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* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
@ 2019-09-15 22:07 Doug McIlroy
  2019-09-17  0:20 ` Steve Johnson
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 14+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2019-09-15 22:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

> Excellent - thanks for the pointer.   This shows nroff before troff.
>  FWIW: I guess I was miss informed, but I had been under the impression
> that was the other way around.  i.e. nroff was done to be compliant with
> the new troff, replacing roff, although the suggestion here is that he
> wrote it add macros to roff.  I'll note that either way, the dates are all
> possible of course because the U/L case ASR 37 was introduced 1968 so by
> the early 1970's they would have been around the labs.

nroff was in v2; troff appeared in v4, which incidentally was
typeset in troff.

Because of Joe Ossanna's role in designing the model 37, we
had 37's in the Labs and even in our homes right from the
start of production. But when they went obsolete, they were
a chore to get rid of. As Labs property, they had to be
returned; and picking them up was nobody's priority.
Andy Hall had one on his back porch for a year.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-15 22:07 [TUHS] earliest Unix roff Doug McIlroy
@ 2019-09-17  0:20 ` Steve Johnson
  2019-09-17  1:11   ` Arthur Krewat
                     ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Steve Johnson @ 2019-09-17  0:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Doug McIlroy, tuhs

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Dennis had a model 37 on his sunporch for years.  The innards were
nearly all mechanical -- cams and levers, etc.  And as the years went
by, wear and tear made the thing shake when it was being used.  
From time to time, it would shake so much that a space would be added
into whatever you were typing.

I think Dennis finally retired it after he typed the command "rm
*.o"  (a common command in those days of small discs), and got the
respnse ".o not found"

The model37 used fan-fold paper, that we got by the box.  It was an
art to arrange the paper flow so that the output didn't pile up inside
the box of blank paper,
but rather ended up in a pile on the floor.

In this era, Unix would, from time to time, crash unexpectedly,
causing you to lose all the edits you hadn't written out yet.  The
drill in that case was to
gather up the paper with all your typing on it, and, with a
highlighter, highlight the stuff you needed to retype when the system
came up.

One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an
hour and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry,
didn't save
my file.  When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered
two things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the
pile of paper
on the floor made a great litter box.  After a few choice words, I
sighed and picked up my highliter...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug McIlroy" <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>
To:<tuhs@tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Sun, 15 Sep 2019 18:07:11 -0400
Subject:Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff

 > Excellent - thanks for the pointer. This shows nroff before troff.
 > FWIW: I guess I was miss informed, but I had been under the
impression
 > that was the other way around. i.e. nroff was done to be compliant
with
 > the new troff, replacing roff, although the suggestion here is that
he
 > wrote it add macros to roff. I'll note that either way, the dates
are all
 > possible of course because the U/L case ASR 37 was introduced 1968
so by
 > the early 1970's they would have been around the labs.

 nroff was in v2; troff appeared in v4, which incidentally was
 typeset in troff.

 Because of Joe Ossanna's role in designing the model 37, we
 had 37's in the Labs and even in our homes right from the
 start of production. But when they went obsolete, they were
 a chore to get rid of. As Labs property, they had to be
 returned; and picking them up was nobody's priority.
 Andy Hall had one on his back porch for a year.

 Doug



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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-17  0:20 ` Steve Johnson
@ 2019-09-17  1:11   ` Arthur Krewat
  2019-09-17  1:17     ` Larry McVoy
  2019-09-17  1:11   ` [TUHS] Model 37's Ronald Natalie
  2019-09-17  1:19   ` [TUHS] earliest Unix roff Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 14+ messages in thread
From: Arthur Krewat @ 2019-09-17  1:11 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an 
> hour and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, 
> didn't save
> my file.  When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered 
> two things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the 
> pile of paper
> on the floor made a great litter box.  After a few choice words, I 
> sighed and picked up my highliter...

This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost 
the same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
"mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype 
the entire thing after the file got corrupted.

Yay MACRO-10

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Model 37's
  2019-09-17  0:20 ` Steve Johnson
  2019-09-17  1:11   ` Arthur Krewat
@ 2019-09-17  1:11   ` Ronald Natalie
  2019-09-17  1:19   ` [TUHS] earliest Unix roff Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Ronald Natalie @ 2019-09-17  1:11 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

Hopkins had a KSR37 in a small office (or perhaps closet) on the second floor.   It was also fitted with a modem I built (a Pennywhistle, an absolutely abhorrant design).
It had the greek box and we used it for many a nroff term paper or the like.    It was also our way of getting on the Arpanet.    The university had a “tie line” that let us call the DC metro area so we could get into the Pentagon TIP.    However, Mike Muuss also convinced the operator once to place a collect call.    “It’s a computer we are calling,” he told her.   “If it beeps, it accepts the charges.”   (This was perhaps one of the boldest operator hacks until Brian Redman and Peter Langston were screwing around with a phone switch and programmed it to answer the phone:   “Bell Communications Research” (long pause) “Yes, Operator!   I’ll accept the charges.”


After I graduated from JHU, I found an ASR 37 in a surplus sale.    I had it for years in my apartment kitchen.   Not only did it handle all the nroff ESC-8/ESC-9 stuff and the like without need for an output filter, it had a giant NEWLINE key on the right side and was perhaps the only terminal I ever used that didn’t need the unix NL->CRLF mapping turned on.     Amusingly, the thing sat there idle until DSR came up on the modem and then its motors would start.    When CD came on a bright green PROCEED light illuminated on the front of it.    I used it for years until modems got up to the 9600 baud range and decided a CRT would be nicer than the printing terminal.

I gave mine to RS who I think used it to block in someone’s car at one of the nacent long distance data carriers (was either Sprint or MCI).
   
	

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-17  1:11   ` Arthur Krewat
@ 2019-09-17  1:17     ` Larry McVoy
  2019-09-17  1:26       ` Clem cole
                         ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2019-09-17  1:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Arthur Krewat; +Cc: tuhs

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> >One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
> >and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
> >my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
> >things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
> >paper
> >on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
> >and picked up my highliter...
> 
> This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the
> same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
> "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the
> entire thing after the file got corrupted.

I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
cd something
and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-17  0:20 ` Steve Johnson
  2019-09-17  1:11   ` Arthur Krewat
  2019-09-17  1:11   ` [TUHS] Model 37's Ronald Natalie
@ 2019-09-17  1:19   ` Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2019-09-17  1:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Steve Johnson; +Cc: tuhs, Doug McIlroy

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The one time you didn't want any cat output....

> On Sep 16, 2019, at 5:20 PM, Steve Johnson <scj@yaccman.com> wrote:
> 
> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
> my file.  When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of paper
> on the floor made a great litter box.  After a few choice words, I sighed and picked up my highliter...
> 


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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-17  1:17     ` Larry McVoy
@ 2019-09-17  1:26       ` Clem cole
  2019-09-17  1:33         ` Larry McVoy
  2019-09-17  1:36         ` Richard Salz
  2019-09-17  1:36       ` [TUHS] wizards test [was roff] Clem cole
  2019-09-17  1:57       ` [TUHS] earliest Unix roff Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Clem cole @ 2019-09-17  1:26 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: tuhs

I’ve forgotten but it could have been early on. Having /root as the super users home directory was on later systems. I thought Masscomp did that but I might be thinking Stellar by then.  

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Sep 16, 2019, at 9:17 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>>> On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
>>> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
>>> and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
>>> my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
>>> things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
>>> paper
>>> on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
>>> and picked up my highliter...
>> 
>> This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the
>> same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
>> "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the
>> entire thing after the file got corrupted.
> 
> I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
> a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
> I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
> Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
> cd something
> and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
> Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
> This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-17  1:26       ` Clem cole
@ 2019-09-17  1:33         ` Larry McVoy
  2019-09-17 22:39           ` Dave Horsfall
  2019-09-17  1:36         ` Richard Salz
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 14+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2019-09-17  1:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem cole; +Cc: tuhs

In retrospect having / be roots home is a super bad idea but I think it
was fairly common practice, /root became a thing as idiots like me 
messed things up :)

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:26:34PM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
> I???ve forgotten but it could have been early on. Having /root as the super users home directory was on later systems. I thought Masscomp did that but I might be thinking Stellar by then.  
> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> 
> > On Sep 16, 2019, at 9:17 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> >>> On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> >>> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
> >>> and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
> >>> my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
> >>> things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
> >>> paper
> >>> on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
> >>> and picked up my highliter...
> >> 
> >> This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the
> >> same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
> >> "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the
> >> entire thing after the file got corrupted.
> > 
> > I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
> > a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
> > I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
> > Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
> > cd something
> > and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
> > Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
> > This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] wizards test [was roff]
  2019-09-17  1:17     ` Larry McVoy
  2019-09-17  1:26       ` Clem cole
@ 2019-09-17  1:36       ` Clem cole
  2019-09-17  1:38         ` Clem cole
  2019-09-17  2:34         ` Larry McVoy
  2019-09-17  1:57       ` [TUHS] earliest Unix roff Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Clem cole @ 2019-09-17  1:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: tuhs

Btw.  This was some I used as a wizards test. 

You have a working system next to a system that is still running so you have the console and its shell but had the rm -fr / done to it.  You have lost all of bin dev etc and lib by the time he hit ^C.   So you have some of /usr inc but much of /usr/bin is still there.    No compiler or assembler on the broken machine since that was in bin and lib.   

It’s possible to fix it using the other system to help.  Just don’t turn the damaged system off 🍺

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Sep 16, 2019, at 9:17 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>>> On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
>>> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
>>> and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
>>> my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
>>> things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
>>> paper
>>> on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
>>> and picked up my highliter...
>> 
>> This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the
>> same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
>> "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the
>> entire thing after the file got corrupted.
> 
> I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
> a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
> I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
> Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
> cd something
> and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
> Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
> This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-17  1:26       ` Clem cole
  2019-09-17  1:33         ` Larry McVoy
@ 2019-09-17  1:36         ` Richard Salz
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Richard Salz @ 2019-09-17  1:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem cole; +Cc: TUHS main list

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We've all been there.  I won a Unix "most egregious use of Unix tools"
award from Usenix for this small script
   trap 'ls | wc' 1 2 3 15
   echo Reflex test. Type control-c
   ls | wc
   rm *

Because I also did "rm * .o"

I still have the ugly little warthog, anatomically correct, on my desk.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] wizards test [was roff]
  2019-09-17  1:36       ` [TUHS] wizards test [was roff] Clem cole
@ 2019-09-17  1:38         ` Clem cole
  2019-09-17  2:34         ` Larry McVoy
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Clem cole @ 2019-09-17  1:38 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: tuhs

I should say you have a root shell on the broken system which why it killed every thing. 

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Sep 16, 2019, at 9:36 PM, Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> Btw.  This was some I used as a wizards test. 
> 
> You have a working system next to a system that is still running so you have the console and its shell but had the rm -fr / done to it.  You have lost all of bin dev etc and lib by the time he hit ^C.   So you have some of /usr inc but much of /usr/bin is still there.    No compiler or assembler on the broken machine since that was in bin and lib.   
> 
> It’s possible to fix it using the other system to help.  Just don’t turn the damaged system off 🍺
> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> 
>>> On Sep 16, 2019, at 9:17 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>>>> On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
>>>> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
>>>> and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
>>>> my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
>>>> things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
>>>> paper
>>>> on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
>>>> and picked up my highliter...
>>> 
>>> This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the
>>> same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
>>> "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the
>>> entire thing after the file got corrupted.
>> 
>> I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
>> a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
>> I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
>> Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
>> cd something
>> and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
>> Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
>> This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-17  1:17     ` Larry McVoy
  2019-09-17  1:26       ` Clem cole
  2019-09-17  1:36       ` [TUHS] wizards test [was roff] Clem cole
@ 2019-09-17  1:57       ` Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2019-09-17  1:57 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

On Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:17:52 -0700 Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> > On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> > >One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
> > >and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
> > >my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
> > >things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
> > >paper
> > >on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
> > >and picked up my highliter...
> > 
> > This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost th
> e
> > same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
> > "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the
> > entire thing after the file got corrupted.
>
> I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
> a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
> I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
> Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
> cd something
> and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
> Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
> This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

I may have mentioned restoring root directory using peek/poke
commands of a primitive boot loader.  Right before Comdex
(fall 1981) someone accidentally wiped out the root dir.  IIRC
we had just two systems that actually worked. The other person
was copying the floppy to the second system when something
went wrong.  The backup didn't work. And this was a Comdex
special filesystem (with demos for the show painstakingly put
together and no time to recreate it all from scratch). I
happened to remember inode & block numbers of the first few
things so I fixed up the root dir enough for the system to
come up & run fsck. Luckily very little was lost and we were
able to repair the demos and run them at Comdex!

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] wizards test [was roff]
  2019-09-17  1:36       ` [TUHS] wizards test [was roff] Clem cole
  2019-09-17  1:38         ` Clem cole
@ 2019-09-17  2:34         ` Larry McVoy
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2019-09-17  2:34 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem cole; +Cc: tuhs

That was exactly the situation I had and I had a tough time so I wrote a
little paper about it.  Lemme see if I can find it.

Yep, found it.  It was when I was messing with roff -me.

http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/restor.e
http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/restor.pdf

I was apparently channeling creat(2) because it was too much work for 
me (or Ken) to add the trailing e.

I'm sort of impressed that I wrote that in 1985 because I got to undergrad
in 1980, I was an accounting major because my coach in high school was
my accounting teacher, you don't disappoint your coach so I did great at
accounting, got to college, no coach and accounting was *not* my thing,
wandered around for a year or so taking STEM classes, took some Art
History and declared that as a major, did that for 2 years (and got
really good at it, as in I have corrected errors in a textbook about
Greek pottery [1]) only to have my advisor tell me there are no jobs,
so I switched to computer science in 1984.  Going from nothing to being
a sys admin that had to do a full restore in a year or so is kinda neat.
But Unix was kinda neat and I was hooked, it's easy to get good when
you really like something (ask me about fly fishing :)

Doug, I still have the nroff/troff/tlb/eqn/pic (sadly no grap but I wrote
my own in pic later) printed out docs that I got from the UW-Madison
Computer Science department.  I used those to write that little memo.

[1] A little rant about art and how hard and how easy it can be.  You
guys know Picasso?  How about Piet Modrian?  Most people know both but
don't know that they know Piet.  They are very similar, Piet painted 
trees, here is one:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KwU6EePgmxk/T8FixzAZxBI/AAAAAAAAB0s/xUKRQc23MNk/s1600/mondrian.jpg

Yep, that's a tree.  WTF you say?  So all great artist start out doing the
simple stuff.  Picasso, if you go back far enough, did still lifes of a
bowl of fruit.  Piet did essentially photographs of trees.  But then they
get weird, they get more abstract.  And more abstract.  To the point that
you look at that link above and you go "how is that a tree?  That's not a
tree".

You need to see their work in chronological order.  You see the stuff
that looks like a photograph and then it is a little different, a little
different, and you get to the end and you go wow, that actually is a tree.
It makes no sense if you just look at one after it gets abstract, it 
makes total sense if you see it order.

I had the good fortune to see an exhibit at New Yorks MOMA of Picasso
in chronological order.  Holy moly did that snap him into focus.

So that's a very long way of saying that it was easy for me to be good
at Greek pottery because I already knew that if you put someones work
in chronological order it would make sense.  The correction I did 
that I'm proud of is to Janson's history of art (which is the benchmark
for art history), there was a Greek artist who did a series of pots
and Janson had two pots backwards, the earlier one was the later one.
Janson was dead but the book carried on and they took my fix.

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:36:40PM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
> Btw.  This was some I used as a wizards test. 
> 
> You have a working system next to a system that is still running so you have the console and its shell but had the rm -fr / done to it.  You have lost all of bin dev etc and lib by the time he hit ^C.   So you have some of /usr inc but much of /usr/bin is still there.    No compiler or assembler on the broken machine since that was in bin and lib.   
> 
> It???s possible to fix it using the other system to help.  Just don???t turn the damaged system off ????
> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> 
> > On Sep 16, 2019, at 9:17 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> >>> On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> >>> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
> >>> and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
> >>> my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
> >>> things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
> >>> paper
> >>> on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
> >>> and picked up my highliter...
> >> 
> >> This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the
> >> same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
> >> "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the
> >> entire thing after the file got corrupted.
> > 
> > I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
> > a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
> > I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
> > Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
> > cd something
> > and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
> > Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
> > This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] earliest Unix roff
  2019-09-17  1:33         ` Larry McVoy
@ 2019-09-17 22:39           ` Dave Horsfall
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2019-09-17 22:39 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Mon, 16 Sep 2019, Larry McVoy wrote:

> In retrospect having / be roots home is a super bad idea but I think it 
> was fairly common practice, /root became a thing as idiots like me 
> messed things up :)

After my similar fsckup, I made /etc root's home directory (it was much 
easier to recover, and was available at boot time).

-- Dave

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2019-09-17 22:40 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2019-09-15 22:07 [TUHS] earliest Unix roff Doug McIlroy
2019-09-17  0:20 ` Steve Johnson
2019-09-17  1:11   ` Arthur Krewat
2019-09-17  1:17     ` Larry McVoy
2019-09-17  1:26       ` Clem cole
2019-09-17  1:33         ` Larry McVoy
2019-09-17 22:39           ` Dave Horsfall
2019-09-17  1:36         ` Richard Salz
2019-09-17  1:36       ` [TUHS] wizards test [was roff] Clem cole
2019-09-17  1:38         ` Clem cole
2019-09-17  2:34         ` Larry McVoy
2019-09-17  1:57       ` [TUHS] earliest Unix roff Bakul Shah
2019-09-17  1:11   ` [TUHS] Model 37's Ronald Natalie
2019-09-17  1:19   ` [TUHS] earliest Unix roff Bakul Shah

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