Re: [TUHS] dmr streams & networking [was: Re: If not Linux, then what?]

[George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>]

This is an object lesson in not making assumptions about things. I had
always assumed the V in UNIX 32V stood for something which went to
demand paging, from 'Virtual Addressing'. Turns out: I was wrong.

One other note about sockets: The original 4.2 port had to be used by
a lot of people without the ethernet, because we didn't have the DEC
ethernet card it was written to. This made unix domain sockets very
interesting because you could test in them. Except: the very first
test program somebody wrote at Leeds university to create and write to
a unix domain socket in /tmp crashed the vax. ... (this was around
1982/3) -We were warned off using sockets until the first patch tape
came in the post.

The Berkeley lawyers were amazing. I like to think 'shakespear
witches' or 'evil gnomes' -We had changed staff in some functional
role, and when we came to do licence renewal for the upgrade from 4.1
They insisted we find the mouldering body of the ex appointee and get
them to countersign (press the dead flesh in a pot of ink and put on
the paper?) before they'd re-issue. I'd never seen documents (a)
printed on this bizarre page size called 'legal and (b) actually
*embossed* by the university seal.. This was some serious magic going
down. In my nightmares, somebody in mid-western nondescript university
of somewhereville is screaming "I CANT GET THE ORIGINAL SIGNATURE" and
the Berkeley lawyers just shrug and walk away from the deal.

This was also the release which brought T/Roff drivers for xerographic
process printers. They emitted wet, shiny, even slimy pages in some
process I don't want to understand, all of which bore cut marks on the
side (roll feed, before A4 printers existed) marking this US legal
thing. Cut at the mark? Won't fit a ring-binder we own in the entire
University...  Mike Lesk told me the code had 'witticisms' such as an
extra emitted char on \r to ensure the specific printer it was written
for didn't stuff up TBL output.

-G

On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 7:55 AM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Reiser added paging and it was working well by early 1981.
>
> -rob
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 4:41 AM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>>
>> > Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >>> How long was research running on a PDP-11 and when did they move to a VAX?
>> >>
>> >> London and Reiser had ported Unix to the VAX, replete with virtual memory, in 1978. By the time v7 was released (1979), Vaxen had become the workhorse machines in Research.
>> >>
>> >> Doug
>> >
>> > So, what's the story on why the London/Reiser port didn't get adapted
>> > back by Research, and they ended up starting from 4.1 BSD?
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> >
>> > Arnold
>>
>>
>> Sorry, what I said about London/Reiser is true, but not the whole story. L/R didn't have demand paging; BSD did.
>>
>> Doug
>>