Larry Wall & Cults

[Brian Inglis]

Yes, and also a single-process pipe emulator. Ever since 2.0, MS has
been trying to turn MS-DOS (later, Windows) into a Unix clone.

MS has been borrowing code from Unix to create a real OS: TCP/IP;
NTFS<-ffs; memory mapped files<-mmap.
Shame they keep trying to add their own ideas in too: that must be
what causes the crashes!

 

[Rob Warnock]

+---------------
| (e-mail address removed) (Rob Warnock) wrote:
| >| Consider the "PIP" command.
| >+---------------
| >
| >Indeed. And COPY & DEL & DIR, etc.
|
| Well, not quite . COPY and DELETE called PIP via a CCL
| command. DIRECT became its own program. To do a directory
| using PIP required a switch and wasn't a monitor level command.
+---------------

Yes, I knew that. What I was trying to convey is that the *names*
of those DOS commands had also been copied from the DEC lineages.
That is, COPY/DEL/DIR rather than cp/rm/ls.


-Rob

 

[Rob Warnock]

+---------------
| (e-mail address removed) (Rob Warnock) wrote:
| >Which, like PS/8 & OS-8 [and "DECsystem-8" from Geordia Tech] for the
| >PDP-8, modelled the command syntax after that of the venerable PDP-10!!
| >
| >+---------------
| >| Consider the "PIP" command.
| >+---------------
| >
| >Indeed. And COPY & DEL & DIR, etc.
|
| But CP/M also derived from IBM VM CP(!) and CMS:
| mount a ...
| attach con/rdr/lst/pun ...
+---------------

Those were also PDP-10 Monitor commands, and probably PDP-6 Monitor
before that.


-Rob

 

[jmfbahciv]

+---------------
| (e-mail address removed) (Rob Warnock) wrote:
| >| Consider the "PIP" command.
| >+---------------
| >
| >Indeed. And COPY & DEL & DIR, etc.
|
| Well, not quite . COPY and DELETE called PIP via a CCL
| command. DIRECT became its own program. To do a directory
| using PIP required a switch and wasn't a monitor level command.
+---------------

Yes, I knew that. What I was trying to convey is that the *names*
of those DOS commands had also been copied from the DEC lineages.
That is, COPY/DEL/DIR rather than cp/rm/ls.

IIRC, those verbs didn't show up until after 4S72 of TOPS-10 (it
wasn't TOPS-10 back then either). I would also suspect that
the PIP didn't originate at DEC either. A lot of those guys
did work at MIT before they coalasced into a startup company.

My whole point is that attributing who started it is not
as interesting as how the "it" flowed through the biz.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[jmfbahciv]

My choice? Definitely TECO, a real programmable editor from the TOPS10 days.

It would create a file if invoked by the "make" command. If you typed
"make love" it would respond with "...not war?" before beginning the edit.

Yup. Definitely a side effect of a pony-tailed hippie protesting
the Nam war.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[jmfbahciv]

At least PIP would copy zero-length files.

Until I started using this braindead OS, I hadn't realized
how spoiled I was w.r.t. combining listed files into one.

Yes, my programs indeed do their own parsing. And they insist on
"-", no matter which OS they're running on.


Now, do you trust Microsoft to keep it that way? I don't. That's why
my programs are full of things like:

#ifdef DOSWIN
strcat (filespec, "\\");
#else
strcat (filespec, "/");
#endif

Yes, it's bulky and ugly. But it's also future-proof.

Well, it is until code substitution at execution time
is provided as a service.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[jmfbahciv]

+---------------
| (e-mail address removed) (Rob Warnock) wrote:
| >Which, like PS/8 & OS-8 [and "DECsystem-8" from Geordia Tech] for the
| >PDP-8, modelled the command syntax after that of the venerable PDP-10!!
| >
| >+---------------
| >| Consider the "PIP" command.
| >+---------------
| >
| >Indeed. And COPY & DEL & DIR, etc.
|
| But CP/M also derived from IBM VM CP(!) and CMS:
| mount a ...
| attach con/rdr/lst/pun ...
+---------------

Those were also PDP-10 Monitor commands, and probably PDP-6 Monitor
before that.

Sigh! Fortunately, IBMers and DECcies all spoke English.
There were a few words that were spelt differently just
to satisfy NIH syndromes.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[jmfbahciv]

MS has been borrowing code from Unix to create a real OS: TCP/IP;
NTFS<-ffs; memory mapped files<-mmap.

All right. Now I'm mystified. Why did they have to borrow code
from Unix? They already had VMS. ISTM, VMS had all of the
above.

Shame they keep trying to add their own ideas in too: that must be
what causes the crashes!

Nope. If you want to know what will get added to the next release
of MS' OSes, just read their small company acquisitions in the WSJ.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[Peter Hansen]

Is this the one about two Roman horses' arses? If so, it also accounts
for the physical dimensions of the Space Shuttle's boosters.

A quick search using Google will show that while there is a
certain amount of truth in the original story, most of the
details are wrong, and the final bit about the booster rockets
is unsubstantiated. But it's still a cute story.

-Peter

 

[jmfbahciv]

I have here my manual of the "Cambridge Multiple-Access System -
User's Reference Manual" (that's Cambridge, England) dated 1968. The
file system hierarchy separator is "/".

And slash was used as a command modifier on the -10s.
File specification parsing used :: : [ ] < > , .
(Note that I did not use punctuation in that last sentence;
all those characters denoted a piece of a full file specification.
A slash said, "Here comes an exception to the last phrase
of the command."

I don't know where -they- got the convention from in the first place,
admittedly.

Trial and error. Historic usage. Typability. Printability.
Not to mention the limitations of characters defined in the
ASCII-1964 standard.

ObPDP: the TITAN system had a PDP7 as a peripheral device, sort-of.

I don't think I ever met a PDP-7.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[jmfbahciv]

But can it quote Zippy the Pinhead?

Who?

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Those were also PDP-10 Monitor commands, and probably PDP-6 Monitor
before that.

there may have been a little bit of common tracing back to the ctss
days ... however recent posting about him using cp/cms at npg when
he was writing pl/m
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#40 Which Monitor Would You Pick????

 

[jmfbahciv]

and unix goes back to multics ... which was on 5th floor, 545 tech sq.
while cp/cms was at the science center on 4th floor, 545 tech sq ...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
and they both go backto ctss

And everybody seems to think that those people never talked to
each other. Even boasting about whose is bigger, faster,
and longer would transmit new ideas among the bit setters.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

MS has been borrowing code from Unix to create a real OS: TCP/IP;
NTFS<-ffs; memory mapped files<-mmap.
Shame they keep trying to add their own ideas in too: that must be
what causes the crashes!

and unix goes back to multics ... which was on 5th floor, 545 tech sq.
while cp/cms was at the science center on 4th floor, 545 tech sq ...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
and they both go backto ctss

 

[Dave Hansen]

On Wednesday, in article
<[email protected]>
(e-mail address removed) "SM Ryan"
wrote:


Is this the one about two Roman horses' arses? If so, it also accounts
for the physical dimensions of the Space Shuttle's boosters.

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.htm

Regards,

-=Dave

 

[John Thingstad]

MS has been borrowing code from Unix to create a real OS: TCP/IP;
NTFS<-ffs; memory mapped files<-mmap.
Shame they keep trying to add their own ideas in too: that must be
what causes the crashes!

You seeem misinformed.
Microsoft swallowed up a team from DEC.
The were developing a operating system called PRISM.
When the project was cancelled they quit DEC in protest.
These peaple had more than a 100 years of experience in developing
muliuser /
mutitasking operating systems between them. The fact that the NT kernel is
not
entirely stable yet really shouldn't supprise anyone. Afterall Unix has
messed with
it's kernel for 30 years. But the modular arcitecture and the microkernel
are new ideas in
OS design and should in time lead to a more extensible OS than unix.
(Unix tradionally has a spagetti of intercalling function calls as a
kernel.)
As for following standards thats just plain sense.
Note the Mac OS 10 / Darwin uses a unix kernel because of all the problems
with
interoperabillity OS 9 had with talking to Windows and Unix boxes.

 

[joe]

Who?

http://www.zippythepinhead.com/

If you're runnning emacs, you can get a quote from him with M-X yow

Not exactly a typical editor function, agreed. I was feeling a little
whimsical at the time.

Joe

 

[John Thingstad]

http://www.zippythepinhead.com/

If you're runnning emacs, you can get a quote from him with M-X yow

Not exactly a typical editor function, agreed. I was feeling a little
whimsical at the time.

Joe

altso try psykoanalize-pinhead

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

http://www.zippythepinhead.com/

If you're runnning emacs, you can get a quote from him with M-X yow

Not exactly a typical editor function, agreed. I was feeling a little
whimsical at the time.

i once did a random email/usenet signature with zippy/yow ... but i
added two other files to it ... and then i had to fix a feature in
yow. yow uses a 16bit random number to index a yow file ... it was ok
as long as your sayings file was less than 64kbytes. i had to modify
yow to handle files larger than 64kbytes ... the "sayings" file used
for 6670 separater pages was 167k bytes and the jargon file was 413k
bytes ... while a current zippy yow file is 52,800 bytes.

recent reference
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#48 Random signatures

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

And everybody seems to think that those people never talked to each
other. Even boasting about whose is bigger, faster, and longer
would transmit new ideas among the bit setters.

and some of them worked jointly/together on ctss ... before some of
them going to multics on the 5th floor and others going to the science
center on the 4th floor. also the north half of 1st floor, 545 tech sq
had a lunch room on the east side and a lounge on the west side
.... and if nothing else ... people ran into each other there.

then there is melinda's vm history which has a lot of the ctss, multics,
cp/cms early lore .... current copy at:
http://pucc.princeton.edu/~melinda/

a much earlier version was posted to vmshare computer conference in
eight parts and can be found at the vmshare archive site:
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=VMHIST01&ft=NOTE
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=VMHIST02&ft=NOTE
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=VMHIST03&ft=NOTE
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=VMHIST04&ft=NOTE
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=VMHIST05&ft=NOTE
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=VMHIST06&ft=NOTE
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=VMHIST07&ft=NOTE
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=VMHIST08&ft=NOTE