] History of top

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Hello,

I'm curious about the history of "top".  As far as I can see, the first
version was written by William LeFebvre and posted to net.sources in
1984.  I'm surprised it appeared that late.  Were there any other
versions or similar Unix programs before that?

Best regards,
Lars Brinkhoff

[TUHS] History of top

[Dave Horsfall]

On Thu, 24 May 2018, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:

> I'm curious about the history of "top".  As far as I can see, the first 
> version was written by William LeFebvre and posted to net.sources in 
> 1984.  I'm surprised it appeared that late.  Were there any other 
> versions or similar Unix programs before that?

My memory is failing me, but I seem to recall that here in Oz we had a
similar program, possibly written by Piers Lauder?  Or IanJ?

It was called "ss" or something, for "system status", and I dimly recall
modifying it (or suggesting same) to show the hostname.

-- Dave

[TUHS] History of top

[jason-tuhs]

>> I'm curious about the history of "top".  As far as I can see, the first 
>> version was written by William LeFebvre and posted to net.sources in 
>> 1984. I'm surprised it appeared that late.  Were there any other 
>> versions or similar Unix programs before that?

> My memory is failing me, but I seem to recall that here in Oz we had a 
> similar program, possibly written by Piers Lauder?  Or IanJ?
>
> It was called "ss" or something, for "system status", and I dimly recall 
> modifying it (or suggesting same) to show the hostname.

BSD's systat is similar.

The current manpage says it was released in 4.3 BSD, but the copyright 
notices in the code go back to 1980, with comments crediting "Bill Reeves 
at Lucasfilm."

https://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/ucb/PORT/systat/pigs.c.html


  -Jason