[TUHS] Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[TUHS] Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Arnold Robbins via TUHS]

Hello all.

The CL memo was interesting, in a way.  The notations are clearly
much more verbose than the standard shell, and I found that a little
off-putting.

The memo's references refer to Marc Rochkind's 2dsh --- Marc, whatever
happened to that? Are source and or the memo for it available somewhere?

Also it refers to a shell by Blewett and arder called Parser. Anyone
have that memo?

Just wondering,

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Arnold Robbins via TUHS]

Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> Also it refers to a shell by Blewett and arder called Parser. Anyone

... and another called Parser. ...

Sheesh. Not enough coffee this morning I guess.

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[ron minnich via TUHS]

there was a lisp shell ca 1977. I always liked the idea.

there were a lot of shells out there, like the REX shell.



On Mon, Mar 2, 2026 at 1:58 AM Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
wrote:

> Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> > Also it refers to a shell by Blewett and arder called Parser. Anyone
>
> ... and another called Parser. ...
>
> Sheesh. Not enough coffee this morning I guess.
>

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Rob Pike via TUHS]

Self promotion: the v8 shell was underseen. Not really even what
people want in shells these days, but in its own environment it worked
well and its principle of all its output being valid shell input is
missing from most interactive tools to this day.

-rob

On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 5:04 AM ron minnich via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> there was a lisp shell ca 1977. I always liked the idea.
>
> there were a lot of shells out there, like the REX shell.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2026 at 1:58 AM Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Also it refers to a shell by Blewett and arder called Parser. Anyone
> >
> > ... and another called Parser. ...
> >
> > Sheesh. Not enough coffee this morning I guess.
> >

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Reese Johnson via TUHS]

Hello,

I just noticed this is the first post I've ever seen from this list. Thank you so much to the person that added me. I hope everybody has a good day today. I really love Unix.

73 DE KN4NTU - Reese

On Mon, Mar 02, 2026 at 04:30:26PM -0500, Douglas McIlroy via TUHS wrote:
> > there were a lot of shells out there
> 
> Much to the credit of Multics innovation, brought to you by Ken's
> mythical man-month.
> 
> Doug

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[George Michaelson via TUHS]

That "output is valid input" thing totally was what I wanted, I played with
making PS1 and PS2 elements which did not prevent cut-paste making valid
commands and it never quite worked for me. Not the same, but related.

I think as a killer feature, that definitely counts as one. Modern shell
behaviour being "nice" makes the output and command history very hard to
just replay if it's a complex command.

I frequently make intermediate commands in piped sequences emit shell which
is then executed, because you can run it without the final | sh to see what
it will do, and then do it. So my command streams in construction are often
echo "thing to be done"

=G

On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 7:00 AM Rob Pike via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> Self promotion: the v8 shell was underseen. Not really even what
> people want in shells these days, but in its own environment it worked
> well and its principle of all its output being valid shell input is
> missing from most interactive tools to this day.
>
> -rob
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 5:04 AM ron minnich via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> >
> > there was a lisp shell ca 1977. I always liked the idea.
> >
> > there were a lot of shells out there, like the REX shell.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 2, 2026 at 1:58 AM Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Also it refers to a shell by Blewett and arder called Parser. Anyone
> > >
> > > ... and another called Parser. ...
> > >
> > > Sheesh. Not enough coffee this morning I guess.
> > >
>

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Larry McVoy via TUHS]

On Tue, Mar 03, 2026 at 08:33:26AM +1000, George Michaelson via TUHS wrote:
> That "output is valid input" thing totally was what I wanted, I played with
> making PS1 and PS2 elements which did not prevent cut-paste making valid
> commands and it never quite worked for me. Not the same, but related.
> 
> I think as a killer feature, that definitely counts as one. Modern shell
> behaviour being "nice" makes the output and command history very hard to
> just replay if it's a complex command.
> 
> I frequently make intermediate commands in piped sequences emit shell which
> is then executed, because you can run it without the final | sh to see what
> it will do, and then do it. So my command streams in construction are often
> echo "thing to be done"

Isn't this sort of solved by "set -x".  lm goes and tries it.  Welp, not 
so much:

$ echo foo
+ echo foo
foo
$ ls | wc
+ ls -C
+ wc
    377     381    3851

The set -x doesn't keep the pipeline so yeah, I see the problem.  Or one
of them.

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Noel Hunt via TUHS]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2026 at 09:33, George Michaelson via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
wrote:

> That "output is valid input" thing totally was what I wanted, I played with
> making PS1 and PS2 elements which did not prevent cut-paste making valid
> commands and it never quite worked for me. Not the same, but related.
>

That's why 'rc' and 'es' use ';' and ';;', respectively, as prompts.

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Paul McJones via TUHS]

> Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2026 11:03:40 -0700
> From: ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>
> Subject: [TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?
> To: arnold@skeeve.com
> Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
> 
> there was a lisp shell ca 1977. I always liked the idea.
> 
> there were a lot of shells out there, like the REX shell.

Here’s the paper on the LISP shell:

John R. Ellis. 1980. A LISP Shell. SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 15, Issue 5 (May 1980), pages 24-34.
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/947639.947642

It was built on Forrest Howard’s Harvard Lisp for the PDP-11:

https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/other.html#Harvard_LISP_

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Rob Pike via TUHS]

Yes, rc shares that property at least to some extent.

Try
% whatis cd
to see what I mean.

-rob

On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 10:14 AM Noel Hunt via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 3 Mar 2026 at 09:33, George Michaelson via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> wrote:
>
> > That "output is valid input" thing totally was what I wanted, I played with
> > making PS1 and PS2 elements which did not prevent cut-paste making valid
> > commands and it never quite worked for me. Not the same, but related.
> >
>
> That's why 'rc' and 'es' use ';' and ';;', respectively, as prompts.

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Arnold Robbins via TUHS]

It took me a while to figure out the references...

Douglas McIlroy via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> > there were a lot of shells out there
>
> Much to the credit of Multics innovation,

Which was that the command interpreter was "just" a user level
program that could be replaced.

> brought to you by Ken's mythical man-month.

The weeks when his wife was on vacation and he turned his
filesystem into an OS.

Did I get them right?

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Arnold Robbins via TUHS]

Thanks Marc.

Warren, can this go into the archive?

It seems that with the invetion of /dev/fd, David Korn managed to
provide a notation for non-linear pipelines:

	diff <(pipeline1) <(pipeline2)

sets up the two pipelines, with the standard output of each
dup'ed to different file descriptors and diff sees something like

	diff /dev/fd/41 /dev/fd/42

Bash provides this, and will use FIFOs if /dev/fd isn't available.

I'm not sure it counts as fully two dimensional.

Thanks,

Arnold

Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:

> The 2dsh shell came up in a discussion some months ago here, and Doug
> McIlroy kindly provided me with a copy of the memo, which I've attached.
>
> I'm sure the source is long gone. It was really just a hobby research
> project for me. (I spent part of my time at Bell Labs horsing around. What
> a great place to work!)
>
> Marc
>
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2026 at 2:57 AM Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Hello all.
> >
> > The CL memo was interesting, in a way.  The notations are clearly
> > much more verbose than the standard shell, and I found that a little
> > off-putting.
> >
> > The memo's references refer to Marc Rochkind's 2dsh --- Marc, whatever
> > happened to that? Are source and or the memo for it available somewhere?
> >
> > Also it refers to a shell by Blewett and arder called Parser. Anyone
> > have that memo?
> >
> > Just wondering,
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Arnold
> >

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) via TUHS]

> That "output is valid input" thing totally was what I wanted, I played with
> making PS1 and PS2 elements which did not prevent cut-paste making valid
> commands and it never quite worked for me. Not the same, but related.


I have had this in ~/.env for as long as I can remember:


cd () {
        command cd "$@" && setprompt
}
setprompt () {
        PS1=": `id -un`@`hostname -s`:$(pwd -L); "
}
export PS1
setprompt


--lyndon

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Ron Natalie via TUHS]

I always detested the CSH.    The problem was the Sys5 Bourne shell 
didn’t support the BSD job control.   So, I spent the time to figure out 
how it worked in csh (the kernel calls are not exactly well documented), 
and hacked it into /bin/sh.   Even that wasn’t enough to convince my 
coworkers to switch as they were now using the tcsh.   So, ,I put 
command line editing (to a better implementation having been working on 
gosmacs at the time) into /bin/sh.   I used it for as long as I was at 
BRL.   By the time I left, the Korn shell was beginning to make its way 
out of the labs.    I do remember sitting at a USENIX having a nice 
discussion of shell internals with Dave.     I also explained carefully 
to the guys working on one of the open source shells how it all worked 
so they could implement it.   For a long time googling my name got shell 
manual pages all over the place as the programmers gave me credit.

Years after the fact I was working for my intelligence imagery company 
and we did a lot of work with loaner equipment (our software being 
ultraportable we worked on MIPS, Dec Alpha, Itanium, Suns and SGIs of 
various configurations  Apollo, HP Oki, Masspar, Cray, DG, Stellar, 
Ardent, NeXT, IBM (from PCs to RS/6000 to mainframes) etc…).

Usually the first thing I did is port emacs (having never really learned 
vi I always impressed my office mates with how fast I could do stuff 
with ed) and   one of the shells (pdksh usually).

Anyhow, I’m sitting at a machine and type “fg” at the coknsole 
absentmindedly.   It comes back with “Job Control Not Enabled”.   Hmm… 
that sounds familiar.   I type “set -J” which was the command to turn on 
Job Control in my version fo the SysV shell and it replies with “Job 
Control Enabled.”
Holy crap, this is a “ron shell.”    After a bit of tracing I found that 
Doug Gwyn had put my shell on the SystemV on BSD distribution tapes.   
Then Mach fully included that distribution in theirs, so every one with 
mach derived source had a “ron shell” for /bin/sh.

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Arnold Robbins via TUHS]

Ron,

Doug Gwyn distributed your changes with his "System 5 on top of BSD"
tape, which we had at Georgia Tech.  As I recall it, the version
we had did not have command line editing, neither csh-style nor
vi/emacs style.

I went through your changes and backported them to the 4.2 BSD Bourne
shell (Boune-gol, anyone?), and posted the diffs to USENET.  I also
wrote a csh-style history mechanism for the Bourne shell and I'm pretty
sure posted it as well.

I did other hacking on the System V shell; Rob sent me the V8 sh(1) man page
and that inspired me to do a whatis command that knew how to pretty-print
shell functions.  I may have done a "builtin" command and changed
the order so that function were found first, but I don't remember.

This would all have been circa 1983-1985.

In any case, Ron, I was very grateful for your efforts, as I detested csh's
syntax, and refused to use it, even though it meant not having job control.

Later on we got ksh86 at Georgia Tech, and I switched to that for day-to-day
use, and then even later on when I was at Emory to ksh88.

At some point I also made a few contributions to pdksh; my name used to
be listed in the doc for it.

Upon moving to Linux, Bash became my daily driver and I've been quite
happy with it for well over 25 years now (thanks Chet!)

Arnold

Ron Natalie via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> I always detested the CSH.    The problem was the Sys5 Bourne shell 
> didn’t support the BSD job control.   So, I spent the time to figure out 
> how it worked in csh (the kernel calls are not exactly well documented), 
> and hacked it into /bin/sh.   Even that wasn’t enough to convince my 
> coworkers to switch as they were now using the tcsh.   So, ,I put 
> command line editing (to a better implementation having been working on 
> gosmacs at the time) into /bin/sh.   I used it for as long as I was at 
> BRL.   By the time I left, the Korn shell was beginning to make its way 
> out of the labs.    I do remember sitting at a USENIX having a nice 
> discussion of shell internals with Dave.     I also explained carefully 
> to the guys working on one of the open source shells how it all worked 
> so they could implement it.   For a long time googling my name got shell 
> manual pages all over the place as the programmers gave me credit.
>
> Years after the fact I was working for my intelligence imagery company 
> and we did a lot of work with loaner equipment (our software being 
> ultraportable we worked on MIPS, Dec Alpha, Itanium, Suns and SGIs of 
> various configurations  Apollo, HP Oki, Masspar, Cray, DG, Stellar, 
> Ardent, NeXT, IBM (from PCs to RS/6000 to mainframes) etc…).
>
> Usually the first thing I did is port emacs (having never really learned 
> vi I always impressed my office mates with how fast I could do stuff 
> with ed) and   one of the shells (pdksh usually).
>
> Anyhow, I’m sitting at a machine and type “fg” at the coknsole 
> absentmindedly.   It comes back with “Job Control Not Enabled”.   Hmm… 
> that sounds familiar.   I type “set -J” which was the command to turn on 
> Job Control in my version fo the SysV shell and it replies with “Job 
> Control Enabled.”
> Holy crap, this is a “ron shell.”    After a bit of tracing I found that 
> Doug Gwyn had put my shell on the SystemV on BSD distribution tapes.   
> Then Mach fully included that distribution in theirs, so every one with 
> mach derived source had a “ron shell” for /bin/sh.

[TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Lars Brinkhoff via TUHS]

Ron Natalie wrote:
> Even that wasn’t enough to convince my coworkers to switch as they
> were now using the tcsh.

I guess they wanted to feel like 10X programmers.