Post by @thalia@discuss.systems

My workshop at LRC on playing with UNIX V4 was a great success!

Everyone loved the teletype and terminal. In the manner of the day, I gave manuals to teach the system and ed (@ed1conf), and we now have a cohort of new ed users. A few groups solved or got close to solving my challenge of backporting the obfuscated mullender.c program from V7 to V4. Surprisingly with a dozen or so people on at once, UNIX handled the load fantastically.

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

2 media files

Me holding a long sheet of roll paper printed by UNIX V4 users with my teletype.

Heathkit H19 terminal showing the current UNIX V4 users connected.

#unix #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

4 Replies

2 Boosts

Thalia Archibald

@thalia@discuss.systems 4 days ago

Doug McIlroy, the first ever UNIX user, visited us at LRC today. He introduced bare m4, a single-operation version of the m4 macro processor with only define, which is nonetheless Turing-complete. “This I decline to explain”, he said on this slide.

#unix

Doug McIlroy pointing at a slide:

define(`switch1of1',
`define(`$1', `_switch1(`$1',$2)('DOL(1)`)')')
define(`_switch1', `$1 $2')

define(`DOL',`$$1') — Doug McIlroy pointing at a slide: define(`switch1of1', `define(`$1', `_switch1(`$1',$2)('DOL(1)`)')') define(`_switch1', `$1 $2') define(`DOL',`$$1')

Thalia Archibald

@thalia@discuss.systems 4 days ago

Someone hacked sh to print “haha” when you mistype chdir as cd.

#unix

Thalia Archibald

@thalia@discuss.systems 4 days ago

LRC 2026

Thalia Archibald

@thalia@discuss.systems 1 hr. ago

I've written up a retrospective on my UNIX V4 workshop at Low Resource Computing, highlighting the cool things people accomplished and learned, along with snapshots of the filesystem throughout the workshop. It was a lot of fun!

https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unix-v4-demo

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

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