Re: [TUHS] History talk in Dallas Texas October 10

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 7:30 AM <reed@reedmedia.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, reed@reedmedia.net wrote:
>
> > Does anyone have scanned copies of early Lions commentary? (Not the 2000
> > printing, unless it looks identical, please let me know.)
>
> I got copied of the cover and front page off-list. Thank you!
>
> > I will try to share my slides to this list by end of this week. (I did
> > look at an early draft of Warner's slides, but didn't look at his final
> > slides nor watch his presentation yet. My presentation is from scratch
> > for now.)
>
> I have a rough draft of around 63 slides. I have a maybe around 10 more
> to add. It is too much content for an hour. Temporarily they are at
> http://reedmedia.net/~reed/pres/.tmp-ibu4txv873cv/
> pdf is 63 slides at ~5MB
> (please don't distribute as I didn't yet cite sources in it nor have
> re-use statements for some images I borrowed.)
> J.tex is the source for the pdf.
> The real source is the notes in the .data file there. (It is a mess.)
> I plan to add a few photos of the earliest participants (as named in
> the research edition manuals.)
> I will add a few pages about Berkeley Unix up to 3BSD. (Later will do
> one hour talk just on BSD.)
>
> Few questions:
>
> If using a 4.5 inch diameter roll of paper for the TTY, how did you cut
> the paper into 11 inch pages? Or did you just let it roll up?
>
> Anyone have a pointer to the photo of a Graphic Systems (GSI)
> phototypesetter (1973)? (for troff v3 slide)
>
> Was patent department that first used Unix on PDP-11 and roff (~1971)
> same department that would later handle Unix licensing two years later?
> (~1973)
>
> Anyone have a pointer to a picture of GE 635 or 645 system? (for multics
> slide)
>

You can find images at:

https://multicians.org/drv-bull.html (says its a GE-645 installed in Paris)

https://multicians.org/mulimg/radc-bldg3-a.jpg (ROME building 3
GECOS/Honeywell systems)

https://multicians.org/645artist.html (weird artist's conception)

In general, there's several images on the multicians page. In my talk I
found one of a later Honeywell system that I mistakenly thought was a 645.

Great slides. Good detail on the bell-labs stream of innovation (better
than my talk by far, I think). Great use of early manual artifacts to drive
the story telling. It's clearly only slightly related to my talk and that
it was done from scratch with at most an element or two from my talk that
could easily have come from this list instead.

So some feedback:

The slide that has LSI-Unix is missing mini-unix. If you look at the AUUGN
news letters, that's mentioned much more than LSI-Unix, so it was out in
the wild.

CB-UNIX had its origins in SCCS Unix, which was derived from a ~1st edition
Unix for a switch (SCCS here is Switch Control Center System) done by New
Jersey Bell in 1972. It took in snapshots from research unix from time to
time. After V6, CB-Unix 1.0 was done based on it, with its additions in the
areas of IPC and enhancements for production systems. After V7, there was a
2.x series. This was later merged with System III / Unix/TS 3.0 to produce
what would become System V (I found conflicting accounts of whether this
was done in Unix/TS 4.0 (never released outside of bell labs) or in Unix TS
5.0). The merges were what we'd call "cherry picks" today: the IPC features
and some minor other things were re-done for the Unix/TS environment and
would become what we call today System V IPC. CB-Unix had infrastructure to
port to multiple CPUs, but really only ran on the 11/70. The IPC system was
called maus (pronounced mouse, evidently). We gave man pages and source for
it in PDF form in the TUHS archive. I'm slowly plowing through OCRing the
sources... All this work was done in Columbus OH. Unix/TS targeted time
sharing systems that developers, secretaries, etc used. CB-UNIX targeted
call record collection systems and similar "production" systems.

MERT is interesting... It ported V4 Unix to run under a PDP-11
hypervisor... It was later called UNIX/RT and merged code from V5 and/or V6
(the recollections differ), but not V7 as the system call ABI changed for
that. It was cancelled in favor of Unix/TS, but hung on to life, was ported
to the 3B2 and later systems to become DMERT...  There's hints of this
scattered in the different bell labs technical journals and in the TUHS
archive of recollections of early unix from the 80s on usenet.

I'll have to go through the PWB stuff in more detail than I have time right
now.

I'm unsure the thing you labeled as DISPLAY-2 is the DISPLAY-2 or the
standard Option 340 display. I know people on this list said it was a
display-2 (maybe my early slides did as well). Based on pictures in the
PDP-7 manuals, I think it was the 340...

Where are you giving it?

Warner

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