Lack of Unix in 70s/80s hacker culture?

[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

[Dan Espen]

Post 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!

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.

[Johnny Billquist]

Post by Dan Espen

Post by John Goerzen
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.

Post by Dan Espen
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

[John Levine]

Post by Dan Espen
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.

Post by Dan Espen
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.

[Peter Flass]

Post by John Levine

Post by Dan Espen
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.

Post by Dan Espen
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

Post by John Levine
it to larger and cheaper machines as they became available.

[Bob Eager]

Post by Peter Flass

Post by John Levine

Post by Dan Espen
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.

Post by Dan Espen
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?

[Dan Cross]

Post by Bob Eager

[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.

[Bob Eager]

Post by Dan Cross

Post by Bob Eager

Post by Peter Flass

[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!

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by John Levine

Post by Dan Espen
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.

Post by Dan Espen
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.

[Bob Eager]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by Peter Flass

Post by John Levine

Post by Dan Espen
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.

Post by Dan Espen
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.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by Bob Eager

Post by John Levine

Post by Dan Espen
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.

Post by Dan Espen
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).

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Bob Eager

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.

Post by Scott Lurndal
The entire Medium Systems MCP group went to the morning matinee
for the move Tron when it came out

:-)

Post by Scott Lurndal
(and the gas station scene
in the Steve Martin move _The Jerk_ was filmed across the street
from the plant in Pasadena).

[Johnny Billquist]

This is going to be very subjective...

Post 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.

Good for you. ESR only ruined it.

Post by John Goerzen
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.

Post by John Goerzen
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.

Post by John Goerzen
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

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Johnny Billquist
This is going to be very subjective...

Post 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.

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.

Post by Johnny Billquist
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 :-)

[Johnny Billquist]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Johnny Billquist
This is going to be very subjective...

Post 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.

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

[John Goerzen]

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[Johnny Billquist]

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[John Goerzen]

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[Johnny Billquist]

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

If we talk about jargon.txt from 1987, it still have no references to
PCs or home computers. I actually have a JARGON.TXT on my computer:

.dir sys$games:jarGON.TXT


Directory DU0:[GAMES]
20-MAR-22 16:45

JARGON.TXT;1 160. 09-DEC-81 23:02

Total of 160./160. blocks in 1. file
.

So dated 1981. It's almost identical to the 1987 version referred to
previously in this thread.

Which brings home the point that at this time, things had started to
die. The PDP-10 had been cancelled. The culture had started to die. Not
much was changed anymore. JARGON.TXT stopped being updated.

If you read through it, it's a lot of PDP-10 stuff, a lot of Lisp
machine stuff, a couple of references to Multics (all very negative),
and that's about it.

It was, by 1987, a document of a culture from a previous era. There were
only fragments remaining. A bunch of years later, ESR started modifying
it, fitting into his desires of associating himself and the people
around into this older age.

Johnny

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
Told you that this was rather DEC-centric. Which also jargon.txt is, if
you read it. Not to mention PDP-10-centric.

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?)

To be clear, the Jargon File *originated* at the Stanford AI lab. It was quickly
adopted by the MIT ITS hackers. At that point, it was not unusual for people to
move between the two AI labs, and they shared a lot of culture. Later, the file
was maintained at MIT, and in particular by Guy Steele.

This should explain why ITS and SAIL terms appear prominently in the file.
There was also an effort to bring in jargon from other PDP-10 sites. I bet no
one at MIT would say "cuspy". WPI had a somewhat open access TOPS-10
machine nurturing a local hacker culture.

[Vir Campestris]

Post by Scott Lurndal
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

[Rich Alderson]

Post by Vir Campestris

Post by Scott Lurndal
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.

[John Levine]

Post by Rich Alderson

Post by Vir Campestris
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.

DTSS ran on a GE 635 which was about the speed of a KA-10 and provided snappy
response to 100 users. They did it with a clever design, sort of a cross
between a transaction system and a time sharing system, which only gave users a
process when they typed RUN.

Post by Rich Alderson

Post by Vir Campestris
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.

They did about as good a job extending the addresses as one can imagine, but by
that time it was obvious that, much though we loved the PDP-10, the future was
eight-bit byte addressable machines.

[Peter Flass]

Post by John Levine

Post by Rich Alderson

Post by Vir Campestris
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.

DTSS ran on a GE 635 which was about the speed of a KA-10 and provided snappy
response to 100 users. They did it with a clever design, sort of a cross
between a transaction system and a time sharing system, which only gave users a
process when they typed RUN.

Post by Rich Alderson

Post by Vir Campestris
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.

They did about as good a job extending the addresses as one can imagine, but by
that time it was obvious that, much though we loved the PDP-10, the future was
eight-bit byte addressable machines.

Did they look into moving to 72 bits? Most 32-bit CPUs have been extended
to 64-bits fairly seamlessly. I suppose, by that time, that they were
pretty heavily involved in developing the VAX, and couldn’t afford to
support two major architectures.

[Johnny Billquist]

Post by Peter Flass

Post by John Levine

Post by Rich Alderson

Post by Vir Campestris
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.

DTSS ran on a GE 635 which was about the speed of a KA-10 and provided snappy
response to 100 users. They did it with a clever design, sort of a cross
between a transaction system and a time sharing system, which only gave users a
process when they typed RUN.

Post by Rich Alderson

Post by Vir Campestris
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.

They did about as good a job extending the addresses as one can imagine, but by
that time it was obvious that, much though we loved the PDP-10, the future was
eight-bit byte addressable machines.

Did they look into moving to 72 bits? Most 32-bit CPUs have been extended
to 64-bits fairly seamlessly. I suppose, by that time, that they were
pretty heavily involved in developing the VAX, and couldn’t afford to
support two major architectures.

A generic extension to a 72 bit machine was never considered, as far as
I know. There wasn't much need for more than 36 bits for most things.
Obviously more than 18 address bits were needed, but that had been
solved. And things like floating point was already using 72 bits.

And I don't think it was that they couldn't have afforded to have two
architectures (after all, they continued the PDP-11 as well, so it was
in fact three architectures).

But the PDP-10 was killed off for several reasons. One was that they
were struggling to get a new, faster PDP-10 out. The Jupiter project was
not going well. And the VAX had similar issues. In the end they decided
to just put all their efforts on the VAX. Probably because the VAX was
financially doing much better. Basically, the PDP-10 was never a big
seller. It was a big, expensive machine. In a world where things were
moving to smaller, and faster machines, the PDP-10 future did probably
not look so bright.
DEC pissed most PDP-10 customers off bigtime, but to be honest, I don't
think that business would have grown much had they kept the PDP-10 line.
Compared to PDP-11 and VAX, which were selling a lot, it didn't make as
much sense to continue with the PDP-10. DEC would obviously have
preferred that those customers switched to VAX. They failed to
anticipate how upset the customers would be, I think.

Also, the PDP-10 was more specialized, compared to PDP-11 or VAX, where
you had a simple bus where new types of hardware could easily be hooked
up. For the PDP-10, it was a strange world with lots of complications.

And yeah, much of the world in other places were moving more and more
into an 8-bit based/centric world, which created more pains on the
PDP-10 side.

Johnny

[John Goerzen]

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by Johnny Billquist
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?

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by Johnny Billquist
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?)

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[Johnny Billquist]

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by John Goerzen
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.)

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by John Goerzen
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.

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[Rich Alderson]

Johnny Billquist <***@softjar.se> writes:

Hi, Johnny!

Post by Johnny Billquist

Post by John Goerzen
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.

[Johnny Billquist]

Post by Rich Alderson
Hi, Johnny!

Post by Johnny Billquist

Post by John Goerzen
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

[Rich Alderson]

Post by Johnny Billquist

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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]

Post by Rich Alderson
Think of an IMP as a 56Kbps Ethernet NIC.

It's been pointed out to me that Steve Crocker, who wrote the IMP code, says
that it was 50Kbps. (The phone company leased lines were raw 56K, but...)

[J. Clarke]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 02:46:18 -0000 (UTC), John Goerzen

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by Johnny Billquist
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?

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:37:13 -0400

Post by J. Clarke
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.

[Peter Flass]

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

Post by John Goerzen
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?

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

Post by Johnny Billquist
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?)

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:55:31 -0700

Post by Peter Flass
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.

[John Levine]

Post by John Goerzen
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.

[Rich Alderson]

Post by John Levine
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.

My friend Bob Clements, who was the junior designer on the PDP-10 (KA-10) and
senior on the KI-10, was part of the team that implemented TSS-8.

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:26:45 +0100

Post by Johnny Billquist
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.

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
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.

coworker at science center was responsible for internal network (larger
than arpanet/internet from just about beginning until sometime mid/late
80s)

Internal network technology also used for the corporate sponsored bitnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET
also extended to Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Academic_Research_Network
NSF funded CSNET ... later merges with BITNET
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSNET

I had HSDT project for T1 and faster computer links and was working with
NSF director and was suppose to get $20M to internconect the NSF
supercomputer centers. Then congress cuts the budget, some other things
happen and finally an RFP is released (in part based on what we already
had running). Copy of "Preliminary Announce" (Mar1986):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#12

"The OASC has initiated three programs: The Supercomputer Centers
Program to provide Supercomputer cycles; the New Technologies Program to
foster new supercomputer software and hardware developments; and the
Networking Program to build a National Supercomputer Access Network -
NSFnet".

... internal IBM politics prevent us from bidding on the RFP, the NSF
director tries to help by writing the company a letter (with support
from other agencies), but that just makes the internal politics worse
(as did claims that what we already had running was at least 5yrs ahead
of the winning bid). The RFP called for T1 links ... but they only
putting in 440kbit/sec links ... then to make it look like they were
meeting the RFP, they put in T1 trunks with telco multiplexors running
multiple 440kbit links. As regional networks connect in, it morphs into
the NSFNET backbone, precursor to modern internet
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401444/grid-computing/

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Post by Anne & Lynn Wheeler
coworker at science center was responsible for internal network (larger
than arpanet/internet from just about beginning until sometime mid/late
80s)
Internal network technology also used for the corporate sponsored bitnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET
also extended to Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Academic_Research_Network
NSF funded CSNET ... later merges with BITNET
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSNET

note at time of 1jan1983 cutover to internetworking protocol from
IMP/host protocols there approx. 100 network IMP nodes with 250
connected hosts. old csnet/internet email:

Date: 10/22/82 14:25:57
To: CSNET mailing list
Subject: CSNET PhoneNet connection functional

The IBM San Jose Research Lab is the first IBM site to be registered on
CSNET (node-id is IBM-SJ), and our link to the PhoneNet relay at
University of Delaware has just become operational! For initial testing
of the link, I would like to have traffic from people who normally use
the ARPANET, and who would be understanding about delays, etc. If you
are such a person, please send me your userid (and nodeid if not on
SJRLVM1), and I'll send instructions on how to use the
connection. People outside the department or without prior usage of of
ARPANET may also register at this time if there is a pressing need, such
as being on a conference program committee, etc.

CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) is funded by NSF, and is an attempt to
connect all computer science research institutions in the U.S. It does
not have a physical network of its own, but rather is a set of common
protocols used on top of the ARPANET (Department of Defense), TeleNet
(GTE), and PhoneNet (the regular phone system). The lowest-cost entry is
through PhoneNet, which only requires the addition of a modem to an
existing computer system. PhoneNet offers only message transfer
(off-line, queued, files). TeleNet and ARPANET in allow higher-speed
connections and on-line network capabilities such as remote file lookup
and transfer on-line, and remote login.

===========================================================================

Date: 30 Dec 1982 14:45:34 EST (Thursday)
From: Nancy Mimno ***@Bbn-Unix
Subject: Notice of TCP/IP Transition on ARPANET
To: csnet-liaisons at Udel-Relay
Cc: mimno at Bbn-Unix
Via: Bbn-Unix; 30 Dec 82 16:07-EST
Via: Udel-Relay; 30 Dec 82 13:15-PDT
Via: Rand-Relay; 30 Dec 82 16:30-EST

ARPANET Transition 1 January 1983
Possible Service Disruption
---------------------------------

Dear Liaison,

As many of you may be aware, the ARPANET has been going through the
major transition of shifting the host-host level protocol from NCP
(Network Control Protocol/Program) to TCP-IP (Transmission Control
Protocol - Internet Protocol). These two host-host level protocols are
completely different and are incompatible. This transition has been
planned and carried out over the past several years, proceeding from
initial test implementations through parallel operation over the last
year, and culminating in a cutover to TCP-IP only 1 January 1983. DCA
and DARPA have provided substantial support for TCP-IP development
throughout this period and are committed to the cutover date.

The CSNET team has been doing all it can to facilitate its part in this
transition. The change to TCP-IP is complete for all the CSNET host
facilities that use the ARPANET: the CSNET relays at Delaware and Rand,
the CSNET Service Host and Name Server at Wisconsin, the CSNET CIC at
BBN, and the X.25 development system at Purdue. Some of these systems
have been using TCP-IP for quite a while, and therefore we expect few
problems. (Please note that we say "few", not "NO problems"!) Mail
between Phonenet sites should not be affected by the ARPANET
transition. However, mail between Phonenet sites and ARPANET sites
(other than the CSNET facilities noted above) may be disrupted.

The transition requires a major change in each of the more than 250
hosts on the ARPANET; as might be expected, not all hosts will be ready
on 1 January 1983. For CSNET, this means that disruption of mail
communication will likely result between Phonenet users and some ARPANET
users. Mail to/from some ARPANET hosts may be delayed; some host mail
service may be unreliable; some hosts may be completely
unreachable. Furthermore, for some ARPANET hosts this disruption may
last a long time, until their TCP-IP implementations are up and working
smoothly. While we cannot control the actions of ARPANET hosts, please
let us know if we can assist with problems, particularly by clearing up
any confusion. As always, we are or [phone].

Please pass this information on to your users.

Respectfully yours,
Nancy Mimno
CSNET CIC Liaison

===========================================================================

Date: 02/02/83 23:49:45
To: CSNET mailing list
Subject: CSNET headers, CSNET status

You may have noticed that since ARPANET switched to TCP/IP and the new
version of software on top of it, message headers have become
ridiculously long. Some of it is because of tracing information that has
been added to facilitate error isolation and "authentication", and some
of it I think is a bug (the relay adds a 'From' and a 'Date' header
although there already are headers with that information in the
message). This usually doesn't bother people on the ARPANET because they
have smart mail reading programs that understand the headers and only
display the relevant ones. I have proposed a mail reader/sender program
that understands about ARPANET headers (RFC822) as a summer project, so
maybe we will sometime enjoy the same priviledge.

The file CSNET STATUS1 on the CSNET disk (see instructions below for how
to access it) contains some clarification of the problems that have been
experienced with the TCP/IP conversion. Here is a summary:

- Nodes that don't yet talk TCP (but the old NCP) can be accessed through
the UDel-Relay. So if you think you have problems reaching a node
because of this, append @Udel-Relay to the ARPANET address.

- You can find out about the status of hosts (e.g., if they run TCP or
not) by sending ANY MESSAGE to ***@UDel-Relay (capitalization is NOT
significant).

- If your messages are undeliverable, you get a notice after two days, and
your messages get returned after 4 days.

- Avoid using any of the fancy address forms allowed by the new header
format (RFC822).

- The TCP transition was a lot more trouble than the ARPANET people had
anticipated.

[Ray Hughes]

Post by Anne & Lynn Wheeler

Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
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.

coworker at science center was responsible for internal network (larger
than arpanet/internet from just about beginning until sometime mid/late
80s)
Internal network technology also used for the corporate sponsored bitnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET
also extended to Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Academic_Research_Network
NSF funded CSNET ... later merges with BITNET
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSNET
I had HSDT project for T1 and faster computer links and was working with
NSF director and was suppose to get $20M to internconect the NSF
supercomputer centers. Then congress cuts the budget, some other things
happen and finally an RFP is released (in part based on what we already
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#12
"The OASC has initiated three programs: The Supercomputer Centers
Program to provide Supercomputer cycles; the New Technologies Program to
foster new supercomputer software and hardware developments; and the
Networking Program to build a National Supercomputer Access Network -
NSFnet".
... internal IBM politics prevent us from bidding on the RFP, the NSF
director tries to help by writing the company a letter (with support
from other agencies), but that just makes the internal politics worse
(as did claims that what we already had running was at least 5yrs ahead
of the winning bid). The RFP called for T1 links ... but they only
putting in 440kbit/sec links ... then to make it look like they were
meeting the RFP, they put in T1 trunks with telco multiplexors running
multiple 440kbit links. As regional networks connect in, it morphs into
the NSFNET backbone, precursor to modern internet
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401444/grid-computing/

Tempus certainly fugit

I recently spent 45 mins on a 5G samsung mobile phone with an octacore
processor 12 gb ram and 128gb storage. I was complaining about the
fact that the best speed virginmedia Gig1 can supply is 600Mbs not 1000mbs that I'm
paying for so they sent me an intelligent wifi pod to install (plug into
a wall socket.) still the same 24 hrs later.

Oh well time to phone India again I guess.

xRay

Have a great day all.
Don't ya all just love tech) :(

[Quadibloc]

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Quadibloc

Post by Johnny Billquist
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...

[Peter Flass]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Quadibloc

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Sat, 19 Mar 2022 10:16:49 -0700

Post by Charlie Gibbs
Speaking of Barb, I haven't seen anything from her for a while.
Hope she's all right...

+1

and another one.

[maus]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Quadibloc

Post by Johnny Billquist
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

++1

[Dave Garland]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Quadibloc
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...

For sure. Been a couple of years. I remember AOL (or whatever ISP she
was using) wasn't working out well.

[Jorgen Grahn]

Post by Dave Garland

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Quadibloc
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...

For sure. Been a couple of years. I remember AOL (or whatever ISP she
was using) wasn't working out well.

In late 2019 she was using a gmail address and wrote "I'm at the
public library so I won't be accessing a.f.c very often".

That's the latest I've seen, but I've been off Usenet a lot too.

/Jorgen

[John Goerzen]

Post by Jorgen Grahn

Post by Dave Garland
For sure. Been a couple of years. I remember AOL (or whatever ISP she
was using) wasn't working out well.

In late 2019 she was using a gmail address and wrote "I'm at the
public library so I won't be accessing a.f.c very often".
That's the latest I've seen, but I've been off Usenet a lot too.

As someone that just dropped into this group, can someone tell me who Barb is
and the story here?

Thanks!

- John

[[e-mail]]

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Jorgen Grahn

Post by Dave Garland
For sure. Been a couple of years. I remember AOL (or whatever ISP she
was using) wasn't working out well.

In late 2019 she was using a gmail address and wrote "I'm at the
public library so I won't be accessing a.f.c very often".
That's the latest I've seen, but I've been off Usenet a lot too.

As someone that just dropped into this group, can someone tell me who Barb is
and the story here?
Thanks!
- John

Barbara Liskov I presume; see CLU:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_(programming_language)

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2022 01:35:46 -0700 (PDT)

Post by ***@gmail.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_(programming_language)

Nope Barbara Huizenga, much missed - for details see elsethread.

[J. Clarke]

Post by ***@gmail.com

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Jorgen Grahn

Post by Dave Garland
For sure. Been a couple of years. I remember AOL (or whatever ISP she
was using) wasn't working out well.

In late 2019 she was using a gmail address and wrote "I'm at the
public library so I won't be accessing a.f.c very often".
That's the latest I've seen, but I've been off Usenet a lot too.

As someone that just dropped into this group, can someone tell me who Barb is
and the story here?
Thanks!
- John

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_(programming_language)

No. BAH worked on TOPS-10 with Jim Fleming.

[Michael Cardell Widerkrantz]

Post by John Goerzen
As someone that just dropped into this group, can someone tell me who
Barb is and the story here?

Barbara Huizenga (BAH), long time DEC employee and partner of Jim
Flemming (JMF), TOPS-10 wizard.

JMF's gravestone:

Loading Image...

James Michael Flemming
TOPS-10 GURU
"HAVE EDDT. WILL TRAVEL."

Linked from

https://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/

[maus]

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Jorgen Grahn

Post by Dave Garland
For sure. Been a couple of years. I remember AOL (or whatever ISP she
was using) wasn't working out well.

In late 2019 she was using a gmail address and wrote "I'm at the
public library so I won't be accessing a.f.c very often".
That's the latest I've seen, but I've been off Usenet a lot too.

As someone that just dropped into this group, can someone tell me who Barb is
and the story here?
Thanks!
- John

Barb is a valued member of this group, a character who thinks that
history started and ended with DEC. Last heard of returning home to
where she had been born, in the Dutch-ancestored part of Michegan.

Her signature was \BAH. I hope she is alive and well, and lurking
somewhere in the bushes.

:}

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

also (google group afc archive)
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/search?q=jmfbahciv

last couple yrs she used googlegroups afc directly ...
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/dFv9sQidWDY/m/GTyliaRbAAAJ

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Jorgen Grahn

Post by Dave Garland
For sure. Been a couple of years. I remember AOL (or whatever ISP she
was using) wasn't working out well.

In late 2019 she was using a gmail address and wrote "I'm at the
public library so I won't be accessing a.f.c very often".
That's the latest I've seen, but I've been off Usenet a lot too.

As someone that just dropped into this group, can someone tell me who Barb is
and the story here?

Barbara A Huizenga, 71, of Holland Michigan. Widow of one of the
main PDP-10 operating system developers. Opinionated.

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2022 18:34:50 -0000 (UTC)

Post 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.

It was probably down to where it was put together and the machines
that were around there.

Post by John Goerzen
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.

Post by John Goerzen
Part of what puzzled me was that by the early 80s, Unix had caught on

ITYM 90s.

Post by John Goerzen
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.

Post by John Goerzen
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.

[John Goerzen]

Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
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

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 21:05:47 -0000 (UTC)

Post by John Goerzen

Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
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.

Post by John Goerzen
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.

Post by John Goerzen
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.

Post by John Goerzen
- Was this particular to Xenix, or what other systems supported Micnet?

I only ever saw it on XENIX

Post by John Goerzen
- 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.

[Dennis Boone]

Post by John Goerzen
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

[a***@math.uni.wroc.pl]

Post 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!

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.

[Rich Alderson]

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.

If you're talking about SIMTEL20, those two digits should be a clue: It was a
KL-10 running TOPS-20. My friend Frank Wancho ran it.

As for the PDP-10 in 1987, Digital announced the cancellation of the next
generation processor (KC-10, code name "Jupiter") in May 1983. "No future" in
1987 is putting it mildly, although there was a company making clones by then
(Systems Concepts), and another which started in 1990 and is still in business
today (XKL).