[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Mark Longridge]

Hi folks,

I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
appeared in Unix v7. It would be interesting to know if one could pass
a file from one Unix v5 machine to another without having to store it
on a magnetic tape.

There's some reference to a mysterious "Spider Interface" in the Unix
v5 manual. It seems to have something to do with DR-11B (which is a
general purpose direct memory access interface to the PDP-11 Unibus).

There's also reference to the "Spider line-printer" :)

Mark

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Mary Ann Horton]

At Bell Labs, PWB (1, I think, which was V6-based) had a sophisticated 
RJE engine that could submit jobs to the GE mainframe and get the output 
back (hence the GECOS field in /etc/passwd.) This was also used to 
submit jobs to be printed using the opr (off-line print) command.

At Berkeley, in 1978 we originally had a "cross-over cable" (basically a 
null modem, my lousy soldering job) in our patch panel, to allow two 
UNIX boxes to cat files across - not even Kermit, as I recall.

Shortly thereafter in 1978, Eric Schmidt (yes, that Eric Schmidt) wrote 
Berknet, which was similar to UUCP but didn't use modems, it ran over 
null modem serial line interconnections.  It ran on V6, V7, and the Vax.

For a few years, the Berknet link between ucbvax (which had a modem and 
was on UUCP) and ingvax (which was on the ARPANET) was the gateway 
between the UUCP and Usenet networks and the ARPANET.

On 08/21/2014 08:42 PM, Mark Longridge wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
> appeared in Unix v7. It would be interesting to know if one could pass
> a file from one Unix v5 machine to another without having to store it
> on a magnetic tape.
>
> There's some reference to a mysterious "Spider Interface" in the Unix
> v5 manual. It seems to have something to do with DR-11B (which is a
> general purpose direct memory access interface to the PDP-11 Unibus).
>
> There's also reference to the "Spider line-printer" :)
>
> Mark
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Cory Smelosky]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Mary Ann Horton wrote:

>
[snip]
> Shortly thereafter in 1978, Eric Schmidt (yes, that Eric Schmidt) wrote 
> Berknet, which was similar to UUCP but didn't use modems, it ran over null 
> modem serial line interconnections.  It ran on V6, V7, and the Vax.
>

How does that Berknet differ from the Berknet in...4.0/4.1BSD?  I've seen 
what I THINK was ethernet code there...but I couldn't be sure as I 
couldn't even decipher the addressing scheme. ;)

I've been meaning to ask about Berknet, anyway.  One of my side projects 
is to get it operational.

> For a few years, the Berknet link between ucbvax (which had a modem and was 
> on UUCP) and ingvax (which was on the ARPANET) was the gateway between the 
> UUCP and Usenet networks and the ARPANET.
>

-- 
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Clem Cole]

4.1 did not have Ethernet support from UCB. only Berknet.   the original ip stack with Ethernet support for 4.1 was done at BBN.   the interface is classic unix using the open call.    similar to the MIT ChaosNet stack

CMU had a new os for the TripleDrip PERQ called Accent. it had a number of interesting concepts such as ports.    

Joy took the BBN stack and created Berkeley sockets as a reaction to Accent's networking scheme.  this would become 4.1A/B/C and eventually 4.2




btw.   CMU responded to 4.2 by taking the ideas from Accent and rewriting then and splicing them into BSD kernel to create Mach.      Which lives today as the core of both Mac OSx and iOS

Clem

> On Aug 22, 2014, at 6:12 PM, Cory Smelosky <csmelosky at gewt.net> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
>> 
> [snip]
>> Shortly thereafter in 1978, Eric Schmidt (yes, that Eric Schmidt) wrote Berknet, which was similar to UUCP but didn't use modems, it ran over null modem serial line interconnections.  It ran on V6, V7, and the Vax.
> 
> How does that Berknet differ from the Berknet in...4.0/4.1BSD?  I've seen what I THINK was ethernet code there...but I couldn't be sure as I couldn't even decipher the addressing scheme. ;)
> 
> I've been meaning to ask about Berknet, anyway.  One of my side projects is to get it operational.
> 
>> For a few years, the Berknet link between ucbvax (which had a modem and was on UUCP) and ingvax (which was on the ARPANET) was the gateway between the UUCP and Usenet networks and the ARPANET.
> 
> -- 
> Cory Smelosky
> http://gewt.net Personal stuff
> http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Clem Cole]

btw: the addressing scheme in Berknet is pretty simple.  it's mupltiplexing an 9600 baud rs232c connection point to point without full connectivity (like uucp).   although IIRC the sender did not have to specify the path.   Berknet figured it out for you - but I might be confusing a different network scheme from those days.  there were so many

Cl

> On Aug 24, 2014, at 6:46 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 4.1 did not have Ethernet support from UCB. only Berknet.   the original ip stack with Ethernet support for 4.1 was done at BBN.   the interface is classic unix using the open call.    similar to the MIT ChaosNet stack
> 
> CMU had a new os for the TripleDrip PERQ called Accent. it had a number of interesting concepts such as ports.    
> 
> Joy took the BBN stack and created Berkeley sockets as a reaction to Accent's networking scheme.  this would become 4.1A/B/C and eventually 4.2
> 
> 
> 
> 
> btw.   CMU responded to 4.2 by taking the ideas from Accent and rewriting then and splicing them into BSD kernel to create Mach.      Which lives today as the core of both Mac OSx and iOS
> 
> Clem
> 
>>> On Aug 22, 2014, at 6:12 PM, Cory Smelosky <csmelosky at gewt.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Shortly thereafter in 1978, Eric Schmidt (yes, that Eric Schmidt) wrote Berknet, which was similar to UUCP but didn't use modems, it ran over null modem serial line interconnections.  It ran on V6, V7, and the Vax.
>> 
>> How does that Berknet differ from the Berknet in...4.0/4.1BSD?  I've seen what I THINK was ethernet code there...but I couldn't be sure as I couldn't even decipher the addressing scheme. ;)
>> 
>> I've been meaning to ask about Berknet, anyway.  One of my side projects is to get it operational.
>> 
>>> For a few years, the Berknet link between ucbvax (which had a modem and was on UUCP) and ingvax (which was on the ARPANET) was the gateway between the UUCP and Usenet networks and the ARPANET.
>> 
>> -- 
>> Cory Smelosky
>> http://gewt.net Personal stuff
>> http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
>> _______________________________________________
>> TUHS mailing list
>> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[A. P. Garcia]

On Aug 24, 2014 5:47 PM, "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> btw.   CMU responded to 4.2 by taking the ideas from Accent and rewriting
then and splicing them into BSD kernel to create Mach.      Which lives
today as the core of both Mac OSx and iOS

And of course, before that, nextstep/openstep... and, well, hurd.  ;-)
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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Clem Cole]

next used Mach.  you're right next brought it into Apple

> On Aug 24, 2014, at 7:07 PM, "A. P. Garcia" <a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Aug 24, 2014 5:47 PM, "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> > btw.   CMU responded to 4.2 by taking the ideas from Accent and rewriting then and splicing them into BSD kernel to create Mach.      Which lives today as the core of both Mac OSx and iOS
> 
> And of course, before that, nextstep/openstep... and, well, hurd.  ;-)
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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Ronald Natalie]

On Aug 24, 2014, at 7:07 PM, A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On Aug 24, 2014 5:47 PM, "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> > btw.   CMU responded to 4.2 by taking the ideas from Accent and rewriting then and splicing them into BSD kernel to create Mach.      Which lives today as the core of both Mac OSx and iOS
> 
> And of course, before that, nextstep/openstep... and, well, hurd.  ;-)
> 
> 
Amusingly, when we got our first NeXT machines I was just poking around working on it and inadvertently typed "bg" to /bin/sh.

I got back "Job Control not Enabled."

Hey, that error message sounds familiar.   So I typed "set -J" 

"Job Control Enabled."

Hey, this is one my shells.    It has made it to NeXt via Mach via Doug Gwyn's System V on BSD tapes.

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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Cory Smelosky wrote:

> How does that Berknet differ from the Berknet in...4.0/4.1BSD?  I've 
> seen what I THINK was ethernet code there...but I couldn't be sure as 
> I couldn't even decipher the addressing scheme. ;)
>
> I've been meaning to ask about Berknet, anyway.  One of my side 
> projects is to get it operational.

I have read most (if not all) of the berknet docs and a lot of the code. 
The docs and code referenced a rcs, rcsq, and rcslog as some tools that 
could be ran without a personal account on a remote system. I didn't 
recognize rcsq, but also these references pre-dated Tichy's alternative 
to SCCS by a year or so.

Then I realized this is "remote computer system link" used something 
like: rcsq to see queued jobs no sent yet for CDC 6400; rcslog to see 
history of jobs sent that day; and rcsrm to delete a job not sent yet. 
Basic concepts similar to berknet (netq, netlog, netrm).
(The clue I found was in 
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1979/ERL-79-16.pdf)

I know the Cyber 6400 was used there (some of my interviewees told me 
about it). Does anyone know if Berknet's design was inspired by this 
"rcs"?  Where can I learn more about it? (as searching for "rcs" is 
difficult)

I don't see any ethernet code in Berknet. The author had a summer job at 
XEROX PARC I think in the middle of his Berknet project and discussed 
the low-level network concepts with Boggs. Later, they considered an 
LNI, an early token ring (if I understand correctly), device, and DMC-11 
link, but I don't think berknet was ever extended for those or used 
using ethernet.

Note that extending Berknet probably didn't make sense. It was all 
batched with all the systems known to each system hardcoded, compiled 
in. Smallest jobs sent first from the queue to neighboring system which 
would send the job to next as if it was queued locally until it arrived 
to desired system.  So retrieving an email (box) or doing a remote copy, 
you would have to wait for the jobs to get ran. The speed on the 1200 
baud links was only around 50 characters per second. (I think at best on 
9600 baud links was around 600 characters per second but normally 350 
cps.) In addition, berknet had hardcoded restrictions limiting 100,000 
characters per single job. (It was later extended to 500,000 characters 
for some machines, then all machines while still limiting only 200,000 
characters max size jobs during day time.) (I never used berknet only 
read code and docs and did some interviews with users.) It was quite 
limited compared to the new real-time tools and near 3Mb network that 
started being developed and used there a couple years later.

By the way, the early berknet had a symlink to the batch remote copy 
netcp called "rcp" which predated Joy's real-time remote file copy, rcp, 
by a few years. The early version also included a trivial "sendmail" to 
remotely send mail over the batch berknet to another berknet system (by 
running "mail" on the remote system later). It predated Allman's 
unrelated intelligent mailer by around two years. The Berknet tool was 
replaced and renamed with "sendberkmail".

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Clem Cole]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3193 bytes --]

​below​


On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Jeremy C. Reed <reed at reedmedia.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>  Does anyone know if Berknet's design was inspired by this
> "rcs"?  Where can I learn more about it? (as searching for "rcs" is
> ​ ​
> difficult)
>
​You'd have to ask Eric.   It was certainly there and the CDC box was used
a good bit before the Vaxen showed up, particular in EE for things like
SPICE, SPLICE, et al.

>
> I don't see any ethernet code in Berknet.

​There would not be any.   As I said, it pre-dated any Ethernet HW at UCB.
  It ran over 9600 bit RS-232C links (usually on a DZ11).​




> they considered an
> LNI, an early token ring (if I understand correctly), device,

​Yes - that is right.   It was a UCI/MIT device -- predates the Proteon
Ring products and Apollo's Ring.​




> and DMC-11
> link, but I don't think berknet was ever extended for those or used
> using ethernet.
>
​Correct​




>
>
> By the way, the early berknet had a symlink to the batch remote copy
> netcp called "rcp" which predated Joy's real-time remote file copy, rcp,
> by a few years.

​right.​





>  The early version also included a trivial "sendmail" to
> remotely send mail over the batch berknet to another berknet system (by
> running "mail" on the remote system later). It predated Allman's
> unrelated intelligent mailer by around two years. The Berknet tool was
> replaced and renamed with "sendberkmail".


​It was built using Kurt Shoen's "delivermail" which is in 4.1 (and was
what Eric would rewrite - see below).

The historical (hysterical) ​reason was this.

Eric was the main guy behind the 11/70 that the Ingress project had (ing70
on the Berknet) in Cory Hall. In Evans, was Ernie (and later ucbvax).   The
Internet connection was owned by the Ingress Group on a long interface pair
to an IMP at LBL.    UCB did not have its own IMP as CMU, MIT, Stanford
did.   The UUCP network came into Evans via Ernie, but Internet via Ing70.
  So the UCB mail system had to send the messages over the BerkNet to
proper host for import/export from campus.

Similarly, folks in other departments as they joined the Berknet had
private and strange mail interfaces.
Originally, different folks in different departments had been hacking mail,
delivermail etc al to handle different header formats.   Eric was a DB guy,
do he wrote a DB production language to walk headers because it was having
to deal with so much dead mail from unparsable messages that would get sent
to Ingress by the Berknet and then not be able to be delivered.

I have always contended that if he has left the SMTP connection out of
sendmail and called the BBN smtpd, to do import/export the way many other
UNIX MTAs did and left sendmail and as purely a middleware layer that
canonnicalized header, it would have been a different world.    Because it
was also the smtpd, people used it ever though most did not have the N
header problem we had at UCB.


The rest is history.
Clem
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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Dan Cross]

Unix was on the ARPAnet circa 1975 (if not earlier):
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc681

V6 was "released" in May 1975, and that document was also published in May
1975 and says that the software had been running for about a month, so it's
entirely possible that the ARPAnet Unix work was done before V6 (or perhaps
they were an early test site: I don't know what the policies were around
that).  It's been many years since I've read RFC681 closely and from my
quick skim just now, I don't think they say what version of Unix they're
running.  It's clear from the RFC that they had been running Unix for more
than a month given the description of their site, and if I had to hazard a
guess I'd say they were running V5; perhaps heavily patched.  I idly wonder
if any of that work has survived; it would be interesting to see an
ARPAnet/NCP implementation for early Unix.

But to address your question yes, Unix was certainly networked well before
UUCP emerged in V7.

        - Dan C.



On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 11:42 PM, Mark Longridge <cubexyz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
> appeared in Unix v7. It would be interesting to know if one could pass
> a file from one Unix v5 machine to another without having to store it
> on a magnetic tape.
>
> There's some reference to a mysterious "Spider Interface" in the Unix
> v5 manual. It seems to have something to do with DR-11B (which is a
> general purpose direct memory access interface to the PDP-11 Unibus).
>
> There's also reference to the "Spider line-printer" :)
>
> Mark
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Dan Cross]

(And upon slightly closer inspection of the RFC's header, it appears that
it was *written* in March of 1975, though Postel didn't post it until May
of that year.  That certainly predates the V6 release by a few months, so
it seems probable that they were, in fact, running either V5 [possibly with
patches] or a pre-release of V6.)


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Unix was on the ARPAnet circa 1975 (if not earlier):
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc681
>
> V6 was "released" in May 1975, and that document was also published in May
> 1975 and says that the software had been running for about a month, so it's
> entirely possible that the ARPAnet Unix work was done before V6 (or perhaps
> they were an early test site: I don't know what the policies were around
> that).  It's been many years since I've read RFC681 closely and from my
> quick skim just now, I don't think they say what version of Unix they're
> running.  It's clear from the RFC that they had been running Unix for more
> than a month given the description of their site, and if I had to hazard a
> guess I'd say they were running V5; perhaps heavily patched.  I idly wonder
> if any of that work has survived; it would be interesting to see an
> ARPAnet/NCP implementation for early Unix.
>
> But to address your question yes, Unix was certainly networked well before
> UUCP emerged in V7.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 11:42 PM, Mark Longridge <cubexyz at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
>> appeared in Unix v7. It would be interesting to know if one could pass
>> a file from one Unix v5 machine to another without having to store it
>> on a magnetic tape.
>>
>> There's some reference to a mysterious "Spider Interface" in the Unix
>> v5 manual. It seems to have something to do with DR-11B (which is a
>> general purpose direct memory access interface to the PDP-11 Unibus).
>>
>> There's also reference to the "Spider line-printer" :)
>>
>> Mark
>> _______________________________________________
>> TUHS mailing list
>> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>>
>
>
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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[John Cowan]

Dan Cross scripsit:

> Unix was on the ARPAnet circa 1975 (if not earlier):
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc681

#     filedes = open( "/dev/net/harv",2 );
#     if( filedes < 0 )
#        printf(" harvard is dead");
#     else
#        while( (nbytes=read(filedes,buf,80)) > 0 )
#           write( 0,buf,nbytes );                                   

If only this code still worked on modern Unixes!  The socket API is
fine, but there really was no need to break good old open, at least
for client-side operations.  Plan 9 got it right here, as usual.

#  In this light Bell was approached to see what their reaction
#  would be to an ARPA network wide liscense,  they  said  they were
#  open  to suggestions in that area.  So should enough people
#  become interested, perhaps a less expensive fee can be
#  negotiated.                                                        

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
    --John Greenleaf Whittier, "Maud Muller"

To which Bret Harte added in "Mrs. Judge Jenkins":

More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn't ought to be".

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
The whole of Gaul is quartered into three halves.
        --Julius Caesar

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Ronald Natalie]

I hate the socket interface, at least once you use it's goofy interface on UNIX, it works mostly like a file descriptor.
The sucky one is Windows which has a socket interface but it's file read and write calls are completely incompatible.

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Ronald Natalie wrote:

> I hate the socket interface, at least once you use it's goofy interface 
> on UNIX, it works mostly like a file descriptor.

In a previous slavery we had a simple socket library; the application did 
little more than say whether it was a client or a server etc.  I wish I 
could steal that code now...

> The sucky one is Windows which has a socket interface but it's file read 
> and write calls are completely incompatible.

Well, we mustn't imitate Unix, must we?

-- Dave

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 04:11:42AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> 
> > I hate the socket interface, at least once you use it's goofy interface 
> > on UNIX, it works mostly like a file descriptor.
> 
> In a previous slavery we had a simple socket library; the application did 
> little more than say whether it was a client or a server etc.  I wish I 
> could steal that code now...

lmbench has one:

/*
 * Get a TCP socket, bind it, figure out the port,
 * and advertise the port as program "prog".
 *
 * XXX - it would be nice if you could advertise ascii strings.
 */
int
tcp_server(int prog, int rdwr)

/*
 * Unadvertise the socket
 */
int
tcp_done(int prog)

/*
 * Accept a connection and return it
 */
int
tcp_accept(int sock, int rdwr)

/*
 * Connect to the TCP socket advertised as "prog" on "host" and
 * return the connected socket.
 *
 * Hacked Thu Oct 27 1994 to cache pmap_getport calls.  This saves
 * about 4000 usecs in loopback lat_connect calls.  I suppose we
 * should time gethostbyname() & pmap_getprot(), huh?
 */
int
tcp_connect(char *host, int prog, int rdwr)

void
sock_optimize(int sock, int flags)

int
sockport(int s)

I swiped all that code and we use it in bitkeeper.

        sock = tcp_server(0, port, 0);
        if (sock == -1) exit(1);
        verbose((stderr, "started server on port %d\n", sockport(sock)));

        while (1) {
                if ((nsock = tcp_accept(sock)) < 0) continue;
                peer = peeraddr(nsock);
                verbose((stderr, "connection from %s\n", peer));
                fin = fdopen(nsock, "r");
                fout = fdopen(nsock, "w");
                info_cmds(fin, fout, dashx);
                fclose(fin);
                fclose(fout);
                verbose((stderr, "%s is done\n", peer));
        }

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[John Cowan]

Larry McVoy scripsit:

> lmbench has one:

I have a similar library for Perl, taken from the Perl 4 man page.
(I finally got around to removing the &s from the procedure names.)
But the point is that it should work with the regular open() system
call, such that calling open("/dev/tcp/<host>/80", O_RDWR) should open
host "<host>" on port 80, and something like "serv(80, cookie)"
should copy a string into cookie such that open(cookie, O_RDWR) would
accept a connection.  Unfortunately, C makes it very hard to
override the meaning of global function names cleanly.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Even a refrigerator can conform to the XML Infoset, as long as it has
a door sticker saying "No information items inside".  --Eve Maler

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Larry McVoy wrote:

> > In a previous slavery we had a simple socket library; the application 
> > did little more than say whether it was a client or a server etc.  I 
> > wish I could steal that code now...
> 
> lmbench has one:

Yeah, that's pretty much what we did.  Conceptually, the client said 
"please connect me to Sydney's pogo stick server", and the server said "I 
am the Sydney pogo stick server".  Networking as it ought to be (none of 
this business about the right phase of the moon and looking for a few 
all-too-scarce virgins etc).  The config stuff was initially in flat 
files, and it was my job to convert the lot to OpenLDAP lookups.

-- Dave

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 06:37:59AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> > > In a previous slavery we had a simple socket library; the application 
> > > did little more than say whether it was a client or a server etc.  I 
> > > wish I could steal that code now...
> > 
> > lmbench has one:
> 
> Yeah, that's pretty much what we did.  Conceptually, the client said 
> "please connect me to Sydney's pogo stick server", and the server said "I 
> am the Sydney pogo stick server".  

If anyone wants the stuff we use, the stuff mentioned above, I can put it
up on the web.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 07:01:40AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Aug 2014, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> > If anyone wants the stuff we use, the stuff mentioned above, I can put 
> > it up on the web.
> 
> Pretty please!  For private use only, of course.

You'all can use it anywhere you like.

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/tcp.shar

It's not that big a deal (other than 20 years of bug fixes :)

Somewhere I have a bigger deal, at least I think it is, I made a library
to talk to Sun RPC servers in parallel.  I called it rpc vectors and Ron
Minnich used it to put a bunch of nfs servers together, he called that
bigfoot.  Paper below, if someone wants that code I can ship that too.
It was pretty neat, back in the days of 10Mbit ethernet I was querying
thousands of machines in a single call.  The code dealt with the fact
that you had to start eating the replies before you were done sending
the question :)

http://wenku.baidu.com/view/797c4ac62cc58bd63186bd1c.html

or for old school people

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/bigfoot.ps

The code was pretty small, pretty clever, it's a shame it didn't catch on.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[John Cowan]

Dave Horsfall scripsit:

> Well, we mustn't imitate Unix, must we?

I shall dub Windows "WIUB", for "WIUB Imitates Unix, Badly".  (Cf.
LIAR, the compiler for MIT Scheme, whose name means "LIAR Imitates
Apply Recursively".)

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Awk!" sed Grep. "A fscking python is perloining my Ruby; let me bash
    him with a Cshell!  Vi didn't I mount it on a troff?" --Francis Turner

[TUHS] portal daemon (was Re: networking on unix before uucp)

[Aaron J. Grier]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 11:57:01AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> #     filedes = open( "/dev/net/harv",2 );
> #     if( filedes < 0 )
> #        printf(" harvard is dead");
> #     else
> #        while( (nbytes=read(filedes,buf,80)) > 0 )
> #           write( 0,buf,nbytes );                                   
> 
> If only this code still worked on modern Unixes!  The socket API is
> fine, but there really was no need to break good old open, at least
> for client-side operations.  Plan 9 got it right here, as usual.

was this the impetus behind mount_portal in 4.4BSD?  It's still
available in NetBSD, although I've never played with it myself.

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier at poofygoof.com

[TUHS] portal daemon (was Re: networking on unix before uucp)

[Clem Cole]

Mumble -- I would say that BSD portals was more in response to an MIT idea
that the Apollo guys (Jim Rees I believe) put in domain as the Apollo Typed
File System.   At the time of the BSD, there was a lots of discussion going
on about how to move things out the kernel and a number of techniques were
considered -- Portals was one of them.


The idea of /dev/mumble/some_other_mumble was kicking around early UNIX for
a long time.   I think I first encountered it in the MIT Chaos code, but
the Arpanet NCP code may have redated its use.   The idea was simple, the
kernel's nami() function that was called by kernel open code (or any other
call the had to walk a pathname), left the pointer to the next undecoded
part of the path in the user's input buffer alone.   So a hack was put in
the kernel that caused open to vector to needed helper code for the network
to do the rest of the pathname to get the parameters.    The advantage of
this of course is open returns a real file descriptor.

BTW: One idea I had many years ago, and I remember talking to Dennis about
it at a couple of USENIX was similar to Apollo's typed scheme.   As dmr put
it to me at the time, UNIX has a typed file system with very few types.
 The question was if we opened up the typing scheme to allow for arbitrary
types, would you get more of mess or would the new feature be of an
advantage.  I was not doing research at the time - I was employed at
Masscomp and just getting a distributed FS was enough.  Since I did not
have a good use for the hack for EFS, I never tried to implement it.  It
was always on my "TODO" list.   Maybe when I retire and I can hack just for
the fun of it, I can try it ;-)

Clem


On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 3:15 PM, Aaron J. Grier <agrier at poofygoof.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 11:57:01AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> > #     filedes = open( "/dev/net/harv",2 );
> > #     if( filedes < 0 )
> > #        printf(" harvard is dead");
> > #     else
> > #        while( (nbytes=read(filedes,buf,80)) > 0 )
> > #           write( 0,buf,nbytes );
> >
> > If only this code still worked on modern Unixes!  The socket API is
> > fine, but there really was no need to break good old open, at least
> > for client-side operations.  Plan 9 got it right here, as usual.
>
> was this the impetus behind mount_portal in 4.4BSD?  It's still
> available in NetBSD, although I've never played with it myself.
>
> --
>   Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier at poofygoof.com
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
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[TUHS] portal daemon (was Re: networking on unix before uucp)

[Erik E. Fair]

Plan 9 went that way in a big way, as I recall the published papers
given at USENIX; they took naming in the UNIX filesystem to a high art.

	oh, and by the way, hi all,

	Erik Fair

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Dave Horsfall]

Does ACSnet (Australian Computer Science Network) count?  It ran over 
leased lines, supporting remote login and file transfer, back around the 
70s.  Definitely V6, because of the 11/40s at the time.  A commercial 
offshoot was MHSnet, which for all I know is still available.

-- Dave (dave:csu40)

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Mark Longridge <cubexyz at gmail.com>

    > I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp appeared
    > in Unix v7. 

In general, no, but I know of a number of networked Unixes prior to V6.

ISTR that there were a number of Unixes attached to the ARPANET; I know at
least one (at UIllinois) was - that was a V6 machine.

There were several different TCP/IP implementations done under V6; the
UIllinois guys did one (in C), BBN did one (by Jack Haverty, who ported one
done in assembler by IIRC SRI), and one was done at MIT (by Liza Martin, in
C). I don't think any of them saw significant deployment.

	Noel

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Ronald Natalie]

BRL backported the BSD port into our primarily version six UNIX kernel.   It took some shenanigans with overlays in the kernel to get it to work,.   Prior to that on the 11/70's we had been getting buy with just running the kernel in split I/D mode (the JHU / BRL boot loader was still one of the more interesting ones in my opinoin.   I like the BSD ones that "trapped" into the kernel to get it going, the JHU one placed the instruction to switch the processor mode right at high memory so that when the PC rolled over to zero it would be in the new mode).

Prior to UUCP we had some "kermit-ish" point to point feeds over the serial lines and we also bridged between our DEC 10 at JHU and the 11/45 running UNIX.   Similar links were set up between some of our LSI 11 UNIX/MINIUNIX systems.

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Ronald Natalie]

Prior to TCP, we also had our own homegrown ARPAnet V6 code in the kernel.    We actually got to pick up some systems when the ARPANET NCP switched to long leaders were our UIllinios ANTS system wasn't going to support.     At the same time we had the early BRLNET which essentially was a system to forward BUF structures and the associated data between machines both over a PCL-11 parallel link and some "high" speed DQ-11 serial links.    This gave us some rudimentary file sharing between our systems.

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com>

    > Unix was on the ARPAnet circa 1975 (if not earlier):
    > http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc681

Good catch; I didn't know of that document. There is a later, more extensive
document (set) about it, "A Network Unix System for the ARPANET", but that's
from several years later, and doesn't include anything about the history of
the implementation.

    > it's entirely possible that the ARPAnet Unix work was done before V6
    > ...
    > if I had to hazard a guess I'd say they were running V5; perhaps
    > heavily patched.

The RFC says this (translated to lower case since the all-upper made my
eyes hurt :-):

  FOr further information concerning the different I/O calls the reader is
  directed to The Unix Programmer's Manual, Fifth Edition, K. Thompson,
  D. M. Ritchie, June 1974.

which I think makes it pretty definitive...

      Noel

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Brian Walden]

Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
> 
> Right from the time Unix came up on the PDP-11 it was
> networked in the sense that it had dial-in and dial-out
> modems. Fairly early on, when Unixes appeared in other
> Bell Labs locations, Charlie Roberts provided a program
> for logging into another machine. It had an escape for
> file transfer, so it covered the basic functionality
> of rsh and ftp. It was not included in distributions,
> however, and its name escapes me. Maybe scj can add
> further details.
> 
> Doug

Are you thinking of the cu (call unix) command? But that was included in v7,
and don't think it was part of uucp. The escape was  ~   So a ~. to hangup,
~%put to send a file to the remote and ~%take to get one, and  ~~ to send a ~

later on, there was a ct (call terminal) command, expecting a terminal at the end
of phone line instead of another machine.

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Sven Mascheck]

Doug McIlroy wrote:
> Right from the time Unix came up on the PDP-11 it was
> networked in the sense that it had dial-in and dial-out
> modems. Fairly early on, when Unixes appeared in other
> Bell Labs locations, Charlie Roberts provided a program
> for logging into another machine. It had an escape for
> file transfer, so it covered the basic functionality
> of rsh and ftp. It was not included in distributions,
> however, and its name escapes me.

That's why you recorded it in this great article
"A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer's
 Manual, 1971-1986",  www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf

"The members of the research group had no desire to isolate
 themselves from the rest of the Bell Labs computing community.
 Nor could they at first justify the purchase of equipment such as
 line printers and tape drives, which cost more than their whole
 computer. Thus, besides dial-up access, which was a sine qua non,
 communication with other machines was a necessity. A 2000bps link
 provided remote job entry to the GECOS system at the Bell Labs
 computer center (opr, Thompson, v2). GECOS guru Charlie Roberts
 contributed tss to exploit the link for remote login and interactive
 file transfer (v2)."

Sven

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Clem Cole]

Years before cu/ct show up in the AT&T distributions, we* at CMU/EE Dept
we created a program called "connect" that had similar functionality.

BEGIN - old guy's memories ....

In the mid 70s the CS Dept "Front End" was two PDP-11's that all the serial
ports in the CS offices and terminal rooms were connected too, and they
were switched the PDP-10s, C.mmp and CM* over DR-11Bs IIRC.    EE & CS were
in a different buildings and we had not yet created the "distributed
front-end" out of LSI11's (we did that in EE actually later when we started
to playing with 3Meg ethernet).

We did have a couple of serial lines to the other building and had to share
them.   Since we wanted to use the UNIX system as a our own timesharing
system independent of CS, but still get to the CS machines over those
shared lines, "connect" was created so we could share the very few serial
connections to CS "front-end" and then we expanded it to be what we used to
support the microprocessor lab.

Another thing I remember from those days is that DEC DH11's serial ports
were expensive (DZ's did not exist and Able Computer did not yet exist).
 We also had DL/KL11's - which had nasty interrupt behavior.  With the
development of the CS Front End CMU had it's own RS-232C interface for the
Unibus called an ASLI - Asynchronous Line Interface - which were similar
too KL11s but had some other improvements (I've forgotten what was
different - should try to find Jim Teetor who I think was the creator).
 I have memories of some of first serial driver learnings chasing issues
with the ASLI.   I've complete forgotten the details now, but having come
over from the IBM/TSS and CMU's version of TOPS-10, I remember thinking is
was strange but so cool that driver was in a HLL not assembler.

END - old guy's memories ....


* "we" - Dan Klein, Tron McConnell, Ted Kowalski and I all hacked on it at
different times.   Frankly, I really do not remember who did what.
Obviously it it ran on V6 and Ted's V6++ system, but I don't think it ever
ran on V5.  I'm pretty sure Ted took it back to Summit after his OYOC year,
so I do not think cu had been done there yet.


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 11:08 PM, Brian Walden <tuhs at cuzuco.com> wrote:

> Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > > I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
> >
> > Right from the time Unix came up on the PDP-11 it was
> > networked in the sense that it had dial-in and dial-out
> > modems. Fairly early on, when Unixes appeared in other
> > Bell Labs locations, Charlie Roberts provided a program
> > for logging into another machine. It had an escape for
> > file transfer, so it covered the basic functionality
> > of rsh and ftp. It was not included in distributions,
> > however, and its name escapes me. Maybe scj can add
> > further details.
> >
> > Doug
>
> Are you thinking of the cu (call unix) command? But that was included in
> v7,
> and don't think it was part of uucp. The escape was  ~   So a ~. to hangup,
> ~%put to send a file to the remote and ~%take to get one, and  ~~ to send
> a ~
>
> later on, there was a ct (call terminal) command, expecting a terminal at
> the end
> of phone line instead of another machine.
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 03:32:45PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> BEGIN - old guy's memories ....

I see your old guy memories and "raise" my sort of old guy memories.
This is a bell labs blit story.  It relies heavily on 7 bit clean stuff.
I'm not entirely sure this ever worked reliably but here is what we did.

I was a grad student at UW Madison and shared an office with another guy.  We
had a serial line to the computing center across the street.  We had a blit,
loved it.  We wanted two.

I found an 8051 (or whatever version had a programable prom and 3
serial ports).  I wrote the code that used the 8th bit to say whether
it was my blit or my office mate's blit.  Burned the proms into two
of those, convinced the lab to let me put one on the other end and
presto!  Two blits running side by side, two happy TA's.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 08:42:53AM -0600, emanuel stiebler wrote:
> On 2014-08-23 22:59, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 03:32:45PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> >> BEGIN - old guy's memories ....
> >
> > I see your old guy memories and "raise" my sort of old guy memories.
> > This is a bell labs blit story.  It relies heavily on 7 bit clean stuff.
> > I'm not entirely sure this ever worked reliably but here is what we did.
> >
> > I was a grad student at UW Madison and shared an office with
> another guy.  We
> > had a serial line to the computing center across the street.  We
> had a blit,
> > loved it.  We wanted two.
> 
> Any chance, you still have any software for the BLIT?

Nope, all we were doing was muxing a serial line and that was 8051 assembler.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[A. P. Garcia]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 9:45 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 08:42:53AM -0600, emanuel stiebler wrote:
>> On 2014-08-23 22:59, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> > On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 03:32:45PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>> >> BEGIN - old guy's memories ....
>> >
>> > I see your old guy memories and "raise" my sort of old guy memories.
>> > This is a bell labs blit story.  It relies heavily on 7 bit clean stuff.
>> > I'm not entirely sure this ever worked reliably but here is what we did.
>> >
>> > I was a grad student at UW Madison and shared an office with
>> another guy.  We
>> > had a serial line to the computing center across the street.  We
>> had a blit,
>> > loved it.  We wanted two.
>>
>> Any chance, you still have any software for the BLIT?
>
> Nope, all we were doing was muxing a serial line and that was 8051 assembler.

still a useful little device today, at 1-2 dollars each...

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[arnold]

> Any chance, you still have any software for the BLIT?

See http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/5620_faq.html

for information and software.

Warren, maybe that software should make its way into the
TUHS archives too?

I too used a blit for a while. It sure could easily kill a vax/780.
But I really liked it. :-)

Arnold

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[emanuel stiebler]

On 2014-08-25 09:49, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> I too used a blit for a while. It sure could easily kill a vax/780.

Sorry, what do you mean by that?

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[arnold]

> On 2014-08-25 09:49, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> > I too used a blit for a while. It sure could easily kill a vax/780.

emanuel stiebler <emu at e-bbes.com> wrote:
> Sorry, what do you mean by that?

We had a vax 11/780, with serial lines to various peoples' offices.
BSD 4.1 at the time IIRC, later 4.2.  The whole ICS dept. at Ga Tech
was using it - faculty and grad students and lab staff (which I was one
of). The load average was constantly in the single digits.

Now add a few blits, where each physical terminal is doing the load of
4-6 virtual ones (using pseudo-ttys) - a shell on each pty and commands
running on each pty.  Bingo! The load average shoots way up.

So, the blit itself wasn't at fault.  All the people taking advantage
of what it could let them do, was.  At some point they wanted the lab
staff to stop using them because of this...

Arnold

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2840 bytes --]


On Aug 25, 2014, at 12:20 PM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> Now add a few blits, where each physical terminal is doing the load of
> 4-6 virtual ones (using pseudo-ttys) - a shell on each pty and commands
> running on each pty.  Bingo! The load average shoots way up.
> 
> So, the blit itself wasn't at fault.  All the people taking advantage
> of what it could let them do, was.  At some point they wanted the lab
> staff to stop using them because of this...

Not just the blit.  When the Telebit Trailblazer modems came out I was one of the first Canadian resellers.  Demoing those beasts was a tricky proposition.  I would haul one out to a customer site, wire it up to a serial port, then dial up to our office system and let the beast loose.

They made a great torture test for mid/late-80s tty drivers (and RS-232 hardware interfaces).  Simply 'cu'ing to the office over the modem link, then 'cat'ing a 100 K text file over the link would reliably take a 3B2 to its knees.  After the first couple of demo's – which invariably brought the local staff out of their offices to ask of the machine had crashed – I learned to schedule these over the lunch hour, or after office hours :-)

It was quite astounding to see the wide range of performance impacts this had on various systems.  3B* systems would tip over and die, except for the (built by Convergent Tech) 3B1.

Suns with VME-based serial cards performed quite well.  If anyone remembers 'ncc' on the UUCP network, it was a 3/280 with the 16(+?)-port  VME serial expansion board, a Telebit rackmount chassis populated with eight modem cards, and another eight Convergent NGEN workstations cabled up to do file transfer.  Even with all the Telebits running UUCP flat out at full speed, you couldn't tell it from the interactive response time on the terminals.

I also used to own an NBI UNIX system.  This was an interesting little beast.  It was a QBUS machine in a deskside tower case that really wanted to be a VAX, but it had on a 68010 processor.  It ran a very generic port of 4.2BSD (complete with the Pascal interpreter/compiler!).  The machine came with the QBUS equivalent of the VAX DH11 serial board, but there was a bug in NBI's driver for the board.  I lifted the DH11 driver from the UCB 4.2 tape, changed the name of one struct, compiled and linked a new kernel, and suddenly it, too, was capable of sustaining several high speed Telebit UUCP links.  (That machine was called 'canada' for anyone still keeping track.)

Fun times :-)

-- {alberta,pyramid,uwvax}!ncc!lyndon

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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[John Cowan]

Lyndon Nerenberg scripsit:

> It was quite astounding to see the wide range of performance impacts
> this had on various systems.  3B* systems would tip over and die,
> except for the (built by Convergent Tech) 3B1.

That surely had to do with how many characters the TTY board could cope
with before it had to interrupt the CPU.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing
on my shoulders.  --Hal Abelson

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Aug 25, 2014, at 2:06 PM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> That surely had to do with how many characters the TTY board could cope
> with before it had to interrupt the CPU.

There was the size of the serial chip's hardware buffer (before kicking the device driver with a hardware interrupt), and the driver itself kicking the kernel via a software interrupt when the driver's buffers were getting full.

--lyndon

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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Aug 25, 2014, at 2:14 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:

> There was the size of the serial chip's hardware buffer (before kicking the device driver with a hardware interrupt), and the driver itself kicking the kernel via a software interrupt when the driver's buffers were getting full.

What mattered was how the driver handed off the data from the bottom end of the driver code to the kernel.  Some drivers were better than others.  In most cases (of the serial ports), the culprit was the device driver.

--lyndon

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[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 01:00:45PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> It was quite astounding to see the wide range of performance impacts
> this had on various systems.  3B* systems would tip over and die, except
> for the (built by Convergent Tech) 3B1.

Sheesh, you people keep bringing up stuff from my past.  My buddy Rob
Netzer (used to be a prof at Brown, now works on BitKeeper with me)
had one of those 3B1s.  Neat machine.  Sort of like a desktop VAX.

We were roommates so we both got to use it, my dim memory is I bought one
too but that might be wrong.  What I do know is that we had a compiler
class together where the prof for the class had written a lex/yacc equiv,
we had to come up with a grammar for a subset of Ada and implement it.
Only problem was that the system was an IBM 360 or something miserable
like that.

So Rob went to the prof and said if we write our own lex/yacc equiv can
we do it on our own system?  The prof said yes and that was the brief
moment in time where I vaguely understood the difference between recursive
decent parsers and LL(1) and LR(1) (just kidding, I never really got it
other than recursive decent is what I'd write not knowing any better.
I think at one point maybe I got the difference but Rob is light years
ahead of me).

Anyhoo, we wrote an Ada compiler on the 3B1.  It didn't do everything,
I think we punted on late binding and some other stuff, but it did a
surprisingly large subset of Ada.  It opened my mind to what could be
accomplished in a semester.  Industry closed my mind to that because
I learned that all the shortcuts we took wouldn't work in industry.
But still.  A couple of guys made a compiler in a semester.  Kinda
Unix like.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[arnold]

Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 01:00:45PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> > It was quite astounding to see the wide range of performance impacts
> > this had on various systems.  3B* systems would tip over and die, except
> > for the (built by Convergent Tech) 3B1.
>
> Sheesh, you people keep bringing up stuff from my past.  My buddy Rob
> Netzer (used to be a prof at Brown, now works on BitKeeper with me)
> had one of those 3B1s.  Neat machine.  Sort of like a desktop VAX.

I had one too. (Also a trailblazer and then a worldblazer.) The 3B1 ran
SVR2; the BSD networking was available as an add-on with the ethernet
card.

I spent many happy hours working on that box, developing gawk and its
documentation; it was slow enough that you could see algorithmic
differences, e.g. standard diff vs. GNU diff.

It had one of those great AT&T keyboards (as did the blit).  The UI
wasn't anything special to write home about though.

For a while there was a separate 3b1.* set of newsgroups and an
archive of stuff at Ohio State; there remains a comp.sys.3b1 group
that still has some activity as new people try to revive some of
these machines and others who had them help out. Someone was writing
an emulator, but I don't think it ever got finished.

Ah, the memories .... :-)

Arnold

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Jason Stevens]

The 3b1 emulator now kind of boot!..

There is some issues with stuff, but for the most part, it works

http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=4149



-----Original Message-----
From: arnold@skeeve.com [mailto:arnold@skeeve.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 2:17 PM
To: lyndon at orthanc.ca; lm at mcvoy.com
Cc: rob at bolabs.com; tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 01:00:45PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> > It was quite astounding to see the wide range of performance impacts
> > this had on various systems.  3B* systems would tip over and die, except
> > for the (built by Convergent Tech) 3B1.
>
> Sheesh, you people keep bringing up stuff from my past.  My buddy Rob
> Netzer (used to be a prof at Brown, now works on BitKeeper with me)
> had one of those 3B1s.  Neat machine.  Sort of like a desktop VAX.

I had one too. (Also a trailblazer and then a worldblazer.) The 3B1 ran
SVR2; the BSD networking was available as an add-on with the ethernet
card.

I spent many happy hours working on that box, developing gawk and its
documentation; it was slow enough that you could see algorithmic
differences, e.g. standard diff vs. GNU diff.

It had one of those great AT&T keyboards (as did the blit).  The UI
wasn't anything special to write home about though.

For a while there was a separate 3b1.* set of newsgroups and an
archive of stuff at Ohio State; there remains a comp.sys.3b1 group
that still has some activity as new people try to revive some of
these machines and others who had them help out. Someone was writing
an emulator, but I don't think it ever got finished.

Ah, the memories .... :-)

Arnold
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TUHS mailing list
TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed at reedmedia.net>

    > Later, they considered an LNI, an early token ring (if I understand
    > correctly), device

Yes. See:

  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/history/RingMIT.txt

for more - that's a pre-print version of an article just published in the
_IEEE Annals of the History of Computing_; slight differences with the final
version, but nothing significant.

Thumbnail: There were two versions; V1 was 1MBit/second, produced in very
limited numbers (~10 or so) at MIT, most used there, although IIRC correctly
at pair (at least - one would be of no use :-) went to UCLA (I remember flying
out to LA to help them get them going). V2 was 10Mbit/second, produced as a
commercial product by Proteon in cooperation with MIT, large numbers sold.

	Noel