Notices by Tom Lyon ✅ (aka_pugs@mastodon.social)

My nickname from high school was Pugs, or Pugsley, inspired by The Addams Family.
My brother Jim, 3 years ahead at Princeton, made sure everyone knew me as Pugs.

So Peter, as UNIX admin, gave me the userid 'pugs'. Which has been constant all these years!

UNIX arrived courtesy of Dr. Jeff Ullman and Bell Labs. Ullman and Al Aho at Bell were deep into their decades-long collaboration (see recent Turing awards), so Ullman convinced Princeton to adopt it.

I remember it as being Version 6 of UNIX, a little ahead of the official release.

At the time, the only time-sharing system at Princeton was APL\360 - which was very cool but very weird. And I had spent the previous summer wrestling with IBM's TSO which was not at all cool, or even weird - just bad.

So UNIX looked very nice - file redirection! pipes! background processing!

I'm celebrating my 50th year of using UNIX!

Sometime in spring of '75, my friend Peter (sysadmin for the PDP-11/45) came around shouting "UNIX is Here! UNIX is Here!"

I asked "What's a UNIX?" and he showed me the 1974 CACM article about UNIX.

Today's fresh scan: beautiful copy of "GE-225 Programming Manual (including programming notes)" - CPB-126A, Nov. 1960
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11WF2c8rfaguNCqRGX2wZZI5NO48ZfrOD/view?usp=sharing

I believe this was GE's first general purpose computer. Produced by a renegade group in Phoenix that had been ordered not to enter the computer business!

OTD 1982: #SunMicrosystems is incorporated.

Preliminary business plan (as VLSI Systems, Inc.): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AISiLW3rBJQhArztoQ5p5K12Z4Bj2hru/view?usp=sharing

OTD 1978: Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" is published. My most precious artifact is Draft #1 of the same.

There's something very satisfying in scanning old manuals for contribution to bitsavers. TECO - PDP10 - 1968.

"Twenty Years of 36-bit Computing with Digital 1964-1984" Brochure from Digital Equipment Corp. https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/digital/DEC1964TO1984.pdf #DEC10

OTD 1973: #UNIX seminar at Bell Labs. pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HAISQ_LTJTBRGtKbIsrsIAM54k8Zub22/view?usp=sharing

Anyways, SMDS disappeared without a trace once Frame Relay came along - and rightfully so.. AFAIK, IEEE 802.6 never got any commercial success.

Some folks at AT&T had developed a VME card for SMDS, so I was able to integrate that into a Sun system. The AT&T folks were skeptical that I could make it work at all -- but it was up and cooking within a month.

Have I mentioned that I do device drivers?

In spite of all that, I was very excited because it would have been the best data service available from US Telcos. Before SMDS, it was either leased lines or X.25 (yecch!)

Pacific Bell was pretty serious about rolling out service and I came *very* close to getting an SMDS/T1 line to my house!

SMDS was the most Frankenstein-ian network protocol I ever dealt with.
- T1 or T3 physical layer
- IEEE 802.6 DQDB data link, but only deployed as point-to-point!
- 53 byte ATM cells - 44 useful (AAL3/4)
- OSI style addressing (phone numbers)
- All to deliver a *connectionless* data service!!

Oh, the things I've lived through - "A Very Important Cultural History of People Photocopying Their Butts" - https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/a-very-important-cultural-history-of-people-photocopying-their-butts

In unrelated news, I have a brand new flat-bed scanner!

First tradeshow swag from #SunMicrosystems? Note the original logo.

SPARC Open PROM Toolkit Reference Summary (1990) - full scan: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FvSH6pM1DERn5cI98gbaeVnqZofv0EQd/view?usp=sharing #SPARC #OpenBoot

I have this weird desire to port #UNIX to the PDP-10, just to annoy that community. #DEC10

Bunch of hot air. #ABQ

OTD 1989: SunLink Channel Gateway released. #SunMicrosystems #Mainframe