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* [TUHS] BTL summer employees
@ 2020-08-02 13:40 Doug McIlroy
  2020-08-02 13:57 ` arnold
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 17+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2020-08-02 13:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

> My unscientific survey of summer students was that they either came
> from scouts, or were people working on advanced degrees in college.

Not all high-school summer employees were scouts (or scout equivalents -
kids who had logins on BTL Unix machines). I think in particular of Steve
Johnson and Stu Feldman, who eventually became valued permanent employees.
The labs also hired undergrad summer employees. I was one.

Even high-school employees could make lasting contributions.  I am
indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 17+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] BTL summer employees
@ 2020-08-10 12:53 Noel Chiappa
  2020-08-10 13:21 ` Lars Brinkhoff
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 17+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2020-08-10 12:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs; +Cc: jnc

    > From: Lars Brinkhoff

    > the Dover printer spooler was written using Snyder's C compiler


I'm not sure if that's correct. I don't remember with crystal clarity all the
details of how we got files to the Dover, but here's what I recall (take with
1/2 a grain of salt, my memory may have dropped some bits). To start with,
there were different paths from the CHAOS and TCP/IP worlds. IIRC, there was a
spooler on the Alto which ran the Dover, and the two worlds had separate paths
to get to it.

From the CHAOS world, there was a protocol translation which ran on whatever
machine had the AI Lab's 3Mbit Ethernet interface - probably MIT-AI's
CHAOS-11? If you look at the Macro-11 code from that, you should see it - IIRC
it translated (on the fly) from CHAOS to EFTP, the PUP prototocol which the
spooler ran 'natively'.

From the IP world, IIRC, Dave Clark had adapted his Alto TCP/IP stack (written
in BCPL) to run in the spooler alongside the PUP software; it included a TFTP
server, and people ran TFTP from TCP/IP machines to talk to it. (IP access to
the 3Mbit Ethernet was via another UNIBUS Ethernet interface which was plugged
into an IP router which I had written. The initial revision was in Macro-11; a
massive kludge which used hairy macrology to produce N^2 discrete code paths,
one for every pair of interfaces on the machine. Later that was junked, and
replaced with the 'C Gateway' code.)

I can, if people are interested, look on the MIT-CSR machine dump I have
to see how it (a TCP/IP machine) printed on the Dover, to confirm that
it used TFTP.

I don't recall a role for any PDP-10 C code, though. I don't think there was a
spooler anywhere except on the Dover's Alto. Where did that bit about the
PDP-10 spooler in C come from, may I enquire? Was it a CMU thing, or something
like that?

  Noel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 17+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] BTL summer employees
@ 2020-08-10 14:02 Noel Chiappa
  2020-08-10 17:08 ` Lawrence Stewart
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 17+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2020-08-10 14:02 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs; +Cc: jnc

    > From: Lars Brinkhoff

    > I haven't investigated it thoroughly, but I do see a file .DOVR.;.SPOOL
    > 8 written in C by Eliot Moss.
    > ...
    > When sending to the DOVER, the spooler waits until Spruce is
    > free before sending another file.

Ah, so there was a spooler on the ITS machine as well; I didn't know/remember
that.

I checked on CSR, and it did use TFTP to send it to the Alto spooler:

  HOST MIT-SPOOLER,       LCS 2/200,SERVER,TFTPSP,ALTO,[SPOOLER]

I vaguely recall the Dover being named 'Spruce', but that name wasn't in the
host table... I have this vague memory that 'MIT-Spooler' was the Alto which
prove the Dover, but now that I think about it, it might have been another one
(which ran only TFTP->EFTP spooler software). IIRC the Dover as a pain to run,
it required a very high bit rate, and the software to massage it was very
tense; so it may have made sense to do the TFTP->EFTP (I'm pretty sure the
vanilla Dover spoke EFTP, but maybe I'm wrong, and it used the PUP stream
protocol) in another machine.

It'd be interesting to look at the Dover spooler on ITS, and see if/how one
got to the CHAOS network from C - and if so, how it identified the protocol
translating box.

   Noel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 17+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2020-08-10 18:14 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 17+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-08-02 13:40 [TUHS] BTL summer employees Doug McIlroy
2020-08-02 13:57 ` arnold
2020-08-02 17:13   ` Doug McIlroy
2020-08-03  9:24     ` arnold
2020-08-02 15:12 ` Robert Diamond
2020-08-02 19:05   ` Jon Steinhart
2020-08-03  5:14     ` Heinz Lycklama
2020-08-03 12:55       ` John P. Linderman
2020-08-03 16:26         ` Jon Steinhart
2020-08-10  0:48 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-10  0:53   ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-10  6:33 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-08-10 12:53 Noel Chiappa
2020-08-10 13:21 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-08-10 14:02 Noel Chiappa
2020-08-10 17:08 ` Lawrence Stewart
2020-08-10 18:13   ` Lars Brinkhoff

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