| Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413617] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 14:34  |
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Originally posted by: John Goerzen
Hi all,
I recently went looking for some older (pre-ESR) Jargon Files and found
http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.4.0.dos.txt dated 1987. That is the
last edition prior to ESR's involvement. I read it with interest and enjoyment.
My main question surrounds the almost complete lack of any references to Unix
within it. Most OS references are to ITS or to something DECish - often
explicitly TOPS-20. I am curious about why that is, or how *nix came to
dominate later hacker culture. I have several guesses, but thought I ought to
ask someone that was there.
My own earliest exposures to computing were on the TRS-80 and later PCs. By the
time I was able to find the occasional glimpse of Internet or UUCP access in my
very rural part of Kansas, it was the 90s and the hacker communities I found
then -- which instantly felt right at home to me -- were around the BSDs and
Linux. It wasn't until well into adulthood when I started to become interested
in computing history that I even *heard* of TOPS-20 or ITS, and that only by
reading Wikipedia and books (eg, Hackers).
Part of what puzzled me was that by the early 80s, Unix had caught on enough
that RMS sought to clone it and not VMS or TOPS-20 or some such. I also
generally understood Unix to be the early native platform of Arpanet/Internet,
Usenet, and UUCP though I gather TCP/IP bolt-ons and ports were available for
other OSs (particularly VMS).
I'm interested in any light folks may be able to shed on it!
Thanks,
- John
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413618 is a reply to message #413617] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 16:28  |
Dan Espen
Messages: 3867
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
> Hi all,
>
> I recently went looking for some older (pre-ESR) Jargon Files and found
> http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.4.0.dos.txt dated 1987. That is the
> last edition prior to ESR's involvement. I read it with interest and enjoyment.
>
> My main question surrounds the almost complete lack of any references to Unix
> within it. Most OS references are to ITS or to something DECish - often
> explicitly TOPS-20. I am curious about why that is, or how *nix came to
> dominate later hacker culture. I have several guesses, but thought I ought to
> ask someone that was there.
>
> My own earliest exposures to computing were on the TRS-80 and later PCs. By the
> time I was able to find the occasional glimpse of Internet or UUCP access in my
> very rural part of Kansas, it was the 90s and the hacker communities I found
> then -- which instantly felt right at home to me -- were around the BSDs and
> Linux. It wasn't until well into adulthood when I started to become interested
> in computing history that I even *heard* of TOPS-20 or ITS, and that only by
> reading Wikipedia and books (eg, Hackers).
>
> Part of what puzzled me was that by the early 80s, Unix had caught on enough
> that RMS sought to clone it and not VMS or TOPS-20 or some such. I also
> generally understood Unix to be the early native platform of Arpanet/Internet,
> Usenet, and UUCP though I gather TCP/IP bolt-ons and ports were available for
> other OSs (particularly VMS).
>
> I'm interested in any light folks may be able to shed on it!
This is more my opinion than a statement of established fact.
There we lots of OS's before Unix. ALL of them were unnecessarily
complicated on purpose. The vendors had to build something complicated
to stop others from creating clones.
Unix caught on because it could do useful work and it's users could
understand it and some of those users could even duplicate it.
--
Dan Espen
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413619 is a reply to message #413617] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 17:26 |
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Originally posted by: Johnny Billquist
This is going to be very subjective...
On 2022-03-17 19:34, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I recently went looking for some older (pre-ESR) Jargon Files and found
> http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.4.0.dos.txt dated 1987. That is the
> last edition prior to ESR's involvement. I read it with interest and enjoyment.
Good for you. ESR only ruined it.
> My main question surrounds the almost complete lack of any references to Unix
> within it. Most OS references are to ITS or to something DECish - often
> explicitly TOPS-20. I am curious about why that is, or how *nix came to
> dominate later hacker culture. I have several guesses, but thought I ought to
> ask someone that was there.
Well. Unix back then was by most of the "hacker community" regarded as a
toy (I'm sure early Unix fans will disagree).
The whole PDP-11 was considered mostly a toy computer. Too small for
real stuff. That whole generation grew up on larger machines, and many
very specifically grew up with the PDP-10.
Everything else was compared to that, and most everything else came up
short.
That said, the whole jargon.txt file was very centered around MIT and
Stanford, which were very DEC-centric. I'm sure there were other
universities and areas where other groups and machines were more
popular, but jargon.txt is what survived, and that was around these two
sites, DEC hardware, and everything that grew around that.
Also, note that for the most part, if PDP-11 was looked upon as a small
toy, the VAX was looked at with animosity, as was VMS. It was the
corporate suites system. Nothing for "hackers". :-)
As for why did Unix take over, in spite of all this. Sortof simple. When
DEC killed the PDP-10 there was an outrage you can't even imagine. And
people eventually swore to never be tied to a single vendor again. That
in combination with Unix having sources freely available made it the
most obvious choice to jump to when TOPS-20 and ITS no longer was an option.
You can find some traces of that in early reasoning by RMS about the GNU
project, if you search around.
> My own earliest exposures to computing were on the TRS-80 and later PCs. By the
> time I was able to find the occasional glimpse of Internet or UUCP access in my
> very rural part of Kansas, it was the 90s and the hacker communities I found
> then -- which instantly felt right at home to me -- were around the BSDs and
> Linux. It wasn't until well into adulthood when I started to become interested
> in computing history that I even *heard* of TOPS-20 or ITS, and that only by
> reading Wikipedia and books (eg, Hackers).
Yeah. This is mostly ancient lore by now.
> Part of what puzzled me was that by the early 80s, Unix had caught on enough
> that RMS sought to clone it and not VMS or TOPS-20 or some such. I also
> generally understood Unix to be the early native platform of Arpanet/Internet,
> Usenet, and UUCP though I gather TCP/IP bolt-ons and ports were available for
> other OSs (particularly VMS).
Well, cloning VMS would have been much harder, but also the opposite of
what people felt by then. After DEC killed the PDP-10, lots of people
swore to never have anything to do with DEC ever again.
And we're talking more like mid 80s. RMS choose to clone Unix because he
felt that it was a better choice for multiple reasons. But note that
even this has not yet actually gotten off the ground. VMS being much
harder, it would have been dead before it even started.
And no, Unix was not the early native platform for Arpanet/Internet. It
was built on lots of pieces, and there was quite a lot of PDP-10 in
there until the switch to TCP/IP in 1982. Unix networking wasn't really
the bleeding edge until after it had moved on from the PDP-11.
And UUCP have nothing to do with Arpanet/Internet. It's two completely
different things. UUCP and Usenet on the other hand are connected.
Usenet migrated over to Internet, while UUCP disappeared.
But there is way more to this. But you can get a fairly good picture by
reading early RFCs. There are ones which basically list what
implementations of TCP/IP exists, and for which OSes, which gives you a
good picture.
Johnny
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413620 is a reply to message #413618] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 17:32 |
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Originally posted by: Johnny Billquist
On 2022-03-17 21:28, Dan Espen wrote:
> John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
>
>> I'm interested in any light folks may be able to shed on it!
>
> This is more my opinion than a statement of established fact.
>
> There we lots of OS's before Unix. ALL of them were unnecessarily
> complicated on purpose. The vendors had to build something complicated
> to stop others from creating clones.
I would absolutely disagree with that. None that I've ever seen or known
about was unnecessarily complicated. And many came with sources. So
cloning wasn't that hard. And things weren't as protected by patents and
copyrights and so on either.
But many were designed to solve specific problems, and not always so
adaptable for other purposes.
But the biggest issue were that most were written in assembler, for a
specific hardware, so they usually died along with the hardware. It's
been said many times that the fact that Unix was written in C made it so
much easier to port, and thus it eventually spread like a wildfire, as
opposed to all others slowly dying.
> Unix caught on because it could do useful work and it's users could
> understand it and some of those users could even duplicate it.
Many other OSes could and did do useful work. And people even wrote
their own OSes, because that is not so hard. But Unix being portable
meant that less people had to do that. And instead it turned out that
you already had a whole set of applications available that would work
after just a compile... Economics of scale... Just porting/implementing
a C compiler and some smaller hardware dependent stuff is much less
effort than writing the whole ecosystem over and over again.
Johnny
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413621 is a reply to message #413617] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 17:53 |
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Messages: 4843
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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On Thu, 17 Mar 2022 18:34:50 -0000 (UTC)
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I recently went looking for some older (pre-ESR) Jargon Files and found
> http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.4.0.dos.txt dated 1987. That is
> the last edition prior to ESR's involvement. I read it with interest and
> enjoyment.
>
> My main question surrounds the almost complete lack of any references to
> Unix within it. Most OS references are to ITS or to something DECish -
> often explicitly TOPS-20.
It was probably down to where it was put together and the machines
that were around there.
> I am curious about why that is, or how *nix
> came to dominate later hacker culture. I have several guesses, but
> thought I ought to ask someone that was there.
Unix was pretty much the only widely portable OS around, and the
source license was made free to academic institutions - Berkeley made best
use of this and their CSRG contributed vi, sockets and a whole bunch of
other stuff to the unix world as well as making the BSD unix releases.
This led to a steadily increasing collection of graduates with unix
experience.
Around the same time in the commercial world there was a spate of
boxes that looked a bit like fridges with a QIC tape drive on the front and
a bunch of RS232 ports on the back running some flavour of unix on a 68K or
MIPS or 80x86 or 88K or NS32032 or something with an MMU a bunch of RAM and
a hard disc.
They ran unix because it was either that or design your own OS, if
you designed your own OS then you would have to get all the application
support lined up - unix was a no brainer even with the exorbitant source
license fee.
This led to a steadily increasing collection of professional
programmers with unix experience.
> Part of what puzzled me was that by the early 80s, Unix had caught on
ITYM 90s.
> enough that RMS sought to clone it and not VMS or TOPS-20 or some such.
The sources for unix were available to be looked at unlike VMS,
TOPS-20 et al. Also unix was already the most widely ported OS.
> I also generally understood Unix to be the early native platform of
> Arpanet/Internet, Usenet, and UUCP though I gather TCP/IP bolt-ons and
> ports were available for other OSs (particularly VMS).
UUCP was written for Unix at AT&T - there was even a UUCP based LAN
called Micnet which provided a namespace below / to address machines with
paths like /../somemachine/home/fred/somefile. USENET and the UUCP based
global network originated at Duke in 1979 and exploded.
Two of the earliest network stacks were the AT&T streams and
Berkeley sockets, I don't think anyone ever implemented TCP/IP over streams
but I could be wrong. It fit very well with Berkeley sockets because they
were based on ARPANET concepts.
Then of course Berkeley managed to remove enough AT&T code to be
allowed to release their code to the public and about the same time Linus
Torvalds created a kernel to go with the complete set of utilities and
libraries that had built up under the GNU label ad suddenly there were two
independent open source implementations of unix.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413622 is a reply to message #413618] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 18:25 |
John Levine
Messages: 1405
Registered: December 2011
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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According to Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com>:
> This is more my opinion than a statement of established fact.
>
> There we lots of OS's before Unix. ALL of them were unnecessarily
> complicated on purpose. The vendors had to build something complicated
> to stop others from creating clones.
Sorry, but no. Until the late 1960s you couldn't even copyright
software. Vendors wrote operating systems and compilers as loss
leaders to sell hardware. Indeed, the cloning went the other way,
as with Amdahl's IBM mainframe clones.
There were at least two free operating systems for the DEC PDP-10,
BBN's TENEX and MIT's ITS, but they both died when the PDP-10 did
since they were written in assembler and tied to the -10's 36 bit
words and 18 bit addresses.
> Unix caught on because it could do useful work and it's users could
> understand it and some of those users could even duplicate it.
Partly that, partly that universites got full copies of the sourcecode
and it ran on a PDP-11 which was cheap enough that individual departments
could buy and run them. It also was the first OS of any importance to
be written in something other than assembler so it was possible to port
it to larger and cheaper machines as they became available.
--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413623 is a reply to message #413617] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 18:38 |
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Originally posted by: drb
> I also generally understood Unix to be the early native platform of
> Arpanet/Internet,
Not really. The first hosts were often SDS and IBM mainframes, and DEC
machines. Honeywell, CDC, and Univac mainframes, Data General minis,
and other less known / more exotic stuff soon followed. The initial
IMPs were Honeywell Series/16 machines.
Eventually, as several organizations developed networking stacks for
Unix, it did become quite common, and even a key part of the backbone.
De
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413625 is a reply to message #413619] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 21:27 |
scott
Messages: 4237
Registered: February 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> writes:
> This is going to be very subjective...
>
> On 2022-03-17 19:34, John Goerzen wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I recently went looking for some older (pre-ESR) Jargon Files and found
>> http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.4.0.dos.txt dated 1987. That is the
>> last edition prior to ESR's involvement. I read it with interest and enjoyment.
>
> Good for you. ESR only ruined it.
>
> Also, note that for the most part, if PDP-11 was looked upon as a small
> toy, the VAX was looked at with animosity, as was VMS. It was the
> corporate suites system. Nothing for "hackers". :-)
I never looked upon VMS with animosity. As a hacker or later a programmer.
I have seldom heard such complaints outside of a few PDP-10 forums.
It was quite hackable and it had a lot of territory to explore. We also
had the source to play with, but even without it, it was definitely hackable.
My first hack was using the system dump analyzer to fetch the system managers
password from one of the VMS typeahead buffers. That got me a job in the
computation center :-).
We eventually caught the
student that had figured out how to change mode to kernel (the debug
utility had been 'install'ed with chmk privilege for some odd reason -
easily fixed after the fact, but not without some damage being done
by the soon-to-be former student).
TSS8 was also hackable in the day. Simplest method was to punch a
paper tape with login sequences for passwords (upper case only) and
run it until login was successful. But we spent days manually
disassembling the basic interpreter, pip, sysstat, et alia.
The HP-3000 MPE systems also were fun to hack (there, again, the
basic interpreter was 'install'ed with PH (Process Handling)
capability, so one could call an SPL function from basic and
mess with queueing priorities et al. Again, easy to fix the
security hole.
>
> As for why did Unix take over, in spite of all this. Sortof simple. When
> DEC killed the PDP-10 there was an outrage you can't even imagine. And
> people eventually swore to never be tied to a single vendor again. That
> in combination with Unix having sources freely available made it the
> most obvious choice to jump to when TOPS-20 and ITS no longer was an option.
I suspect "outrage you can't even imagine" is hyperbole, those of us
in the Operating System group at Burroughs weren't even aware of the PDP-10
demise at the time :-)
It certainly has fanatical followers, however :-)
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413626 is a reply to message #413619] |
Thu, 17 March 2022 22:46 |
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Originally posted by: John Goerzen
On 2022-03-17, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
>
> Well. Unix back then was by most of the "hacker community" regarded as a
> toy (I'm sure early Unix fans will disagree).
> The whole PDP-11 was considered mostly a toy computer. Too small for
> real stuff. That whole generation grew up on larger machines, and many
> very specifically grew up with the PDP-10.
Thank you, Johnny (and everyone else). This has been very helpful!
I had never before realized that the PDP-11 wasn't really the top-of-the-line
from DEC.
> Everything else was compared to that, and most everything else came up
> short.
> That said, the whole jargon.txt file was very centered around MIT and
> Stanford, which were very DEC-centric. I'm sure there were other
> universities and areas where other groups and machines were more
> popular, but jargon.txt is what survived, and that was around these two
> sites, DEC hardware, and everything that grew around that.
It looks to me that there were only a few operating systems for the PDP-10
(TOPS-10, TOPS-20, ITS, and WAITS are the ones I've seen). But a huge explosion
for the PDP-11, right? All sorts of Unix, plus even Ultrix I guess. Wikipedia
lists dozens, most of which I haven't heard of. So I had previously thought
that the DEC ecosystem was vibrant with all sorts of OSs, but perhaps that only
began with the PDP-11, which was cheaper and less powerful hardware. Is that an
accurate summary?
> Also, note that for the most part, if PDP-11 was looked upon as a small
> toy, the VAX was looked at with animosity, as was VMS. It was the
> corporate suites system. Nothing for "hackers". :-)
And see here I get puzzled too. I think VMS was sort of the "flagship" OS for
VAX, right? But then again there was BSD for it also, and apparently even
Ultrix also. I see a lot of "vax" in the UUCP maps that survive in Usenet
archives, particularly ucbvax which seems to have been some sort of hub.
https://groups.google.com/g/ucb.net.announce/c/r58EXmvcfw8/m /E0lLEWcV-xwJ gives
some of the history of the thing. Looks like it was indeed a VAX running Unix.
> And no, Unix was not the early native platform for Arpanet/Internet. It
> was built on lots of pieces, and there was quite a lot of PDP-10 in
> there until the switch to TCP/IP in 1982. Unix networking wasn't really
> the bleeding edge until after it had moved on from the PDP-11.
Interesting. What OSs hosted this early development? (And after TCP, as well?)
> And UUCP have nothing to do with Arpanet/Internet. It's two completely
> different things. UUCP and Usenet on the other hand are connected.
> Usenet migrated over to Internet, while UUCP disappeared.
This I'm aware of, but don't think it's quite that clear. Or at least it wasn't
at the end. ucbvax had an IP by the end of its time at least. I worked for an
ISP in the 90s that provided Usenet and email service over UUCP, but didn't
participate in UUCPNet; the Internet was the backbone past the ISP, and UUCP was
for customer leaf sites. My understanding is that a number of Usenet sites had
NNTP access in addition to UUCP for while, so while the protocols were obviously
quite distinct, they would have interoperated, right?
FWIW, a few very small pockets of UUCP still exist, often running over ssh.
NNCP (see my info on https://www.complete.org/nncp/) is a successor protocol
(sort of to UUCP what ssh is to telnet) that is a small but growing community as
well.
Thanks again!
- John
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413630 is a reply to message #413625] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 13:34 |
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Originally posted by: Johnny Billquist
On 2022-03-18 02:27, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> writes:
>> This is going to be very subjective...
>>
>> On 2022-03-17 19:34, John Goerzen wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I recently went looking for some older (pre-ESR) Jargon Files and found
>>> http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.4.0.dos.txt dated 1987. That is the
>>> last edition prior to ESR's involvement. I read it with interest and enjoyment.
>>
>> Good for you. ESR only ruined it.
>
>>
>> Also, note that for the most part, if PDP-11 was looked upon as a small
>> toy, the VAX was looked at with animosity, as was VMS. It was the
>> corporate suites system. Nothing for "hackers". :-)
>
> I never looked upon VMS with animosity. As a hacker or later a programmer.
> I have seldom heard such complaints outside of a few PDP-10 forums.
[...]
Told you that this was rather DEC-centric. Which also jargon.txt is, if
you read it.
Not to mention PDP-10-centric.
For people from elsewhere, it was probably very invisible. But since the
question originates with jargon.txt, we need to step into that little
world... :-)
Johnny
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413631 is a reply to message #413626] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 14:06 |
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Originally posted by: Johnny Billquist
On 2022-03-18 03:46, John Goerzen wrote:
> On 2022-03-17, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
>>
>> Well. Unix back then was by most of the "hacker community" regarded as a
>> toy (I'm sure early Unix fans will disagree).
>> The whole PDP-11 was considered mostly a toy computer. Too small for
>> real stuff. That whole generation grew up on larger machines, and many
>> very specifically grew up with the PDP-10.
>
> Thank you, Johnny (and everyone else). This has been very helpful!
>
> I had never before realized that the PDP-11 wasn't really the top-of-the-line
> from DEC.
Just look at the pricelist back then. PDP-11 was cheap, used in lots of
places, had rather simple/stupid peripherals, and a lot of the more
complex software DEC had never was available for the PDP-11. It just
didn't have the capacity for it (mainly too little addressable memory).
But it was a good machine for labs, automation, control, education as
well as for smaller business.
With time, the PDP-11 grew more powerful, but it was never
top-of-the-line. It was the big cache cow.
>> Everything else was compared to that, and most everything else came up
>> short.
>> That said, the whole jargon.txt file was very centered around MIT and
>> Stanford, which were very DEC-centric. I'm sure there were other
>> universities and areas where other groups and machines were more
>> popular, but jargon.txt is what survived, and that was around these two
>> sites, DEC hardware, and everything that grew around that.
>
> It looks to me that there were only a few operating systems for the PDP-10
> (TOPS-10, TOPS-20, ITS, and WAITS are the ones I've seen).
SAIL as well. But that is already quite a lot for one architecture.
> But a huge explosion
> for the PDP-11, right? All sorts of Unix, plus even Ultrix I guess. Wikipedia
> lists dozens, most of which I haven't heard of. So I had previously thought
> that the DEC ecosystem was vibrant with all sorts of OSs, but perhaps that only
> began with the PDP-11, which was cheaper and less powerful hardware. Is that an
> accurate summary?
All sorts of Unix... Well, I would count that as just one OS. Hardly
getting close to PDP-10 yet, with that. :-D
But yes, DEC made lots of OSes. DOS-11, RT-11, RSTS/E, RSX-11A to D, M,
S, IAS, TRAX, and probably something more I've forgotten.
But part of the reason for this is that because of limitations, DEC
found it easier to do OSes that tried to solve specific problems instead
of just one OS to rule them all.
And it also helped with sales, since you could pick the cheapest option
that fulfilled your needs.
With VMS DEC tried to do the one OS rules them all, but it sortof
failed. They still ended up with VAXELN for those with need for better
realtime embedded stuff, while they never really managed to replace the
PDP-11 in many places, which they had hoped to. The VAX was still very
successful, but less than the all conquering thing they might have aimed
for.
(DEC wasn't really happy with all the proliferation of operating systems
for the PDP-11. It had costs for maintenance and layered product support
for the different systems, which hurt. Which was one of the reasons for
VMS trying to cover it all.)
>> Also, note that for the most part, if PDP-11 was looked upon as a small
>> toy, the VAX was looked at with animosity, as was VMS. It was the
>> corporate suites system. Nothing for "hackers". :-)
>
> And see here I get puzzled too. I think VMS was sort of the "flagship" OS for
> VAX, right?
Yes.
But DEC was not only VAX.
And most people from the TOPS-20 world considered VMS to be a big step
backward. You seem to assume that PDP-11 and VAX was all there was. That
was not the case back then.
> But then again there was BSD for it also, and apparently even
> Ultrix also. I see a lot of "vax" in the UUCP maps that survive in Usenet
> archives, particularly ucbvax which seems to have been some sort of hub.
Sure. Since VAXen were big among Unix people. And the follow on to the
PDP-11. But as I said - that is not where the hacker culture was.
Especially not if you are looking at jargon.txt and where it comes from.
>> And no, Unix was not the early native platform for Arpanet/Internet. It
>> was built on lots of pieces, and there was quite a lot of PDP-10 in
>> there until the switch to TCP/IP in 1982. Unix networking wasn't really
>> the bleeding edge until after it had moved on from the PDP-11.
>
> Interesting. What OSs hosted this early development? (And after TCP, as well?)
Well, the development was never hosted on any one specific system.
See https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc801.txt for a list of the progress
on some different platforms in 1981.
Unix was in there, as was TOPS-20 and VMS, RT-11, Multics, and some
other systems...
Earlier it was mostly IMPs (look it up). I don't remember what the
hardware was (Honeywell?). And then came some small PDP-11s running a
special OS called Fuzzball, which was started up from RT-11.
>> And UUCP have nothing to do with Arpanet/Internet. It's two completely
>> different things. UUCP and Usenet on the other hand are connected.
>> Usenet migrated over to Internet, while UUCP disappeared.
>
> This I'm aware of, but don't think it's quite that clear. Or at least it wasn't
> at the end.
The end was very different than the beginning, indeed.
UUCP was just dial up lines using modems, for file copying a couple of
times per day between Unix systems. Hence the name - Unix to Unix CoPy.
Files could obviously also be mails, or newsfeeds.
Johnny
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413632 is a reply to message #413619] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 15:41 |
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Messages: 4843
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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On Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:26:45 +0100
Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
> And UUCP have nothing to do with Arpanet/Internet. It's two completely
> different things. UUCP and Usenet on the other hand are connected.
> Usenet migrated over to Internet, while UUCP disappeared.
I recall reading at one point that the core UUCP sites had become
connected full time using a "new protocol" - I think that article was
referring to NSFNET which was in many ways the start of the public
internet. At the time I was trying to persuade my employer to spring for a
daily 15 minute UUCP slot at UKC. It was only a few years later that I had
my own dial up IP connection with my very own static IP address and
(sub)domain. Things moved very fast in the early days of the internet.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413638 is a reply to message #413631] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 16:35 |
Rich Alderson
Messages: 489
Registered: August 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> writes:
Hi, Johnny!
> On 2022-03-18 03:46, John Goerzen wrote:
>> It looks to me that there were only a few operating systems for the PDP-10
>> (TOPS-10, TOPS-20, ITS, and WAITS are the ones I've seen).
> SAIL as well. But that is already quite a lot for one architecture.
"SAIL" is the name of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and
eventually the name of their PDP-10 complex on the Internet. (On the ARPANET,
it was "SU-AI".) It is also the name of an Algol dialect written at SAIL the
organization, which included associative data structures.
WAITS was the name of the Tops-10 derivative OS which ran SAIL's PDP-10s.
--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413639 is a reply to message #413626] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 16:37 |
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Originally posted by: J. Clarke
On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 02:46:18 -0000 (UTC), John Goerzen
<jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
> On 2022-03-17, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
>>
>> Well. Unix back then was by most of the "hacker community" regarded as a
>> toy (I'm sure early Unix fans will disagree).
>> The whole PDP-11 was considered mostly a toy computer. Too small for
>> real stuff. That whole generation grew up on larger machines, and many
>> very specifically grew up with the PDP-10.
>
> Thank you, Johnny (and everyone else). This has been very helpful!
>
> I had never before realized that the PDP-11 wasn't really the top-of-the-line
> from DEC.
>
>> Everything else was compared to that, and most everything else came up
>> short.
>> That said, the whole jargon.txt file was very centered around MIT and
>> Stanford, which were very DEC-centric. I'm sure there were other
>> universities and areas where other groups and machines were more
>> popular, but jargon.txt is what survived, and that was around these two
>> sites, DEC hardware, and everything that grew around that.
>
> It looks to me that there were only a few operating systems for the PDP-10
> (TOPS-10, TOPS-20, ITS, and WAITS are the ones I've seen). But a huge explosion
> for the PDP-11, right? All sorts of Unix, plus even Ultrix I guess. Wikipedia
> lists dozens, most of which I haven't heard of. So I had previously thought
> that the DEC ecosystem was vibrant with all sorts of OSs, but perhaps that only
> began with the PDP-11, which was cheaper and less powerful hardware. Is that an
> accurate summary?
>
>> Also, note that for the most part, if PDP-11 was looked upon as a small
>> toy, the VAX was looked at with animosity, as was VMS. It was the
>> corporate suites system. Nothing for "hackers". :-)
>
> And see here I get puzzled too. I think VMS was sort of the "flagship" OS for
> VAX, right? But then again there was BSD for it also, and apparently even
> Ultrix also. I see a lot of "vax" in the UUCP maps that survive in Usenet
> archives, particularly ucbvax which seems to have been some sort of hub.
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/ucb.net.announce/c/r58EXmvcfw8/m /E0lLEWcV-xwJ gives
> some of the history of the thing. Looks like it was indeed a VAX running Unix.
>
>> And no, Unix was not the early native platform for Arpanet/Internet. It
>> was built on lots of pieces, and there was quite a lot of PDP-10 in
>> there until the switch to TCP/IP in 1982. Unix networking wasn't really
>> the bleeding edge until after it had moved on from the PDP-11.
>
> Interesting. What OSs hosted this early development? (And after TCP, as well?)
The first Arpanet message involved SEX, Genie, and 6000 words of
machine code on Honeywell DDP-516s, with the machine code created on a
PDP-1. This would have been on October 29, 1969, when what became
UNIX was 2 months old and C was still B.
>> And UUCP have nothing to do with Arpanet/Internet. It's two completely
>> different things. UUCP and Usenet on the other hand are connected.
>> Usenet migrated over to Internet, while UUCP disappeared.
>
> This I'm aware of, but don't think it's quite that clear. Or at least it wasn't
> at the end. ucbvax had an IP by the end of its time at least. I worked for an
> ISP in the 90s that provided Usenet and email service over UUCP, but didn't
> participate in UUCPNet; the Internet was the backbone past the ISP, and UUCP was
> for customer leaf sites. My understanding is that a number of Usenet sites had
> NNTP access in addition to UUCP for while, so while the protocols were obviously
> quite distinct, they would have interoperated, right?
>
> FWIW, a few very small pockets of UUCP still exist, often running over ssh.
> NNCP (see my info on https://www.complete.org/nncp/) is a successor protocol
> (sort of to UUCP what ssh is to telnet) that is a small but growing community as
> well.
>
> Thanks again!
>
> - John
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413640 is a reply to message #413631] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 16:52 |
Rich Alderson
Messages: 489
Registered: August 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> writes:
> On 2022-03-18 03:46, John Goerzen wrote:
>> On 2022-03-17, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
>>> And no, Unix was not the early native platform for Arpanet/Internet. It
>>> was built on lots of pieces, and there was quite a lot of PDP-10 in
>>> there until the switch to TCP/IP in 1982. Unix networking wasn't really
>>> the bleeding edge until after it had moved on from the PDP-11.
>> Interesting. What OSs hosted this early development? (And after TCP, as well?)
> Well, the development was never hosted on any one specific system.
> See https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc801.txt for a list of the progress
> on some different platforms in 1981.
> Unix was in there, as was TOPS-20 and VMS, RT-11, Multics, and some other
> systems...
> Earlier it was mostly IMPs (look it up). I don't remember what the hardware
> was (Honeywell?). And then came some small PDP-11s running a special OS
> called Fuzzball, which was started up from RT-11.
IMPs (Interface Message Processors) were Honeywell DDP-316 (later 516) minis
which only handled the phone line traffic between sites; each host (mostly
mainframes) had an architecture-specific interface to connect to the IMP, and
the host did all the protocol interpretation of the packets handed to it by the
IMP or pushed out over the IMP.
Think of an IMP as a 56Kbps Ethernet NIC.
For hysterical raisins, much of the development of the protocols used on the
Internet really was done on PDP-10 systems, because DEC did a good job of
selling them into the research labs. The great majority of these ran either
TENEX (the BBN OS for the original PDP-10, adapted to the second generation
KI-10 processor of the 1970 DECsystem-10) or TOPS-20 (which was a licensed and
improved version of TENEX created by DEC for the third generation KL-10
processor of the DECSYSTEM-20 and later DECsystem-10).
Two of the most important hosts on the ARPANET were SRI-NIC, which hosted the
official tables of ARPANET hosts and was the repository for all RFCs (Requests
For Comment), and ISI, where Jon Postel assigned host numbers, were PDP-10s...
--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413641 is a reply to message #413622] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 16:55 |
Peter Flass
Messages: 8375
Registered: December 2011
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> According to Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com>:
>> This is more my opinion than a statement of established fact.
>>
>> There we lots of OS's before Unix. ALL of them were unnecessarily
>> complicated on purpose. The vendors had to build something complicated
>> to stop others from creating clones.
>
> Sorry, but no. Until the late 1960s you couldn't even copyright
> software. Vendors wrote operating systems and compilers as loss
> leaders to sell hardware. Indeed, the cloning went the other way,
> as with Amdahl's IBM mainframe clones.
>
> There were at least two free operating systems for the DEC PDP-10,
> BBN's TENEX and MIT's ITS, but they both died when the PDP-10 did
> since they were written in assembler and tied to the -10's 36 bit
> words and 18 bit addresses.
>
>> Unix caught on because it could do useful work and it's users could
>> understand it and some of those users could even duplicate it.
>
> Partly that, partly that universites got full copies of the sourcecode
> and it ran on a PDP-11 which was cheap enough that individual departments
> could buy and run them. It also was the first OS of any importance to
> be written in something other than assembler
Umm…Multics and MCP?
so it was possible to port
> it to larger and cheaper machines as they became available.
--
Pete
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413642 is a reply to message #413626] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 16:55 |
Peter Flass
Messages: 8375
Registered: December 2011
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
> On 2022-03-17, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
>>
>> Well. Unix back then was by most of the "hacker community" regarded as a
>> toy (I'm sure early Unix fans will disagree).
>> The whole PDP-11 was considered mostly a toy computer. Too small for
>> real stuff. That whole generation grew up on larger machines, and many
>> very specifically grew up with the PDP-10.
>
> Thank you, Johnny (and everyone else). This has been very helpful!
>
> I had never before realized that the PDP-11 wasn't really the top-of-the-line
> from DEC.
>
>> Everything else was compared to that, and most everything else came up
>> short.
>> That said, the whole jargon.txt file was very centered around MIT and
>> Stanford, which were very DEC-centric. I'm sure there were other
>> universities and areas where other groups and machines were more
>> popular, but jargon.txt is what survived, and that was around these two
>> sites, DEC hardware, and everything that grew around that.
>
> It looks to me that there were only a few operating systems for the PDP-10
> (TOPS-10, TOPS-20, ITS, and WAITS are the ones I've seen). But a huge explosion
> for the PDP-11, right?
It’s hard to write an OS when you don’t have access to the whole machine.
Once cheap hardware like the -11 came along, all sorts of people could
start playing.
cameAll sorts of Unix, plus even Ultrix I guess. Wikipedia
> lists dozens, most of which I haven't heard of. So I had previously thought
> that the DEC ecosystem was vibrant with all sorts of OSs, but perhaps that only
> began with the PDP-11, which was cheaper and less powerful hardware. Is that an
> accurate summary?
>
>> Also, note that for the most part, if PDP-11 was looked upon as a small
>> toy, the VAX was looked at with animosity, as was VMS. It was the
>> corporate suites system. Nothing for "hackers". :-)
>
> And see here I get puzzled too. I think VMS was sort of the "flagship" OS for
> VAX, right? But then again there was BSD for it also, and apparently even
> Ultrix also. I see a lot of "vax" in the UUCP maps that survive in Usenet
> archives, particularly ucbvax which seems to have been some sort of hub.
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/ucb.net.announce/c/r58EXmvcfw8/m /E0lLEWcV-xwJ gives
> some of the history of the thing. Looks like it was indeed a VAX running Unix.
>
>> And no, Unix was not the early native platform for Arpanet/Internet. It
>> was built on lots of pieces, and there was quite a lot of PDP-10 in
>> there until the switch to TCP/IP in 1982. Unix networking wasn't really
>> the bleeding edge until after it had moved on from the PDP-11.
>
> Interesting. What OSs hosted this early development? (And after TCP, as well?)
>
>> And UUCP have nothing to do with Arpanet/Internet. It's two completely
>> different things. UUCP and Usenet on the other hand are connected.
>> Usenet migrated over to Internet, while UUCP disappeared.
>
> This I'm aware of, but don't think it's quite that clear. Or at least it wasn't
> at the end. ucbvax had an IP by the end of its time at least. I worked for an
> ISP in the 90s that provided Usenet and email service over UUCP, but didn't
> participate in UUCPNet; the Internet was the backbone past the ISP, and UUCP was
> for customer leaf sites. My understanding is that a number of Usenet sites had
> NNTP access in addition to UUCP for while, so while the protocols were obviously
> quite distinct, they would have interoperated, right?
>
> FWIW, a few very small pockets of UUCP still exist, often running over ssh.
> NNCP (see my info on https://www.complete.org/nncp/) is a successor protocol
> (sort of to UUCP what ssh is to telnet) that is a small but growing community as
> well.
>
> Thanks again!
>
> - John
>
--
Pete
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| Micnet [message #413643 is a reply to message #413621] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 17:05 |
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Originally posted by: John Goerzen
On 2022-03-17, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
> UUCP was written for Unix at AT&T - there was even a UUCP based LAN
> called Micnet which provided a namespace below / to address machines with
> paths like /../somemachine/home/fred/somefile. USENET and the UUCP based
> global network originated at Duke in 1979 and exploded.
I'm interested in both of these statements! I've never heard of Micnet and
information on it is sparse. Some of the most detailed info on it -- and even
this is sparse -- is from a Xenix manual I found at
http://www.nj7p.org/Manuals/PDFs/Intel/174461-001.pdf .
Its chapter on UUCP also discusses Micnet, but Micnet is discussed more
particularly starting in Chapter 3 on page 45. It says "the network consists of
computers connected by serial communication lines.... If you want to construct
a network using dial-up (modem) connections over phone lines, you must use
uucp."
It looks like micnet uses different commands from uucp (they talk a lot about
netutil).
So my questions are:
- Was this particular to Xenix, or what other systems supported Micnet?
- Any idea where I might be able to read more about Micnet and this path-based
addressing?
- That manual is rather unclear on how UUCP is used on Micnet, although there
seems to be a vague way to integrate email.
Thanks!
John
- John
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413644 is a reply to message #413625] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 17:23 |
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Originally posted by: Vir Campestris
On 18/03/2022 01:27, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> I suspect "outrage you can't even imagine" is hyperbole, those of us
> in the Operating System group at Burroughs weren't even aware of the PDP-10
> demise at the time:-)
>
> It certainly has fanatical followers, however:-)
I sort of cut my teeth on TOPS-10 at university at the end of the 70s,
then went on to work for operating systems at ICL - a rather less
important company on the other side of the pond.
I was barely aware of the loss.
I'm to this day impressed by the way TOPS-10 did time sharing for 70
people in 1.25MB. Not very well, but it did it. Far more than we could
manage.
But that 18 bit address space wasn't good for the long term.
Andy
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413645 is a reply to message #413641] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 17:41 |
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Originally posted by: Bob Eager
On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:55:30 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>> According to Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com>:
>>> This is more my opinion than a statement of established fact.
>>>
>>> There we lots of OS's before Unix. ALL of them were unnecessarily
>>> complicated on purpose. The vendors had to build something
>>> complicated to stop others from creating clones.
>>
>> Sorry, but no. Until the late 1960s you couldn't even copyright
>> software. Vendors wrote operating systems and compilers as loss
>> leaders to sell hardware. Indeed, the cloning went the other way,
>> as with Amdahl's IBM mainframe clones.
>>
>> There were at least two free operating systems for the DEC PDP-10,
>> BBN's TENEX and MIT's ITS, but they both died when the PDP-10 did since
>> they were written in assembler and tied to the -10's 36 bit words and
>> 18 bit addresses.
>>
>>> Unix caught on because it could do useful work and it's users could
>>> understand it and some of those users could even duplicate it.
>>
>> Partly that, partly that universites got full copies of the sourcecode
>> and it ran on a PDP-11 which was cheap enough that individual
>> departments could buy and run them. It also was the first OS of any
>> importance to be written in something other than assembler
>
> Umm…Multics and MCP?
and... Burroughs?
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413646 is a reply to message #413645] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 18:18 |
cross
Messages: 11
Registered: May 2013
Karma: 0
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Junior Member |
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In article <j9kck9FcnhU6@mid.individual.net>,
Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:55:30 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>> Partly that, partly that universites got full copies of the sourcecode
>>> and it ran on a PDP-11 which was cheap enough that individual
>>> departments could buy and run them. It also was the first OS of any
>>> importance to be written in something other than assembler
>>
>> Umm…Multics and MCP?
>
> and... Burroughs?
Isn't that MCP? :-)
- Dan C.
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413648 is a reply to message #413642] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 18:11 |
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Messages: 4843
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:55:31 -0700
Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> wrote:
> It’s hard to write an OS when you don’t have access to the whole machine.
> Once cheap hardware like the -11 came along, all sorts of people could
> start playing.
The next iteration of that came when microprocessors became
powerful enough to displace small minis. The hardware was cheap and easy
to design, prototype and manufacture which left just one small problem - it
needed an OS with applications[1] to persuade people to buy it and oh look
there's this portable thing called unix and it has applications we'll use
that.
[1] The next time you curse a modern word processor, try Uniplex.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
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| Re: Micnet [message #413649 is a reply to message #413643] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 18:27 |
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Messages: 4843
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 21:05:47 -0000 (UTC)
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
> On 2022-03-17, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>> UUCP was written for Unix at AT&T - there was even a UUCP based
>> LAN called Micnet which provided a namespace below / to address
>> machines with paths like /../somemachine/home/fred/somefile. USENET and
>> the UUCP based global network originated at Duke in 1979 and exploded.
>
> I'm interested in both of these statements! I've never heard of Micnet
> and information on it is sparse. Some of the most detailed info on it --
It wasn't very well documented even at the time.
> and even this is sparse -- is from a Xenix manual I found at
> http://www.nj7p.org/Manuals/PDFs/Intel/174461-001.pdf .
Yep that's about it.
> Its chapter on UUCP also discusses Micnet, but Micnet is discussed more
> particularly starting in Chapter 3 on page 45. It says "the network
> consists of computers connected by serial communication lines.... If you
> want to construct a network using dial-up (modem) connections over phone
> lines, you must use uucp."
>
> It looks like micnet uses different commands from uucp (they talk a lot
> about netutil).
If memory serves correctly and it has been a long time but I rather
thought we had email running between the boxes using UUCP and file sharing
using MICNET over the same fixed serial connections (running as fast as we
could get them to go - all 115,200 cps of it) and we could in principle
have used any of the other UUCP transfers but there was no point.
> So my questions are:
>
> - Was this particular to Xenix, or what other systems supported Micnet?
I only ever saw it on XENIX
> - Any idea where I might be able to read more about Micnet and this
> path-based addressing?
>
> - That manual is rather unclear on how UUCP is used on Micnet, although
> there seems to be a vague way to integrate email.
IIRC it boils down to MICNET also carrying UUCP traffic over the
same link. We didn't use it a lot because we didn't have any external UUCP
connection.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413650 is a reply to message #413639] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 18:02 |
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Messages: 4843
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:37:13 -0400
J. Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> wrote:
> The first Arpanet message involved SEX, Genie, and 6000 words of
> machine code on Honeywell DDP-516s, with the machine code created on a
> PDP-1. This would have been on October 29, 1969, when what became
> UNIX was 2 months old and C was still B.
At the time only a handful knew of it.
Ten years later it was a wide spread experiment largely unkown
outside of the experimentors.
Ten years after that the Internet had pretty much saturated
academia swallowing the UUCP network in the process and was working on going
commercial.
Ten years after that it was in the homes of non technical people
and starting to be considered essential to business.
After that it grew a carry a lot of social media, entertainment and
porn, but most of the good bits still work many of them better than ever.
The experiment is deemed a success, but please don't terminate it.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413651 is a reply to message #413646] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 18:33 |
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Originally posted by: Bob Eager
On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 22:18:27 +0000, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <j9kck9FcnhU6@mid.individual.net>,
> Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:
>> On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:55:30 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>>> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>>>> [snip]
>>>> Partly that, partly that universites got full copies of the
>>>> sourcecode and it ran on a PDP-11 which was cheap enough that
>>>> individual departments could buy and run them. It also was the first
>>>> OS of any importance to be written in something other than assembler
>>>
>>> Umm…Multics and MCP?
>>
>> and... Burroughs?
>
> Isn't that MCP? :-)
>
> - Dan C.
OOps. Yes. I was thinking of the language rather than the system!
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413652 is a reply to message #413630] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 19:26 |
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Originally posted by: John Goerzen
On 2022-03-18, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
> Told you that this was rather DEC-centric. Which also jargon.txt is, if
> you read it.
> Not to mention PDP-10-centric.
>
> For people from elsewhere, it was probably very invisible. But since the
> question originates with jargon.txt, we need to step into that little
> world... :-)
Several have mentioned that jargon.txt is probably highly specific to a few
particular locations. I wonder if there were sort of multiple "hacker cultures"
out there, and only the MIT/SAIL ones seem to be covered (in Jargon File, by
Levy, etc?)
Of course, there were the homebrew computer clubs on the far other end of
things, a bit before my time. Within my memory, you had FidoNet and UUCPNet
serving essentially similar high-level purposes but with vastly different kinds
of support (mostly individuals self-funding BBSs vs. well-funded institutions).
My recollections of PC and DOS cultures was that there was not much emphasis on
sharing source code; "shareware" and all that. I don't know that you'd
necessarily call it a hacker culture without that. That was one of the huge
things that drew me to *BSD and Linux back in the day (that and the free
compilers!)
-- John
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413653 is a reply to message #413645] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 19:43 |
scott
Messages: 4237
Registered: February 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> writes:
> On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:55:30 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>
>> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>>> According to Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com>:
>>>> This is more my opinion than a statement of established fact.
>>>>
>>>> There we lots of OS's before Unix. ALL of them were unnecessarily
>>>> complicated on purpose. The vendors had to build something
>>>> complicated to stop others from creating clones.
>>>
>>> Sorry, but no. Until the late 1960s you couldn't even copyright
>>> software. Vendors wrote operating systems and compilers as loss
>>> leaders to sell hardware. Indeed, the cloning went the other way,
>>> as with Amdahl's IBM mainframe clones.
>>>
>>> There were at least two free operating systems for the DEC PDP-10,
>>> BBN's TENEX and MIT's ITS, but they both died when the PDP-10 did since
>>> they were written in assembler and tied to the -10's 36 bit words and
>>> 18 bit addresses.
>>>
>>>> Unix caught on because it could do useful work and it's users could
>>>> understand it and some of those users could even duplicate it.
>>>
>>> Partly that, partly that universites got full copies of the sourcecode
>>> and it ran on a PDP-11 which was cheap enough that individual
>>> departments could buy and run them. It also was the first OS of any
>>> importance to be written in something other than assembler
>>
>> Umm…Multics and MCP?
>
> and... Burroughs?
MCP is Burroughs OS. For the B5500 and successors, it was written
in a dialect of Algol.
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413654 is a reply to message #413653] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 20:11 |
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Originally posted by: Bob Eager
On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 23:43:34 +0000, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> writes:
>> On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:55:30 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>>
>>> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>>>> According to Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com>:
>>>> > This is more my opinion than a statement of established fact.
>>>> >
>>>> > There we lots of OS's before Unix. ALL of them were unnecessarily
>>>> > complicated on purpose. The vendors had to build something
>>>> > complicated to stop others from creating clones.
>>>>
>>>> Sorry, but no. Until the late 1960s you couldn't even copyright
>>>> software. Vendors wrote operating systems and compilers as loss
>>>> leaders to sell hardware. Indeed, the cloning went the other way,
>>>> as with Amdahl's IBM mainframe clones.
>>>>
>>>> There were at least two free operating systems for the DEC PDP-10,
>>>> BBN's TENEX and MIT's ITS, but they both died when the PDP-10 did
>>>> since they were written in assembler and tied to the -10's 36 bit
>>>> words and 18 bit addresses.
>>>>
>>>> > Unix caught on because it could do useful work and it's users could
>>>> > understand it and some of those users could even duplicate it.
>>>>
>>>> Partly that, partly that universites got full copies of the
>>>> sourcecode and it ran on a PDP-11 which was cheap enough that
>>>> individual departments could buy and run them. It also was the first
>>>> OS of any importance to be written in something other than assembler
>>>
>>> Umm…Multics and MCP?
>>
>> and... Burroughs?
>
> MCP is Burroughs OS. For the B5500 and successors, it was written in a
> dialect of Algol.
AS I noted afterwards, I knew that. I was focusing my mind on Burroughs
Algol. The MCP bit passed me by probably because I worked on another
(unrelated) system that had an operating system called MCP.
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413655 is a reply to message #413638] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 20:56 |
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Originally posted by: Johnny Billquist
On 2022-03-18 21:35, Rich Alderson wrote:
> Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> writes:
>
> Hi, Johnny!
>
>> On 2022-03-18 03:46, John Goerzen wrote:
>
>>> It looks to me that there were only a few operating systems for the PDP-10
>>> (TOPS-10, TOPS-20, ITS, and WAITS are the ones I've seen).
>
>> SAIL as well. But that is already quite a lot for one architecture.
>
> "SAIL" is the name of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and
> eventually the name of their PDP-10 complex on the Internet. (On the ARPANET,
> it was "SU-AI".) It is also the name of an Algol dialect written at SAIL the
> organization, which included associative data structures.
>
> WAITS was the name of the Tops-10 derivative OS which ran SAIL's PDP-10s.
Damn. For some reason I suddenly thought that SAIL was the OS. Oh
well... Too much PDP-10 details that I tried to squeeze out in a short time.
Johnny
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413656 is a reply to message #413652] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 21:07 |
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Originally posted by: Johnny Billquist
On 2022-03-19 00:26, John Goerzen wrote:
> On 2022-03-18, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
>> Told you that this was rather DEC-centric. Which also jargon.txt is, if
>> you read it.
>> Not to mention PDP-10-centric.
>>
>> For people from elsewhere, it was probably very invisible. But since the
>> question originates with jargon.txt, we need to step into that little
>> world... :-)
>
> Several have mentioned that jargon.txt is probably highly specific to a few
> particular locations. I wonder if there were sort of multiple "hacker cultures"
> out there, and only the MIT/SAIL ones seem to be covered (in Jargon File, by
> Levy, etc?)
>
> Of course, there were the homebrew computer clubs on the far other end of
> things, a bit before my time. Within my memory, you had FidoNet and UUCPNet
> serving essentially similar high-level purposes but with vastly different kinds
> of support (mostly individuals self-funding BBSs vs. well-funded institutions).
>
> My recollections of PC and DOS cultures was that there was not much emphasis on
> sharing source code; "shareware" and all that. I don't know that you'd
> necessarily call it a hacker culture without that. That was one of the huge
> things that drew me to *BSD and Linux back in the day (that and the free
> compilers!)
You also have to understand that the hacker culture that sprung up, and
which was reflected in jargon.txt is from way before there were PCs or
even home computers.
Which is why, in a way, later cultures many times were inspired by
jargon.txt, and wanted to emulate/replicate/duplicate that.
Especially the Unix/Linux crowd have wanted to take over that spirit
since the late 90s.
But I'd bet there was at least some sort of cultures in other places as
well, centered around other systems. It's just that they never grew as
big, or was preserved so much.
Johnny
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413657 is a reply to message #413642] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 21:32 |
John Levine
Messages: 1405
Registered: December 2011
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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According to Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com>:
>> It looks to me that there were only a few operating systems for the PDP-10
>> (TOPS-10, TOPS-20, ITS, and WAITS are the ones I've seen). But a huge explosion
>> for the PDP-11, right?
>
> It’s hard to write an OS when you don’t have access to the whole machine.
> Once cheap hardware like the -11 came along, all sorts of people could
> start playing.
DEC had cheap machines before the PDP-11, most notably the PDP-8, but it was
so small that most of the operating systems were rudimentary, along the lines
of CP/M or early MS-DOS, a program loader and a simple file system.
The exception was TSS-8 which ran on a PDP-8 with a disk, extra
memory, multiple tty interfaces, and an option to add system/user
modes, and gave each user a virtual small PDP-8. I played with it a
little and found it amazingly usable for something that ran on a
12-bit machine with a single accumulator.
--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413659 is a reply to message #413656] |
Fri, 18 March 2022 23:10 |
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Originally posted by: John Goerzen
On 2022-03-19, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
> You also have to understand that the hacker culture that sprung up, and
> which was reflected in jargon.txt is from way before there were PCs or
> even home computers.
Yep, got it. Though by the 1987 edition I referenced, that certainly wouldn't
have been the case.
> Which is why, in a way, later cultures many times were inspired by
> jargon.txt, and wanted to emulate/replicate/duplicate that.
> Especially the Unix/Linux crowd have wanted to take over that spirit
> since the late 90s.
>
> But I'd bet there was at least some sort of cultures in other places as
> well, centered around other systems. It's just that they never grew as
> big, or was preserved so much.
You know, this is a good point, and reminds me that Jason Scott has documented
two of them in his documentaries Get Lamp (about interactive fiction) and BBS:
The Documentary. I haven't worked my way through the entirety of the later one,
but I can see a lot of parallels between it and the original jargon.txt culture,
even though AFAIK there was very little overlap between them. There was
certainly a spirit of openness and collaboration, though I suppose one could say
the impulse to close source code impacted both over time.
- John
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413660 is a reply to message #413619] |
Sat, 19 March 2022 00:00 |
Quadibloc
Messages: 4399
Registered: June 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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On Thursday, March 17, 2022 at 3:26:48 PM UTC-6, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> When
> DEC killed the PDP-10 there was an outrage you can't even imagine. And
> people eventually swore to never be tied to a single vendor again. That
> in combination with Unix having sources freely available made it the
> most obvious choice to jump to when TOPS-20 and ITS no longer was an option.
We have Barb here. She's still outraged about that after all these years.
John Savard
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413664 is a reply to message #413654] |
Sat, 19 March 2022 11:47 |
scott
Messages: 4237
Registered: February 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> writes:
> On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 23:43:34 +0000, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>
>> Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> writes:
>>> On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:55:30 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>>>
>>>> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>>>> > According to Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com>:
>>>> >> This is more my opinion than a statement of established fact.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> There we lots of OS's before Unix. ALL of them were unnecessarily
>>>> >> complicated on purpose. The vendors had to build something
>>>> >> complicated to stop others from creating clones.
>>>> >
>>>> > Sorry, but no. Until the late 1960s you couldn't even copyright
>>>> > software. Vendors wrote operating systems and compilers as loss
>>>> > leaders to sell hardware. Indeed, the cloning went the other way,
>>>> > as with Amdahl's IBM mainframe clones.
>>>> >
>>>> > There were at least two free operating systems for the DEC PDP-10,
>>>> > BBN's TENEX and MIT's ITS, but they both died when the PDP-10 did
>>>> > since they were written in assembler and tied to the -10's 36 bit
>>>> > words and 18 bit addresses.
>>>> >
>>>> >> Unix caught on because it could do useful work and it's users could
>>>> >> understand it and some of those users could even duplicate it.
>>>> >
>>>> > Partly that, partly that universites got full copies of the
>>>> > sourcecode and it ran on a PDP-11 which was cheap enough that
>>>> > individual departments could buy and run them. It also was the first
>>>> > OS of any importance to be written in something other than assembler
>>>>
>>>> Umm…Multics and MCP?
>>>
>>> and... Burroughs?
>>
>> MCP is Burroughs OS. For the B5500 and successors, it was written in a
>> dialect of Algol.
>
> AS I noted afterwards, I knew that. I was focusing my mind on Burroughs
> Algol. The MCP bit passed me by probably because I worked on another
> (unrelated) system that had an operating system called MCP.
>
Even Burroughs had multiple MCPs. The Large systems MCP was written
in Algol. The Medium systems MCP was written first in Assembler,
and later rewritten in a high-level modula-like language called Sprite (I
was part of that project). I never was exposed to the small
systems operating system (B1[789]00) so can't address that, or
the CP9500 systems.
The entire Medium Systems MCP group went to the morning matinee
for the move Tron when it came out (and the gas station scene
in the Steve Martin move _The Jerk_ was filmed across the street
from the plant in Pasadena).
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413667 is a reply to message #413660] |
Sat, 19 March 2022 12:48 |
Charlie Gibbs
Messages: 5313
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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On 2022-03-19, Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> On Thursday, March 17, 2022 at 3:26:48 PM UTC-6, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
>> When
>> DEC killed the PDP-10 there was an outrage you can't even imagine. And
>> people eventually swore to never be tied to a single vendor again. That
>> in combination with Unix having sources freely available made it the
>> most obvious choice to jump to when TOPS-20 and ITS no longer was an option.
>
> We have Barb here. She's still outraged about that after all these years.
Speaking of Barb, I haven't seen anything from her for a while.
Hope she's all right...
--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413668 is a reply to message #413664] |
Sat, 19 March 2022 12:48 |
Charlie Gibbs
Messages: 5313
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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On 2022-03-19, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:
> Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> writes:
>
>> On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 23:43:34 +0000, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>>
>>> MCP is Burroughs OS. For the B5500 and successors, it was written in a
>>> dialect of Algol.
>>
>> AS I noted afterwards, I knew that. I was focusing my mind on Burroughs
>> Algol. The MCP bit passed me by probably because I worked on another
>> (unrelated) system that had an operating system called MCP.
>
> Even Burroughs had multiple MCPs. The Large systems MCP was written
> in Algol. The Medium systems MCP was written first in Assembler,
> and later rewritten in a high-level modula-like language called Sprite (I
> was part of that project). I never was exposed to the small
> systems operating system (B1[789]00) so can't address that, or
> the CP9500 systems.
A friend of mine worked in a B1700 shop. While visiting him there
I saw references to SDL (System Definition Language), which looked
like another Algol variant.
> The entire Medium Systems MCP group went to the morning matinee
> for the move Tron when it came out
:-)
> (and the gas station scene
> in the Steve Martin move _The Jerk_ was filmed across the street
> from the plant in Pasadena).
--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413669 is a reply to message #413667] |
Sat, 19 March 2022 13:16 |
Peter Flass
Messages: 8375
Registered: December 2011
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
> On 2022-03-19, Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, March 17, 2022 at 3:26:48 PM UTC-6, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>
>>> When
>>> DEC killed the PDP-10 there was an outrage you can't even imagine. And
>>> people eventually swore to never be tied to a single vendor again. That
>>> in combination with Unix having sources freely available made it the
>>> most obvious choice to jump to when TOPS-20 and ITS no longer was an option.
>>
>> We have Barb here. She's still outraged about that after all these years.
>
> Speaking of Barb, I haven't seen anything from her for a while.
> Hope she's all right...
>
+1
--
Pete
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413672 is a reply to message #413617] |
Sat, 19 March 2022 19:57 |
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Originally posted by: antispam
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I recently went looking for some older (pre-ESR) Jargon Files and found
> http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.4.0.dos.txt dated 1987. That is the
> last edition prior to ESR's involvement. I read it with interest and enjoyment.
>
> My main question surrounds the almost complete lack of any references to Unix
> within it. Most OS references are to ITS or to something DECish - often
> explicitly TOPS-20. I am curious about why that is, or how *nix came to
> dominate later hacker culture. I have several guesses, but thought I ought to
> ask someone that was there.
>
> My own earliest exposures to computing were on the TRS-80 and later PCs. By the
> time I was able to find the occasional glimpse of Internet or UUCP access in my
> very rural part of Kansas, it was the 90s and the hacker communities I found
> then -- which instantly felt right at home to me -- were around the BSDs and
> Linux. It wasn't until well into adulthood when I started to become interested
> in computing history that I even *heard* of TOPS-20 or ITS, and that only by
> reading Wikipedia and books (eg, Hackers).
>
> Part of what puzzled me was that by the early 80s, Unix had caught on enough
> that RMS sought to clone it and not VMS or TOPS-20 or some such. I also
> generally understood Unix to be the early native platform of Arpanet/Internet,
> Usenet, and UUCP though I gather TCP/IP bolt-ons and ports were available for
> other OSs (particularly VMS).
>
> I'm interested in any light folks may be able to shed on it!
Adding to what other wrote: there is time delay. AFAICS in
1982 culture around PDP-10 was very much alive. At that
time people from MIT stated lisp machines companies. In 1982
Unix was still a newcomer. Stevens book about network
programming says that around 1983-1984 period there were
subtantial changes in Arpanet. In period between 1982
and 1987 Unix made significant advances. In 1987 it
was clear that PDP-10 line has no future. Still, in
1992 one of most popular anonymous FTP sites was on DEC
machine (IIUC running VMS). So IMO 1987 jargon mostly
reflected earlier situation.
--
Waldek Hebisch
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| Re: Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture? [message #413674 is a reply to message #413644] |
Sat, 19 March 2022 20:53 |
Rich Alderson
Messages: 489
Registered: August 2012
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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Vir Campestris <vir.campestris@invalid.invalid> writes:
> On 18/03/2022 01:27, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>> I suspect "outrage you can't even imagine" is hyperbole, those of us
>> in the Operating System group at Burroughs weren't even aware of the PDP-10
>> demise at the time:-)
>> It certainly has fanatical followers, however:-)
> I sort of cut my teeth on TOPS-10 at university at the end of the 70s,
> then went on to work for operating systems at ICL - a rather less
> important company on the other side of the pond.
> I was barely aware of the loss.
> I'm to this day impressed by the way TOPS-10 did time sharing for 70
> people in 1.25MB. Not very well, but it did it. Far more than we could
> manage.
> But that 18 bit address space wasn't good for the long term.
Which is why DEC defined an extended addressing scheme beginning with TOPS-20 v4
(which made it into Tops-10 v7.0<somedigit>), with a 30 bit address. The top
12 bits define a "section", and 18-bit addressing is section local, so that a
simple mapping of an old program into a "nonzero section" (section 0 is treated
as if it were the original 18-bit address space) mostly works without rewrite.
The control processors in XKL's high-end networking gear are still PDP-10s at
heart, using the full 30 bit address space. Digital only defined 23 bits in
the KL-10 microcode, with a special hack for section 7776.
--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen
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