From billcu1 at verizon.net Mon Jun 12 12:26:01 2006 From: billcu1 at verizon.net (Bill Cunningham) Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 22:26:01 -0400 Subject: [pups] PDP-11 Message-ID: <000001c68dc7$98c39280$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> Did these old minis use a teletype or a monitor as stdout? The pictures I've seen of them looks like they used a printout as stdout. Bill From kelli217 at gmail.com Mon Jun 12 12:43:21 2006 From: kelli217 at gmail.com (Kelli Halliburton) Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 21:43:21 -0500 Subject: [pups] PDP-11 In-Reply-To: <000001c68dc7$98c39280$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> References: <000001c68dc7$98c39280$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> Message-ID: <200606112143.21997.kelli217@gmail.com> On Sunday 11 June 2006 09:26 pm, Bill Cunningham wrote: > Did these old minis use a teletype or a monitor as stdout? The pictures > I've seen of them looks like they used a printout as stdout. V7 assumes a teletype and has little or no provision for anything else. There are retrofits for termcap and ncurses out there, though. From frank at wortner.com Mon Jun 12 13:17:15 2006 From: frank at wortner.com (Frank Wortner) Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 23:17:15 -0400 Subject: [pups] PDP-11 In-Reply-To: <200606112143.21997.kelli217@gmail.com> References: <000001c68dc7$98c39280$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> <200606112143.21997.kelli217@gmail.com> Message-ID: <448CDCBB.1050503@wortner.com> Kelli Halliburton wrote > V7 assumes a teletype and has little or no provision for anything else. > Having used it in "the good old days," I can only assure you that this was totally true. I thought we were truly in heaven when we upgraded from 110 baud Teletypes to 1200 baud Decwriters! My goodness, I feel really old just now. :-) Frank From iking at killthewabbit.org Mon Jun 12 13:29:34 2006 From: iking at killthewabbit.org (Ian King) Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 20:29:34 -0700 Subject: [pups] PDP-11 In-Reply-To: <448CDCBB.1050503@wortner.com> References: <000001c68dc7$98c39280$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> <200606112143.21997.kelli217@gmail.com> <448CDCBB.1050503@wortner.com> Message-ID: <448CDF9E.1030509@killthewabbit.org> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From frank at wortner.com Mon Jun 12 14:01:17 2006 From: frank at wortner.com (Frank Wortner) Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:01:17 -0400 Subject: [pups] PDP-11 In-Reply-To: <448CDF9E.1030509@killthewabbit.org> References: <000001c68dc7$98c39280$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> <200606112143.21997.kelli217@gmail.com> <448CDCBB.1050503@wortner.com> <448CDF9E.1030509@killthewabbit.org> Message-ID: <448CE70D.5010100@wortner.com> Ian King wrote: > I remember reworking the serial card on a PDP-8/e to talk to a 2400 > baud "glass teletype," f Thanks for all the nostalgic comments. Now I feel (a few months) younger. :-) Frank From carl.lowenstein at gmail.com Mon Jun 12 15:11:07 2006 From: carl.lowenstein at gmail.com (Carl Lowenstein) Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 22:11:07 -0700 Subject: [pups] PDP-11 In-Reply-To: <448CE70D.5010100@wortner.com> References: <000001c68dc7$98c39280$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> <200606112143.21997.kelli217@gmail.com> <448CDCBB.1050503@wortner.com> <448CDF9E.1030509@killthewabbit.org> <448CE70D.5010100@wortner.com> Message-ID: <5904d5730606112211m1e9af86anadcbc90f3216a112@mail.gmail.com> On 6/11/06, Frank Wortner wrote: > Ian King wrote: > > I remember reworking the serial card on a PDP-8/e to talk to a 2400 > > baud "glass teletype," f > Thanks for all the nostalgic comments. Now I feel (a few months) > younger. :-) > If you had ever attached a DEC VT05 (glass teletype) to your Sixth Edition or Seventh Edition Unix system you would understand why the Usenix monthly magazine is named ";login:". The user prompt contains escape sequences to control a model 37 Teletype, but the VT05 doesn't respond to them, and in fact ignores the character and just displays the semicolon and colon part of the escape sequences. carl -- carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego clowenst at ucsd.edu From dfevans at bbcr.uwaterloo.ca Mon Jun 12 17:21:58 2006 From: dfevans at bbcr.uwaterloo.ca (David Evans) Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 03:21:58 -0400 Subject: [pups] PDP-11 In-Reply-To: <5904d5730606112211m1e9af86anadcbc90f3216a112@mail.gmail.com> References: <000001c68dc7$98c39280$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> <200606112143.21997.kelli217@gmail.com> <448CDCBB.1050503@wortner.com> <448CDF9E.1030509@killthewabbit.org> <448CE70D.5010100@wortner.com> <5904d5730606112211m1e9af86anadcbc90f3216a112@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060612072158.GA2159@bcr10.uwaterloo.ca> On Sun, Jun 11, 2006 at 10:11:07PM -0700, Carl Lowenstein wrote: > If you had ever attached a DEC VT05 (glass teletype) to your Sixth > Edition or Seventh Edition Unix system you would understand why the > Usenix monthly magazine is named ";login:". The user prompt contains > escape sequences to control a model 37 Teletype, but the VT05 doesn't > respond to them, and in fact ignores the character and just > displays the semicolon and colon part of the escape sequences. > ISTR that 2.9BSD on the Pro 350 does this too. -- David Evans dfevans at bbcr.uwaterloo.ca Research Associate http://bbcr.uwaterloo.ca/~dfevans/ Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge From martin_lovick at yahoo.com Thu Jun 15 09:24:29 2006 From: martin_lovick at yahoo.com (Martin Lovick) Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 16:24:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [pups] bitsavers document Message-ID: <20060614232429.78414.qmail@web36905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf archive, I found a document called PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. Having had a quick scan through, it contains a source code listing and some commentary (lions i hear you say). The strange thing is that all of the source code appears to be in assembler... whats this about? is it a comentary of PDP-7 unix? regards Martin __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com Thu Jun 15 13:33:22 2006 From: dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com (dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com) Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 23:33:22 -0400 Subject: [pups] bitsavers document Message-ID: <937c6608a0e872a0993a2b439ec8ad16@plan9.bell-labs.com> Martin Lovick remarked, > whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf archive, I > found a document called > PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. > Having had a quick scan through, it contains a source > code listing and some commentary (lions i hear you > say). The strange thing is that all of the source code > appears to be in assembler... > whats this about? > is it a comentary of PDP-7 unix? It is a fairly early version, with commentary, of PDP-11 Unix (the kernel), indeed still in assembler. It is an interesting find, probably the earliest version yet unearthed. Kossow told me about it when he did (or got) the scan of the document. I can't remember receiving it at the time. It is clearly different from what we in the research group were running at the time--it has devices we didn't have, and I think by then we were on the 11/45. Dennis From milov at uwlax.edu Thu Jun 15 23:35:36 2006 From: milov at uwlax.edu (Milo Velimirovic) Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 08:35:36 -0500 Subject: [pups] bitsavers document In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9EF0B27C-44E4-41D4-91B0-D58090D393D7@uwlax.edu> > Message: 1 > Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 16:24:29 -0700 (PDT) > From: Martin Lovick > Subject: [pups] bitsavers document > To: pups at minnie.tuhs.org > Message-ID: <20060614232429.78414.qmail at web36905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 > > whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf archive, I > found a document called > PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. > Having had a quick scan through, it contains a source > code listing and some commentary (lions i hear you > say). No, not Lions. The author is listed on the first page as one T. R. Bashkow. > The strange thing is that all of the source code > appears to be in assembler... yup. This would be an early pdp11 UNIX from the period before the rewrite in C. > > whats this about? It appears to be a listing of an assembly language version of an early UNIX kernel for the pdp11 in the pages labelled E*-*; the pages F*-* are a commentary; G*-* is a glossary of terms used; H*-* contains a description of each function in the kernel with complete details of each function. > > is it a comentary of PDP-7 unix? It's (Bell Labs flavor) pdp11 assembly language. > > regards > > Martin -- Milo Velimirović Unix Computer Network Administrator 608-785-6618 Office ITS Network Services 608-386-2817 Cell University of Wisconsin - La Crosse La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601 USA 43 48 48 N 91 13 53 W -- Unix: Where /etc/init is job #1. From grog at lemis.com Fri Jun 16 10:33:37 2006 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:03:37 +0930 Subject: [pups] bitsavers document In-Reply-To: <20060614232429.78414.qmail@web36905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20060614232429.78414.qmail@web36905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20060616003337.GW59694@wantadilla.lemis.com> On Wednesday, 14 June 2006 at 16:24:29 -0700, Martin Lovick wrote: > whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf archive, I found a > document called PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. Can you give a full URL for this document? I've taken a brief look at the list in http://bitsavers.org/pdf/, but nothing jumped out at me. Greg -- Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available URL: From carl.lowenstein at gmail.com Fri Jun 16 11:13:39 2006 From: carl.lowenstein at gmail.com (Carl Lowenstein) Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 18:13:39 -0700 Subject: [pups] bitsavers document In-Reply-To: <5904d5730606151811v74671bbfy2091f7e78fdf270e@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060614232429.78414.qmail@web36905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20060616003337.GW59694@wantadilla.lemis.com> <5904d5730606151811v74671bbfy2091f7e78fdf270e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5904d5730606151813t2b6b334cm2ef16b0adebcd97b@mail.gmail.com> On 6/15/06, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Wednesday, 14 June 2006 at 16:24:29 -0700, Martin Lovick wrote: > > whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf archive, I found a > > document called PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. > > Can you give a full URL for this document? I've taken a brief look at > the list in http://bitsavers.org/pdf/, but nothing jumped out at me. < http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bellLabs/unix/PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf > carl -- carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego clowenst at ucsd.edu From martin_lovick at yahoo.com Fri Jun 16 16:52:11 2006 From: martin_lovick at yahoo.com (Martin Lovick) Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 23:52:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [pups] bitsavers document In-Reply-To: <20060616003337.GW59694@wantadilla.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20060616065211.50242.qmail@web36905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bellLabs/unix/PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf a few people have responded indicating that this is the first verion of unix ported to the pdp11 because the assembler is pdp11. --- Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Wednesday, 14 June 2006 at 16:24:29 -0700, Martin > Lovick wrote: > > whilst looking around the bitsavers.org pdf > archive, I found a > > document called > PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf. > > Can you give a full URL for this document? I've > taken a brief look at > the list in http://bitsavers.org/pdf/, but nothing > jumped out at me. > > Greg > -- > Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. > See complete headers for address and phone numbers. > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From bob at jfcl.com Mon Jun 19 13:15:52 2006 From: bob at jfcl.com (Robert Armstrong) Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:15:52 -0700 Subject: [pups] Major/minor device numbers and device names for MSCP drives? Message-ID: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> Probably this is documented somewhere, but I really need a pointer or a brief tutorial on the major/minor device numbers for mknod() and the device names for MSCP drives in 2.11bsd. If I have a really simple PDP with an RQDXn and one RDxx disk, then the device name is conventionally /dev/ra0x and the first partition, ra0a is (5,0), the second, ra0b, is (5,1), etc. Pretty easy. If I have two drives on my single RQDXn, then the second hard disk is /dev/ra1 and ra1a is (5,8), ra1b is (5,9), etc. I guess the offset of 8 must be the maximum number of partitions on a drive - OK, I'm still with you. But what if I have a second MSCP controller? Assuming that I've built the kernel to handle it and modified dtab to autoconfigure it, that is. What are the usual names and mknod() numbers for the drives on the second controller? Worse, what if the MSCP controller isn't a RQDX but is a real UDA/QDA ? Now the drives have their own MSCP unit numbers that can be anything from 0 to 250 - where does this figure in? Same question for TMSCP - what if I have more than one tape controller? This case is easier, though, since TMSCP controllers normally have only one drive associated with them. Thanks, Bob Armstrong -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de Mon Jun 19 16:57:33 2006 From: jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de (Jochen Kunz) Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 08:57:33 +0200 Subject: [pups] Major/minor device numbers and device names for MSCP drives? In-Reply-To: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> References: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> Message-ID: <20060619085733.60529d8d@SirToby.dinner41.de> On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:15:52 -0700 "Robert Armstrong" wrote: > But what if I have a second MSCP controller? /dev/ra1a is still (5,8). The disks are numbered in the same order as they are found. (Modulo devices that are "nailed down" in the kernel config file.) This is independent of the controler they are connected to. Some years ago I used a MSCP ESDI disk controller and in addition a MSCP SMD disk controller to connect two disks to my PDP-11/73 and IIRC the SMD disk showd up as /dev/ra1[a-h]. At least this is "the generic BSD way". 2.11BSD may be a bit different due to its age. -- tschüß, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/ From bob at jfcl.com Tue Jun 20 00:51:56 2006 From: bob at jfcl.com (Robert Armstrong) Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 07:51:56 -0700 Subject: [pups] Major/minor device numbers and device names for MSCP drives? In-Reply-To: <20060619085733.60529d8d@SirToby.dinner41.de> Message-ID: <00b301c693af$ef11d140$0401010a@GIZMO> >Jochen Kunz wrote: >The disks are numbered in the same order as they are found. Is it safe to assume that drives are always discovered in ascending unit number order, starting with the first controller and continuing with the second ? Is there any utility that will examine the running system and tell you which drives and units were actually discovered? init will say something like "ra 0 at ...." and "ra 1 at ...", but that's talking about controllers. AFAIK it says nothing about the drives discovered. Sorry to complain, but it seems like it can be a little bit ambiguous as to whether BSD actually discovered the drives you think it should have. This is especially true if you have something like a SCSI controller where it may not be immediately obviously which drives are online or what their MSCP unit numbers are. And it's important to know which actual disk drive you're writing on :-) Bob From chd_1 at nktelco.net Tue Jun 20 07:43:33 2006 From: chd_1 at nktelco.net (C. H. Dickman) Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:43:33 -0400 Subject: [pups] Major/minor device numbers and device names for MSCP drives? In-Reply-To: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> References: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> Message-ID: <44971A85.8060406@nktelco.net> Robert Armstrong wrote: > Probably this is documented somewhere, but I really need a pointer > or a brief tutorial on the major/minor device numbers for mknod() and > the device names for MSCP drives in 2.11bsd. This is what I remember about it all when I struggled with it a couple of years ago. The 8 bit minor number has 3 parts: the upper two bits are the controller (4 controllers max), the middle 3 bits are unit number (8 drives per controller) and the lower 3 bits are the partition (a-h). The assignment of device names is static (or nearly static). The discovery code for the controllers checks them in the order listed in /dev/dtab and assigns a controller number to each that is discovered and in that order (the nearly static part). Note also that DEC has a standard order for controller addresses too (which might be different). After that, drives are accessed using the 3 bit unit number which MUST correspond to the MSCP unit number (a catch follows because of this). Partitions are accessed with the 3 bit partition number. The catch is that MSCP unit numbers are supposed to be global cross all controllers and the microPDP-11/83 boot code assumes this. The boot code can only see the first unit n that is encountered and 2.11BSD can only see the drives with MSCP unit numbers less than 8. If you only have one controller there is no problem. When you add multiple controllers, things get more complex because you can only boot the first 8 MSCP units if you want to be able to access them from 2.11BSD. -chuck From chd_1 at nktelco.net Tue Jun 20 07:53:37 2006 From: chd_1 at nktelco.net (C. H. Dickman) Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:53:37 -0400 Subject: [pups] Major/minor device numbers and device names for MSCP drives? In-Reply-To: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> References: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> Message-ID: <44971CE1.105@nktelco.net> Robert Armstrong wrote: > Probably this is documented somewhere, but I really need a pointer > or a brief tutorial on the major/minor device numbers for mknod() and > the device names for MSCP drives in 2.11bsd. > > If I have a really simple PDP with an RQDXn and one RDxx disk, then > the device name is conventionally /dev/ra0x and the first partition, > ra0a is (5,0), the second, ra0b, is (5,1), etc. Pretty easy. > > If I have two drives on my single RQDXn, then the second hard disk > is /dev/ra1 and ra1a is (5,8), ra1b is (5,9), etc. I guess the offset > of 8 must be the maximum number of partitions on a drive - OK, I'm > still with you. > > But what if I have a second MSCP controller? Assuming that I've > built the kernel to handle it and modified dtab to autoconfigure it, > that is. What are the usual names and mknod() numbers for the drives > on the second controller? The second controller starts at ra8a (5, 8), and ra8a must be MSCP unit 0. > Worse, what if the MSCP controller isn't a RQDX but is a real > UDA/QDA ? Now the drives have their own MSCP unit numbers that can be > anything from 0 to 250 - where does this figure in? An MSCP unit number greater than 8 cannot be accessed from 2.11BSD. > Same question for TMSCP - what if I have more than one tape > controller? This case is easier, though, since TMSCP controllers > normally have only one drive associated with them. Don't know a think about it... > Thanks, > Bob Armstrong > -chuck From bqt at GW.SoftJAR.SE Tue Jun 20 01:08:59 2006 From: bqt at GW.SoftJAR.SE (Johnny Billquist) Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:08:59 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [pups] Major/minor device numbers and device names for MSCP drives? In-Reply-To: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> References: <00a601c6934e$b1e90b50$0401010a@GIZMO> Message-ID: On Sun, 18 Jun 2006, Robert Armstrong wrote: > Worse, what if the MSCP controller isn't a RQDX but is a real UDA/QDA ? > Now the drives have their own MSCP unit numbers that can be anything from 0 > to 250 - where does this figure in? Note that this isn't really anything special. You can both have a RQDX with an extender card which allows you to set other unit numbers on RD disks, and if you have two UDA controllers, they could both have disks starting from number 0. The other response about automatic numbering of disks is true of NetBSD, as well as Ultrix. However, I'm not sure that BSD2 do this. Unfortunately I can't remember for sure. But don't you actually tell the unit numbers in the configuration file, along with the controller? Or do BSD2 also do a full autodetect and connect of MSCP disks? If not, it could work in several ways, but I would suspect that disks on the second controller would start with minor # 64 (8 disks * 8 partitions per disk is I believe the default). But that assumes that the first disk found will be "0", no matter what the physical unit number is set to. Unless of course, this also is set in the configuration file. :-) > Same question for TMSCP - what if I have more than one tape controller? > This case is easier, though, since TMSCP controllers normally have only one > drive associated with them. Well, DEC only have TMSCP controllers with a single unit for the PDP-11. Third party controllers can have several units... Johnny From bob at jfcl.com Wed Jun 21 01:45:07 2006 From: bob at jfcl.com (Robert Armstrong) Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:45:07 -0700 Subject: [pups] Major/minor device numbers and device names for MSCP drives? In-Reply-To: <44971A85.8060406@nktelco.net> Message-ID: <000a01c69480$8c0d1470$1424fa48@GIZMO> > C. H. Dickman writes: >The 8 bit minor number has 3 parts: ... Thanks, Chuck - this is exactly what I wanted to know. Now I've got to try it out and see if I can get my SCSI ZIP drive talking to BSD. Thanks again, Bob From m.welle at gmx.net Sat Jun 3 23:57:09 2006 From: m.welle at gmx.net (Michael Welle) Date: Sat, 03 Jun 2006 15:57:09 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? Message-ID: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> Hi, last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a castrated successor of Multics. Hmmm, I am interested in Unix history for several years now, but I haven't heard about that before. It is really a tale I guess. Any clear words about this topic? Michael -- biff4emacsen - A biff-like tool for (X)Emacs http://www.c0t0d0s0.de/biff4emacsen/biff4emacsen.html From vasco at icpnet.pl Mon Jun 5 06:44:57 2006 From: vasco at icpnet.pl (Andrzej Popielewicz) Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2006 22:44:57 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> Message-ID: <44834649.2020108@icpnet.pl> Michael Welle napisał(a): > Hi, > > last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its > name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a > homophone of (to?) unix in english language). In Oxford American Dictionary eunuch (spelled yoo-nuk) . Is it the source of this tale ? In Webster 3 edition (Koenemann, about 2000 pages)) unix is not mentioned eunuch (spelled yu-nik,yu-nek) > One can see Unix as a > castrated successor of Multics. > Unix was Unics at the beginning(uniplexed information computer system) as opposed to Multics (multiplexed information computer system), last was working even in 1980.Even name suggests, that Unics was a simplified concept, of course at that time. As You know most modern Unix boxes are multiCPU systems etc ,etc. > Hmmm, I am interested in Unix history > for several years now, but I haven't heard about that before. It is > really a tale I guess. Any clear words about this topic? > > Michael > > > You will find tones of information in Internet. Andrzej From vasco at icpnet.pl Mon Jun 5 20:41:19 2006 From: vasco at icpnet.pl (Andrzej Popielewicz) Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 12:41:19 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> Message-ID: <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> Michael Welle napisał(a): >Hi, > >last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its >name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a >homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a > > Now, that You know where the name unix comes from(see my previous post), there still is a *funny* coincidence in pronounciation of both words. In Oxford American Dictionary eunuch is pronounced as "yoo-nuk" (not all symbols reproduced) unit is "yoo-nit" unique is "yoo-neek" In Webster English Language Dictionary eunuch is "'yunek" unit is "'yunet" unique is "yu'nek,yu'nik" You can notice, that unix , more similar to unit or unique will be pronounced differently(?). It suggests , that although for us foreigners the difference is hard to be distinguished, but perhaps Americans and Englishmen can hear the subtle difference above shown in the pronounciation(or perhaps not all). I suspect , that if the pronounciation were be same many people would have noticed it before. It is clear , that opinion of American/English linguistic/language specialist would be neccesarry. Andrzej From tfb at tfeb.org Mon Jun 5 21:20:25 2006 From: tfb at tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 12:20:25 +0100 (BST) Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <22829.80.75.66.29.1149506425.squirrel@www.gradwell.com> On Mon, June 5, 2006 11:41 am, Andrzej Popielewicz wrote: > > eunuch is pronounced as "yoo-nuk" (not all symbols reproduced) unit is > "yoo-nit" > unique is "yoo-neek" > > In Webster English Language Dictionary > > > eunuch is "'yunek" unit is "'yunet" unique is "yu'nek,yu'nik" > > You can notice, that unix , more similar to unit or unique will be > pronounced differently(?). > I think the position of the stress is important. `Unix', the way I pronounce it (and I think the way everyone does) is stressed on the 1st syllable, as is `eunuch' and `Multics'. To a large extent the distinction in the sound of the 2nd syllable then doesn't matter because in typical English dialects they all end up the same null sound (schwar? I forget the name). `unique' for instance has stress on second syllable, so really is very different. --tim From cowan at ccil.org Mon Jun 5 23:49:06 2006 From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 09:49:06 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <20060605134905.GA10437@ccil.org> Andrzej Popielewicz scripsit: > eunuch is "'yunek" > unit is "'yunet" > unique is "yu'nek,yu'nik" > > You can notice, that unix , more similar to unit or unique will be > pronounced differently(?). English is a vowel-reduction language, like Russian or Portuguese; vowels in unstressed syllables tend to be reduced either to schwa or to lax short i. Because the anglophone countries broke up politically before language standardization could take effect, there is no single standard pronunciation worldwide, nor any fixed hierarchy of standards. Therefore, one must consider both dialects in which the unstressed short i and the unstressed schwa both become schwa, and ones where they do not. In the former dialects, "Unix" and "eunuchs" sound exactly alike; in the latter dialects, there is a small difference. (As Tim Bradshaw notes, "unique" is stressed on the second syllable, so there is no vowel reduction on that syllable.) > I suspect , that if the pronounciation were be same many people would > have noticed it before. I am quite certain that many people have. It was perfectly obvious to me the first time I saw the word "Unix" written, and that was in 1976 or so. > It is clear , that opinion of American/English linguistic/language > specialist would be neccesarry. I am not a specialist, but I am a generalist with a good understanding of the domain. -- John Cowan cowan at ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan Female celebrity stalker, on a hot morning in Cairo: "Imagine, Colonel Lawrence, ninety-two already!" El Auruns's reply: "Many happy returns of the day!" From vasco at icpnet.pl Tue Jun 6 00:14:02 2006 From: vasco at icpnet.pl (Andrzej Popielewicz) Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 16:14:02 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <20060605134905.GA10437@ccil.org> References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> <20060605134905.GA10437@ccil.org> Message-ID: <44843C2A.1010207@icpnet.pl> John Cowan napisał(a): >Andrzej Popielewicz scripsit: > > > >>eunuch is "'yunek" >>unit is "'yunet" >>unique is "yu'nek,yu'nik" >> >>You can notice, that unix , more similar to unit or unique will be >>pronounced differently(?). >> >> > >English is a vowel-reduction language, like Russian or Portuguese; >vowels in unstressed syllables tend to be reduced either to schwa or to >lax short i. Because the anglophone countries broke up politically before >language standardization could take effect, there is no single standard >pronunciation worldwide, nor any fixed hierarchy of standards. > >Therefore, one must consider both dialects in which the unstressed short >i and the unstressed schwa both become schwa, and ones where they do not. >In the former dialects, "Unix" and "eunuchs" sound exactly alike; in >the latter dialects, there is a small difference. > > OK, so I have learned something about English. >(As Tim Bradshaw notes, "unique" is stressed on the second syllable, >so there is no vowel reduction on that syllable.) > > > It is and it was quite obvious for me before, I agree with You both,I found only words with similar pronounciation(neglecting stress). >>I suspect , that if the pronounciation were be same many people would >>have noticed it before. >> >> > >I am quite certain that many people have. It was perfectly obvious to me >the first time I saw the word "Unix" written, and that was in 1976 or so. > > > Well, I cannot "reproduce it" in my mind this funny feeling I suspect, as not natively Enlish speaking. Hopefully it helped the Unix .Does it cause the smile every time You hear it ? Even now knowing it I will probably ,hearing or reading the word "Unix", not associate it with "eunuch".Probably because I have coded Polish pronounciation in my mind, or in other words I mostly think in Polish. >>It is clear , that opinion of American/English linguistic/language >>specialist would be neccesarry. >> >> > >I am not a specialist, but I am a generalist with a good understanding >of the domain. > > > Your opinion is sufficient.I appreciate. Andrzej From wb at freebie.xs4all.nl Tue Jun 6 00:26:43 2006 From: wb at freebie.xs4all.nl (Wilko Bulte) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 16:26:43 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44843C2A.1010207@icpnet.pl> References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> <20060605134905.GA10437@ccil.org> <44843C2A.1010207@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <20060605142643.GB11731@freebie.xs4all.nl> On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 04:14:02PM +0200, Andrzej Popielewicz wrote.. > John Cowan napisa??(a): > > >Andrzej Popielewicz scripsit: > > > > > > > >>eunuch is "'yunek" > >>unit is "'yunet" > >>unique is "yu'nek,yu'nik" > >> > >>You can notice, that unix , more similar to unit or unique will be > >>pronounced differently(?). > >> > >> > > > >English is a vowel-reduction language, like Russian or Portuguese; > >vowels in unstressed syllables tend to be reduced either to schwa or to > >lax short i. Because the anglophone countries broke up politically before > >language standardization could take effect, there is no single standard > >pronunciation worldwide, nor any fixed hierarchy of standards. > > > >Therefore, one must consider both dialects in which the unstressed short > >i and the unstressed schwa both become schwa, and ones where they do not. > >In the former dialects, "Unix" and "eunuchs" sound exactly alike; in > >the latter dialects, there is a small difference. > > > > > OK, so I have learned something about English. > > >(As Tim Bradshaw notes, "unique" is stressed on the second syllable, > >so there is no vowel reduction on that syllable.) > > > > > > > It is and it was quite obvious for me before, I agree with You both,I > found only words with similar pronounciation(neglecting stress). > > >>I suspect , that if the pronounciation were be same many people would > >>have noticed it before. > >> > >> > > > >I am quite certain that many people have. It was perfectly obvious to me > >the first time I saw the word "Unix" written, and that was in 1976 or so. > > > > > > > Well, I cannot "reproduce it" in my mind this funny feeling I suspect, > as not natively Enlish speaking. > Hopefully it helped the Unix .Does it cause the smile every time You > hear it ? > Even now knowing it I will probably ,hearing or reading the word "Unix", > not associate it with "eunuch".Probably because I have coded Polish > pronounciation in my mind, or in other words I mostly think in Polish. FWIW and to clutter the discussion: in Dutch Unix is pronounced like "Uniks", eunuch as "Eu-neug". So the funny implications were completely lost on me until now. Wilko -- Wilko Bulte wilko at FreeBSD.org From cowan at ccil.org Tue Jun 6 01:02:26 2006 From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 11:02:26 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44843C2A.1010207@icpnet.pl> References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> <20060605134905.GA10437@ccil.org> <44843C2A.1010207@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <20060605150225.GB10437@ccil.org> Andrzej Popielewicz scripsit: > Well, I cannot "reproduce it" in my mind this funny feeling I suspect, > as not natively Enlish speaking. Not surprising. Puns in other languages are often hard to appreciate. > Hopefully it helped the Unix .Does it cause the smile every time You > hear it ? Well, the joke is rather less funny after 30 years than when I first saw it. Also not surprising. English is full of unrelated words pronounced exactly alike, at least partly because of its habit of borrowing words from foreign languages as they are written and then changing the pronunciation to suit itself, which accounts for the strange English pronunciation of "eunuch" (of Classical Greek origin). English has always had an appetite for borrowed words, ever since we replaced huge amounts of our native vocabulary with borrowed French, Latin, and Greek words. (From Polish, not so much, except for the names of specifically Polish things such as "babka", "ogonek", "pierogi" (more usually "pierogies", with an English plural ending added), "Sejm", and "zloty".) (There is, however, just to get *completely* off-topic, the curious case of the English word "spruce", which means any of various coniferous evergreen trees of the genus _Picea_. Most of this word is unquestionably from "Pruce", the older English name for Prussia, now obsolete. But Wikipedia suggests, perhaps rightly, that the initial s- comes from a misinterpretation of the Polish phrase _z Prus_ 'from Prussia'. English dictionaries are not conclusive.) A question for any francophones on the list: is the final -x in "Unix" normally pronounced in French, or is it silent? -- John Cowan cowan at ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to [Sam], a grey-clad moving hill. Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes, but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are but memories of his girth and his majesty. --"Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit" From iking at killthewabbit.org Tue Jun 6 01:13:07 2006 From: iking at killthewabbit.org (Ian King) Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 08:13:07 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <20060605134905.GA10437@ccil.org> References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> <20060605134905.GA10437@ccil.org> Message-ID: <44844A03.9000204@killthewabbit.org> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jpetts at operamail.com Tue Jun 6 01:57:58 2006 From: jpetts at operamail.com (James Petts) Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 07:57:58 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? Message-ID: <20060605155758.BAD863AA552@ws5-8.us4.outblaze.com> > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "John Cowan" > To: "Andrzej Popielewicz" > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? > Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 11:02:26 -0400 > English has always had an appetite for borrowed words, ever since we > replaced huge amounts of our native vocabulary with borrowed French, > Latin, and Greek words. I would rather say "augmented" than "replaced", and of course one should not neglect the other languages from which there have been significant borrowings, such as Hindi, which are not, of course, as extensive as from the languages you mention. > (There is, however, just to get *completely* off-topic, the curious > case of the English word "spruce", which means any of various coniferous > evergreen trees of the genus _Picea_. Most of this word is unquestionably > from "Pruce", the older English name for Prussia, now obsolete. > But Wikipedia suggests, perhaps rightly, that the initial s- comes > from a misinterpretation of the Polish phrase _z Prus_ 'from Prussia'. > English dictionaries are not conclusive.) Well, the definition of Spruce in the OED has several quotations from the 17th century and before, which seem to indicate that one of the names for Prussia was in fact "Spruce", which suggests that the Wikipedia article may not be in fact accurate. The "z Prus" etymology, without any supporting evidence, is tenuous... 1378 Durh. Acc. Rolls (Surtees) 47 In xxiiij piscibus de sprws empt., ijs. 14.. Chaucer's Dethe Blaunche 1025 (MS. Bodl. 638), She wolde not..send men yn-to Walakye, To Sprewse & yn-to Tartarye. 1521 in Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser. II. I. 292 The expedition of the Gentlemen of Spruce. c1550 BALE K. Johan (Camden) 9 In Sycell, in Naples, in Venys and Ytalye, In Pole, Spruse and Berne. 1639 FULLER Holy War V. iii. 233 They busied themselves in defending of Christendome,..as the Teutonick order defended Spruce-land against the Tartarian. 1656 G. ABBOT Descr. World 69 On the east and north corner of Germany lyeth a country called Prussia, in English Pruthen or Spruce. From cowan at ccil.org Tue Jun 6 02:28:54 2006 From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 12:28:54 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <20060605155758.BAD863AA552@ws5-8.us4.outblaze.com> References: <20060605155758.BAD863AA552@ws5-8.us4.outblaze.com> Message-ID: <20060605162854.GE10437@ccil.org> James Petts scripsit: > I would rather say "augmented" than "replaced", Only about 15 to 30 in every 100 of the words that Old English speakers knew, and that were written down before 1066 in books that haven't been lost or burned, are still being spoken and written in 2006. You can, if you work at it, write English today with only those words, but it isn't so straightforward -- and it couldn't be done at all if the words kept from Old English times were not also the most often seen words in today's English. All of the other Old English words have been dropped and French, Latin, or Greek words taken instead. You're right that many new words for new things were also put into English over the years as well. (I had to work on that a great deal to weed all the old French words out of it.) > and of course one should not neglect the other languages from which > there have been significant borrowings, such as Hindi, which are not, > of course, as extensive as from the languages you mention. Indeed. > Well, the definition of Spruce in the OED has several quotations from > the 17th century and before, which seem to indicate that one of the > names for Prussia was in fact "Spruce", which suggests that the > Wikipedia article may not be in fact accurate. The "z Prus" etymology, > without any supporting evidence, is tenuous... As you say. But where did the S- at the beginning of the name "Spruce" come from, then? No book of words tells us. > 1378 Durh. Acc. Rolls (Surtees) 47 In xxiiij piscibus de sprws empt., > ijs. 14.. Chaucer's Dethe Blaunche 1025 (MS. Bodl. 638), She wolde > not..send men yn-to Walakye, To Sprewse & yn-to Tartarye. 1521 in > Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser. II. I. 292 The expedition of the Gentlemen > of Spruce. c1550 BALE K. Johan (Camden) 9 In Sycell, in Naples, in > Venys and Ytalye, In Pole, Spruse and Berne. 1639 FULLER Holy War > V. iii. 233 They busied themselves in defending of Christendome,..as > the Teutonick order defended Spruce-land against the Tartarian. > 1656 G. ABBOT Descr. World 69 On the east and north corner of Germany > lyeth a country called Prussia, in English Pruthen or Spruce. Thanks for this helpful piece of the OED. -- Do what you will, John Cowan this Life's a Fiction cowan at ccil.org And is made up of http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Contradiction. --William Blake From a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com Tue Jun 6 07:14:19 2006 From: a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com (A P Garcia) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 16:14:19 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 3 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Interesting thread. The Jargon file only says: [In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was "UNICS"] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/U/Unix.html It never occurred to me that the pun might not be recognized, even to people whose first language is not English. Americans sometimes forget that not everyone is American. From dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com Tue Jun 6 13:41:06 2006 From: dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com (dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 23:41:06 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? Message-ID: <2c7513b6f888c65a2cdd19adee40d215@plan9.bell-labs.com> Michael Welle originally asked, > last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its > name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a > homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a > castrated successor of Multics. The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's mind, but the original explanation was "one of whatever Multics was many of." I think the quip about "castrated Multics" came from MIT. Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred in print, though I could be proved wrong. Dennis From txomsy at yahoo.es Tue Jun 6 17:18:46 2006 From: txomsy at yahoo.es (Jose R Valverde) Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 09:18:46 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? Message-ID: <20060606071846.11102.qmail@web26108.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> First, my apologies if this message looks awful. The pun might have stemmed from another variant. Like EUNICE. The original poster was certainly not much aware of UNIX history, so it might as well come to him from an also less knowledgeable user who got it from a vendor of a EUNI* variant. >From memory, I seem to remember at least a company named EUNICE involved with UNIX, and a UNIX-like environment for the VAX (under VMS). So, may be one of these later was actually named with the 'eunuchs' pun intended (perhaps as a castrated down UNIX system on top of VMS) and the pun circulated among some customers. For a newcomer buying it, it would be easy to assimilate *his* variant with standard UNIX and extend the pun. We just saw a similar confussion of LINUX with UNIX from a poster asking for LINUX v5, 6 o 7. It makes sense as well to have a similar pun circulated later, when other operating systems which were arguably better (and I DO NOT want to start that discussion) or more extensive had to deploy support for POSIX/UNIX due to market needs. To me it certainly has no sense having such an association in a time like the early 70s when it would have had a much stronger emotional charge and at a time when UNIX was still in its early development. j On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 23:41:06 -0400 dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com wrote: > Michael Welle originally asked, > > > last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its > > name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a > > homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a > > castrated successor of Multics. > > The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's mind, > but the original explanation was "one of whatever > Multics was many of." I think the quip about > "castrated Multics" came from MIT. > > Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred > in print, though I could be proved wrong. > > Dennis __________________________________________________ Correo Yahoo! Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ¡gratis! Regístrate ya - http://correo.yahoo.es From vasco at icpnet.pl Tue Jun 6 18:21:16 2006 From: vasco at icpnet.pl (Andrzej Popielewicz) Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:21:16 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <2c7513b6f888c65a2cdd19adee40d215@plan9.bell-labs.com> References: <2c7513b6f888c65a2cdd19adee40d215@plan9.bell-labs.com> Message-ID: <44853AFC.4060608@icpnet.pl> dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com napisał(a): > >Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred >in print, though I could be proved wrong. > > Dennis > > > Hi, I have taken my info about unics from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics. Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your person is mentioned there. BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and Computer System" as UNIACS . Andrzej PS. Last Multics was runing in 2000 , and not in 1980 as I claimed before From vasco at icpnet.pl Tue Jun 6 18:24:03 2006 From: vasco at icpnet.pl (Andrzej Popielewicz) Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:24:03 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44853AFC.4060608@icpnet.pl> References: <2c7513b6f888c65a2cdd19adee40d215@plan9.bell-labs.com> <44853AFC.4060608@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <44853BA3.3030904@icpnet.pl> Andrzej Popielewicz napisał(a): >dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com napisał(a): > > > >>Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred >>in print, though I could be proved wrong. >> >> Dennis >> >> >> >> >> >Hi, >I have taken my info about unics from >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics. > >Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your person is mentioned there. > >BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and Computer System" as >UNIACS . > >Andrzej > >PS. Last Multics was runing in 2000 , and not in 1980 as I claimed before >_______________________________________________ >TUHS mailing list >TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org >https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics and http://en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics From vasco at icpnet.pl Tue Jun 6 18:26:31 2006 From: vasco at icpnet.pl (Andrzej Popielewicz) Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:26:31 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44853BA3.3030904@icpnet.pl> References: <2c7513b6f888c65a2cdd19adee40d215@plan9.bell-labs.com> <44853AFC.4060608@icpnet.pl> <44853BA3.3030904@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <44853C37.3040804@icpnet.pl> Andrzej Popielewicz napisał(a): > Andrzej Popielewicz napisał(a): > >> dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com napisał(a): >> >> >> >>> Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred >>> in print, though I could be proved wrong. >>> >>> Dennis >>> >>> >>> >>> >> >> Hi, >> I have taken my info about unics from >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics. >> >> Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your person is mentioned >> there. >> >> BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and Computer System" >> as UNIACS . >> >> Andrzej >> >> PS. Last Multics was runing in 2000 , and not in 1980 as I claimed >> before >> _______________________________________________ >> TUHS mailing list >> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs >> >> >> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics > > and > > http://en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics > > > Sorry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics From vasco at icpnet.pl Tue Jun 6 20:56:20 2006 From: vasco at icpnet.pl (Andrzej Popielewicz) Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 12:56:20 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44853C37.3040804@icpnet.pl> References: <2c7513b6f888c65a2cdd19adee40d215@plan9.bell-labs.com> <44853AFC.4060608@icpnet.pl> <44853BA3.3030904@icpnet.pl> <44853C37.3040804@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <44855F54.8020108@icpnet.pl> Andrzej Popielewicz napisał(a): > Andrzej Popielewicz napisał(a): Two more interesting links concerning our discussion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Unix http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html Andrzej From cowan at ccil.org Tue Jun 6 23:58:13 2006 From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 09:58:13 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <20060606071846.11102.qmail@web26108.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> References: <20060606071846.11102.qmail@web26108.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20060606135812.GK14868@ccil.org> Jose R Valverde scripsit: > The pun might have stemmed from another variant. Like > EUNICE. I think that's unlikely: the Unix/eunuchs pun is much closer than anything involving "Eunice". I remember Eunice quite fondly: it was the first thing I installed on the first Microvax II I got my hands on back in the mid-80s. -- Andrew Watt on Microsoft: John Cowan Never in the field of human computing cowan at ccil.org has so much been paid by so many http://www.ccil.org/~cowan to so few! (pace Winston Churchill) From dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com Wed Jun 7 12:32:46 2006 From: dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com (dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com) Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 22:32:46 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? Message-ID: <49d52b2057749338fb3bb8d01ec2ca7d@plan9.bell-labs.com> Andrzey wrote: >I have taken my info about unics from >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics . > >Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your person is mentioned there. > Don't believe everything in a (or the) wiki. >BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and Computer System" as >UNIACS . One could, but wouldn't. Dennis From helbig at Lehre.BA-Stuttgart.DE Wed Jun 7 15:59:29 2006 From: helbig at Lehre.BA-Stuttgart.DE (Wolfgang Helbig) Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 07:59:29 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [TUHS] Unix V6 man pages Message-ID: <200606070608.k5768mo00240@bsd.korb> Warren, please consider linking the Unix-V6 man pages at http://www.ba-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/v6/doc/index.html from your site at http://www.tuhs.org/manpages.html Regards, Wolfgang -- Weniger, aber besser. From grog at lemis.com Thu Jun 8 13:11:39 2006 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 12:41:39 +0930 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature In-Reply-To: <20060603195531.3c634eca@hydrocodone.org> References: <447E9540.2020003@io.dk> <200606011357.11990.aren.tyr@gawab.com> <447F0062.8060302@daleco.biz> <447F4E7C.8050404@bitfreak.org> <20060603195531.3c634eca@hydrocodone.org> Message-ID: <20060608031139.GR81573@wantadilla.lemis.com> This recently went round the FreeBSD-chat mailing list. I rather like it, and tend to agree with the opinions. Unfortunately, the URL appears mutilated, and the site itself is "under maintenance", but Google points me at what appears to be the same article at http://www.rap.ucar.edu/staff/tres/elements.html I haven't resisted the temptation to re-wrap the paragraphs :-) Greg Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 19:55:31 -0400 From: Allen this is somewhat long... But some of you may have already read it, and probably liked it: [ From http://www.performancecomputing.com...s/9809of1.shtml ] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come so many were liberal-arts majors? It's the love of words that makes UNIX stand out. Thomas Scoville In the late 1980s, I worked in the advanced R&D arm of the Silicon Valley's regional telephone company. My lab was populated mostly by Ph.D.s and gifted hackers. It was, as you might expect, an all-UNIX shop. The manager of the group was an exception: no advanced degree, no technical credentials. He seemed pointedly self-conscious about it. We suspected he felt (wrongly, we agreed) underconfident of his education and intellect. One day, a story circulated through the group that confirmed our suspicions: the manager had confided he was indeed intimidated by the intelligence of the group, and was taking steps to remedy the situation. His prescription, though, was unanticipated: "I need to become more of an intellectual," he said. "I'm going to learn UNIX." Needless to say, we made more than a little fun out of this. I mean, come on: as if UNIX could transform him into a mastermind, like the supplicating scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz." I uncharitably imagined a variation on the old Charles Atlas ads: "Those senior engineers will never kick sand in my face again." But part of me was sympathetic: "The boss isn't entirely wrong, is he? There is something different about UNIX people, isn't there?" In the years since, I've come to recognize what my old manager was getting at. I still think he was misguided, but in retrospect I think his belief was more accurate than I recognized at the time. To be sure, the UNIX community has its own measure of technical parochialism and nerdy tunnel vision, but in my experience there seemed to be a suspicious overrepresentation of polyglots and liberal-arts folks in UNIX shops. I'll admit my evidence is sketchy and anecdotal. For instance, while banging out a line of shell, with a fellow engineer peering over my shoulder, I might make an intentionally obscure literary reference: if test -z `ps -fe | grep whom` then echo ^G fi # Let's see for whom the bell tolls. UNIX colleagues were much more likely to recognize and play in a way I'd never expect in the VMS shops, IBM's big-iron data centers, or DOS ghettos on my consulting beat. Being a liberal-arts type myself (though I cleverly concealed this in my resume), I wondered why this should be true. My original explanation--UNIX's historical association with university computing environments, like UC Berkeley's--didn't hold up over the years; many of the UNIX-philiacs I met came from schools with small or absent computer science departments. There had to be a connection, but I had no plausible hypothesis. It wasn't until I started regularly asking UNIX refuseniks what they didn't like about UNIX that better explanations emerged. Some of the prevailing dislike had a distinctly populist flavor--people caught a whiff of snobbery about UNIX and regarded it with the same proletarian resentment usually reserved for highbrow institutions like opera or ballet. They had a point: until recently, UNIX was the lingua franca of computing's upper crust. The more harried, practical, and underprivileged of the computing world seemed to object to this aura of privilege. UNIX adepts historically have been a coddled bunch, and tend to be proud of their hard-won knowledge. But these class differences are fading fast in modern computing environments. Now UNIX engineers are more common, and low- or no-cost UNIX variations run on inexpensive hardware. Certainly UNIX folks aren't as coddled in the age of NT. There was a standard litany of more specific criticisms: UNIX is difficult and time-consuming to learn. There are too many things to remember. It's arcane and needlessly complex. But the most recurrent complaint was that it was too text-oriented. People really hated the command line, with all the utilities, obscure flags, and arguments they had to memorize. They hated all the typing. One mislaid character and you had to start over. Interestingly, this complaint came most often from users of the GUI-laden Macintosh or Windows platforms. People who had slaved away on DOS batch scripts or spent their days on character-based terminals of multiuser non-UNIX machines were less likely to express the same grievance. Though I understood how people might be put off by having to remember such willfully obscure utility names like cat and grep, I continued to be puzzled at why they resented typing. Then I realized I could connect the complaint with the scores of "intellectual elite" (as my manager described them) in UNIX shops. The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn't seem so mysterious, and pointed the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture of the word. UNIX programmers express themselves in a rich vocabulary of system utilities and command-line arguments, along with a flexible, varied grammar and syntax. For UNIX enthusiasts, the language becomes second nature. Once, I overheard a conversation in a Palo Alto restaurant: "there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let me see...cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10..." though not syntactically correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a diner from an NT shop probably couldn't have expressed himself as casually. With UNIX, text--on the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR--is the primary interface mechanism: UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance. Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression. At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice. It doesn't take much exposure to UNIX before you realize that the UNIX core was the creation of a very few well-synchronized minds. I've never met Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, or Ken Thompson, but after a decade and a half on UNIX I imagine I might greet them as friends, knowing something of the shape of their thoughts. You might argue that UNIX is as visually oriented as other OSs. Modern UNIX offerings certainly have their fair share of GUI-based OS interfaces. In practice though, the UNIX core subverts them; they end up serving UNIX's tradition of word culture, not replacing it. Take a look at the console of most UNIX workstations: half the windows you see are terminal emulators with command-line prompts or vi jobs running within. Nowhere is this word/image culture tension better represented than in the contrast between UNIX and NT. When the much-vaunted UNIX-killer arrived a few years ago, backed by the full faith and credit of the Redmond juggernaut, I approached it with an open mind. But NT left me cold. There was something deeply unsatisfying about it. I had that ineffable feeling (apologies to Gertrude Stein) there was no there there. Granted, I already knew the major themes of system and network administration from my UNIX days, and I will admit that registry hacking did vex me for a few days, but after my short scramble up the learning curve I looked back at UNIX with the feeling I'd been demoted from a backhoe to a leaf-blower. NT just didn't offer room to move. The one-size-fits-all, point-and-click, we've-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k. I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world of Microsoft Foundation Classes. NT was definitely much too close to image culture for my comfort: endless point-and-click graphical dialog boxes, hunting around the screen with the mouse, pop-up after pop-up demanding my attention. The experience was almost exclusively reactive. Every task demanded a GUI-based utility front-end loaded with insidious assumptions about how to visualize (and thus conceptualize) the operation. I couldn't think "outside the box" because everything literally was a box. There was no opportunity for ad hoc consideration of how a task might alternately be performed. I will admit NT made my life easier in some respects. I found myself doing less remembering (names of utilities, command arguments, syntax) and more recognizing (solution components associated with check boxes, radio buttons, and pull-downs). I spent much less time typing. Certainly my right hand spent much more time herding the mouse around the desktop. But after a few months I started to get a tired, desolate feeling, akin to the fatigue I feel after too much channel surfing or videogaming: too much time spent reacting, not enough spent in active analysis and expression. In short, image-culture burnout. The one ray of light that illuminated my tenure in NT environments was the burgeoning popularity of Perl. Perl seemed to find its way into NT shops as a CGI solution for Web development, but people quickly recognized its power and adopted it for uses far outside the scope of Web development: system administration, revision control, remote file distribution, network administration. The irony is that Perl itself is a subset of UNIX features condensed into a quick-and-dirty scripting language. In a literary light, if UNIX is the Great Novel, Perl is the Cliffs Notes. Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I'm hoping that as IT folks become more seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill the need. Thomas Scoville has been wrestling with UNIX since 1983. He currently works at Expert Support Inc. in Mountain View, CA. -- Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available URL: From johnzulu at yahoo.com Thu Jun 8 15:22:44 2006 From: johnzulu at yahoo.com (John Chung) Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 22:22:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060608052244.2395.qmail@web36815.mail.mud.yahoo.com> > > 1. Re: Unix, eunuchs? (dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com) > 2. Unix V6 man pages (Wolfgang Helbig) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 22:32:46 -0400 > From: dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? > To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org > Message-ID: > <49d52b2057749338fb3bb8d01ec2ca7d at plan9.bell-labs.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" > > Andrzey wrote: > > >I have taken my info about unics from > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics . > > > >Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your > person is mentioned there. > > > > Don't believe everything in a (or the) wiki. > > >BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and > Computer System" as > >UNIACS . > > One could, but wouldn't. > > Dennis > > Thanks for clearing it up Dennis. John __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From helbig at Lehre.BA-Stuttgart.DE Thu Jun 8 16:06:50 2006 From: helbig at Lehre.BA-Stuttgart.DE (Wolfgang Helbig) Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 08:06:50 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature Message-ID: <200606080616.k586GDR00257@bsd.korb> Greg, After I read all of it consulting my dictionary a lot one question remains: What are "Cliffs Notes"? Regards, Wolfgang -- Weniger, aber besser. From lyricalnanoha at dosius.ath.cx Thu Jun 8 16:20:59 2006 From: lyricalnanoha at dosius.ath.cx (Lyrical Nanoha) Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 02:20:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature In-Reply-To: <200606080616.k586GDR00257@bsd.korb> References: <200606080616.k586GDR00257@bsd.korb> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Wolfgang Helbig wrote: > Greg, > > After I read all of it consulting my dictionary a lot one question remains: > What are "Cliffs Notes"? > > Regards, > Wolfgang A brief summary and some rough notes on a work of literature, often used by high school students who wish to avoid reading the book. -uso. From hansolofalcon at worldnet.att.net Fri Jun 9 03:08:03 2006 From: hansolofalcon at worldnet.att.net (Gregg C Levine) Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 13:08:03 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <007701c68b1e$23138780$6501a8c0@who7> Hello! Not anymore. The last I had heard was that Cliff Notes had ceased publishing around the beginning of this century. All of the ones that roost in the public library here in Queens happen to be dated 1999 at the latest. Someone asked what happened to the newer ones and was told that. -- Gregg C Levine hansolofalcon at worldnet.att.net --- "Remember the Force will be with you. Always." Obi-Wan Kenobi > -----Original Message----- > From: tuhs-bounces at minnie.tuhs.org [mailto:tuhs-bounces at minnie.tuhs.org] On > Behalf Of Lyrical Nanoha > Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 2:21 AM > To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org > Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX as literature > > On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Wolfgang Helbig wrote: > > > Greg, > > > > After I read all of it consulting my dictionary a lot one question remains: > > What are "Cliffs Notes"? > > > > Regards, > > Wolfgang > > A brief summary and some rough notes on a work of literature, often used > by high school students who wish to avoid reading the book. > > -uso. > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs From mparson at bl.org Fri Jun 9 05:41:26 2006 From: mparson at bl.org (Michael Parson) Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 14:41:26 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature In-Reply-To: <007701c68b1e$23138780$6501a8c0@who7> References: <007701c68b1e$23138780$6501a8c0@who7> Message-ID: <20060608194126.GA21994@bl.org> On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 01:08:03PM -0400, Gregg C Levine wrote: > Hello! > Not anymore. The last I had heard was that Cliff Notes had ceased > publishing around the beginning of this century. All of the ones that > roost in the public library here in Queens happen to be dated 1999 at > the latest. Someone asked what happened to the newer ones and was told > that. They've still got a website up: http://www.cliffsnotes.com/ And have links for buying stuff. -- Michael Parson mparson at bl.org From asbesto at freaknet.org Fri Jun 9 03:15:57 2006 From: asbesto at freaknet.org (asbesto) Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 17:15:57 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11/23 questions ... Message-ID: <20060608171557.GA16159@freaknet.org> Hi dudes, We recovered an almost working pdp-11/23 and some other stuff for our computer museum. Some images are online at http://dyne.org/museum :) well, 2 questions: 1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required, so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this? 2) what kind of UNIX can be run on an 11/23 using a RL02 disk drive? (just one, unfortunately :!) that's all folks! *:) -- [ asbesto : IW9HGS : freaknet medialab : radiocybernet : poetry ] [ http://freaknet.org/asbesto http://papuasia.org/radiocybernet ] [ NON SCRIVERMI USANDO LETTERE ACCENTATE, NON MANDARMI ALLEGATI ] [ *I DELETE* EMAIL > 100K, ATTACHMENTS, HTML, M$-WORD DOC, SPAM ] From pete at dunnington.plus.com Fri Jun 9 08:44:15 2006 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 23:44:15 +0100 (BST) Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11/23 questions ... In-Reply-To: asbesto "[TUHS] PDP-11/23 questions ..." (Jun 8, 17:15) References: <20060608171557.GA16159@freaknet.org> Message-ID: <10606082344.ZM8534@mindy.dunnington.plus.com> On Jun 8 2006, 17:15, asbesto wrote: > > 1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the > schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required, > so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS > backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this? Is it missing or just not working? It's hard to imagine a BA11-N box like the one in your picture without the PSU, since the screws that hold the front panel onto the backplane go through the PSU cover. If it's simply not working, it's not usually hard to repair. You will need to ensure that the BDCOK H (Bus DC OK, active high) signal is held high, also the BPOK H (Bus Power OK, active high, from the AC input) signal or the CPU won't run -- the normal PSU does this. "High" means tied to no less than 3.5V DC. The PSU also provides a mains-frequency square-wave at about 3.5V-4V which drives the BEVENT L line for a real-time clock interrupt, which Unix needs. One of the switches on the front panel can be configured to control this (there are times when you might want to switch it off). Note that devices that turn off BEVENT, including the switch on the front panel, or the DIP switch on the CPU card, do it by shorting that line to ground! The same switch that can be configured to stop the BEVENT signal, is also often used to control the rack's power controller via a 3-wire cable with a 3-pin AMP Mate-N-Lok connector on each end. The front panel with the three switches also has a flip-flop controlled by one of the switches, connected to the BHALT L line, and another connected by a flip-flop to BINIT L. The first halts the CPU when enabled (active low), the other provides a pulse to start it. The RUN light on the panel is driven by the SRUN L signal on the first slot in the backplane. Most of the signals I've mentioned are carried between the backplane and the panel by a narrow ribbon cable. The backplane pinout is shown in a PostScript file called QBusConnsBig.ps on my web page at http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/PDP-11/ QBusConns.ps is the same file, but actual size, if you want to hold it up against the backplane. > 2) what kind of UNIX can be run on an 11/23 using a RL02 disk > drive? (just one, unfortunately :!) Nothing later than about 7th Edition, because BSD needs separate I&D space, which an 11/23 doesn't have (2.9 BSD might work, I can't remember). BSD (any version) is much too big for a single RL02 anyway. 7th Edition works; my original PDP-11 Unix system is my second 11/23, still in its original condition, which looks rather like yours, except it has two RL02s and a slightly earlier front panel. Be aware that the RL11/RLV11/RLV12 driver was not a standard feature of 7th Edition, though. You ought to do an inventory of the cards. 7th Edition wants at least 256K of memory. You might also want to see what version of the CPU you have. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York From msokolov at ivan.Harhan.ORG Fri Jun 9 05:56:00 2006 From: msokolov at ivan.Harhan.ORG (Michael Sokolov) Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 19:56:00 GMT Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11/23 questions ... Message-ID: <0606081956.AA02969@ivan.Harhan.ORG> asbesto wrote: > 1) we lack the power supply of the 11/23 cpu. From the > schematics, we see that only +5V, +12V and -12V are required, > so we will try to use a normal PC power supply for the QBUS > backplane; does somebody know about problems in doing this? Off the top of my head, two thoughts: 1. You need the DCOK and POK signals. 2. Do the math and make sure that your power supply provides enough amps -- a real computer needs quite a bit more juice than a sleazy PeeCee. MS From P.A.Osborne at kent.ac.uk Fri Jun 9 18:30:49 2006 From: P.A.Osborne at kent.ac.uk (Paul Osborne) Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2006 09:30:49 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <20060608052244.2395.qmail@web36815.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20060608052244.2395.qmail@web36815.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <448931B9.8010304@kent.ac.uk> I just took a quick look in the OED - which for those of us in the UK is the definitive reference dictionary anyway here is the entry: Unix, n. Computing. (ju:niks) Also UNIX. [f. as a play on the earlier *MULTICS n., with uni- one for multi- many (after the relative compactness of the newer system) and with phonetic respelling of -ics as -ix.] A proprietary name for a multi-user operating system orig. designed for use with minicomputers. 1973 Bell Lab. Rec. LI. 200 Some of the concepts, especially for file-handling, appeared in a time-shared operating system called UNIX, which was designed and implemented at Bell Labs. 1978 Bell Syst. Techn. Jrnl. LVII. 1991 C..is sufficiently expressive and efficient to have completely displaced assembly language programming on UNIX. 1983 Austral. Personal Computer Aug. 66/2 Xenix, the Microsoft implementation of Unix disk operating systems for microcomputers. 1985 Official Gaz. (U.S. Patent Office) 29 Oct. TM63/1 UNIX...For computer programs... First use 12-14-1972. 1986 Trade Marks Jrnl. 5 Mar. 522/2 Unix..Computer programmes, computing apparatus; [etc.] 1989 N.Y. Times 25 Oct. D1/4 A wider industry agreement on a single Unix standard would also increase the possibility that Unix will be widely adopted in the business computer market. NOTE: I had to tweak the pronunciation a tad to work in plain text. :-) I guess if Ken/Dennis think that it needs correcting in any way they will need to contact the OED... --Paul --yays for academic access to the OED From P.A.Osborne at kent.ac.uk Fri Jun 9 19:38:55 2006 From: P.A.Osborne at kent.ac.uk (Paul Osborne) Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2006 10:38:55 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] address change Message-ID: <448941AF.6040700@kent.ac.uk> Hi, I know that this mail is going to hit moderation. May work email address has changed from P.A.Osborne at ukc.ac.uk to P.A.Osborne at kent.ac.uk Consequently my posts are getting moderated. Can you update the list please? Many thanks Paul From bgoodheart at wasabisystems.com Fri Jun 9 21:42:07 2006 From: bgoodheart at wasabisystems.com (bgoodheart) Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 12:42:07 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <00c101c68bb9$bd7f6050$4205a6c0@FERRARI> A great read Greg and so true too. Thanks for posting that. I particularly liked the bit about the overheard conversation in Palo Alto "there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let me see...cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10..." though not syntactically correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a diner from an NT shop probably couldn't have expressed himself as casually. This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in Starbucks in Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a heated debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It seemed to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to the other party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their conversation. Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all ushered out of Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was. Cheers, Berny From norman at nose.cs.utoronto.ca Fri Jun 9 22:41:36 2006 From: norman at nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson) Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2006 08:41:36 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature Message-ID: <20060609124329.2C4B66B@minnie.tuhs.org> Berny: This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in Starbucks in Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a heated debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It seemed to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to the other party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their conversation. Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all ushered out of Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was. ======= The Linux crowd is indeed ruder and more argumentative than the hackers of my youth. Maybe it's because they hang out in Starbucks, rather than in all-night terminal rooms with Coke machines down the hall. Or maybe it's just my memory. Norman Wilson Toronto ON Somewhat more than 30 years into the disease From milov at uwlax.edu Fri Jun 9 22:42:08 2006 From: milov at uwlax.edu (Milo Velimirovic) Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 07:42:08 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature In-Reply-To: <00c101c68bb9$bd7f6050$4205a6c0@FERRARI> References: <00c101c68bb9$bd7f6050$4205a6c0@FERRARI> Message-ID: On Jun 9, 2006, at 6:42 AM, bgoodheart wrote: [snip] > This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in > Starbucks in > Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a > heated > debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It > seemed > to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to > the other > party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their > conversation. > Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all > ushered out of > Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was. a 'c | n > k' moment... -- Milo Velimirović University of Wisconsin - La Crosse La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601 USA 43 48 48 N 91 13 53 W -- There's a reason Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1998) and are fellows of the Computer History Museum Online. Dave Cutler hasn't and isn't. "You are not expected to understand this." From lm at bitmover.com Sat Jun 10 13:46:17 2006 From: lm at bitmover.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 20:46:17 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20060610034617.GC24315@bitmover.com> A somewhat different view on the Starbucks story: A friend of mine moved here from New Mexico (which is a fantastic place to live, amazing, I used to live there) and she said "It's unbelievable - you can watch people and realize that they are actually thinking before they are talking". Indeed. I'd rather be in the midst of rude people thinking than any sort of people not thinking. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com From lm at bitmover.com Sat Jun 10 13:58:04 2006 From: lm at bitmover.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 20:58:04 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20060610035804.GD24315@bitmover.com> > There's a reason Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded > the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1998) and are fellows of the > Computer History Museum Online. Dave Cutler hasn't and isn't. > "You are not expected to understand this." And while I think this is a little unfair to Dave that's a great .sig It goes well with the recent post about Unix vs NT that concluded about NT "there is no there there". I live on both platforms and I couldn't agree more. Some day I'll post my view on this but here is the really short summary. There are two classes of people: those who derive answers and those who memorize them. As Mark Twain said, the latter group is much larger than the former. My claim is that Unix appeals to the first group - you can guess what it is going to do and you'll be right most of the time. Windows appeals to the other group. They don't have the ability to derive any answer and they are comfortable with a system that mostly works but has "no there there". They can't tell the difference. The sad part (and the good part!) is that all of us on this list are in the former group which is smaller. I think we (well, many of us) wish that more people thought like we do and figured stuff out for themselves but the reality is that most people aren't inclined to do that. So the good and bad part is that we're a small select group. Personally, I've come to accept that and like it. I've gotten to the point where I realize that people who can derive the answer are special, they are gift, and I consider myself lucky when I run into a concentrated group of them. Cough, cough, that would be you. :) -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com From cowan at ccil.org Sat Jun 10 14:40:56 2006 From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:40:56 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8 In-Reply-To: <20060610035804.GD24315@bitmover.com> References: <20060610035804.GD24315@bitmover.com> Message-ID: <20060610044055.GA4461@ccil.org> Larry McVoy scripsit: > There are two classes of people: those who derive answers and those who > memorize them. As Mark Twain said, the latter group is much larger than > the former. My claim is that Unix appeals to the first group - you can > guess what it is going to do and you'll be right most of the time. > Windows appeals to the other group. They don't have the ability to derive > any answer and they are comfortable with a system that mostly works but > has "no there there". They can't tell the difference. 'Sfunny, but it seems just the other way about to me. Unix, especially Olde Worlde Unix, is all about memorizing stuff. Creat(2) has no final e. The option to set the field delimiter is -t, except in cut(1) where it's -d and in awk(1) where it's -F. You dump a file to standard output with cat(1); yeah, you can remember the name if you learn the word "catenate", but most of us don't know that word, and it's no easier to memorize "catenate" than "cat" (more fun, but no easier). We all find all this very natural, it ripples off our fingers because we've been doing it for 10 or 20 or 30 or nearly 40 years, and none of the inconsistencies can be fixed because if they were it would break all of our muscle memory and then it wouldn't be so easy at all. Windows folks can't deal with all that memorization. They want it laid out for them: menus dialogs wizards with tabs that make all the options visible, or if not all visible at once, at least easy to see how you can make them visible. And all consistent, or reasonably so. With Windows programs you really can guess what they re going to do, and you will be right most of the time. Unix utilities aren't like that. Even X programs aren't -- indeed, less so than the utilities, unless they use a Windows-mimicking toolkit, which most of them do nowadays. No, what makes Unixicians sont droit et Windowsites sont tort is that Unix lets you make up your own stuff out of existing pieces, and Windows does not. The Windows utilities just do what they do, and if it's not what you want, it's back to the drawing board, so people create TMA-1 monoliths. This tendency is infecting Unix too nowadays, as lots of people have discovered how much easier it is to create TMA-1s on Unix than on Windows, and so they do, and the native tradition of coarse-grained dataflow gets almost lost against the background surviving only in the memories of the Old Farts here gathered. Our tradition's dying unless we do something to keep it alive. What's that going to be? -- I don't know half of you half as well John Cowan as I should like, and I like less than half cowan at ccil.org of you half as well as you deserve. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --Bilbo From menace3society at gnu-darwin.org Sat Jun 10 16:04:49 2006 From: menace3society at gnu-darwin.org (Evan de Riel) Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 02:04:49 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8 In-Reply-To: <20060610044055.GA4461@ccil.org> References: <20060610035804.GD24315@bitmover.com> <20060610044055.GA4461@ccil.org> Message-ID: <8980E2E3-2E56-4F5B-91C4-80046885E631@gnu-darwin.org> On 10 Jun, 2006, at 00:40, John Cowan wrote: > ... > > No, what makes Unixicians sont droit et Windowsites sont tort > is that Unix lets you make up your own stuff out of existing pieces, > and Windows does not. The Windows utilities just do what they do, and > if it's not what you want, it's back to the drawing board, so people > create TMA-1 monoliths. This tendency is infecting Unix too nowadays, > as lots of people have discovered how much easier it is to create > TMA-1s on Unix than on Windows, and so they do, and the native > tradition > of coarse-grained dataflow gets almost lost against the background > surviving only in the memories of the Old Farts here gathered. > > Our tradition's dying unless we do something to keep it alive. > What's that going to be? As ashamed as I am to admit it, I do read slashdot on occasion, and on one such occasion I saw that there was an interview with Rob Pike [1]; Mr Pike's comments weren't one and all insightful, but his answer the to question about whether "Unix style" was still a valid development aesthetic started me thinking (I've haven't stopped yet, so I don't yet know if I agree): Q: ... do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job" has been abandoned? ... A: Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl. I think his point is that what Perl and its friends--the other high- level, interpreter languages like Python, Ruby, and maybe (ick) PHP-- have gotten to the point where they can be used as a single framework for writing short, ad-hoc programs in these languages that replace combinations of the whole mess of Unix utilities like grep, cat, sed, awk, uniq, sort, column, rs, head, tail, and maybe even more complex tools like wget or hexdumps. It's certainly more typing to write a perl function that can do the work of one of these utilities, but on the other hand one has to worry substantially less about syntax options for dozens different commands, remembering enough escape sequences for nested for loops, etc. Instead of making many programs that each do one thing well, we have a language and a framework designed to do *anything*, and handle it well (or at least satisfactorily). And isn't being able to do anything you tell it to do with equal facility one of the great things about computers? [1]: http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1153211 Yours, Evan From cowan at ccil.org Sat Jun 10 16:28:33 2006 From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 02:28:33 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8 In-Reply-To: <8980E2E3-2E56-4F5B-91C4-80046885E631@gnu-darwin.org> References: <20060610035804.GD24315@bitmover.com> <20060610044055.GA4461@ccil.org> <8980E2E3-2E56-4F5B-91C4-80046885E631@gnu-darwin.org> Message-ID: <20060610062833.GB4461@ccil.org> Evan de Riel scripsit: > Q: ... do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job" has been > abandoned? ... > A: Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl. > > I think his point is that what Perl and its friends--the other high- > level, interpreter languages like Python, Ruby, and maybe (ick) PHP-- > have gotten to the point where they can be used as a single framework > for writing short, ad-hoc programs in these languages that replace > combinations of the whole mess of Unix utilities like grep, cat, sed, > awk, uniq, sort, column, rs, head, tail, and maybe even more complex > tools like wget or hexdumps. Well, I don't have a problem with replacing the shell-and-utilities framework with a more consistent one. The trouble is that the essential idea of that framework, what I called "coarse-grained dataflow" in the last posting, and which has been called "plumbing" since the earliest days, gets lost in the process. Perl-level programming is only incrementally better than C-level (admittedly the increments are good ones, like garbage collection and simple strings and dynamic typing). The only consistent framework I know of that preserves plumbing as a functional programming approach is scsh , and much as I love Scheme personally, it's just too alien to mainstream ways of thinking to have a real chance of survival as anything but a niche of a niche. What I'd really like to see is something that merges Lua and rc(1), a lightweight but powerful language with a lightweight but powerful shell, in a clean way. I even messed around with constructing a unified Yacc grammar to use them jointly, with the notion that a top-end parser could compile the hybrid into pure Lua using a Posix library. But I got bogged down and never went back there. Lua might be *too* lightweight, though: Python comes with a big library of useful stuff, is a fair approximation to Lisp (as Lua is also), and could perhaps be transmogrified into a shell somehow, given how dynamic everything in Python is (even the variable and function declarations are really executable statements). I'll think on it further. -- Barry gules and argent of seven and six, John Cowan on a canton azure fifty molets of the second. cowan at ccil.org --blazoning the U.S. flag http://www.ccil.org/~cowan From newsham at lava.net Mon Jun 12 02:18:36 2006 From: newsham at lava.net (Tim Newsham) Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 06:18:36 -1000 (HST) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature In-Reply-To: <00c101c68bb9$bd7f6050$4205a6c0@FERRARI> References: <00c101c68bb9$bd7f6050$4205a6c0@FERRARI> Message-ID: > This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in Starbucks in > Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a heated > debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It seemed > to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to the other > party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their conversation. > Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all ushered out of > Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was. The bandwidth of a mouse and menus is not very high. The bandwidth of a keyboard is a lot higher. Going the other way, though, the bandwidth of graphical data is much higher than textual data (perhaps as high as a thousand words per picture). > Berny Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/ From wes.parish at paradise.net.nz Mon Jun 12 11:22:48 2006 From: wes.parish at paradise.net.nz (Wesley Parish) Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:22:48 +1200 (NZST) Subject: [TUHS] UNIX as literature In-Reply-To: References: <00c101c68bb9$bd7f6050$4205a6c0@FERRARI> Message-ID: <1150075368.448cc1e81847f@www.paradise.net.nz> Quoting Tim Newsham : > > This reminded me of a time not so long ago when I was seated in > Starbucks in > > Menlo Park enjoying my Caramel Macchiato Venti and overhearing a > heated > > debate between 6 or 7 guys about the GUI vs. command line issue. It > seemed > > to start when a couple of guys in one party, seemingly unknown to the > other > > party, who were talking about kde, rudely butted in to their > conversation. > > Anyway the debate got so verbal that in the end they were all ushered > out of > > Starbucks in an effort to keep the peace. How funny it was. > > The bandwidth of a mouse and menus is not very high. The bandwidth of a > > keyboard is a lot higher. Going the other way, though, the bandwidth of > > graphical data is much higher than textual data (perhaps as high > as a thousand words per picture). AKA, "If a face could sink/launch a thousand ships, then why can't I paint you?\ The words will never show, the you I've come to know ..." ;) Graphical displays of data excel in showing relationships and patterns. Discovering patterns in text can be much, much harder. Hence the blink comparator in astronomy. And Fred Hoyle's feeble attempt to describe such a form of data transfer in "The Black Cloud". But a lot depends on one's familiarity with the idioms of the graphical data - anyone can see a desolate outback, but it took an Albert Namatjira to make us see it as beautiful. Wesley Parish > > > Berny > > Tim Newsham > http://www.lava.net/~newsham/ > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuh s > "Sharpened hands are happy hands. "Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands" - A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge "I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!" I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the other horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press From lm at bitmover.com Mon Jun 12 12:09:40 2006 From: lm at bitmover.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 19:09:40 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 10 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20060612020940.GA9031@bitmover.com> > The bandwidth of a mouse and menus is not very high. The bandwidth of a > keyboard is a lot higher. I've long thought that what we needed was control panel which operated on revision controlled flat files in /etc. So you could write scripts to do the automated stuff but you could point and click to do the stuff that you forgot how to do. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com From jrvalverde at cnb.uam.es Mon Jun 12 23:02:56 2006 From: jrvalverde at cnb.uam.es (Jose R. Valverde) Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:02:56 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8 In-Reply-To: <20060610035804.GD24315@bitmover.com> References: <20060610035804.GD24315@bitmover.com> Message-ID: <20060612150256.79c1bee7.jrvalverde@cnb.uam.es> That is a bit self-complacent. I for one would *love* to believe it. The truth is it isn't true. See, what happens is that besides the odd Leonardo or Erasmus, most of us have a limited brain with a limited ability to cope with the Real World. As a result we all must take decisions about what we do, learn, master or relay to others to do for us. Everyday more so. This implies we learn something well and just the basics (if anything) of all the rest, relying on others to do the work for us. Most Windows users started as people who needed an easy way to do an odd job efficiently. For the odd job, it is by far orders of magnitude more efficient to point and click than learning a new language. A professional user needs to learn the tools and language of the trade and abhors the Windows way. That's why if you look around, you'll discover windows power users programming spreadhseets, wirting macros, etc... So, why Windows? Because computers are a recent addition to our home life (see, UNIX and UNIX-like systems where unattainable till mid-90s) and Microsoft is very successfult at equating OS with Windows (see, they have a quasi-monopoly), and all of us are frightened in front of change and novelties (since we were slime molds). The average user starts on Windows because it is easier to point and click once a month than learning a new language. When they become pro's they see the shortcoming but it's easier to use VisualBASIC than jumping ships. When the average user starts on *X with CDE/KDE/Gnome/whatever and then needs to become pro and learn the language, they find a friendlier system underneath. If only they could share their work with the 90% of their colleagues who use windows instead of UNIX/Linux/Mac... But then MS wouldn't keep a monopoly, would they? Guess where all their PR is going to be invested ;-) Don't blame the users, they are doing as best they can with whatever it is they have at hand (even if it is Windows) and we should be really astonished at their tenacious efforts to get things done. j On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 20:58:04 -0700 lm at bitmover.com (Larry McVoy) wrote: > > There's a reason Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded > > the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1998) and are fellows of the > > Computer History Museum Online. Dave Cutler hasn't and isn't. > > "You are not expected to understand this." > > And while I think this is a little unfair to Dave that's a great .sig > > It goes well with the recent post about Unix vs NT that concluded about > NT "there is no there there". I live on both platforms and I couldn't > agree more. > > Some day I'll post my view on this but here is the really short summary. > There are two classes of people: those who derive answers and those who > memorize them. As Mark Twain said, the latter group is much larger than > the former. My claim is that Unix appeals to the first group - you can > guess what it is going to do and you'll be right most of the time. > Windows appeals to the other group. They don't have the ability to derive > any answer and they are comfortable with a system that mostly works but > has "no there there". They can't tell the difference. > > The sad part (and the good part!) is that all of us on this list are > in the former group which is smaller. I think we (well, many of us) > wish that more people thought like we do and figured stuff out for > themselves but the reality is that most people aren't inclined to do that. > So the good and bad part is that we're a small select group. Personally, > I've come to accept that and like it. I've gotten to the point where I > realize that people who can derive the answer are special, they are gift, > and I consider myself lucky when I run into a concentrated group of them. > Cough, cough, that would be you. :) > -- > --- > Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: From m.welle at gmx.net Tue Jun 13 17:19:56 2006 From: m.welle at gmx.net (Michael Welle) Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 09:19:56 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44843C2A.1010207@icpnet.pl> (Andrzej Popielewicz's message of "Mon, 05 Jun 2006 16:14:02 +0200") References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> <20060605134905.GA10437@ccil.org> <44843C2A.1010207@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <8764j5bjz7.fsf@hqltmwe01.nwc-services.de> Hi, Andrzej Popielewicz writes: [...] > Well, I cannot "reproduce it" in my mind this funny feeling I suspect, > as not natively Enlish speaking. > Hopefully it helped the Unix .Does it cause the smile every time You > hear it ? > Even now knowing it I will probably ,hearing or reading the word "Unix", > not associate it with "eunuch".Probably because I have coded Polish > pronounciation in my mind, or in other words I mostly think in > Polish. same here. Except the starting syllable the terms sound totally different for me. The form of my mouth is different if I speak the words. That makes the whole story incredible for me. >>>It is clear , that opinion of American/English linguistic/language >>>specialist would be neccesarry. >>> >>> >> >>I am not a specialist, but I am a generalist with a good understanding >>of the domain. >> >> >> > Your opinion is sufficient.I appreciate. FACK. Michael -- biff4emacsen - A biff-like tool for (X)Emacs http://www.c0t0d0s0.de/biff4emacsen/biff4emacsen.html From m.welle at gmx.net Tue Jun 13 17:20:40 2006 From: m.welle at gmx.net (Michael Welle) Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 09:20:40 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <001001c6875d$69b02e60$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> (Bill Cunningham's message of "Sat, 03 Jun 2006 18:31:09 -0400") References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <001001c6875d$69b02e60$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com> Message-ID: <871wttbjxz.fsf@hqltmwe01.nwc-services.de> Hi, "Bill Cunningham" writes: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Welle" > To: > Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 9:57 AM > Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? > > >> Hi, >> >> last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its >> name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a >> homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a >> castrated successor of Multics. Hmmm, I am interested in Unix history >> for several years now, but I haven't heard about that before. It is >> really a tale I guess. Any clear words about this topic? >> >> Michael >> > > I know Dennis have said pretty clearly that Unix is a pun on Multics > that the team really never got to start on because Bell changed there minds. > Ken continued with Unix which must've been his idea. In assembly first then > B. Dennis came up with C and its lasted down through the years. that sounds familiar to me. The same story is told in 'A quarter century of Unix' and other sources. VG hmw -- biff4emacsen - A biff-like tool for (X)Emacs http://www.c0t0d0s0.de/biff4emacsen/biff4emacsen.html From m.welle at gmx.net Tue Jun 13 17:40:37 2006 From: m.welle at gmx.net (Michael Welle) Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 09:40:37 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs? In-Reply-To: <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> (Andrzej Popielewicz's message of "Mon, 05 Jun 2006 12:41:19 +0200") References: <874pz21gwa.fsf@stella.c0t0d0s0.de> <44840A4F.1060005@icpnet.pl> Message-ID: <871wtta4ga.fsf@hqltmwe01.nwc-services.de> Hi, Andrzej Popielewicz writes: [...] > In Oxford American Dictionary > > eunuch is pronounced as "yoo-nuk" (not all symbols reproduced) > unit is "yoo-nit" > unique is "yoo-neek" > > In Webster English Language Dictionary > > eunuch is "'yunek" > unit is "'yunet" > unique is "yu'nek,yu'nik" > > You can notice, that unix , more similar to unit or unique will be > pronounced differently(?). interesting. I tend to use a more british english style, but I pronounce the terms like in OAD. Michael -- biff4emacsen - A biff-like tool for (X)Emacs http://www.c0t0d0s0.de/biff4emacsen/biff4emacsen.html From jpeek at jpeek.com Thu Jun 15 09:46:52 2006 From: jpeek at jpeek.com (Jerry Peek) Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 16:46:52 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] NY Times article on Bell Labs Holmdel closure Message-ID: <29100.1150328812@pyry.gw.com> This is a long New York Times article with a lot of detail. They say there'll be at least one public open house before it's demolished. I think you can now read a limited number of NY Times articles without subscribing (they seem to count how many you read -- maybe with a cookie). Here's the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/realestate/commercial/14bell.html Jerry -- Jerry Peek, jpeek at jpeek.com, http://www.jpeek.com/ From jwb at paravolve.net Thu Jun 15 10:32:13 2006 From: jwb at paravolve.net (James W. Brinkerhoff) Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 20:32:13 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] NY Times article on Bell Labs Holmdel closure In-Reply-To: <29100.1150328812@pyry.gw.com> References: <29100.1150328812@pyry.gw.com> Message-ID: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hrm, any idea when the tour might be? It didn't say, although it mentioned a public meeting on development to be held later this month.. - -jwb James W. Brinkerhoff Voice: +1 (212) 201-5706 VoIP: sip:jwb at paravolve.net PGP Key: 0xE484C9B9 On Jun 14, 2006, at 7:46 PM, Jerry Peek wrote: > This is a long New York Times article with a lot of detail. > They say there'll be at least one public open house before it's > demolished. I think you can now read a limited number of NY Times > articles without subscribing (they seem to count how many you read > -- maybe with a cookie). Here's the URL: > > http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/realestate/commercial/14bell.html > > Jerry > -- > Jerry Peek, jpeek at jpeek.com, http://www.jpeek.com/ > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (Darwin) iD8DBQFEkKqUHyXYB+SEybkRAukLAJ9TDvkHUOidSgSN11XUVQQMoVXwmQCfU5u2 Vmnb0t/fxN45pg7Ell19/5M= =KWdW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From dugo at xs4all.nl Sun Jun 18 08:38:39 2006 From: dugo at xs4all.nl (Jacob Goense) Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 00:38:39 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 10 In-Reply-To: <20060612020940.GA9031@bitmover.com> Message-ID: <20060618003755.H24579-100000@xs3.xs4all.nl> On Sun, 11 Jun 2006, Larry McVoy wrote: > I've long thought that what we needed was control panel which operated on > revision controlled flat files in /etc. So you could write scripts to > do the automated stuff but you could point and click to do the stuff that > you forgot how to do. Smit? From lm at bitmover.com Sun Jun 18 09:53:30 2006 From: lm at bitmover.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 16:53:30 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 10 In-Reply-To: <20060618003755.H24579-100000@xs3.xs4all.nl> References: <20060612020940.GA9031@bitmover.com> <20060618003755.H24579-100000@xs3.xs4all.nl> Message-ID: <20060617235330.GC27621@bitmover.com> On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 12:38:39AM +0200, Jacob Goense wrote: > On Sun, 11 Jun 2006, Larry McVoy wrote: > > I've long thought that what we needed was control panel which operated on > > revision controlled flat files in /etc. So you could write scripts to > > do the automated stuff but you could point and click to do the stuff that > > you forgot how to do. > > Smit? Good god, no, please, no. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com From asbesto at freaknet.org Wed Jun 21 19:38:10 2006 From: asbesto at freaknet.org (asbesto) Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 09:38:10 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] weird problem with our Decwriter III terminal ... Message-ID: <20060621093810.GA24010@freaknet.org> Hi, maybe someone here can help us - our problem is that the decwriter terminal seem to "jump" in particular positions when printing we don't understand how to solve this problem - maybe this is a stepper motor problem, or another problem in gears/transmission? the problem is evident in this image: http://dyne.org/museum/dec/terminals/la120/tn/dscn3488.jpg.html does someone have an idea about this problem? tnx! :) -- [ asbesto : IW9HGS : freaknet medialab : radiocybernet : poetry ] [ http://freaknet.org/asbesto http://papuasia.org/radiocybernet ] [ NON SCRIVERMI USANDO LETTERE ACCENTATE, NON MANDARMI ALLEGATI ] [ *I DELETE* EMAIL > 100K, ATTACHMENTS, HTML, M$-WORD DOC, SPAM ] From johnzulu at yahoo.com Thu Jun 22 15:31:13 2006 From: johnzulu at yahoo.com (John Chung) Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:31:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [TUHS] weird problem with our Decwriter III terminal In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060622053113.49645.qmail@web36806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I would start with the gears first. Stepper motor testing can be done by visual inpection by running through 1 character at a time. Mark each turn when moving to the next character. This requires diassembly of the casing and other visual blocking components. John --- tuhs-request at minnie.tuhs.org wrote: > Send TUHS mailing list submissions to > tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, > visit > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > or, via email, send a message with subject or body > 'help' to > tuhs-request at minnie.tuhs.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > tuhs-owner at minnie.tuhs.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it > is more specific > than "Re: Contents of TUHS digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. weird problem with our Decwriter III terminal > ... (asbesto) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 09:38:10 +0000 > From: asbesto > Subject: [TUHS] weird problem with our Decwriter III > terminal ... > To: tuhs at tuhs.org > Message-ID: <20060621093810.GA24010 at freaknet.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > > Hi, > > maybe someone here can help us - our problem is that > the > decwriter terminal seem to "jump" in particular > positions > when printing > > we don't understand how to solve this problem - > maybe this is a > stepper motor problem, or another problem in > gears/transmission? > > the problem is evident in this image: > > http://dyne.org/museum/dec/terminals/la120/tn/dscn3488.jpg.html > > does someone have an idea about this problem? > tnx! > > :) > > -- > [ asbesto : IW9HGS : freaknet medialab : > radiocybernet : poetry ] > [ http://freaknet.org/asbesto > http://papuasia.org/radiocybernet ] > [ NON SCRIVERMI USANDO LETTERE ACCENTATE, NON > MANDARMI ALLEGATI ] > [ *I DELETE* EMAIL > 100K, ATTACHMENTS, HTML, > M$-WORD DOC, SPAM ] > > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > > > End of TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 15 > ************************************ > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From wb at freebie.xs4all.nl Thu Jun 22 19:52:41 2006 From: wb at freebie.xs4all.nl (Wilko Bulte) Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 11:52:41 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] weird problem with our Decwriter III terminal In-Reply-To: <20060622053113.49645.qmail@web36806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20060622053113.49645.qmail@web36806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20060622095241.GA8166@freebie.xs4all.nl> On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 10:31:13PM -0700, John Chung wrote.. > I would start with the gears first. Stepper motor > testing can be done by visual inpection by running > through 1 character at a time. Mark each turn when > moving to the next character. This requires diassembly > of the casing and other visual blocking components. I don't recall if this model has one of these optical position 'belts', if yes, make sure the sensor and belt are free from debris. Wilko