Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[M Douglas McIlroy]

Connectivity evolved rapidly in the early 1980s. In 1980 I served on the
board of CSNet, which connected have-not CS departments (including Bell
Labs) via dialup and X.25 links onto the periphery of the magic circle
of Arpanet.
By 1982 it was not extraordinary that I could via international email arrange
all aspects of a trip to visit lively universities of the AUUG.

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[George Michaelson]

I often think about Quartermains book "the matrix" and also Carl
Malamud's time couch-surfing his contact list.

Both of them were very much "of their time" -you wouldn't need to
write "the matrix" now, because convergence has taken care of many of
the meta-net issues Quartermain talked about.

Carls problem on the other hand, just got monetised into AirBNB

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 9:19 AM M Douglas McIlroy
<m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
> Connectivity evolved rapidly in the early 1980s. In 1980 I served on the
> board of CSNet, which connected have-not CS departments (including Bell
> Labs) via dialup and X.25 links onto the periphery of the magic circle
> of Arpanet.
> By 1982 it was not extraordinary that I could via international email arrange
> all aspects of a trip to visit lively universities of the AUUG.

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Richard Salz]

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On Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 7:20 PM M Douglas McIlroy <
m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> Connectivity evolved rapidly in the early 1980s. In 1980 I served on the
> board of CSNet, which connected have-not CS departments (including Bell
> Labs) via dialup and X.25 links onto the periphery of the magic circle
> of Arpanet.


I think Steve Bellovin said something about CSNET being what you got with
grants and Usenet being what grad students could afford.

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[TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Josh Good]

Hello UNIX veterans.

So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating
System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the
asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know
exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose.

I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I
am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost
spartan.

The chapter titles are:

1. Introduction
2. vi: A Text Editor
3. ed
4. mail
5. Communicating with Other Sites
6. bc: A Calculator
7. The Shell
8. The C-Shell
9. Using the Visual Shell

And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port
based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words
"Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.

Granted, this Xenix version is derived from System V Release 2, and I think
it was for the Intel 286 (not yet ported to the i386), but hey it's 1988
already and the Internet is supposed to be thriving on UNIX in the Pacific
Coast, or so the lore says. I see now that it probably was only in the
Berkely family that the Internet was going on...

In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere
users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like
WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from
those years.

I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it
could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and the
Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version,
from a user's point of view.

I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free
software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of":
email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video
player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these
days.

-- 
Josh Good

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Adam Thornton]

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Just because it didn't have TCP/IP doesn't mean it couldn't send mail to
other sites.  UUCP was used for batched file transfer over serial lines,
such as dialup modems.  There was not generally _real-time interactive_
network stuff done with other sites, but there was plenty of
store-and-forward goodness.  Which is probably what Chapter 5 is about.

Adam

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 1:51 PM Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote:

> Hello UNIX veterans.
>
> So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating
> System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the
> asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know
> exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose.
>
> I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I
> am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost
> spartan.
>
> The chapter titles are:
>
> 1. Introduction
> 2. vi: A Text Editor
> 3. ed
> 4. mail
> 5. Communicating with Other Sites
> 6. bc: A Calculator
> 7. The Shell
> 8. The C-Shell
> 9. Using the Visual Shell
>
> And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port
> based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words
> "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.
>
> Granted, this Xenix version is derived from System V Release 2, and I think
> it was for the Intel 286 (not yet ported to the i386), but hey it's 1988
> already and the Internet is supposed to be thriving on UNIX in the Pacific
> Coast, or so the lore says. I see now that it probably was only in the
> Berkely family that the Internet was going on...
>
> In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere
> users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like
> WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from
> those years.
>
> I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it
> could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and
> the
> Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version,
> from a user's point of view.
>
> I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free
> software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of":
> email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video
> player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these
> days.
>
> --
> Josh Good
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Al Kossow]

>  hey it's 1988 already
> mail without Internet is pretty useless

And Usenet was tin cans and a string.

--al (feeling very old)

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 02:04:36PM -0700, Al Kossow wrote:
> > hey it's 1988 already
> >mail without Internet is pretty useless
> 
> And Usenet was tin cans and a string.

Usenet was awesome when it was really small.  Almost everyone connected
was an academic or some sort of scientist.  I could post a question in
pretty much any discipline and wake up to an answer from someone smart.

I tried to get my dad to see it and uttered the fatal words:

"Usenet is so cool, I wish everyone was on it."

Yep, I'm the guy that ruined Usenet :-)  I'm not, but I got my wish
and learned quantity is not the same as quality.  I was pretty dumb
back in the day.

--lm

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Jim Capp]

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Josh, 


The appeal was that SCO Xenix would turn a PC into a multi-user machine. For me, that meant shared databases and shared applications. We would run anywhere from 3 to a dozen or more "dumb" terminals. 


Unlike a DOS PC, SCO Xenix included most of the UNIX tools. At one time, it even included PWB. 


Just like a DOS based PC, applications like Word Perfect and Lotus 123 were available (for a price). 


My $.02 


Jim 





From: "Josh Good" <pepe@naleco.com> 
To: tuhs@tuhs.org 
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2021 4:33:37 PM 
Subject: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse! 

Hello UNIX veterans. 

So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating 
System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the 
asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know 
exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose. 

I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I 
am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost 
spartan. 

The chapter titles are: 

1. Introduction 
2. vi: A Text Editor 
3. ed 
4. mail 
5. Communicating with Other Sites 
6. bc: A Calculator 
7. The Shell 
8. The C-Shell 
9. Using the Visual Shell 

And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port 
based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words 
"Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index. 

Granted, this Xenix version is derived from System V Release 2, and I think 
it was for the Intel 286 (not yet ported to the i386), but hey it's 1988 
already and the Internet is supposed to be thriving on UNIX in the Pacific 
Coast, or so the lore says. I see now that it probably was only in the 
Berkely family that the Internet was going on... 

In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere 
users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like 
WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from 
those years. 

I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it 
could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and the 
Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version, 
from a user's point of view. 

I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free 
software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of": 
email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video 
player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these 
days. 

-- 
Josh Good 


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Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 09:33:37PM +0100, Josh Good wrote:
> And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port
> based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words
> "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.

SCO got Lachman's TCP/IP stack (that they bought from Convergent) just
after this timeframe.  I know because I did the port.  Also open sourced
a sw (STREAMS watch) program I wrote so you could tune the kernel (kernel
defaults yielded horrible performance).  I still have that code if anyone
cares, can't imagine it is interesting.

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Henry Bent]

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On Wed, 17 Mar 2021 at 16:52, Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote:

>
> And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port
> based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words
> "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.
>

Not a total surprise.  In 1988, the average home user had probably barely
even heard of the internet.  Even business users were only concerned with
on-site networking, and that was a fairly expensive proposition.


> In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere
> users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like
> WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from
> those years.
>

Indeed, from the perspective of a home user you didn't really need an
expensive UNIX box to do normal household chores.  I was more than happy
with a Visual 1050 running CP/M (and Wordstar, Multiplan, etc.) well into
the late '80s.


> I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it
> could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and
> the
> Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version,
> from a user's point of view.
>

Which might well explain why Xenix failed to gain much ground with normal
folks at home.  If you used a UNIX at work, sure, you might want to pay the
money to have it at home.  But why spend the $ for an operating system that
didn't have widespread application development?


>
> I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free
> software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of":
> email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video
> player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these
> days.
>

The proliferation of free software is practically unthinkable from the
standpoint of a home user 30 years ago.

-Henry

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Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 05:29:40PM -0400, Henry Bent wrote:
> > I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it
> > could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and
> > the
> > Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version,
> > from a user's point of view.
> 
> Which might well explain why Xenix failed to gain much ground with normal
> folks at home.  If you used a UNIX at work, sure, you might want to pay the
> money to have it at home.  But why spend the $ for an operating system that
> didn't have widespread application development?

My first home Unix machine was a 3B1.  It was great.  There is just
something so bloody limiting about DOS when you compare it to Unix.
Unix was for developers, DOS was for end users.  Entirely different
beasts.

That said, System V was very limited compared to BSD.  BSD was much 
closer to what we have today, it felt friendly, System V felt sort
of corporate.  To me at least.

--lm

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Henry Bent]

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Just for a little perspective here: my father worked for Bell Labs as a
sysadmin, so we had much more computer exposure and internet access than
your average person, and it wasn't until I believe 1992 that we actually
got an internet connection at home as opposed to using a terminal with a
modem to connect to the labs.  Things moved fairly quickly around this
time, and there was a huge difference in internet penetration in say 1996
vs. 1992 amongst the general populace.  In 1992 you probably would have
gotten blank stares asking the average person on the street about the
internet, and in 1996 in the next town over there was an internet cafe.
Even then, this was the east coast of the US - I'm sure the interior of the
country with its much more vast physical distances was a few steps behind.

-Henry

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Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Wesley Parish]

On 3/18/21, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Mar 2021 at 16:52, Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a
>> serial-port
>> based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words
>> "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.
>>
>
> Not a total surprise.  In 1988, the average home user had probably barely
> even heard of the internet.  Even business users were only concerned with
> on-site networking, and that was a fairly expensive proposition.

FWVVLIW, I was not a computer user in 1989, and I had heard of the
Internet, such as it was back then, through the pages of a little
paperback highly critical of the SDI (or as Arthur C. Clarke retitled
it, the BDI - Budgetary Defense Initiative). The author of that book
the title of which I can't recall, talked about a computer network
that was designed to stay up and working in spite of having bits and
pieces shot out of it ... obviously not the Interwebs we today are
blessed with, where a half-hearted DDoS can make the experience ...
interesting ... if you happen to be on an ISP that's even remotely
connected to the site undergoing the DDoS ... at the time I was
envious and wished that the Pentagon and the US university system
would make it more widely available. Be careful what you wish for (he
growls to himself) you just might get it.

Wesley Parish
>
>
>> In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere
>> users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like
>> WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from
>> those years.
>>
>
> Indeed, from the perspective of a home user you didn't really need an
> expensive UNIX box to do normal household chores.  I was more than happy
> with a Visual 1050 running CP/M (and Wordstar, Multiplan, etc.) well into
> the late '80s.
>
>
>> I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it
>> could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and
>> the
>> Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version,
>> from a user's point of view.
>>
>
> Which might well explain why Xenix failed to gain much ground with normal
> folks at home.  If you used a UNIX at work, sure, you might want to pay the
> money to have it at home.  But why spend the $ for an operating system that
> didn't have widespread application development?
>
>
>>
>> I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free
>> software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of":
>> email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video
>> player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these
>> days.
>>
>
> The proliferation of free software is practically unthinkable from the
> standpoint of a home user 30 years ago.

Shareware was a big concept a few decades ago, and PC/MS/DR DOS was
very well supplied with useful programs. Even the Mac had its share,
though significantly less than the *DOS family of OSes. It's amusing
that Lotus' heavy-handed approach to its 1-2-3 spreadsheet interface
succeeded in driving its direct competitors AsEasyAs and some others,
into shareware distribution. Nobody as far as I know, ever tried to
compete with WordPerfect by copying its interface - the shareware DOS
word processors I tried, had their own approach.

That small one-man shareware businesses could compete with big
multinational companies for market share with products often as good
or better, should've given Microsoft pause when it came out swinging
against Linux in the late 90s and early 2000s. None so blind as those
who will not see.

Wesley Parish
>
> -Henry
>

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)]

Josh Good writes:

> I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless,

In the mid-late-1980s, half the world's email went through 'ihnp4' (google
it) via UUCP.  That was a cluster of machines running SVRx.

We don't need no steenking Internet ...

--lyndon

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Richard Salz]

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> In the mid-late-1980s, half the world's email went through 'ihnp4' (google
> it) via UUCP.  That was a cluster of machines running SVRx.
>

When you're the phone company, calls are free. :) This is the best article
I saw: www.nobell.org/~gjm/about/ihnp4.html  Let's also remember seismo and
decvax which had phone bills in the tens of thousands per month. And they
weren't free.

I was the moderator of mod.sources, everyone wanted to call me.  mirror!rs
:)

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Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:45:53PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote:
> > In the mid-late-1980s, half the world's email went through 'ihnp4' (google
> > it) via UUCP.  That was a cluster of machines running SVRx.
> >
> 
> When you're the phone company, calls are free. :) This is the best article
> I saw: www.nobell.org/~gjm/about/ihnp4.html  Let's also remember seismo and
> decvax which had phone bills in the tens of thousands per month. And they
> weren't free.
> 
> I was the moderator of mod.sources, everyone wanted to call me.  mirror!rs
> :)

seismo had the connection to Europe.  decvax was a thing.  A shout out to 
my Alma Mater, uwvax, it was not ihnp4 but it sent a bunch through.  I was
..!uwvax!geophysics!geowhiz!lm for a long time.  I used to have all those
paths memorized, I'm old.

..!lm

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Chris Torek]

We used to say: "Seismo bangs everybody"

(then they became uunet, then Worldcom bought them)

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Earl Baugh]

My first job out of college was at a company (1986ish) that did seismic and meteorological modeling and monitoring.  At college we were on csnet ( on our Vax, running BSD 4.2 ).  At work, I was deliriously happy to have my own Sun 3/110 to work on, vs having to fight to share the Vax.  However,  I was having email and Usenet withdrawal... so after completing a 6 month scheduled task In about a month ( thank you lex and yacc :-) ) I was looking for things to fill the time and asked my boss about email. He said, well there is this dedicated line up to Virginia that he used every once in a month and checked his email.. and sometimes helped the seismologists pull some data.  He thought the folks on the other end might be able to help.  He gave me the name and phone number - it was Rick Adams. ( and yes, this was a dedicated circuit into seismo... well the Annex box physically right next to it :-) ). 

Shall we say, I called fairly quickly, and was working with David Comay who helped support things there ( the center for seismic studies - css ) and got an early version of CSLIP...  Then excitedly ( though a tad nervously) learned how to rebuild a Sun 3/110 kernel and get it installed.  

The newsfeed and email speed, shall we say, didn’t suck 🙂

Oh, and btw, seismo wasn’t uunet.  The original uunet was a sequent 8 processor box ( I believe ). One of my trips to DC I got to visit with David and saw the box as it was there at css with seismo. ( if memory serves me, it was in Ricks office ).  Rick had gotten permission to host it there to “see if there was a business model for providing internet access”, which now I think we can definitely answer yes :-) 

There still is a seismo, but obviously the box isn’t the sun 3/2xx series machine it was then. 

Earl 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 18, 2021, at 10:27 PM, Chris Torek <torek@elf.torek.net> wrote:
> 
> We used to say: "Seismo bangs everybody"
> 
> (then they became uunet, then Worldcom bought them)

Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Chris Torek]

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>Oh, and btw, seismo wasn’t uunet.

Yes, I was being deliberately vague with "they" here. :-)

>The original uunet was a sequent 8 processor box ( I believe ).

I'm not sure what was *original* but they definitely had a
Sequent.

> On Mar 18, 2021, at 10:27 PM, Chris Torek <torek@elf.torek.net> wrote:
> 
> We used to say: "Seismo bangs everybody"

Okay, who stuck a BOM into my email?

Chris