[HN Gopher] Research Unix Sixth Edition (WASM)
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Research Unix Sixth Edition (WASM)
Author : simjue
Score : 146 points
Date : 2023-10-29 07:25 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (research.swtch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (research.swtch.com)
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| That is very cool, is there a writeup on how it was done?
| mzi wrote:
| https://github.com/rsc/unix/
| baudaux wrote:
| https://www.exaequos.com
| ilaksh wrote:
| How do you log in? What user/pass?
| baudaux wrote:
| Dummy login / no password
| jdblair wrote:
| ken/ken
|
| There are others documented on the landing page.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I'm not able to log in on my phone. The login prompt doesn't echo
| any characters when I typed and I don't get a prompt for
| password.
| grose wrote:
| Try clicking the tty1-8 buttons, it should pop up a keyboard
| (but will scroll you to a weird place). I just sent a patch
| that should fix the scrolling behavior after a tty switch:
| https://github.com/rsc/unix/pull/1
|
| If you have a different problem, post your OS/browser so we can
| try debugging it.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Of course I clicked the buttons. It's an inexpensive Android
| phone on Chrome 118 and Android 11.
| grose wrote:
| OK, thanks. I was able to reproduce it on an Android 11
| emulator. I'll take a look. I brought up the tty thing
| because on iOS it scrolls everything offscreen but input
| works.
| grose wrote:
| Sent a PR with a fix. The problem is that it was relying on
| the keydown event which Android Chrome doesn't send.
| Tweaked it to also handle the event input and it seems to
| work.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Sixth Edition is from 1975. Let's consider its contemporary
| large-scale multiuser OS environments:
|
| * PLATO at UIUC. Much more sophisticated graphics and extensive
| support for multiuser gaming, but requires custom (and expensive)
| terminals. Homegrown mainframe, then CDC hardware.
|
| * Michigan Terminal System at University of Michigan and
| elsewhere. Runs on IBM mainframes.
|
| * Multics, ITS, TOPS-10, and who knows what else at MIT. ( _Not_
| Unix.) Mostly DEC hardware.
|
| * Stanford's WAITS, a descendant of ITS. DEC hardware.
|
| * Last but definitely not least, DTSS at Dartmouth, running on
| GE/Honeywell systems.
|
| Of these, DTSS is by far the most widely used. Every Dartmouth
| undergraduate student is required to, at some point, write and
| debug a BASIC program. Terminals are everywhere on campus and
| almost everyone uses them for work (homework, research, and
| homegrown applications for registration and asset management for
| employees) and fun (games, email). Dartmouth's later BlitzMail is
| a natural extension of this mindset once things are decentralized
| to micros.
|
| PLATO is widely available at UIUC but it is not proactively
| forced upon all students like DTSS. Based on _The Friendly Orange
| Glow_ , some classes require its use but otherwise most seem to
| discover it from some unused terminal in the basement. No use by
| university employees.
|
| From what little I know of MTS I think this is somewhere in
| between DTSS and PLATO in terms of adoption, at least at
| Michigan. Possibly more widespread/proactive at some other
| installations?
|
| Stanford and MIT's systems are not for the masses, in the sense
| that students at large are not expected to use them. I don't
| think we're yet at the point where, for several years, anyone
| (affiliated with the university or not) can go to an MIT terminal
| (or connect remotely) and get an account. If not, you probably
| need to know someone in Course 6 or works at LCS. I think
| Stanford requires SAIL affiliation.
|
| If Walter Bright reads this, he can tell us what Caltech is like.
|
| Most other universities have computers by this time, of course,
| but almost always just batch-card systems.
|
| Note that Unix is _not_ listed above. I don 't believe any
| university has students using it. Over the next decade there will
| be an explosion in multiuser, mostly driven by DEC hardware and,
| at first, DEC software, with Unix slowly, then suddenly, taking
| market share from DEC's own OSs despite outrage from DEC staff.
| DTSS, as widely used as it is, remains stuck in BASIC; in 1984
| Dartmouth moves heavily into micros by becoming an early
| Macintosh adopter. PLATO remains isolated at UIUC; the ambitious
| CDC attempt to commercialize it almost kills the company, and
| anyway never goes beyond "drill and practice"-type software that
| wastes the graphical and social features. As mentioned, MIT is
| _not_ a place where most students get exposure to computers, or
| otherwise an early pioneer in Unix. This suddenly changes in 1983
| with Project Athena; within a few years MIT produces X and
| Kerberos.
| rootbear wrote:
| Interesting comparisons. Students were definitely using Unix in
| 1975. My first Unix was actually sixth edition running on a
| PDP-11/45 at the University of Maryland. I started using it in
| 1979, but the system had been in use for some years. The system
| was part of the Computer Vision Lab and was mostly used by grad
| students for their research. The systems available to the
| general student population were Univac mainframes (1108 and
| 1106).
|
| About this time, my friend was working on his Ph.D. in Biology
| at Wayne State University and they had the MTS. It was pretty
| ubiquitous from what he's told me.
|
| I had a free account on MIT-AI at some point in the late 70s. I
| accessed it over the ARPANET!
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I had a free account on MIT-AI at some point in the late
| 70s. I accessed it over the ARPANET!
|
| My understanding is that, during the open access era, if you
| entered the wrong password the system would ask whether you
| wanted an account. Is that accurate?
|
| How long did your account last? When did the mass revoking of
| non-MIT accounts occur? Or was there no such revoking, and
| accounts just expired from disuse?
| rootbear wrote:
| This was a long time ago, but I think you're correct. If
| the system didn't recognize you, it asked if you wanted an
| account. I only used the account for a year or so, mostly
| to access some mailing lists. I assume it died of neglect.
| p_l wrote:
| ITS didn't really have password control, one was
| technically added but IIRC it was a fig leaf on some
| requirement from outside MIT. The user accounts were there
| mostly to inform others who was logged on and who owned
| what process.
|
| You could login either using terminal through ARPAnet dial-
| in support, or later over network, and over time there was
| added a more concrete "tourist" policy.
|
| DonHopkins seems to have an interesting writeup
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-
| policy-f73b...
|
| and of course there's PDP-10 org and its gather docs on
| github: https://github.com/PDP-10/its
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Students were definitely using Unix in 1975.
|
| What I meant was that none of the various large multiuser
| systems in universities in 1975 ran on Unix. I imagine that
| most computer people probably vaguely think that Unix was the
| first large multiuser OS, and that all Berkeley, Stanford,
| and MIT students were using it, when neither is the case. If
| a random university student in 1975 wanted a computer
| account, assuming that such was available to a non-
| math/engineering/CS student, it would almost certainly have
| been on a batch system like your UMD example.
|
| As I alluded to at the end, it's striking how within a decade
| Unix had clearly gained the momentum. Many (even majority) of
| non-batch systems in 1985 were likely still on VMS, RSTS,
| TOPS, or some other DEC OS, but those DEC-hardware sites were
| of course the first to move to Unix despite DEC's best
| attempts to prevent this.
| Aloha wrote:
| I've really wondered where things would be if TOPS-20 and
| Multics has made the leap to a modern architecture and
| continued development. The command interpreter for TOPS-20 was
| really intuitive, and if you've used Cisco iOS - you've used
| something that works a lot like TOPS-20.
| pests wrote:
| How was the command interpreter for the TOPS-20 so intuitive?
| rst wrote:
| This omits a bunch of others -- WYLBUR supported interactive
| program development on IBM mainframes at several universities,
| for example. (The "large scale" qualifier here is also a little
| bit dubious -- it seems to be a way of saying that anything
| running on a machine as small as a PDP-11 doesn't count. But
| there were timesharing systems on even smaller machines, such
| as PDP-8s.)
| TMWNN wrote:
| By "large scale" I meant something used by, well, a lot of
| people. More than a university's CS department (or the math
| or EE department; whichever side had the proto-CS faculty in
| 1975). Like, V6 was being used across Bell Labs, but I
| wouldn't call that a large-scale deployment compared to MTS,
| let alone DTSS. When V6 was ported to IBM mainframes by Eric
| Schmidt and others, that didn't result in Unix being made
| available to any Princeton student who wanted an account. Nor
| did the Interdata port result in a campuswide Unix system for
| all Wollongong students. In both cases, had a random student
| wanted a computer account and was eligible for one, he would
| have received something on a batch system.
| swagempire wrote:
| I love all the comments.
|
| But I have no idea what I can do after I login.
|
| Anyone know a place I could read up on this version, or provide a
| small description of its capabilities and limitations compared to
| modern Linux?
| mseepgood wrote:
| Explore the file system via chdir and ls (or ls -l), see what
| programs there are under /bin. Compile a C program (e.g. from
| ken's home directory) with cc and run it. Read the v6 man
| pages: https://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/ Learn ed and write your
| own C program.
| swagempire wrote:
| OK -- thanks:)
| swagempire wrote:
| It even lacks man pages btw
| mseepgood wrote:
| I don't know why the man command is missing, because the
| pages themselves are there under /usr/man.
| mimotomo2009 wrote:
| You can use roff to show the manpages.
|
| e.g. roff -Tman who.1
| swagempire wrote:
| Cool-- thanks :)
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I'm intrigued by the /LICENSE.txt file. How did Caldera
| International obtain the rights to distribute Research Unix 1-7e
| and 32V? Was it through their acquisition of SCO, and if so, how
| did SCO receive those rights?
| rst wrote:
| AT&T sold its Unix-related IP to Novell, which then relicensed
| some of it to SCO. Whether Novell transferred enough to provide
| a basis for the lawsuits is itself a question that was argued
| in court -- and ultimately _not_ decided in SCO 's favor.
| Summary here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes
| mlyle wrote:
| It dies when you run bc. Can't even switch between ttys.
|
| "fatal error: sync: unlock of unlocked mutex" shows up on the
| javascript console.
| chubot wrote:
| Why a simulated PDP-11 CPU rather than compiling to wasm? I guess
| because wasm is pure computation with no interrupts and so forth?
| Also no access to the stack
|
| Also it's probably a lot more work to retarget the existing
| compilers to new back ends
|
| Although if this is a new Go implementation, it's probably a lot
| of work anyway
| rst wrote:
| Nontrivial amounts of the source are PDP-11 assembly -- a lot
| of it in the kernel, but also bits of userland.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Did v6 have control-C? It doesn't seem to do anything. C-\
| crashes the wasm with `panic: qsav`. Try running just `cat`.
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(page generated 2023-10-29 23:02 UTC)