Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > I may have the the original Rand MH release somewhere.

There's this:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/mh

Not sure how modified from the formal release this is, it may be pretty much
the original (it's certainly quite old - pre-TCP/IP).

    Noel

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

[Clem Cole]

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Noel, I did a quick look at that code.   That is some of it for sure -
looks like the parts in /usr/bin and maybe some of /usr/lib (MH was scatter
all of the file system in traditional UNIX manner -- lots of small programs
- each to do one job only - each fit in a small address PDP-11 just fine).
The docs are missing and the MTA part is not there (which I think I
remember was called 'submit' - but I could be very wrong on that).   It's
the second version because that code is using stdio, the first version used
a Rand IO library, if I remember right (not the portable C library).

Clem

PS For all you younger readers to this list, you need to remember that for
early C, I/O was specifically not defined as part of the language (in some
sense it is still not), so many early programs had their own libraries and
its a good way to date things.   If the code is using stdio, it actually
more 'modern' in the life of the PDP-11 [post 'typesetter C'].     BTW: I
can say, in the mid 1970s, I personally found the lack of defined I/O
confusing when I was learning the language and (remember Dennis has not yet
written the 'White Book' which was really part of V7).   It was one of my
bitches about C compared to BLISS, which was what I was coming and was a
very rich system at CMU - while I/O in C was really a pain because ever
program did it different - everybody wrote their own routines - which I
thought was silly.   Soon there after the 'portable C library' appeared and
then with typesetter C, stdio.

ᐧ

On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 10:44 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Clem Cole
>
>     > I may have the the original Rand MH release somewhere.
>
> There's this:
>
>   https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/mh
>
> Not sure how modified from the formal release this is, it may be pretty
> much
> the original (it's certainly quite old - pre-TCP/IP).
>
>     Noel
>

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Re: [TUHS] off-topic list [ really mh ]

[Jon Steinhart]

Clem Cole writes:
>
> Noel, I did a quick look at that code.   That is some of it for sure -
> looks like the parts in /usr/bin and maybe some of /usr/lib (MH was scatter
> all of the file system in traditional UNIX manner -- lots of small programs
> - each to do one job only - each fit in a small address PDP-11 just fine).
> The docs are missing and the MTA part is not there (which I think I
> remember was called 'submit' - but I could be very wrong on that).   It's
> the second version because that code is using stdio, the first version used
> a Rand IO library, if I remember right (not the portable C library).
>
> Clem

BTW, I would think that the original code is somewhere in the nmh archives too.

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

[Paul Winalski]

On 6/25/18, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> BTW: I can say, in the mid 1970s, I personally found the lack of defined I/O
> confusing when I was learning the language and (remember Dennis has not yet
> written the 'White Book' which was really part of V7).   It was one of my
> bitches about C compared to BLISS, which was what I was coming and was a
> very rich system at CMU - while I/O in C was really a pain because ever
> program did it different - everybody wrote their own routines - which I
> thought was silly.   Soon there after the 'portable C library' appeared and
> then with typesetter C, stdio.

???

The BLISS language doesn't have any I/O capability built into the
language (as do BASIC,  Fortran, COBOL, PL/I).  Being intended as a
systems programming language, it is expected that programmers will
write their own I/O routines using the target OS's I/O services.

-Paul W.

Re: [TUHS] off-topic list

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 12:03 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> The BLISS language doesn't have any I/O capability built into the
> language (as do BASIC,  Fortran, COBOL, PL/I).

​Sorry for the strange side trip ...  you didn't parse my words careful
(which I know can sometimes be a challenge).  What I said was that CMU had
a rich set of BLISS system​

​services where I/O was one set of those services.
I did not say it was part of the language
​.   But I/O
was very much part of way we programmed and we moved code from the PDP10
and the 11's reasonably freely that was not intended to be machine
specific, particularly since the PDP11 compiler was a cross compiler that
ran on the 10.
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Old RAND MH Source.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Jon,

> > > https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/mh
> >
> > Noel, I did a quick look at that code.   That is some of it for sure
>
> BTW, I would think that the original code is somewhere in the nmh
> archives too.

No, I don't think there's anything going back this far, e.g. no
`pickup.c' in git, and I think David Levine, another maintainer, along
with you and me, would like to expand the collection as he often looks
back to understand the present.

Clem, if you do dig out old MH source then please point the
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers list at it, or me
directly if you'd prefer.  Amongst nmh's current users is its co-author,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Shapiro, and I don't think he has
source that old otherwise he'd have passed it on.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy