All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd previously used? Mine was: Oh, I can: + write a simple script + to edit a file on the fly + with no temporary files (a la pipes) + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. Cheers, Warren
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 423 bytes --] El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> escribió: > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > Me too. But in adittion and specially: + the availability of the C compiler + syslog Regards Sergio Pedraja [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1130 bytes --]
On 2019-10-10 15:55, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. > Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems > you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! I'm a bit younger, first started playing with Unix systems in 1992, a Sun something running SunOS 4.1.something while in collage. I just kinda assumed that this remote system I was accessing over a dial-up connection some some big-iron box, I mean, it had dozens of people logged into it at a time! Of course it was something bigger than the PC I had at home. When I first saw a Sun pizza-box, and realized it was the same class system I'd been logging into remotely, I was impressed, but was still sure it was some magic that made it way more special than the PC stuff I was used to. I later learned about Linux and installed it on a 486DX-50 that had been slated to be a backup Novell box at my job. This was a system that did a decent job at being a Novel server, its clone had ~45 systems attached to it in the student lab, was a file/print server, etc. I knew that it was a beefy box for Windows (3.1, at the time), but with Linux... With Linux, I had X11 on the console, could be playing Doom, browse thew eb with Mosaic, etc, while a dozen+ CS students were logged in from the Wyse terminals in the next building, and it kept chugging along. > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. I started out on home-PCs of the era: Commodore 64, Apple II, various CP/M systems, TI 99/4A, and of course MS/PC-DOS systems. Unix showed me what a computer could really do. I don't really remember being impressed with pipes, for some reason, they just made sense to me. For me, the first time someone showed me xargs, that was cool. It was my introduction to command-line scripting. > Cheers, Warren -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1074 bytes --] Thanks for the warm welcome! For me, it was uucp of all things. I needed to set up a way of copying mailboxes from one place to another over a modem-to-modem connection. Unix allowed me to do it with a simple script and minimal overhead. When I realised that I also had a C compiler built in then.... On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 21:56, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > -- www.mattrudge.net - for wibble and guff blog.mattrudge.net - for Linuxy goodness [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1694 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 839 bytes --] My “aha” moment was the discovery of man pages and the realization that the design of the entire system, from inodes to tty drivers were freely available at my fingertips for perusal. It was like having an operating system design course “on-line”, and what a beautiful design!!! Cheers, Jim > On Oct 10, 2019, at 5:11 PM, SPC <spedraja@gmail.com> wrote: > > > El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> escribió: >> >> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd >> previously used? >> >> Mine was: Oh, I can: >> + write a simple script > > > Me too. But in adittion and specially: > > + the availability of the C compiler > + syslog > > Regards > Sergio Pedraja > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1936 bytes --]
Warren Toomey wrote in <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org>: |All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. |A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you |if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. | |So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you |first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd |previously used? | |Mine was: Oh, I can: I get the feeling somebody's watching me! (However: #?0|kent:$ prt-get info xeyes Package 'xeyes' not found #?255|kent:$ prt-get dsearch xeye No matching packages found #?255|kent:$ prt-get fsearch xeye #?255|kent:$) | + write a simple script Perl with full set of manual pages available! (Only as single page HTML before.) | + to edit a file on the fly That was really hard, coming from Notepad plus or what its name was. Luckily there was MidnightCommander as a NortonCommander clone, otherwise i would likely have been bogged down. xedit no, xemacs no. There was a graphical editor thing, i think it used Motif, but i have forgotten. Had syntax highlighting, but had no tabs if i recall correctly. It was a long way to get myself going with emacs, but finally, after a year or two, came to vim. The window managers were really hard to get right, i grabbed a super-cheap SuSE debug CD on 1999-01-11, it used fvwm2. Focus follows mouse and much more i could not deal with. I booted Windows for working purposes until first of May 1999, when i finally switched over to fulltime Linux. (I ended up using icewm after Enlightenment (cool but to slow) and WindowMaker did not make it. Until i discovered ahwm, which then was it. Only recently i switched to cwm.) | + with no temporary files (a la pipes) That did bother you. I am superficial. And i came in via 4DOS. And as a Basic, .BAT and perl "programmer". | + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! Discovery of shebang was a tremendous moment. And anything around that. Discovery of manuals, for example the GNU C library manual! Ah, it soon was discovery of the entire basic UNIX tool set, that dispersed set of tools acting together for a greater whole! That was really, really great. |I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. C64/GEOS, Win 3.1/DOS, Windows95/4DOS. |Cheers, Warren --End of <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org> --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)
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1241 bytes --] Before unix, I had only used a TRS80-III and an Atari 800. So it was my first real operating system. I think I was pretty amazed when I logged in to my account from a second location and it was the same account, somehow. Magic! I was also pretty blown away when my professor used ^T in Unipress Emacs. On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 5:25 PM Jim Capp <jcapp@anteil.com> wrote: > My “aha” moment was the discovery of man pages and the realization that > the design of the entire system, from inodes to tty drivers were freely > available at my fingertips for perusal. > > It was like having an operating system design course “on-line”, and what a > beautiful design!!! > > Cheers, > > Jim > > > On Oct 10, 2019, at 5:11 PM, SPC <spedraja@gmail.com> wrote: > > > El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> escribió: > >> >> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd >> previously used? >> >> Mine was: Oh, I can: >> + write a simple script >> > > Me too. But in adittion and specially: > > + the availability of the C compiler > + syslog > > Regards > Sergio Pedraja > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2566 bytes --]
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
Unix was pretty much the first thing I used. I did regress to CPM Z80
based machine because 40-60 users on a 1Mhz (I think) VAX was crazy
slow, even though it had disk and I think 4MB of ram, the 128K 4mhz
z80 with floppies was faster.
I wrote assembly versions of ls, cp, mv, rm, etc - assembly so that
I could cram the program into a 512 byte sector (both for speed of
loading as well as for small size).
The aha moment for me was one of the many times I was logged into
slovax (an 11/750 that had the BSD source on it) reading popen.c
and got to the point where it forked a process. It blew my mind,
here I am in libc and it's creating processes for me. I just didn't
expect that but was struck by the thought "huh, these Unix guys don't
fool around, they use the abstractions they advertise".
I expected something like Windows spawn or some VMS complex thing,
I sure as heck didn't expect fork and exec, shows how naive I was
at the time. Fun times.
Warren Toomey writes:
> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
A fun topic!
I'm a bit on the young side, so Unix was my first exposure to any kind
of timesharing or multi-user system. Prior to getting access to MIPS
Ultrix 4.2 on a DECstation, my experience consisted ENTIRELY of:
* 8-bit systems, mainly Commodore 64 and Tandy TRS-80
* The Commodore Amiga 1000 and 500
* DOS and Windows 3.0 in the form of an IBM PC XT and a PS/2
Then, when I arrived at Cornell University in 1992, I discovered that
there was a network of three clustered DECstations, sharing about 2GB
(!) of system and user disk space. Enormous!
As an avid reader of BYTE Magazine, I had _heard_ of Unix in the trade
press, but I didn't honestly know what it was. I was plunged head first
into it as a user, and quickly found myself addicted. I did get some
guidance from a few experienced users, so I wasn't completely on my
own. I owe them quite a bit for their patience and guidance.
For me, the "Aha!" moment was entirely related to being attached to
Usenet and the Internet. The fact that I could suddently read email
(with the RAND MH system) and Usenet (with nn) and communicate with all
of these very clever people all over the world was positively
intoxicating.
My love only grew when I discovered that there was a C compiler
installed, and that I could build my own programs from source downloaded
by FTP. Later, Perl 4 was installed, and I learned how to write my own
programs. It was an exciting time in my young life.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA, USA
web@loomcom.com
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 768 bytes --] On Thursday, October 10, 2019, 4:55:58 PM EDT, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote: > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? For me, it was reading the source code on 6th Ed. Seeing the elegance, simplicity, and beauty was like seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time or hearing Beethoven's 9th for the first time. To this day, I still remember looking through some of the userland code and saw that who figured out if you use it in "who am i" just by looking at argc. Using as "who are you" or "who really cares" was fun, but the real effect was realizing how much more I'd understand by reading code than by reading documentation. BLS [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 944 bytes --]
Wanting to print something and reaching for Tops-10 PIP.. to realize I didn't need to do that. Irrational concepts did not carry across Logging in by name but having my uid:gid map naturally to the Tops-10 [xxxx,yyy] form. -Rational concepts carried across Learn. "omg. Is that all there is? really? is it that simple? you mean the file permissions flags ARE BITS IN A WORD" RUNOF -> nroff. The pascal and fortran experience was a bit of a backwards step. But makefiles were logical, and once I stopped writing in fortran, things got remarkably better. csh in many ways. I know that's heresy for a lot of people, but some things were just subtly easier in csh. I didn't write csh scripts. -G
On Oct 10, 2019, at 1:55 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
>
> Mine was: Oh, I can:
> + write a simple script
> + to edit a file on the fly
> + with no temporary files (a la pipes)
> + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!
>
> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.
>
> Cheers, Warren
Being an OS student I had read "The Unix Timesharing System" paper by
Ritchie and Thompson and had wanted to use Unix years before I actually
had the chance. I don't remember an "Aha!" moment but I took to it like
a duck to water. Most everything felt just so comfortable and right.
It was very much as I had imagined it to be.
Prior to it I had used TSO, TOPS-10, VM/CMS and VMS. And CP/M @home.
> On Oct 10, 2019, at 4:35 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 10, 2019, at 1:55 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
>>
>> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
>> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
>> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>>
>> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
>> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
>> previously used?
>>
>> Mine was: Oh, I can:
>> + write a simple script
>> + to edit a file on the fly
>> + with no temporary files (a la pipes)
>> + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!
>>
>> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.
>>
>> Cheers, Warren
>
I was at UCSD on the Pascal project, so I was used to using a machine with
a nice editor and had access to the OS source code to play with and learn from.
When UCSD spun the Pascal project out to SofTech MicroSystems I moved as
well. SofTech had a pdp 11/45 running V6 with the famous patch tape.
We called it V6.9.
When I first logged in, it was just a feeling of simplicity and elegance. I could
edit files, move them around on the disk, and when I was curious about what
was happening under the covers, I could go look at the sources.
Aha - I could use the shell to script the formatting of text files making the task
of generating new printed documentation for the Pascal Project something
as easy as saying ./printdocs.sh. After that it was all nroff, vi, and C compiler
experiences, learning what really made this system tick.
Back at UCSD I got access to the VAX (sdcsvax) and did all of my homework
there never again returning to the Pascal system on the Terak boxes.
Never looked back, I’ve been using Unix as my OS ever since.
David
Hello!
Me? I got started bitbanging my way through things on Apple 2 designs,
and then DOS on a grouch PC/XT clone from AT&T, and then a PC/AT clone
also from AT&T, there I also included Windows. Around the time the
P100 came out from Intel I also stuffed Slackware onto it in the form
their Zipslack, and about the time I'd gotten connected to the 'net, I
found your site, and off I went. I'd run UNIX on SIMH/pdp-11. (Amazing
stuff that!) And for your Larry I also had a Sun system here who also
ran first my website, then just the background stuff.
Meeting Ken sometime earlier at the VCF East, and recognizing Brian
from his style, made me realize that Armstrong the musician was right
about it being a "wonderful world". especially watching the big gaggle
of machines celebrating the wonders of UNiX.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
>
> Mine was: Oh, I can:
> + write a simple script
> + to edit a file on the fly
> + with no temporary files (a la pipes)
> + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!
>
> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.
>
> Cheers, Warren
Hello again.
(Silly keyboard.) That line regarding the Sun box, should read "for you Larry".
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 9:44 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello!
> Me? I got started bitbanging my way through things on Apple 2 designs,
> and then DOS on a grouch PC/XT clone from AT&T, and then a PC/AT clone
> also from AT&T, there I also included Windows. Around the time the
> P100 came out from Intel I also stuffed Slackware onto it in the form
> their Zipslack, and about the time I'd gotten connected to the 'net, I
> found your site, and off I went. I'd run UNIX on SIMH/pdp-11. (Amazing
> stuff that!) And for your Larry I also had a Sun system here who also
> ran first my website, then just the background stuff.
>
> Meeting Ken sometime earlier at the VCF East, and recognizing Brian
> from his style, made me realize that Armstrong the musician was right
> about it being a "wonderful world". especially watching the big gaggle
> of machines celebrating the wonders of UNiX.
> -----
> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
> >
> > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
> > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
> > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
> >
> > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> > previously used?
> >
> > Mine was: Oh, I can:
> > + write a simple script
> > + to edit a file on the fly
> > + with no temporary files (a la pipes)
> > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!
> >
> > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.
> >
> > Cheers, Warren
Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> writes: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? I'm not sure if this was *my* "Aha, Unix!" moment, but my Dad complained once that he had some CSV file containing bills and needed to do some computation, and it would be a hassle to do in Delphi (which he is most proficient in). So I told him I could have a look at it on my Linux system, and while he explained what computations he needed, I would type in some awk oneliner and a bit of other pipe stuff and he had his answer within minutes. -- Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> https://leahneukirchen.org/
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1599 bytes --] One of the things that makes unix so special to me is how many different ways I had the "Aha" moment. Viscerally, I got drawn in after I tried writing some Batch script for a windows machine and found bash so much easier. Intellectually, ESR's Art of Unix Programming really shown a light onto what made unix feel so fun. Seeing the unix principles laid out shortly and clearly was world changing. Then when Apple and Google pumped out 3 BILLION unix like devices and made unix mainstream, it just nailed it in that unix is a really special piece of software*.* Tyler On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 1:56 PM Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> wrote: > Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> writes: > > > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > > previously used? > > I'm not sure if this was *my* "Aha, Unix!" moment, but my Dad > complained once that he had some CSV file containing bills and needed > to do some computation, and it would be a hassle to do in Delphi > (which he is most proficient in). So I told him I could have a look > at it on my Linux system, and while he explained what computations he > needed, I would type in some awk oneliner and a bit of other pipe > stuff and he had his answer within minutes. > > -- > Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> https://leahneukirchen.org/ > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2857 bytes --]
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
>
[cut]
Disclaimer: I am on the young-ish side as well.
I learned the basic Unix commands and the use of vi(1) from a book,
some four or five years before I sat in front of a unix login prompt
(around '91 or '92). I just found the whole thing amazing, so I
re-read that book several times, waiting for the day when I would have
been there for real.
Then finally that day came, and that was my "aahhh, Unix!"
moment. Instantly, everything made so much sense. As somebody else
suggested, I really felt like a duck plunging in a pond for the first
time.
Since then, it has been just a sequence of "aha! Unix!" moments, like
when I conjured a longish pipe which solved in 30 seconds a reporting
problem on which two people had spent about two weeks, or when I left
a colleague jaw-dropped after seeing how I fitted several million data
points to a reference distribution with an awk+bc oneliner :P
HND
On 10/10/19 1:55 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
For me it happened in highschool - 1992/1993. I had been playing around
with my i386 at home which had a modem and i used to dial into my local
library and eventually bbs's and stuff. then my school offered a class
on Earth Systems Science which was partly funded and sponsored by NASA
which was awesome by itself, but for me the real turning point was our
computer lab had an SGI indigo workstation. everything about it blew my
mind, i have very clear memories of learning how to download satalite
data via ftp, use tar to expand the data then visualize it. i also
remember bugging one of the smarter guys in the class how he changed his
prompt to look so cool :^)
this workstation also had mosaic and we were all given email addresses
(domain gaia.circles.org, even had a webpage hosted there!).
so for me - this Unix aha! moment was very closely mixed with an
Internet aha! moment when i discovered how much more info was available
to me compared to my local suburban library :)
-pete
--
Pete Wright
pete@nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1351 bytes --] On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > As an undergrad in the 80's. Before college most of my experience had been on various flavors of BASIC, with the one exception being a summer spent at a science camp where I did Pascal on an Apple ][ and other programming assignments on VMS. My college had a big schism between the computer services department that serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account and started seeing how much more elegant things were. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1791 bytes --]
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 01:13:37PM -0400, Jim Geist wrote:
> My college had a big schism between the computer services department that
> serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the
> actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad
> classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I
> learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account
> and started seeing how much more elegant things were.
Our CS department had a mainframe as well, also a handful of 11/750s and
11/780s. The compiler class was taught on the mainframe, the prof had
a lex/yacc clone he had written and wanted us to use that.
My buddy Rob Netzer and I had 3B1 (Unix PC) or maybe 2, I think I had
one as well, and we asked the prof if we could do the class on those.
Rob had to write the lex/yacc clone to be compat with the profs, he
did and we happily avoided using the mainframe. We were very sold
on Unix by then.
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2314 bytes --] Thanks Jim. Your story about BASIC and C reminded me of another "aha" moment. My first programming job involving UNIX in the early 1980's was to send data to an IBM mainframe via 2780/3780 binary synchronous communications (BSC). I started writing a HEX dump utility using BASIC. I wasn't happy with the execution speed and started reading man pages. I discovered C. Having done some work with assembly, I immediately recognized the similarity and function as a "portable assembler". By that time, UNIX had been ported to at least a dozen different architectures. I was sold on the design, utility, and "openness" of the documentation, and have been working with nearly every flavor of *NIX ever since. Cheers, Jim From: "Jim Geist" <velocityboy@gmail.com> To: "Warren Toomey" <wkt@tuhs.org> Cc: "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs@tuhs.org> Sent: Friday, October 11, 2019 1:13:37 PM Subject: Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey < wkt@tuhs.org > wrote: All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd previously used? Mine was: Oh, I can: + write a simple script + to edit a file on the fly + with no temporary files (a la pipes) + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. Cheers, Warren As an undergrad in the 80's. Before college most of my experience had been on various flavors of BASIC, with the one exception being a summer spent at a science camp where I did Pascal on an Apple ][ and other programming assignments on VMS. My college had a big schism between the computer services department that serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account and started seeing how much more elegant things were. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3603 bytes --]
>On 10/10/19, 4:56 PM, "TUHS on behalf of Warren Toomey" <tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org on behalf of wkt@tuhs.org> wrote: > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? When I first typed ps -x and saw all the running processes on the system. That was on a Dec Alpha at the university of southern Maine in the computer science lab. I thought to myself I need this on my PC. A few weeks later my friend pointed me at Slackware. -- Larry C$
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. I am from this previous dozen. The current one, I guess, might have come here with help of outlets like Lobsters and HN. > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? Oh, that is a good question. I think I had a few aha's which are now faded, but the one I remember well was when I wrote a program which was to be described in a document, and it generated lots of data (20mb, which for me, in mid-1990-ies, was a lot - today, one of my org files is bigger and I keep adding to it every day). There was no way I would want to process this data by hand, and reading it into Excel was a no-no either, because typical Windows machine had 4-8 megs of ram and I did not think they would be able to handle this task. The files compressed well (like, 20:1). So I wrote some shell scripts and (n)awk scripts, find-ed compressed files, feeded uncompressed data via pipe and awk made nice tables for LaTeX and data for gnuplot. On a machine that had 4mb of ram itself. So, that was a moment - I could use Unix and the tools to make things requiring much bigger machines (if they were not running Unix). Later on, knowing some nuances of Unix helped me a lot, even if those were really small tricks. Like, using 'cp -l' to copy huge source tree to user with inadequate quota and then compile it. Later on, I bought me a crappy modem without hardware error control, and it was unusable when connection was made from Windows/DOS (time counted in seconds, then hangup because of line errors). Again, Unix (Linux, actually) to the rescue - after I learned to use ppp, hangups became extremely rare, even if many times connection was despetately slow. Still, slow was better than none. > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. Before I started to use university SunOS, I was using university's VAX for a year and Amiga at home. On Amiga, I sometimes played and sometimes played with a system. So I already had some expectations about what a computer should be like (at least, the "my computer"). Before that, I spent few years playing on and off with other people's 8-bit computers (with their knowledge, of course) - Atari (800?), Polish-made Meritum-1 (docs said it was CP/M capable, but at that time, I had hard time getting more info on this and programing simple stuff in Basic was low hanging fruit). While Amiga gave me many early pleasures of multitasking (playing Centurion and doing low-priority fractal in the background, just for the kicks), and I kept her up to 1994, SunOS quickly dwarfed her. Around 1994 I got introduced to the Linux concept by a bud. Anyway, I installed Slackware on 486 and was able to configure olvwm on it, thus having almost same look as uni-SunOS. Which helped with adoption. After that, fvwm. After some time with KDE and Gnome, back to fvwm, because it just works. There is still plenty to learn. I feel like I barely licked the surface. My recent memorable aha was when I wrote a script in Elisp rather than in bash, as usually. Elisp is hardly a scripting language, it just copes in some cases, but for some reason complicated flow control looked much better than I expected. Another aha was after reading that running stuff in pipes may outperform some well know parallel computing frameworks. Yes indeed, each part of multipipe runs on different cpu and OS takes care of making the flows as fluent as it can. And the concept of pipe is, what, more than fourty years old? Almost fifty? This quite an aha, I think. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com **
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 852 bytes --] Perhaps impertinent since it's not part of the UNIX standard, but probably when I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I learned that quite a bit later. On 10/10/19 3:55 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1220 bytes --]
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 09:41:07PM -0500, ricercar@lycos.com wrote:
> I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I
> learned that quite a bit later.
If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense. You
had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see
all of it in real time, that was wasteful. ed let you see as much as
you needed and as little as was productive. And it worked without
termcap. ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what
it needs to do and no more.
ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the
days when getting a print out took a day or so. pic(1) is a great
example of that. I *love* pic because I can look at the input to
pic and I can see what it will look like. xfig and friends are
not so much.
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 295 bytes --] My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code in the BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes that I wrote communicate. Without a pipe! (I'd already used Unix for a few years and didn't think twice, it was just a natural fit. But sockets, woah.) [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 369 bytes --]
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 11:23:21PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote:
> My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code in the
> BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes that I
> wrote communicate. Without a pipe! (I'd already used Unix for a few years
> and didn't think twice, it was just a natural fit. But sockets, woah.)
Sockets woah indeed. Shout out to Clem and the Masscomp doc people because
they, not UW Madison that was doing all sorts of good work, the Masscomp
docs got me to understand sockets.
Richard, I get it, it is a light bulb moment when you realize that
you can get two unrelated processes talk to each other. It bumps your
understanding of what is possible. Which today seems lame, there is so
much, but I get it, back then that was huge.
For a contrast in aha moments, consider this introduction to an early Apple (Apple II, I think). When my wife got one, my natural curiosity led me to try to make "Hello world". I asked her what to use as an editor and learned it all depends on what you're editing. So I looked in the manual. First thing you do to make a C program is to set up a "project", as if it was a corporate undertaking. I found it easier to write a program in some other editor than the one for C. Bad idea. Every file had a type and that editor produced files of some type other than C program. After succumbing to the Apple straitjacket, I succeeded. Then I found "Hello world" given as an example in the manual. The code took up almost a page; real men make programs that set up their own windows. Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers. And that didn't change until OS X. Doug
On Oct 11, 2019, at 9:42 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers.
> And that didn't change until OS X.
Well, the II kinda was. Not by the time of the //gs, which, if you were writing C, was probably the one you were using. By then it had a windowing system and complications. And then the Mac, prior to OS X, yeah, not intended for the end user to be a software developer.
But the II/II+/IIe were all straightforward machines. As long as you wanted to write BASIC or 6502 assembly they were reasonably programmer-friendly (I say, as someone who couldn’t afford Merlin, the real assembler of the day, at that point, and did his assembly by hand, so, yeah, maybe not THAT friendly). Once you learned what the zero page addresses were for in the particular OS/ROM BASIC you were running, it was a pretty intelligible system.
….and now having done a little googling, there was indeed an Aztec C for Apple II DOS 3.3 in 1982. If that was what you were using, well, yep, looks like you had to use its editor, but the sample program (slightly more complex than “Hello world") looks pretty much like it would have in any other C (interestingly, no #include <stdio.h> needed):
main(argc, argv)
int argc;
char *argv[];
{
register int i = 1;
printf("Program <%s> has %d arguments\n", argv[0], argc-l);
while (--argc) {
printf("Arg %d = <%s>\n", i, argv[i]);
i++;
}
}
So I’m guessing you were using something for the //gs plus GS/OS.
Adam
I don't really think I had an "Aha" moment as such. More a set of
them, after discovering computers again after failing to understand
them at high school - I blame Apple BASIC for that.
I think it was discovering two articles on Minix (also discussing the
Minix book) and Coherent in a local computer magazine, and of course
that Unix came with source was mentioned. So I bought the Minix book,
then when I could, I did a Unix course at the local polytech (SCO of
some description c. early 90s) and got the SLS Linux that now resides
in the Bochs area at Sourceforge.
It wasn't instantaneous, but more of a build-up - this stuff is
powerful and just works. Even better, you can read the source files
and get to understand everything about it - so you're not in a "cargo
cult" attitude to operating systems and applications: everything is in
your hands and you can go in as deeply as you wish. You just have to
be willing to work at learning it.
My 0.02c worth - don't spend it all at once!!! :)
Wesley Parish
On 10/11/19, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
>
> Mine was: Oh, I can:
> + write a simple script
> + to edit a file on the fly
> + with no temporary files (a la pipes)
> + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!
>
> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.
>
> Cheers, Warren
>
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> For a contrast in aha moments, consider this introduction to
> an early Apple (Apple II, I think).
>
> When my wife got one, my natural curiosity led me to try to
> make "Hello world".
>
> I asked her what to use as an editor and learned it all depends
> on what you're editing.
>
> So I looked in the manual. First thing you do to make a C program
> is to set up a "project", as if it was a corporate undertaking.
>
> I found it easier to write a program in some other editor than
> the one for C. Bad idea. Every file had a type and that editor
> produced files of some type other than C program.
>
> After succumbing to the Apple straitjacket, I succeeded.
>
> Then I found "Hello world" given as an example in the manual.
> The code took up almost a page; real men make programs that
> set up their own windows.
>
> Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers.
> And that didn't change until OS X.
>
> Doug
>
That sounds like Macintosh rather than Apple ][.
-uso.
My aha moment was implementing a bourne-like shell for a Unix & C course I took in uni. We were given about 3 weeks to implement the shell from scratch with a lot of bonus points up for grabs such as using lex/yacc for parsing, supporting more than one pipe in a pipeline, backgrounding jobs, advanced i/o redirection, etc. It was quite fun, and we got to sort of "prove" how the Unix shell works and how the fundamental interfaces behave. - Naveen
Hoi, my Aha moments were (in no particular order): - Users can change their login shell! -- This surely was the most impressing discovery for me. - Users are regarded as programmers and are provided with structurally all possiblities, i.e. you can recreate the whole system to your preferences within your home directory and use that as the default. - The shell as a fluid way from dumb programm calling to full programming, where any user can float up and down the level, based on personal skills and the problem at hand. - Chroot (Linux from Scratch) - To me it's actually more a philosophy behind it all, and UNIX itself ist more a demonstration and the scientific experiment that helped to uncover and shape this philosophy. The Aha moment was that there is so much behind it. - Those guys implemented about anything there is about an operating system and application tools, and -- what is even more impressive -- in each of those fields (typesetting, fonts, chess, languages, and so on for a long time), they went deep and invented there as well. Such a small group and so hugely much and deep output! meillo
> That sounds like Macintosh rather than Apple ][.
You are right. My error. I might add that OS X was
afforded a different kind of "Aha, Unix!" moment.
Doug
> From: Warren Toomey > What was your "ahah" moment when you first saw that Unix was special, > especially compared to the systems you'd previously used? Sometime in my undergrad sophmore year, IIRC. A friend had a undergrad research thing with DSSR, who I think at that point had the first UNIX at MIT. He showed me the system, and wrote a tiny command in C, compiled it, and executed the binary from the shell. No big deal, right? Well, at that point ('75 or so), the only OS's I had used were RSTS-11, a batch system running on an Interdata (programs were submitted on card decks), the DELPHI system (done by the people in DSSR), and a few similar things. I had never used a system where an ordinary user could 'add' a command to the command interpreter, and was blown away. (At that point in time, not many OS's could do that.) Unix was in a whole different world compared to contemporaneous PDP-11 OS's. It felt like a 'mainframe' OS (background jobs, etc), but on a mini. Noel
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> That sounds like Macintosh rather than Apple ][.
>
> You are right. My error. I might add that OS X was
> afforded a different kind of "Aha, Unix!" moment.
>
> Doug
>
For me Unix felt like something that took the best parts of MS-DOS (which
I was very familiar with) and improved on them - plus I knew / as a path
separator from ProDOS on the Apple ][ (you can probably see where I'm
going) ;p.
I later learned that this was because MS-DOS, while it was growing out of
its "CP/M clone" phase, had pinched a lot of things from Unix and so this
similarity was not a coincidence. But what MS-DOS has to fumble around
with and pretend to do, Unix actually *did*.
Not to mention, it had, like the Apple ][ and unlike MS-DOS, a single
environment that combined a command shell and a programming language.
Plus the network transparency.
It was the best of both worlds.
-uso.
Random: One of my laptops' Windows 10 install ate itself due to a bum
update a couple days ago. I had left Windows on it when I got it because
I'd heard that the company's laptops that were not in a specific product
line would not run Linux properly. Actually, it was no problem at all, so
it's running Debian now. I also have a broken laptop that runs Debian
headless. I know it's not the real thing, but it'll suffice me. ;p
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 08:01:55PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense. You > had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see > all of it in real time, that was wasteful. ed let you see as much as > you needed and as little as was productive. And it worked without > termcap. ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what > it needs to do and no more. > > ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the > days when getting a print out took a day or so.... ed isn't all that different from most of the text based editors from that era. My first text based editor was "edit" from the PDP-8's 4k disk monitor system. The "monitor" was located in the high 128 (12-bit) word page of the PDP-8's 4k core memory, and the editor and its text buffer had to fit in the bottom 3968 words, which meant you had to read and edit your program file in small chunks[1]. [1] https://www.pdp8.net/asr33/dms_session.shtml The 4k disk monitor pre-dated Unix by two years, and similar text editors were part of the PDP-15 and PDP-11 operating systems from Digital. Many of the edito commands that I remember from using ASR-35 connected to my Dad's PDP-8/i are the same as what /bin/ed. Fortunately people weren't trying to copyright user interfaces back in the 1960's..... - Ted
I graduated high school in 1977. I hadn’t heard anything about UNIX but I had hung around the University of Maryland and the like enough to know about Digital Equipment Corporation. One of my friend’s mother worked in the doc room a the local DEC office in Lanham and being the budding computer geeks we had, we’d often stop by the office and pick up whatever manuals she could spare to give us. I had processor handbooks, software handbook, peripheral handbook, etc… all in my personal library when I enrolled at Johns Hopkins that year. I got a letter from Professor Bill Huggins who was teaching my first year course “Models and Simulation” stating that the course would be taught on the departments PDP-11/45 computer (this I found in my documents) using BASIC/PLUS (again a fine DEC product taken from the RSTS operating system) on the UNIX operating system. The last one stumped me. There was not a mention (obviously) of UNIX anywhere in my docs. Of course, you couldn’t google it back then, and I probably could have asked around at the UofM (I had friends in various computer installations there) but probably would have not yielded an answer. All was answered a few weeks later when I started classes. The EE department had the PDP-11 and it was run by an organization called the UCS (Undergraduate Computer Society) on behalf of the department. This was a group of indeed undergraduates headed at the time by Michael Muuss and Pete Koziar. It was split into groups including the system programming headed by those two, documentation (led by George Toth), hardware (run by Bill Lindeman), and Operations (Joe Pistritto). It was at an early meeting of this where the whole UNIX things was explained to me. Also, having pretty much BASIC’d myself out in high school (We used HP 2000 systems that only ran basic) and was desperate for a higher level language (I’d done some Fortran and Cobol as well as APL and PLUM (and odd PL/I-ish variant at UofM), I set to learn C. At the time there were mimeographed copies of K&R’s document which was the first chapter of “The C Programming Language.” Mike Muuss, always the one to mentor someone, helped review my early stabs at C. I remember typing many of these on a Model 33 using \( \) for curly braces, etc… I quickly moved through becoming an operator (where you had to demonstrate knowledge of the file system structure as well as use of icheck/dcheck/clri and the like to recover from crashes). Mike then mentored me through basic system programming. He printed out a copy of the kernel sources for me. I volunteered to debug some device drivers George Toth had written and Mike spent a night half sleeping on a bean bag chair in the computer room supervising my stabs at Kernel work. At that point UNIX did crash a bit and this wasn’t helped by the fact that there were many students who thought that crashing or otherwise hacking on the machine was sport. I rapidly became adept at working both sides of the scheme, but trying to break the machine from user mode and then going back and fixing things (either ones I had found or figuring out what others had done). It was probably the only machine other than ones I owned myself that I was deeply involved in all aspects of. The University had a graphics display system donated to them and I set about using a DR-11 to interface it. After college I was hired to do database work on an RSX-11M system. However, the QA department had just gotten in to PWB and source code control so I got deputized into helping set up an IS PWB system to maintain the source and project documentation. It was here that I hacked on the -ms macro package and the lineprinter spooler to handle security classifications. About six months into it, I ran into Mike and former classmates Bob Miles and Doug Kingston at a Unix conference and they told me they were porting UNIX to a supercomputer, the Delelcor HEP. I actually had a HEP manual (my friends at the UofM had given it to me after they passed at doing the software). Soon I was back at BRL working with Mike doing not only the HEP (I did the ld and F77 ports and all the IO system, as well as conspiring with Denelcor’s Burton Smith on redesigning the IO system so it had reasonable performance), but also on early TCP/IP work. I was going to use the MIT C gateway (written by fellow list member Noel Chiappa) but support from MIT was problematic as Noel had been deported to Bermuda (or some such thing) at the critical time, so I wrote my own based on my own pidjin operating system, though it booted using a UNIX boot block and filesystem. Among other things I did, having detested the C shell syntax, was add many features (notably job control and the TCSH-style command line editing) to /bin/sh. (KSH hadn’t escaped the labs yet). Amusingly, since I sat down at a UNIX conference and explained to some guys working on some of the open source shells how job control actually worked, my name showed up in many of the Linux manual set as a contributor. Those were really the glory days. Mike’s standard answer to any computer problem at the labs was “Let’s put UNIX on it” and we usually did. I then went off to spend several years as a University administrator (Rutgers) and then got sucked into a startup Image Processing company where I remained for 21 years only randomly dabbling in UNIX. Though several years in I was using a MIPS workstation. Of course, I was using /bin/sh and absent mindedly typed “fg.” It came back and said “Job control not enabled.” That was odd, I thought. It sounds like something I wrote. I typed “set -J” and it said “Job control enabled.” Holy crap, this is one of my shells. I later found that Doug Gwyn had put my shell on his SYSV-on-BSD emulation package tape. The mach guys included the shell from that in all their distributions, so any mach-derived system had a “ron shell” on it.
> On Oct 11, 2019, at 8:01 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 09:41:07PM -0500, ricercar@lycos.com wrote:
>> I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I
>> learned that quite a bit later.
>
> If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense. You
> had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see
> all of it in real time, that was wasteful. ed let you see as much as
> you needed and as little as was productive. And it worked without
> termcap. ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what
> it needs to do and no more.
>
> ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the
> days when getting a print out took a day or so. pic(1) is a great
> example of that. I *love* pic because I can look at the input to
> pic and I can see what it will look like. xfig and friends are
> not so much.
After using ed and other Unix programs I convinced a member of the
UCSD Pascal project that having a line oriented editor would make sense.
YALOE (Yet Another Line Oriented Editor) was the result. It took almost all
of the commands that ed did and so familiarity with one would allow you to
work with the other.
The simplicity of ed was so nice. One other thing using ed forced me to do
was to keep my files small. Large files would quickly become something you
had to hunt around in. Small files were easier to edit.
David
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2437 bytes --] Now I'm trying to remember if I ever had a single epiphanic a-ha moment. I don't think I did. I remember being introduced to Unix the summer before my senior year of high school, when I was a research intern at a physics lab at UT Austin. I learned very little about Unix, but learned how to drive Emacs inexpertly (I remain pretty mediocre at it thirty years later) and how to read and post to Usenet. At Rice, although by my sophomore year I was making beer money as a student systems programmer on our VM/CMS system, I'd gravitated to the Sun3/60 workstations we had around the place. And it would have been, I guess, in the fall of my sophomore year that I started playing around with Linux. By the spring, IIRC, I had gotten 4 more MB of discrete DIP RAM (for my Gateway 2000 386DX/25) and repartitioned my hard disk (65MB RLL, IIRC). The rest of undergrad life and graduate school I multibooted between DOS-Windows, OS/2, and Linux, but my primary environment became Linux/X by, oh, 1997 or so. It became OS X in the early 2000s (too bad BeOS didn't make it) but that is (from my perspective as not-a-kernel-developer) just a BSD with a nice GUI; that's where I've stayed in terms of my favorite interactive environment. As far back as 1998 I remember someone saying to me "I've never seen someone use a GUI as just a collection of terminal windows before." My graduate advisor was Mike Mahoney, so I strongly suspect I absorbed a lot of the Way Things Ought To Be from him. Which is why I guess I feel like the following principles are basically axioms of how you should design an operating system: 1) everything's a file, and a file is just an unstructured stream of bytes. Device drivers look like files and give you byte streams 2) input on stdin, output on stdout, errors to stderr 3) pipe things that do #2 together to compose complex functionality. Record semantics are the responsibility of the communicating applications to know, not the pipeline layer, which just transmits bytes 4) fork() and exec() I am willing to grudgingly recognize that #4 in particular is not a great way to create UI-intensive user-facing apps, and that you do need some sort of threading/lightweight process model to deal with a bunch of asynchronous interrupt-triggered user interactions. But for something operating as a classic transforming filter, which really *is* most computing problems, those four things do nicely. Adam [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2789 bytes --]
I was a new grad student at UC Santa Barbara (where I did my undergrad) in ~1977. Somebody who I had found for my committee had just returned from a stay at Bell Labs, and he told me about this thing called Unix. It sounded very interesting, so I asked around. It turned out that the Computer Center, where all computing was done back then, had a PDP11/45 on which they ran RSTS during the day, and Unix at night. In fact, somebody had created a sign in one of the terminal rooms that said "Oh say can you C by the dawn's early light". which very accurately described my life back then, because I was spending many a night learning C, and was getting used to seeing the dawn's early light while doing so. Not exactly an "Aha" moment, but what I learned from spending these sleepless nights is what got me started on a career that lasted ~40 years. Jon Forrest
On 11 Oct 2019 06:55 +1000, from wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey): > What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? My Unix moment wasn't anywhere near as distinct as some other peoples'. It was rather very much a gradual process. I got Internet access of my own as I recall some time in 1996. (I'd got a modem only a year or so earlier.) I definitely had Internet access and my own e-mail address in mid-1996. At that time, having had problems installing Windows 95 on top of 3.1x, I believe I was still running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on MS-DOS. Before I figured out how to get Trumpet Winsock to talk to my ISP (it probably would have gone more easily if not for the fact that due to still young age at the time and English not being my native language I was rather Englishtically challenged), that meant dial-up and log in to my ISP's Unix systems, which I mainly used to send and receive e-mail using Pine (which I _was_ able to figure out how to use). Looking back today at some of the e-mails from around that time, I'm guessing that system ran Solaris; the message-IDs from the oldest e-mails I still have clearly indicate "Pine.SOL.3.92" but a quick web search for what SOL meant to Pine turned out to be rather unhelpful. Also somewhere around that same time, someone first introduced me to Linux, but the two of us just weren't ready for each other at the time. I dipped my toes twice before taking the plunge to using Linux (then Red Hat 6.2) as my main desktop OS some time in mid-2000. Even then it took a while to get used to, but on the whole, here I am almost two decades later, not looking back... (though I do have to use Windows at work.) -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael@kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)
Richard Salz wrote in <CAFH29tq=Mfk9RQNchoT+a7XzR3+qpUuBZA9_Mr1OL7RAYFW_\ Xw@mail.gmail.com>: |My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code \ |in the BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes \ |that I wrote communicate. Without a pipe! (I'd already used |Unix for a few years and didn't think twice, it was just a natural \ |fit. But sockets, woah.) Oh yes, and having a single-threaded HTTP server which could serve small static files to hundreds (128) of (test) clients concurrently on a Cyrix 166, simply by using non-blocking I/O and select(2) (through event driven C++ objects). (And by that time i think / seem to recall from computer magazine article JAVA implemented such I/O / xy monitors by creating a thread of execution, and the select(2) Cygwin code that i have seen was _so_ complicated and expensive, it was a real Aha!, just like in Kate Bush's "Wow".) --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)
Hello!
Actually Michael you're not alone in the problems regarding Trumpet
Windsock. I spent an exhaustive summer several years ago trying to get
it to work. And that was on my backup machine. I did get Win95 to
install onto Win3.11 without a problem. It only seems hard.
By time the string of events that I described above happened within
the Linux world, well that's where I am now.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Sat, Oct 12, 2019 at 3:34 PM Michael Kjörling <michael@kjorling.se> wrote:
>
> On 11 Oct 2019 06:55 +1000, from wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey):
> > What was your "ahah" moment when you
> > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> > previously used?
>
> My Unix moment wasn't anywhere near as distinct as some other
> peoples'. It was rather very much a gradual process.
>
> I got Internet access of my own as I recall some time in 1996. (I'd
> got a modem only a year or so earlier.) I definitely had Internet
> access and my own e-mail address in mid-1996.
>
> At that time, having had problems installing Windows 95 on top of
> 3.1x, I believe I was still running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on
> MS-DOS.
>
> Before I figured out how to get Trumpet Winsock to talk to my ISP (it
> probably would have gone more easily if not for the fact that due to
> still young age at the time and English not being my native language I
> was rather Englishtically challenged), that meant dial-up and log in
> to my ISP's Unix systems, which I mainly used to send and receive
> e-mail using Pine (which I _was_ able to figure out how to use).
>
> Looking back today at some of the e-mails from around that time, I'm
> guessing that system ran Solaris; the message-IDs from the oldest
> e-mails I still have clearly indicate "Pine.SOL.3.92" but a quick web
> search for what SOL meant to Pine turned out to be rather unhelpful.
>
> Also somewhere around that same time, someone first introduced me to
> Linux, but the two of us just weren't ready for each other at the
> time. I dipped my toes twice before taking the plunge to using Linux
> (then Red Hat 6.2) as my main desktop OS some time in mid-2000. Even
> then it took a while to get used to, but on the whole, here I am
> almost two decades later, not looking back... (though I do have to use
> Windows at work.)
>
> --
> Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael@kjorling.se
> “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person
> is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)
>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5209 bytes --] On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > I'm afraid I have a rather pedestrian story. Like many folks in the 80s, we had a home computer, and in early high school I got kind of hooked on this idea of using a modem to call other computers. I remember one of the kids at school telling me, "don't use DOS unless you're afraid of speed." At the time, I had no real conception of what that meant, nor how fundamentally wrong it was, but hey, ok. Our home machine was actually a Mac, but I managed to convince the family that a PC clone running DOS would be a better machine. Dad relented, a suitable machine was acquired and while it is likely the thing would have become another object gather dust, an unfortunate encounter with a solid object at a high rate of speed basically ended my changes of becoming a professional skateboarder and the (new) computer filled the void. As I was recuperating from that broken collar bone, I got into the idea of learning C. My dad, an engineer, mentioned to me that the folks at his company were using Sun machines and the word "Unix" hung in the air. It was mysterious and cool. Eventually, I saved up enough money to order a copy of Coherent, which while interesting, was abstruse and opaque: let's face it, DOS was written to drive what amounted to souped up microcontrollers; things were pretty understandable in that world once you achieved a basic level of competence. But this Unix thing sounded intriguing and I wanted to learn more. Getting access was a challenge. Coherent didn't really seem like the thing. About a year of DOS and some Coherent later, I fell in with a crowd of undergrads at the local university who were mostly CS/EE/Math majors and that cemented things: it pains me somewhat to admit it, but I got into Unix because that's what the cool kids were doing. I ditched DOS and Coherent and installed NetBSD. Interestingly, I found a Linux distribution somewhere, and we had that running in a lab for a while, but it didn't stick; I still thought BSD was better and at the time, that was probably (technically) true. Besides, we were mostly running RISC machines running various commercial Unix variants; the BSD/Linux stuff was just for messing around and/or for home use. The one unique quirk in this anecdote is that, at some point, I did two weird things: 1) I saw an ad locally for a guy selling a DECstation running Ultrix and I bought it. I could never get X to work on my 486, but it sure worked on the DECstation, so I had a graphical environment at home. 2) I bought a VAX off USENET. Not a "real" VAX in the 10th edition sense, but a desktop VAXstation. I ran VMS on that. Both of those machines are probably still down in my basement somewhere.... Anyway, while the kids were running Linux at home, most people I knew really wanted a RISC workstation and I had one as well as a personal VAX. That definitely gave me some street cred for a while. At some point I had learned enough technically to realize that Unix really was better than the alternatives I had access to; I liked VMS, but it was specific to a limited set of hardware and seemed more complex than Unix for little benefit. Some people claimed it was simpler, though; I'm not sure in what sense they meant, even today. Some of the college folks I was spending time with used the local mainframe (VM/ESA) a fair bit and RSCS was a big deal locally. I played around with it, but never found it all that interesting; it seemed to me that Unix did everything the mainframe could do, but, well, better. So yeah, that's it: it's kind of sad, but I ran Unix because people told me Unix was better. And while on the one hand it was obviously better than DOS, I had limited exposure to other systems from which to form a real opinion about its relative merits with respect to similarly ambitious designs. I see now the superiority of the design relative to other common systems of the day, but that's a perspective developed after the fact, as opposed to something that I saw or felt at the time. One more aside here: Doug lambasted the Macintosh earlier, but in retrospect I'm really glad that our first computer was a Mac. It was never a machine that was designed for command-line use; hence why something was simple as "Hello, World!" would be so complex. But it did have a regularity of interface and was simple enough that for years I never realized a computer could be any different. I didn't appreciate the value of those early lessons and how they shaped how I thought about how a system should work until much, much later. - Dan C. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 5890 bytes --]
Well, I guess mine is kinda weird. I had messed with a number of computer systems a litle bit and then became proficient with 516-TSS as a result of being part of the explorer scout post at BTL Murray Hill in high school. Interesting note is that one of my advisors who wrote a lot of 516-TSS interviewed Ken for his job at BTL. Ended up with a paid job at BTL starting near the end of my senior year of high school. Needed to document my work. Don't remember why, but my group acquired a PDP-11/40 that was across the hall from the 516 lab in building 2 that was running UNIX version 3. I started using roff on it to do my documentation which meant learning ed and a bunch of other tools. Of course, I took the manual home and read it cover to cover and started messing around with the various cool tools that it had and was hooked. Jon
Not sure I had an "aha erlebnis" with UNIX. I'd done some testing on a Philips PTS6000 with T.O.S. All assembler code with debugging syslod the most fun (breakpointing code which moves itself in memory). Then I was a user on VAX 11/730, 11/750 with Ultrix which was a bit of a step down. The VAXes run VMS during the week and only in weekends we could place our disk pack and boot Ultrix. Funny feeling to go home when colleagues arrive in the morning. Later "Propriety UNIX" versions based on System III, 7, V. No source. Still had shells, command line, scripts, a bit of programming in C if all else fails (or is too slow). Never liked Windows. In that sense maybe more an 'aha windows' moment to quickly forget :-) Cheers, uncle rubl
On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. Well I've been on this list for 13 years (just checked) but I'll jump in. I've mostly lurked with probably less than 13 comments total. > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? I had run Microware OS-9 as a teenager which is somewhat Unix like so some commands were familiar to me from the outset, but my Unix ahah moment is almost embarrassingly simple. I was trying to arrange to meet with a fellow student during 2nd year at University to work on a project. It was 1992 so neither of us had a calendar readily available. I turned to the dumbterm in front of me and said "If Unix had a calendar command I think it would be 'cal'". I typed cal and when it worked I realised I found Unix so much more intuitive than other OSes I had used in the past. I used Unix at university for the next couple of years, installed Linux at home in 1994 and a year later I founded a Unix user group[1]. At the first meeting I hoped we wouldn't run out of things to talk about. I had a lot to learn. [1] Which is still going to this day. http://www.humbug.org.au. Rob
Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
I first met Unix in the fall of 1980, after a two-year hiatus from
college. Up to then, I'd only used Sperry Univac mainframes and a
weird Xerox computer (only a little) and punch cards on an IBM 1130.
In the interim, the college gave the undergrads access to a PDP-11/70
at the med school running IS/1 - Interactive Systems' commercial version
of V6. No access for us to source code, though. :-(
I/O redirection and space separated arguments were really cool, as well
as pipelines. Light years ahead of anything else.
More or less simultaneously, someone lent me their copies of "Software Tools"
and "The C Programming Language" (which I immediately got my own copies
of). Software Tools opened my eyes to the whole Unix philosophy.
K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read. I then
read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked.
I decided pretty quickly during the course of that first year with Unix
that I only wanted to work with C and Unix. Both were so far ahead of
everything else...
Arnold
On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 09:33:09AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read. I then
> read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked.
Agreed, it's an awesome book. All the stuff you need is there and there
is no fluff. I suspect people will still be reading that book 50 years
from now.
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 491 bytes --] I just bought my first copy about 3 months ago. On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 10:42 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote: > On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 09:33:09AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote: > > K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read. I then > > read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked. > > Agreed, it's an awesome book. All the stuff you need is there and there > is no fluff. I suspect people will still be reading that book 50 years > from now. > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 855 bytes --]
> From: Arnold Skeeve > K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read. I learned C from "Programming in C - A Tutorial", by Brian Kernighan, which for some reason seemed to have fallen into desuetude from V7 on (at least, that was the impression I got). Which was a pity, it was one of the best documents I ever read - a breeze to read through, and clear as crystal. Noel
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 84 bytes --] Man, those Bell Labs folks could really write. They were short, clear, unambiguous. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 106 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1068 bytes --] I don't recall a specific aha moment either. Possibly it was make - I had previously expressed a wish for some sort of dependency tracking mechanism to speed up the build system I was using in my job, and had been told it couldn't be done. I was impressed that Unix provided one out of the box. On 2019-Oct-11 15:04:15 +0300, Tyler Adams <coppero1237@gmail.com> wrote: >Then when Apple and Google pumped out 3 BILLION unix like devices and made >unix mainstream, it just nailed it in that unix is a really special piece >of software*.* Well, whilst Apple and Google products are built around a Unix-like core, none of them expose the Unix UI to normal users. And, if you come from a Unix background, even once you access the underlying core, the differences are more likely to trip you up than make you feel at home. Instead, they each have their own, proprietary UI, together with a relatively proprietary development environment. None of them are going to introduce a new generation to Unix or generate Unix evangelists. -- Peter Jeremy [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 963 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3188 bytes --] My Aha, Unix! moment was the Unix man pages, especially that they had a section for BUGS. The very reality of it attracted me. As Gloria Steinem said, "Something doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful!" I notice that on Linux the older man pages still have BUG sections, but the newer ones don't. Telling. Even more telling is that 'man python' gives you a lot of information, but at the end where the Bugs section used to be is a section labled "LICENSING"... I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System. The sequence that initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was: % echo hello joe > hijoe % cat hijoe hello joe At the time, permanent file storage was a relatively new concept for mainframes, and the implementations were very influenced by space constraints and punched card images. The IBM was worst, because for them a disc file was made to look like a tape drive -- "records" that had multiple card images on them." In order to create a file, you had to submit a job (punched cards again) using a Job Control Language whose authors are hopefully all burning in hell at this very moment. And the job failed if the file was already there, ... The time sharing system was not much better -- still had the notion of card images in mind, but also an initial size, a maximum size, and a lot of settings for who could do what with the file. In the time sharing system, a special subsystem took control and asked you roughly a dozen questions, one at a time. It was quite common to botch one or more of the answers, in which case you got to answer all the questions again. No wonder when the file was finally created, the system replied "Successful!". Typing the above created shock and awe followed by questions like "what's the blocking factor" and "what device is it allocated on". Followed, mostly, by a dazed joy as they finally got it... Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Forrest" <nobozo@gmail.com> To:<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> Cc: Sent:Sat, 12 Oct 2019 12:10:12 -0700 Subject:Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? I was a new grad student at UC Santa Barbara (where I did my undergrad) in ~1977. Somebody who I had found for my committee had just returned from a stay at Bell Labs, and he told me about this thing called Unix. It sounded very interesting, so I asked around. It turned out that the Computer Center, where all computing was done back then, had a PDP11/45 on which they ran RSTS during the day, and Unix at night. In fact, somebody had created a sign in one of the terminal rooms that said "Oh say can you C by the dawn's early light". which very accurately described my life back then, because I was spending many a night learning C, and was getting used to seeing the dawn's early light while doing so. Not exactly an "Aha" moment, but what I learned from spending these sleepless nights is what got me started on a career that lasted ~40 years. Jon Forrest [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4001 bytes --]
On 10/13/2019 2:45 PM, Steve Johnson wrote: > > I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to > several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers and > the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System. The sequence that initiated > gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was: > % echo hello joe > hijoe > % cat hijoe > hello joe A technically equivalent but more dramatic version of this that I used to use back then was a shell script that would prompt for the name of a file to display, and then display the file whose name the user entered. This would make steam come out of the ears of the IBM mainframe people because it wasn't possible to do that on the IBM mainframe in use at the time. Jon
With JCL it is as easy to read one tape as it is to read 1000 tapes.
> On 2019, Oct 13, at 8:36 PM, Jon Forrest <nobozo@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 10/13/2019 2:45 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
>
>> I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System. The sequence that initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was:
>> % echo hello joe > hijoe
>> % cat hijoe
>> hello joe
>
> A technically equivalent but more dramatic version of this
> that I used to use back then was a shell script that would
> prompt for the name of a file to display, and then display the
> file whose name the user entered.
>
> This would make steam come out of the ears of the IBM mainframe
> people because it wasn't possible to do that on the IBM mainframe
> in use at the time.
>
> Jon
>
>
>
I first encountered Unix as v6 on an 11/34 at Stanford Information Systems Lab. I read all the man pages and then the Lions book turned up and then we had need of some new device drivers, and then we needed to get hooked up to the Arpanet,… and it took off from there. -Larry
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1094 bytes --] My first "Aha moment" was when I (accidentally) discovered job control. Being able to hit ctrl-Z while editing something, do some things, type "fg" and be back where I left off was just amazing. None of the "unix emulation" products on top of dos/windows could do that (at least at the time, the ones available to me. IIRC cygwin these days has job control). Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to anyone. Great book). The next epiphany was the discovery of `` (backticks) and xargs. Command line arguments and pipes could be transformed into each other. Just wow. Then I discovered vi and permanently lost the ability to be happy with other operating systems. On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 7:21 PM Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> wrote: > I first encountered Unix as v6 on an 11/34 at Stanford Information Systems > Lab. I read all the man pages and then the Lions book turned up and then > we had need of some new device drivers, and then we needed to get hooked up > to the Arpanet,… and it took off from there. > > -Larry > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1446 bytes --]
On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp@servium.ch (Rico Pajarola): > Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to > anyone. Great book). Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books USD 1 for that book and a few others. I made a longer post about that bundle to the COFF list. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael@kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)
Apropos of Steve Johnson's evocative description of JCL and other pre-Unix OS interfaces, doing legwork for Multics I ran the following experiment on a lot of then-current time-sharing systems. As a model of creating and installing a new compiler, I used a very short Fortran program that simply copied its input to its output, stopping after finding END in column 7 of the input. The drill was compile the program run it, using its own source as input compile the freshly made output file This failed on every system I tried it on, though local experts could intervene with magic to overcome the gratuitous file-type distinctions that typically got in the way. Dartmouth's DTSS came closest, but inexplicably, even to the gurus, it had a special prohibition against a program reading the source from which it was compiled. Incidentally, my favorite manifestation of JCL-like mumbo jumbo was the ironically named FUTIL control card in GECOS. Doug
> From: Doug McIlroy > doing legwork for Multics I ran the following experiment on a lot of > then-current time-sharing systems. Fascinating; you don't happen to remember the ones you tried, do you? Also, when you say "legwork for Multics", was this something done during the planning stages (so, say '64-'65), or later on? Noel
On 10/14/19 05:49, Michael Kjörling wrote:
> On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp@servium.ch (Rico Pajarola):
>> Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to
>> anyone. Great book).
> Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble
> Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle.
>
> https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books
>
> USD 1 for that book and a few others.
Mininum is USD1 but I humbly suggest paying more.
N.
(And I still have the first print edition.)
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 991 bytes --] I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for that logo. On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 2:44 PM Nemo Nusquam <cym224@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 10/14/19 05:49, Michael Kjörling wrote: > > On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp@servium.ch (Rico Pajarola): > >> Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to > >> anyone. Great book). > > Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble > > Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle. > > > > https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books > > > > USD 1 for that book and a few others. > Mininum is USD1 but I humbly suggest paying more. > > N. > > (And I still have the first print edition.) > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1575 bytes --]
On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 05:10:31PM -0400, Jim Geist wrote: > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted me > an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete with a > B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for that > logo. I donated this image to Kirk from my set a while back: https://www.mckusick.com/beastie/gif/4.2daemon.gif Cheers, Warren
There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I currently
work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they
closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff.
Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS
archives ;)
Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my hands
on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years because of
environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a
complete set of boards.
I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the
ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an
RM05 drive to try.
art k.
On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote:
> I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was
> on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted
> me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete
> with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover.
>
> I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for
> that logo.
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1262 bytes --] I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require 3-phase? On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 6:56 PM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote: > There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I currently > work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they > closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff. > > Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS > archives ;) > > Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my hands > on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years because of > environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a > complete set of boards. > > I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the > ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an > RM05 drive to try. > > art k. > > > On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was > > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted > > me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete > > with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. > > > > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for > > that logo. > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1698 bytes --]
> On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist <velocityboy@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require 3-phase?
730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet). I would expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know.
Adam
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1855 bytes --] From what I remember, the 750 will run off single-phase 110 volt. So will an RM05, but it has to be 220 (which, in the US, requires two phases to make 220). I think only the RP06/7's really needed 3-phase, but even then, I could be wrong. Most of this DEC equipment really only needed single-phase, but balancing the load was always a good idea in places that were already 3-phase capable. On 10/14/2019 7:44 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it > require 3-phase? > > On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 6:56 PM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net > <mailto:krewat@kilonet.net>> wrote: > > There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I > currently > work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they > closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff. > > Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS > archives ;) > > Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my > hands > on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years > because of > environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a > complete set of boards. > > I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the > ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an > RM05 drive to try. > > art k. > > > On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote: > > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to > Unix was > > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school > gifted > > me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete > > with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover. > > > > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for > > that logo. > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3090 bytes --]
On 10/14/2019 7:47 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
>> On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist <velocityboy@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require 3-phase?
>
> 730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet). I would expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know.
>
True, the 750 might need 220. I really can't remember. But when I set up
a few, with a TU78, and a few RM05's at the warehouse I was storing
them, I really only needed a single phase.
And again, in the US, 220 requires "two phases" but the actual equipment
only needed a single source of 220. So it was "single phase". Clear as
mud? :)
ak
There is no DEC process cabinets that is really three phase. Some of the power controllers (notably the VAX 780 and the larger PDP-11’s), that had three phase cords on them but all they do is split out the three phases as three 120V circuits. I believe Armando Stetner made use of this when he ran a VAX in his hotel room at one of the conferences, he just ran 120V extension cords all over the place to get it up. There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase). I’m not sure if the RP06’s fell into this category but some of the Storage Tek drives did.
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 991 bytes --] On Mon, 14 Oct 2019 at 19:54, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote: > On 10/14/2019 7:47 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: > >> On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist <velocityboy@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it > require 3-phase? > > > > 730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet). I would > expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know. > > > > True, the 750 might need 220. I really can't remember. But when I set up > a few, with a TU78, and a few RM05's at the warehouse I was storing > them, I really only needed a single phase. > > And again, in the US, 220 requires "two phases" but the actual equipment > only needed a single source of 220. So it was "single phase". Clear as > mud? :) > > > ak > A quick trawl through the Bitsavers 11/750 field maintenance docs did not definitively answer the question. Looks like it could have been 240V 12A or 120V 24A. -Henry [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1443 bytes --]
On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase).
Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US.
ak
Absolutely INCORRECT. The drives see (and the power cord only provides) ONE phase.
208 is essentially a single phase voltage you get by connecting two of your three phase legs.
240 V on 120/240 is only single phase.
> On Oct 14, 2019, at 7:04 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:
>
> On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
>> There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase).
> Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US.
>
> ak
Tracy Kidder evokes different emotions around "the soul of a new machine" -To me, the book is great because its a humanist reading of technology choices. People matter. Careers are built on seemingly trivial decisions like the size of the average door frame in a lift in Tokyo. (a brief moment in the book, from memory) I always wished it had been written about Digital Equipment and not Data General, because the only DG box I worked on (a Nova) was a dog. I know one person who came from Australia (UQ) to Maynard, to track the building of the Dec-10 destined for the campus. He had entertaining anecdotes about parking and weather. (australians are not naturally prepared for 2m of snow and the effect of parking in the wrong side of the snow shadow, which explains why the parking spots were empty for the visitor to claim) -I think the birth of the pdp-8 and pdp-11 would be fascinating. I was told the queue to sign up for pdp-8 at the IFIP floor show in the 60s in Edinburgh was a mile long: people were dog tired of walking card decks over to central computing facilities and the offer of a deskside or even desktop (if your desk was strong enough) compute engine for stats and maths and process control... Sub-floor radius limits made it hard to retrofit a Cray into the UQ machine room because the piping radii had been done for the IBM mainframe. We had to lift the raised floor for the flourinert piping. 400Hz voltage demanded a spinning metal regenerator to do frequency conversion from the Australian wallplate voltage/frequency. Our groundplane was inadequate. The Tops-10 box, the cluster of Vaxen, were completely oblivious to most of this: they did air cooling through floor venting, thats really all that mattered in their machine-room. It was the one we chose to fit the comms racks because it was the least pain to work in, and the nearest to the hosts which could actually use Internet protocols trivially on UTP or thinwire. (the IBM required us to buy a $10,000 PC to fit the line card which translated TCP/IP into IBM networking and was possibly the last piece of "thickwire" ethernet we owned) -G
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 10:07:34AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
> I always wished it had been written about Digital Equipment and not
> Data General ...
> -I think the birth of the pdp-8 and pdp-11 would be fascinating.
+1. I'd read that book in a heartbeat.
That's exactly my point. For example, in my house, I have two phases.
Each one, to neutral, gets me 120 volts.
If I use both phases, I get 220.
The equipment might be "single phase 220", but I need two phases out of
the electric panel to get it.
Sorry, I may not have explained myself well enough ;)
On 10/14/2019 8:06 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> Absolutely INCORRECT. The drives see (and the power cord only provides) ONE phase.
>
> 208 is essentially a single phase voltage you get by connecting two of your three phase legs.
> 240 V on 120/240 is only single phase.
>
>> On Oct 14, 2019, at 7:04 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:
>>
>> On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
>>> There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase).
>> Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US.
>>
>> ak
>
>
I don't know that I had a single "Aha!" moment, but there were a few things that just got hold of me and led me down the Unix path... The first Unix I used was V7m on a PDP-11/40, in college. By this point, I was "aware" of Unix, in theory I even knew C - but never had an actual system to try it out on until this point. I'd used other operating systems (or things that called themselves operating systems...), primarily TRSDOS, CP/M, OS1100, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, and VMS. Unix was certainly the first multiuser operating system that I ever had administrator access on. 1) The idea of taking the output of one program, and using it directly as input to another program - and the simplicity by which it was done - was revolutionary to me. It was not unusual for me at that time to do things like this by having the first program create a temporary file, and then having another program open this temporary file and use it as input, but the whole paradigm of stdin/stdout/pipes made it so you didn't even have to "know" in your program that you might need to use the output of some other program (via a temporary file) as input. That was amazing to me. 2) Unix was really the first operating system that I had full, buildable sources for. (I theoretically had access to VMS source code, but it was on microfiche and not in machine-readable form, so it was just a read-only reference.) If I wanted to see how the OS was doing something, I could look. If I wanted to change something the OS did, or add something to the OS (either in the kernel, or as a user space utility), I could do that (and I did on a couple of occasions). If something was broken, I could try to figure it out and fix it. There was this bug in V7m, where if you were on a non-separate I&D system that didn't have the floating point option (and our 11/40 did not), and you tried to run an "a.out" file that was zero length, you'd get a kernel panic. We were using the system for a computer architecture course, students were programming in assembly language, and if there was a problem with the source file the assembler would leave a zero length executable behind. Of course, students would try to run it anyway, even though "as" produced errors. We'd sometimes get 3 or 4 system crashes in the course of an evening. The students and the instructors were all up in arms because any time this would happen, everyone would lose whatever they were working on (and maybe more, if the filesystem got messed up during the panic), and if there was no one around who had a key to the computer room when it happened, it would stay down until they could find someone who had physical access and the knowledge to know how to deal with "fsck"... (The construction in the lab was pretty minimal, and the walls to most of the rooms didn't go all the way to the ceiling - sometimes when it crashed and no one was around, they'd take to climbing over the wall to reboot the system themselves - which could produce disasterous results of there were filesystem issues...) I found the problem, and I fixed it. That was my first adventure in kernel debugging... (Later, we migrated to a PDP-11/24 and we ordered the KEF11-A floating point option for it, so that problem became moot.) 3) The idea of processes being able to talk to each other (without some kind of pre-arrangement, like setting up a pipe between them, or using temporary files) was just amazing, and this was the first time I'd really seen it. I knew VMS had this thing called a "mailbox", but I never used it for anything and didn't even know what it was for. On V7m, I stumbled across the mpx(5) man page. I think the first time I came across it, I stared at it for hours, looking at the description and trying to figure out what you'd even use that functionality for. At some point it was like a lightning bolt hit me - "Oh, wait! You can use this to send messages between unrelated processes!" Except V7m came with one little proviso - the mpx code was there, but it didn't work... So I dug into it, and made it work - at least, well enough for what I wanted to use it for. I wrote a multiuser chat program with it (isn't that the first thing any undergrad does when they discover interprocess communications? :-) ). I had a similar epiphany with sockets on 4.2BSD a year or two later, under similar circumstances. The one thing I found in command with both mpx and sockets was that the documentation described the low-level functionality - but there was nothing that clearly stated, "This functionaliy is used to allow processes to talk to each other"... I'm sure there are plenty more experiences with early Unix that ensured that I'd continue down this path, but I think these are my favorites. --Pat.
I didn't really have a single "Aha" moment, but I remember borrowing some books on Unix from the library and realizing it was more powerful than anything else I'd used (up until then, I'd only really used DOS/Windows, classic Mac OS, and Apple II systems; as you can probably tell, I'm quite a bit younger than many other people on this list). Shortly afterwards, I installed Linux (initially Mandrake 8.2, but I replaced it with Debian 3.0 shortly thereafter; I still have my original Debian 3.0 install around as a VM that I use from time to time) and never really looked back. I did keep a Windows dual boot around for a while but that eventually went away (although I still do have Windows VMs around). Soon after that, I decided I was going to put together my own Unix-like OS; initially I was going to put together a NeXTStep/OS X-like Linux distribution, but then later decided I was going to write a QNX-like microkernel-based OS instead. I still don't have anything that is actually useful at the moment, although now I am making a bit better progress than in the past (I changed my mind on several parts of the design and was quite busy with other projects for a while).
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2292 bytes --] I had two aha moments. First was that I really didn't want the filesystem to do logical name translation. It was simple enough to do in the program. So no way to have the kernel expand /usr/share/fubar/$USER/fu. While VMS' logical names were a cool wart on its filename stuff, the whole ball of wax had too many special cases for different device types, permission areas of logical names, logical name table nesting rules, etc. Simpler was better. The second was the simplicity of the install... boot one file to prep the disk, one to copy a fs to the future swap system and a final one to get the ball rolling... for booting off of tape, on systems with no real memory, this kept what wound up in memory small enough to live in the sub Megabyte systems ot needed to work on... though once there was a lot more, this was left behind when you could just load one kernel with a ran disk to do all the setup... the different pieces of the install acted as a Koan for how Unix worked... Warner On Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 7:19 PM Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com> wrote: > I didn't really have a single "Aha" moment, but I remember borrowing > some books on Unix from the library and realizing it was more powerful > than anything else I'd used (up until then, I'd only really used > DOS/Windows, classic Mac OS, and Apple II systems; as you can probably > tell, I'm quite a bit younger than many other people on this list). > Shortly afterwards, I installed Linux (initially Mandrake 8.2, but I > replaced it with Debian 3.0 shortly thereafter; I still have my > original Debian 3.0 install around as a VM that I use from time to > time) and never really looked back. I did keep a Windows dual boot > around for a while but that eventually went away (although I still do > have Windows VMs around). Soon after that, I decided I was going to > put together my own Unix-like OS; initially I was going to put > together a NeXTStep/OS X-like Linux distribution, but then later > decided I was going to write a QNX-like microkernel-based OS instead. > I still don't have anything that is actually useful at the moment, > although now I am making a bit better progress than in the past (I > changed my mind on several parts of the design and was quite busy with > other projects for a while). > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2783 bytes --]
I started using cards with a sperry univac scientific mainframe, the ibm mainframes with block terminals and later ibm "midrange" computers, when I finally got a network programming job on a SNI Unix system. Finally I felt free, I had the 'I can do what ever I want' feelingup to today.
On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 02:45:37PM -0700, Steve Johnson wrote:
>
>
>My Aha, Unix! moment was the Unix man pages, especially that they had
>a section for BUGS. The very reality of it attracted me. As Gloria
>Steinem said, "Something doesn't have to be perfect to be
>wonderful!" I notice that on Linux the older man pages still have
>BUG sections, but the newer ones don't. Telling. Even more
>telling is that 'man python' gives you a lot of information, but at
>the end where the Bugs section used to be is a section labled
>"LICENSING"...
>
>I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to
>several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers
>and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System. The sequence that
>initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was:
>% echo hello joe > hijoe
>% cat hijoe
>hello joe
>
Coming from a Multics background, my first view of Unix (sort of
v7 ported to a Bull Mini6) was more like a rant: "cwd" on Multics
has been renamed to a more cryptic "cd" on Unix, these guys have
done worse!
The Aha! came when I realized that redirections were so simple...
Pierre
> From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
>
> > From: Doug McIlroy
>
> > doing legwork for Multics I ran the following experiment on a lot of
> > then-current time-sharing systems.
>
> Fascinating; you don't happen to remember the ones you tried, do you?
>
> Also, when you say "legwork for Multics", was this something done during
> the planning stages (so, say '64-'65), or later on?
It was probably 1965. The places we visited
included at least Rand, NBS, Michigan, and Dartmouth.
I specifically remember trying the experiment
at Michigan and Dartmouth. There were other places,
too, but they've dropped from memory.
Doug
On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? When I discovered that there was nothing special about the Shell i.e. I could write/modify it, as it was not privileged in any way (unlike, cough cough, DCL etc). -- Dave
Indeed, the shell and just about any command (save a few setuid ones) were just programs that you could just as soon have your own copies of.
that was always very neat coming from more “canned” systems.
> On Oct 17, 2019, at 8:49 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote:
>
>> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight.
> Welcome.
>> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
>> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>>
>> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
>> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
>> previously used?
>
> When I discovered that there was nothing special about the Shell i.e. I could write/modify it, as it was not privileged in any way (unlike, cough cough, DCL etc).
>
> -- Dave
Bakul Shah: Being an OS student I had read "The Unix Timesharing System" paper by Ritchie and Thompson and had wanted to use Unix years before I actually had the chance. I don't remember an "Aha!" moment but I took to it like a duck to water. Most everything felt just so comfortable and right. It was very much as I had imagined it to be. ===== That's more or less what it was like to me. Not so much an aha! moment, more just a feeling of coming home. It took a while to understand the different way things worked in UNIX (I had previously used TOPS-10 for several years) but as it all sank in it felt more and more right. C felt the same way. It took me a while to grok the pointer syntax (I had done a lot of MACRO-10 programming so I certainly understood the concept, just not how it fit into the higher- level language), but things like the three-clause condition in for so that all control for a loop could be in one place were just magically right. I don't think I read the CACM paper before I touched UNIX, but I had read both editions of Software Tools, so my brain was perhaps pre-seeded with some of the ideas. Norman Wilson Toronto ON
On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 03:25:52PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
> That's more or less what it was like to me. Not so much
> an aha! moment, more just a feeling of coming home. It
> took a while to understand the different way things worked
> in UNIX (I had previously used TOPS-10 for several years)
> but as it all sank in it felt more and more right.
Up to my 30s I had only vaguely known about computers, it definitely wasn't my
thing, I was a musician. But one day I found myself buying a $3k Packard Bell
486, learnt DOS and began buying CD-ROMS with software often taken straight
off the big ftp sites. That is how I discovered Unix and how much better than
DOS it was. Within a year (1994) I was running my own Linux system. There was
a lot of stuff being ported from Solaris and the BSDs and I was learning C
just to build utilities I wanted, but if there was a 'killer app' for me that
was the aha! moment, it was a close contest between adventure and ching.
The odd thing was that adventure was certainly playable, but ching only
existed as a weird hybrid of shell script and two C programs and used some
kind of manpage macros and I didn't understand why but I loved it. That was my
introduction really to the Unix tools philosophy and suddenly the way my Linux
system worked made sense. Being also a history buff I wanted to know how this
all happened and that led to Don Libes and Life With Unix and my fate was
sealed.
--
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by.
i was writing the small utilities for the first
pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....)
so, cd was next.
% pwd
/usr/ken
% cd /tmp
% pwd
/usr/ken
Aha!
On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 1:12 PM Sean Dwyer <ewe2@ewe2.ninja> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 03:25:52PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
> > That's more or less what it was like to me. Not so much
> > an aha! moment, more just a feeling of coming home. It
> > took a while to understand the different way things worked
> > in UNIX (I had previously used TOPS-10 for several years)
> > but as it all sank in it felt more and more right.
>
> Up to my 30s I had only vaguely known about computers, it definitely wasn't my
> thing, I was a musician. But one day I found myself buying a $3k Packard Bell
> 486, learnt DOS and began buying CD-ROMS with software often taken straight
> off the big ftp sites. That is how I discovered Unix and how much better than
> DOS it was. Within a year (1994) I was running my own Linux system. There was
> a lot of stuff being ported from Solaris and the BSDs and I was learning C
> just to build utilities I wanted, but if there was a 'killer app' for me that
> was the aha! moment, it was a close contest between adventure and ching.
>
> The odd thing was that adventure was certainly playable, but ching only
> existed as a weird hybrid of shell script and two C programs and used some
> kind of manpage macros and I didn't understand why but I loved it. That was my
> introduction really to the Unix tools philosophy and suddenly the way my Linux
> system worked made sense. Being also a history buff I wanted to know how this
> all happened and that led to Don Libes and Life With Unix and my fate was
> sealed.
>
> --
> I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by.
On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 07:31:55PM -0700, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:
> i was writing the small utilities for the first
> pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....)
>
> so, cd was next.
>
> % pwd
> /usr/ken
> % cd /tmp
> % pwd
> /usr/ken
>
> Aha!
As in, 'cd' has to be built into the shell. If it's external, the forked
child gets to change directory and the parent shell doesn't. I'm just
putting this in for those who didn't spot the nuance immediately -- took
me a few tens of seconds.
But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell?
Thanks, Warren
On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 19:31:55 -0700 Ken Thompson via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
> i was writing the small utilities for the first
> pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....)
>
> so, cd was next.
>
> % pwd
> /usr/ken
> % cd /tmp
> % pwd
> /usr/ken
>
> Aha!
It was probably more like this:
% pwd
/usr/ken
?
Aha!
On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 07:31:55PM -0700, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:
> i was writing the small utilities for the first
> pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....)
>
> so, cd was next.
>
> % pwd
> /usr/ken
> % cd /tmp
> % pwd
> /usr/ken
>
> Aha!
I'm old and slow, had to think about that one. Aha indeed!
>> % pwd >> /usr/ken >> % cd /tmp >> % pwd >> /usr/ken >> >> Aha! > I'm old and slow, had to think about that one. Aha indeed! I've actually been asking this (or, as a variation, how a child can set environment in its parent) as an interview question for unix sysadmins for the past fifteen or so years. Maybe one in three gets it. The answer that I'm secretly hoping for, no one has ever yet given me: hashbrown/home/jason-112719: /bin/pwd /home/jason hashbrown/home/jason-112720: ./cd.sh /tmp hashbrown/home/jason-112721: /bin/pwd /tmp hashbrown/home/jason-112722: cat cd.sh cat: cd.sh: No such file or directory hashbrown/home/jason-112723: cat ~/cd.sh #!/bin/sh test -n "$1" && TARGET=$1 || TARGET=$HOME ( echo "call (int) chdir(\"$TARGET\")" ; echo detach ; echo quit ) | gdb -q -p $PPID >/dev/null 2>&1 & "With ptrace(2) all things are possible." -Jason
You could cheat a little:
CHDIR=/usr/newFolder
echo “cd ${CHDIR}” > ./changeEnv
. ./changeEnv
Bill Corcoran
> On Oct 21, 2019, at 6:52 AM, "jason-tuhs@shalott.net" <jason-tuhs@shalott.net> wrote:
>
>
>>> % pwd
>>> /usr/ken
>>> % cd /tmp
>>> % pwd
>>> /usr/ken
>>>
>>> Aha!
>
>> I'm old and slow, had to think about that one. Aha indeed!
>
> I've actually been asking this (or, as a variation, how a child can set environment in its parent) as an interview question for unix sysadmins for the past fifteen or so years. Maybe one in three gets it.
>
> The answer that I'm secretly hoping for, no one has ever yet given me:
>
>
> hashbrown/home/jason-112719: /bin/pwd
> /home/jason
>
> hashbrown/home/jason-112720: ./cd.sh /tmp
>
> hashbrown/home/jason-112721: /bin/pwd
> /tmp
>
> hashbrown/home/jason-112722: cat cd.sh
> cat: cd.sh: No such file or directory
>
> hashbrown/home/jason-112723: cat ~/cd.sh
> #!/bin/sh
>
> test -n "$1" && TARGET=$1 || TARGET=$HOME
>
> ( echo "call (int) chdir(\"$TARGET\")" ; echo detach ; echo quit ) | gdb -q -p $PPID >/dev/null 2>&1 &
>
>
> "With ptrace(2) all things are possible."
>
>
> -Jason
>
> From: Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> > But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell? No. See "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", in section "Process control". Also, the old 'cd' had different syntax than today's (since there was no notion of a pathname in the earliest Unix); it took instead a list of directories (e.g. "cd dd ken"). Noel
{Been meaning to get to this one for a while...} > From: Pat Barron <patbarron@acm.org> > The idea of processes being able to talk to each other (without some > kind of pre-arrangement, like setting up a pipe between them, or using > temporary files) was just amazing ... On V7m, I stumbled across the > mpx(5) man page. It's probably worth pointing out that before V7, stock Unix _didn't_ have a way for two un-related processes to communicate, hence the invention of port() by Rand. See: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6 https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6/doc/ipc (Note: BBN did _not_ do the original port() stuff, they just used it.) Noel
Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote: > [...] What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems > you'd previously used? Not particularly serious, but still enlightening, was the first time I did: cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp on Linux and had white noise come out of the speaker. It was one of the first things that made me realize how far the "everything is a file" concept can be taken. OK, Unix-like moment. -- Dario Niedermann. Also on the Internet at: gopher://darioniedermann.it/ <> https://www.darioniedermann.it/
On 21/10/19, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> > > > But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell? > > No. See "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", in section "Process > control". In fact, in our code it is: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/cmd/sh.s#L367 Probably a later version than what dmr described. And it would contradict the timing of ken's aha-moment story. aap
> On Oct 21, 2019, at 3:45 AM, jason-tuhs@shalott.net wrote:
>
> hashbrown/home/jason-112723: cat ~/cd.sh
> #!/bin/sh
>
> test -n "$1" && TARGET=$1 || TARGET=$HOME
>
> ( echo "call (int) chdir(\"$TARGET\")" ; echo detach ; echo quit ) | gdb -q -p $PPID >/dev/null 2>&1 &
>
>
> "With ptrace(2) all things are possible.”
I honestly don’t know whether to applaud or vomit.
Adam
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 583 bytes --] On 2019-Oct-21 12:37:20 +1000, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote: >As in, 'cd' has to be built into the shell. If it's external, the forked >child gets to change directory and the parent shell doesn't. I'm just >putting this in for those who didn't spot the nuance immediately -- took >me a few tens of seconds. I'm still amazed at the number of people who don't get this and write shellscripts that save the working directory on entry and do an explicit cd at the end (usually without considering that the shellscript could die at other locations). -- Peter Jeremy [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 963 bytes --]
On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 12:37:20PM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 07:31:55PM -0700, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:
> > i was writing the small utilities for the first
> > pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....)
> >
> > so, cd was next.
> >
> > % pwd
> > /usr/ken
> > % cd /tmp
> > % pwd
> > /usr/ken
> >
> > Aha!
>
> As in, 'cd' has to be built into the shell. If it's external, the forked
> child gets to change directory and the parent shell doesn't. I'm just
> putting this in for those who didn't spot the nuance immediately -- took
> me a few tens of seconds.
>
> But wasn't "chdir" built into the PDP-7 Unix shell?
>
> Thanks, Warren
Aha indeed, Ken & Warren!
chdir seems to be a syscall in 7 (sys4.c), its handling in sh mostly in xec.c,
a real workout for the preprocessor ;)
--
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by.
> From: Sean Dwyer > chdir seems to be a syscall in 7 (sys4.c) It's been a system call forever, see e.g.: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man2/chdir.2 (And the working dir was a property of the process, not data in the shell.) Noel
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 832 bytes --] On a somewhat related note, if someone could shine some light on, if such chdir() which wasn't yet integrated into the shell function independent of fork() as in did fork() just spawn off a new child shell if one did chdir() or more generally how did processes interact when/if more than one child existed. I know PDP-7 had some archaic IPC but haven't gotten around to grokking fork.s or others to understand the actual operation. On Tue, 22 Oct 2019 at 7:06 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > > From: Sean Dwyer > > > chdir seems to be a syscall in 7 (sys4.c) > > It's been a system call forever, see e.g.: > > https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man2/chdir.2 > > (And the working dir was a property of the process, not data in the shell.) > > Noel > -- Abhinav Rajagopalan [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2274 bytes --]
On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 07:52:32PM +0530, Abhinav Rajagopalan wrote: > On a somewhat related note, if someone could shine some light on, if > such chdir() which wasn't yet integrated into the shell function > independent of fork() as in did fork() just spawn off a new child shell > if one did chdir() or more generally how did processes interact when/if > more than one child existed. I know PDP-7 had some archaic IPC but > haven't gotten around to grokking fork.s or others to understand the > actual operation. The best place to learn all this is Dennis' paper on the Evolution of Unix: http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/aosref/ritchie84evolution.pdf Cheers, Warren
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1364 bytes --] Hi! Mine was more of an "oh oh" moment... when, back in 1994, I needed to clean up /tmp on the company Data General Aviion that I was administering... and I typed "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" Notice the involuntary space between /tmp and /* ... hence the "oh oh..." moment when I started seeing this take long... and when I typed Ctrl-C and started seeing some things like "/bin/ls not found" when I looked for the files in / ... Gilles Le ven. 11 oct. 2019 à 00:55, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> a écrit : > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > -- *Gilles Gravier* - Gilles@Gravier.org GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437 Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0xA610DB098DE6D026 <http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=0xA610DB098DE6D026&op=index> [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2968 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4974 bytes --] I can't remember an epiphanal "a-ha!" moment. I remember that by 1999 I had migrated from OS/2 to Linux as my primary computing environment, and I've never really left; I ran Linux for a bunch of years, and then slid over to OS X, where I've mostly remained--the host OS on most of the modern stuff I own is either OS X or Linux, with other Unixes usually running under emulation (I have a NeXTStation and three Sparc machines of varying vintage, all running period-appropriate Unixes, when I fire them up, but they don't stay running; the MicroVAX comes frustratingly close to running but doesn't quite, and I haven't even powered up the VAX 11/730 I got a couple months ago to see how close it is to usable). Turning back the clock farther... In 1998 I remember someone saying, with a mixture of awe and horror, "I've never seen anyone use a GUI as just a place to stash a bunch of terminal windows before." I also remember screwing with dialup scripts to run PPP on my Linux machine at home, which must have been '96 or so? So that early I was clearly living in it at least enough that I didn't want to leave to fire up another OS (although I also remember learning far too much about PPP on OS/2), and spending enough time connected to the Internet that I wanted a network stack running all the time. I remember Cygwin on NT and ... EMX, I think it was? ... to let me use and build Unixy-feeling things on NT and OS/2 respectively, which suggests that while I was still using them in the mid-to-late 90s I kinda hated them. (That's not quite fair; OS/2 had some nice points.) In 1992 or 1993 I remember fiddling with definitions inside kernel include files to make my soundcard, my parallel port, and my modem all work at the same time (again on Linux), and not finding that a big deal (I had some nonstandard IRQs set up to get everything to play nice together, IIRC). I guess that was also about when I was hand-editing my partition table to multiboot a 386DX/25 of my very own so it could run Linux and DOS/Win3.11 off the same drive. I remember some very early Linux experiences (late '91 or early '92) as my first exposure to bash (the Sun workstations at school ran SunOS and my environment, at least, was csh, which was certainly less unpleasant than /bin/sh) and realizing how vastly much more I liked using bash than csh, as well as the difficulty my muscle memory had transitioning from esc-completion to tab-completion. I remember that I didn't really speak C at that point. Though come to think of it I didn't really get _fluent_ at C until the late-ish 90s. The first Unix system I used was something, probably Xenix, on a Dell '386 in a physics lab at UT Austin in the summer of '89, and while I didn't really "get" Unix at that point, I knew I liked it better than DOS, and it let me access Usenet, which was a huge deal. That was the same summer and same lab where I discovered the flight simulator on the SGI IRIS. I'm sure that hardware was expensive and used to do complex nonlinear dynamic simulations for people, but it was also certainly used for flying pretend planes in what seemed then like an astonishingly realistically rendered 3-D world. That summer was when I made the choice between Emacs and vi, and that choice has stuck with me for 30 years. In two more years the core of my .emacs file (which I inherited, obviously) will be old enough to be president. Adam On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 10:14 PM Gilles Gravier <gilles@gravier.org> wrote: > Hi! > > Mine was more of an "oh oh" moment... when, back in 1994, I needed to > clean up /tmp on the company Data General Aviion that I was > administering... and I typed "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" > > Notice the involuntary space between /tmp and /* ... hence the "oh oh..." > moment when I started seeing this take long... and when I typed Ctrl-C and > started seeing some things like "/bin/ls not found" when I looked for the > files in / ... > > Gilles > > Le ven. 11 oct. 2019 à 00:55, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> a écrit : > >> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. >> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you >> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. >> >> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you >> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd >> previously used? >> >> Mine was: Oh, I can: >> + write a simple script >> + to edit a file on the fly >> + with no temporary files (a la pipes) >> + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! >> >> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. >> >> Cheers, Warren >> > > > -- > *Gilles Gravier* - Gilles@Gravier.org > GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437 > Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0xA610DB098DE6D026 > <http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=0xA610DB098DE6D026&op=index> > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 7051 bytes --]
More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
I posted a "paper" here about how to recover from that on a Masscomp so yeah, guilty as well. It was a learning experience. On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:08:57AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote: > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) > > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: > >"sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 352 bytes --] I turned it into a reflex tester: trap "ls | wc ; exit" 1 2 3 15 echo go... `ls | wc` rm -f * And I got a prize at Usenix for it. On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote: > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) > > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: > > "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 743 bytes --]
On 23 Oct 2019, at 17:17, Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I turned it into a reflex tester:
> trap "ls | wc ; exit" 1 2 3 15
> echo go... `ls | wc`
> rm -f *
>
> And I got a prize at Usenix for it.
I assume this was tested both on personal and work systems to see if the reflex speed changed?
Arrigo
I had posted a question on sys.unix.wizards about this a long long time ago when in academia. The gist of it was: “when does the system die after issuing the lethal command?”
We tested on a limited number of systems (Linux with kernel around 1.0, SunOS 4.1.4, SGI Irix and both DEC OSF/1 and Ultrix) but I lost the results :(
> On 23 Oct 2019, at 17:11, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> I posted a "paper" here about how to recover from that on a Masscomp
> so yeah, guilty as well. It was a learning experience.
>
> On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:08:57AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
>>
>> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>>> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 476 bytes --] On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:26 AM Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote: > I had posted a question on sys.unix.wizards about this a long long time > ago when in academia. The gist of it was: “when does the system die after > issuing the lethal command?” > > We tested on a limited number of systems (Linux with kernel around 1.0, > SunOS 4.1.4, SGI Irix and both DEC OSF/1 and Ultrix) but I lost the results > :( > The irony.... - Dan C. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 803 bytes --]
Laugh out loud moment of the day...
On 10/23/2019 11:33 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
>
> The irony....
>
> - Dan C.
On 10/23/19 10:08 AM, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
>
> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
>
Oh yeah. Did something similar on my Powerbook back around Panther:
sudo rm -fr /bin
I heart my Macs (all of 'em), it was just a matter of copying back the
bin directory or reinstalling over the existing files or grabbing the
timemachine copy or somesuch... whatever it was, it was 20 minutes of
frustration, then all good. Try that on linux... no, don't :), unless
you're doing timeshift or something similar and just wanna have some fun.
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1141 bytes --] _These_ days on the Mac, the root filesystem is mounted ro with some cute overmounting tricks such that everything mutable in normal operations lives in /System/Volumes/Data. I presume updates take the form of booting into single-user-mode and running a script to remount rw and copy, but I haven't actually looked into it. Adam On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 9:45 AM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote: > On 10/23/19 10:08 AM, Arthur Krewat wrote: > > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;) > > > > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote: > >> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*" > > > Oh yeah. Did something similar on my Powerbook back around Panther: > > sudo rm -fr /bin > > I heart my Macs (all of 'em), it was just a matter of copying back the > bin directory or reinstalling over the existing files or grabbing the > timemachine copy or somesuch... whatever it was, it was 20 minutes of > frustration, then all good. Try that on linux... no, don't :), unless > you're doing timeshift or something similar and just wanna have some fun. > > Will > > > -- > GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1580 bytes --]
Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> writes:
> Try that on linux... no, don't :)
We accidentally totally hosed a Linux system running MySQL a dozen or so
years back. Redhat, and pretty much "rpm -qa | xargs rpm -e". Totally
destroyed the ability to do anything at all on that box, of course, even
using the logged-in shell that caused the damage. We set up a new host,
replicated the running database across, and retired the original. No
down time, no data loss. :)
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 777 bytes --] Manual small enough to pick up. Man pages for each program. IO simple and made sense. -jsq On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote: > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1140 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3196 bytes --] On 10/25/19 3:58 PM, John S Quarterman wrote: > Manual small enough to pick up. Man pages for each program. IO simple > and made sense. -jsq > > On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org > <mailto:wkt@tuhs.org>> wrote: > > All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. > Welcome. > A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you > if the conversation goes a bit off-topic. > > So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the > systems you'd > previously used? > > Mine was: Oh, I can: > + write a simple script > + to edit a file on the fly > + with no temporary files (a la pipes) > + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! > > I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. > > Cheers, Warren > I've been watching this thread and thinking to myself, what was my personal aha moment? I guess it came to me in 1993 when I downloaded Patrick Volkerding's magnificent 11 floppy labor of love via my amazingly fast 300 baud modem attached to the University of Texas at Arlington's VMS system with a gateway to the internet. After many weeks of trying, I eventually got Slackware downloaded and burned to floppies. After booting up and after another couple of weeks of configuration frustration, I was able to run X on my machine and while it would be another decade before I switched over permanently, I never got over how much more powerful *nix was than anything I'd been exposed to and way more interesting than Windows 3 which was prevalent at the time. I was a C programmer back then and to have access to a system that was predicated on the language was awesome. Then In 2005, I bought a powerbook with my bonus, I learned you could have your cake (beautiful gui - thank you Next) and eat it too (thank you FreeBSD) and after that you couldn't pay me enough to ever switch back to windows :). Then, In 2019, I downloaded Mint 19.2 Tina Cinnamon 64 bit edition to my $300 Lenovo Thinkpad T430, installed zfsutils and marveled at how far linux has come. Oh, wait! Last week, I... But seriously, I am constantly surprised at how Unix underpins so much of my computing happiness. Gone are the doldrums of blue screens, stoopid command lines, even stoopider menus, microsoft bob's, and paper clip wizards,. Every time I move a mouse in the classroom and windows shows up, I shudder. Then I calmly connect my hdmi cable from my laptop to the projector, breathe a sigh of relief, and fire up my Mac/Linux/FreeBSD/Unix v6/v7/v0 environment and show my students what it means to be free :). OK, so technically speaking these aren't exactly Unix recollections, but they are certainly dependent on their Unix forebears and wouldn't exist without that heritage. Thank you Unix pioneers for making such a fun (something new to learn every day) system. Oh, and thanks for the file metaphor, and thanks for vi, best editor ever, and for C, and and and... Thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4530 bytes --]
On Wed, 23 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
>
> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
It's almot becomea rite of passage :-)
-- Dave
The year was 1986. Top Gun was in the theaters. Lionel Ritchie was belting out “Say you, say me” on serious overplay.
I was working on the coolest machine I ever saw. The Motorola S290. Initially, we had System III and eventually System V. At the time, I learned MS DOS months before I was exposed to UNIX. I could not understand how a new small Motorola UNIX Super-microcomputer could have such an extensive set of documentation. I had to read these huge books to learn this same system could run computers from DEC and others. These UNIX books were so extensive and I found there were two ways to use UNIX: (1) sign on to the system at at work; or, (2) sign on to the system in my imagination. Both were equally as fun.
The Motorola S290 had a small DPU tower called Data Processing Unit and several other similar shaped small towers linked by a SCSI bus that housed 5.25” devices of the day. This included 50MB hard disks, Wangtek Streaming Tape Drive.
Yes! You could mount a streaming tape as a block device! It would “shoe shine” the tape heads if you “cd” into a formatted tape. It was not practical as a block device, but it worked.
The Motorola S290 DPU ran a primary operating system called ISOS. It was UNIX like. But not UNIX. Boot disks had to have an ISOS partition and a UNIX partition.
The Motorola S290 would first boot ISOS. Then, UNIX would start afterwards.
ISOS has similar UNIX commands like “cd”, “ls”, and “ps”
After working in a UNIX shell one day, I signed on to ISOS. I wanted to understand how UNIX integrated with ISOS.
What blew my 1986 kid mind: After signing on to ISOS, I did a “ps”
PID PPID ... COMMAND
123 2 “/UNIX”
Aha UNIX! UNIX was a process running under ISOS!
Bill Corcoran
> On Oct 10, 2019, at 4:56 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
> A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
> if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.
>
> So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?
>
> Mine was: Oh, I can:
> + write a simple script
> + to edit a file on the fly
> + with no temporary files (a la pipes)
> + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!
>
> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.
>
> Cheers, Warren