Those OS could do so much so early I'm impressed. Text-based input is a very powerful UI

@CallousCoder

11 ай бұрын

My first experience with Unix was minix in 1990. Before that I was a TOS and DOS guy - always disliked DOS. I was immediate sold to the basic Unix philosophy of “everything is a file”. I find that Linux unfortunately is slowly moving away from that paradigm. I started Linux in 1995, at the same time I had an Indy with Irix. Irix is a nice clean SystemV Unix. Then in 1997 I got a written off, microPDP11 from my work. I put SystemIII on it. Was quiet an ordeal so early in the time of the internet (not a lot of downloads available). Then I did Tru64/TruCluster (the best ever Unix!), AIX, HP-UX and SunOS and Solaris. Those days of the mid 90s to the early 00s were magical for Unix. Because the internet started to happen and that was what Unix excelled on. Great standard development tools, good networking stack, lightweight. Man… miss these days.

@toonz9971

11 ай бұрын

@@CallousCoder The only proper UNIX I've ever used was Sun Microsystems' Solaris. I think Sun made some amazing products. I have a little bit of Linux experience, but I prefer FreeBSD to Linux in most cases. I agree the late 90s to early 00s was peak for Linux (as well as UNIX) and whatever Linux is these days pales in comparison to that era. I miss those days too man...what an exciting time it was!

@CallousCoder

11 ай бұрын

@@toonz9971 then you haven’t used Irix or Tru64. Full SystemV systems and DEC Tru64 with its Alpha blew everything out of the water with its speed. And then adding TruCluster to the mix made a 24x7 Unix you could migrate a running process to another node, not even the socket was disconnected just a little “hiccup as it moved across the memory channel”. And you could just patch the code or the OS. It was marvelous! And their SpecFp was a long-standing record. When Sun and SGI were doing 200MHz on 32 bits we were pushing 700MHz with full 64 bit. My jaw dropped back in 1995 when we gotten two GS140s with TruCluster for our 24x7 available database and fluid sim calculation. Me colleague who made the fluid sim code was like… how many CPUs 14? Oh… I think I will do my first ever parallel programming 😀And me well technically 28 but then you may want to fork a second instance. I did btw love Solaris 10 on Intel! I used the shit out of containers and zfs! I immediate realized containers solved our development system problems. As well zfs, snapshot the database run your integration tests rollback snapshot. New container for your feature, there you go! Have fun! It was amazing! We had lpar on AIX but this was better. Now Docker took its place.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

My first Unix was SunOS 4.1.x in our campus computer lab in the early 1990s. SunOS was the precursor to Solaris. (Technically, SunOS 4.1.1 was also "Solaris" but it wouldn't be branded as "Solaris" until a little later than that - we ran SunOS at my first job, and Solaris at my second job.) I'll always have fond memories of running SunOS and Solaris. We had Sun 3/50 diskless workstations on campus, but I loved the SPARCstation "pizzabox" (S4? S5?) at my first job.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Glad you liked it! I always have a terminal window running on my Linux machine at home, even though I run GNOME as my desktop and run GUI apps. The terminal offers a very flexible and powerful command line.

I barely used ed a few times when I was in college, so it's nice to see a non-trivial intro to using it. Thanks for making this.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Glad you like it! I wrote an article about the experiment of using Linux like original Unix, but "screenshots" in an article doesn't show the experience quite like a video. I don't usually use ed for big projects - but when I could only use ed for this experiment, I found I quickly adapted to using it. While working on larger editing projects (I wrote several nontrivial programs and documents that I didn't show in the video) using ed became second nature. It's just a different way of thinking when I edit. 👍

@jbs.

10 ай бұрын

If you use sed, you're using ed commands.

@Ormaaj

10 ай бұрын

Fast forward to 2023 and still no good non-interactive editor

@jnharton

10 ай бұрын

@@OrmaajPerhaps that is because very few people would even want one.

@desertdude540

9 ай бұрын

@jnharton Non-interactive editors are useful. One of the options for the diff command (I think it's -e) makes it generate a script of ed commands to turn one file into another. This was then used to build the first version of SCCS, which later led to RCS, CVS, Git, Fossil, etc.

I'm a 2004 kid and I started coding with a full blown IDE and Java as a kid, this is so cool to see and while ill probably never end up using fortran or unix os seeing the history of terminals and an editor predating even vim and vi is beyond cool.

@GeoffRiley

10 ай бұрын

If you can try a bit of FORTRAN, go for it. Just play with some non-trivial maths problems, and you'll be surprised at the ease it affords. I firmly believe that *all* programmers should have at least had a look at one of the early languages… it gives you an insight into how far we've come and helps you to appreciate what the modern high-level language takes care of for you.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

I agree! I also started a FORTRAN 77 programming series on this channel. I've done one video so far, the next one will be this weekend.

@zeektm1762

8 ай бұрын

You will use UNIX, every time you use a POSIX standard OS or a Linux distro. Many things change, but the core remains eternal

@DutchmanRadio

7 ай бұрын

I was in the fourth grade when you were born, neat.

@mytech6779

5 ай бұрын

Modern Fortran has not been column based since the spelling stopped being in all caps (in the 80s) and it dominated HPC until just the last decade when C++ has started to overtake it. These language choices are partly due to speed/efficiency but it also has a lot to do with the availible proven debugged math libraries, no sense spending a week and $100k of electricity on a scientific calculation just to be slightly uncertain of the accuracy. The fixed-column thing was a direct artifact of punched-paper programming. Java is OK for portable widget apps that are distributed to run on many operating systems, but Java was in decline until Android came along and gave it some customers. Any language that is interpreted or JIT optimized at runtime, or even just garbage collected, is no good for applications like industrial machines, healthcare, music recording, and other real-time tasks that need deterministic behavior. (Real-time doesn't mean fast, it means the actual physical wall clock latency must be bounded with guarantees of worst case maximums and minimums.) Eg some fool at Boeing tried to use Java in a new landing gear control unit and during bench testing it would just fail to extend a few percent of the time; the reason was the JVM doing some "helpful" housekeeping thing in the background would block reception of the interupt signal. The C-17 engine contol unit on the other hand has mathmatical proofs of worst case behavior (This took several years though, it is proof of the whole hardware and software stack combined.) Simpler hardware generally helps a lot in this regard, eg an little AVR arduino can handle control of more stepper motors more accurately than an i9 desktop. The i9 has a latency variation of 150µS even after disabling hyperthreading and using a hard real-time operating system. Then you add the uncertainty of PCIe based I/O and such. This is why the 80386 remained in production through 2007 despite being of no use for new desktops after about 1993 and long after the 80486 went away. 386 was the last predictable x86 design. Newer x86 CPUs have out of order execution pipelining, branch prediction, cache effects, register renaming and so on and so forth. Even though you might know it takes 5 cycles to do a multiply on a modern CPU you can't know when it will get its timeslice or when it will flush to output.

us old computer folks still have these commands in our muscle memory.

The first time I used a PDP-11 the Telex terminal had an accoustic coupler built in and I'd use it to dial the computer at our local university. Thank heavens, the computer room housing the PDP-11 had air conditioning so loud you couldn't hear the rattle and klankk of the Telex! Unix wasn't on that particular unit, we used RSTS/E, but I kind of recall that Unix was the OS at first but was changed for some reason. The memory is foggy - it was almost 50 years ago and I was barely 12.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

I never used a Teletype or Telex terminal as a terminal, but the physics department in my undergrad years (I was a physics student) had a Teletype terminal set up as a printer in the mini computer "lab" (a tiny room with two VT terminals, plus a pen plotter, plus the Teletype "printer").

This was very fascinating. I can not imagine how many people must have written their own version of awk back then. Everyone must have had their own set of helper programs, I imagine. Thank you for sharing.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Pretty much, yes. Awk (1977) made it easy to write scripts to do lots of useful tasks that you'd otherwise need to write a one-off program. Sed was useful for simple mass edits, grep was excellent for one-line patterns. Awk made it easy to do things like "If *this* line in the log file says 'Error' then print the next few lines (line count might vary) until you see some end-marker." That's easy to do in awk, not possible in grep.

@yash1152

7 ай бұрын

hi! just to confirm, u can print a predefined number of "context" lines with grep too right? the -B or -A flags. > _"[untill end-marker] That's easy to do in awk, not possible in grep."_

@freedosproject

6 ай бұрын

What a great future world you must come from! ☺ The "grep" command was added in Unix 4th Edition in November 1973 - so it wasn't available in the Unix 3rd Edition I'm showing here. And no, grep didn't support context lines in 4th Edition .. it was one line of output per match. (Basically the same as the g/re/p command in the ed editor.) I'm not sure when Unix grep supported context lines, or if that was a GNU extension. And the example I mentioned in my above comment was meant to suggest a variable number of lines .. like a multi-line error message that might end with some "end error" message on its own line (typical in some large environments I've used). That's easy to write as an awk program (if line matches, then doprint=1 .. print if doprint==1 .. if we find the "end error" message, then doprint=0).

Great stuff!! Ty so much for taking your time

This was a great demonstration, thank you for putting this together

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it! This was a fun video to do. 👍

History and extra additional context, give you passion and motivation than any other method.

This video was fantastic. I've been using Unix for decades and admittedly I've gotten used to all the modern tools but there's a certain fondness for doing some things manually. Kudos to you, sir and keep the videos coming.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Glad it was helpful!

very interesting video! the history of computing is fun to explore. thank you!

I could watch this all day. Thanks! Keep up the great work.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoy it!

Amazing little CS class! looking forward to see more like these Jim, It would really help the new and old generations maintain fresh knowledge of these legendary tools of trade.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Thanks! Glad you liked it. 😃 Most of the videos are FreeDOS or FreeDOS-related, but I like doing videos like this every once in a while.

This takes me right back to my early days of my computer career. I started using a PDP 11/34 where I learned the basics of Fortran programming. It wasn't later until the 1990s when I entered the world of IT as a computer operator and eventually met my favourite operating system - Solaris 2.6 ...ah the nostalgia. Now some near 40 years later I'm working with various flavours of Linux and haven't touched Unix since 2009.

Thanks for the great content you publish, really appreciated!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you like them!

The terminal effect brought back many memories I had forgotten about. Thank you for the time travel tour!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

Absolutely fantastic video, I'm a junior dev getting more into Linux infrastructure for work and this was brilliant!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it! ☺

Awesome video. History can add so much context to computing and can help give a deeper understanding of why things are the way they are and why they are done a certain way. The days of elegant and long lasting solutions that squeezed every last bit of use out of the equipment have almost gone now and whilst I'm glad that computing has come so far, simplistic elegance and endurance have been replaced by superficiality and complexity. P.S. At 28.04 you missed out the ^2 for the equation x(t) = 1/2at^2

Thank you very much for making this interesting video. I started learning DEC Ultrix back in 1988 and we tested the ED editor. We moved fast over to the VI editor. Liked and subscribed. Please make more videos. I'll follow them.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you liked it! 😎

So grateful things got easier to do (I worked on these systems in high school then in engineering school back in 1984). They still had a few teletypes at the University and would spit out a small "book" of errors when something went wrong, then we'd get charged for the paper (a big motivator to test your code on paper thoroughly, before typing it in - I recall typing code into one terminal, running the compiler, saving to an 8in floppy, then handing the floppy over to a system operator, who would insert it into another machine to actually run the program)

Wow, that brings back some memories! I was in junior high school when UNIX came out, and was unaware it existed, outside what the "Popular" magazines may have said about it. In college I got to use my university's VAX system running some iteration of SysV UNIX, over 19200 bps serial lines. In the basement of our dorm there were rows and rows of Wyse (IIRC) terminals that were available around the clock. Getting a hard copy to turn to the TA required a walk to the computer room during business hours. When I logged off, it showed how much CPU time I had used. There was no limit on that, but in CS101 we got a very small number of disk blocks to do our homework on. A few years later, I was working at a different university, and was given an account on a UNIX machine. This time it was a Sun SPARCstation 20 running Solaris, with a lot of GNU utilities added to it. When I stood up my first Linux box, those GNU programs were familiar, and notably absent on bone stock Solaris machines. Had I known that Linux would take over so quickly, and dominate so many things, I might have paid a bit more attention!

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Sounds like we are about the same age. When I was an undergrad (early 1990s) we had terminals around campus. I think they were VT52 or VT100 .. maybe both, depending on the building? I used those a lot between classes to check email or write papers. I discovered Linux🐧 in 1993, and installed it (dual boot with DOS) on my computer at home. Check out my other video about how I wrote papers using nroff - if I didn't want to reboot into DOS, I could use nroff to write my papers and print from my dot matrix printer in my dorm room, or the (free) dot matrix printer in the computer lab.

@StringerNews1

11 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject I'm a bit older, if I had gone straight to college, I would have graduated in the early '80s. I had a couple friends who were into computers, including one who took home a VAX while working for the phone company. So I knew a little, but not much. Electrical engineering was my major, and I was the only one in my class who wasn't planning on doing digital and/or ICs. Back then, I thought that home computers were a novelty, but not that useful. Networking really changed that. I discovered Linux while working for another university in 1995. MS-DOS / Windows 3.11 was the standard OS, but I discovered that I could dual boot into Linux and access the files on my work computer from home. (Most network cards at the university had public IP addresses back then.) I never used nroff myself. Back then I was a big fan of plain text. I used my free class audit privelege to learn C programming, and instead of turning in my assignments on fanfold paper from the line printers, I turned in fanfold from my MX-80 hooked up to my home computer running Linux.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

@@StringerNews1 Loved the Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer! We had one in the 1980s and it was a workhorse. Printed out countless code listings and class papers, and just never broke down.

@StringerNews1

11 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject and when I installed OS/2 Warp on the same computer, it revealed a near-letter quality mode that was a lot more readable.

@lawrencedoliveiro9104

10 ай бұрын

All seasoned Unix sysadmins of the latter 1980s and into the 1990s knew that the first thing you did when setting up a new box was to download and install the GNU utilities.

Ed is the standard text editor.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

😎

@edgarbonet1

10 ай бұрын

Indeed! In Version 6 Unix, the DESCRIPTION section of `man ed` starts with this exact sentence: “Ed is the standard text editor.”

Amazing! Lots of memories watching this video. Please, more terminal sessions!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Will do! I'll try not to do too many, since I mostly cover FreeDOS things - but I think occasional videos about other retro computing is okay too.

10 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject I know that you mostly cover FreeDOS things, for that I appreciate it even more. I saw that you have a list of videos on "FreeDOS Programming" and I'm going to watch them. I really like the software development terminal session videos that explain how the development environment is built and the workflows used. Thank you very much for your content!

Liked and subscribed! Well done Jim.

I enjoyed that. Thank you!

I love computer history and I found this post extremely enjoyable! thanks dude.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

This video was so cool, I'm particularly impressed by ed's capabilities.

@0LoneTech

11 ай бұрын

It has a far ranging legacy, with descendants like ex, vi, sed, grep and perl. The ex language is still there in neovim, although they removed ex mode to avoid confusion.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

And you can "script" ed by doing something like this: ed

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

ed is pretty cool. I don't use it all the time, but I do use it occasionally when I need it. Good tool to have. And if you're like me, just to play around in sometimes.

@0LoneTech

11 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject Still can, though your example is more of a sed -i job. Another relation is that diff can output ed scripts.

@alvarocafe

11 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject I've just never seen it behave so well and fast, I've thought ed was a slow, grinding editor, but it's actually pretty elegant! I'll definetly try it more, I even played with it for a while after watching your video. Cheers!

Hehe, I really enjoyed this! I'd love to see more early FORTRAN content :)

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

More to come! I'm doing a "learn FORTRAN77" series on the channel. I've done just one video so far, but I have the rest of the series planned out.

Love this, masterclass in ed, the standard editor. Thank you!

@freedosproject

9 күн бұрын

You're very welcome! Since doing this video, I sometimes use ed (and FreeDOS edlin) unironically to edit files. Usually if I just need to make a quick edit to a file, or if I run several commands and realize "that should be a script" .. I can do ed and edit my file while I can still see the previous commands I typed.

This was very interesting to see the processes involved in using Unix in a “daily use case” from 50 years ago. Thank you!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

I'm glad you liked it! I think it's pretty cool too. 👍

Nicely done. There are a number of "seminal" developments related to Unix in the 70s into early 80s: 1) Unix 6, PWB (Programmer's Work Bench), those usually come together. 2) BSD, the University of California, Berkeley Unix release. If I am not mistaken, that's where VI, the editor, developed by Bill Joy was first released (he later on co-founded Sun Micro Systems). 3). Televideo, the first $395 video terminal, which "democratized" Unix, as people no longer had to spend a bunch of money to buy VTs or teletypes. 4). John Lions of University of New South Wales, Australia's Unix 6 source code and commentary. Everybody that works on Unix those days carries a (pirated, likely illegal) Xerox copy of those. 5). Dr Bob McClure, Professor at University of Texas, Austin at the time, wrote the first C compiler outside of Bell Labs, on a non PDP machine. I believe it was on a Data General.

When I was in high school in the early 80's in the Albuquerque school system at the Career Enrichment Center they had a DEC System 10 and a bunch of TTYs and a single VT100 terminal. You had to get into the room early or be very lucky to get to use the VT100 instead of the TTYs where you would waste reams of paper. DEC was building the VT100 in Albuquerque at the time. The VT100 also supported 132 columns by 14 lines.

As I see it, the most important thing that kernels have now that was missing from Fifth-edition Unix was support for networking.

I low-key love the trail of the cursor when you type

Beautiful!! lean, lightweight, simple. no mouse pushing

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you liked it! ☺

Great demonstration of computing culture back then! I'm gläd that all this knowledge and all these tools and techniques are not forgotten and are still kept alive not only by the old-timers but by young enthusiasts also! Fascinating video, thanks a lot!

@freedosproject

8 ай бұрын

Thank you very much!

I'm among some of the other young people here, I'm a first-year computer science major who's only had experience with programs and systems very abstracted away from the hardware. I feel like this video taught me a lot more about the much finer details of what a computer actually does with data like that and how much of that whole process you detailed has been automated by newer IDEs and word processors. Even if not every CS major is particularly interested in Linux/Unix, I think having some experience working with such raw, primitive programs would give them a much better idea of the work our newer computers really do and how they do it. As for me, I really enjoyed the video, I've been particularly interested in *nix operating systems for about a year now and have slowly been exploring our history with computers, operatong systems, and programming languages, and this video really taight me a lot about an area I've been wanting to learn more about. Thank you for your work!

@freedosproject

8 ай бұрын

I'm glad you liked it! 🤓 I think it's important for every CS student to have at least a basic understanding of how we got from "there" to "here" - that's why I did this video. You might also be interested in some of the articles in the "A Look Back" series that I write on Technically We Write: technically we write . com

Cool video... as someone who grew up with Linux and use bash all the time it's great to see the history and how it was in the earlier days. I'm now using cool retro term and Fortran programming using ed 👍👍

@freedosproject

6 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it! ☺

Thanks for this Jim! It really brought me back to the old days (I must say that using ED kinda gave me a headache.... or was it the Apple II screen flicker??) Anyway thanks again and keep 'em coming, loads of fun! .... allowed me to write my first FORTRAN program.... yay!

@squirlmy

11 ай бұрын

🤔I'm sure Apple II didnt have "ed". Back I. The day, I remember getting countless reminders that it was pronounced ee-dee, but DOS also had an Ed that everyone pronounced "ed", so that battle was pretty much lost.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

I learned it as "ed" back in the day, but later learned it was properly pronounced "ee-dee." But old habits are had to break. 😅

I remember these good old days. Thank you nice post! From Japan.

@freedosproject

7 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thank you that was fascinating!

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

Awesome presentation, would like to have more please

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Thanks! I'll try to share presentations like this whenever I speak on a new topic at conferences.

Was the C compiler at the time capable of dealing with types in function declarations? I would have thought your main function should have been written: int main(argv, argc) int argc; char **argv; { ... Likewise for the linenum() function.

@CallousCoder

11 ай бұрын

No it wasn’t yet. I had to look up my first edition C book by Kernighan and it wasn’t no.

@DavidHembrow

11 ай бұрын

I came here to say the same thing. The first c compilers I used couldn't cope with the ANSI style function prototypes as in his example. They were a huge improvement, and came at the same as much better type awareness in the compilers. I found a couple of potential nasty bugs in my existing code when I ported it to a machine with a more modern compiler.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Oops - good catch! I'll have to do it the K&R way when I do this "for real" as a conference talk. Here's a "K&R C" version of the "66 lines" program: #include linenum(in,out) FILE* in; FILE* out; { int ltr; int line; line = 1; fputs(" 1:", out); while ( (ltr = fgetc(in)) != EOF ) { fputc(ltr, out); if (ltr == ' ') { fprintf(out, "%2d:", ++line); if (line == 66) { line = 0; } } /* if ltr */ } /* while */ } main(argc,argv) int argc; char** argv; { int i; FILE* pfile; /* usage: linenum [files..] */ for (i = 1; i pfile = fopen(argv[i], "r"); if (pfile == NULL) { fputs("cannot open file: ", stderr); fputs(argv[i], stderr); fputc(' ', stderr); } else { linenum(pfile, stdout); fclose(pfile); } } if (argc == 1) { linenum(stdin,stdout); } return 0; }

@b43xoit

10 ай бұрын

int argc is the default, so you don't have to say it. Also, argc comes first.

@CallousCoder

10 ай бұрын

@@b43xoit As far as I have always seen on Unix and Windows, is that you always have to define the integer. It will not assign it implicitly.

great video love it keep up the good work.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Thanks 👍

Very very VERY COOL VIDEO!! (and good C code style! ;-)

@freedosproject

7 ай бұрын

Thanks! 😀 I also recorded a followup video showing "old style" C coding. You can find that on the channel, too.

Two of my favorite subjects: history and computing, it's great! Thank you very much, more uploads of this kind please 🙂 EDIT: Unix related history especially.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

I will try! I'm planning more FreeDOS videos next, but I'll do another one on Unix history sometime.

@beardymonger

10 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject thank you!

This was a nice little bit of digital archaeology. I especially love that you pronounced char correctly, as it is short for character. Are we going to see a video series on you writing some program like a text editor or a compiler for your own programming language now? Maybe a new version of edit that has syntax highlighting. That would be awesome.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

@christopherneufelt8971

10 ай бұрын

We need the Czar, we need the Czar Wait, you mean a Char for the Structure? No, man, the Czar is dead, long live the Czar. (From digital archeology from a Fortran, BCPL manual, late 70s. Not from me).

This is a great history lesson from the computer world. The world of the past is difficult to understand for many modern users. (and I still prefer nano) Those green letters remind me of DOS world and green Hercules monitors. Maybe it's time for something like CP/M?

There is a nice interview and discussion on roff / nroff development

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

And I recently interviewed Brian Kernighan about it for Technically We Write: technicallywewrite.com/2023/06/01/groff

The first iterations of Unix were a bit before my time. However, when I was about 10 or 11 (circa 1993/94), I found a DEC VT100 at a yard sale (pretty sure that's where it came from). I used it with a 9600 baud modem to connect to some BBSs. I thought I was pretty hot stuff at the time lol

@squirlmy

11 ай бұрын

A friend of mine was born mid-March 1970, and he claims to share his b'day with Unix! 🙄 I don't think an exact date has ever been pinned down, but could be I suppose.🤷‍♂️

@ruthlessadmin

11 ай бұрын

@@squirlmy Well, either way, I hope we can agree that Unix existed before 1993, when I first used a VT100 terminal, which would have been used early on in Unix history...

@CallousCoder

11 ай бұрын

We actually connected veterinarians using dial up and a terminal to their central system. It was the most affordable way.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

We had VT100's on campus - they got rid of them after I graduated. If I knew then what I know how - how "retro" cool they were - I would have found the space to keep one when the campus CS department gave them away for free.

@howardjones543

11 ай бұрын

Definitely this. I remember using top on a 9600 vt100-clone and you could clearly see the cursor flying around... I remember that more than the stereotypical "long phosphor" that things like Cool Retro Term lean heavily on. I can't figure out how you would limit the speed of a vty without an actual serial cable though. Cathode on the mac does have this option, from memory.

I played along at home and typed out drop.f in ed. First time using ed and FORTRAN 😁 As a kid I started programming BASIC on my Dad's homemade TRS-80 clone (green screen and cassette tapes), so this felt nostalgic. Thank you for the video!

@freedosproject

9 ай бұрын

I'm glad you liked it! This was a fun video to do. ☺

Really nice👍!

I'm so glad that I'm about thirty years late to this party and can just enjoy the wonderful desert that has come from people typing code like this (also makes it very understandable why it's near impossible to find anyone to maintain such systems). :w!

@brianh.000

10 ай бұрын

You never know. I'm actually so glad that I came to the party over 30 years ago, and got to mess around with lower-level stuff. In a way, it makes you more appreciative of the tools we have now, and also know their limits. ✌

great video on unix history. 👍

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Glad you liked it! 😃

No IDE, no vim, a primitive text editor...and no compiling errors! Never seen one shot code that worked out of the gate. What you guys accomplished with such simple tools is amazing. Though I'm sure y'all felt the same way about the people working on pre assemblers with machine code. Thank you for the peek into what it was like to work on an early UNIX terminal. Friday night well spent.

@freedosproject

22 күн бұрын

Glad you liked it! Using Linux at the command line like this (and using ed) is really fun, and it's an interesting experiment. When I did this experiment (to use Linux like original Unix) I lived at the terminal. I just maximized it on my system, and did everything there. [Technically I cheated .. I had my work email up on my other monitor, so I can keep an eye out for client emails.] When you write nontrivial programs using ed, your brain starts to work differently. You build a kind of mental map in your head, and you can navigate pretty easily using ed. I became quite comfortable with ed - and I sometimes still use ed if I need to write something quick .. like make a script out of hte commands I just ran.

Such a cozy video for a linux / unix fan

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Glad you liked it! 🐧

I remember it being a bit tedious at times. But there's a feel to doing it over a slow serial hardware link.

@scottstempmail9045

10 ай бұрын

Slow serial link with line noise, even more fun.

Thank you!

Years ago, I did a project to control the generation of and interconnection to the utility for a paper mill. Wound upmwritib a lot of Groff stuff to generate some pretty fanc reports. Watching this brought back memories.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you liked it! I found nroff and groff was really easy to use when I first learned it as an undergrad, and I still like writing some things in groff today.

So cool, 1 minute 30 seconds in and I'm already commenting for no reason. Yay functional Unix history.

This reminded me of my first week of University in 1985 where we were introduced to Berkley BSD 4.2. The professor had us writing programs in ed. After a day or two we switched to vim when one the students discovered the more modern full screen interactive editor and the word spread. We had rooms of terminals like this and few had early graphical windowed workstations from the local Whitechapel company. There was also a few colour graphics terminals that had a build it mode to do coloured text in the terminal with letters, punctuation and numbers in different colours like primitive syntax highlighter. Around that time I had my first digital photo taken and it was saved to a 10.5-inch magnetic tape to be able to transfer it to my home directory.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Very cool! 😃 Brian has a great story about Bill Joy writing vi, in his book 'Unix: A History and a Memoir.' Short version: Bill hung around the Labs when he was a grad student and showed off this new editor he was working on. Brian told Bill that he should focus on his degree, not the editor. Brian comments in the book that maybe he shouldn't give career advice. 🤣

@GodEmperorSuperStar

10 ай бұрын

​@@freedosprojectexamination of 4.1c source code especially from the 4.1c.1 directory tree on the CSRG ISO shows traces of early SunOS. There was a partial implementation of a "unmount(2)" system call that was backed out. SunOS kept that system call. There is a kernel configuration file "files.sun". Guy Harris admitted on USENET in 1990 that SunOS ran on a VAX-11/750 and stated that Sun Microsystems had one of those minicomputers. I still don't know when they acquired it. There is a chance that the earliest SunOS development took place in the UCB CSRG before SMI got their own VAX-11/750.

@GodEmperorSuperStar

10 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject "Bill hung around the Labs" making 4.2BSD a reality while also helping himself to DoD time and materials to write his proprietary SunOS.

@glenyoung1809

10 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject There were holy wars fought over the best choice of editors to be used. Ed was primitive and time consuming when I first started using Unix back in 1985, then I discovered Vi, loved it. Then in 1986 GNU Emacs came along and thus began the holy wars over which was better. I tried learning Emacs and it felt too alien and not intuitive, which others strongly disagreed with. Those green screen CRTs brings back a lot of memories, first used printer terminals but they were strongly discouraged for use in programming because of the consumables cost. Then switched to VT100, and finally used Visual550s which was a larger screen and actually had a Textronics graphing mode for 2D plots! Made some amazing plots for physics assignments and could preview them on screen before sending the output to the wide carriage plotters down in computing services. A lot of memories of this era… used to program in f77 on the campus time-share Honeywell Multics mainframes, never fun when class assignments were due and typing a character sometimes took 30 seconds to come back and forget about Fortran compiling during peak times. The arrival of the first Sun-3 and 4 Unix workstations was a godsend! But only the profs with fat research grants could afford them…

On one hand you could do today this amount of work and much more in minutes with modern OSes, IDEs and even now, an AI assistant. On the other hand... Think about the gap between what they had before, even just a few years, and how much this toolset brought to the table... The productivity gain from this tech was incredible.

Wow , just wow . Love this history

@freedosproject

3 ай бұрын

Glad you like it!

very cool. One thing that's hard to communicate is how cool and futuristic this all seemed to us back in the day.

@freedosproject

8 ай бұрын

I agree! 🤩 I grew up with an Apple II (actually a clone of the II+ called the Franklin ACE 1000) back when we measured memory in a few kB. I sometimes teach a university course on the history of tech, and I try to share what that was like - and how amazing it was to experience a powerful command line operating system like Unix for the first time.

Whats crazy to me is that the ": No such file or directory" has the exact same error message today, as back in the days (for example at 17:14). If you open python and then try to open a non-existing file, you will still see the same exact error message.

I did not intend to watch the whole video but I was hooked!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Glad you liked it! I really enjoyed this one. Looking forward to doing it as a live conference talk sometime soon.

Your explanation make the cryptic ancient editor looks easy .. very good tutorial.

@freedosproject

7 ай бұрын

Glad you like it! The original ed command make sense after you've used them for a bit. Funny too that you start to think a little differently, you build a sort of mental map of the file and where you are in it.

In 1997/98 Motorola proprietary(pre DOCSIS) cable routers required using ed to manage the router config. Apparently vi was just too difficult to port lol.

This was what it was like! We're lucky we didn't have to use front-panel switches to manually load the C compiler in assembly into memory on our PDP-11. I started programming in the 80s, and worked on a VT100, editing my Pascal code in ED. It wasn't UNIX though, but VAX/VMS. My first intro to UNIX was in 1985. We had greenscreen Datamedia terminals, and used vi or emax, running on a Sequent UNIX system. I wonder how many hours I spent in that comp/sci lab, writing silly programs, or emails to my friends.

That took me down sone memory lanes. I wasn’t using Unix in the 70s but I was in the 80s. Saying “50 years ago” makes me feel very old!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

😅 You're welcome!

Cool retro Term is my favourite terminal out of them all

@freedosproject

7 ай бұрын

I still prefer CRT for certain things, like working on files. I like the throwback feel.

This brings me back to the days of DEC workstations and Digital UNIX. :)

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

And you can bask in the warm "glow" of a simulated CRT. 😅

05:22 The VT100 is connected to a PDP-11/70 RT-11 at Living Computers Museum running

makes me appreciate what we have now

It's interesting to see how commands in vi/vim got their start in Ed, like 'i' and 'a' for insert/append, '$' for 'to-end-of-line', etc.

@pauldwalker

11 ай бұрын

vi = Visual editor, Improved. it still has an ed mode.

@mkd1964

11 ай бұрын

@@pauldwalker Technically, vi actually stands for the "visual" [mode] in Ex (not Ed). It was a shortcut for launching Ex directly into visual mode instead of line mode. Then we got "Vim" (vi improved) several years later.

@pauldwalker

10 ай бұрын

@@mkd1964 i’m getting old. i could have looked it up but went with my creative interpretation instead.

@mkd1964

10 ай бұрын

@@pauldwalker You're not the only one. I thought it was feature of Ed as well, until someone recently reminded me in a different video. 🙂

Thank you.

Nice presentation Jim. Speaking of Unix, I believe I've read somewhere that FreeDOS supports the AVAILDEV and SWITCHAR options in CONFIG.SYS, which are the options that allow (MS-)DOS operating systems to function more like Unix with paths and parameter switches. Could these be covered in a future video?

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Sure thing, especially SWITCHAR for those programs that support it.

@TheSulross

11 ай бұрын

the transition from line editing to full screen text editing is interesting subject - and when and where was the first full screen mode word processor? Did that happen first on late 70s CP/M systems ala something like Wordstar? Or does Xerox get credit for that with their GUI worstation perhaps?

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

@@TheSulross I tried to trace the history of word processors sometime last year as a side project, and "word processor" is hard to define clearly. My *personal* definition of "word processor" is a full screen program that supports basic page and text formatting (minimally: top/bottom and left/right page margins, line wrap, bold, italics, underline) and shows your text on screen how it will appear on paper. I'll allow that character mode can't display all text formatting, so it's okay to use colors (say, bright white for bold, cyan for italics, green for underline, ..) but otherwise the same. And a lot of older word processors don't meet that - you needed to type special codes (sometimes similar to nroff, sometimes not - depending) within the body of the text. That's not really "as it will appear on paper." So what's the oldest "word processor" according to that definition? I haven't figured it out. 🤔

@TheSulross

10 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject But you know, that approach of mixing formatting codes with the text content is all back in favor again. Any thing I document that needs to be dressed up a bit beyond plain text I write in Markdown using an editor specifically for that. It's a bit of a hybrid way to work because even in the working text representation it will, say, have bold faced text and the Markdown embedded codes for bolding that text, and then over in the preview pane it will show how it looks when rendered for final output display. Because of github Markdown has seen a dramatic uptake, and its great. It's expressive enough for most things and suites the non-paginated way most documentation gets seen these days. Okay, well, wish table of contents and footnotes were bit more officially incorporated, and so there are different variations of Markdown with extra features. So it's got some standardization problems. Just to say, though, that when you hang around in computing long enough you see things that are in style, then go out of style, and maybe decades later come back into style again.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

@@TheSulross As one of my first bosses in my IT career said: "The pendulum of technology swings back and forth."

Awesome look into the past and showcase for ed! I'll be back for more if there will be :) You seem to have missed the square for t in the simplified equation, though, so there's a potential part 2 :P

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Oh no! 😧 I didn't realize I forgot that (27:50) Good catch!

@ResonantBytes

11 ай бұрын

​@@freedosproject In a way why we do free software is, because we know there are always some mistakes that slip in, but we're not alone, isn't it? ;) Thanks for all your work on FreeDOS, you guys rock!

I really can't get enough of retro/vintage computers.

@freedosproject

Ай бұрын

Thanks! I try to keep the channel focused on FreeDOS, but sometimes I like to show Linux/Unix history too. ☺

I love the look of that terminal, what are you using?

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

I'm using Cool Retro Term. You can find it here: github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

One of my first assignments in my C/Assembly programming class in uni was to write an ed clone. Fun times. I'd like to see more videos demonstrating how the early Unix tools would have been used.

@TheSulross

11 ай бұрын

Unix before pipes - gee, talk about some stone age computing using bear skins and stone knives!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

I wrote an article once about "how to check spelling the 'old school Unix' way, but it was easier to show with pipes. Without pipes, it would have been like this: tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' tmp1 tr -d ',.:;()?!_' tmp2 tr ' ' ' ' tmp3 sort tmp4 uniq tmp5 comm -2 -3 tmp5 words ..and then you get a list of words that are likely misspelled. (For anyone who doesn't understand the commands: convert all text from the teset.me document to lowercase, remove special characters, translate spaces to newlines, sort the output, remove duplicate lines, compare the list to show only the lines that don't appear in the 'words' dictionary.) 'sort' is from Unix 1st Ed, 'uniq' is from Unix 3rd Ed, 'comm' and 'tr' appeared in Unix 4th Ed (1973). And by 3rd Ed, you had pipes anyway. In 1st and 2nd Ed, you would have written a simple program that de-duped lines from input (basically 'uniq'), a one-off program to turn a document into lowercase words one per line, and another one-off program that compared line-by-line input to a list of words and printed the "not found" lines: ./makewords tmp3 sort tmp4 ./dedupe tmp5 ./nonwords < tmp5

@AureliusR

10 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject There's a great video about UNIX from the AT&T History channel in which Brian Kernighan shows how to use pipes to do a basic spellcheck. It's so funny to watch, A) because he looks so young, and B) because he has his feet up on the desk, keyboard in lap, casually showing the viewers features of UNIX that were revolutionary. There were some other, lesser known Bell Labs employees who also did a lot for UNIX, including Lorinda Cherry, John Mashey, etc. They deserve credit too, though of course Thompson and Ritchie really did the heavy lifting for UNIX.

I used Xenix (Microsoft and SCO) on the Intel 8086 and 80286 (1983-1986). By 1986, the 80386 was released and Microsoft walked away from Xenix and started OS/2 development with IBM.

Lots of fun. I use ed to this day. It's so fast for quick config file edits.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

It really is! I use ed whenever I need to capture something quickly, especially if I need to write a quick 3-line script to process some data and I want to keep the previous output on my screen while I write the script. So easy to use ed(1) when I'm on ssh somewhere. Also, I use edlin on Linux sometimes. Gregory's FreeDOS Edlin compiles and runs fine on Linux. I should do a video about that… 😃

amazing，great job

My favourite terminal was the Wyse 60 & the Wyse 160

Yes, please do more videos about UNIX history,

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Will do! I'm back to doing more DOS videos now, but I'll do another Unix video sometime.

I used to own a copy of System III. Was on a terminal used to control a mainframe. Huge tower with large format motherboard with a bunch of daughter cards.

@freedosproject

8 ай бұрын

That's great! 😃 The first Unix system I used was on a Sun 3/50 running SunOS (version 3? or was it version 4 by then?). My first job used a mix of Unix systems, including SunOS, HP-UX, and Apollo DomainOS/AEGIS (which provided both BSD and System V) … until I replaced some of the older systems with Linux.

Super entertaining retro flashback here in Sweden! You did a great job on this video. What color was your terminal back in the day? Mine was amber. I don't remember what system it was. By the way, it's interesting that ed, then vi, then vim, then neovim all carried on the same janky keybindings that someone came up with in the 1970s, back when screens couldn't even highlight/select text. I am sure they never thought those keybinds would live on for so long. Now there's Helix which uses the same bindings but cleans up the inconsistencies and changes from "verb, motion" (blind destruction a la Vim) to "motion, verb" (which shows the selection before you do the edit, to let you avoid mistakes, or continue expanding the selection if needed). It blows my mind that Vim's keybindings have been relatively unchanged for half a century.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Thanks - glad you liked the video! I grew up on green and amber screens, like on the Apple II.

@MyAmazingUsername

10 ай бұрын

@@freedosproject That's fantatic. I remember the Apple IIs didn't have lowercase. How far we've come! :D I honestly really like older hardware and the slow speed it ran at. It felt so cozy. You had to wait for things to happen, and had time to brew some coffee! Maybe I should run Cool Retro Term + something that limits the baud rate of the output for nostalgia. :)

Hi. Great video. Besides minor changes like lcd instead of crt and window terminal instead of glass or paper on, all the things are similar. C language is has been used for last 50 yrs. Fortran is not so popular and new languages like Go/Golang which I love or renewed languages like C++20 got a palm to be first but also python and javaScript and other interpreted stuff is commonly in use - which I don't like. I like old good assembly translated language for many processors' architectures (6502; 8088;MC68000) and other compiled and more productive programming languages which were or even are used today at least for retro programming or just for fun. I appreciate your enthusiasm to share your hobbies to us. I always admire people with passion. Cheers!

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Thanks! 😊

really appreciate the long way from where we are coming from, but there's still somthing about those green screen :)

@freedosproject

6 ай бұрын

I do love the command line. My Linux machine is running the GNOME desktop, but I usually have a terminal open to do command line things once in a while. I grew up with the command line, so I'm very comfortable there. 🤓

I learned my first unix commands to be able to login and run rogue. This was on dial up modem to a unix computer that had a guest account. I have no idea whose computer it was. A friend gave me the number.

Love it.

This is incredible! I would have loved to live those times. Men must have felt superhumans for the first time

Next best thing to a time machine, thanks. I even caught myself thinking out loud: "use a ternary to reset line number to 1, saves 3 lines of code!". We were young then...

@freedosproject

7 ай бұрын

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it! I'm giving this as a conference talk in a few weeks. Also, I just posted a new video that's very similar to this, as a "history of tech writing" video. I know it's repeating some content from this video, but it's for a different article to celebrate National Day of Writing, so I wanted to record a shorter video just for that.

Fascinating.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Thanks Rugxulo! 👍

It must have been around 1982 when I first got exposed to SunOS 4 at the university. As a professional systems administrator I got exposed to Sun Solaris, Data General DG/UX, MV/UX, IBM AIX, HP/UX, and much later to SuSE Linux, RedHat Linux, etc. Because I was brought up with old time Unix'es, and because I never knew what toolset would be available on the next server, I stuck with the old-fashioned tools like Bourne Shell, awk, , sed, ls, find, grep, and vi, and did not use any of the GNU features. It is only these last two years that I have finally embraced GNU/Linux and started using Bash, vim, less, and all the other goodies that comes with the current GNU/Linux releases.

@freedosproject

10 ай бұрын

Same for me, but a few years later. My first job was managing Apollo, Sun, and HP - and I added Linux. My second job had HP and AIX - plus Linux. My third job was also a mix. I didn't learn the GNU additions until much later, after I no longer was a sysadmin, no longer had to worry about "will my scripts run everywhere?"

One good thing about ed editor is that you can learn sed command syntax and Vi ex mode commands and regular expression syntax. The original Unix (Unix V7, System V, BSD4.3 etc) used K&R C compiler. Argument types in the function argument list is ANSI C style. K&R compiler used in original Unix did not support such ANSI-C style argument list.

@freedosproject

11 ай бұрын

Yup, a few others also pointed out that I used ANSI C style, not K&R C. In another comment, I rewrote the linenum.c program using K&R C style.

it's just a unix terminal where the names of the executables have been changed to make more scene. I worked on it with the old SCO Unix and also with subsequent versions and it wasn't complicated at all, more or less like msdos, it had "case sensitivity" on its side and if you had to run a program if it wasn't in the search path you had to to specify ./

Amazing! Great! Thanks a lot! So... is it really possible to use "cc" without get errors and warnings??? :)

@freedosproject

9 ай бұрын

Of course! If you write valid code, you won't get errors or warnings. ☺ I usually use the -Wall option with gcc and aim for warning-free code.

I still have printer paper in the attic that is full of my ed sessions in 1980, we didn’t have a monitor as it was too expensive! Probably one of those accountant decisions where the CapEx was the only thing that mattered, my time waiting for the terminal to print and the cost of the paper weren’t considered - no wonder it took two of us a year to write 4k of assembler! (Having to fit all the code into a 4k ROM didn’t help.)

@TonyWhitley

11 ай бұрын

Strictly speaking, not ed but "The Editor" which was a clone written for the RCA1802 processor in the COSMAC Development System worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-UK/Technology/Technology-Modern/Archive-Elektor-IDX/IDX/00s/Elektor-2011-12-OCR-Page-0076.pdf Nothing as sophisticated as UNIX, there was no OS at all - the editor was "Disc 0: Track 00" (you literally typed 000 Enter to run it) and the assembler was "Disc 0: Track 02". Similarly for the source files, "Disc 1: Track 00" etc. If you added too much to a file when you saved it it would simply carry on to the next track overwriting whatever was there so it was best to leave a blank track between files: 00, 02, 04 etc!