[Sluglug] 10 reasons I hate U(nix)

Mon Nov 14 15:15:26 PST 2005

Actually, it wasn't at all Intel - it was some combination of IBM
(long before Intel), the desire to have larger than 6-bit or 7-bit
character sets, TI's packaging of IC's in groups of 4 gates or
flipflops, that caused the change. The IBM 360 a bit after 1965
lead the way.

As for DEC: the PDP-10 used all discrete (meaning PNP
transistors and diodes) logic - negative levels - except for
the registers, which were implemented with TTL flipflops
with their 'grounds' at -3 volts and vcc at +2 volts to interface
with the negative level DEC "flip chip" logic. BTW PDP-6's
and PDP-8's and earlier mainly used germanium transistors,
thus they needed good air conditioning due to the temp.
characteristics of germanium. PDP-10s mainly used
silicon PNP transistors for more speed and better temperature
stability.

When Stanford got its first PDP-10 - with no core memory - they
built their own interface to some core memory built by Ampex -
I ran some test programs in the registers (the 16 registers were
the 1st 16 memory locations) and found a flipflop burnt out
already, so we had to order a new register card. (yeah, I
keyed in the instructions in binary on the switches)

The later KI-10 used all IC's. Likewise with the DEC 20 of course.
Then there was the Xerox PARC MAXC which emulated it -
that was microcoded, sharing logic with the later ALTO.

 Peter

On 11/14/05, Thomas Leavitt <thomas at thomasleavitt.org> wrote:
> This is a good reminder that we were not always stuck on Intel's 4, 8,
> 16, 32, 64, 128 bit squirrel wheel. :)
>
> Thomas
>
> On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 22:47 -0800, Peter Belew wrote:
> > The first Unix versions were run on the PDP-7, which has a quite
> > different architecture from the later PDP-11 - 18-bit words,
> > no byte addressing (in fact, Digital hadn't started to use the word
> > 'byte' yet - an IBM coinage somewhat disparaged by the
> > anti-IBM users of DEC machines of the day - note that
> > networking folks dating back to that time tend to say 'octet'
> > rather than 'byte'). The first Unix was in assembly code; 'B'
> > was eventually written for the PDP-7 version (it was inspired
> > by the very spartan word-only BCPL language, in turn inspired
> > by the British language CPL, which was never fully implemented
> > by anyone). But with the PDP-11 came C, based on 'B',
> > which had byte addressing added on.
> >
> >    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7
> >    http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html
> >
> > (As an aside, the version of BCPL used by Xerox PARC in the
> > mid-1970s did have a really kludgy syntax for byte addressing
> > on the Data General Nova and Xerox PARC Alto - I believe
> > this version was created in Switzerland, possibly at CERN??.
> > BTW BCPL had a feature most recently seen in Perl - in
> > addition to the 'if' statement, it had 'unless'. This was dropped
> > in C, sadly IMHO).
> >
> > Process control went under a lot of changes in early Unix, as
> > the Ritchie article describes. The advent of multithreading
> > has a bearing on some of the criticisms. Also named pipes
> > are a useful mechanism in Unix for dealing with processes
> > with multiple output streams and/oAcr needing 2-way
> > communication:
> >
> >   http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/named_pipes.html
> >
> > (Another aside: most early PDP's, like a number of early IBM
> > machines, in fact, used a 6-bit character set, and word sizes
> > were typically a multiple of that - 36 bits for the PDP-6 and
> > PDP-10 and DEC 20 and IBM 704/7090 machines, 18
> > bits for the PDP-1 and PDP-4 and PDP-7, 12 bits for the
> > PDP-5 and PDP-8, for example; the PDP6/10/DEC20 series
> > software switched to using 7-bit ASCII, with a bit left over on
> > each 36-bit word to flag words used for line number marks
> > in text files; that series of computers were the first PDPs to
> > have byte addressing, with special instructions for addressing
> > variable-length bytes. The PDP-11 marks the transition
> > to little-ending byte and bit addressing and power-of-2
> > word sizes in the DEC world).
> >
> > (I'm running out of steam, so off to bed! Maybe it's
> > "out of streams")
> >
> > (Another aside, further afield - speaking of the 36-bit big-endian
> > IBM machines like the 704 - their instruction set and registers
> > inspired the CAR and CDR keywords of LISP, first implemented
> > by John McCarthy on a 704 - 'Contents of Address Register'
> > and 'Contents of Decrement Register'.)
> >
> > Now I'm really sleepy.
> >
> >  - Peter
> >
> >
> > On 11/11/05, Thomas Leavitt <thomas at thomasleavitt.org> wrote:
> > > Message: 2
> > > Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 14:04:51 -0800
> > > From: Ignacio Solis <isolis at igso.net>
> > > Subject: [Sluglug] 10 reasons I hate U(nix)
> > > To: SlugLUG <sluglug at sluglug.ucsc.edu>
> > > Message-ID: <20051107220451.GB16415 at inrg.cse.ucsc.edu>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> > >
> > > I read this article today and was wondering what were people's
> > > impressions.
> > > Link originally from osnews.
> > >
> > > http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=424451&rl=1
> > >
> > > Nacho
> > >
> > > ***
> > >
> > > Interesting, although I've heard most of this before in one rant or
> > > another. ... but, it would seem that a lot of these things can be fixed
> > > (or have already been fixed, such as he points out with Mach and GNU
> > > Hurd).
> > >
> > > There's nothing stopping someone from designing and releasing a version
> > > of Linux that has fixes for most of these problems layered in.
> > >
> > > Thomas
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Sluglug mailing list
> > > Sluglug at sluglug.ucsc.edu
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> > >
>
>