Re: [TUHS] congratulations to Warner on a great talk

[Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org>]

On 25 Sep 2019, at 17:09, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> Slides have been published, though maybe not through the EuroBSDCon site. I wasn't aware that I could publish them there.

I was under the mistaken impression that recordings of the talks would be made available on the site - I generally find it rather useful when conferences have slides, papers and recordings available on the web pages of past conferences, e.g. Usenix.

> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/177KxOif5oHARyIdZHDq-OO67_GVtMkzIAlDX-cHxgb4/edit?usp=sharing

Ah, that’s the final version of what we got a preview of?

> I'm told it will be a small number of weeks before the bsdtv folks that taped everything can edit the talks down from the raw footage and post them to youtube. They have the raw livestream, but a small number of tweaks need to be made to each talk.

Right, that makes sense. I would like to see the “colour” which goes with the slides, i.e. all that isn’t written down..

> I'll be writing a followup paper, as well as an article for the FreeBSD Journal. There's a number of small technical errors in the talk owing to two factors: (1) I couldn't see my speaker notes during the talk so I think I misspoke or neglected to include a clarifying sentence or two that I'd planned and (2) I found more original material that helped to clarify timelines (eg: PWB 1.0 was distributed outside of bell labs: it was V6 + the "50 changes" based, but still retained features like the V6 TTY driver. This was in 1978, about a year before V7 was released. PWB 2.0 was fully V7 based and included updates to the tools PWB added, exact details TBD). I did talk a little about the ambiguity between UNIX/TS and PWB/UNIX 3.0 in the talk, but the details of that need to be ironed out a bit. I hope to go through more original sources to figure all that out as different people remember things slightly differently, and sometimes contemporary documentation or scholarly papers contradicts the remembrance so I need to sort that out better, as well as where I can run diffs between supposed sources of things to find as much of the truth around this that I can.

That is wonderful! I have been desperately trying to find the Unix tapes which made it to the University of Milan “Cybernetics” department back in the 70s but have failed miserably. Most of the people who were there at the time are sadly no longer with us and my dad can’t remember who had them. All that I have left is the photocopied Unix manual with the cover printed by the department in Italian, an nth copy Lions and then other bits and pieces. All the rest is gone forever (or, more likely, in some Italian state warehouse since the bureaucracy necessary to throw anything away, or donate it, was so daunting it was just stuck somewhere). Unfortunately there were three physical moves of the department so chances are the cellars were cleaned out by workers.

Thank you again for the talk!

Arrigo