Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

tuhs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 42 posts

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#31

Post by nickpsecurity »

aplorbust wrote: post #28

"The most important role for UNIX is to provide a file system." I looked up TGM which is mentioned in this manual (TGML). Apparently this was what Thompson used to write the B compiler. Anyway, I ended up on the Multicians site. Some online accounts of computing history suggest UNIX was an alternative to the Multics project. On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which cou…

"On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which could also be "segments". There was apparently potential ambiguity regarding the term "file"."

Segments are a hardware mechanism often used then for accessing or protecting things in memory due to simplicity & speed of mechanism. Several modern techniques in INFOSEC use segments to protect programs.

Here's how the MULTICs filesystem worked, though. Gist of it seems like MULTICS came up with all the key concepts I recognize for hierarchical, filesystems.

http://www.multicians.org/fjcc4.html

Hansen's history shows the Titan System also had a similar filesystem:

http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/2001b.pdf

Both predate UNIX with Thompson and Ritchie actually using MULTIC before writing UNIX. So, it's probably main influence.

"Today we often see the phrase "Everything is a file" being cited when introducing people to UNIX. But I have never seen anyone attempt to explain why. What was the context in the 1970's?"

It's explained here:

https://superuser.com/questions/364152/why-is-everything-is-...

More detail from authors (see 3.3):

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/nyu/04fa/sched/readings/unix.pdf

"Again, this early manual says: "The most important role for UNIX is to provide a file system.""

Ritchie was clear in other writings that there wasn't a single goal for UNIX at all other than to be usable and more than what they were working with. It was designed to be efficient and enable programmers rather than hold them back. The rest fell into place from there.

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#32

Post by LukeShu »

kps wrote: post #24
geofft wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but at that point it's equally possible that it stands for "catharsis" and represents a file, previously being kept inwardly on disk, being released to standard output. The command doesn't predate UNIX, so it's a very narrow window of time for Ritchie to have gotten it wrong. And I have not seen any claims from the 1970s or 1980s that the command stands for "catenate".

> And I have not seen any claims from the 1970s or 1980s > that the command stands for "catenate". The Seventh Edition (1979) man page for cat(1) says “catenate and print”. Sixth Edition (1975) says “concatenate and print”.

This made me do my own investigating. The `csh` manual in 2BSD said "catenate" earlier in '79. Even before that, a comment in the ex (vi) 1.1 source code in 1BSD (1978) says "catenate".

So it looks like Bill Joy made the mistake! (and the Bell Labs people thought it funny?)

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#34

Post by devdas »

aplorbust wrote: post #28

"The most important role for UNIX is to provide a file system." I looked up TGM which is mentioned in this manual (TGML). Apparently this was what Thompson used to write the B compiler. Anyway, I ended up on the Multicians site. Some online accounts of computing history suggest UNIX was an alternative to the Multics project. On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which cou…

The name Unix is a pun on Multics.

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#35

Post by aplorbust »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #31
aplorbust wrote: post #28

"The most important role for UNIX is to provide a file system." I looked up TGM which is mentioned in this manual (TGML). Apparently this was what Thompson used to write the B compiler. Anyway, I ended up on the Multicians site. Some online accounts of computing history suggest UNIX was an alternative to the Multics project. On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which cou…

"On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which could also be "segments". There was apparently potential ambiguity regarding the term "file"." Segments are a hardware mechanism often used then for accessing or protecting things in memory due to simplicity & speed of mechanism. Several modern techniques in INFOSEC use segments to protect programs. Here's how the MULTICs files…

I can appreciate the response from "alvin" in the superuser comments.

Too bad networking was not part of early UNIX; sockets could perhaps have been part of the "carefully selected set of fertile ideas" that could be "keys to the implementation of a _small_ yet powerful operating system."

"carefully selected" (i.e., things are deliberately left out)

"small" (i.e., smaller than the alternatives)

These are ideas in programming that seem to have been lost over time.

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#36

Post by hga »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #31
aplorbust wrote: post #28

"The most important role for UNIX is to provide a file system." I looked up TGM which is mentioned in this manual (TGML). Apparently this was what Thompson used to write the B compiler. Anyway, I ended up on the Multicians site. Some online accounts of computing history suggest UNIX was an alternative to the Multics project. On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which cou…

"On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which could also be "segments". There was apparently potential ambiguity regarding the term "file"." Segments are a hardware mechanism often used then for accessing or protecting things in memory due to simplicity & speed of mechanism. Several modern techniques in INFOSEC use segments to protect programs. Here's how the MULTICs files…

Indeed, Multics segments were mapped into your address space on demand, and the standard way to access them was as memory. As a '60s architecture, they had a maximum size of 1 MiB (of 9 bit bytes), and by the time I showed up on the scene there was a "multi-segment file" abstraction for those with data that fit into that model that was bigger than 1 MiB.

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#38

Post by pteredactyl »

luckydude wrote: post #10

Is it just me or are the comments here missing the point? This is the original writeup of Unix. It's amazingly well written and pretty complete for when it was done. This is v0 of Unix, it's barely started. You could, and people did, write a lot of code with just that doc as documentation. Maybe it's because I'm a Bell Labs fanboy, I find this doc impressive.

100% agree on impressiveness. Great to see the architecture in its nascent form.

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#39

Post by nickpsecurity »

aplorbust wrote: post #35
nickpsecurity wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which could also be "segments". There was apparently potential ambiguity regarding the term "file"." Segments are a hardware mechanism often used then for accessing or protecting things in memory due to simplicity & speed of mechanism. Several modern techniques in INFOSEC use segments to protect programs. Here's how the MULTICs files…

I can appreciate the response from "alvin" in the superuser comments. Too bad networking was not part of early UNIX; sockets could perhaps have been part of the "carefully selected set of fertile ideas" that could be "keys to the implementation of a _small_ yet powerful operating system." "carefully selected" (i.e., things are deliberately left out) "small" (i.e., smaller than the alternatives) These are ideas in pro…

Yeah, it's unfortunate. There were a number of systems in the past that got very clever with networking and it made everything easier for developers/users. Mostly happened in the 1990's. Most are aware of Plan 9. More interesting were Amoeba distributed OS and Convergent's CTOS. The CTOS was a commercial, alternative to mainframes that distributed the system among cheaper computers. Had a lot of take-up before it was canned by Unisys after an acquisition. Couldn't have innovative products threatening their mainframe profits. ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_%28operating_system%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operat...

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#40

Post by nickpsecurity »

hga wrote: post #36
nickpsecurity wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"On the Multicians site it suggests Multics had a very different concept of "files", which could also be "segments". There was apparently potential ambiguity regarding the term "file"." Segments are a hardware mechanism often used then for accessing or protecting things in memory due to simplicity & speed of mechanism. Several modern techniques in INFOSEC use segments to protect programs. Here's how the MULTICs files…

Indeed, Multics segments were mapped into your address space on demand, and the standard way to access them was as memory. As a '60s architecture, they had a maximum size of 1 MiB (of 9 bit bytes), and by the time I showed up on the scene there was a "multi-segment file" abstraction for those with data that fit into that model that was bigger than 1 MiB.

Makes sense. Yeah, people doing the comparison should keep the timeline in mind: MULTICS 1960's concepts; UNICS (err, UNIX) 1970's concepts including takeaways from MULTICS. Back then, OS & architecture innovation was moving fast with significant changes in how things were done in that short span. Not to mention UNIX targeted a minicomputer.
Post reply on HN