From lm at mcvoy.com Sun May 5 06:48:29 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 13:48:29 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? Message-ID: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> Decades ago there was an interpreted C in an X10 or X11 app, I believe it came from the UK. And maybe it wasn't X11, maybe it was Sunview? Whatever it was the author didn't like the bundled scrollbars and had their own custom made one. You could set breakpoints like a debugger and then go look around at state. Does anyone else remember that app and what it was called? From bakul at bitblocks.com Sun May 5 07:08:10 2019 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 14:08:10 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> The ups debugger by Mark Russell of University of Kent. It used x11 or sunview. IIRC it used a separate graphics library built directly on top of x11 (or sunview) that provided variable scrolling etc. scrolling speed and direction depended on the distance you dragged the mouse pointer from its initial position. You could click on any source like and add a break or custom code in interpreted C. You could click on the data structure window and follow linked list structures etc. The last version was 3.38 in 2003. I don’t think it works with anything more modern than gcc3. The nicest debugger I ever used. > On May 4, 2019, at 1:48 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > Decades ago there was an interpreted C in an X10 or X11 app, I believe it > came from the UK. And maybe it wasn't X11, maybe it was Sunview? > Whatever it was the author didn't like the bundled scrollbars and had > their own custom made one. > > You could set breakpoints like a debugger and then go look around at state. > > Does anyone else remember that app and what it was called? From lm at mcvoy.com Sun May 5 07:30:00 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 14:30:00 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> Message-ID: <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> That's it! And my memory is exactly like yours, it was a pleasant debugger. And I think you are right, the normal code was C but the break points ran in a interpreter. Neat tool, a shame it's not maintained. On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 02:08:10PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote: > The ups debugger by Mark Russell of University of Kent. It used x11 or sunview. IIRC it used a separate graphics library built directly on top of x11 (or sunview) that provided variable scrolling etc. scrolling speed and direction depended on the distance you dragged the mouse pointer from its initial position. You could click on any source like and add a break or custom code in interpreted C. You could click on the data structure window and follow linked list structures etc. The last version was 3.38 in 2003. I don???t think it works with anything more modern than gcc3. The nicest debugger I ever used. > > > On May 4, 2019, at 1:48 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > > Decades ago there was an interpreted C in an X10 or X11 app, I believe it > > came from the UK. And maybe it wasn't X11, maybe it was Sunview? > > Whatever it was the author didn't like the bundled scrollbars and had > > their own custom made one. > > > > You could set breakpoints like a debugger and then go look around at state. > > > > Does anyone else remember that app and what it was called? -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm From rich.salz at gmail.com Sun May 5 08:05:53 2019 From: rich.salz at gmail.com (Richard Salz) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 18:05:53 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: Also there was a commercial product, centerline C. Originally Saber-C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bakul at bitblocks.com Sun May 5 08:18:30 2019 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 15:18:30 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <62C741C1-F45D-4D12-941A-54F2B33A87DD@bitblocks.com> Turns out, it is still being maintained! https://github.com/sth/ups Previous sourceforge site is still around and has a screenshot of ups http://ups.sourceforge.net/ No idea if the ups-users group is around. The last time there was any activity was in 2010 — including a post from you! > On May 4, 2019, at 2:30 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > That's it! And my memory is exactly like yours, it was a pleasant debugger. > And I think you are right, the normal code was C but the break points ran > in a interpreter. Neat tool, a shame it's not maintained. > >> On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 02:08:10PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote: >> The ups debugger by Mark Russell of University of Kent. It used x11 or sunview. IIRC it used a separate graphics library built directly on top of x11 (or sunview) that provided variable scrolling etc. scrolling speed and direction depended on the distance you dragged the mouse pointer from its initial position. You could click on any source like and add a break or custom code in interpreted C. You could click on the data structure window and follow linked list structures etc. The last version was 3.38 in 2003. I don???t think it works with anything more modern than gcc3. The nicest debugger I ever used. >> >>> On May 4, 2019, at 1:48 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: >>> >>> Decades ago there was an interpreted C in an X10 or X11 app, I believe it >>> came from the UK. And maybe it wasn't X11, maybe it was Sunview? >>> Whatever it was the author didn't like the bundled scrollbars and had >>> their own custom made one. >>> >>> You could set breakpoints like a debugger and then go look around at state. >>> >>> Does anyone else remember that app and what it was called? > > -- > --- > Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nobozo at gmail.com Sun May 5 08:23:50 2019 From: nobozo at gmail.com (Jon Forrest) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 15:23:50 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On 5/4/2019 3:05 PM, Richard Salz wrote: > Also there was a commercial product, centerline C. Originally Saber-C. There's also Ch from https://www.softintegration.com/ "Ch is a C/C++ interpreter and scripting language environment." Jon From clemc at ccc.com Sun May 5 08:35:15 2019 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem cole) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 18:35:15 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <049F84E5-E84F-4B4F-B611-EBE5D9F04995@ccc.com> Peter Darrell did another one as a companion to the his learning C book in the mid/late 90s. I’ll have to ask him what happened to it. He later morphed it into VisSol which was a mathlab like language that was visual drag/drop system that was popular in the scientific community. Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. > On May 4, 2019, at 6:23 PM, Jon Forrest wrote: > > > >> On 5/4/2019 3:05 PM, Richard Salz wrote: >> Also there was a commercial product, centerline C. Originally Saber-C. > > There's also Ch from https://www.softintegration.com/ > > > "Ch is a C/C++ interpreter and scripting language environment." > > Jon From lm at mcvoy.com Sun May 5 10:07:08 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 17:07:08 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: <62C741C1-F45D-4D12-941A-54F2B33A87DD@bitblocks.com> References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> <62C741C1-F45D-4D12-941A-54F2B33A87DD@bitblocks.com> Message-ID: <20190505000708.GF25317@mcvoy.com> Does anyone know what the fix is for this: ./ci_compile_expr.c: In function 'opcode_offset': ./ci_compile_expr.c:599:11: error: 'LONGLONG_FORM_OFFSET' undeclared (first use in this function) return LONGLONG_FORM_OFFSET; On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 03:18:30PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote: > Turns out, it is still being maintained! > > https://github.com/sth/ups > > Previous sourceforge site is still around and has a screenshot of ups > http://ups.sourceforge.net/ > > No idea if the ups-users group is around. The last time there was any activity > was in 2010 ??? including a post from you! > > > On May 4, 2019, at 2:30 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > > That's it! And my memory is exactly like yours, it was a pleasant debugger. > > And I think you are right, the normal code was C but the break points ran > > in a interpreter. Neat tool, a shame it's not maintained. > > > >> On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 02:08:10PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote: > >> The ups debugger by Mark Russell of University of Kent. It used x11 or sunview. IIRC it used a separate graphics library built directly on top of x11 (or sunview) that provided variable scrolling etc. scrolling speed and direction depended on the distance you dragged the mouse pointer from its initial position. You could click on any source like and add a break or custom code in interpreted C. You could click on the data structure window and follow linked list structures etc. The last version was 3.38 in 2003. I don???t think it works with anything more modern than gcc3. The nicest debugger I ever used. > >> > >>> On May 4, 2019, at 1:48 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > >>> > >>> Decades ago there was an interpreted C in an X10 or X11 app, I believe it > >>> came from the UK. And maybe it wasn't X11, maybe it was Sunview? > >>> Whatever it was the author didn't like the bundled scrollbars and had > >>> their own custom made one. > >>> > >>> You could set breakpoints like a debugger and then go look around at state. > >>> > >>> Does anyone else remember that app and what it was called? > > > > -- > > --- > > Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm From bakul at bitblocks.com Sun May 5 10:15:40 2019 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Sat, 04 May 2019 17:15:40 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 04 May 2019 17:07:08 -0700." <20190505000708.GF25317@mcvoy.com> References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> <62C741C1-F45D-4D12-941A-54F2B33A87DD@bitblocks.com> <20190505000708.GF25317@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20190505001547.F0B93156E40C@mail.bitblocks.com> On Sat, 04 May 2019 17:07:08 -0700 Larry McVoy wrote: > Does anyone know what the fix is for this: > > ./ci_compile_expr.c: In function 'opcode_offset': > ./ci_compile_expr.c:599:11: error: 'LONGLONG_FORM_OFFSET' undeclared (first u > se > in this function) > return LONGLONG_FORM_OFFSET; add --enable-longlong when calling configure. This is still not enough to compile it on freebsd though. I hacked in #include in ifdefs.h but nope. From lm at mcvoy.com Sun May 5 10:29:17 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 17:29:17 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] interpreted C? In-Reply-To: <20190505001547.F0B93156E40C@mail.bitblocks.com> References: <20190504204829.GB25317@mcvoy.com> <1B576642-442C-4C4F-8374-A966BD63DAB8@bitblocks.com> <20190504213000.GC25317@mcvoy.com> <62C741C1-F45D-4D12-941A-54F2B33A87DD@bitblocks.com> <20190505000708.GF25317@mcvoy.com> <20190505001547.F0B93156E40C@mail.bitblocks.com> Message-ID: <20190505002917.GG25317@mcvoy.com> On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 05:15:40PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote: > On Sat, 04 May 2019 17:07:08 -0700 Larry McVoy wrote: > > Does anyone know what the fix is for this: > > > > ./ci_compile_expr.c: In function 'opcode_offset': > > ./ci_compile_expr.c:599:11: error: 'LONGLONG_FORM_OFFSET' undeclared (first u > > se > > in this function) > > return LONGLONG_FORM_OFFSET; > > add --enable-longlong when calling configure. > This is still not enough to compile it on freebsd though. > I hacked in #include in ifdefs.h but nope. I got it to build on Linux 4.4.0-146-generic - cool! Blast from the past! -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Tue May 7 22:50:24 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 08:50:24 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East Message-ID: Brian interviewing Ken -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From crossd at gmail.com Wed May 8 00:17:08 2019 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 10:17:08 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Wow, that's really great! I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I didn't get Ken's shirt until 30 minutes into the talk.... On Tue, May 7, 2019 at 8:51 AM John P. Linderman wrote: > Brian interviewing Ken > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From david at kdbarto.org Wed May 8 00:33:48 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 07:33:48 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Loved the talk, and getting more information about Belle. Saw the shirt right away, even understood the greek. David > On May 7, 2019, at 7:17 AM, Dan Cross wrote: > > Wow, that's really great! I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I didn't get Ken's shirt until 30 minutes into the talk.... > > On Tue, May 7, 2019 at 8:51 AM John P. Linderman > wrote: > Brian interviewing Ken -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Wed May 8 02:32:24 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 12:32:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] VCF East Message-ID: <20190507163224.A02DD18C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: "John P. Linderman" > Brian interviewing Ken Ah, thanks for that. I had intended going (since I've never met Ken), but alas, my daughter's family had previously scheduled to visit that weekend, so I couldn't go. The 'grep' story was amusing, but historically, probably the most valuable thing was the detail on the origins of B - DMR's paper on early C ("The Development of the C Language") mentions the FORTRAN, but doesn't give the detail on why that got canned, and B appeared instead. Noel From aap at papnet.eu Wed May 8 02:36:12 2019 From: aap at papnet.eu (Angelo Papenhoff) Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 18:36:12 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: <20190507163224.A02DD18C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20190507163224.A02DD18C091@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20190507163612.GA29343@indra.papnet.eu> On 07/05/19, Noel Chiappa wrote: > The 'grep' story was amusing, but historically, probably the most valuable > thing was the detail on the origins of B - DMR's paper on early C ("The > Development of the C Language") mentions the FORTRAN, but doesn't give the > detail on why that got canned, and B appeared instead. I was also quite surprised by that. No mention of BCPL... Great video, really loved it. From arnold at skeeve.com Wed May 8 02:51:31 2019 From: arnold at skeeve.com (arnold at skeeve.com) Date: Tue, 07 May 2019 10:51:31 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <201905071651.x47GpVad031140@freefriends.org> Dan Cross wrote: > Wow, that's really great! I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I didn't get > Ken's shirt until 30 minutes into the talk.... Can you clue in those of us who are less mathematically (or whatever) inclined? Thanks, Arnold From ality at pbrane.org Wed May 8 03:04:41 2019 From: ality at pbrane.org (Anthony Martin) Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 10:04:41 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: <201905071651.x47GpVad031140@freefriends.org> References: <201905071651.x47GpVad031140@freefriends.org> Message-ID: <20190507170441.GA19420@alice> arnold at skeeve.com once said: > Can you clue in those of us who are less mathematically (or whatever) > inclined? You are not expected to understand this [t-shirt]. Anthony From grog at lemis.com Fri May 10 14:45:41 2019 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 14:45:41 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: <20190507170441.GA19420@alice> References: <201905071651.x47GpVad031140@freefriends.org> <20190507170441.GA19420@alice> Message-ID: <20190510044541.GA13284@eureka.lemis.com> On Tuesday, 7 May 2019 at 10:04:41 -0700, Anthony Martin wrote: > arnold at skeeve.com once said: >> Can you clue in those of us who are less mathematically (or whatever) >> inclined? > > You are not expected to understand this [t-shirt]. I found that particularly clever. It's not Greek, as far as I can tell, but who cares? You are not expected to understand it. Of course, the real clue was the code (Sixth Edition /usr/sys/ken/slp.c, lines 325 and on). Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From arno.griffioen at ieee.org Sun May 12 18:07:38 2019 From: arno.griffioen at ieee.org (Arno Griffioen) Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 10:07:38 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20190512080738.GB25068@ancienthardware.org> On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 07:33:48AM -0700, David wrote: > Loved the talk, and getting more information about Belle. At the risk of going off-topic TUHS-wise.. This month: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/in-1983-this-bell-labs-computer-was-the-first-machine-to-become-a-chess-master Bye, Arno. From robpike at gmail.com Sun May 12 22:09:13 2019 From: robpike at gmail.com (Rob Pike) Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 22:09:13 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: <20190512080738.GB25068@ancienthardware.org> References: <20190512080738.GB25068@ancienthardware.org> Message-ID: That photo is not Belle, or at least not the Belle machine that the article is about. Belle is in a white wooden box about the size of a bar fridge, with a stylized blue and gold logo on the side. -rob On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 6:21 PM Arno Griffioen wrote: > On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 07:33:48AM -0700, David wrote: > > Loved the talk, and getting more information about Belle. > > At the risk of going off-topic TUHS-wise.. This month: > > > https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/in-1983-this-bell-labs-computer-was-the-first-machine-to-become-a-chess-master > > > Bye, Arno. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ralph at inputplus.co.uk Sun May 12 22:36:44 2019 From: ralph at inputplus.co.uk (Ralph Corderoy) Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 13:36:44 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: References: <20190512080738.GB25068@ancienthardware.org> Message-ID: <20190512123644.DEF3721C9A@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Hi Rob, > > https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/in-1983-this-bell-labs-computer-was-the-first-machine-to-become-a-chess-master > > That photo is not Belle, or at least not the Belle machine that the > article is about. Belle is in a white wooden box about the size of a > bar fridge, with a stylized blue and gold logo on the side. Here's a picture that matches. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=23230 The one in the article seems to come from http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/belle-chess-machine/ -- Cheers, Ralph. From robpike at gmail.com Mon May 13 22:48:36 2019 From: robpike at gmail.com (Rob Pike) Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 22:48:36 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: <20190512123644.DEF3721C9A@orac.inputplus.co.uk> References: <20190512080738.GB25068@ancienthardware.org> <20190512123644.DEF3721C9A@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Message-ID: Ken tells me (and I now remember) that the photo in the article was of a sort of input device, a board built by Dave Hagelbarger that sensed where the pieces were so could digitize moves. -rob On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 10:44 PM Ralph Corderoy wrote: > Hi Rob, > > > > > https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/in-1983-this-bell-labs-computer-was-the-first-machine-to-become-a-chess-master > > > > That photo is not Belle, or at least not the Belle machine that the > > article is about. Belle is in a white wooden box about the size of a > > bar fridge, with a stylized blue and gold logo on the side. > > Here's a picture that matches. > http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=23230 > > The one in the article seems to come from > http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/belle-chess-machine/ > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Tue May 14 00:14:41 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 10:14:41 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East [Belle] Message-ID: <201905131414.x4DEEfpq039056@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> > That photo is not Belle, or at least not the Belle machine that the article is about. The photo shows the piece-sensing (by tuned resonant circuits) chess board that Joe Condon built before he and Ken built the harware version of Belle that reigned as world computer chess champion for several years beginning in 1980 and became the first machine to earn a master rating. Doug From jon at fourwinds.com Tue May 14 02:26:44 2019 From: jon at fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart) Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 09:26:44 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: References: <20190512080738.GB25068@ancienthardware.org> <20190512123644.DEF3721C9A@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Message-ID: <201905131626.x4DGQiIR018261@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Rob Pike writes: > > Ken tells me (and I now remember) that the photo in the article was of a > sort of input device, a board built by Dave Hagelbarger that sensed where > the pieces were so could digitize moves. > > -rob My extremely fuzzy recollection is that Dave had an LC tuned circuit in the base in each chess piece and an antenna coil underneath each square on the board. Jon From doug at cs.dartmouth.edu Tue May 14 23:41:00 2019 From: doug at cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 09:41:00 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East Message-ID: <201905141341.x4EDf0Q2140314@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> About the creator of the sensing chessboard: It was Dave Hagelbarger, as Rob said, not Joe Condon as I wrongly recalled. Doug From ralph at inputplus.co.uk Wed May 15 05:36:39 2019 From: ralph at inputplus.co.uk (Ralph Corderoy) Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 20:36:39 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: <201905141341.x4EDf0Q2140314@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201905141341.x4EDf0Q2140314@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <20190514193639.8E7132199F@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Hi, Doug wrote: > About the creator of the sensing chessboard: It was Dave Hagelbarger, > as Rob said And if others are thinking Dave sounds familiar, like me, it's because he was co-developer of the CARDIAC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation -- Cheers, Ralph. From jon at fourwinds.com Wed May 15 07:01:59 2019 From: jon at fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart) Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 14:01:59 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: <20190514193639.8E7132199F@orac.inputplus.co.uk> References: <201905141341.x4EDf0Q2140314@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20190514193639.8E7132199F@orac.inputplus.co.uk> Message-ID: <201905142101.x4EL1x1j027122@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Ralph Corderoy writes: > Hi, > > And if others are thinking Dave sounds familiar, like me, it's because > he was co-developer of the CARDIAC. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. Dave was one of my favorite people in my group. He was the first person that met who was absolutely brilliant in technology but couldn't spare any cycles for things like tying his shoes. Another interesting thing that he designed was the keyboard that eventually got hooked up to the music playing version of the digital filter setup that Hal Alles and Jim Kaiser designed. It had a ribbon cable the length of the keyboard that was fed by a binary pattern, and each key had an antenna that moved across the cable when it was pressed making it possible to determine how far a key was pressed down. Jon From robpike at gmail.com Wed May 15 07:48:45 2019 From: robpike at gmail.com (Rob Pike) Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 07:48:45 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] VCF East In-Reply-To: <201905142101.x4EL1x1j027122@darkstar.fourwinds.com> References: <201905141341.x4EDf0Q2140314@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20190514193639.8E7132199F@orac.inputplus.co.uk> <201905142101.x4EL1x1j027122@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: Dave had lots of spare cycles. He was almost all fun. He tied his shoelaces and his bow tie every day. -rob On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 7:02 AM Jon Steinhart wrote: > Ralph Corderoy writes: > > Hi, > > > > And if others are thinking Dave sounds familiar, like me, it's because > > he was co-developer of the CARDIAC. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation > > > > -- > > Cheers, Ralph. > > Dave was one of my favorite people in my group. He was the first person > that met who was absolutely brilliant in technology but couldn't spare any > cycles for things like tying his shoes. > > Another interesting thing that he designed was the keyboard that eventually > got hooked up to the music playing version of the digital filter setup that > Hal Alles and Jim Kaiser designed. It had a ribbon cable the length of the > keyboard that was fed by a binary pattern, and each key had an antenna that > moved across the cable when it was pressed making it possible to determine > how far a key was pressed down. > > Jon > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rmswierczek at gmail.com Sat May 25 17:07:28 2019 From: rmswierczek at gmail.com (Robert Swierczek) Date: Sat, 25 May 2019 03:07:28 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix manuals, TMs, etc In-Reply-To: <20180524010913.GB10344@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20180524010913.GB10344@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: > I will be mailing the Unix TMs and other papers > to Robert Swierczek > who said he will scan any one-of-a-kind items > and make them available to you and TUHS. After an embarrassingly long time, I have found a few spare cycles to scan some of the more interesting items from Mel's collection. Many of the papers can already be found online, others can be found with slightly different formatting or missing the abstract. I will try to prioritize accordingly: https://archive.org/details/@swieros From rminnich at gmail.com Sun May 26 04:46:59 2019 From: rminnich at gmail.com (ron minnich) Date: Sat, 25 May 2019 11:46:59 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Old Unix manuals, TMs, etc In-Reply-To: References: <20180524010913.GB10344@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: does anyone have Plauger's "what is a unix" paper On Sat, May 25, 2019 at 12:17 AM Robert Swierczek wrote: > > > I will be mailing the Unix TMs and other papers > > to Robert Swierczek > > who said he will scan any one-of-a-kind items > > and make them available to you and TUHS. > > After an embarrassingly long time, I have found a few spare cycles to > scan some of the more interesting items from Mel's collection. Many > of the papers can already be found online, others can be found with > slightly different formatting or missing the abstract. I will try to > prioritize accordingly: https://archive.org/details/@swieros From david at kdbarto.org Thu May 30 23:49:05 2019 From: david at kdbarto.org (David) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 06:49:05 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? Message-ID: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. So, anyone ever use this feature? David From crossd at gmail.com Fri May 31 00:26:01 2019 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 10:26:01 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 9:58 AM David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was > just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user > and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, > just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which > they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? > Oh yes. I used them in multiple places; in fact, on a public access Unix system that I still (!!) am active on (well, not really...grex.org) we use them; mostly to try and limit the effects of abuse. Quotas were very useful in time shared and network environments, where you didn't quite trust all of the users. For example, university networks where undergrads were given accounts for course work, but could be otherwise mischievous, and you didn't want them interfering with research happening on the same system/network. - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rp at servium.ch Fri May 31 00:27:04 2019 From: rp at servium.ch (Rico Pajarola) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 16:27:04 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: Every university that allowed "general" student access used disk quotas. I remember 1MB file quota on the system I had access to. And of course we found all kinds of tricks to get around those quotas (e.g. "giving away" large files to someone with leftover quota), which is why on many systems you're not allowed to chown files if you're not root. On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 3:58 PM David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was > just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user > and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, > just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which > they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? > > David > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dds at aueb.gr Fri May 31 00:23:48 2019 From: dds at aueb.gr (Diomidis Spinellis) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 10:23:48 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: As a university student in the 1980s we had a cluster of Sun 3/50s using a Gould computer as a file server over NFS. The system administrators had quotas enabled (5MB per student) to prevent students gobbling up disk space. Here's an email I received when I used more disk space than what was allowed. > From: Tim [...] <[...]@doc.ic.ac.uk> > Date: Tue, 13 Feb 90 10:54:18 GMT > X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.0.3 12/22/89) > To: zmact61 at doc.ic.ac.uk > Subject: quota > Message-ID: <9002131054.aa20550 at tgould.doc.ic.ac.uk> > Status: ORr > > D Spinellis > > I see you have taken advantage of a small admin. oversight when > no quotas were set for your class. > > On Friday 16th I shall be setting your disk quota to 5Mb, and your > inode quota to 500. Please take appropriate action. > > Disk quotas for (no account) (uid 1461): > Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit timeleft > /home/gould/teach > 18545 20000 21000 1602 1700 1750 > /home/gould/staff > 0 200 250 0 40 50 Diomidis On 30-May-19 16:49, David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? > > David > > From robert at timetraveller.org Fri May 31 00:29:01 2019 From: robert at timetraveller.org (Robert Brockway) Date: Fri, 31 May 2019 00:29:01 +1000 (AEST) Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 30 May 2019, David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was > just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a > user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was > interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst > themselves. Which they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? As an undergrad in the 90s I was most definitely subject to quotas on university systems. I believe Unix filesystem quotas have been widely used. FWIW I have quotas enabled on my home fileserver (without enforcement) just so I can see user utilisation at a glance. Cheers, Rob From tytso at mit.edu Fri May 31 00:34:14 2019 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Ts'o) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 10:34:14 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <20190530143414.GF2751@mit.edu> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:49:05AM -0700, David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I > was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or > industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I > thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort > it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? Back when MIT Project Athena was using Vax/750's as time sharing machines (before the advent of the MicroVax II workstations and AFS), students were assigned to a Vax 750, and were given a quota of I think a megabyte, at least initially. It could be increased by applying to the user accounts office. Given that there were roughly 4,000 undergraduates sharing 5 or 6 Vax/750's, it was somewhat understandable... - Ted From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Fri May 31 00:48:50 2019 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 10:48:50 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <20190530143414.GF2751@mit.edu> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> <20190530143414.GF2751@mit.edu> Message-ID: We used them in an AT&T Labs research environment. The intent was less to prevent users from selfishly grabbing (then semi-precious) disk space but to prevent accidents from adversely affecting the user community at large. If you *knew* you were going to need honking amounts of disk, the sysadmins would raise the quota (probably on a partition dedicated to such activities). On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 10:40 AM Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:49:05AM -0700, David wrote: > > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I > > was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or > > industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I > > thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort > > it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. > > > > So, anyone ever use this feature? > > Back when MIT Project Athena was using Vax/750's as time sharing > machines (before the advent of the MicroVax II workstations and AFS), > students were assigned to a Vax 750, and were given a quota of I think > a megabyte, at least initially. It could be increased by applying to > the user accounts office. Given that there were roughly 4,000 > undergraduates sharing 5 or 6 Vax/750's, it was somewhat understandable... > > - Ted > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velocityboy at gmail.com Fri May 31 00:57:18 2019 From: velocityboy at gmail.com (Jim Geist) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 10:57:18 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> <20190530143414.GF2751@mit.edu> Message-ID: I have an account on a school system that uses them. On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 10:49 AM John P. Linderman wrote: > We used them in an AT&T Labs research environment. The intent was less to > prevent users from selfishly grabbing (then semi-precious) disk space but > to prevent accidents from adversely affecting the user community at large. > If you *knew* you were going to need honking amounts of disk, the > sysadmins would raise the quota (probably on a partition dedicated to such > activities). > > On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 10:40 AM Theodore Ts'o wrote: > >> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:49:05AM -0700, David wrote: >> > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I >> > was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or >> > industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I >> > thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort >> > it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. >> > >> > So, anyone ever use this feature? >> >> Back when MIT Project Athena was using Vax/750's as time sharing >> machines (before the advent of the MicroVax II workstations and AFS), >> students were assigned to a Vax 750, and were given a quota of I think >> a megabyte, at least initially. It could be increased by applying to >> the user accounts office. Given that there were roughly 4,000 >> undergraduates sharing 5 or 6 Vax/750's, it was somewhat understandable... >> >> - Ted >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andreas.kahari at abc.se Fri May 31 00:55:10 2019 From: andreas.kahari at abc.se (Andreas Kusalananda =?iso-8859-1?B?S+Ro5HJp?=) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 16:55:10 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <20190530145510.GA58792@eeyore.my.domain> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:49:05AM -0700, David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? > > David At my current workplace, we use quotas on shared systems (Linux compute clusters and multi-user interactive login nodes). When I was at univeristy (early 1990's), the SunOS and Solaris systems at the department had the home directories mounted over NFS, and there were quotas in effect on the file server. On VM systems that I set up privately, where /home is not on a separate partition, I use quotas for my own account (because sometimes I want to use a really tiny disk, and limiting the size of /home is easier with quotas than through partitioning off the correct size on the first try). I have access to a shared non-work related OpenBSD and Linux system which does *not* use quotas, and it makes me slightly nervous because I don't actually know how much disk space I'm *allowed* to use without being told off by a human operator. It would have been better if they had had quotas enabled and then made it easy to ask for more space thourgh a simple email to the admins. -- Kusalananda Sweden From katolaz at freaknet.org Fri May 31 01:00:42 2019 From: katolaz at freaknet.org (KatolaZ) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 17:00:42 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <20190530150018.fzz5c63cbxztywvd@katolaz.homeunix.net> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:49:05AM -0700, David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? > As others have said already, disk (or better, filesystem) quotas have been used widely in any environment with more than a few users. I remember a 5MB quota at uni when I was an undergrad, and I definitely remember when it was increased to 10MB :) Filesystem quotas are currently used extensively in large computing facilities (clusters and distributed computing systems of different sort), and in virtually all pubnix systems (we have been using it for "medialab" at freaknet for more than 20 years now...). Over the years I have learnt that if unix has something that I think is useless, then almost surely I have not bumped into the use case, and the use case is normally important enough to explain why that feature was made part of unix ;) My2Cents KatolaZ -- [ ~.,_ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - Devuan -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ "+. katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it ] [ @) http://kalos.mine.nu --- Devuan GNU + Linux User ] [ @@) http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia -- GPG: 0B5F062F ] [ (@@@) Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 195 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Fri May 31 02:04:49 2019 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 12:04:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? Message-ID: <20190530160449.2444518C088@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: KatolaZ > I remember a 5MB quota at uni when I was an undergrad, and I definitely > remember when it was increased to 10MB :) Light your cigar with disk blocks! When I was in high school, I had an account on the school's computer, a PDP-11/20 running RSTS, with a single RF11 disk (well, technically, an RS11 drive on an RF11 controller). For those whose jaw didn't bounce off the floor, reading that, the RS11 was a fixed-head disk with a total capacity of 512KB (1024 512-byte blocks). IIRC, my disk quota was 5 blocks. :-) Noel From katolaz at freaknet.org Fri May 31 02:48:21 2019 From: katolaz at freaknet.org (KatolaZ) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 18:48:21 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <20190530160449.2444518C088@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20190530160449.2444518C088@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20190530164821.qzbgduu27ktxmkpa@katolaz.homeunix.net> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:04:49PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: KatolaZ > > > I remember a 5MB quota at uni when I was an undergrad, and I definitely > > remember when it was increased to 10MB :) > > Light your cigar with disk blocks! > > When I was in high school, I had an account on the school's computer, a > PDP-11/20 running RSTS, with a single RF11 disk (well, technically, an RS11 > drive on an RF11 controller). For those whose jaw didn't bounce off the floor, > reading that, the RS11 was a fixed-head disk with a total capacity of 512KB > (1024 512-byte blocks). > > IIRC, my disk quota was 5 blocks. :-) Yep, I am not that "experienced" ;P HND -- [ ~.,_ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - Devuan -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ "+. katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it ] [ @) http://kalos.mine.nu --- Devuan GNU + Linux User ] [ @@) http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia -- GPG: 0B5F062F ] [ (@@@) Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 195 bytes Desc: not available URL: From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net Fri May 31 03:28:29 2019 From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 11:28:29 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <5f3efe76-a47e-8782-814a-1f91ba95a785@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> On 5/30/19 7:49 AM, David wrote: > So, anyone ever use this feature? Yes. I have been on both sides of disk / file system quota, occasionally at the same time. I remember them being applied when I was in school. I applied them to mail servers I administered (50 MB quota). I think I even used a combination of soft (50 MB) and hard (100 MB) quotas. I really liked the soft/hard pair because someone could go over their quota for up to 7 days (?) until they hit the hard quota. This gave some buffer for busy weekends and vacation time. I also applied a quota to myself (and the other admins) specifically so that we couldn't accidentally fill the file system and DoS our users. I think I gave us a 1 or 2 GB quota. I do remember raising it once or twice for specific things. It did save our collected back sides multiple times too. -- Grant. . . . unix || die -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4008 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: From ron at ronnatalie.com Fri May 31 03:42:49 2019 From: ron at ronnatalie.com (ron at ronnatalie.com) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 13:42:49 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <20190530164821.qzbgduu27ktxmkpa@katolaz.homeunix.net> References: <20190530160449.2444518C088@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20190530164821.qzbgduu27ktxmkpa@katolaz.homeunix.net> Message-ID: <015701d5170f$19b44310$4d1cc930$@ronnatalie.com> Hopkins had a 11/45 system with several RK05's (2.4M). One was / and /usr, one was /sys1 (one set of users) and the other /sys2 (the other users). My initial quota for class was 8 blocks and that went up to 30 when I went on staff there. We also had two additional RK05 drives and I thought I was in fat city when I invested $65 in my own cartridge for that. Before that, I had spent a few bucks on DecTapes. The system swapped on an RF11 disk (1024 blocks). > -----Original Message----- > From: TUHS On Behalf Of KatolaZ > Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2019 12:48 PM > To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? > > On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:04:49PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > > From: KatolaZ > > > > > I remember a 5MB quota at uni when I was an undergrad, and I > definitely > > > remember when it was increased to 10MB :) > > > > Light your cigar with disk blocks! > > > > When I was in high school, I had an account on the school's computer, > > a > > PDP-11/20 running RSTS, with a single RF11 disk (well, technically, an > > RS11 drive on an RF11 controller). For those whose jaw didn't bounce > > off the floor, reading that, the RS11 was a fixed-head disk with a > > total capacity of 512KB > > (1024 512-byte blocks). > > > > IIRC, my disk quota was 5 blocks. :-) > > Yep, I am not that "experienced" ;P > > HND > > -- > [ ~.,_ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - Devuan -- Freaknet Medialab ] > [ "+. katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it ] > [ @) http://kalos.mine.nu --- Devuan GNU + Linux User ] > [ @@) http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia -- GPG: 0B5F062F ] > [ (@@@) Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ ] From michael at kjorling.se Fri May 31 05:19:26 2019 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 19:19:26 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <20190530191926.6n4uvebwill77qzp@h-174-65.A328.priv.bahnhof.se> On 30 May 2019 06:49 -0700, from david at kdbarto.org (David): > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I > was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or > industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I > thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort > it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? Don't forget probably every ISP under the sun. My first Internet account in 1995 (or possibly 1996) came with *nix shell access (please don't ask me what variant; I used it mostly to run pine, and occasionally pico, and it was dial-up which was charged per minute by the phone company) and a 4 MB quota, which you could pay to have increased. That quota covered everything in your $HOME; as I recall, including e-mail, and definitely including ~/public_html. These days, it seems that with the exception of _really_ cheap accounts, web host quotas are big enough that they for all intents and purposes might as well not be there, even with today's bloated content. Back then, even 4 MB for everything felt on the tight side, and you certainly had to think about what you put there. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor) From imp at bsdimp.com Fri May 31 06:42:30 2019 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 14:42:30 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 7:58 AM David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was > just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user > and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, > just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which > they mostly did. So, anyone ever use this feature? The PDP-11 running RSTS/E 7.2 we had in high school had a quota of 100 blocks. It was almost enough to store three BASIC programs... At college, our VAX running 4.3BSD used the quota system, but it was weird in ways I can't recall now.... Maybe I couldn't logout when I was over quota, but I worked around that with telnet... Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ggm at algebras.org Fri May 31 08:23:28 2019 From: ggm at algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Fri, 31 May 2019 08:23:28 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: Unless it's been replaced, Robert Elz. Melbourne Uni wrote this. He's still puttering along in Southern Thailand, doing his thing. (they had the Australian dictionary of Aboriginal words and every host at Melbourne Uni started MU hence munnari.oz.au) - The same operations unit wrote one of the first Apple File System codebases for BSD too. Robert had a bizarre theory about body heat. He wore a jersey in Hawaii mid-summer on the principle the insulation kept the external heat OUT. He also is a cricket tragic. B&W tv by the console, in season, you had to stop talking while the bowler was running and could engage during the advert breaks. (and yes, I used them in uni systems admin to constrain the wild behaviours of the userbase. Imagine letting all those pristine ones and zeros be .. tainted by data) -G From beebe at math.utah.edu Fri May 31 10:21:02 2019 From: beebe at math.utah.edu (Nelson H. F. Beebe) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 18:21:02 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? Message-ID: Several list members report having used, or suffered under, filesystem quotas. At the University Utah, in the College of Science, and later, the Department of Mathematics, we have always had an opposing view: Disk quotas are magic meaningless numbers imposed by some bozo ignorant system administrator in order to prevent users from getting their work done. Thus, in my 41 years of systems management at Utah, we have not had a SINGLE SYSTEM with user disk quotas enabled. We have run PDP-11s with RT-11, RSX, and RSTS, PDP-10s with TOPS-20, VAXes with VMS and BSD Unix, an Ardent Titan, a Stardent, a Cray EL/94, and hundreds of Unix workstations from Apple, DEC, Dell, HP, IBM, NeXT, SGI, and Sun with numerous CPU families (Alpha, Arm, MC68K, SPARC, MIPS, NS 88000, PowerPC, x86, x86_64, and maybe others that I forget at the moment). For the last 15+ years, our central fileservers have run ZFS on Solaris 10 (SPARC, then on Intel x86_64), and for the last 17 months, on GNU/Linux CentOS 7. Each ZFS dataset gets its space from a large shared pool of disks, and each dataset has a quota: thus, space CAN fill up in a given dataset, so that some users might experience a disk-full situation. In practice, that rarely happens, because a cron job runs every 20 minutes, looking for datasets that are nearly full, and giving them a few extra GB if needed. Affected users in a average of 10 minutes or so will no longer see disk-full problems. If we see serious imbalance in the sizes of previously similar-sized datasets, we manually move directory trees between datasets to achieve a reasonable balance, and reset the dataset quotas. We make nightly ZFS snapshots (hourly for user home directories), and send the nightlies to an off-campus server in a large datacenter, and we write nightly filesystem backs to a tape robot. The tape technology generations have evolved through 9-track, QIC, 4mm DAT, 8mm DAT, DLT, LTO-4, LTO-6, and perhaps soon, LTO-8. Our main fileserver talks through a live SAN FibreChannel mirror to independent storage arrays in two different buildings. Thus, we always have two live copies of all data, and third far-away live copy that is no more than 24 hours old. Yes, we do see runaway output files from time to time, and an occasional student (among currently more than 17,000 accounts) who uses an unreasonable amount of space. In such cases, we deal with the job, or user, involved, and get space freed up; other users remain largely remain unaware of the temporary space crisis. The result of our no-quotas policy is that few of our users have ever seen a disk-full condition; they just get on with their work, as they, and we, expect them to do. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe at acm.org beebe at computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From lm at mcvoy.com Fri May 31 10:37:34 2019 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 17:37:34 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20190531003734.GA12897@mcvoy.com> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:21:02PM -0600, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote: > Several list members report having used, or suffered under, filesystem > quotas. > > At the University Utah, in the College of Science, and later, the > Department of Mathematics, we have always had an opposing view: > > Disk quotas are magic meaningless numbers imposed by some bozo > ignorant system administrator in order to prevent users from > getting their work done. > > Thus, in my 41 years of systems management at Utah, we have not had a > SINGLE SYSTEM with user disk quotas enabled. I can see both sides of this, but man, do I love the attitude of just get out of their way and let them do their work. I get the reasons that other people did disk quotas, it's reasonable, but I like Nelson's approach better. From krewat at kilonet.net Fri May 31 10:42:33 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 20:42:33 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8c0e17fb-41e3-753c-9678-04e410825dce@kilonet.net> On 5/30/2019 8:21 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote: > Several list members report having used, or suffered under, filesystem > quotas. > > At the University Utah, in the College of Science, and later, the > Department of Mathematics, we have always had an opposing view: > > Disk quotas are magic meaningless numbers imposed by some bozo > ignorant system administrator in order to prevent users from > getting their work done. You've never had people like me on your systems ;) - But yeah... > For the last 15+ years, our central fileservers have run ZFS on > Solaris 10 (SPARC, then on Intel x86_64), and for the last 17 months, > on GNU/Linux CentOS 7. > I do the same with ZFS - limit the individual filesystems with "zfs set quota=xxx" so the entire pool can't be filled. I assign a zfs filesystem to an individual user in /export/home and when they need more, they let me know. Various monitoring scripts tell me when a filesystem is approaching 80%, and I either just expand it on my own because of the user's usage, or let them know they are approaching the limit. Same thing with Netbackup Basic Disk pools in a common ZFS pool. I can adjust them as needed, and Netbackup sees the change almost immediately. At home, I did this with my kids ;) - Samba and zfs quota on the filesystem let them know how much room they had. art k. PS: I'm starting to move to FreeBSD and ZFS for VMware datastores, the performance is outstanding over iSCSI on 10Gbe - (which Solaris 11's COMSTAR is not apparently very good at especially with small block sizes). I have yet to play with Linux and ZFS but would appreciate to hear (privately, if it's not appropriate for the list) your experiences with it. From alan at alanlee.org Fri May 31 11:36:36 2019 From: alan at alanlee.org (alan at alanlee.org) Date: Thu, 30 May 2019 21:36:36 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Message-ID: <3ab907e0bdf1be98c1c628ce3957b415@alanlee.org> My story is similar to most others here. University of Arkansas in the early 90s enabled user disk quotas on the public access UNIX system - a SPARCserver 2000 with 10 CPUs and gobs of disk. Each quota limit was far higher than (total disk space) / (# user accounts). But each of the 17K students at the time was automatically provisioned an account during registration. So it became a bit necessary to impose a limit - even if one 98% of users would never come close to. The dedicated college of engineering UNIX system was also a similarly equipped SPARCserver 2000 and did not enforce any quotas. Unless the sys-admin yelling in the hallway at the povray guy eating 100% x 10 CPUs was technically a throttle / quota system. He was efficient too. Zero'd in on the lab and workstation number by IP address and would be over your shoulder in less than 10K ms if you were acting a fool! -Alan On 2019-05-30 09:49, David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was > just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a > user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was > interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst > themselves. Which they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? > > David From gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk Fri May 31 17:16:55 2019 From: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk (George Ross) Date: Fri, 31 May 2019 08:16:55 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 30 May 2019 16:27:04 +0200." Message-ID: <201905310716.x4V7GtsJ011721@maysl7.inf.ed.ac.uk> > And of course we > found all kinds of tricks to get around those quotas (e.g. "giving away" > large files to someone with leftover quota), which is why on many systems > you're not allowed to chown files if you're not root. When I took over running a labful of SunOS machines that were used by our CS students, one of the first thing I did was turn off a few things in the system call vector for UIDs higher than a "staff" cutoff. That included things like chown, chmod and setting the umask. As well as making it harder for them to share solutions, it also had the advantage of making other systems more tempting targets... -- George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9LE Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk Voice: 0131 650 5147 PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5 B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A 426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5 The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. From steve at quintile.net Fri May 31 20:56:39 2019 From: steve at quintile.net (Steve Simon) Date: Fri, 31 May 2019 11:56:39 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] anyone used the fair share shedular? Message-ID: i used the fair share schedular whilst a sysadmin of a small cray at UNSW. being an expensive machine the various departments who paid for it wanted, well, their fair share. in a different job i had a cron job that restricted Sybase backend engines to a subset of the cpus on an big SGI box during peak hours, at night sybase had free reign of all cpus. anyone did anything similar? -Steve