[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[Serissa]

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In the lost-in-time department, my group at Digital Cambridge Research lab in 1993 did an audio interface patterned after the X Window system.  Paper in the Summer USENIX: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/cinci93/gettys.html

For extra fun, the lab director of CRL at the time was Vic Vyssotsky.

But there must have been some Bell work, because around 1983 (?) when I was doing Etherphone at PARC I visited John DeTreville at Holmdel.  He was building a voice - over - Ethernet system as well.

-Larry

> On Jan 6, 2025, at 4:51 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:
> segaloco via TUHS wrote in
> <BWYwXjScYdFHM1NV0KEtgvazEfJM1PX7WaZ8lygZ45Bw2pEQG6JQr5OCtX-KMwEwr_k2zLD\
> GXac7wymRCtifnU9VKnlsrJCrKFqGZSgM6-0=@protonmail.com>:
> |The sound situation in the UNIX world to me has always felt particularly
> |fragmentary, with OSS offering some glimmer of hope but faltering under \
> |the long
> |shadow of ALSA, with a hodge podge of PCM and other low level interfaces
> |littered about other offerings.
> 
> Oh, but *how* great it was when FreeBSD came on over with those
> "virtual sound devices", in 4.7 or 4.9 i think it was.  Ie instead
> of one blocking device, one could open dev.1 and dev.2 and it was
> multiplexed in the kernel.  It did some format conversion in the
> kernel alongside this.
> 
> It was *fantastic*!, and i had a recording program sitting on
> a Cyrix 166+ and it took me ~1.5 percent of (single) CPU to record
> our then still great Hessenradio HR3 for long hours (Clubnight
> with worldwide known DJs, Chill with great sets in the Sunday
> mornings), and oh yes HR2 with the wonderful Mr. Paul Bartholomäi
> in "Notenschlüssel" (classical music), and the fantastic "Voyager"
> hour with Robert Lug on Sunday evening.  It cannot be any better.
> I could code and compile and there was no stuttering alongside.
> 1.5 percent of CPU, honestly!
> 
> I say this because FreeBSD has replaced that very code last year,
> if i recall correctly.  It now all scales dynmically, if i read
> the patches that flew by right.  (So it may be even better as of
> now, but by then, over twenty years ago, it blew my mind.  And the
> solution was so simple, you know.  The number of concurrent
> devices was a compile time constant if i recall correctly, four by
> default.)
> 
> I also say this because today i am lucky i can use ALSA on Linux,
> and apulse for the firefox i have to use (and do use, too
> .. i also browse the internet in such a monster, and at least in
> parts still like that).  I always hated those server solutions,
> where those masses of audio data flow through several context
> switches.  What for?  I never understood.  Someone convinced me to
> try that pulseaudio server, but i think it was about 20 percent of
> CPU for a simple stream, with a terrible GUI, and that on
> a i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz with up to 3.4 Ghz (four core; the four
> HT are alwys disabled).  20 percent!!
> 
>  ...
> |Any recollections?[.]
> 
> Sorry, the above is totally apart, but for me the above is still
> such a tremendous thing that someone did; and for free.  Whoever
> it was (i actually never tried to check it, now that i track their
> git for so many years), *thank you*!
> (And that includes the simple usual format conversions in between
> those 22050/44100 etc etc.  Just like that -- open a device and
> read it, no thousands of callbacks, nothing.  And 1.5 percent CPU.
> Maybe it is not good/exact enough for studio level audio editing.
> But i still have lots of those recordings, except that the "Balkan
> piss box" chill somehow disappeared.  (Sorry Pedja, shall you read
> this.))
> 
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)
> |
> |In Fall and Winter, feel "The Dropbear Bard"s pint(er).
> |
> |The banded bear
> |without a care,
> |Banged on himself for e'er and e'er
> |
> |Farewell, dear collar bear

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[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

P.S.:

Steffen Nurpmeso wrote in
 <20250106215143.b3Q14AL1@steffen%sdaoden.eu>:
 |segaloco via TUHS wrote in
 | <BWYwXjScYdFHM1NV0KEtgvazEfJM1PX7WaZ8lygZ45Bw2pEQG6JQr5OCtX-KMwEwr_k2zLD\
 | GXac7wymRCtifnU9VKnlsrJCrKFqGZSgM6-0=@protonmail.com>:
 ||The sound situation in the UNIX world to me has always felt particularly
 ||fragmentary, with OSS offering some glimmer of hope but faltering under \
 ||the long
 ||shadow of ALSA, with a hodge podge of PCM and other low level interfaces
 ||littered about other offerings.
 |
 |Oh, but *how* great it was when FreeBSD came on over with those
 |"virtual sound devices", in 4.7 or 4.9 i think it was.  Ie instead
 |of one blocking device, one could open dev.1 and dev.2 and it was
 |multiplexed in the kernel.  It did some format conversion in the
 |kernel alongside this.
 |
 |It was *fantastic*![.]

For the younger and overall clarification.
Around Y2K many programs -- audio players, but also early desktop
environment "betas" of GNOME and KDE unless my memory fools me
completely (i used such by then, at least at times, when not under
FreeBSD cons25 or Linux then framebuffer!) -- had fixed paths
built-in, for example /dev/dsp or /dev/pcm or /dev/audio or
whatever it actually was (for real).  There may have been multiple
dev files, actually, ie, /dev/dsp1/2/3 etc, but the path was
built-in, and it would not multiplex: if you opened /dev/dsp1 you
had /dev/dsp1, but /dev/dsp and that thing was in use, and could
not be used for any other purpose, at all.

With the FreeBSD change program 1 could open "/dev/dsp", but
2 could open it, too, because it internally multiplexed to the
virtual .1 .2 .3 etc.  This was a tremendous improvement!

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
|
|In Fall and Winter, feel "The Dropbear Bard"s pint(er).
|
|The banded bear
|without a care,
|Banged on himself for e'er and e'er
|
|Farewell, dear collar bear

[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[sjenkin]

A reminder of 2 stories of CS Research’s long running interest in Music and Audio: (much) “better than MP3”

	 - Rob Pike on Plan 9’s CD-ROM (not) being filled with compressed music, including new works from Lou Reed & Debby Harry

	- In a comment, Ken’s 400MB disk full of compressed music & his talking about his work at conferences.


<https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/H2XN5ONL3XAAUFVERXNYKS7QOZAOGBFA/>

	"And that, my friends, is why MP-3 took off instead of the far better follow-on system we were on the cusp of getting out the door.”



> On 8 Jan 2025, at 01:42, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
> In the early days of Unix there were intimate ties between CS Research and Visual and Acoustic Research. V&A were Bell Labs' pioneer minicomputer users because they needed interactive access to graphics and audio, which would have been prohibitively expensive on the Labs' pre-timesharing mainframes. Also they generally had EE backgrounds, so were comfortable  working hands-on with hardware, whereas CS had been largely spun off from the math department.
> 
> Ed David, who led Bell Labs into Multics, without which Unix might not have happened, had transferred from V&A to CS. So had Vic Vyssotsky and Elliot Pinson (Dennis's department head and coauthor with me of the introduction to the 1978 BSTJ Unix issue). John Kelly, a brilliant transferee who died all too young pre-Unix, had collaborated with Vic on BLODI, the first dataflow language, which took digital signal processing off breadboards and into computers. One central member of the Unix lab, Lee McMahon, never left V&A.
> 
> The PDP-7 of Unix v0 was a hand-me-down from Pinson's time in V&A. And the PDP-11 of v1 was supported by a year-end fund surplus from there. 
> 
> People came from V&A to CS because their interests had drifted from signal processing to computing per se. With hindsight, one can see that CS recruiting--even when it drew on engineering or physics talent--concentrated on similarly motivated people. There was dabbling in acoustics, such as my "speak" text-to-speech program. And there were workers dedicated to a few specialties, such as Henry Baird in optical character recognition. But unlike text processing, say, these fields never reached a critical mass of support that might have stimulated a wider array of I/O drivers or full toolkits to use them.
> 
> Meanwhile, in V&A Research linguists adopted Unix, but most others continued to roll their own one-off platforms. It's interesting to speculate whether the lack of audio interfaces in Unix was a cause or a result of this do-it-yourself impulse.
> 
> Doug


--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Warner Losh wrote:
> Yes. V1 and V2 ran on the 11/20 without an MMU, while V3 and later was
> the port to the 11/45 with an MMU.

Aren't you skipping over the KS11?

[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[Phil Budne]

G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> What model of PDP-11 was v1 Unix developed and run on at the CSRC?

For what it's worth, there is a roff.s in the PDP-7 sources.

The command list:
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/cmd/roff.s#L189

> What model did the CSRC acquire next?  Specifically, which one did
> (n)roff make possible?

The first was an 11/20, initially, I seem to recall running without
any MMU (I remember a story that it was customary to yell out "a.out"
in the terminal room before running a newly compiled binary to give
everyone a chance to save their files).

I believe the step up was to the high-end 11/45, which I believe came
out before the 11/40 (a mid-range system with MMU but not separate
Instruction & Data spaces).

See https://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11

[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[Warner Losh]

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On Tue, Jan 7, 2025 at 8:22 AM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> At 2025-01-07T09:42:14-0500, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> > The PDP-7 of Unix v0 was a hand-me-down from Pinson's time in V&A. And
> > the PDP-11 of v1 was supported by a year-end fund surplus from there.
>
> Hi Doug,
>
> This seems to clarify something I'm a bit murky on in early Unix/nroff
> history, because I have read (and repeated, in groff's roff(7), the
> claim that revenue from internal AT&T deployments of nroff were a major
> aid to getting the CSRC on its feet hardware-wise.  But that's in some
> tension with the story of Ossanna being able to deliver to the patent
> application typists a new line numbering feature in the (n)roff
> formatter "by tomorrow" if it was only after nroff's success that these
> revenues showed up.
>
> I also seem to remember from the preface to the v3 or v4 manual that the
> CSRC was trying to get itself and its Unix users everywhere away from
> the PDP-11/20 as fast as possibly, because that model didn't have memory
> protection.
>

Yes. V1 and V2 ran on the 11/20 without an MMU, while V3 and later was the
port to the 11/45 with an MMU. I touch on these transitions in my history
of unix
talk.

And I didn't know the connections that Douglas just relayed before my talk.
It
would have made it more interesting to include. Unix has always been about
making it easier to collaborate and collaboration has a multiplier effect.


> I thus have these questions:
>
> What model of PDP-11 was v1 Unix developed and run on at the CSRC?
>
> What model did the CSRC acquire next?  Specifically, which one did
> (n)roff make possible?
>

I'd love to hear this info first hand too. I've delved and discovered what I
think the answers are, but I have no primary sources for them.

Warner


> Regards,
> Branden
>

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[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2025-01-07T09:42:14-0500, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> The PDP-7 of Unix v0 was a hand-me-down from Pinson's time in V&A. And
> the PDP-11 of v1 was supported by a year-end fund surplus from there.

Hi Doug,

This seems to clarify something I'm a bit murky on in early Unix/nroff
history, because I have read (and repeated, in groff's roff(7), the
claim that revenue from internal AT&T deployments of nroff were a major
aid to getting the CSRC on its feet hardware-wise.  But that's in some
tension with the story of Ossanna being able to deliver to the patent
application typists a new line numbering feature in the (n)roff
formatter "by tomorrow" if it was only after nroff's success that these
revenues showed up.

I also seem to remember from the preface to the v3 or v4 manual that the
CSRC was trying to get itself and its Unix users everywhere away from
the PDP-11/20 as fast as possibly, because that model didn't have memory
protection.

I thus have these questions:

What model of PDP-11 was v1 Unix developed and run on at the CSRC?

What model did the CSRC acquire next?  Specifically, which one did
(n)roff make possible?

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[Douglas McIlroy]

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> Was the landscape of signal processing solutions just so
> particular that trying to create a centralized interface didn't make
sense at
> the time?  Or was it a simple matter of priorities, with things like
language
> development and system design taking center stage, leaving a dearth of
resources
> to direct towards these sorts of matters?  Was there ever a chance of
seeing,
> say, the 5ESS handling of PCM, extended out to non-switching
applications,

In the early days of Unix there were intimate ties between CS Research and
Visual and Acoustic Research. V&A were Bell Labs' pioneer minicomputer
users because they needed interactive access to graphics and audio, which
would have been prohibitively expensive on the Labs' pre-timesharing
mainframes. Also they generally had EE backgrounds, so were comfortable
working hands-on with hardware, whereas CS had been largely spun off from
the math department.

Ed David, who led Bell Labs into Multics, without which Unix might not have
happened, had transferred from V&A to CS. So had Vic Vyssotsky and Elliot
Pinson (Dennis's department head and coauthor with me of the introduction
to the 1978 BSTJ Unix issue). John Kelly, a brilliant transferee who died
all too young pre-Unix, had collaborated with Vic on BLODI, the first
dataflow language, which took digital signal processing off breadboards and
into computers. One central member of the Unix lab, Lee McMahon, never left
V&A.

The PDP-7 of Unix v0 was a hand-me-down from Pinson's time in V&A. And the
PDP-11 of v1 was supported by a year-end fund surplus from there.

People came from V&A to CS because their interests had drifted from signal
processing to computing per se. With hindsight, one can see that CS
recruiting--even when it drew on engineering or physics
talent--concentrated on similarly motivated people. There was dabbling in
acoustics, such as my "speak" text-to-speech program. And there were
workers dedicated to a few specialties, such as Henry Baird in optical
character recognition. But unlike text processing, say, these fields never
reached a critical mass of support that might have stimulated a wider array
of I/O drivers or full toolkits to use them.

Meanwhile, in V&A Research linguists adopted Unix, but most others
continued to roll their own one-off platforms. It's interesting to
speculate whether the lack of audio interfaces in Unix was a cause or a
result of this do-it-yourself impulse.

Doug

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[TUHS] Re: Bell-Era UNIX Audio/DSP Interfaces?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

segaloco via TUHS wrote in
 <BWYwXjScYdFHM1NV0KEtgvazEfJM1PX7WaZ8lygZ45Bw2pEQG6JQr5OCtX-KMwEwr_k2zLD\
 GXac7wymRCtifnU9VKnlsrJCrKFqGZSgM6-0=@protonmail.com>:
 |The sound situation in the UNIX world to me has always felt particularly
 |fragmentary, with OSS offering some glimmer of hope but faltering under \
 |the long
 |shadow of ALSA, with a hodge podge of PCM and other low level interfaces
 |littered about other offerings.

Oh, but *how* great it was when FreeBSD came on over with those
"virtual sound devices", in 4.7 or 4.9 i think it was.  Ie instead
of one blocking device, one could open dev.1 and dev.2 and it was
multiplexed in the kernel.  It did some format conversion in the
kernel alongside this.

It was *fantastic*!, and i had a recording program sitting on
a Cyrix 166+ and it took me ~1.5 percent of (single) CPU to record
our then still great Hessenradio HR3 for long hours (Clubnight
with worldwide known DJs, Chill with great sets in the Sunday
mornings), and oh yes HR2 with the wonderful Mr. Paul Bartholomäi
in "Notenschlüssel" (classical music), and the fantastic "Voyager"
hour with Robert Lug on Sunday evening.  It cannot be any better.
I could code and compile and there was no stuttering alongside.
1.5 percent of CPU, honestly!

I say this because FreeBSD has replaced that very code last year,
if i recall correctly.  It now all scales dynmically, if i read
the patches that flew by right.  (So it may be even better as of
now, but by then, over twenty years ago, it blew my mind.  And the
solution was so simple, you know.  The number of concurrent
devices was a compile time constant if i recall correctly, four by
default.)

I also say this because today i am lucky i can use ALSA on Linux,
and apulse for the firefox i have to use (and do use, too
.. i also browse the internet in such a monster, and at least in
parts still like that).  I always hated those server solutions,
where those masses of audio data flow through several context
switches.  What for?  I never understood.  Someone convinced me to
try that pulseaudio server, but i think it was about 20 percent of
CPU for a simple stream, with a terrible GUI, and that on
a i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz with up to 3.4 Ghz (four core; the four
HT are alwys disabled).  20 percent!!

  ...
 |Any recollections?[.]

Sorry, the above is totally apart, but for me the above is still
such a tremendous thing that someone did; and for free.  Whoever
it was (i actually never tried to check it, now that i track their
git for so many years), *thank you*!
(And that includes the simple usual format conversions in between
those 22050/44100 etc etc.  Just like that -- open a device and
read it, no thousands of callbacks, nothing.  And 1.5 percent CPU.
Maybe it is not good/exact enough for studio level audio editing.
But i still have lots of those recordings, except that the "Balkan
piss box" chill somehow disappeared.  (Sorry Pedja, shall you read
this.))

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
|
|In Fall and Winter, feel "The Dropbear Bard"s pint(er).
|
|The banded bear
|without a care,
|Banged on himself for e'er and e'er
|
|Farewell, dear collar bear