* [TUHS} Running V8 ...
@ 2017-10-16 11:58 Doug McIlroy
2017-10-16 15:41 ` Don Hopkins
` (2 more replies)
0 siblings, 3 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2017-10-16 11:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
> How realistic would the experience be to actually running the system
> described in the Unix Programming Environment [v8] if it's actually
running > BSD 4.1... Thanks for any insights y'all might have on this.
This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My
favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works
everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about.
That's also what allowed me to use a giant Cray with no instruction
whatsoever. And to do everyday "programmering" on the previously
inscrutable Macintosh, thanks to OS X.
The advent of non-typewriter input put a damper on Universal Unix. One has
to learn something to get started with a novel device. I am impressed,
though, by the breadth of Universal Unix that survives behind those
disparate facades.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS} Running V8 ... 2017-10-16 11:58 [TUHS} Running V8 Doug McIlroy @ 2017-10-16 15:41 ` Don Hopkins 2017-10-17 11:47 ` Tony Finch 2017-10-16 16:28 ` Clem Cole 2017-10-16 16:38 ` [TUHS} Running V8 Will Senn 2 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Don Hopkins @ 2017-10-16 15:41 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1230 bytes --] > On 16 Oct 2017, at 13:58, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: > >> How realistic would the experience be to actually running the system >> described in the Unix Programming Environment [v8] if it's actually > running > BSD 4.1... Thanks for any insights y'all might have on this. > > This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My > favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works > everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about. > > That's also what allowed me to use a giant Cray with no instruction > whatsoever. And to do everyday "programmering" on the previously > inscrutable Macintosh, thanks to OS X. > > The advent of non-typewriter input put a damper on Universal Unix. One has > to learn something to get started with a novel device. I am impressed, > though, by the breadth of Universal Unix that survives behind those > disparate facades. I love the OpenFirmware “L1-A Forth” built into SparcStations. It has the “SEE” word, that decompiles FORTH words and disassembles FORTH primitives. You can start with “SEE SEE”, and then recursively climb down and see each of the words and primitives that defines it, or anything else! -Don ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS} Running V8 ... 2017-10-16 15:41 ` Don Hopkins @ 2017-10-17 11:47 ` Tony Finch 2017-10-17 14:30 ` Larry McVoy 2017-10-17 14:50 ` Don Hopkins 0 siblings, 2 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Tony Finch @ 2017-10-17 11:47 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 761 bytes --] Don Hopkins <don at DonHopkins.com> wrote: > > I love the OpenFirmware “L1-A Forth” built into SparcStations. It has > the “SEE” word, that decompiles FORTH words and disassembles FORTH > primitives. You can start with “SEE SEE”, and then recursively climb > down and see each of the words and primitives that defines it, or > anything else! Nice. OpenFirmware was also used in PowerMacs and in IBM POWER systems. I thought it was a great shame that Intel didn't adopt OpenFirmware but instead created EFI. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot at dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h punycode Lundy, Fastnet: Variable 3 or 4, becoming east or southeast 5 or 6. Moderate or rough, occasionally slight. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS} Running V8 ... 2017-10-17 11:47 ` Tony Finch @ 2017-10-17 14:30 ` Larry McVoy 2017-10-17 14:50 ` Don Hopkins 1 sibling, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2017-10-17 14:30 UTC (permalink / raw) On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 12:47:53PM +0100, Tony Finch wrote: > Don Hopkins <don at DonHopkins.com> wrote: > > > > I love the OpenFirmware ???L1-A Forth??? built into SparcStations. It has > > the ???SEE??? word, that decompiles FORTH words and disassembles FORTH > > primitives. You can start with ???SEE SEE???, and then recursively climb > > down and see each of the words and primitives that defines it, or > > anything else! > > Nice. OpenFirmware was also used in PowerMacs and in IBM POWER systems. > I thought it was a great shame that Intel didn't adopt OpenFirmware but > instead created EFI. You and me both. I always thought forth was a little weird, not bad weird, just weird. But I had worked on a forth system before, done some programming in it, so I could deal. But when I met EFI I yearned for the good old forth boot proms :( My guess is that Mitch wanted too much money for Intel to go for it, Intel is super super cheap. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS} Running V8 ... 2017-10-17 11:47 ` Tony Finch 2017-10-17 14:30 ` Larry McVoy @ 2017-10-17 14:50 ` Don Hopkins 1 sibling, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Don Hopkins @ 2017-10-17 14:50 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 12432 bytes --] The OLPC XO-1 also used OpenFirmware! Mitch Bradley ported and extended Forthmacs to support secure auto-boot, power management, and used it for debugging the OLPC’s unique hardware and operating system. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware> >Open Firmware is the hardware-independent firmware (computer software which loads the operating system) that the XO runs. >It was developed by Mitch Bradley at Sun Microsystems, and used in post-NuBus PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers (though it has been dropped with Apple's transition to Intel processors), Sun Microsystems SPARC based workstations and servers, IBM POWER systems, and PegasosPPC systems, among others. On those computers, Open Firmware fulfills the same tasks as BIOS does on PC computers. >For example Fedora and Debian use the YaBoot BootLoader for Open Firmware. >The Open Firmware user interface includes a FORTH-based shell interface. FORTH is a powerful high level language that is remarkably compact. A complete Forth development environment including compiler, decompiler, assembler, disassembler, source level debugger, and assembly language debugger is present in the XO boot ROM (SPI FLASH). With the Open Firmware Forth system, you can directly access all of the hardware devices on the XO, use built-in functions like selftest diagnostics and games, and even write complete applications, without needing any external tools. The bulk of Open Firmware is written in Forth, so the source level debugger can be used to debug Open Firmware itself. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OFW_FAQ <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OFW_FAQ> OpenFirmware also has its own song to the tune of the Jetson’s theme, and Mitch’s rendition is much more mellifluous than RMS singing his Free Software song: https://web.archive.org/web/20060213143046/http://bananajr6000.apple.com/1275/misc/ofwsong.au <https://web.archive.org/web/20060213143046/http://bananajr6000.apple.com/1275/misc/ofwsong.au> I used the 68K and SPARC versions of Mitch’s “Forthmacs” system under SunOS. It had a re-targetable meta-compiler, portably supported targets targets with 16 bits, 32 bits, different byte orders, could dynamically link and call C libraries, also ran in stand-alone mode, could be burnt into ROM and run in framebuffer memory, and and which he later developed into OpenFirmware). I worked with Mitch as a summer intern at Sun in ’87, integrating his other pure C “CForth" system into a circuit editor called “CADrioid”. At the University of Maryland, I used Forthmacs to develop a dynamic memory allocator (which I would run diagnostics on in mmap'ed framebuffer memory as a screen saver), a FORTH extensible X10 window manager with pie menus called “piewm” (kind of like NeWS for X10 with FORTH instead of PostScript), a hypermedia brower for NeWS called “HyperTIES”, and a cellular automata machine simulator compatible with Toffoli and Margolus’s CAM6 hardware and Forth rule definitions published in their book (which I’ve since rewritten in JavaScript). Forthmacs: http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/forthmacs-doc/ <http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/forthmacs-doc/> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/allocate.f.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/allocate.f.txt> http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/forth.html <http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/forth.html> piewm: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/Xlib.forth.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/Xlib.forth.txt> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/fuwm-main.forth.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/fuwm-main.forth.txt> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/hacks.forth.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/hacks.forth.txt> HyperTIES: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/fmt.f <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/fmt.f> CAM6: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/cam.f.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/cam.f.txt> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/compile.f.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/compile.f.txt> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/rules.f.txt <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/rules.f.txt> https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L41 <https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L41> Here’s an old post extolling the virtues of CForth and Forthmacs, that I posted in response to a question on comp.lang.forth back in ’89. -Don https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.forth/cAFn_jDDu50/t8wEQeCe4pYJ <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.forth/cAFn_jDDu50/t8wEQeCe4pYJ> From: don@brillig.umd.edu (Don Hopkins) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Forth for VAX, Sun Summary: Bradley Forthware: 4444 is the number of the best! Keywords: sun, unix, cforth Date: 10 May 89 11:06:40 GMT Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction Lab In article <24... at agate.BERKELEY.EDU> w... at garnet.berkeley.edu (William Baxter) writes: >To my inquiry about Forth systems for the VAX and Sun, I received two >responses, both mentioning the same programs. > >C Forth 83: > >Runs on both VAX (VMS or Unix) and Sun, and in fact on just about every >computer with a half decent C compiler. The price is $50, which gets >you C kernel source, Forth utilities source, on-line documentation, and >a printed glossary. It's a Forth-83 dialect with 32-bit stacks, real >files, and several utilities. I used a version of CForth when I was working for Mitch, summer before last at Sun. It's a very nice Forth system, and quite portable. You can define your own Forth primatives in C, by adding them to this big switch statement! We linked CForth together with a schematics CAD system (CADroid), so you could call the CADroid commands from Forth, and then we wrote a user-friendly extension language in Forth. It accepted postfix commands, and prompted for arguments in English. You could interactivly define macros for laying out circuit bodies and wiring them up, by typing commands, pointing with the mouse, selecting from menus, pressing function keys, putting in your own prompts for arguments, bindings macros to keys, etc. It also supported interactive loops and conditionals. Mitch came up with a really neat unified syntax for them: condition? [ <stuff to do if true> ] condition? [ <stuff to do if true> ][ <stuff to do if false> ] count [ <stuff to do in a loop> ] count [ <stuff to do in a loop> ][ <stuff to do if count is 0> ] The last one (the loop-with-an-else-clause) was particularly useful because it could be used instead of the otherwise common construct: count 0= [ <stuff to do if count is 0> ][ count [ <stuff to do in a loop if count isn't 0> ] ] The way these constructs worked interactivly (and during macro definition) was that you started a loop by typing a count and a [, and it would execute commands as you typed them in, the first time through the loop, and once you typed the matching ] (they nested!), it would re-execute the now-compiled loop count-1 more times, real fast. The conditional form had just the same behavior: It would either execute what you typed as you typed it, or ignore your commands, according to the condition (|-1| or 0). So when we carefully consider all of these facts, we are forced to ask ourselves the following question: What was today's topic again? Wait, I remember: Bradley Forthware. > >Sun Forth: > >Runs on any Sun 2, Sun 3, or Sun 4, and also on most non-Sun 680x0 Unix >machines. The price is $200, which gets you the binary, source code, >metacompiler, 200+ page printed manual, and a ton of utilities (for >instance, it can load C object files into the Forth dictionary and >execute the C subroutines as Forth words. It also has a disassembler >and both high level and assembly language debugging tools.) > > Sun Forth is an excellent, rich, fast, fantastic Forth system! I've used it for all kinds of things, on the Sun-2, the Sun-3 (68K), and the Sun-4 (SPARC). It also runs on the Atari ST, and the Mac, I think. (I haven't used those versions) On the Sun-2, I had a good time using Sun Forth to figure out how to frob the CG1 color graphics card, by printing out the cg1reg.h file, mmap'ing in the device registers, and frobbing around with them. (I finally discovered that you could only write to the color table during vertical retrace, when I got mad and frustrated that my unsucessful attempts at loading the color table were taunting me by kinda sorta working occasionaly, and I decided to punish it by running it in an infinite loop. My color table slowly faded into view!) It's got a kick-ass decompiler, that pretty prints forth code and disassembles primatives! Who needs manuals or source code? (But you get them anyway! ;-) There are a lot of other nice features, like an emacs-like command line editor, with history, and command completion over your Forth vocabularies. It's very well interfaced with Unix. It also runs stand-alone without Unix. Mitch uses it in the hardware lab at Sun to debug decadent wayward hardware, by dropping in a Forth ROM, talking to it through a serial port, and running it in the framebuffer memory! [It looks real neat munching away on the screen, and it can work even when the main memory is fried!] The list of features goes on and on... The ability to dynamicly load in C object files makes Sun Forth useful for a whole lot of things you'd normally never think of (or at least admit to thinking of) using Forth for! On the Sun-3, I linked in a version of the X10 "uwm" window manager I had modified to do pie menus. I could call all the window manager functions from Forth, passing them arguments on the stack, and I could bind mouse actions and menu selections to Forth functions. I moved the main control loop that dispatched events into Forth, so I had a crack at the events before passing them on to uwm. Forth could could respond to window system events, track the mouse, pop up menus, change the cursor, move windows around, etc... It had complete access to all the window manager function and data structures. One thing I used this system for was to implement an experiment that Jack Callahan designed, comparing pie menus with linear menus. (A paper describing the experiment is in the CHI'88 conference proceedings.) The Forthified window manager administered the experiment by randomizing the order in which the menus were presented, prompting the test subject to select a certain item from each menu, and recording the menu selections made and the time each took, etc... The Forth system was very useful for prototyping different mouse tracking techniques for pie menus -- it would have been very painful to have to go through the old edit-compile-link cycle every time I wanted to tweak something! NeWS is an example of how useful it is to have a window manager with an interactive extension language! (But I didn't have NeWS yet.) X window managers are big messy programs (even in the X10 days!), but I was able to plug X10 uwm right into Sun Forth, and start hacking away -- instant extension language! (Though uwm wasn't exactly /designed/ for that kind of abuse!) I've also used Sun Forth for other projects, like prototyping a hypertext markup language interpreter (NeWS HyperTIES), and as a Cellular Automata Machine rule compiler. I cloned Tom Tofoli's CAM rule language in Sun Forth, and wrote a tool for computing and displaying them in NeWS. Not anything like as fast as the real CAM hardware [256x256 cells @ 60 frames/sec], but if you feed it the right rules and initial conditions, and wait a while, it will make lots of pretty patterns that take up lots of disk space. >Both are available from: > >Mitch Bradley >Bradley Forthware >P.O. Box 4444 >Mountain View, CA 94040 > Mitch swears the PO box number was totally coincidental! >---- >Disclaimer: Endorsement? I haven't even used them. > >William Baxter > >ARPA: web@{garnet,brahms,math}.Berkeley.EDU >UUCP: {sun,dual,decwrl,decvax,hplabs,...}!ucbvax!garnet!web Disclamer: Of course I'm quite biased, since I worked with Mitch for a summer, and I just love his Forth system. But so does Mitch, or it wouldn't have so many great features! -Don -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171017/7334a939/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS} Running V8 ... 2017-10-16 11:58 [TUHS} Running V8 Doug McIlroy 2017-10-16 15:41 ` Don Hopkins @ 2017-10-16 16:28 ` Clem Cole 2017-10-16 16:39 ` [TUHS} Running V8 ... [ really basic tools ] Jon Steinhart 2017-10-16 16:38 ` [TUHS} Running V8 Will Senn 2 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2017-10-16 16:28 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1251 bytes --] On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 7:58 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My > favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works > everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about. +1 I would add, to me that's what the 'standardization' efforts were really about as a >>user<<. To settle on the minimum subset needed to the get the job do and stop adding 'sugar' because you could. The ISVs wanted to maximize (SPEC1170 et al), but to me 'Universal' was what do I really need/use every day. In fact, its why I switch from EMACS to vi early in my UNIX career. Vi and (ed) were everywhere (K&P style). EMACS was not and if I found a flavor for that system, it was always 'different.' I could sit down at anything from MS-DOS to a Cray and stuff worked well enough that I could do what I needed to do. [I'm not a great fan of "vim" for that reason either BTW -- I just want the basics to 'be there' and 'be reliable' - do what I want without me having to rethink]. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171016/b64274eb/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS} Running V8 ... [ really basic tools ] 2017-10-16 16:28 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-10-16 16:39 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-10-16 19:16 ` Ian Zimmerman 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-10-16 16:39 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1765 bytes --] Clem Cole writes: > On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 7:58 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My > favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works > everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about. > > +1 I would add, to me that's what the 'standardization' efforts were really > about as a >>user<<. To settle on the minimum subset needed to the get the > job do and stop adding 'sugar' because you could. The ISVs wanted to maximize > (SPEC1170 et al), but to me 'Universal' was what do I really need/use every > day. > > In fact, its why I switch from EMACS to vi early in my UNIX career. Vi and > (ed) were everywhere (K&P style). EMACS was not and if I found a flavor for > that system, it was always 'different.' I could sit down at anything from > MS-DOS to a Cray and stuff worked well enough that I could do what I needed to > do. [I'm not a great fan of "vim" for that reason either BTW -- I just want > the basics to 'be there' and 'be reliable' - do what I want without me having > to rethink]. I have a similar and maybe even more extreme position. When I was a manager I placed restrictions on the tools and customizations for members of my team. My goal was to make sure that any team member could go over to any other team member's desk and get stuff done. I strongly pushed vi as an editor because it was "standard"; as Clem said every emacs seemed to be different. I prohibited the redefinition of the vi key bindings and also any shell aliases that replaced standard commands. Nothing worse for productivity than going to help out a colleague and then discovering that they the redefined "ls" as "rm"! Jon ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Running V8 ... [ really basic tools ] 2017-10-16 16:39 ` [TUHS} Running V8 ... [ really basic tools ] Jon Steinhart @ 2017-10-16 19:16 ` Ian Zimmerman 2017-10-16 19:28 ` Jon Steinhart 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Ian Zimmerman @ 2017-10-16 19:16 UTC (permalink / raw) On 2017-10-16 09:39, Jon Steinhart wrote: > > I have a similar and maybe even more extreme position. When I was a > manager I placed restrictions on the tools and customizations for > members of my team. My goal was to make sure that any team member > could go over to any other team member's desk and get stuff done. I > strongly pushed vi as an editor because it was "standard"; as Clem > said every emacs seemed to be different. I prohibited the > redefinition of the vi key bindings and also any shell aliases that > replaced standard commands. Nothing worse for productivity than going > to help out a colleague and then discovering that they the redefined > "ls" as "rm"! As an Emacs user, obviously I disagree :P How many keystrokes are needed to do a given edit with Emacs versus vi, and in particular such an artificially frozen version of vi? This is not just laziness (though as we know laziness is a virtue in programmers). It's a health issue with RSI. And I disagree with restrictions on shell tools as well. They may have made for a uniform predictable environment on one project and one job. But what if an engineer moved on? Do you really expect him to reinvent the wheel all over again everytime? As an example of the level of tool I mean: today I decided I had to stop using the perl-rename program in my scripts, because different distributions install it under different names. It is very painful to do this: there is no such tool in basic Unix. Of course I can hack my own in maybe 10-15 lines of shell code, but that is exactly the kind of thing you would prohibit. -- Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Running V8 ... [ really basic tools ] 2017-10-16 19:16 ` Ian Zimmerman @ 2017-10-16 19:28 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-10-17 1:15 ` Ian Zimmerman 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-10-16 19:28 UTC (permalink / raw) Ian Zimmerman writes: > On 2017-10-16 09:39, Jon Steinhart wrote: > > > > I have a similar and maybe even more extreme position. When I was a > > manager I placed restrictions on the tools and customizations for > > members of my team. My goal was to make sure that any team member > > could go over to any other team member's desk and get stuff done. I > > strongly pushed vi as an editor because it was "standard"; as Clem > > said every emacs seemed to be different. I prohibited the > > redefinition of the vi key bindings and also any shell aliases that > > replaced standard commands. Nothing worse for productivity than going > > to help out a colleague and then discovering that they the redefined > > "ls" as "rm"! > > As an Emacs user, obviously I disagree :P > > How many keystrokes are needed to do a given edit with Emacs versus vi, > and in particular such an artificially frozen version of vi? > > This is not just laziness (though as we know laziness is a virtue in > programmers). It's a health issue with RSI. > > And I disagree with restrictions on shell tools as well. They may > have made for a uniform predictable environment on one project and one > job. But what if an engineer moved on? Do you really expect him to > reinvent the wheel all over again everytime? > > As an example of the level of tool I mean: today I decided I had to stop > using the perl-rename program in my scripts, because different > distributions install it under different names. It is very painful to > do this: there is no such tool in basic Unix. Of course I can hack my > own in maybe 10-15 lines of shell code, but that is exactly the kind of > thing you would prohibit. Emacs is a lot more "stable" these days; there aren't as many versions floating around. No way to answer your question about keystrokes; it really depends on what you're doing. I would guess that it's a wash. Of course, this depends on your point of view. I remember a big argument decades ago with Ed Post of Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal fame. He was claiming that emacs was superior because it was "modeless". Someone else in the car stumped him by asking the question "Isn't holding down the meta key a mode?" So vi may require hitting escape, but emacs is very heavy on the shift key usage so as I said, it's likely a wash. I didn't prohibit people from creating their own tools and shortcuts. I prevented them from using existing utility names for their tools and shortcuts. That meant that when they asked someone else in the group to take a look at a problem that that person could actually do so instead of causing damage. And yes, I would prohibit you making a program called perl-rename if it did something different than perl-rename. I wouldn't care if it was identical. Not sure why you wouldn't set your path to find it wherever it was or just make a link. Jon ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Running V8 ... [ really basic tools ] 2017-10-16 19:28 ` Jon Steinhart @ 2017-10-17 1:15 ` Ian Zimmerman 2017-10-17 4:20 ` UNIX version 2*pi Don Hopkins 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Ian Zimmerman @ 2017-10-17 1:15 UTC (permalink / raw) On 2017-10-16 12:28, Jon Steinhart wrote: > I didn't prohibit people from creating their own tools and shortcuts. > I prevented them from using existing utility names for their tools and > shortcuts. That meant that when they asked someone else in the group > to take a look at a problem that that person could actually do so > instead of causing damage. I see - I have misunderstood you. No problem with this policy. -- Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* UNIX version 2*pi 2017-10-17 1:15 ` Ian Zimmerman @ 2017-10-17 4:20 ` Don Hopkins 2017-10-17 6:08 ` Dave Horsfall 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Don Hopkins @ 2017-10-17 4:20 UTC (permalink / raw) ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* UNIX version 2*pi 2017-10-17 4:20 ` UNIX version 2*pi Don Hopkins @ 2017-10-17 6:08 ` Dave Horsfall 2017-10-17 18:23 ` Ron Natalie 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2017-10-17 6:08 UTC (permalink / raw) On Tue, 17 Oct 2017, Don Hopkins wrote: > McGill University EE UNIX lab systems administration, PDP-11 running > UNIX version 2*pi (>6, <7, irrational) Sounds like the one I was maintaining at UNSW: Edition 6, with the bits of Edition 7 that would fit on an 11/40 and 11/60, plus local AUSAM stuff. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer." ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* UNIX version 2*pi 2017-10-17 6:08 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2017-10-17 18:23 ` Ron Natalie 2017-10-18 2:46 ` Dave Horsfall 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2017-10-17 18:23 UTC (permalink / raw) One of my predecessors at JHU decided 6.06 was a nice symmetrical number and stuck the version there through many kernel changes. When he left, our release numbers started forward again. The BRL/JHU kernel was based on V6. It had a kludge to allow more that 256 users but eventually, we widened the UID/GID to 16 bits each. We then added a the ability to mount either V6 or V7 file systems (we had a lot of removable V6 FS media). -----Original Message----- From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:09 AM To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Subject: Re: UNIX version 2*pi On Tue, 17 Oct 2017, Don Hopkins wrote: > McGill University EE UNIX lab systems administration, PDP-11 running > UNIX version 2*pi (>6, <7, irrational) Sounds like the one I was maintaining at UNSW: Edition 6, with the bits of Edition 7 that would fit on an 11/40 and 11/60, plus local AUSAM stuff. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer." ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* UNIX version 2*pi 2017-10-17 18:23 ` Ron Natalie @ 2017-10-18 2:46 ` Dave Horsfall 2017-10-18 10:15 ` Ron Natalie 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2017-10-18 2:46 UTC (permalink / raw) On Tue, 17 Oct 2017, Ron Natalie wrote: > The BRL/JHU kernel was based on V6. It had a kludge to allow more that > 256 users but eventually, we widened the UID/GID to 16 bits each. We then > added a the ability to mount either V6 or V7 file systems (we had a lot of > removable V6 FS media). We dropped the GID (nobody used them) and glued it onto the UID, thus making it 16-bit. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer." ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* UNIX version 2*pi 2017-10-18 2:46 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2017-10-18 10:15 ` Ron Natalie 0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2017-10-18 10:15 UTC (permalink / raw) JHU ownership was a bit more of a kludge. If your GID was less than 200, then everything worked the normal UNIX way. If your GID was greater than 200, then it was also taken to be part of the UID. The student accounts would have a GID based on the class that they were in. Of course, newgrp, setuid, setgid (and their related bits) had to be changed to avoid secuirty fun and games. I spent a lot of time trying to break that when I was just a student. When I became one of the system programmers, I spent a lot of time trying to fix those holes. -----Original Message----- We dropped the GID (nobody used them) and glued it onto the UID, thus making it 16-bit. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer." ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS} Running V8 ... 2017-10-16 11:58 [TUHS} Running V8 Doug McIlroy 2017-10-16 15:41 ` Don Hopkins 2017-10-16 16:28 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-10-16 16:38 ` Will Senn 2 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Will Senn @ 2017-10-16 16:38 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3011 bytes --] On 10/16/17 6:58 AM, Doug McIlroy wrote: > The advent of non-typewriter input put a damper on Universal Unix. One has > to learn something to get started with a novel device. I am impressed, > though, by the breadth of Universal Unix that survives behind those > disparate facades. Doug, I totally agree. In 2005, I bought a Powerbook because I liked the aesthetics of it over Windows laptops of that era. I had been using Linux for fun but not without a significant bit of pain since the early 1990's (0.9 kernel), but never seriously. When I opened up my first terminal on the Powerbook, I began to love my Powerbook and Unix - beauty AND power! As a result of that exposure, I'm comfortable with pretty much any *nix and am only frustrated when distributions mess with the core tools or leave out system documentation. To digress a little, my recent exposure to V6 an V7 have only served to reinforce my appreciation for the universal aspects of Unix. How is it remotely possible that OS's that are approaching 40 years old have so much in common with their modern ancestors? The thing that most impresses me though, is the durability of the documentation. I was reading K&R's "Programming Unix" in volume 2 of the V7 programmer's guide. When I came across a concise and informative description of fork: Now we will show how to regain control after running a program with execl or execv. Since these routines simply overlay the new program on the old one, to save the old one requires that it first be split into two copies; one of these can be overlaid, while the other waits for the new, overlaying program to finish. The splitting is done by a routine called fork. Nowadays, fork is usually discussed first, with exec seeming to be included as a second class citizen (see Rago & Stevens APUE), which to me always seemed a little inverted. The K&R note shows exec first and then fork - seems logical - which is how most of K&R and most of the V6 & V7 documentation is - too bad most of today's documentation is either deemed unnecessary (vis a vis the intuitiveness of the Mac/iPhone or is of poor quality. Your note makes me wonder what you thought of Plan 9's mouse input, or what K&R thought of it, about "having" to use a mouse for input. I'm playing with Plan 9 on my raspberry pi 2 model b and while it seems to work, I find the interface constantly getting in the way of my mind and fingers :). You even have to use the mouse to wake the screen up! Don't get me wrong, I find Plan 9 to be quite interesting and parts of it conceptually elegant, but not the interface! Later, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171016/4bf58ed0/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2017-10-18 10:15 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 16+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2017-10-16 11:58 [TUHS} Running V8 Doug McIlroy 2017-10-16 15:41 ` Don Hopkins 2017-10-17 11:47 ` Tony Finch 2017-10-17 14:30 ` Larry McVoy 2017-10-17 14:50 ` Don Hopkins 2017-10-16 16:28 ` Clem Cole 2017-10-16 16:39 ` [TUHS} Running V8 ... [ really basic tools ] Jon Steinhart 2017-10-16 19:16 ` Ian Zimmerman 2017-10-16 19:28 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-10-17 1:15 ` Ian Zimmerman 2017-10-17 4:20 ` UNIX version 2*pi Don Hopkins 2017-10-17 6:08 ` Dave Horsfall 2017-10-17 18:23 ` Ron Natalie 2017-10-18 2:46 ` Dave Horsfall 2017-10-18 10:15 ` Ron Natalie 2017-10-16 16:38 ` [TUHS} Running V8 Will Senn
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