From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2017 17:12:39 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] 197[78] usenix conf. at columbia, magtapes "found in the street"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: This sounds like Ken's v6 patch tape; which was swapped around at USENIX meetings and 77-78 sound about right as the time frame. On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 5:05 PM, ron minnich wrote: > Random memories, possibly wrong. > > In 1977/78 I was at udel and had done a fair amount of work on unix but as > a lowly undergrad did not get to go to the Columbia Usenix meeting. Ed > Szurkowski of udel went. Ed was the grad student who did hardware design > for 11s for Autotote (another story) but also stood up a lot of the early > unix 11s at udel starting in 1976, starting with an 11/70. Mike Muus used > to come up and visit us at udel and Mike and Ed would try to ask questions > the other could not answer. Mike always had a funny story or two. > > Ed later went to Bell Labs and I lost track of him. > > The directions for the MTA were fairly clear: it listed a stop that you > under no circumstances should get off at, and if you did get off at, you > should not go up to the street, lest you never return. This was no joke. > Some places in NY were pretty hazardous in those days. > > I *think* this was the meeting where Ken showed up with a bunch of > magtapes, and Ed claimed that, in Ken's word, they were "... found in the > street." > > This part I remember well: Ed returning with two magtapes and our desire > to upgrade. We at udel, like many places, had done lots of our own mods to > the kernel, which we wanted to keep. So we ran a diff between trees, and I > wrote a merge with TECO and ed which got it all put together. I later > realized this was a very early form of 'patch', as it used patterns, not > line numbers, to figure out how to paste things back together. I really got > to love regex in those years. > > Except for one file: the tools just would not merge them. Ed later > realized there was one key difference that we had not noticed, a missing > comment, namely, the Western Electric copyright notice ... > > I'm kinda sorry that our "udel Unix" is lost to the great /dev/null, it > would be interesting to see it now. > > ron > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: