[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[James Falknor]

To all you programmers,

    I'm sure you're scoffing at me, but I just obtained Borland's C++ 
BuilderX, Person Edition. It only cost $10.00 U.S. dollars direct from 
Borland.

    I plan to teach myself how to view, modify, replace, and 
write/re-write Unix Operating System code.

    May I rely on help from TUHS expert programmers? I know I'm going to 
need the help.

    My ultimate goal is to bring Unix Version7 into the 21st century. 
Since 4.3BSD contributed code into Unix Version8, I feel I will probably 
use portions of the latest BSD sources that are legally available.

    Again, if I may use those of you that programmers help, I would 
surely appreciate it alot.

Thank you,
James Falknor
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[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

Uz.ytkownik James Falknor napisa?:

> To all you programmers,
> My ultimate goal is to bring Unix Version7 into the 21st century. 

And which hardware do You plan to support ? Unix Version 7 was as I
understand designed for PDP-11 etc. Do You have running PDP machine ?

Andrzej

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Wilko Bulte]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 10:21:54PM +0200, Andrzej Popielewicz wrote..
> Uz.ytkownik James Falknor napisa?:
> 
> > To all you programmers,
> > My ultimate goal is to bring Unix Version7 into the 21st century. 
> 
> And which hardware do You plan to support ? Unix Version 7 was as I
> understand designed for PDP-11 etc. Do You have running PDP machine ?

You can also run on a PDP emulator.

-- 
Wilko

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[James Falknor]

Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:

>Uz.ytkownik James Falknor napisa?:
>
>  
>
>>To all you programmers,
>>My ultimate goal is to bring Unix Version7 into the 21st century. 
>>    
>>
>
>And which hardware do You plan to support ? Unix Version 7 was as I
>understand designed for PDP-11 etc. Do You have running PDP machine ?
>
>Andrzej
>  
>
Andrzej,

My first goal is to achieve modern x86 system support. After all,  
somebody was able to get Unix Version6 to run on a 286 system. 
Eventually, achieve modern 64bit system support.

James Falknor
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[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

Uz.ytkownik James Falknor napisa?:

> My first goal is to achieve modern x86 system support. After all,
> somebody was able to get Unix Version6 to run on a 286 system.
> Eventually, achieve modern 64bit system support.

Well , it seems to be a giant effort You are planning to accomplish.
Because pdp and x86 have different architectures, a lot of new low level
stuff will have to be added.
The same concerns multitasking, multithreading , shared libraries etc.
You will take these from BSD probably.
So I am asking what are You planning to preserve in the modified system.
Will it be still be a Unix Version 7 ?

BTW I have ported apout emulator to Coherent. What I miss is "more" and
"vi". Editing with "cat" is possible but not very useful. I am not going
to learn "ed". Did You try to port "vi" to Unix Version 7 system ? I can
build everything for V7 under Coherent, so I thought about vi. One would
have to port curses . What about termcap and terminfo for V7 ?

Andrzej

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Tim Newsham]

> The same concerns multitasking, multithreading , shared libraries etc.

V7 already multitasks.
Why would you want shared libraries!?

> BTW I have ported apout emulator to Coherent. What I miss is "more" and

I have a small paging utility at
   http://lava.net/~newsham/x/machine/more_v6.c
   http://lava.net/~newsham/x/machine/more_v7.c

> "vi". Editing with "cat" is possible but not very useful. I am not going
> to learn "ed".

Why?

> Did You try to port "vi" to Unix Version 7 system ? I can

Why!?

> Andrzej

If one wanted an architecturally clean and modern V7-like system
that ran on the PC they could always install Plan9.  Of course if
you're porting V7 for the educational experience, more power to you.

Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

Uz.ytkownik Tim Newsham napisa?:

>> The same concerns multitasking, multithreading , shared libraries etc.
>
>
> V7 already multitasks.

OK, so problem is solved.But I suspect it multitasks differently on
different hardware, unless You use existing V7 x86 implementation. I do
not know pdp architecture, I suspect it does differ from x86, I mean
TSS,GDT, TR etc.

> Why would you want shared libraries!?

Not me, but others, and possibly James himself, he wanted to make V7 top
modern.

> http://lava.net/~newsham/x/machine/more_v6.c
> http://lava.net/~newsham/x/machine/more_v7.c 

Fine, I will try it out.I let You know if it works on Coherent.
I have already began to port more, but to finish I need to port termcap
first.

>> "vi". Editing with "cat" is possible but not very useful. I am not going
>> to learn "ed".
>
> Why?

Simply because. Because I do not like ed.
I want to have useful and user friendly system. To use ed, only because
it is the oldest editor, does not make any sense for me.
I appreciate ed, because of sed, because sed has some similarity to ed
and is extremely useful as a tool.
Unix is not about ed, Unix is about unlimited possibilities of adding
new software , new applications or new editors, it makes Unix beautiful
that it can develop and not editor ed.If ed were all Unix has, it would
not survive.
I hope You accept that someone else can have different favourite
editors. I prefer vi, or even more vim, which is perfect editor.Of
course in the case of emulator missing user friendly editor is not a
problem, because I can edit under Coherent and then build under
emulator.It is good to have a choice, and Unix offers it.

>> Did You try to port "vi" to Unix Version 7 system ? I can
>
> Why!? 

As I said, because I like vi more than ed. Do You suggest , that James
should invest giant amount of time into porting V7 to x86/x64 and than
after use only one editor , namely ed ? As if it was prohibited to
develop another editor ?

> If one wanted an architecturally clean and modern V7-like system
> that ran on the PC they could always install Plan9. Of course if
> you're porting V7 for the educational experience, more power to you. 

I do not know Plan9, but according to descriptions I have read, it looks
very interesting. Well it was developed by Bell Lab...(?)-AT/T, which
does not require recommendation.They offer also another interesting OS,
namely Inferno.

BTW, I am not porting it(V7), It is James , who wants to do it .So more
power to him.
I have enough fun with Coherent, it is according to wikipedia based on
Unix version 7 and is x86.

Andrzej

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Wesley Parish]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 07:50, Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:
> Uz.ytkownik Tim Newsham napisa?:
<snip>
> >> "vi". Editing with "cat" is possible but not very useful. I am not going
> >> to learn "ed".
> >
> > Why?
>
> Simply because. Because I do not like ed.
> I want to have useful and user friendly system. To use ed, only because
> it is the oldest editor, does not make any sense for me.
> I appreciate ed, because of sed, because sed has some similarity to ed
> and is extremely useful as a tool.

If you have a  look at the more modern *BSD, you'll see that vi contains ed 
and ex.  It should be possible to backport that to V7 and likewise to 
Coherent.
> Unix is not about ed, Unix is about unlimited possibilities of adding
> new software , new applications or new editors, it makes Unix beautiful
> that it can develop and not editor ed.If ed were all Unix has, it would
> not survive.
> I hope You accept that someone else can have different favourite
> editors. I prefer vi, or even more vim, which is perfect editor.Of
> course in the case of emulator missing user friendly editor is not a
> problem, because I can edit under Coherent and then build under
> emulator.It is good to have a choice, and Unix offers it.
>
> >> Did You try to port "vi" to Unix Version 7 system ? I can
> >
> > Why!?
>
> As I said, because I like vi more than ed. Do You suggest , that James
> should invest giant amount of time into porting V7 to x86/x64 and than
> after use only one editor , namely ed ? As if it was prohibited to
> develop another editor ?
>
<snip>
>
> Andrzej
>
<snip>

Wesley Parish
-- 
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui?
You ask, what is the most important thing?
Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

Uz.ytkownik Wesley Parish napisa?:

>If you have a  look at the more modern *BSD, you'll see that vi contains ed 
>and ex.  It should be possible to backport that to V7 and likewise to 
>Coherent.
>  
>
What for ?
Vim 6.1(my port) under Coherent works perfectly. And of course Coherent
has its own very good vi and also ed and microEmacs and as far as I
rememeber (I have seen on Tuhs) Emacs too.
I have ported also mp( ala DOS edit) , asedit,xed(better version of
xedit) .Unfortunately I was not lucky with gvim and nedit.I have added
also about 1990 my own editor cedit(with hex support ala vim), but it
was for Coherent 4.0 and I did not port it to Coherent 4.2.10 yet.

OK, but if You see it does make sense than do it.

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

Uz.ytkownik Wesley Parish napisa?:

>If you have a  look at the more modern *BSD, you'll see that vi contains ed 
>and ex.  It should be possible to backport that to V7 and likewise to 
>Coherent.
>  
>
According to Coherent Manual :
*****
Coherent vi is a link to Berkeley screen editor elvis by Kirkendall from
1990.
elvis is a clone of Unix vi and ex editors.
elvis command structure ressembles command structure of line editor ed.
*****

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Wesley Parish]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 21:27, Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:
> Uz.ytkownik Wesley Parish napisa?:
> >If you have a  look at the more modern *BSD, you'll see that vi contains
> > ed and ex.  It should be possible to backport that to V7 and likewise to
> > Coherent.
>
> According to Coherent Manual :
> *****
> Coherent vi is a link to Berkeley screen editor elvis by Kirkendall from
> 1990.
> elvis is a clone of Unix vi and ex editors.
> elvis command structure ressembles command structure of line editor ed.
> *****

Makes sense.  My bad.

Wesley Parish

-- 
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui?
You ask, what is the most important thing?
Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Gunnar Ritter]

Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz> wrote:

> If you have a  look at the more modern *BSD, you'll see that vi contains ed 
> and ex.

Which BSD implementation of vi contains ed?

> It should be possible to backport that to V7 and likewise to 
> Coherent.

For Unix 7th edition, you can just use vi version 2 from one of
the early 2BSD releases.

	Gunnar

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

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Użytkownik José R. Valverde napisał:

>Looks like overkill to me. It made lots of sense way back then, but as you
>are speaking of an X86 port and you can assume an ANSI terminal to be the
>default and available, you may as well (at least as a start) do without
>termcap and terminfo (BTW I'd bet you don't need support for almost none
>of those ancient terminals).
>
I do not need curses or termcap or terminfo to work under simulated pdp
environment  via apout in Coherent. As I said I can build
everything(using V7 make,cc ans as), it means I can work, and I do not
need ANSI terminal (if You have meant true VT100 terminal, and not
TERM=vt100 on PC, BTW apout for version 7 assumes as default TERM=vt100
). I was meaning building in pdp environment running in Coherent, and
not building in Coherent via for example a crosscompiler or so.

 One needs  termcap or terminfo if one wants to port more sophisticated
 tools like vi etc.

>
>What you can get is then a simpler screen-oriented text editor which can
>easily be ported and then used as a bootstrap to port more advanced tools.
>
>Namely, S from 'A Software Tools Sampler' by Webb Miller. I ported and used 
>it on both V6 and V7, and still use it on V7 on SIMH. Neat, small, easy to 
>port, usage alike vi, but much simpler... And comes with some other 
>interesting tools (actually my first involvement with that code was to have a 
>unix-like toolkit on eraly VMS long, long ago).
>
>The code is available on the Net, but I'm including it here as an attachment
>as it is not that big (52K).
>
>				j
>  
>
Great, I will try it out. I have already tested succesfully more_v7 ,
which I obtained from Tim.
Thanks. I will let You know how it works.
 

Andrzej

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[James Falknor]

Andrzej,

My first goal is to achieve modern x86 system support. After all,  
somebody was able to get Unix Version6 to run on a 286 system. 
Eventually, achieve modern 64bit system support.

James Falknor

Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:

>Uz.ytkownik James Falknor napisa?:
>
>  
>
>>To all you programmers,
>>My ultimate goal is to bring Unix Version7 into the 21st century. 
>>    
>>
>
>And which hardware do You plan to support ? Unix Version 7 was as I
>understand designed for PDP-11 etc. Do You have running PDP machine ?
>
>Andrzej
>  
>

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[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[James Falknor]

Andrzej,

My first goal is to achieve modern x86 system support. After all,  
somebody was able to get Unix Version6 to run on a 286 system. 
Eventually, achieve modern 64bit system support.

James Falknor

Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:

>Uz.ytkownik James Falknor napisa?:
>
>  
>
>>To all you programmers,
>>My ultimate goal is to bring Unix Version7 into the 21st century. 
>>    
>>
>
>And which hardware do You plan to support ? Unix Version 7 was as I
>understand designed for PDP-11 etc. Do You have running PDP machine ?
>
>Andrzej
>  
>

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[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <42D18F06.3010104 at peacemax.org>
            James Falknor <james at peacemax.org> writes:
: somebody was able to get Unix Version6 to run on a 286 system. 

Venix 86 ran on my old Rainbow.  That's a 8086.  It was v6 based,
iirc.

Warner

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[James Falknor]

Warner,
    Where might I find the source code to Venix 86. I looked and could 
not find it here on THUS.

Thank you,
James Falknor

M. Warner Losh wrote:

>In message: <42D18F06.3010104 at peacemax.org>
>            James Falknor <james at peacemax.org> writes:
>: somebody was able to get Unix Version6 to run on a 286 system. 
>
>Venix 86 ran on my old Rainbow.  That's a 8086.  It was v6 based,
>iirc.
>
>Warner
>
>  
>

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <42D1EACD.8000701 at peacemax.org>
            James Falknor <james at peacemax.org> writes:
:     Where might I find the source code to Venix 86. I looked and could 
: not find it here on THUS.

I'd love to know myself.  All a google search has turned up is the DEC
PRO version.

Warner

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2005-Jul-09 09:41:36 -0600, James Falknor wrote:
>   My ultimate goal is to bring Unix Version7 into the 21st century. 

That's already been done: Look at 2.11BSD.

Note that getting V7 (or 2BSD) running on a 286 is non-trivial.
Whilst both the PDP-11 and 286 are both 16-bit machines supporting VM,
the 286 MMU is extremely primitive compared to the PDP-11.  Your
biggest problem will be that the 286 does not support holes in the
address space - which means your data segment needs to cover both the
real data as well as the stack area and you lose brk limit checking.

-- 
Peter Jeremy

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Brantley Coile]

> OK, so problem is solved.But I suspect it multitasks differently on
> different hardware, unless You use existing V7 x86 implementation. I do
> not know pdp architecture, I suspect it does differ  from x86, I mean
> TSS,GDT, TR etc.

These details are hidden under the kernel.  The idea of a process with
address space and other contexts are what V7 provides.  It's pretty
easy to implement what V7 expects using Intel's paging.

  Brantley

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[Brantley Coile]

> I do not know Plan9, but according to descriptions I have read, it looks
> very interesting. Well it was developed by Bell Lab...(?)-AT/T, which
> does not require recommendation.They offer also another interesting OS,
> namely Inferno.

This is my last email on this subject.  Promise.

I suggest using the Plan 9 compilers and start with the code for the
32V system.  That's the code that first ran on the VAX.  It'll be
easier to move than the PDP version.  It's just Seventh Edition moved
to the VAX.

I'm using Plan 9 to type this.  It's the os I have used as my primary
os for the last 10 years.  I wrote the Cisco PIX Firewall and the
LocalDirector using it.  I first used Plan 9 15 years ago at Bell Labs.
In a very real sense, it is the true decendent of a very noble line of
timesharing systems, going all the way back to MIT's CTSS.

You should try Plan 9 for free by downloading it  from Bell Labs.  It's
all open source.  Expect to learn a lot.  It's UNIX like a Ford
Mustang is a T-Model.  Lot of the ideas of V7-10 are further developed
in Plan 9.  It's certainly the os perfered by a good number of UNIX
purests.  It was the result of a number of poeple, including Ken
Thompson, who thought that a fresh code start would allow them to
better exploit new technology like networking, hetergenious
processors, and symmetrical multiple processors.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com

I really hope James does the port.  I wish I had the time to do it
myself.  A native V7 port would be really useful in some situations,
but more importantly it would help educate new generations of
programmers.  It would demonstrate the true power and synergy of the
software tools approach that UNIX blessed us with.  It doesn't need
shared libraries, threads, gui's or even vi.  The Seventh Edition is
amazing technology in a form that can be understood, internalized, and
the resulting education used to produce much better modern software.
There should be at least a version in it's native form.  There's just
something special about running it native.

  Brantley Coile

[TUHS] Borland's C++ BuilderX, Personal Edition

[James Falknor]

Thanks to all,
   
    This project is, indeed, for my own educational purposes. I have 
always been "all idea, no action" type of person. It's time for me to 
act on my ideas.

    I have started by comparing the differences between Unix V7, 32V, 
Coherent, and NetBSD code base.

    I wish to preserve as much of Unix V7 as possible. Unix V7 was not 
without code contributed by others, namely Universities around the 
world. I don't know the legal logistics, but I don't see any reason to 
change the name from Unix V7 to anything else.

    As I begin to make run time progress on this project, I will keep 
everybody notified. I will also be posting questions as they arise.

Thank you,
James Falknor

(I know I'm not alone with a World of Programmers on this mailing list)