From clemc at ccc.com Sat Nov 7 01:53:59 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 10:53:59 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> Message-ID: Moving to COFF. below. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 10:40 AM Will Senn wrote: > Clem, > > It figures. I should have known there was a reason for the shorter lines > other than display. Conventions are sticky and there appears to be a > generation gap. I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors > used 2... who knows why? :). > You never use a real typewriter. Double-space allows you to edit (physically) the document if need be. This was how I did everything before I had easy computer access. I went to college with an electric typewriter and all my papers were done on it in the fall of my freshman year (until I got access to UNIX). I did have an CS account for the PDP-10 and they had the XGP, but using it for something like your papers was somewhat frowned upon. However, the UNIX boxes we often bought 'daisy wheel' typewriters that had RS-232C interfaces. Using nroff, I could then do my papers and run it off in the admin's desk at night. Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Sat Nov 7 02:22:39 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 11:22:39 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net> References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net> Message-ID: Exactly -- just re-read Will's question. 2 spaces after punctuation is a fix-size typeface solution to the 1.5 typographer layout. I was referring to why typed papers were traditionally double spaced between the lines. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 11:02 AM Chris Torek wrote: > >I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors > >used 2... who knows why? :). > > Typewriters. > > In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, > we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- > sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than > the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get > stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. Note that this is > all in the variable-pitch font world. > > Since typewriters are fixed-pitch, the way to emulate the > 1.5-space-wide gap is to expand it to 2. > > Chris > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Sat Nov 7 03:56:05 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 12:56:05 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <3c54b19d-e604-68eb-2b4b-0b65e9cfb896@earthlink.net> References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <5BE1CBD5-C9EB-45D4-B135-E58BCCCBE38C@gmail.com> <3c54b19d-e604-68eb-2b4b-0b65e9cfb896@earthlink.net> Message-ID: I'd be curious to hear from the folks a few years older than I (I started in the later 60s with the GE-635), but my own experiences of having lived through some of it, I personally think it was more to do with all of the systems of the time switching from cards to the Model 28 and later the 33 then Unix or AT&T. Unix was just one of the systems that we used at the time of the transition from cards. But the other timesharing systems of those days began to transition to the tty's requirements. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 12:27 PM Stephen Clark wrote: > On 11/6/20 12:13 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: > > I’m going to chime in on pro-80-columns here, because with the text a > comfortable size to read (although this is getting less true as my eyes > age), I can read an entire 80-column line without having to sweep my eyes > back and forth. > > > > I can’t, and never could, do that at 132. > > > > As a consequence, I read much, much faster with 80-column-ish text > blocks. > > > > I also think there is something to the “UNIX is verbal” and “UNIX nerds > tend to be polyglots often with a surprising amount of liberal arts > background of one kind or another,” argument. That may, however, merely be > confirmation bias. > > > > Adam > May have had to do with the first terminal commonly used with UNIX. > > The Model 33 printed on 8.5-inch (220 mm) wide paper, supplied on > continuous > 5-inch (130 mm) diameter rolls and fed via friction (instead of, e.g., > tractor > feed). It printed at a fixed 10 characters per inch, and supported > 74-character > lines,[13] although 72 characters is often commonly stated. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Sat Nov 7 05:24:43 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 14:24:43 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <20201106192201.GM1750809@mit.edu> References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106192201.GM1750809@mit.edu> Message-ID: Outstanding hack! On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 2:22 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 10:53:59AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > > > > I went to college with an electric typewriter and all my papers were done > > on it in the fall of my freshman year (until I got access to UNIX). I > did > > have an CS account for the PDP-10 and they had the XGP, but using it for > > something like your papers was somewhat frowned upon. However, the > UNIX > > boxes we often bought 'daisy wheel' typewriters that had RS-232C > > interfaces. Using nroff, I could then do my papers and run it off in the > > admin's desk at night. > > When I was in high school, we had a box that could be fitted over an > Olivetti electric typewriter's keyboard, which had solenoids to > "type". The other end had a parallel port and it was connected to a > Heathkit H-89 CP/M system, and so rough drafts would be sent to the > dot matrix printer, but for the final copy, it could look like it came > out of a typewriter --- because technically, it did. :-) > > - Ted > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tytso at mit.edu Sat Nov 7 05:22:01 2020 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 14:22:01 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20201106192201.GM1750809@mit.edu> On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 10:53:59AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > > I went to college with an electric typewriter and all my papers were done > on it in the fall of my freshman year (until I got access to UNIX). I did > have an CS account for the PDP-10 and they had the XGP, but using it for > something like your papers was somewhat frowned upon. However, the UNIX > boxes we often bought 'daisy wheel' typewriters that had RS-232C > interfaces. Using nroff, I could then do my papers and run it off in the > admin's desk at night. When I was in high school, we had a box that could be fitted over an Olivetti electric typewriter's keyboard, which had solenoids to "type". The other end had a parallel port and it was connected to a Heathkit H-89 CP/M system, and so rough drafts would be sent to the dot matrix printer, but for the final copy, it could look like it came out of a typewriter --- because technically, it did. :-) - Ted From grog at lemis.com Sat Nov 7 08:58:25 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 09:58:25 +1100 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 10:53:59 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > However, the UNIX boxes we often bought 'daisy wheel' typewriters > that had RS-232C interfaces. Using nroff, I could then do my papers > and run it off in the admin's desk at night. My memory is hazy, but I thought that the daisy wheel printers I knew (Qume Sprint\5) also had proportional spacing. I ran into significant problems with early MS-DOS based formatting software because it made (frequently incorrect) assumptions about character widths. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From grog at lemis.com Sat Nov 7 09:08:57 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 10:08:57 +1100 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <202011061519.0A6FJOAx034308@elf.torek.net> References: <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com> <202011061519.0A6FJOAx034308@elf.torek.net> Message-ID: <20201106230857.GF99027@eureka.lemis.com> [Following clemc's example and moving to COFF] On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:19:24 -0800, Chris Torek wrote: >> I'm lazy. > > I am too, but I still use a big screen: I just fit a lot of smaller > windows in it. Agreed. There's a second issue here: for reading text, 70 to 80 n widths is optimal. For reading computer output, it should be much wider. I've compromised by fitting two 120 character wide xterms on my monitors, left and right. I still display only 70-80 characters for text. > I'd like to have a literal wall screen, especially if I'm in an > interior, windowless (as in physical glass windows) room, so that > part of the wall could be a "window" showing a view "outside" (real > time, or the ocean, or whatever) and other parts of the wall could > be the text I'm working on/with, etc. The issue there is perspective. I could do that (modulo cost) in my office, but I'd have a horizontal angle of about 90°, and that's uncomfortable. > (But I'll make do with these 27" 4k displays. :-) ) Yes, that's about the widest I find comfortable, and it took me a while to adapt. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From torek at elf.torek.net Sat Nov 7 04:12:20 2020 From: torek at elf.torek.net (Chris Torek) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 10:12:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <202011061812.0A6ICKKp034910@elf.torek.net> >I was referring to why typed papers were traditionally double spaced >between the lines. (this seems to have moved to coff@, which I think I am not on) Ah, the traditional reason for doubling the "leading" (not that there's any actual chemical-element-Pb lead in typewriting) is for copy-editing purposes. I'm not sure if traditional typesetting drafts had increased leading like this. Chris From dave at horsfall.org Sat Nov 7 10:16:56 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 11:16:56 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <20201106222302.GG26411@mcvoy.com> References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <20201106063725.GB99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106150609.GR26296@mcvoy.com> <20201106222302.GG26411@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: [ Moving to COFF (if your MUA respects "Reply-To:") ] On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote: > But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and > asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur. You've never experienced the joy of having your code suddenly working when inserting printf() statements? Oh dear; time to break out GDB... -- Dave From cym224 at gmail.com Sat Nov 7 12:52:57 2020 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 21:52:57 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net> Message-ID: <4cb3465d-ed2f-104b-494f-4fd8c97f595b@gmail.com> On 11/06/20 11:22, Clem Cole wrote: > Exactly -- just re-read Will's question. 2 spaces after punctuation > is a fix-size typeface solution to the 1.5 typographer layout. Is it not an m-space after a full-stop? (Though Brinhurst eschewed this in the fourth edition.) > I was referring to why typed papers were traditionally double spaced > between the lines. I was advised to this with drafts for copy-editing but legal documents are always double-spaced lines (and I know not why). N. > On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 11:02 AM Chris Torek > wrote: > > >I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors > >used 2... who knows why? :). > > Typewriters. > > In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, > we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- > sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than > the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get > stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. Note that this is > all in the variable-pitch font world. > > Since typewriters are fixed-pitch, the way to emulate the > 1.5-space-wide gap is to expand it to 2. > > Chris > From grog at lemis.com Sat Nov 7 14:22:49 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 15:22:49 +1100 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <20201106232901.AkY2I%steffen@sdaoden.eu> References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net> <20201106225422.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106232901.AkY2I%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Message-ID: <20201107042249.GG99027@eureka.lemis.com> [Coff, etc] On Saturday, 7 November 2020 at 0:29:01 +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in > <20201106225422.GD99027 at eureka.lemis.com>: >> On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote: >>> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, >>> we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- >>> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than >>> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get >>> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. >> >> FWIW, this is the US convention. Other countries have different >> conventions. My Ausinfo style manual states >> >> There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the >> end of a sentence. >> >> I believe that this also holds for Germany. I'm not sure that the UK >> didn't have different rules again. > > Yes, the DUDEN of Germany says for typewriters that the punctuation > characters period, comma, semicolon, colon, question- and > exclamation mark are added without separating whitespace. The next > word follows after a space ("Leerschritt", "void step"). Thanks for the confirmation. Where did you find that? I checked the yellow Duden („Richtlinien für den Schriftsatz“) before sending my previous message, but I couldn't find anything useful. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From steffen at sdaoden.eu Sun Nov 8 06:31:22 2020 From: steffen at sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Sat, 07 Nov 2020 21:31:22 +0100 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <20201107042249.GG99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <202011061546.0A6Fkv3D034443@elf.torek.net> <20201106225422.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201106232901.AkY2I%steffen@sdaoden.eu> <20201107042249.GG99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201107203122.7dGQ4%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Hello and good evening. Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in <20201107042249.GG99027 at eureka.lemis.com>: |[Coff, etc] I tend to hang in compose mode so long that i miss such switches at first. |On Saturday, 7 November 2020 at 0:29:01 +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: |> Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in |> <20201106225422.GD99027 at eureka.lemis.com>: |>> On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote: |>>> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, |>>> we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- |>>> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than |>>> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get |>>> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. |>> |>> FWIW, this is the US convention. Other countries have different |>> conventions. My Ausinfo style manual states |>> |>> There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the |>> end of a sentence. |>> |>> I believe that this also holds for Germany. I'm not sure that the UK |>> didn't have different rules again. | |> Yes, the DUDEN of Germany says for typewriters that the punctuation |> characters period, comma, semicolon, colon, question- and |> exclamation mark are added without separating whitespace. The next |> word follows after a space ("Leerschritt", "void step"). | |Thanks for the confirmation. Where did you find that? I checked the |yellow Duden (â␦␦Richtlinien für den Schriftsatzâ␦␦) before sending my |previous message, but I couldn't find anything useful. (The charset errors were already in.) Well yes, i looked first, it has been a very long time since i only follow my gut, if it does not come naturally leave it. The next chapter it is, »Hinweise für das Maschinenschreiben« ("Advices for typewriting"). (For handwriting hope is lost anyway, noone can read that. Even though one could find philosophic background in good handwriting style, but i personally was touched by the Japanese, Chinese etc., also Arabic way of doing things already so young, western style has a hard time against calligraphie that is to say.) But mind you, reassuring that old typewriters really placed the mentioned punctuation characters left in their box i even found a bug in mutool! (Ghostscript mupdf issue 703092.) --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) From clemc at ccc.com Sun Nov 8 07:04:16 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 16:04:16 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 5:58 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > My memory is hazy, but I thought that the daisy wheel printers I knew > (Qume Sprint\5) also had proportional spacing. I never used that brand. Xerox (which was the main USA supplier as a pure typewriter to compete with IBM's Selectric 'ball' units) were definitely fixed width. People started to hack the Xerox units to add access to serial interface and Xerox made it standard or maybe an option as somepoint. IIRC it was somebody like Ollivetti that originally did the daisywheel and Xerox licensed it and they definitely were the primary player here. But by the late 70s, early 80's, there were a number of manufacturers of them. My memory was with the maybe circa 74/75 timeframe, Xerox unit (but it might have been one of the others) was that the original unit had a serial port for diagnostics/maintenance which allowed access to the on-board microprocessor (which might have been a 4-bit TI chip IIRC - same used in some early 'Simon' games). Somebody figured out how to hack it and the schematics/description was available. I remember we hacked one of the units in the EE dept. But by the late 1970's the serial interface was a first class part of the unit, which made them different from IBM Selectrics which did not have an easy to access serial interface, even though IBM used the printer mechanism from the Selectric as the guts of the console for the 360 which I think was called a 2150 but the bits in my brain on that are extremely stale. > I ran into significant > problems with early MS-DOS based formatting software because it made > (frequently incorrect) assumptions about character widths. > > Greg > -- > Sent from my desktop computer. > Finger grog at lemis.com 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 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Sun Nov 8 09:05:56 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2020 10:05:56 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Nov 2020, Clem Cole wrote: > > My memory is hazy, but I thought that the daisy wheel printers I knew > > (Qume Sprint\5) also had proportional spacing.  > > I never used that brand.   [...] The daisywheel that I used (Fujitsu?) definitely was fixed-width (Courier); I used it a lot with WordStar on CP/M. -- Dave From grog at lemis.com Mon Nov 9 14:36:19 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2020 15:36:19 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature) In-Reply-To: References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Saturday, 7 November 2020 at 16:04:16 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 5:58 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> My memory is hazy, but I thought that the daisy wheel printers I knew >> (Qume Sprint\5) also had proportional spacing. > > I never used that brand. Xerox (which was the main USA supplier as a pure > typewriter to compete with IBM's Selectric 'ball' units) were definitely > fixed width. People started to hack the Xerox units to add access to > serial interface and Xerox made it standard or maybe an option as > somepoint. IIRC it was somebody like Ollivetti that originally did the > daisywheel and Xerox licensed it and they definitely were the primary > player here. But by the late 70s, early 80's, there were a number of > manufacturers of them. The Qume printers seemed to have been the best round 1980 when we used them in our applications. In particular, a large choice of wheels and fine-grained spacing. I forget how the spacing worked. > But by the late 1970's the serial interface was a first class part > of the unit, which made them different from IBM Selectrics which did > not have an easy to access serial interface, even though IBM used > the printer mechanism from the Selectric as the guts of the console > for the 360 which I think was called a 2150 but the bits in my brain > on that are extremely stale. The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the /360 itself. The model numbers I recall were 735, and the newer generation 2731/2735. The last digit related to the carriage width (11"/15"). Round the time in question I bought a second-hand 735 machine. It had an arcane interface that directly talked to the magnets. I built an interface for it to a parallel port, but it never worked well. Not the interface: the 735 was second-hand and basically worn out, and it kept coming out of adjustment. The Qume machines were *so* much easier to use. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From clemc at ccc.com Tue Nov 10 00:26:05 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2020 09:26:05 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature) In-Reply-To: <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 11:36 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the /360 > itself. > Hmmm, I think what I said is correct. The S/360 system was released in 1964. My friend Russ Roebling (360/50 chief designer ) once told me the console came from the office products (typewriter) division. I wish I could remember the story he told me, but IIRC it was something WRT to politics inside of IBM and ensuring the console device and the 360's launch between the divisions. [Just like every large firm I have worked, I'm not really surprised to hear that divisional fiefdoms were rampant at IBM in those days, too]. I'm fairly sure that the Selectric (I) was early1960s (I think 61/62). I just don't remember the model number of the S/360's console (every device at IBM had numeric names), your memory is likely that the number was 7xy. But as I said, I'm fair sure that the guts of the console were based on the Selectric's design. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Tue Nov 10 08:08:44 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 09:08:44 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature) In-Reply-To: <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 9 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > The Qume printers seemed to have been the best round 1980 when we used > them in our applications. In particular, a large choice of wheels and > fine-grained spacing. I forget how the spacing worked. Presumably some sort of a table lookup, based on which character is about to be hit? Or are you referring to the micro-spacing itself? > The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the > /360 itself. The model numbers I recall were 735, and the newer > generation 2731/2735. The last digit related to the carriage width > (11"/15"). I once had a fine collection of goofballs (as we called them); sadly lost in a house move :-( > Round the time in question I bought a second-hand 735 machine. It had > an arcane interface that directly talked to the magnets. I built an > interface for it to a parallel port [...] I'd like to know a bit more about that interface... You'd have to control the carriage, roller, swivel/tilt/hit etc. How did you detect the BREAK key to get the 360's attention and unlock the keyboard? -- Dave From grog at lemis.com Tue Nov 10 10:10:57 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 11:10:57 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature) In-Reply-To: References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201110001057.GP99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Monday, 9 November 2020 at 9:26:05 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 11:36 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the /360 >> itself. >> > Hmmm, I think what I said is correct. The S/360 system was released in > 1964. My friend Russ Roebling (360/50 chief designer ) once told me the > console came from the office products (typewriter) division. I wish I > could remember the story he told me, but IIRC it was something WRT to > politics inside of IBM and ensuring the console device and the 360's launch > between the divisions. [Just like every large firm I have worked, I'm not > really surprised to hear that divisional fiefdoms were rampant at IBM in > those days, too]. > > I'm fairly sure that the Selectric (I) was early1960s (I think 61/62). I > just don't remember the model number of the S/360's console (every device > at IBM had numeric names), your memory is likely that the number was 7xy. > But as I said, I'm fair sure that the guts of the console were based on > the Selectric's design. Thanks for the interesting details. Yes, that all matches my recollection. Originally you were talking about mid- to late 1970s, and that's what my "much earlier" referred to. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From grog at lemis.com Tue Nov 10 10:48:03 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 11:48:03 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature) In-Reply-To: References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201110004803.GQ99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 9:08:44 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Mon, 9 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> The Qume printers seemed to have been the best round 1980 when we used >> them in our applications. In particular, a large choice of wheels and >> fine-grained spacing. I forget how the spacing worked. > > Presumably some sort of a table lookup, based on which character is about > to be hit? Or are you referring to the micro-spacing itself? "Yes". As I said, I forget. I have a feeling that it must have been explicit micro-spacing, since the machine didn't know anything about the kind of daisy wheel that was fitted. >> The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the >> /360 itself. The model numbers I recall were 735, and the newer >> generation 2731/2735. The last digit related to the carriage width >> (11"/15"). > > I once had a fine collection of goofballs (as we called them); sadly lost > in a house move :-( I was going to say "ditto", but I think I actually sold them along with the 735. >> Round the time in question I bought a second-hand 735 machine. It had >> an arcane interface that directly talked to the magnets. I built an >> interface for it to a parallel port [...] > > I'd like to know a bit more about that interface... You'd have to > control the carriage, roller, swivel/tilt/hit etc. Yes, I'm trying to recall that too. The ball itself was controlled by 6 signals: Up 1, up 2 (for the 4 rows of characters), left 1, left 2, left 2 (yes, twice) and right 5, for a total of 11 columns. But my recollection was that I only had about 10 power transistors driving the thing. I wish I had kept more details. Maybe there's something amongst the useless junk in the shed. > How did you detect the BREAK key to get the 360's attention and > unlock the keyboard? I didn't. The 735 doesn't have a BREAK key. It was a typewriter, not a teletype. I used it as a printer in addition to a normal glass TTY. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From clemc at ccc.com Wed Nov 11 00:48:22 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 09:48:22 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature) In-Reply-To: <20201110001057.GP99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201110001057.GP99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: Fair enough, sorry to be confusing. It is interesting that a piece of IBM early 60s mechanical design (the electric), lasted as long as it did. I don't know if there was a Selectric IV, there certainly was a Selectric III that was sold through the 70s and early 1980s. Wang created what they called word processing and only then did the Selectrics and Daisy Wheels start to slowly diminish[1]. By the 80s, when we created Stellar Computers, all of the admin's had a PC/AT and a copy of Wordperfect and used our LaserWriters in Engineering, but we still had one Selectric for times when a typewriter was easier. Clem 1] A fun side story. One of many sisters is/was a professional concert harpist (she has incredible manual dexterity). Tough to feed yourself as a concert harpist, so she got a job at MIT working as Ron's admin. Her terminal was an ITS connection and so they taught her to edit documents using EMACS/Tex (she actually typed the RSA papers for Ron so many years ago using the same). At one point, she was thinking of leaving MIT, and when she would interview different firms, they usually would ask her if she knew 'Wang.' It's interesting that her MIT skills were the ones that lasted. For the last few years, she has worked as a technical editor/book index creator *etc*.. for a number of research orgs and technical book publishers -- she can handle EMACS and LaTex of course, not just MS-Word ;-) On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 7:10 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Monday, 9 November 2020 at 9:26:05 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > > On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 11:36 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey > wrote: > > > >> The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the > /360 > >> itself. > >> > > Hmmm, I think what I said is correct. The S/360 system was released in > > 1964. My friend Russ Roebling (360/50 chief designer ) once told me the > > console came from the office products (typewriter) division. I wish I > > could remember the story he told me, but IIRC it was something WRT to > > politics inside of IBM and ensuring the console device and the 360's > launch > > between the divisions. [Just like every large firm I have worked, I'm > not > > really surprised to hear that divisional fiefdoms were rampant at IBM in > > those days, too]. > > > > I'm fairly sure that the Selectric (I) was early1960s (I think 61/62). > I > > just don't remember the model number of the S/360's console (every device > > at IBM had numeric names), your memory is likely that the number was 7xy. > > But as I said, I'm fair sure that the guts of the console were based on > > the Selectric's design. > > Thanks for the interesting details. Yes, that all matches my > recollection. Originally you were talking about mid- to late 1970s, > and that's what my "much earlier" referred to. > > Greg > -- > Sent from my desktop computer. > Finger grog at lemis.com 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 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stewart at serissa.com Wed Nov 11 01:10:56 2020 From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 10:10:56 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature) In-Reply-To: References: <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201110001057.GP99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: Speaking of the Selectric Another old story about printers. Back in 1974 (ish) I was an undergrad at MIT working at the Architecture Machine Group, which was the predecessor to the Media Lab. We had a home-grown OS for the Interdata 16-bit minicomputers, whose instruction sets were very much like 16-bit IBM 360’s. There was an IBM 2741 there for talking to the institute mainframes, and somehow I got the job of writing a device driver for it. It was quite an adventure getting the tilt-rotate codes and so forth to fit in the 160 hex bytes available… I recall having to chain short branches together if the condition codes were right. The success of that made me a go-to guy for printing, unfortunately, so later it was my job to patch the line printer to print capital O after the 0 wore out*. * A real thing, way before Dilbert got hold of it. From grog at lemis.com Wed Nov 11 09:11:18 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 10:11:18 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days Message-ID: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, and I can't find one! Can anybody help? Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From imp at bsdimp.com Wed Nov 11 09:38:17 2020 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 16:38:17 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: It depends a lot on when. For pure research V7 / 2BSD / 4BSD that was true. You can give the install.ms from these releases as a reference. It was a lot more daunting than today, and often times only bug fixes warranted a recompile. You can find references in the 2.11BSD patch series to the 'annual recompilation of the sources' which Steve did and where he'd always find something. However, after that, everything was binaries. The kernel you got was a bunch of .o files (even for the V7 ports), though often you had all the source to the drivers (but not the core of the kernel). I have said files for Venix, though there it was an extra cost option it seems (I say seems, since I've not found a price sheet for it from the era, though I have the disks). DEC's ultrix was binary. Sun's SunOS. All the Unisoft ports to 68k machines. Sony's NEWS workstations likewise. HP's unix offerings too. Sure, you could get a source license, sometimes, but they kept those expensive. IBM and VMS were always binary only (though again, you could buy source if you had the right amount of $$$ and leverage). So I'm not sure what old days you were talking about, or which machines.... The BSD build.sh and/or make world were a bit of an anomaly imho. Once Linux got distributions the whole notion of building it yourself faded somewhat. Warner On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 4:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the > comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for > a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, > and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > Greg > -- > Sent from my desktop computer. > Finger grog at lemis.com 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 > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Wed Nov 11 09:45:15 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 18:45:15 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: Mumble -- For IBM and DEC in the 60s and early 70s, the manufactures distributed the (assembler) sources to the OS and we could (and did) build from source but usually just built parts. By the time of VMS and the other minis, you tended to link together from modules, although many sites did have sources (in assembler). Remember, the target was the manufacturers HW so they were not giving away much. In the case of IBM, eventually, Amdahl started cloning and they got a tad more closed, but by that time there were also many mainframe OS flavors in wild. That said, I think Burrough's gave away the ESPOL code for their systems, but I never saw it; so I can not speak definitively there. Unix was different. Like Burrough's, it was heavily written in a systems programming language. To my knowledge, the 'concept' or 'porting' the OS in it's entirety to a completely new ISA began with UNIX. On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the > comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for > a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, > and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > Greg > -- > Sent from my desktop computer. > Finger grog at lemis.com 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 > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bakul at iitbombay.org Wed Nov 11 10:01:41 2020 From: bakul at iitbombay.org (Bakul Shah) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 16:01:41 -0800 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <756A5C2A-F2AF-4792-8A9B-5CB5DCE04AF2@iitbombay.org> On Nov 10, 2020, at 3:11 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the > comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for > a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, > and I can't find one! Can anybody help? Not sure about a "big computer" but what about this paper by Richard Miller on porting V6 to Interdata 7/32? http://bitsavers.org/bits/Interdata/32bit/unix/univWollongong_v6/miller.pdf From grog at lemis.com Wed Nov 11 10:02:58 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 11:02:58 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201111000258.GX99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 16:52:58 -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > If 4.3BSD is old enough, the System Administrator's Manual (e.g. > http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/isi/bsd/490197C_Unix_4.3BSD_System_Administrator_Guide_ISI_Release_4.1_May88.pdf) > section 4.2 _et seq_. > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 4:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for >> a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, >> and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > How olden days do you mean? Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was thinking commercial systems of the 1960s and 1970s, not any form of Unix. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From grog at lemis.com Wed Nov 11 10:06:21 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 11:06:21 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 18:45:15 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for >> a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, >> and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > Mumble -- For IBM and DEC in the 60s and early 70s, the manufactures > distributed the (assembler) sources to the OS and we could (and did) > build from source but usually just built parts. Right, this is my recollection. > Remember, the target was the manufacturers HW so they were not > giving away much. Again, my assessment. The real issue is: where can I find a reference? Google brings up so many false positives that it's not worth the trouble, and Wikipedia's pages on "System generation" are too vague. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From athornton at gmail.com Wed Nov 11 10:10:37 2020 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 17:10:37 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: Pretty sure this VM/370 reference has, somewhere in its rather formidable bulk, what you're looking for. Start around p. 225: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/370/VM_370/Release_6/GC20-1801-10_VM370_Sysgen_Rel_6_Jan80.pdf Now granted VM was never the most popular of the IBM OSes. But it was delivered (and patched) as assembler sources. You may also enjoy Melinda Varian's "What Mother Never Told You about VM Service." http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/tutorial.pdf On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 5:06 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 18:45:15 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey > wrote: > > > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the > >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for > >> a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, > >> and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > > > Mumble -- For IBM and DEC in the 60s and early 70s, the manufactures > > distributed the (assembler) sources to the OS and we could (and did) > > build from source but usually just built parts. > > Right, this is my recollection. > > > Remember, the target was the manufacturers HW so they were not > > giving away much. > > Again, my assessment. > > The real issue is: where can I find a reference? Google brings up so > many false positives that it's not worth the trouble, and Wikipedia's > pages on "System generation" are too vague. > > Greg > -- > Sent from my desktop computer. > Finger grog at lemis.com 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 > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From athornton at gmail.com Wed Nov 11 10:12:27 2020 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 17:12:27 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: I don't know enough about MVS but it too is public domain until 3.8j or so, and I would expect that the way you serviced the system was about the same: patch the assembly code from PTFs (or whatever those are called in MVS-land), reassemble the modules, relink into a kernel/system image/whatever the os-appropriate nomenclature is. Adam On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 5:10 PM Adam Thornton wrote: > Pretty sure this VM/370 reference has, somewhere in its rather formidable > bulk, what you're looking for. Start around p. 225: > > > http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/370/VM_370/Release_6/GC20-1801-10_VM370_Sysgen_Rel_6_Jan80.pdf > > Now granted VM was never the most popular of the IBM OSes. But it was > delivered (and patched) as assembler sources. You may also enjoy Melinda > Varian's "What Mother Never Told You about VM Service." > http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/tutorial.pdf > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 5:06 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey > wrote: > >> On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 18:45:15 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: >> > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey >> wrote: >> > >> >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the >> >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for >> >> a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, >> >> and I can't find one! Can anybody help? >> > >> > Mumble -- For IBM and DEC in the 60s and early 70s, the manufactures >> > distributed the (assembler) sources to the OS and we could (and did) >> > build from source but usually just built parts. >> >> Right, this is my recollection. >> >> > Remember, the target was the manufacturers HW so they were not >> > giving away much. >> >> Again, my assessment. >> >> The real issue is: where can I find a reference? Google brings up so >> many false positives that it's not worth the trouble, and Wikipedia's >> pages on "System generation" are too vague. >> >> Greg >> -- >> Sent from my desktop computer. >> Finger grog at lemis.com 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 >> _______________________________________________ >> COFF mailing list >> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Wed Nov 11 11:01:40 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:01:40 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the > comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for a > big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, and > I can't find one! Can anybody help? Depends what you mean by "olden days" and "big computer". As I recall we (Uni of NSW) had the source to the 360/50 and the Cyber 72, but not for the VMS stuff; binaries were patched with IEBUPDTE and later on SUPERZAP (possibly written locally). I got an official pat on the back for getting SPITBOL to work after its time-bombs (yes, plural) expired[*]... And we had the source to something called Unix Edition 5 & 6 etc, but they were hardly mainframes :-) [*] The first bomb failed with an error message, so I patched that. It then started crashing rather mysteriously, and I discovered that it was taking an indirect jump to whatever was in R0 at the time (I think). Rather than waste time digging them all out, I wrote a program that LOADed the binary, scanned memory for a word that matched that date, and printed each address so they could then be inspected by hand. There were something like six of them... One big SUPERZAP later, and we had a working SPITBOL compiler again; a bored CompSci student is terrible to behold. -- Dave From dave at horsfall.org Wed Nov 11 11:26:33 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:26:33 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <756A5C2A-F2AF-4792-8A9B-5CB5DCE04AF2@iitbombay.org> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <756A5C2A-F2AF-4792-8A9B-5CB5DCE04AF2@iitbombay.org> Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 2020, Bakul Shah wrote: > Not sure about a "big computer" but what about this paper by Richard > Miller on porting V6 to Interdata 7/32? > > http://bitsavers.org/bits/Interdata/32bit/unix/univWollongong_v6/miller.pdf Either that server is suddenly overloaded, or the Interweb pipes are suddenly blocked... -- Dave From clemc at ccc.com Wed Nov 11 12:07:20 2020 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 21:07:20 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: Well bitsavers is probably your best bet. I would look at any ibm doc for os/360 and TSS/360. Then look at the DEC docs for Tops-10 and the distro library's. Tops-20 I would have expected but maybe not as by the VMS and more closed culture had begun at DEC but because it was based on Tenex (from BBN) might have been available with full sources. IIRC early versions of RT-11 was distributed as a binary but the sources were readily available. I know I have seen them. Some of the first assembler based driver code I ever looked was from RT11 (the TC11 driver) TSS/8 was in PDP-8 source originally from CMU but DEC made it a product. That was source which I think I have somewhere from the paper tape swapping hack. I never looked for or built OS/8 but I have to believe it was distributed as source from DEC As I said I would suggest bit savers. Clem On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 7:06 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 18:45:15 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey > wrote: > > > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the > >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for > >> a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, > >> and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > > > Mumble -- For IBM and DEC in the 60s and early 70s, the manufactures > > distributed the (assembler) sources to the OS and we could (and did) > > build from source but usually just built parts. > > Right, this is my recollection. > > > Remember, the target was the manufacturers HW so they were not > > giving away much. > > Again, my assessment. > > The real issue is: where can I find a reference? Google brings up so > many false positives that it's not worth the trouble, and Wikipedia's > pages on "System generation" are too vague. > > Greg > -- > Sent from my desktop computer. > Finger grog at lemis.com 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 > -- Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brad at anduin.eldar.org Wed Nov 11 12:03:15 2020 From: brad at anduin.eldar.org (Brad Spencer) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 21:03:15 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: (message from Dave Horsfall on Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:01:40 +1100 (EST)) Message-ID: Dave Horsfall writes: > On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for a >> big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, and >> I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > Depends what you mean by "olden days" and "big computer". As I recall we > (Uni of NSW) had the source to the 360/50 and the Cyber 72, but not for > the VMS stuff; binaries were patched with IEBUPDTE and later on SUPERZAP > (possibly written locally). > > I got an official pat on the back for getting SPITBOL to work after its > time-bombs (yes, plural) expired[*]... > > And we had the source to something called Unix Edition 5 & 6 etc, but they > were hardly mainframes :-) > > [*] > The first bomb failed with an error message, so I patched that. It then > started crashing rather mysteriously, and I discovered that it was taking > an indirect jump to whatever was in R0 at the time (I think). Rather than > waste time digging them all out, I wrote a program that LOADed the binary, > scanned memory for a word that matched that date, and printed each address > so they could then be inspected by hand. There were something like six of > them... One big SUPERZAP later, and we had a working SPITBOL compiler > again; a bored CompSci student is terrible to behold. > > -- Dave > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff Wow... you too... Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s I removed a time bomb from a language compiler running on a Data General MV/10000 with AOS/VS as the OS while an undergrad. This particular bomb, apparently, was put in by a disgruntled employee of the company that provided the compiler, as I received the story. I honestly don't know many of the details, beyond that. The effort required that I disassemble the compiler with a assembly debugger and then patch the machine code to defeat the bomb. I seem to remember that I just patched out a jump instruction with a nop or two. I have mostly forgotten what the compiler was for, but it may have been the commercial Simscript compiler for the DG. We, that is myself and one of the professors, sent the patch to the company that provided the compiler and I know that they ended up giving the patch out as another university with the same bomb problem sent me a thank you note. The only other work around was to set the clock back on the system, as it literally was a time based bomb. -- Brad Spencer - brad at anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org From grog at lemis.com Wed Nov 11 13:09:51 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 14:09:51 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201111030951.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 17:12:27 -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > I don't know enough about MVS but it too is public domain until 3.8j or so, > and I would expect that the way you serviced the system was about the same: > patch the assembly code from PTFs (or whatever those are called in > MVS-land), Right! There's a TLA that rings a bell. "Permanent Temporary Fix"? Or was that a reinterpretation? But yes, it's clearly source-related. > reassemble the modules, relink into a kernel/system image/whatever > the os-appropriate nomenclature is. Yup. That reminds me of a poem published in Datamation decades ago: On either die the printer lie Fat stacks of paper six feet high That stun the mind abnd blur the eye, And lo! Still more comes streaming by, A fresh SYSABEND dump. Ye printer clackth merrily "Compleccioun code is 043" Alack! What can the matter be That made SYSABEND dump? My TCAM hath no MCP? My data cannot OPENed be? Consult my neighbourhood SE? The devil take thy dam and thee, Thou vile SYSABEND dump! Assemble modules on the fly And link for yet another try. With SUPERZAP a patch apply, This time THOU SHALT NOT DUMP! On either side the printer lie Fat stacks of paper twelve feet high That blow the mind and blast the eye. Gadzooks! How shrill yon varlet's cry As sixteen megabytes go by In yet another dump. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From grog at lemis.com Wed Nov 11 13:11:26 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 14:11:26 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201111031126.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Wednesday, 11 November 2020 at 12:01:40 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for a >> big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, and >> I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > Depends what you mean by "olden days" and "big computer". Since clarified, of course, but you're in the right track. > As I recall we (Uni of NSW) had the source to the 360/50 and the > Cyber 72, but not for the VMS stuff; binaries were patched with > IEBUPDTE and later on SUPERZAP (possibly written locally). Was SUPERZAP source or object related? I thought the latter, but I've never come close to it. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From athornton at gmail.com Wed Nov 11 13:22:01 2020 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 20:22:01 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201111031126.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111031126.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: Pretty sure SUPERZAP was for object files. That was for wizardry beyond my ken. Normal VM service, as I recall, and I am only about 75% sure I'm right, was in the form of source patches rather like diff files--I don't know anymore if they were literally editor commands to transform File A into File B, but that was the net effect--plus reassembly. Patching the object modules was possible, but you had to be better at it than I ever was to pull it off. Adam On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 8:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Wednesday, 11 November 2020 at 12:01:40 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the > >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for a > >> big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, and > >> I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > > > Depends what you mean by "olden days" and "big computer". > > Since clarified, of course, but you're in the right track. > > > As I recall we (Uni of NSW) had the source to the 360/50 and the > > Cyber 72, but not for the VMS stuff; binaries were patched with > > IEBUPDTE and later on SUPERZAP (possibly written locally). > > Was SUPERZAP source or object related? I thought the latter, but I've > never come close to it. > > Greg > -- > Sent from my desktop computer. > Finger grog at lemis.com 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 > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Wed Nov 11 14:54:06 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 15:54:06 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201111030951.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111030951.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > Right! There's a TLA that rings a bell. "Permanent Temporary Fix"? Program Temporary Fix. -- Dave From grog at lemis.com Wed Nov 11 14:58:23 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 15:58:23 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111030951.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201111045823.GH99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Wednesday, 11 November 2020 at 15:54:06 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> Right! There's a TLA that rings a bell. "Permanent Temporary Fix"? > > Program Temporary Fix. Yes. But I recall correctly. See the Wikipedia page: Customers sometimes explain the acronym in a tongue-in-cheek manner as permanent temporary fix or more practically probably this fixes, because they have the option to make the PTF a permanent part of the operating system if the patch fixes the problem. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dave at horsfall.org Wed Nov 11 15:15:58 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 16:15:58 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201111031126.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111031126.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > Was SUPERZAP source or object related? I thought the latter, but I've > never come close to it. Binary, for things for which there was no source (like SPITBOL). To edit the source, you used a keypunch :-) Which reminds me; our SPITBOL was just a demo program, until I nobbled it; the "real" one (no time bomb) cost many $$$ which we couldn't afford. -- Dave, a bored CompSci student at the time From peter at rulingia.com Wed Nov 11 18:31:56 2020 From: peter at rulingia.com (Peter Jeremy) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 19:31:56 +1100 Subject: [COFF] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20201111083156.GA57519@server.rulingia.com> On 2020-Nov-06 10:07:21 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: >Will, I do still the same thing, but the reason for 72 for email being that >way is still card-based. In FORTRAN the first column defines if the card >is new (a blank), a comment (a capital C), no zero a 'continuation' of the >last card. But column 73-80 were 'special' and used to store sequence #s >(this was handy when you dropped your card deck, card sorters could put it >back into canonical order). Since no-one has mentioned it, the reason why Fortran and Cobol ignore columns 73-80 goes back to the IBM 711 card reader - which could read any (but usually configured for the first) 72 columns into pairs of 36-bit words in an IBM 701. -- Peter Jeremy -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 963 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tih at hamartun.priv.no Wed Nov 11 22:21:10 2020 From: tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 13:21:10 +0100 Subject: [COFF] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <20201111083156.GA57519@server.rulingia.com> (Peter Jeremy via COFF's message of "Wed, 11 Nov 2020 19:31:56 +1100") References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <20201111083156.GA57519@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: Peter Jeremy via COFF writes: > Since no-one has mentioned it, the reason why Fortran and Cobol ignore > columns 73-80 goes back to the IBM 711 card reader - which could read any > (but usually configured for the first) 72 columns into pairs of 36-bit words > in an IBM 701. ...and for those who, like me, did a double-take on that, thinking "WTF? That would mean it read *rows* of bits from the card into machine words!", I checked, and yes, that's exactly what it did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card_input/output#Binary_format -tih (who learned FORTRAN using punched cards on a UNIVAC) -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay From tih at hamartun.priv.no Wed Nov 11 22:21:10 2020 From: tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 13:21:10 +0100 Subject: [COFF] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <20201111083156.GA57519@server.rulingia.com> (Peter Jeremy via COFF's message of "Wed, 11 Nov 2020 19:31:56 +1100") References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <20201111083156.GA57519@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: Peter Jeremy via COFF writes: > Since no-one has mentioned it, the reason why Fortran and Cobol ignore > columns 73-80 goes back to the IBM 711 card reader - which could read any > (but usually configured for the first) 72 columns into pairs of 36-bit words > in an IBM 701. ...and for those who, like me, did a double-take on that, thinking "WTF? That would mean it read *rows* of bits from the card into machine words!", I checked, and yes, that's exactly what it did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card_input/output#Binary_format -tih (who learned FORTRAN using punched cards on a UNIVAC) -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay From dave at horsfall.org Thu Nov 12 07:09:01 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2020 08:09:01 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature In-Reply-To: <20201111083156.GA57519@server.rulingia.com> References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <20201111083156.GA57519@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Peter Jeremy via COFF wrote: > Since no-one has mentioned it, the reason why Fortran and Cobol ignore > columns 73-80 goes back to the IBM 711 card reader - which could read > any (but usually configured for the first) 72 columns into pairs of > 36-bit words in an IBM 701. I'll be damned... So obvious when it's pointed out! -- Dave From dave at horsfall.org Fri Nov 13 12:15:14 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2020 13:15:14 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: <20201111045823.GH99027@eureka.lemis.com> References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111030951.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111045823.GH99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: >> Program Temporary Fix. > > Yes. But I recall correctly. See the Wikipedia page: > > Customers sometimes explain the acronym in a tongue-in-cheek manner as > permanent temporary fix or more practically probably this fixes, > because they have the option to make the PTF a permanent part of the > operating system if the patch fixes the problem. Yeah, they did have a habit of being permanent, but I don't recall them ever being called by any of those names during my servitude. -- Dave From athornton at gmail.com Fri Nov 13 16:57:11 2020 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2020 23:57:11 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days In-Reply-To: References: <20201110231118.GW99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111000621.GY99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111030951.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com> <20201111045823.GH99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: This has inspired me to re-read Melinda Varian's "What Mother Never Told You About VM Service" and it's still a magnificent document. I once again find the control files confusing as hell, but once you get used to how they work, which once upon a time I was, you had a repeatable (and unwindable!) service process. I miss the casualness with which you'd build a new CP nucleus and test it out on a second-level system. It's so much better than anything in the Unix world, far more elegant than testing kernel patches in a Linux virtual machine, largely because of the ease with which you can attach minidisks to a first, second, or whatever-level system. I guess cgroups and bind mounts finally get you most of the way there in terms of mounting arbitrary storage to virtual systems, but it's still a pain in the ass to test multiple kernels. Not that I spend much time anymore that far down in the system (any system!), but...VM got a lot of things right. Adam On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 7:15 PM Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > >> Program Temporary Fix. > > > > Yes. But I recall correctly. See the Wikipedia page: > > > > Customers sometimes explain the acronym in a tongue-in-cheek manner as > > permanent temporary fix or more practically probably this fixes, > > because they have the option to make the PTF a permanent part of the > > operating system if the patch fixes the problem. > > Yeah, they did have a habit of being permanent, but I don't recall > them ever being called by any of those names during my servitude. > > -- Dave > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From grog at lemis.com Tue Nov 24 08:29:52 2020 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 09:29:52 +1100 Subject: [COFF] DDP-516 hardware (was: 516-TSS Documents) In-Reply-To: <20201123134234.8F52218C096@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20201123134234.8F52218C096@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20201123222952.GF56952@eureka.lemis.com> [Redirecting to COFF] On Monday, 23 November 2020 at 8:42:34 -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote: >> On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 12:28 PM Erik E. Fair wrote: > >> The Honeywell DDP-516 was the computer (running specialized software >> written by Bolt, Bernanek & Newman (BBN)) which was the initial model of >> the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMP). > > The IMPs had a lot of custom interface hardware; sui generis serial > interlocked host interfaces (so-called 1822), and also the high-speed modem > interfaces. I think there was also a watchdog time, IIRC (this is all from > memory, but the ARPANET papers from JCC cover it all). I worked with a DDP-516 at DFVLR 46 years ago. My understanding was that the standard equipment included two different channel interfaces. One, the DMC (Direct Multiplexer Control, I think) proved to be just what I needed for my program, a relatively simple tape copy program. The input tape was analogue, unbuffered, and couldn't be stopped, so it was imperative to accept all data as it came in from the ADC. But the program didn't work. According to the docco, the DMC should have reset when the transfer was complete (maybe depending on configuration parameters), but it didn't. We called in Honeywell support, who scratched their heads and went away, only to come back later and say that it couldn't be fixed. I worked around the problem in software by continually checking the transfer count and restarting when the count reached 0. So the program worked, but I was left wondering whether this was a design problem or a support failure. Has anybody else worked with this feature? Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dave at horsfall.org Fri Nov 27 06:18:29 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 07:18:29 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] In memorium: Ada Lovelace Message-ID: The world's first computer programmer (and a mathematician, when that was deemed unseemly for a mere woman), we lost her in 1852 from uterine cancer. -- Dave