r==> alice-commentary <== From: mnelson@stimpy.eecis.udel.edu (Mark Nelson) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Alice doesn't live here anymore Date: 18 Jan 1995 01:40:18 GMT Organization: University of Delaware, Newark Lines: 15 Distribution: world Message-ID: <3fhri2$j4h@louie.udel.edu> References: <3fh5t4$ccm@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: stimpy-fddi.udel.edu In article <3fh5t4$ccm@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> dave@racer.enet.dec.com () writes: >;;; With thanks (and apologies) to Chris Stacy, Alan Wechsler, Noel >;;; Chiappa, Larry Allen, and of course Arlo Guthrie, and particularly >;;; to Ann Marie Finn who is a kind soul and not at all like the >;;; person portrayed herein. --sra 3 May 85 Wow, that brings back memories: I haven't seen this in a long time. sra is Rob Austein, who was my roommate at Wesleyan where we both were first exposed to TOPS-20, and who was working at MIT's LCS when he wrote "Alice's PDP-10". -- Ceci n'est pas une signature. Mark Nelson mnelson@cis.udel.edu From mnelson@stimpy.eecis.udel.edu Thu Jan 26 18:00:45 PST 1995 From: mnelson@stimpy.eecis.udel.edu (Mark Nelson) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Alice doesn't live here anymore Date: 24 Jan 1995 20:48:20 GMT Organization: University of Delaware, Newark Lines: 15 Message-ID: <3g3p2k$7sc@louie.udel.edu> References: <3fh5t4$ccm@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> <3fv78e$83s@tardis.tymnet.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: stimpy-fddi.udel.edu In article <3fv78e$83s@tardis.tymnet.com> jms@tardis.Tymnet.COM (Joe Smith) writes: >I heard the song performed at DECUS and captured it on a borrowed >microcassette. Before returning the dictation recorder, I copied the audio >to video tape, and used a VT180 for the video. > >Could someone repost the history of this little ditty? Thankx. > -Joe You can check out the author's commentary on "Alice's PDP-10" at http://www.epilogue.com/~sra/alice/. -- Ceci n'est pas une signature. Mark Nelson mnelson@cis.udel.edu ==> intro.html <== I wrote "Alice" during my first year on the staff at MIT, but the villain of this piece dates from an earlier era. Back during the late Mesozoic period of computer science (otherwise known as the early 1980s), I was working part time as a systems programmer while doing my level best to flunk out of the small liberal arts school I was then attending. We had one, count it, one DECSystem-20 which was used for everything from introductory computer science classes to the university payroll accounts. Nowadays, when a few thousand dollars will buy a timesharing machine one can stow in a briefcase with room left for a bag lunch, it's hard to remember that in those days a -real- computer was one that took up only slightly less space than an 18-wheel tractor trailer rig and cost rather more to feed. Or that's how we felt about it at the time. Then, in early 1983, Digital announced the cancellation of the Jupiter project and their intent to phase out the 36-bit product line. But, they said, it's ok, all you DEC-10 and DEC-20 users can just migrate to VAX/VMS, the system of the future. Gosh, thanks, DEC. We don't mind throwing away all our programs and learning a user interface that was already obsolete by the time it first shipped. That's another one of those feelings that's hard to remember these days, what with the way that weird PDP-11 operating system from Bell Labs has spread like kudzu within DEC itself, but even after I got to MIT, I still felt that VMS was The Enemy. Hence "Alice." When Eric Raymond first asked for permission to include Alice in this anthology, I extracted from him a promise that it would appear verbatim. I figured that Alice had become a piece of history, and that nobody, myself included, should muck with it. A few days ago I saw Arlo Guthrie in concert for the first time since the year before I wrote "Alice's PDP-10," and damned if he isn't still changing the story here and there to suit the times. So I've taken the liberty of cleaning up a few rough spots and inside jokes that no longer seem funny even to me. A dead TOPS-20 RM03 pack awaits the first person to spot one of the changes. The only thing I've ever regretted about "Alice" was using Ann Finn's real name. Ann and I shared an office during my first year at MIT. She was a good friend and was very patient with the obnoxious kid from the hinterlands away from the ARPANET. When I originally wrote "Alice," it was intended for private consumption by the other people on our floor at the lab; I'd never really intended for it to travel quite as far as it did. A few months after "Alice" escaped into the outside world, Ann and her fiance were in the process of leaving MIT, and Ann went for a job interview in the city that was to be their new home. When she came back she told me that all had gone just fine until her prospective boss had taken her to the company lunchroom to introduce her to the people with whom she'd be working if she took the job. "Ann Finn? Ann -Marie- Finn?" Ann's reponse: "I'm going to kill him." Well, it's been long enough since I wrote this thing that the statutes have run, but just in case, Arlo, if you're reading this, I've got another dead RM03 pack reserved for you if you want it.... --sra, Thanksgiving Day, 1991 ==> glossary.html <== <PLAINTEXT> PDP-10: Mainframe computer having a word size of 36 bits. Arguably the finest machine ever designed for assembly language programming. Discarded by its manufacturer, DEC, in favor of the VAX and VMS. Monitor: What's called the "operating system kernel" nowadays. Named in the days when what we now call a "monitor" was called a "teletype." SUPDUP: Highly sophisticated network display protocol based on the ITS terminal driver, including the Intelligent Terminal Protocol. Implemented more features with less hassle than the current day TELNET protocol. Ignored by most of the world because "it's too complicated." ITS: Incompatable Timesharing System. One of the oldest timesharing operating systems in existance, originally implemented on the PDP-6. ITS is for assembly language hackers what a Lisp Machine is for Lisp hackers. LISP: General purpose programming language, used primarily in AI work. One of the two oldest surviving general purpose programming languages (the other is FORTRAN). MIT-OZ: One of the legendary MIT PDP-10s. This one ran Twenex. Named by the person who noticed the little PDP-11/40 inside the front panel of this dinosaur: "I am Oz the great and powerful (pay no attention to the PDP-11 behind the front panel)." Hackers: People who program computers because they're there and it's fun, and who really hate to be confused with the pinheaded vandals who are properly referred to as "crackers." At MIT hackers don't just play with computers, they also play with electric trains, install working pay telephones on the roof of the Great Dome, and provide halftime entertainment at Harvard-Yale football games. LISPM (Lisp Machine): A workstation specially designed for running the Lisp programming language. PS (Public Structure): Primary filesystem on a Twenex machine. At MIT all Twenex filesystems were built on DEC RP06 removable pack disk drives; a single filesystem could span multiple disk packs. One RP06 pack held about 76000 pages of 512 36-bit words each. CHECKD: Twenex filesystem scavenger, used to diagnose and repair broken filesystems and to locate filesystem pages which had gone AWOL. ACJ: Access Control Job. Generic name for site-specific TOPS-20 security program. OZ's ACJ was particularly famous for implementing a somewhat eccentric security policy. MDDT (Monitor DDT): A version of the Twenex dialect of DDT which could examine and modify the running monitor. ("In MDDT, no one can you scream -- but everybody can hear you say `whoops!'" --VAF@CMU-CS-C) ANONYMOUS: Username available to anybody at all who had network access and wanted to transfer some files to or from a Twenex machine. Chaosnet: High speed (for the era) local area networking protocol suite and hardware, developed as part of the Lisp Machine project and heavily used at MIT in the early 1980s. Twenex: MIT's hacked up version of DEC's TOPS-20 operating system, which was itself a hacked up version of BBN's TENEX. At the time this story was written, all MIT Twenex machines ran on KL-10 processors. PS:<OPERATOR>LOST-PAGES.BIN.-1: Filename under which CHECKD would write out the addresses of any AWOL pages it might have found. SEND: Similar to electronic mail, but displayed directly on user's screen. Did not require one to be running a special "talk" program. Implemented by the SEND and REPLY programs, with a history kept by the system and accessable with the WHAT program. On ITS the WHAT program could also furnish useful information about bus schedules, menus at chinese resturants, and the importance of thinking before answering questions put to you by scruffy little men guarding bridges in Monty Python skits. Ann Marie Finn: Author's officemate, who really didn't deserve to be immortalized as a villain. But she does drink a lot of coffee. SIXBIT: Short for "six bit ASCII." The character set that everybody used back when even Big Blue made 36-bit machines. POPJ: PDP-10 machine instruction the right halfword of which is totally ignored and was thus occasionally used for data storage by hackers who were -really- bored. UNAME: User NAME. CD%DIR: Twenex filesystem directory attribute, indicating that the name of a particular directory was not also a Twenex username. Also called the "FILES-ONLY" bit. CLU: Programming language developed by people on the other side of the fifth floor of building NE43. CLU hackers and Lisp hackers generally regarded each other as hopelessly confused. JSYS: PDP-10 machine instruction used to implement Twenex monitor calls. ROLM DTI: Box used to interface a terminal to a ROLM data switch ==> text.txt <== From: dave@racer.enet.dec.com () Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Alice doesn't live here anymore Date: 17 Jan 1995 19:30:44 GMT ;;; With thanks (and apologies) to Chris Stacy, Alan Wechsler, Noel ;;; Chiappa, Larry Allen, and of course Arlo Guthrie, and particularly ;;; to Ann Marie Finn who is a kind soul and not at all like the ;;; person portrayed herein. --sra 3 May 85 This song is called "Alice's PDP-10". But Alice doesn't own a PDP-10, in fact Alice isn't even in the song. It's just the name of the song. That's why I called this song "Alice's PDP-10". You see, it all started about two incompatible monitor versions ago, about two months ago on a Tuesday, when my friend and I SUPDUP'd over to MIT-OZ to pick up some hackers to go out for a Chinese dinner. But AI hackers don't live on MIT-OZ, they live on various assorted lispms and such, and seeing as and how they never log in except via the file server, they hadn't gotten around to doing filesystem garbage collection for a long time. We got over there, saw 600 pages free, 10000 pages in use on a 5 pack PS:, and decided it would be a friendly gesture to run CHECKD for them and try to reclaim some of that lost space. So we reloaded the system with the floppies and the switch registers and other implements of destruction, and answered "Y" to RUN CHECKD? But when we got the system up and tried to release all the lost pages there was a loud beeping and a big message flashed up on our screen saying: PERMISSION DENIED BY ACJ Well, we'd never heard of a version of ACJ that would let you go into MDDT from ANONYMOUS but not run CHECKD, and so, with tears in our eyes, we headed off over the Chaosnet looking for a filesystem with enough free pages to write out the LOST-PAGES.BIN file. Didn't find one... Until we got to XX-11, and at the other end of XX-11 was another MIT Twenex, and in PS:<OPERATOR> on that MIT Twenex was another LOST-PAGES.BIN file. And we decided that one big LOST-PAGES.BIN file was better than two little LOST-PAGES.BIN file, and rather than page that one in we thought we'd write ours out. So that's what we did. Went back to OZ, found some hackers and went out for a Chinese dinner that couldn't be beat, and didn't get up until the next morning when we got a SEND from Ann Marie Finn. She said, "Kid, we found your initials in SIXBIT in the right half of a POPJ at the end of a two megaword core dump full of garbage, just wanted to know if you had any information about it". And I said, "Yes ma'am Ann Marie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that XUNAME into that halfword". After talking back and forth with Ann for about 45 messages we arrived at the truth of the matter and Ann said that we had to go rebuild the bittable and we also had to come down and talk to her in room NE43-501. Now friends, there was only one of two things that Ann could of done with us down at room 501, and the first one was that she could have hired us on the spot for actually knowing enough about Twenex to screw it up that badly, which wasn't very likely and we didn't expect it, and the other was that she could have bawled us out and told us never to be seen hacking filesystems again, which was what we expected. But when we got to room 501 we discovered that there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was both immediately de-wheeled. CD%DIR'ed. And I said "Ann, I don't think I can rebuild the bittable with this here FILES-ONLY bit set." And she said "XOFF, kid, get into this UDP packet" and that's what we did and rode up to the square bracket asciz slash scene of the crime slash close square bracket. Now friends, I want to tell you about the ninth floor of building NE43 where this happened. They got three KL10s, 24 LISPMs, and about 32 VAXen running 4.2 unix. But when we got to the square bracket asciz slash scene of the crime slash close square bracket there was five twenex hackers past and present, this being the biggest lossage yet by an RMS clone and everybody wanted to get in their suggestion for a new system daemon that would have kept it from ever having happened in the first place. And they was using up all kinds of debugging equipment that they had lying around on V3A SWSKIT tapes. They were doing DSs, MONRDs, and RSTRSHs, and they made 27000 pages of core dumps and photo files on an RP06 with comments and -READ-.-THIS- files to be used as evidence against us. After the ordeal, Ann took us back downstairs and left us with the CLU hackers. She said "Kid, I'm gonna leave you with the CLU hackers. I want your jsys manual and your ROLM DTI". I said "Ann, I can understand your wanting my jsys manual so I won't remind the CLU hackers of grody things like operating systems, but what do you want my DTI for?" and she said "Kid, we don't want any VTS errors". I said "Ann, did you think I was going to try to crash the system for littering?" Ann said that she was making sure, and friends, Ann was, 'cause she cleared all my left-hand privs bits so I couldn't logout. And she disabled the TREPLACE command so I couldn't crock in an XCT [0] instruction, cause an illegal instruction interrupt to MEXEC, and sneak into MDDT. Yeah, Ann was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Chiappa (remember Chiappa? This song's never even mentioned Chiappa) Chiappa came by and with a few gratuitous insults to the CLU hackers bailed us out of there, and we went out and had another Chinese dinner that couldn't be beat, and didn't get up