[TUHS] Bell Labs CSTRs

[TUHS] Bell Labs CSTRs

[arnold]

Available at https://www.skeeve.com/bell-labs-cstrs.tar.gz

Warren and Brantley and anyone else, feel free to retrieve.

I have two sets - both are in the tarball so there are undoubtedly
duplications.  If someone else can curate them into single canonical
set that'd be helpful, I just don't have the time right now.

Enjoy,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Bell Labs CSTRs

[Noel Hunt]

Many thanks.

On Thu, 29 Jun 2023 at 17:14, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> Available at https://www.skeeve.com/bell-labs-cstrs.tar.gz
>
> Warren and Brantley and anyone else, feel free to retrieve.
>
> I have two sets - both are in the tarball so there are undoubtedly
> duplications.  If someone else can curate them into single canonical
> set that'd be helpful, I just don't have the time right now.
>
> Enjoy,
>
> Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Bell Labs CSTRs

[Clem Cole]

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+1 👍
ᐧ

On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 3:37 AM Noel Hunt <noel.hunt@gmail.com> wrote:

> Many thanks.
>
> On Thu, 29 Jun 2023 at 17:14, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> >
> > Available at https://www.skeeve.com/bell-labs-cstrs.tar.gz
> >
> > Warren and Brantley and anyone else, feel free to retrieve.
> >
> > I have two sets - both are in the tarball so there are undoubtedly
> > duplications.  If someone else can curate them into single canonical
> > set that'd be helpful, I just don't have the time right now.
> >
> > Enjoy,
> >
> > Arnold
>

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[TUHS] Re: Bell Labs CSTRs

[Will Senn]

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Clem's +1 caught my attention, so I looked into the referenced docs. I 
saw the rather simple (conceptually) m6 processor described in tech note 
54. I like its understandable.

Why is it called m6? Just curious.

Will

On 6/29/23 09:40, Clem Cole wrote:
> +1 👍
> ᐧ
>
> On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 3:37 AM Noel Hunt <noel.hunt@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     Many thanks.
>
>     On Thu, 29 Jun 2023 at 17:14, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>     >
>     > Available at https://www.skeeve.com/bell-labs-cstrs.tar.gz
>     >
>     > Warren and Brantley and anyone else, feel free to retrieve.
>     >
>     > I have two sets - both are in the tarball so there are undoubtedly
>     > duplications.  If someone else can curate them into single canonical
>     > set that'd be helpful, I just don't have the time right now.
>     >
>     > Enjoy,
>     >
>     > Arnold
>

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[TUHS] Re: Bell Labs CSTRs

[Will Senn]

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On a related note, I just read cstr 99 - Bell's computing research 
history and one of Doug's early articles was mentioned:

M. D. McIlroy, "Macro Instruction Extension of Compiler Languages," 
Communications of the
ACM 3 (April 1960), pp. 214-220.

It's discussing the general extensibility that macros provide and I was 
interested to obtain a copy to read at leisure. I found it over on ACM's 
digital library:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/367177.367223

But, the copy's not that great on my deteriorating eyesight. Does 
anybody have a cleaner copy?

Lately, I've been vastly improving my vi/vim skills and part of that 
process is shifting from an ad-hoc process to a move, act, repeat 
mentality (thank you Drew Neil for that revelation) and macros are 
consonant with this line of thinking :).

Will


On 6/29/23 09:40, Clem Cole wrote:
> +1 👍
> ᐧ
>
> On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 3:37 AM Noel Hunt <noel.hunt@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     Many thanks.
>
>     On Thu, 29 Jun 2023 at 17:14, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>     >
>     > Available at https://www.skeeve.com/bell-labs-cstrs.tar.gz
>     >
>     > Warren and Brantley and anyone else, feel free to retrieve.
>     >
>     > I have two sets - both are in the tarball so there are undoubtedly
>     > duplications.  If someone else can curate them into single canonical
>     > set that'd be helpful, I just don't have the time right now.
>     >
>     > Enjoy,
>     >
>     > Arnold
>

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[TUHS] Re: Bell Labs CSTRs

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 11:05 AM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> Clem's +1 caught my attention, so I looked into the referenced docs. I saw the rather simple (conceptually) m6 processor described in tech note 54. I like its understandable.
>
> Why is it called m6? Just curious.

I'll take a stab at that; I presume it's due to the naming convention
for macro processors from Bell Labs. Consider m4, which itself was
written as, "an extension of a macro processor called M3 which was
written by D. M. Ritchie for the AP-3 minicomputer; M3 was in turn
based on a macro processor implemented for [1]." (from, "The M4 Macro
Processor" by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, as distributed with
4.3BSD; reference [1] is to "Software Tools" by Kernighan and
Plauger).

Anyway, once you've got M3 and M4, you've got a naming convention; I'd
think it a safe bet that there was an M5 that was an internal
experiment, and that M6 was simply the next in line and was
interesting enough to be documented in a tech report.

        - Dan C.

Aside: the AP-3 minicomputer came up on this list a few years ago,
when Dag Spicer of the Computer History Museum was looking for
information about it. Near as folks could figure, it was the computer
portion of a Bendix "stereoplotter" for creating terrain maps and the
like (Adam Sampson figured that part out; others derived Bendix from
part numbers taken from a US Air Force spare parts requisition
document I found).

> On 6/29/23 09:40, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> +1 👍
> ᐧ
>
> On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 3:37 AM Noel Hunt <noel.hunt@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Many thanks.
>>
>> On Thu, 29 Jun 2023 at 17:14, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Available at https://www.skeeve.com/bell-labs-cstrs.tar.gz
>> >
>> > Warren and Brantley and anyone else, feel free to retrieve.
>> >
>> > I have two sets - both are in the tarball so there are undoubtedly
>> > duplications.  If someone else can curate them into single canonical
>> > set that'd be helpful, I just don't have the time right now.
>> >
>> > Enjoy,
>> >
>> > Arnold
>
>

[TUHS] Re: Bell Labs CSTRs

[segaloco via TUHS]

> Anyway, once you've got M3 and M4, you've got a naming convention; I'd
> think it a safe bet that there was an M5 that was an internal
> experiment, and that M6 was simply the next in line and was
> interesting enough to be documented in a tech report.

Only problem there is m6 predates m3 and m4.  Th m6(I) page first appears in V2 and there is a published reference from 1972.  Software Tools, from which m3 derives, was 1976, and m4 was then introduced in V7 (which is also the first research version since V2 without m6 somewhere in the manual.)

Here's a rough history of the m6 manpage: https://gitlab.com/segaloco/mandiff/-/commits/v6/man6/m6.6

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Bell Labs CSTRs

[Dan Cross]

On Sat, Jul 1, 2023 at 2:03 PM segaloco <segaloco@protonmail.com> wrote:
> > Anyway, once you've got M3 and M4, you've got a naming convention; I'd
> > think it a safe bet that there was an M5 that was an internal
> > experiment, and that M6 was simply the next in line and was
> > interesting enough to be documented in a tech report.
>
> Only problem there is m6 predates m3 and m4.  Th m6(I) page first appears in V2 and there is a published reference from 1972.  Software Tools, from which m3 derives, was 1976, and m4 was then introduced in V7 (which is also the first research version since V2 without m6 somewhere in the manual.)
>
> Here's a rough history of the m6 manpage: https://gitlab.com/segaloco/mandiff/-/commits/v6/man6/m6.6

Oops. Very well, then: stab my stab with a fork, for it is dead.

        - Dan C.

[TUHS] Bell Labs CSTRs

[arnold]

Hello Folks,

A while back I made avaiable a tarball of two directories I had
of Bell Labs CSTRs (Computing Science Technical Reports). There
was some overlap between them, and at the time I didn't have the
free time to go through and weed through the duplicates.

I have now done that. There is a new tar file available at

	https://www.skeeve.com/combined-cstr.tar.gz

Warren, please add this to the TUHS archives.

Enjoy,

Arnold

[TUHS] Bell Labs CSTRs

[Douglas McIlroy]

> once you've got M3 and M4, you've got a naming convention; I'd
> think it a safe bet that there was an M5 that was an internal
> experiment, and that M6 was simply the next in line

M6 came first, created by Andy Hall as a portability tool for Altran.
I always assumed the name echoed Ken Knowlton's L6 (BelL Labs low
level list language, with a superscript 6). I seem to recall that M6
was endowed with a very labored acronym.

Doug