From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: rminnich@gmail.com (ron minnich) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2017 22:51:05 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] 197[78] usenix conf. at columbia, magtapes "found in the street"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: ah, patch tape, now that makes way more sense. Thanks Clem! On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 2:13 PM Clem Cole wrote: > 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: