From mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU Fri Jan 19 23:29:23 1990 From: mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Emacs Date: 19 Jan 90 22:56:26 GMT Organization: Mendou Zaibatsu, Tomobiki-Cho, Butsumetsu-Shi In article nott@unix.cis.pitt.edu (nancy nott) writes: >In the same vein as all of the posts about TECO, VAX, and PDP.... >What does Emacs mean? Editing MACroS. Work on EMACS started in the summer of 1976. The people who worked on it primarily at that time were Guy Steele, Richard Stallman, and Dave Moon. EMACS was written in TECO, but not the TECO that most people know. Most people know a very stripped-down and bastardized TECO which Bob Clements adapted for the DEC operating system for the PDP-6. The original TECO was written by Dan Murphy for the PDP-1, and later reimplemented on the PDP-6 (by, if I remember correctly, Richard Greenblatt, Jack Holloway, and Tom Knight in a single weekend!). The original TECO used a display scope to display the text being edited around the editing point. It remained a source of wonder and astonishment to the original authors of TECO that anyone ever used it without a display screen. This TECO ran on MIT's operating system for the PDP-6 and PDP-10, ITS (Incompatible TimeSharing). At Stanford, a different track of display editors had developed, again starting with the display scope on the PDP-1. The two surviving today are TVEDIT for Tenex/TOPS-20 and E for WAITS. Richard Stallman visited the Stanford AI Lab and was impressed by E's real-time editing facility. When he returned to MIT, he implemented so-called "^R mode" (a real time editing mode in TECO invoked by the CTRL/R command) in TECO. Although ^R mode made a whole new style of editing possible (unlike E and TVEDIT, the default action for newly typed in text was insert rather than replace), it was still rather primitive. The search was for a single character only, and you would still have to go back to TECO to do lots of things (such as read or write files!). Two major sets of TECO macro packages (a "macro" is a program, written in TECO, stored in a TECO register) developed; TECMAC and TMACS. TECMAC was a more real-time editor, while TMACS had a much richer set of functionality including named commands. Just about everybody had their own customizations on top of these packages. This was the situation when I worked at MIT in the summer of '76. I had brought with me my own favorite TECO-style editor, which, although it had only the functionality of primitive DEC TECO, had two interesting facilities: (1) it compiled all TECO programs (including commands) prior to execution, and (2) it had multi-character register names, which greatly increased the number of possible TECO registers to virtually infinite. Richard Stallman implemented the latter in TECO as part of the EMACS project, which was originally intended as a replacement for both TECMAC and TMACS. By New Years in 1977 EMACS had made significant inroads against TECMAC/TMACS; and in another year or so the older editors had both succumbed to software rot. Michael McMahon was irritated at the editor situation for Tenex and TOPS-20; the alternatives at that time ranged from TVEDIT to QED to TV (a DEC TOPS-20 TECO-like program with display terminal functionality much like that of the 1964 MIT TECO). He undertook the long and laborious task of porting MIT EMACS from ITS to Tenex and TOPS-20, and by 1978 EMACS was running on a small set of Tenex and TOPS-20 systems at MIT, Stanford, and SRI. Richard Stallman did heroic efforts to propagate the mass (and free) distribution to just about every TOPS-20 system in the work. This guaranteed EMACS a place in the sun. Without McMahon and Stallman's efforts we'd probably all be using vi or worse today. In the 1980's, TOPS-20 had reached its zenith. Because of horribly high maintenance costs (DEC was trying to shut down the product line in favor of VAX/VMS, and finally did in 1983), many sites were migrating from TOPS-20. Not trusting DEC, many sites picked UNIX as their migration path instead of VMS. There were a few critical TOPS-20 tools which "must" be ported before the migration; and one of those was EMACS. The rest is well-known... _____ ____ ---+--- /-\ Mark Crispin Atheist & Proud _|_|_ _|_ || ___|__ / / 6158 Lariat Loop NE R90/6 pilot |_|_|_| /|\-++- |=====| / / Bainbridge Island, WA "Gaijin! Gaijin!" --|-- | |||| |_____| / \ USA 98110-2098 "Gaijin ha doko ka?" /|\ | |/\| _______ / \ +1 (206) 842-2385 "Niichan ha gaijin." / | \ | |__| / \ / \ mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU "Chigau. Gaijin ja nai. kisha no kisha ga kisha de kisha-shita Omae ha gaijin darou." sumomo mo momo, momo mo momo, momo ni mo iroiro aru "Iie, boku ha nihonjin." uraniwa ni wa niwa, niwa ni wa niwa niwatori ga iru "Souka. Yappari gaijin!"
Archive for the ‘software’ Category
Origin of Emacs
August 5, 2008Origin of dd
August 5, 2008
From prp@SEI.CMU.EDU Sun Jul 8 23:32:29 1990
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 90 11:09:11 -0400
From: prp@SEI.CMU.EDU
To: djm@eng.umd.edu
Subject: The Unix "dd" command
Why not collect responses and post them.
My understanding of the naming (and syntax for use)
is that this was done as a joke. Notably it is poking
fun at OS/360 - a once reasonably well known operating
system where commands like //DD SYSIN= ... abounded and
were used for setting up I/O devices for various programs
that were about to be run.
Pat Place prp@sei.cmu.edu
From shore@mtxinu.COM Sun Jul 8 23:32:44 1990
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 90 16:23:49 -0700
From: shore@mtxinu.COM (Melinda Shore)
To: djm@eng.umd.edu
Subject: Re: etymology of the Unix "dd" command
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley
Cc:
[]
IBM batch OS job control decks take data definition cards (DD cards)
to describe files involved to run a job. If you take a look at the
syntax of the dd command, you'll see that it looks an awful lot like
DD cards, sans commas.
Melinda
--
Melinda Shore shore@mtxinu.com
mt Xinu ..!uunet!mtxinu.com!shore
From clt@pyrps5 Fri Apr 20 14:23:24 1990
From: clt@pyrps5 (Chris Torkildson)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: etymology of the Unix \
Date: 20 Apr 90 15:51:16 GMT
Reply-To: clt@pyrps5.pyramid.com (Chris Torkildson)
Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA
In article throoph@jacobs.CS.ORST.EDU (Henry Throop) writes:
>In article djm@eng.umd.edu (David J. MacKenzie) writes:
>>Does anyone know how the Unix "dd" command got its name?
>
>I read (I think in UnixWorld, or some other magazine) that it stood
>for DarneD if I know, but I don't know whether to believe this or
>not. (No, I'm not making think up, btw.)
>
>Henry
The IBM dd statement stands for "Data Description" which is a keyword,
non-Unix like JCL statement to exactly specify volume id, blocking factors,
tape densities and so on. The IBM dd statement looks very much like the Unix
dd command. I always assumed that the person who named the Unix dd just
followed the IBM naming conventions, for some warped and perverted reason.
From bzs@world.std.com Sun Apr 22 19:24:47 1990
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: etymology of the Unix "dd" command
Date: 22 Apr 90 19:19:28 GMT
Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
In-Reply-To: throoph@jacobs.CS.ORST.EDU's message of 18 Apr 90 04:44:23 GMT
>Does anyone know how the Unix "dd" command got its name?
It's a play on the IBM/JCL DD command, DD stood for DATA DEFINITION in
JCL and was how you attached files to a job. All files had to be
pre-allocated and were defined externally to the job, sort of like the
Unix commands only absurdly complicated.
The cards looked like:
//sysin dd *
which meant attach the symbolic input name (sysin) to the rest of this
card deck (*), but more telling are things like:
//sysin dd lrecl=80,blksiz=800,disp=(new,new,save),
space=(20,20,rlse)
(hmm, doesn't look quite right, who cares)
starting to look familiar? There were around 200 options available,
and the defaults were almost always wrong...
The job accessed the symbol SYSIN (or whatever, you just made it up,
but a lot of packages used SYSIN, SYSOUT, SYSPRINT and SYSPUNCH as a
standard) as if it were a file and the file was attached externally
through a DSNAME (data set name) card who's format was described in
the DD card.
Let's put it this way, it took a reasonably seasoned programmer to
just make a copy of a file...
The fun part was that JCL errors where I worked years ago cost about
$1.50 each due to minimum costs of running one job through and having
it bomb out. I went through over $1,000 one evening, in real money,
trying to get one lousy JCL bug out which turned out to be a change
someone in systems had made in a standard JCL utility program...
The point being, DD cards were loathsome things so making a Unix
command with that name was black humor.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | bzs@world.std.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD
Origin of alloca
August 5, 2008From dmr@bell-lbs.com Wed Feb 2 00:02:18 2000 Path: news.eng.us.uu.net!uunet!ffx.uu.net!nntphub.cb.lucent.com!news From: Dennis Ritchie Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: !alloca (was: Re: How's this: Where do I get a C99 compiler?) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 19:08:12 +0000 Organization: Lucent Technologies, Columbus, Ohio Lines: 17 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: centaur.cs.bell-labs.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.03 [en] (WinNT; U) Xref: news.eng.us.uu.net comp.std.c:32470 As a point of history, alloca was first done by Ken Thompson between the 6th and 7th edition PDP-11 systems. Because of the stack layout, this was trivial and robust against most of the obvious failures (not f(a, alloca(10), b) though.) When we started doing the Interdata port, alloca looked quite hard to do and much less robust. So I extirpated it; none of our distributions had it. Somehow, however, it had escaped, perhaps in a PWB distribution. Or perhaps it was reinvented. Dennis
D-Mac's Stuff 