[HN Gopher] Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
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Unix Programmer's Manual Third Edition [pdf] (1973)
Author : rbanffy
Score : 177 points
Date : 2024-11-05 22:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dspinellis.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dspinellis.github.io)
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Third edition in 1973
| nineteen999 wrote:
| Around the time that UNIX was being rewritten in C.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > the number of UNIX installations has grown to 16, with more
| expected.
|
| What a time.
| userbinator wrote:
| A time when computers were _very_ expensive.
| kragen wrote:
| But Unix could run on a cheap PDP-11, within the budget of
| many departments.
| nine_k wrote:
| Take a look at the PDP-11 price list from 1973: https://iam
| virtual.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.
| bityard wrote:
| Enterprise gear today can pretty quickly and easily add
| up to seven digits per rack. At a previous job, I
| personally handled a specialized network processing card
| that retailed for over a quarter million dollars.
|
| The PDP-11 seems like a bargain for what was fairly close
| to cutting edge technology at the time.
| a2800276 wrote:
| And most "departments" nowadays won't have a seven-figure
| racks of hardware. Especially not incredibly arcane
| hardware that possibly only 100's of people on earth are
| capable of operating at all, which require you to upgrade
| your electrical and possibly floors and furthermore are
| so novel conceptually that one is not even sure what
| problems would be applicable to it.
| kragen wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42058952 for
| details on current and past capital intensity in the US.
| It doesn't take a very big department in most industries
| to get past seven figures of capital stock, sometimes
| just a single person and virtually always less than ten
| people.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| 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.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| +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_compute
| r_class...
| p_l wrote:
| It was cheap compared to computers one would have
| otherwise run for timesharing, whether they were PDP-10,
| S/360, or some of the other contenders.
|
| The real breakout for Unix was that it was something you
| could grab for free and later it was possible to port
| software to other platforms easier
| kragen wrote:
| I'm not sure how to interpret these prices. Is your $100k
| number current dollars or 01973 dollars? Does it include
| terminals?
|
| That price list seems to be mostly for the PDP-11/40,
| which according to
| http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11_Memory_Management does
| seem to have supported a kernel/user mode split and a
| base register for keeping multiple processes resident in
| core, without any extra options, so I infer it was
| suitable for Unix. But I'm not sure if you might have
| needed the KT11-D addon memory management unit.
|
| The 01974 CACM paper
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/361011.361061 says
| Unix could run on hardware costing as little as [US]$40
| 000, which would be about US$250 000 today.
|
| I think it's common for each office employee today to
| receive a US$2500 computer, so US$250k is a 100-employee
| departmental computer budget, not counting things like
| network infrastructure and servers. In other workplaces
| such as machine shops, coal mines, construction sites,
| and cattle ranches, capital investment per employee is
| commonly several times that.
|
| Unix was not designed to support that many users--the uid
| was 8 bits--so the Programmer's Workbench users over the
| next few years took to sharing a single uid per a whole
| team of users. Later versions of Unix, of course,
| expanded the uid to 16 and later 32 bits.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/capital-intensity-vs-
| labo... seems to have a measure of capital intensity
| capital stock per worker, but I don't understand how to
| interpret it. The US today is around 198, and 103 in
| 01973, and the units are supposed to be inflation-
| adjusted (02010) dollars per work hour. But work hours
| are a flow, not a stock, and we're supposed to be
| measuring capital stock. So does that mean dollars per
| work hour _per year_? If so, that works out to about
| US$200k of capital stock per full-time worker in 01973,
| as an average across the economy. That would be a US$700k
| PDP-11-equivalent for every 4-8 workers in 01973, or for
| every 2-4 workers today.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RKNANPUSA666NRUG puts
| the total capital stock of the US at 23 trillion
| inflation-adjusted dollars in 01973, and
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS puts total
| nonfarm employment at about 78 million for the country.
| This works out to about US$290 000 per employee, which is
| in the same ballpark as the French data but a bit higher,
| a US$700k PDP-11 for every 2-3 workers. But maybe a lot
| of the capital stock was on farms, which are excluded
| from the denominator here.
| 0xbs0d wrote:
| Elegant software for a more civilized age.
| pstric wrote:
| Would this OS have any chance of getting certified as a genuine
| Unix today?
| gavindean90 wrote:
| No not even close
| scrybdopylon wrote:
| It'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.
| doublehelix1020 wrote:
| Go Engineers!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| PDP-7 (original Bell Labs), PDP-11 (very popular at
| universities), and VAX-11 (especially VAX-11/780) were popular
| 1970s/80s Unix hosts.
|
| (Long live kremvax!!! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax>.)
| kragen wrote:
| I don't think the PDP-7 was a _popular_ Unix host; as far as
| I know, Unix only ever ran on one PDP-7, because all but the
| earliest Unix versions were for the PDP-11, which was
| profoundly incompatible with the PDP-7.
| rightbyte wrote:
| 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.
| rjurney wrote:
| Downloaded for future RAG / LLM retrieval :)
| ape4 wrote:
| I love how the "Index" (starting on page 18 of the PDF) doesn't
| send the reader to page numbers
| a2800276 wrote:
| Pretty useable though. It's more of a glossary that explains
| the meaning of the (very short) command names and sends you to
| the proper Volume (in roman numerals) those are sorted
| alphabetically.
|
| Considering most users would probably be reading this on a fan
| paper printout, an index like this was probably quite good
| ergonomically.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| My favorite (and also surprising) old Unix document is an USENIX
| paper from 1984, describing the /proc filesystem:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26298564
| jdougan wrote:
| I 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.
| blueflow wrote:
| A Brief History of the 'rm' and 'rmdir' commands :
| https://linuxgazette.net/issue49/fischer.html
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| It probably got dropped when more orthogonal ways to do the
| same thing were better supported.
|
| Before looking for a builtin command to do that, I'd execute a
| _find_ (1) in my editor to load a buffer up with potential
| files to delete, and then _xargs_ (1) the edited buffer to _rm_
| (1) them; without xargs I'd probably just prepend "rm -f" to
| all lines and then execute the whole buffer; if I wished to do
| it the slow way I could pipe those names through a shell loop;
| etc. etc.
|
| (with _ed_ (1) you'd need to first write the buffer to the
| filesystem, then bang-execute it, but the same workflow would
| suffice even on a hard tty)
|
| EDIT: see sibling for real story: _dsw_ (1) was meant to remove
| files with shell-inexpressible filenames, so none of the above
| would apply. Not being a unix-kernel hacker (and not having had
| my shell sessions corrupted by noise chars due to someone
| attempting to use the modem line for voice in decades), I've
| always managed to use wildcards to get a suitably-unique
| typeable match to the occasional binary-named junk file.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Replaced by rm -i perhaps?
| jdougan wrote:
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| mimotomo2009 wrote:
| Maybe for someone interesting, too, could be the Repository
| "Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today"
| (https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo.git) from Prof.
| Diomidis Spinellis.
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(page generated 2024-11-06 23:02 UTC)