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Warning: DirtyDB is used. This is fine for testing but not recommended for production. -- To suppress these warning messages change suppressErrorsInPadText to true in your settings.json# Notes from the visit of the computer museum of KULeuven (group 1)
J
e
an
was
disappointed
that
the museum only shows hardware,
and has
n't f
ou
nd a satisfying way to show software.
He
worked
in
computer science
after graduating in 19
75, developing and later moving to system administration
during the
eighties & nineties,
having become
more interested in
the development of the I
nternet
.
O
ne of the first computers in
KU L
euven
was
the digital
PDP
-11.
T
h
is
machine was very expensive (50
thousand dollars
),
while
the software (AT&T / Bell Labs'
U
nix) was
gratis
, with some licensing strings attached.
The operating system that shipped with the
PDP
, developed by digital, was not so good, but another operating system was developed for the same machines: U
nix.
Bell
L
abs,
created as a result of
of AT&T
,
was developing UNIX. They were selling the system for
a
very expensive
sum
(2
0000
$), but they were also distributing it for free to universities.
The university would contact the developers
(Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie)
personally
, and
they would ship the operating system
's
source code via post
al
, as a hard drive
.
(
a
disk-dump of Ken Thompson's system?)
KU
Leuven did not have the
appropriate
disk drive interface to read it in to the machine, so they went to
UVA in
Amsterdam, wh
ich
had a machine with both disk drives.
T
hat way
,
they could transfer it to another drive and finally load it in their PDP-11.
U
nix
was shipped for free
(with
a service charge of 190 dollars
)
to universities that requested i
t. It came with a set of restrictions:
universities could not re-distribute modified copies, and
while
they could share it
with other
universities
, some countries were off-limits
.
Still
during the
Cold War, Bell had the pressure to not have the system flow to countries of the
R
ussian block. The
license agreement describing these restrictions can be found in
the
CS
L
euven
M
useum website
.
They could share to "ABC" countries (USA being an "A" country), but not to "XYZ" countries
, which included the Eastern bloc
.
AT
&
T Unix licen
ce and the list of commands:
<
https://museum.cs.kuleuven.be/pdp/licentie-E.html
>
<
http://etherbox.local/home/pi/documents/6thEdlicence.pdf
>
![List of commands 1](
https://museum.cs.kuleuven.be/pdp/ulic4.gif)
![List of commands 2]
(
https://museum.cs.kuleuven.be/pdp/ulic5.gif
)
COCOM: coordinating committee for multilateral export controls
Later they moved to the VAX system
(<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX
>)
, also from
DEC
-digital, and still running Unix.
T
his time they moved to BSD Unix, developed at Berkeley University.
Unix BSD was the first system with virtual memory. In the previous
PDP
they had 64kb of memory, so that was the size of the biggest program they could run.
Every year, they received the system as a magnetic tape, with the source.
This tape also shipped with many commands and programs, most of which they knew nothing about, and had to search inside to figure out what was available.
That's where they first encountered `make`! The documentation
, in the form of Unix man pages and troff/nroff formatted documents, was also provided in this tape.
The
Morris worm (1988) serves as a time-reference in his personal memories.
BSD
4.3 systems running sendmail were infected
;
Jan Huens spent an evening with Piet Beersma
from
UVA to dig into the problem, and see whether their systems were exposed
.