[TUHS] MS-DOS

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Norman Wilson]

I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
would give an Englishman a stroke.

If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:

> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
> would give an Englishman a stroke.
>
> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
>
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
>

I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)

-uso.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Random832]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2016, at 21:13, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)

Not "Solidus"? (Along with its counterpart, the reverse solidus)

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[scj]

> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
>> would give an Englishman a stroke.
>>
>> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
>>
>> Norman Wilson
>> Toronto ON
>>
>
> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)
>
> -uso.
>

AT&T's original term for the 12th key on your phone was 'Octothorpe'.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/octothorpe
It pretty quickly became 'pound', but for anybody under the age of 35 it's
now 'hashtag'  (much to the dismay of music teachers...)

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Friday,  1 July 2016 at 21:13:00 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
>> would give an Englishman a stroke.
>>
>> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
>
> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)

For some definition of "proper".  But it's doubly ambiguous: it's the
French word for comma, and OED states:

   A thin sloping or upright line (/, |) occurring in mediæval MSS. as
   a mark for the cæsura or as a punctuation-mark (frequently with the
   same value as the modern comma).

In modern context, it might apply equally to \\.
Clearly that has even more capacity to confuse.

Greg
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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Nemo]

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On 7 July 2016 at 01:02, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> On Friday,  1 July 2016 at 21:13:00 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
>>
>>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
>>> would give an Englishman a stroke.
>>>
>>> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
>>
>> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)
>
> For some definition of "proper".  But it's doubly ambiguous: it's the
> French word for comma, and OED states:
>
>    A thin sloping or upright line (/, |) occurring in mediæval MSS. as
>    a mark for the cæsura or as a punctuation-mark (frequently with the
>    same value as the modern comma).

On the other hand, the OED has the following.

slash 5. A thin sloping line, thus /

solidus 2. A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6,
in writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a
shilling-mark.

I would argue "solidus" is closer.

N.

>
> In modern context, it might apply equally to \\.
> Clearly that has even more capacity to confuse.
>
> Greg
> --
> Sent from my desktop computer.
> Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[John Cowan]

Nemo scripsit:

> I would argue "solidus" is closer.

A solid argument, worth at least a shilling.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
It's like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver
spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, "I want to be
rich, too, so I'm going to start walking with a cane and I'm going to
act crotchety and I'm going to get liver disease. --Wil Shipley

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

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Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
 |On 7 July 2016 at 01:02, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
 |> On Friday,  1 July 2016 at 21:13:00 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
 |>> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
 |>>
 |>>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
 |>>> would give an Englishman a stroke.
 |>>>
 |>>> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
 |>>
 |>> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)
 |>
 |> For some definition of "proper".  But it's doubly ambiguous: it's the
 |> French word for comma, and OED states:
 |>
 |>    A thin sloping or upright line (/, |) occurring in mediæval MSS. as
 |>    a mark for the cæsura or as a punctuation-mark (frequently with the
 |>    same value as the modern comma).
 |
 |On the other hand, the OED has the following.
 |
 |slash 5. A thin sloping line, thus /
 |
 |solidus 2. A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6,
 |in writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a
 |shilling-mark.
 |
 |I would argue "solidus" is closer.

SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.
To the contrary, the POSIX standard, says "Slash Character
(<slash>)" and then states "also known as solidus" in the
description, and ditto does so for reverse solidus.  Maybe this
will change over time to better reflect ISO 10646.

--steffen

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Thursday,  7 July 2016 at 16:18:41 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 7 July 2016 at 01:02, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>>> On Friday,  1 July 2016 at 21:13:00 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
>>>>> would give an Englishman a stroke.
>>>>>
>>>>> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
>>>>
>>>> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)
>>>
>>> For some definition of "proper".  But it's doubly ambiguous: it's the
>>> French word for comma, and OED states:
>>>
>>>    A thin sloping or upright line (/, |) occurring in mediæval MSS. as
>>>    a mark for the cæsura or as a punctuation-mark (frequently with the
>>>    same value as the modern comma).
>>
>> On the other hand, the OED has the following.
>>
>> slash 5. A thin sloping line, thus /
>>
>> solidus 2. A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6,
>> in writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a
>> shilling-mark.

This was, of course, also the origin of the word "shilling".  The OED
entry is interesting.

>> I would argue "solidus" is closer.
>
> SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
> SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.

Finally we have clarity!  From now on it's only (without shouting)
solidus and reverse solidus.  No confusion any more, at least not for
those in the know.

Greg
--
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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[scj]

>
>>> I would argue "solidus" is closer.
>>
>> SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
>> SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.
>
> Finally we have clarity!  From now on it's only (without shouting)
> solidus and reverse solidus.  No confusion any more, at least not for
> those in the know.
>
> Greg
> --

What fun!  Having disposed of # and / and \, anybody want to find other
obscure names for the other operators?   Soon we could be as obscure as
Algol 68!

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday,  7 July 2016 at 22:40:47 -0700, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
>
>>
>>>> I would argue "solidus" is closer.
>>>
>>> SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
>>> SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.
>>
>> Finally we have clarity!  From now on it's only (without shouting)
>> solidus and reverse solidus.  No confusion any more, at least not for
>> those in the know.
>
> What fun!  Having disposed of # and / and \, anybody want to find
> other obscure names for the other operators?  Soon we could be as
> obscure as Algol 68!

That takes real talent.

You've made me locate my Report (not Revised Report).  It's
surprisingly dog-eared.  I'll go through it and see what I can find,
but for the moment section 2.2 seems appropriate.

Greg
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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

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Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
 |On Thursday,  7 July 2016 at 16:18:41 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
 |>> On 7 July 2016 at 01:02, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
 |>>> On Friday,  1 July 2016 at 21:13:00 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
 |>>>> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
 |>>>>
 |>>>>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
 |>>>>> would give an Englishman a stroke.

 |>> On the other hand, the OED has the following.
 |>>
 |>> slash 5. A thin sloping line, thus /
 |>>
 |>> solidus 2. A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6,
 |>> in writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a
 |>> shilling-mark.

 |>> I would argue "solidus" is closer.
 |>
 |> SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
 |> SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.
 |
 |Finally we have clarity!  From now on it's only (without shouting)

Copied and pasted from UnicodeData.txt.

 |solidus and reverse solidus.  No confusion any more, at least not for
 |those in the know.

Maybe it helps that the German «Schrägstrich» will desert into
Slash («Herkunft: englisch slash, eigentlich = (harter, kurzer)
Schlag, Hieb, laut- und bewegungsnachahmend oder zu altfranzösisch
esclachier = (zer)teilen») and that a furtherly described
Schrägstrich will wind up in «Backslash» («Herkunft: englisch
backslash, aus: back = zurück und slash = Hieb, Schnitt»)

It gives me cause for concern that we replace a civil word like
«Schrägstrich» ("oblique bar") with something aggressive and
dismembering that slash seems to represent.  That may be a reason
for Linguists to promote solidus and ban the other words into the
commentary, one might think.

...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
created what became POSIX preferred slash instead -- i hope it is
not the proud of high skills in using (maybe light) sabers that
some people of the engineer community seem to foster.  But it
could be the sober truth.  Or, it could be a bug caused by
inconsideration.  And that seems very likely now.

--steffen

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Friday,  8 July 2016 at 13:09:12 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday,  7 July 2016 at 16:18:41 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
>>> Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I would argue "solidus" is closer.
>>>
>>> SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
>>> SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.
>>
>> Finally we have clarity!  From now on it's only (without shouting)
>> solidus and reverse solidus.  No confusion any more, at least not
>> for those in the know.
>
> Maybe it helps that the German «Schrägstrich» will desert into Slash
> («Herkunft: englisch slash, eigentlich???= (harter, kurzer) Schlag,
> Hieb, laut- und bewegungsnachahmend oder zu altfranzösisch
> esclachier???= (zer)teilen»

You don't quote your source, but the blue Duden (paraphrased for
non-German speakers) makes it clear that "Strich" comes from an Ablaut
form of "streichen", itself derived from the root "Strahl", originally
meaning "arrow".  So ultimately, it seems, you have the choice of
being struck or shot.

Greg
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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

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Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
 |On Friday,  8 July 2016 at 13:09:12 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
 |>> On Thursday,  7 July 2016 at 16:18:41 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |>>> Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
 |>>>> I would argue "solidus" is closer.
 |>>>
 |>>> SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
 |>>> SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.
 |>>
 |>> Finally we have clarity!  From now on it's only (without shouting)
 |>> solidus and reverse solidus.  No confusion any more, at least not
 |>> for those in the know.
 |>
 |> Maybe it helps that the German «Schrägstrich» will desert into Slash
 |> («Herkunft: englisch slash, eigentlich???= (harter, kurzer) Schlag,
 |> Hieb, laut- und bewegungsnachahmend oder zu altfranzösisch
 |> esclachier???= (zer)teilen»
 |
 |You don't quote your source, but the blue Duden (paraphrased for
 |non-German speakers) makes it clear that "Strich" comes from an Ablaut
 |form of "streichen", itself derived from the root "Strahl", originally
 |meaning "arrow".  So ultimately, it seems, you have the choice of
 |being struck or shot.

Haha, very nice.  I wouldn't sign the "originally meaning" --
without knowing it seems more likely that this visualization of an
"arrow"-in-the-flight was itself based on the "beam"s of sunlight
(that fall through holes in a cloudy sky).  Nature-induced
visualizations are pretty common me thinks; e.g., Fritz Walter
describes a football goal of the young Uwe Seeler during world
championship 1958 with "Ein Strich.  Ein Blitz." ("A line/stroke.
A Lightning.").

I would really think that "Strich" (line, dash, stroke) of
"streichen" (hm, stroke) is derived from such.  We say things like
"Die Segel streichen" (Taking in the sails), "Der Wind streicht
durch die Bäume" (The wind sweeps through the trees) and such
things.  "Streichen" is documented as an Onomatopoeia, and,
funnily, the english Wikipedia article for this mentions "bang".

Slash is not that bad, we all come from a very dark and
substantial base, and i think at least subconsciously we take that
with us, and it is a problem even before it becomes conscious.
(Interestingly just today i heard a review of a book of Sacha
Batthyany, "Und was hat das mit mir zu tun?" (What has that got to
do with me?), but not (yet) english i think.)
And, not hundred years ago one could buy liquid human fat
("Axungia hominis") in pharmacies, and usage of dismembered parts
was pretty common, and by 1984 face creams still contained fat
extracted from placenta remains.   Not 150 years ago a preacher
wrote "the thumb of a thieve laid aside from or under the goods
provides fortune for the merchant".  In Cannes this year i heard
times are about cannibalism.  So slash is just as hip as it always
had been.  I will now go and slice some pieces of Austrian cheese.

--steffen

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[John Cowan]

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Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit:

> "Die Segel streichen" (Taking in the sails), 

"Striking the sails" in technical English.  All the nations around the
North and Baltic Seas exchanged their vocabularies like diseases, and if
we didn't have records of their earlier histories, we would know they
were related but we'd never figure out exactly how.  For example, it
can be shown that French bateau, German Boot, common Scandinavian båt,
Irish bád, Scottish Gaelic bàta, Scots boat, and the equivalents in
the various Frisian languages are none of them original native words:
they all were borrowed from English boat.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
        --Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Tony Finch]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> On Thursday,  7 July 2016 at 16:18:41 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> >>
> >> solidus 2. A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6,
> >> in writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a
> >> shilling-mark.
>
> This was, of course, also the origin of the word "shilling".  The OED
> entry is interesting.

Not quite.

"Shilling" comes from Germanic schilling and Gothic skilliggs.

The name solidus for / comes from the Roman coin solidus, as in the Lsd
notation where / separates the solidi from the denarii.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=shilling
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=solidus

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
North Utsire: Variable, mainly southwesterly, 3 or 4. Slight or moderate.
Showers, fog patches. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor.

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Nemo]

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On 11 July 2016 at 07:20, Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote (in part):
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote (in part):
>> On Thursday,  7 July 2016 at 16:18:41 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
>>
>> This was, of course, also the origin of the word "shilling".  The OED
>> entry is interesting.
>
> Not quite.
>
> "Shilling" comes from Germanic schilling and Gothic skilliggs.
>
> The name solidus for / comes from the Roman coin solidus, as in the Lsd
> notation where / separates the solidi from the denarii.
>
> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=shilling
> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=solidus
>
> Tony.

Here is the full OED entry for solidus and the start of that for
shilling.  (Apologies to those whose displays do not show all the
glyphs used.)

solidus
Pl. solidi (ˈsɒlɪdaɪ); also 5–7 solidos.
[L., a substantival use of solidus (sc. nummus) solid a. The form
solidos is the L. acc. pl.]

1. a.1.a A gold coin of the Roman empire, originally worth about 25
denarii. †b.1.b A shilling.

   1387 Trevisa Higden (Rolls) II. 313 Gentil men hade rynges, and
oþere hadde solidy þat were hole and sownde.    1432–50 tr. Higden
(Rolls) VII. 301 Kynge William toke this yere of every hyde of grownde
in Ynglone vj. solidos of silver.    1487 in Paston Lett. III. App.
463, I bequeith to the reparacion of the stepull of the said churche
of Saint Albane xx. solidos.    1609 Bible (Douay) 1 Chron. xxix. 7
And they gaue‥of gold, fiue thousand talentes, and ten thousand
solidos.    1706 Phillips (ed. Kersey), Solidus, an entire or whole
piece of Gold-Coin, near the Value of our old Noble or Spur-Royal; but
it is now taken for a Shilling.    1860 C. R. Smith in Archæol. Cant.
III. 38 The solidi of the Eastern Empire were commonly imitated in
France under the Merovingian princes.    1885 Athenæum 24 Oct. 541/2
Mr. Webster exhibited‥a gold solidus of Constantius.

2. A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6, in
writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a
shilling-mark. Also attrib. Cf. oblique n. 5.

   1891 in Cent. Dict.    1898 G. Chrystal Introd. Algebra i. (1902) 3
The symbols / (solidus notation) and : (ratio notation) are equivalent
to ÷.    1905 F. H. Collins Author & Printer s.v.    1909 Athenæum 27
Mar. 379/1 The last‥have been quick to adopt the use of the solidus or
slanting line instead of the horizontal bar in writing fractions.
1923 N. Shaw Forecasting Weather i. 35 A solidus (/) such as occurs in
the combination ‘bc/r’ separates weather at the time of observation
from the preceding weather, bc/r thus indicating ‘fine or fair after
rain or drizzle’.    1947 [see non-linear a. b].    1971 Archivum
Linguisticum II. 4 Johnson/Jenkinson's ‘oblique dash’‥, which is
otherwise called a ‘solidus’ or ‘virgule’.


shilling
(ˈʃɪlɪŋ)

Forms: 1 scilling, scylling, (-ingc), 3 ssillinge, 3–6 schillinge, 4
ssyllyng, 4–5 schillyng(e, schelyng(e, shulleng(e, schullyng(e, 4–6
schiling, shill-, shyllyng(e, -inge, silling, 4–7 schilling, 5
schyllynge, shylynge, schilenge, silyn, 5–6 sheling, -yng(e,
shellyng(e, 6 scheling(e, schillengge, shealinge, shyllyn, syllyng, 4–
shilling.

[Common Teut.: OE. scilling masc. = OFris. skilling, skilleng,
schilling, MDu. schellingh (Du. schelling), OS. scilling (MLG.
schillink, schildink, mod.LG. schillink, schilling), OHG. scilling,
skillink, schilling (MHG., G. schilling), ON. skilling-r (Icel. also
skildingr, SW., Da. skilling), Goth. skilliggs:—OTeut. *skilliŋgo-z.
Adopted in OSlav. as skŭlęzĭ, in Sp., Pr., Fr. as escalin (13th c. F.
eskallin, mod.F. also schelling), It. scellino.
   The Teut. word is referred by some etymologists to the root *skell-
to resound, ring (see shill a. and v.1). Others assign it to the root
*skel- to divide (whence skill v., shale n., shell n., etc.); some
have conjectured that the word originally denoted one of the segments
of fixed weight into which an armlet of gold or silver was divided, so
that they might be detached for use as money. In the bilingual
documents of the 6th century, Goth. skilliggs corresponds to the L.
solidus; in mediæval Germany the Teut. and the Latin word were
commonly used to render each other, but in England the correspondence
appears to have been only occasionally recognized until Norman times.
The value of the ‘shilling’ in continental Teut. countries has varied
greatly; its relation to the penny and the pound has also varied,
though a widely accepted scale was 1 pound or libra = 20 shillings or
solidi = 240 pennies or denarii. See schelling, schilling1,
skilling2.]

1. a.1.a A former English money of account, from the Norman Conquest
of the value of 12d. or 1/20 of a pound sterling. Abbreviated s. (= L.
solidus: see solidus1), formerly also sh., shil.; otherwise denoted by
the sign /- after the numeral. No longer in official use after the
introduction of decimal coinage in 1971, but still occas. used to
denote five new pence.
   Before the Norman Conquest the value of the shilling varied in
different times and places. It was 5 pence in Wessex and 4 pence in
Mercia; the shilling of 12 pence mentioned in two passages c 1000 may
refer to the continental solidus.

[...remaining 100 lines omitted...]

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Joerg Schilling]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
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Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:

> "Shilling" comes from Germanic schilling and Gothic skilliggs.

The name Schilling comes from the knight Heinrich III. Schilling von Lahnstein (1166 - 
1221).


He had a shining armour...

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/'

[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[scj]

Steve Bourne tried hard to interest us in A68, and I personally liked some
features of it (especially the automatic type morphing of arguments into
the expected types).  But the documentation was a huge barrier--all the
familiar ideas were given completely new (and unintuitive) names, making
it very difficult to get into.

I may be biased in my view, but I think one fatal mistake that A68 made
was that it had no scheme for porting the language to the plethora of
computers and systems around at that time.  (The Bliss language from CMU
had a similar problem, requiring a bigger computer to compile for the
PDP-11).  Pascal had P-code, and gave C a real run, especially as a
teaching language.  C had PCC.

Nowadays, newer languages like Python just piggyback on C or C++...

[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Clem Cole]

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Steve - good stuff.   comments below.

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 11:17 AM, <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

> But the documentation was a huge barrier

​Amen​ - I remember trying to read the report and getting utterly befuddled.



> --all the
> ​ ​
> familiar ideas were given completely new (and unintuitive) names, making
> ​ ​
> it very difficult to get into.
>
​And as importantly, it was not clear to many of us what we were getting
for all that stuff.   Was it sugar or really going to help?​    C, BLISS,
PL/360, BCPL et al, took a much more minimalist view.   Algol68 seems like
it was the "one ring to rule them all" but how could you be sure?



>
> I may be biased in my view, but I think one fatal mistake that A68 made
> was that it had no scheme for porting the language to the plethora of
> computers and systems around at that time.

​I would put this this a little differently.   To me it was not so much
that there was or was not a scheme to move the language, but it was not
economical to try.​   Between your and Dennis's compilers, which were both
"reachable" by many of us, when we needed a language and compiler for these
new microprocessors that were becoming prevalent at the same time, we had
the sources for your compilers and it was "just a matter of a new back
end."



> (The Bliss language from CMU
> ​ ​
> had a similar problem, requiring a bigger computer to compile for the
> ​ ​
> PDP-11).

​While true, I'm not so sure that was the real problem with BLISS.  I
really think it was that CMU sold the language to DEC and compiler sources
were not available to people.   I've always said if DEC had given away the
BLISS compiler and made the sources available in the same manner as C (or
Pascal for that matter), folks like me would have been tempted to use it
write a backend for the 68K (Z8000, 8086 much less the 8-bit micros).​

I also think the size issue could have been (and would have been) fixed if
it was worth it.   But it was not.  The requirement of needing a PDP-10 (or
later Vax) to run was due to the small address space of the PDP-11 and the
amazing things that the BLISS optimizer did.   But you are correct - that
was never done, so it certainly added why BLISS never went very far.

My own experience was simple. At Tektronix, in the late 1970's I was given
a chip that would become the 68K (it was yet to be numbered by Motorola at
that point) and I wanted a HLL for the system we started to make with it
(what would later be called Magnolia).  As a V6 (and later V7) licensee, I
had the sources to the Ritchie compiler.  I knew both BLISS and C (as well
as Algol/Pascal/FTN/PL-1 et,), and I admit in those days still had a
fondness for the former as a CMU grad and Bill Wulf student.   But I did
not have any of the CMU tools (PQCC et al) much less the DEC ones (and you
are correct, I ould get access to the PDP-10, but I had a couple of UNIX
boxes available).  So, I had your tools and they worked well.   Thus,
I wrote a back end for my project for that chip.  It was that simple.   It
was pure economics.




> Pascal had P-code, and gave C a real run, especially as a
> teaching language.

​Right, Pascal had a number of generally available compilers, with P-Code
being the most used.​  It was as economical as C to work.   And a lot of
people used it.  While I liked it as a teaching language, it was useless as
a production language unless you hacked on it and extended it.  And as
importantly for me, it could not be used as a "systems" language as it.  In
fact, at that time Tektronix has at least 6 different but incompatible
flavors of "Tek Pascal." It was language of choice in the product teams
(BTW, our friends and rivals had over 20 flavors of HP BASIC in those days
too).

I picked C because I could and I knew my PDP-11 code would pretty much just
work on this new device.   Admittedly "proof by lack of imagination" reined
here, but I really could not image trying to use Pascal to write an OS.
 I knew I could with BLISS or C.




> Nowadays, newer languages like Python just piggyback on C or C++...

​Hmm... I would say piggyback on the C ecosystem - i.e. GCC (or now LLVM).​

​Clem​
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[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Marc Rochkind]

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Bill Cheswick: "What a different world it would be if IBM had selected the
M68000 and UCSD Pascal.  Both seemed
to me to better better choices at the time."

Not for those of us trying to write serious software. The IBM PC came out
in August, 1981, and I left Bell Labs to write software for it full time
about 5 months later. At the time, it seemed to me to represent the future,
and that turned out to be a correct guess.

Microsoft Basic is well known as the primary initial language for the PC,
but from day one there was another choice called Microsoft Pascal (we used
the IBM Pascal version). It was a considerable extension over classical
Pascal. It had full-blown string manipulation and pointers. With it, I was
able to implement a text editor called EDIX and an nroff-ripoff called
WORDIX. The compiler was full of bugs, but it was a true compiler, and the
programs were small enough and fast enough to work well on the limited 8088
(I think that was the processor) hardware.

Initially, with no hard drive, I had to switch floppies several times just
to compile one file. Later, I got a 6MB hard drive for about $3000.
Interestingly, that drive could not even hold one (raw) image from my
current digital camera!

We could not have used Microsoft Basic or UCSD Pascal.

Just a few years later, something called Lattice C came along, and we
switched (back) to C, and stayed with it from there on out.

--Marc

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 7:22 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Steve - good stuff.   comments below.
>
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 11:17 AM, <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
>
>> But the documentation was a huge barrier
>
> ​Amen​ - I remember trying to read the report and getting utterly
> befuddled.
>
>
>
>> --all the
>> ​ ​
>> familiar ideas were given completely new (and unintuitive) names, making
>> ​ ​
>> it very difficult to get into.
>>
> ​And as importantly, it was not clear to many of us what we were getting
> for all that stuff.   Was it sugar or really going to help?​    C, BLISS,
> PL/360, BCPL et al, took a much more minimalist view.   Algol68 seems like
> it was the "one ring to rule them all" but how could you be sure?
>
>
>
>>
>> I may be biased in my view, but I think one fatal mistake that A68 made
>> was that it had no scheme for porting the language to the plethora of
>> computers and systems around at that time.
>
> ​I would put this this a little differently.   To me it was not so much
> that there was or was not a scheme to move the language, but it was not
> economical to try.​   Between your and Dennis's compilers, which were both
> "reachable" by many of us, when we needed a language and compiler for
> these new microprocessors that were becoming prevalent at the same time, we
> had the sources for your compilers and it was "just a matter of a new back
> end."
>
>
>
>> (The Bliss language from CMU
>> ​ ​
>> had a similar problem, requiring a bigger computer to compile for the
>> ​ ​
>> PDP-11).
>
> ​While true, I'm not so sure that was the real problem with BLISS.  I
> really think it was that CMU sold the language to DEC and compiler sources
> were not available to people.   I've always said if DEC had given away the
> BLISS compiler and made the sources available in the same manner as C (or
> Pascal for that matter), folks like me would have been tempted to use it
> write a backend for the 68K (Z8000, 8086 much less the 8-bit micros).​
>
> I also think the size issue could have been (and would have been) fixed if
> it was worth it.   But it was not.  The requirement of needing a PDP-10 (or
> later Vax) to run was due to the small address space of the PDP-11 and the
> amazing things that the BLISS optimizer did.   But you are correct - that
> was never done, so it certainly added why BLISS never went very far.
>
> My own experience was simple. At Tektronix, in the late 1970's I was given
> a chip that would become the 68K (it was yet to be numbered by Motorola at
> that point) and I wanted a HLL for the system we started to make with it
> (what would later be called Magnolia).  As a V6 (and later V7) licensee, I
> had the sources to the Ritchie compiler.  I knew both BLISS and C (as well
> as Algol/Pascal/FTN/PL-1 et,), and I admit in those days still had a
> fondness for the former as a CMU grad and Bill Wulf student.   But I did
> not have any of the CMU tools (PQCC et al) much less the DEC ones (and you
> are correct, I ould get access to the PDP-10, but I had a couple of UNIX
> boxes available).  So, I had your tools and they worked well.   Thus,
> I wrote a back end for my project for that chip.  It was that simple.   It
> was pure economics.
>
>
>
>
>> Pascal had P-code, and gave C a real run, especially as a
>> teaching language.
>
> ​Right, Pascal had a number of generally available compilers, with P-Code
> being the most used.​  It was as economical as C to work.   And a lot of
> people used it.  While I liked it as a teaching language, it was useless as
> a production language unless you hacked on it and extended it.  And as
> importantly for me, it could not be used as a "systems" language as it.  In
> fact, at that time Tektronix has at least 6 different but incompatible
> flavors of "Tek Pascal." It was language of choice in the product teams
> (BTW, our friends and rivals had over 20 flavors of HP BASIC in those days
> too).
>
> I picked C because I could and I knew my PDP-11 code would pretty much
> just work on this new device.   Admittedly "proof by lack of imagination"
> reined here, but I really could not image trying to use Pascal to write an
> OS.    I knew I could with BLISS or C.
>
>
>
>
>> Nowadays, newer languages like Python just piggyback on C or C++...
>
> ​Hmm... I would say piggyback on the C ecosystem - i.e. GCC (or now LLVM).​
>
> ​Clem​
>
>
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[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Dan Cross]

On Jun 30, 2016 10:10 AM, "Marc Rochkind" <rochkind at basepath.com> wrote:

> Bill Cheswick: "What a different world it would be if IBM had selected
> the M68000 and UCSD Pascal.  Both seemed
> to me to better better choices at the time."
>
> Not for those of us trying to write serious software. The IBM PC came out
> in August, 1981, and I left Bell Labs to write software for it full time
> about 5 months later. At the time, it seemed to me to represent the future,
> and that turned out to be a correct guess.
>
> Microsoft Basic is well known as the primary initial language for the PC,
> but from day one there was another choice called Microsoft Pascal (we used
> the IBM Pascal version). It was a considerable extension over classical
> Pascal. It had full-blown string manipulation and pointers. With it, I was
> able to implement a text editor called EDIX and an nroff-ripoff called
> WORDIX. The compiler was full of bugs, but it was a true compiler, and the
> programs were small enough and fast enough to work well on the limited 8088
> (I think that was the processor) hardware.
>

I don't know about UCSD Pascal versus MS-DOS, but I think you yourself just
alluded to the processor distinction that Ches was referring to. Of course
it's only of historical interest now, but from a technology standpoint
MC68000 vs Intel 8088 seems like a no-brainer: the 68k is the superior
chip. From a business perspective, I guess it was a very different matter,
but that's not my area and the ship has long sailed over the horizon.
Still, it's fun to speculate and I can't help but think that a 68k-based
IBM PC would have been a nicer machine.

Initially, with no hard drive, I had to switch floppies several times just
> to compile one file. Later, I got a 6MB hard drive for about $3000.
> Interestingly, that drive could not even hold one (raw) image from my
> current digital camera!
>
> We could not have used Microsoft Basic or UCSD Pascal.
>
> Just a few years later, something called Lattice C came along, and we
> switched (back) to C, and stayed with it from there on out.
>

Something I never understood about the IBM PC: even the 8088 machine was
fairly beefy compared to e.g. a PDP-11/20. The 6th Edition Unix kernel was
objectively pretty small and understandable; mini-Unix showed that that
sort of software could be used on a machine without an MMU. I've never
understood why IBM didn't just write a real OS in a high-level language
instead of saddling the world with MS-DOS. Perhaps it's naive of me, but
even if they didn't use Unix directly, it was an existence proof that such
a thing was possible. I suppose, again, it was less a technical issue and
more a business issue, or perhaps I'm underestimating the amount of work or
missing some of the technical complexities.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Diomidis Spinellis]

On 30/06/2016 18:32, Dan Cross wrote:
> Of
> course it's only of historical interest now, but from a technology
> standpoint MC68000 vs Intel 8088 seems like a no-brainer: the 68k is the
> superior chip.

Two factors might had made the choice of 8088 a more practical one for IBM.

First, the 8088 was a 16-bit CPU with an 8-bit data bus in a cheap 
40-pin package.  This halved the number DRAM chips required and allowed 
the IBM PC to be easily designed along existing easily-available 8-bit 
peripherals.  In contrast the 68000 had a 16-bit data bus in a more 
expensive 64-pin package.  Remember that in the 1980s glue logic was 
implemented through simple TTL chips, so adopting the 68000 might have 
doubled the number of chips on the motherboard.

In addition, the 8086 architecture was an extension of the 8080 one, 
which made it easier to make the MS-DOS API compatible with the CP/M 
one, which was used by many popular programs.  This would simplify their 
porting.  (A lot of early IBM PC software was written in assembly 
language.)  The MS-DOS 1.0 interrupts (system calls) even used the same 
numbers and structures (file control blocks - FCBs) as those used by 
CP/M.  MS-DOS 2.0 added file paths and other Unix-influenced abstractions.

[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Nemo]

On 30 June 2016 at 15:21, Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr> wrote:
[...]
> Two factors might had made the choice of 8088 a more practical one for IBM.
>
[...]
> In addition, the 8086 architecture was an extension of the 8080 one, which
> made it easier to make the MS-DOS API compatible with the CP/M one, which
> was used by many popular programs.  This would simplify their porting.  (A
> lot of early IBM PC software was written in assembly language.)

I heard that a lot of the BIOS was a simple-minded translation of
corresponding 8080-assembler.  I believe that; if you look at the
horrible assembler, which was actually printed in the IBM Technical
Manual, you could see that most 8086 extensions were not used.

N.

[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Marc Rochkind]

Clem Cole: "IBM allowed the system to be cloned"

I never looked at it that way. To discourage cloning, IBM published and
copyrighted the BIOS source code. Most serious programmers were very
familiar with it, because one had to know details of the BIOS to program
the computer, for many applications (such as ours). That reduced the number
of programmers who could work on a BIOS clone, as such people would have to
be recruited from outside the world of the IBM PC. A few outfits sprang up
to do clean-room BIOS clones, including an outfit called Phoenix, which had
the best. Compaq's internal BIOS was also excellent.

As for the computer hardware, it was just Intel parts along with
off-the-shelf floppy disk controllers and drives and other such stuff. IBM
had built the PC almost entirely from existing parts, and had no exclusive
on any of it.

For the clones, no copyrighted code was used, the programmers had never
seen the code, and the function of the BIOS wasn't copyrightable. So, IBM
really had no way to prevent the clones.

There were a lot of PCs in the early 1980s that weren't clones. They had
8088 or 8086 CPUs, and looked liked PCs, but they weren't identical, so we
had to port our software. Sometimes companies gave us machines, including
AT&T, whose PC was made by Olivetti. I remember many conversations with
computer vendors in which I was just trying to get the memory address and
layout for the screen. They never could even understand the question. DEC,
which had their own weird version of a PC, was the worst.

Within a few years all these went away, and only identical clones existed,
for which we didn't need to develop a special version.

A few people here have said that IBM could have produced a more
sophisticated OS. Actually, I would have been against anything that took up
more resident memory. Initially, I think the most memory IBM would supply
was 384K, and most serious applications needed it all. Multiprogramming or
sophisticated system calls of any sort would have sucked up valuable
memory. I was able to design the EDIX editor to be entirely memory
resident, even with multiple active files, with no floppy swapping at all.

As someone mentioned, we pretty much used MS-DOS only for its file
management. Access to all other facilities was through the BIOS or directly
to the hardware. With such a completely unprotected system, running more
than one application at a time was out of the question.

One might ask why we had such a primitive system with 384K, when UNIX had
been developed over 10 years before on a smaller system. Simple: UNIX had
swapping. With no hard drive, and floppies being inserted and removed,
everything had to be resident in RAM. In addition, as I've mentioned
already, screen speed is what distinguished PC software, ever since Apple
games and Visicalc. Traditional UNIX screen speed was ridiculously slow,
until the workstations came along, but for many times the price of a PC. To
get the screen speed on a PC, the application had to own the hardware. UNIX
insists on standing between the application and the hardware. In PC land
that would be unacceptable.

--Marc

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 2:57 PM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 30 June 2016 at 15:21, Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr> wrote:
> [...]
> > Two factors might had made the choice of 8088 a more practical one for
> IBM.
> >
> [...]
> > In addition, the 8086 architecture was an extension of the 8080 one,
> which
> > made it easier to make the MS-DOS API compatible with the CP/M one, which
> > was used by many popular programs.  This would simplify their porting.
> (A
> > lot of early IBM PC software was written in assembly language.)
>
> I heard that a lot of the BIOS was a simple-minded translation of
> corresponding 8080-assembler.  I believe that; if you look at the
> horrible assembler, which was actually printed in the IBM Technical
> Manual, you could see that most 8086 extensions were not used.
>
> N.
>
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[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Clem Cole]

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Marc,

I mostly agree but you have a little history out of order.  Apple and
Franklin really are important here.  More inline...

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 7:16 PM, Marc Rochkind <rochkind at basepath.com>
wrote:

> Clem Cole: "IBM allowed the system to be cloned"
>
> I never looked at it that way. To discourage cloning, IBM published and
> copyrighted the BIOS source code.
>
​Hang on that it was not quite that simple.   In fact IBM did publish
everything because that was what all the PC folks did at the time.   As did
IBM themselves in their mainframes.   Remember when the PC was originally
developed, Judge Green has not yet left IBM from its bondage.​   So IBM was
very careful in those days to follow industry norms.   The PC folks (like
Apple, Altair, Cromemco et al) published the schematics and the ROM
listings.  The OS's and higher level tools were closed but the rest tended
to be generally available so IBM followed suit.





> ​....​
>  A few outfits sprang up to do clean-room BIOS clones, including an outfit
> called Phoenix, which had the best. Compaq's internal BIOS was also
> excellent.
>
​This post the Franklin Computer case.​  Clones of Apple II sprung up, with
CPU motherboards coming from Taiwan.   Hey I made an Apple II clone, as
well as an Xerox 820 clone in those days myself (I may still have the
later).

Franklin Computer of Philadelphia started to sell their Apple II to run
Visacalc - which was the "killer app" of the day (note a theme here).  Jobs
did not like it and took them to court.  I actually knew the main attorney
for Franklin at the time (one of the few big cases he even lost).   Apple
won because it was the contents of the ROM (bit for bit) that was found to
be identical.   The question became could you "copyright" the bits. [There
is a whole side discussion about what the memory chip guys of that day did
to try to keep people from copying them BTW].

Anyway, once that became case law, the concept of a "clean room" was
created.  As you say, Phoenix did a remarkable job.   BTW:  in an
interested side note, years later, IBM sold Phoenix its BIOS and started to
use theirs when the Phoenix BIOS became the gold standard.



>
> As for the computer hardware, it was just Intel parts
>
​Motorola, WD, and TI parts originally.​




> For the clones, no copyrighted code was used, the programmers had never
> seen the code, and the function of the BIOS wasn't copyrightable. So, IBM
> really had no way to prevent the clones.
>
​If they had not published the original material, I suspect it would have
been far, far harder and less attractive.   But also remember, clone in the
IBM land was already around.  Amdahl was selling like hot cakes.  IBM had
learned that with the clone market, they sold more of their own product.
It was an interesting business view.   The pie was getting bigger faster,
so they got a larger amount of pie, even though the percentage of the pie
got smaller.​  So IBM made more money.

This was a lesson a lot of companies, particularly computer firms, never
quite understood.   Having a weak, buy alive competitor is better than no
competition.




>
>
> There were a lot of PCs in the early 1980s that weren't clones.
>
​Absolutely.​  But if the OS has been reasonable and had be able to hide
the differences (and you not be able to go directly to HW addresses etc..)
this would have been less of an issue.




> ​...
> DEC, which had their own weird version of a PC, was the worst.
>
​No doubt.​



> One might ask why we had such a primitive system with 384K, when UNIX had
> been developed over 10 years before on a smaller system. Simple: UNIX had
> swapping.
>
​Truth is folks built systems that swapped to floppies (and cassette tape
et al) in those days.  Originally Magix was going to be in that same camp
when it was a "G-job" by Roger and myself.  When our boss funded its the
first thing we did was add a 10M disk.​




> ​... ​
> To get the screen speed on a PC, the application had to own the hardware.
>
​That was a deficiency of the PC HW design.   Other systems, such as the
Magnolia and later Apollo/Masscomp/Sun, showed you could have fine speed
with out having to do that.  Also in "PC land" consider when the '20 Mac
came out and Apple started to get religion (as did NeXT shortly there
after).

You could do it, but the original PC designs were sloppy and did not care
-- the feeling was that extra HW (and SW to support) was unnecessary.   In
many ways, the original PC guys were right given how far and how long those
systems lived.   But it was painful for the SW building as you pointed out.
   You should not have had to do such "unnatural" or "unsafe" acts.




> UNIX insists on standing between the application and the hardware.
>
​As it should ;-) ​It required  good HW under the covers and then UNIX
drivers that did the the right things.  In the same time frame as the PC
was developed it was definitely possible and would not have cost more.​




> In PC land that would be unacceptable.
>
​Only because the HW sucked and the OS did not have the right types of
structures to make it work.​

Seriously, Marc I get it and you are better man for dealing with the craziness
of the day.  Many of the rest of us would not at the time, and until we got
"real HW" did not mess that much with it.  Then again, I did not care to
run a VisaCalc or a Word Perfect :-)

Clem
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[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

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> On Jun 30, 2016, at 5:38 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> ​Hang on that it was not quite that simple.   In fact IBM did publish everything because that was what all the PC folks did at the time.   As did IBM themselves in their mainframes.   Remember when the PC was originally developed, Judge Green has not yet left IBM from its bondage.​   So IBM was very careful in those days to follow industry norms.   The PC folks (like Apple, Altair, Cromemco et al) published the schematics and the ROM listings.  The OS's and higher level tools were closed but the rest tended to be generally available so IBM followed suit.

But IBM had long stopped publishing source for VM/360 by that point.  They were quite aware by the time of ??-DOS that copyright applied to source code.

And by then there were copyright notices being slapped all over BIOS code.  I remember seeing it in S-100 systems at the time.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[William Cheswick]

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>>​...​why didn't they have a more capable kernel than MS-DOS?
​>I don't think they cared. or felt it was needed at the time (I disagreed then and still do).

MS-DOS was a better choice at the time than Unix. It had to fit on floppies, and was very simple.

“Unix is a system administrations nightmare” — dmr

Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite the last two letters of its name.
This is a term of art lost to antiquity.
Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a crappy, built-in shell,
I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc. No multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly). DEC had several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy: they were getting operating-ish.

It all had to fit on a floppy (do I remember correctly that the original floppyies, SSSD, were 90KB?), run
flight simulator and some business apps.  MSDOS lasted a decade, and served the PC world well, for all its
crapiness.  Win 3.1 was an attempt at an OS, and Win 95 an actual one, with a network stack and everything.

>I agree with 90% of what he says, but not about Algol 68.  He obviously
>has a strong preference for small languages: it would be interesting
>to see his uncensored opinions of C++, the Godzilla of our day as Ada

I’d be astonished if he had anything good at all to say about C++.

He’s still around…you could ask him...

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Marc Rochkind]

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Bill: "MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system"

Well said... that's completely true.

Those original floppies were I believe 160K. If you paid extra, the box
would hold two drives. Later, IBM introduced double-sided drives, at 320K
each.

The XT model, with a built-in hard drive (10MB as I recall) came out
one-and-a-half years after the original, in 1983. With it came MS-DOS 2.0,
with a hierarchical file system.

Since the forward slash was used for command-line options, paths used a
backwards slash.

--Marc

On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 6:47 AM, William Cheswick <ches at cheswick.com> wrote:

> >>​...​why didn't they have a more capable kernel than MS-DOS?
> ​>I don't think they cared. or felt it was needed at the time (I disagreed
> then and still do).
>
> MS-DOS was a better choice at the time than Unix. It had to fit on
> floppies, and was very simple.
>
> “Unix is a system administrations nightmare” — dmr
>
> Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite
> the last two letters of its name.
> This is a term of art lost to antiquity.
> Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a
> crappy, built-in shell,
> I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc. No
> multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly). DEC had
> several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy: they were
> getting operating-ish.
>
> It all had to fit on a floppy (do I remember correctly that the original
> floppyies, SSSD, were 90KB?), run
> flight simulator and some business apps.  MSDOS lasted a decade, and
> served the PC world well, for all its
> crapiness.  Win 3.1 was an attempt at an OS, and Win 95 an actual one,
> with a network stack and everything.
>
> >I agree with 90% of what he says, but not about Algol 68.  He obviously
> >has a strong preference for small languages: it would be interesting
> >to see his uncensored opinions of C++, the Godzilla of our day as Ada
>
> I’d be astonished if he had anything good at all to say about C++.
>
> He’s still around…you could ask him...
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[TUHS] MS-DOS

[John Cowan]

Marc Rochkind scripsit:

> Since the forward slash was used for command-line options, paths used a
> backwards slash.

This use of forward slashes came into MS-DOS from CP/M, which got it from
the DEC operating systems.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Yes, chili in the eye is bad, but so is your ear.  However, I would
suggest you wash your hands thoroughly before going to the toilet.
        --gadicath

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Jacob Ritorto]

>
> Marc Rochkind scripsit:
>
> > Since the forward slash was used for command-line options, paths used a
> > backwards slash.



Does anyone besides me bristle at the term "forward slash?"  In my day
(although I'm under fifty), we called them slash and backslash.  The M$
culture seems to encourage this redundant advective as normal parlance.

--jake
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[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Jacob Goense]

On 2016-07-01 18:27, Jacob Ritorto wrote:
>> Marc Rochkind scripsit:
>> 
>>> Since the forward slash was used for command-line options, paths
>> used a
>>> backwards slash.
> 
> Does anyone besides me bristle at the term "forward slash?"  In my day
> (although I'm under fifty), we called them slash and backslash.  The
> M$ culture seems to encourage this redundant advective as normal
> parlance.

Yes, but not but not when used for emphasis.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[John Cowan]

Jacob Ritorto scripsit:

> Does anyone besides me bristle at the term "forward slash?"  In my day
> (although I'm under fifty), we called them slash and backslash.  The M$
> culture seems to encourage this redundant advective as normal parlance.

I encourage it, after hearing people say "Aitch tee tee pee, colon,
backslash, backslash, ...."

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Arise, you prisoners of Windows / Arise, you slaves of Redmond, Wash,
The day and hour soon are coming / When all the IT folks say "Gosh!"
It isn't from a clever lawsuit / That Windowsland will finally fall,
But thousands writing open source code / Like mice who nibble through a wall.
        --The Linux-nationale by Greg Baker

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, John Cowan wrote:

> Jacob Ritorto scripsit:
>
>> Does anyone besides me bristle at the term "forward slash?"  In my day
>> (although I'm under fifty), we called them slash and backslash.  The M$
>> culture seems to encourage this redundant advective as normal parlance.
>
> I encourage it, after hearing people say "Aitch tee tee pee, colon,
> backslash, backslash, ...."
>
>

Oy gevalt. *crumbles to dust*

-uso.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Kurt H Maier]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2016 at 07:44:09PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Jacob Ritorto scripsit:
> 
> > Does anyone besides me bristle at the term "forward slash?"  In my day
> > (although I'm under fifty), we called them slash and backslash.  The M$
> > culture seems to encourage this redundant advective as normal parlance.
> 
> I encourage it, after hearing people say "Aitch tee tee pee, colon,
> backslash, backslash, ...."
> 

NPR did this on a national basis for many, many years.

khm

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Jacob Ritorto wrote:

> Does anyone besides me bristle at the term "forward slash?"  In my day 
> (although I'm under fifty), we called them slash and backslash.  The M$ 
> culture seems to encourage this redundant advective as normal parlance.

In my day, it was "slash" and "slosh" (you need to be Australian to 
understand).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday,  1 July 2016 at 18:27:02 -0400, Jacob Ritorto wrote:
>>
>> Marc Rochkind scripsit:
>>
>>> Since the forward slash was used for command-line options, paths used a
>>> backwards slash.
>
> Does anyone besides me bristle at the term "forward slash?"

Does anybody not?  I've even written a Rant about it:
http://www.lemis.com/grog/Rant/bad-language.php#forward-slash

As I say there, I thought it might be an Australianism.  Dave
Horsefall clearly has other views.  Either way, it makes me twitch
every time I hear it.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

[ backslash vs. slosh ]

> As I say there, I thought it might be an Australianism.  Dave Horsefall 
> clearly has other views.  Either way, it makes me twitch every time I 
> hear it.

Please, no "e" in "Horsfall" (although it is named after an old 
Anglo/Saxon word, referring to someone who tends horses in a field).

I have a mixed English/Scottish background (with Aussie citizenship), if 
that helps to explain my weird turns of phrase...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Marc Rochkind wrote:

> Those original floppies were I believe 160K. If you paid extra, the box 
> would hold two drives. Later, IBM introduced double-sided drives, at 
> 320K each.

Those in the know, of course, simply put a notch on the opposite side.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Marc Rochkind wrote:
>
>> Those original floppies were I believe 160K. If you paid extra, the box
>> would hold two drives. Later, IBM introduced double-sided drives, at
>> 320K each.
>
> Those in the know, of course, simply put a notch on the opposite side.

Well, yeah, if the drive let you. I did that on the Apple ][ all the time.

But try that on a 5150 and you get "Drive not ready". :/

-uso.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[SZIGETI Szabolcs]

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Hi,

I think that only worked on the Commodore 64 and likes, where the drive did
not use the index hole to identify the start of sectors/tracks. Punching a
hole there was much harder operation, than cutting a new write protect
notch.

Szanolcs
2016.07.02. 2:16 ezt írta ("Dave Horsfall" <dave at horsfall.org>):

> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Marc Rochkind wrote:
>
> > Those original floppies were I believe 160K. If you paid extra, the box
> > would hold two drives. Later, IBM introduced double-sided drives, at
> > 320K each.
>
> Those in the know, of course, simply put a notch on the opposite side.
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."
>
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[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Brantley Coile]

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The dual notch worked on Apple, as it didn’t use the index hole either. Woz didn’t see any sense in the index hole. This scheme only worked after the media for all the disks were two sided, oxide on both sides of the mylar. At first they were made from the same sheets as 1/2” magnetic tape, which has oxide on only one side.

My first floppy drive was in 1978 and it sure beat paper tape!

  Brantley Coile

> On Jul 2, 2016, at 12:37 AM, SZIGETI Szabolcs <szigiszabolcs at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I think that only worked on the Commodore 64 and likes, where the drive did not use the index hole to identify the start of sectors/tracks. Punching a hole there was much harder operation, than cutting a new write protect notch.
> 
> Szanolcs
> 
> 2016.07.02. 2:16 ezt írta ("Dave Horsfall" <dave at horsfall.org>):
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> 
> > Those original floppies were I believe 160K. If you paid extra, the box
> > would hold two drives. Later, IBM introduced double-sided drives, at
> > 320K each.
> 
> Those in the know, of course, simply put a notch on the opposite side.
> 
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 8:47 AM, William Cheswick <ches at cheswick.com> wrote:
>
>
> MS-DOS was a better choice at the time than Unix.

​Mumble - the question is what is UNIX.  When comparing MS-DOS to UNIX, I'm
talking about the kernel and the programming API.   Unix as a Kernel could
be very small.​  You might not have had as many commands as we do today
/{,usr}/*bin but it could and did fit.   We ran V7 off floppies on LSI-11s
in those days.   It worked just fine.



> It had to fit on floppies, and was very simple.
>
​UNIX could (and did) at the time --   by the time of the AT (which was
when the PC's hockey stick curve took off) an 5.25" floppy had a capacity
of 1.44M.  An RK05, the V6 and V7 standard,  was 2.5 M which is a 40% loss
of space, but it was do-able.  We also know swapping would have been
slower, but again, had been and was done.  I will say, I used to have an 8"
floppy insides hanging over my desk at one point.  You see that there is no
magnetic material left near the center -- where the i-list was.



>
> “Unix is a system administrations nightmare” — dmr
>
​+1 -- this would have been an issue, particularly pre-Goble work on
getting the write ordering correct.  Halts and crashes trashed the FS and
that was an issue!!​  But it was fixed when people cared, and I suspect if
a Unix-ish system had been on the low end, it would have been addressed.




>
> Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite
> the last two letters of its name.
>
​Amen​.  I use the words "executive."  Or as I have said, it was really
agreement between applications programs on how modify the disk structures
and what could be left in what places in main memory.  As Marc apply points
out, applications >>had to<< by-pass MS-DOS because the HW was not very
good and there really were not good services from the "OS" provided.




> This is a term of art lost to antiquity.
>
​Amen -- sad and very important. ​




> Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a
> crappy, built-in shell,
> I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc.

And most importantly, were based around an agreement between programs, but
that agreement had no way to be enforced.​



> No multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly).

​Networking not so much.  You definitely could (and people did/do) add
networking to executives.  In those days, DEC has DECnet for their systems
(including MS-DOS) and today in the IoT world, I use many of my Arduino's
with network connections.  But I the programing is very much like it was in
my DOS-8/DOS-11/RT-11 days.



> DEC had several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy:
> they were getting operating-ish.
>
​Be careful here Ches.  RT-11 and DOS-11 meet your (and my definitions).
But RSTS and RSX were multi-users and ran (run) protected mode, have/had
full networking stacks etc.  [There is even a lively network of historic
DEC users that to this day have those systems running and available on the
Internet and few member of which lurk and even sometimes comment on this
mailing list].




>
> It all had to fit on a floppy (do I remember correctly that the original
> floppyies, SSSD, were 90KB?), run
> flight simulator and some business apps.

​We ran V7 on 8" floppies (SA800's from Shugart Associates IIRC).  These
were ~ 256K each.  You did have to swap disks in/out a little as Marc
described.   You booted from one Floppy and replaced it with a "root" FS
floppy after the OS loaded.   But it all could and did fit.  You had ad
editor, the compilers, etc.

That said, no graphics files or other stuff   Which as you point out was
important.




> MSDOS lasted a decade, and served the PC world well, for all its
> ​ ​
> crapiness.

​I basically agree.   Although I think it could have been a UNIX-like
substance just as easily >>if<< people had cared.   They key point is that
they did not:  MS-DOS was good enough for what the market needed, and it
was not economically interesting to try supplant it.   The PC (together
with MS-DOS) was a classic "Christensen​ style disruption" to the
minicomputer industry.  As the good Professor points out, the PC was not as
technically good as the technology it replaced, but it was served a new
market that did not care and was good enough for it.



> Win 3.1 was an attempt at an OS, and Win 95 an actual one, with a network
> stack and everything.

​Again - classic Christensen disruption.   The faster moving technology
starts to catch up with the established one.​

So it all come back to my basic point.   The PC and MS-DOS >>could<< have
been made to be in the image of UNIX easily; if people had cared or it was
needed/desired.   But economics caused it to stay in "all its crapiness"
not technology.
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[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Steve Nickolas]

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On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Clem Cole wrote:

> ​Networking not so much.  You definitely could (and people did/do) add
> networking to executives.  In those days, DEC has DECnet for their systems
> (including MS-DOS) and today in the IoT world, I use many of my Arduino's
> with network connections.  But I the programing is very much like it was in
> my DOS-8/DOS-11/RT-11 days.

I've seen TSR network stacks for MS-DOS; I don't *use* such, but they 
exist.

> ​We ran V7 on 8" floppies (SA800's from Shugart Associates IIRC).  These
> were ~ 256K each.  You did have to swap disks in/out a little as Marc
> described.   You booted from one Floppy and replaced it with a "root" FS
> floppy after the OS loaded.   But it all could and did fit.  You had ad
> editor, the compilers, etc.

I think that's how Minix worked on 5.25" floppies too, if I remember how I 
got it up on my old Tandy 1000EX.

> So it all come back to my basic point.   The PC and MS-DOS >>could<< have
> been made to be in the image of UNIX easily; if people had cared or it was
> needed/desired.   But economics caused it to stay in "all its crapiness"
> not technology.

I think OS/2 was certainly closer to Unix than MS-DOS was.

-uso.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Ronald Natalie]

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> 
> I think OS/2 was certainly closer to Unix than MS-DOS was.
> 
Mostly it had the ugliness of both systems.    The presentation manager and various other aspects got points for the concept, but the implementation was really far from robust.    You spent a lot of time hard-rebooting the the thing when it got wedged.   I was so happy to just switch to AIX on all the PS/2s.    One of my contracts was to port AIX to the i860 on a couple of add in cards (the IBM Wizard and then subsequently the W4).   We actually started with the 370 version of the AIX kernel (closer than the i386 version).    Still it was fun because were were running two UNIXes per box:  one on the i860 and the other on the i386.   The TCF (borrowed from the UCLA Locus system) made it all seamlessly move back and forth.    We even had it boogeying with a 370 when we were working at IBM’s Palo Alto center.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Ronald Natalie wrote:

>>
>> I think OS/2 was certainly closer to Unix than MS-DOS was.
>>
> Mostly it had the ugliness of both systems.

Not gonna deny that, having been tinkering around with porting stuff to 
the earliest versions of OS/2 lately.

(Actually, I was trying to see if I could make a sort of quasi-'nix out of 
OS/2 1.0 using Watcom. ;) Haven't been doing too well at that because of 
Watcom's limited libc.)

-uso.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Nemo]

On 2 July 2016 at 11:32, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
[...]
> (Actually, I was trying to see if I could make a sort of quasi-'nix out of
> OS/2 1.0 using Watcom. ;) Haven't been doing too well at that because of
> Watcom's limited libc.)

The MKS Toolkit for OS/2 along with gcc+emx gave a second-order
approximation.  (And Warp Connect had 'Net tools, even remote logins
with the former.)

N.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Nemo wrote:

> On 2 July 2016 at 11:32, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
> [...]
>> (Actually, I was trying to see if I could make a sort of quasi-'nix out of
>> OS/2 1.0 using Watcom. ;) Haven't been doing too well at that because of
>> Watcom's limited libc.)
>
> The MKS Toolkit for OS/2 along with gcc+emx gave a second-order
> approximation.  (And Warp Connect had 'Net tools, even remote logins
> with the former.)
>
> N.
>

EMX is either the DJGPP/MinGW or the Cygwin of the OS/2 world, right?

-uso.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Nemo]

On 2 July 2016 at 21:18, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Nemo wrote:
[...]
>> The MKS Toolkit for OS/2 along with gcc+emx gave a second-order
>> approximation.  (And Warp Connect had 'Net tools, even remote logins
>> with the former.)
>>
>> N.
>
> EMX is either the DJGPP/MinGW or the Cygwin of the OS/2 world, right?

EMX was the massive undertaking by Eberhard Mattes (then at Stuttgart) to
port UNIX stuff to DOS and then OS/2.  Besides gcc, he also ported (La)TeX,
called emtex.  emacs, and a bunch of GNU stuff.   Except for the file system
restrictions, one could have first-order approximation to UNIX;  later OS/2 file
systems had the option of case-sensitivity and an actual OS, hence a
second-order approximation.  I wrote a lot of stuff at home for compilation on
the dep't Sun.  (By the way, a reasonable OS/2 history may be found here:
http://www.os2museum.com)

Now my two favourite desk boxes are a G5 and an SB2500.

N.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[John Cowan]

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Clem Cole scripsit:

> ​UNIX could (and did) at the time --   by the time of the AT (which was
> when the PC's hockey stick curve took off) an 5.25" floppy had a capacity
> of 1.44M.  An RK05, the V6 and V7 standard,  was 2.5 M which is a 40% loss
> of space, but it was do-able.  

The AT also had the 10 MB disk.  Back when I had an AT, I ran Xenix
System III on it along with the MS C compiler, and was able to create
console-mode programs to run on everyone else's MS-DOS machines.
It's hard to remember/believe that Xenix was a Microsoft product before
DOS was.

> > DEC had several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy:
> > they were getting operating-ish.
> >
> ​Be careful here Ches.  RT-11 and DOS-11 meet your (and my definitions).

I would say even RT-11 is somewhere between executive and OS.  It could
run foreground tasks (hence the name Real Time) if properly sysgenned,
and it had a decent kernel API that you didn't have to bypass.

> But RSTS and RSX were multi-users and ran (run) protected mode, have/had
> full networking stacks etc.  

+1

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
We pledge allegiance to the penguin and to the intellectual property
regime for which he stands, one world under Linux, with free music
and open source software for all.  --Julian Dibbell on Brazil, edited

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Ronald Natalie]

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> 
> The AT also had the 10 MB disk.  Back when I had an AT, I ran Xenix
> System III on it along with the MS C compiler, and was able to create
> console-mode programs to run on everyone else's MS-DOS machines.
> It's hard to remember/believe that Xenix was a Microsoft product before
> DOS was.

I had an Xenix running on my AT as well.

> 
> I would say even RT-11 is somewhere between executive and OS.  It could
> run foreground tasks (hence the name Real Time) if properly sysgenned,
> and it had a decent kernel API that you didn't have to bypass.

I remember the FB (Foreground/Background) version that had more flexibility, even so, it didn’t preempt any running job.   My second paying computer job was writing database software for an RT-11 system.    This was a port of a 370 mainframe application to do lab test management at Hopkins hospital.   This was after the two guys who were tasked with porting it to the Series-1 were having a hard time with it.    Being the wizkid, the IBM guys brought me a 3101 Ascii terminal and asked if I could do anything with it and I connected it to the RT system in lieu of the ADM3 I had been using.

[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Derek Fawcus]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2016 at 08:47:01AM -0400, William Cheswick wrote:
> 
> Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite the last two letters of its name.
> This is a term of art lost to antiquity.
> Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a crappy, built-in shell,
> I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc. No multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly). DEC had several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy: they were getting operating-ish.

I seem to recall a whole bunch of DOS's for different systems in the early 80's,
where the term seemed to be used in the sense of a System for Operating a Disk.

DF