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* [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-10-02 18:00 Nelson H. F. Beebe
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 38+ messages in thread
From: Nelson H. F. Beebe @ 2015-10-02 18:00 UTC (permalink / raw)


Recent traffic on the TUHS list has discussed early publications about
UNIX at DECUS.

The Digital Technical Journal of Digital Equipment Corporation began
publishing in August 1985, and there is a nearly complete bibliography
at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/dectechj.bib

Change .bib to .html for a version with live hyperlinks.

The first publication there that mentions ULTRIX in its title is from
March 1986.  Unix appears in a title first in Spring 1995.

The document collection at

	http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/decus/ 

doesn't appear to have much that might be related to Unix ports to DEC
hardware.

The Hewlett-Packard Journal is documented in

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/hpj.bib

The first paper recorded there that mentions Unix or HP-UX is
from March 1984.

The Intel Technical Journal is covered in those archives as well at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/intel-tech-j.bib

but it only began relatively recently, in 1997.

The IBM Systems Journal began in 1962, and the IBM Journal of Research
and Development in 1957, and both are in those archives at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ibmsysj.bib
	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ibmjrd.bib

In the Systems Journal, the first mention of Unix or AIX is in Fall
1979 (Unix) and then December 1987 (AIX).  In the Journal of R&D, AIX
appears in January 1990, and Unix appears in abstracts sporadically,
but is in a title first in late Fall 2002.

In the Bell Systems Technical Journal, covered at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/bstj1970.bib
	
(and other decades from 1920 to 2010), the first mention of Unix in a
title is July/August 1978.

There may have been similar corporate technology journals at other
computer companies, such as CDC, Cray, Data General, English Electric,
Ferranti, Gould, Harris, NCR, Pr1me, Univac, Wang, and others, but
I've so far made no attempt to track them down and add bibliographic
coverage.  Suggestions are welcome!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-10-07 13:26 Nelson H. F. Beebe
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 38+ messages in thread
From: Nelson H. F. Beebe @ 2015-10-07 13:26 UTC (permalink / raw)


On Fri, 2 Oct 2015 12:00:08 -0600, I posted to this list a summary of the
earliest mentions of Unix in several corporate technical journals.

This morning, I made a similar search in the complete bibliographies of
29 journals on the history of computing, mathematics, and science listed at

	http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/index.html#content

As might be expected, there is little mention of Unix (or Linux) in those
publications: they only ones that I found are these:

+-----------------------+------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| filename              | label            | substr(title,1,80)                                                               |
+-----------------------+------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| cryptologia.bib       | Morris:1982:CFU  | Cryptographic Features of the UNIX Operating System                              |
| annhistcomput.bib     | Tomayko:1989:ACI | Anecdotes: a Critical Incident; The First Port of UNIX                           |
| annhistcomput.bib     | Tomayko:1989:AWC | Anecdotes: The Windmill Computer---An Eyewitness Report of the Scheutz Differenc |
| ieeeannhistcomput.bib | Toomey:2010:FEU  | First Edition Unix: Its Creation and Restoration                                 |
| ieeeannhistcomput.bib | Sippl:2013:IIM   | Informix: Information Management on Unix                                         |
+-----------------------+------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-10-01 16:37 Norman Wilson
  2015-10-01 18:57 ` Dave Horsfall
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 38+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2015-10-01 16:37 UTC (permalink / raw)


Dave Horsfall:

  Oh, and I also wrote many articles for AUUGN, and presented the original 
  Unix paper at a DECUS conference, just to stir up the VMSoids.

=====

Do you mean the first UNIX-related paper ever at a DECUS?  If so,
do you mean DECUS Australia or DECUS at all?  I'm pretty sure there
was UNIX-related activity in DECUS US in 1980, probably earlier, and
am quite sure there was by 1981 when I was on the sidelines of what
eventually became the UNIX SIG.

It was initially called the Special Software and Operating Systems SIG,
because DECUS US leadership always included a somewhat stodgy subgroup
who were more afraid of offending Digital's marketing people than of
serving the membership.  So we ended up with a code name.

Since there were in fact Digital technical and marketing people supporting
the new SIG, it was only a couple of years before the name was fixed.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Lived in Los Angeles and then New Jersey during that period)



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-09-29  8:07 Hellwig Geisse
  2015-09-29 15:35 ` scj
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 38+ messages in thread
From: Hellwig Geisse @ 2015-09-29  8:07 UTC (permalink / raw)


Hi,

I don't know if John Lions ever wrote a full book about
PCC, but there is a paper analyzing its second pass:

https://github.com/eunuchs/unix-archive/blob/master/Documentation/Papers/lions_PCCpass2_jun1979.pdf

Hellwig




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-09-25  2:14 Doug McIlroy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 38+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2015-09-25  2:14 UTC (permalink / raw)


I can assure you that Lorinda Cherry wrote most of the important
code in WWB, including style and diction. The idea for them
came from Bill Vesterman at Rutgers. Lorinda already had parts,
a real tour de force, which assigned parts of speech to words 
in a text. Style was the killer app for parts and was running
within days of his approach to the labs wondering whether 
such a thing could be built. Lorinda also wrote deroff, which
these tools of course needed. WWB per se was packaged by 
USDL; I am sorry I can't remember the name of the guiding
spirit. So Lorinda's code detoured through there on its
way into research Unix.

Chris van Wyk was cvw. He was at Bell Labs, not BSD.

Chuck Haley is indeed Charles B. Haley.

Andy Koenig was ark.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread
* [TUHS]  Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-09-24 17:12 Norman Wilson
  2015-09-24 20:07 ` scj
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 38+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2015-09-24 17:12 UTC (permalink / raw)


A few scattered answers, some redundant with those of others:

-- Lorinda Cherry (llc) worked at Bell Labs.  She wrote diction (and
the rest of the Writer's Workbench tools) there, in the early
1980s; if some people saw it first in BSD releases that is just
an accident of timing (too late for V7) and exposure (I'm pretty
sure it was available in the USG systems, which weren't generally
accessible until a year or two later).

Lorinda is one of the less-known members of the original Computer
Science Research Center who nevertheless wrote or co-wrote a lot
of things we now take for granted, like dc and bc and eqn and
libplot.

Checking some of this on the web, I came across an interesting
tidbit apparently derived from an interview with Lorinda:

http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/precis/cherry2.htm

I wholly endorse what she says about UNIX and the group it came from.
One fumble in the text: `Bob Ross' who liked to break programs is
surely really Bob Morris.

-- So far as I know, Tom Duff (td) was never at Berkeley.  He's
originally from Toronto; attended U of T; was at Lucasfilm for a
while (he has a particular interest in graphics, though he is a
very sharp and subtle programmer in general); started at Bell Labs
in 1984, not long before I did.  He left sometime in the 1990s,
lives in Berkeley CA, but works neither at UCB nor at Google but
at Pixar.

-- T. J. Kowalski (frodo) was at Bell Labs; when I was there he
worked in the research group down the hall (Acoustics, I think), with
whom Computer Science shared a lot of UNIX-releasted stuff.  Ted is
well-known for his work on fsck, but did a lot of other stuff, including
being the first to get Research UNIX to work on the MicroVAX II.  He
also had a high-quality mustache.

-- Andrew Koenig (ark) was part of the Computer Science group when
I was there in the latter 1980s.  He was a early adopter of C++.
asd, the automatic-software distributor we used to keep the software
in sync on the 20-or-so systems that ran Research UNIX, was his work.

-- Mike Tilson was, I think, one of the founders of HCR (Human Computing
Resources), a UNIX-oriented software company based in Toronto in the
early 1980s.  The company was later acquired by SCO, in the days when
SCO was still a technical company rather than a den of lawyers.

-- Peter Honeyman (honey) was never, I think, at Berkeley, though
he is certainly of the right character.  In the 1980s he was variously
(sometimes concurrently?) working for some part of AT&T and at Princeton.
For many years now he has been in Ann Arbor MI at the University of
Michigan, where his still-crusty manner appears not to interfere with
his being a respected researcher and much-liked teacher.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Bell Labs Computing Science Research, 1984-1990)



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-09-24 14:08 Clem Cole
  2015-09-24 15:20 ` Mary Ann Horton
  2015-09-24 19:04 ` Jeremy C. Reed
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 38+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2015-09-24 14:08 UTC (permalink / raw)


[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1708 bytes --]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 9:27 AM, <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> I think the Berkeley guys had an underground
> pipeline to Bell labs and some stuff got out that way. :-)
>

​It was not underground at all.    Tools packaged in BSD came from all over
the community.   style and diction were released into the wild by
themselves before the were packaged into an AT&T USG UNIX or Research UNIX
release.  It got them personally directly and had them installed at
Tektronix soon after first publishing and a talk about them at USENIX (IIRC
that was the Boulder conference in the "Black Hole" movie theatre.

Since I had a minor stake in it (as my first C program) fsck is another
good example of the path to UCB .  Ted started the predecessor program
​when he was at UMich (with Bill Joy).   He did his OYOC year and later a
full PhD at CMU.   He was one of my lab partners in his OYOC year.   fsck
was a we know it now was done during that time ( and I helped him a bit).
He was bring the sources back and forth from Summit to CMU (at the time in
an RK05 or sometimes a bootable DOS tape image of one - I may still have
one of these).    I believe he gave a copy of the sources very early to wnj
-- which is how it ended up in 4.1BSD.  I don't think it was in the
original 3.0 or 4.0 packages as it was not in V5, V6 or V7 either.  I
believe it was released in PWB 2.0 - not sure and Minnie does not seem to
have them.

I'm pretty the SCCS and cpio sources came through one of the PWB releases
(1 or 2)  that UCB got from AT&T.

​Clem​
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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-09-24 13:56 Noel Chiappa
  2015-09-24 14:38 ` Lawrence Stewart
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 38+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2015-09-24 13:56 UTC (permalink / raw)


    > From: Clem Cole 

    > Eric Schienbrood
    > .. Noel might remember his MIT moniker

No, alas; and I tried 'finger Schienbrood at lcs.mit.edu' and got no result.
Maybe he was in some other part of MIT, not Tech Sq?

    > From: Arnold Skeeve

    > Here too I think stuff written at ATT got out through Berkeley. (SCCS)

That happened at MIT, too - we had SCCS quite early (my MIT V6 manual has
it), plus all sorts of other stuff (e.g. TROFF).

I think some of it may have come through Jon Sieber, who, while he was in high
school, had been part of (IIRC) a Scout troop which had some association with
Bell Labs, and continued to have contacts there after he became an MIT
undergrad.

	Noel



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors
@ 2015-09-24  9:27 Diomidis Spinellis
  2015-09-24  9:52 ` Warren Toomey
                   ` (4 more replies)
  0 siblings, 5 replies; 38+ messages in thread
From: Diomidis Spinellis @ 2015-09-24  9:27 UTC (permalink / raw)


I found out that the book "Life with Unix" by Don Libes and Sandy
Ressler has a seven page listing of Unix notables, and I'm using that to
fill gaps in the contributors of the Unix history repository [1,2].
Working through the list, the following questions came up.

- Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction.  But diction.c first appears
in 4BSD and 2.10BSD.  Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley?

- Is Chuck Haley listed in the book as the author of tar the same as
Charles B. Haley who co-authored V7 usr/doc/{regen,security,setup}?  He
appears to have worked both at Bell labs (tar, usr/doc/*) and at
Berkeley (ex, Pascal).  Is this correct?

- Andrew Koenig is credited with varargs.  This is a four-line header
file in V7. Did he actually write it?

- Ted Dolotta is credited with the mm macros, but the document "Typing
Documents with MM is written by by D. W. Smith and E. M. Piskorik.  Did
its authors only write the documentation?  Did Ted Dolotta also write
mmcheck?


Also, I'm missing the login identifiers for the following people.  If
anyone remembers them, please send me a note.

Bell Labs, PWB, USG, USDL:
Andrew Koenig
Charles B. Haley
Dick Haight
Greg Chesson
Herb Gellis
Mark Rochkind
Ted Dolotta

BSD:
Bill Reeves
Charles B. Haley
Colin L. Mc Master
Chris Van Wyk
Douglas Lanam
David Willcox
Eric Schienbrood
Earl T. Cohen
Herb Gellis
Ivan Maltz
Juan Porcar
Len Edmondson
Mark Rochkind
Mike Tilson
Olivier Roubine
Peter Honeyman
R. Dowell
Ross Harvey
Robert Toxen
Tom Duff
Ted Dolotta
T. J. Kowalski

Finally, I've summarized all contributions allocated through file path
regular expressions [3] into two tables ordered by author [4].  (The
summary is auto-generated by taking the last significant part of each
path regex.) If you want, please have a look at them and point out
omissions and mistakes.

I will try to commit all responses I receive with appropriate credit to
the repository.  (You can also submit a GitHub pull-request, if you prefer.)

[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
[2]
http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.pdf
[3]
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/author-path
[4] http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr/~dds/contributions.pdf

Diomidis



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 38+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2015-10-07 13:26 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 38+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2015-10-02 18:00 [TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors Nelson H. F. Beebe
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2015-10-07 13:26 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2015-10-01 16:37 Norman Wilson
2015-10-01 18:57 ` Dave Horsfall
2015-09-29  8:07 Hellwig Geisse
2015-09-29 15:35 ` scj
2015-10-01 18:00   ` Aharon Robbins
2015-09-25  2:14 Doug McIlroy
2015-09-24 17:12 Norman Wilson
2015-09-24 20:07 ` scj
2015-09-24 14:08 Clem Cole
2015-09-24 15:20 ` Mary Ann Horton
2015-09-24 17:08   ` Jeremy C. Reed
2015-09-24 17:28   ` Clem Cole
2015-09-26  2:37     ` Dave Horsfall
2015-09-26 23:22       ` Clement T. Cole
2015-09-27  6:52     ` Armando Stettner
2015-09-27 17:31       ` Clem Cole
2015-09-28 14:59       ` Dave Horsfall
2015-09-28 16:55         ` scj
2015-09-28 23:23           ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2015-10-01  2:09             ` Dave Horsfall
2015-10-01  3:52               ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2015-10-01  4:51                 ` Dave Horsfall
2015-09-29  6:57           ` arnold
2015-09-24 19:04 ` Jeremy C. Reed
2015-09-24 20:13   ` Clem Cole
2015-09-24 20:16     ` Clem Cole
2015-09-25  8:04   ` Diomidis Spinellis
2015-09-25 12:04   ` Clem Cole
2015-09-24 13:56 Noel Chiappa
2015-09-24 14:38 ` Lawrence Stewart
2015-09-24  9:27 Diomidis Spinellis
2015-09-24  9:52 ` Warren Toomey
2015-09-24 12:59 ` Clem Cole
2015-09-24 13:27 ` arnold
2015-09-24 16:12 ` John Cowan
2015-09-24 17:58 ` Jeremy C. Reed

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