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Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#32It's 30 pages of intro and then -allthemanpages-. I remember a 10-foot-long book at my college for Michigan Terminal System (MTS) because we didn't have UNIX running on the mainframe... i can't remember what UNIX ran on now, it was 1984-1988 at RPI. Anybody remember what UNIX ran on? It wasn't the VAX on the Vorhees building altar.
I love it that systems were so 'simple' that you could have a manual for it.
My fauvorite book in this regard is the annoted source of Unix.
Nowadays there is no way to get such grasp of the system.
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#33I hadn't realized there was a built in "interactively delete files asking the user" command, "dsw" this far back. I wonder when and why it got dropped? > For each file in the given directory ("." if not specified) d_s_w_ types its name. If "y" is typed, the file is deleted; if "x", d_s_w_ exits; if anything else, the file is not removed.
Replaced by rm -i perhaps?
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#34I hadn't realized there was a built in "interactively delete files asking the user" command, "dsw" this far back. I wonder when and why it got dropped? > For each file in the given directory ("." if not specified) d_s_w_ types its name. If "y" is typed, the file is deleted; if "x", d_s_w_ exits; if anything else, the file is not removed.
Replaced by rm -i perhaps?
The problem with rm is that it defaults to "you asked for it, you got it" mode and will delete things not intended without warning. If dsw (or related standard utility that defaults the other way) was there you could hand that to users and be a lot less likely to have accidental deletions.
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replaced by rm -i perhaps?
The problem with rm is that it defaults to "you asked for it, you got it" mode and will delete things not intended without warning. If dsw (or related standard utility that defaults the other way) was there you could hand that to users and be a lot less likely to have accidental deletions.
Aliases solve the problem of undesirable default options in most shells.
I have not used cp or rm with their default options for decades, because I always use aliases that set correct default options. Similarly for many other traditional UNIX utilities.
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take a look at the PDP-11 price list from 1973: https://iamvirtual.ca/collection/systems/minis/PDP11-10/PDP1... Does not look very cheap to me. Please note that $1 of 1973 is approximately $7 of 2024, so prices of usable configurations quickly reach the $100k to $200k territory, with a few grand of monthly upkeep.
That does indeed sound very cheap compared to the earlier time when there was infamously only a market for a couple of commercial computers in the whole world.
+1. Gorden Bell said a new computer category would enter the market every decade [1]. PDP-8 and later the PDP-11 were the quintessential minicomputer category makers. They were basically the microcomputer-equivalent in the 1970s. Both brought great cost reduction in their respective eras.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_law_of_computer_class...
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#37It's 30 pages of intro and then -allthemanpages-. I remember a 10-foot-long book at my college for Michigan Terminal System (MTS) because we didn't have UNIX running on the mainframe... i can't remember what UNIX ran on now, it was 1984-1988 at RPI. Anybody remember what UNIX ran on? It wasn't the VAX on the Vorhees building altar.
What kind of OS was Michigan Terminal System and who developed it?
Re: Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
#38It's 30 pages of intro and then -allthemanpages-. I remember a 10-foot-long book at my college for Michigan Terminal System (MTS) because we didn't have UNIX running on the mainframe... i can't remember what UNIX ran on now, it was 1984-1988 at RPI. Anybody remember what UNIX ran on? It wasn't the VAX on the Vorhees building altar.
What kind of OS was Michigan Terminal System and who developed it?
You can even run it yourself.