@cstross Such bugs are far older than that.

The place I studied as an undergrad had a PDP-10 for campus-wide time sharing. ca. 1979 official IT staff (not that they were called that) moved most of their effort to getting new VAXes going as replacements. As part of that, they cancelled the weekly downtime to run diagnostics on the PDP-10.

That revealed a long-standing bug in TOP-10: some internal counter (I forget what, can't have been simple uptime in clock ticks on a system with 36-bit words) overflowed after about a month of uptime, causing havoc.

I forget whether DEC supplied a fix, IT staff (or us students helping keep the -10 running) rolled our own, or we just scheduled monthly reboots.

@oddhack @cstross I was happy to leave VMS behind when I left California. I wish I could do the same with Linux and return to something that really feels like Unix, but that doesn't exist any more.

Need to find time to assemble, at long last, my PiDP-11 and run 7/e on it.

@oddhack

For context:

The -v option to cat was introduced to AT&T #Unix in 1987 with System 5 Release 3, so @oclsc is looking for something that's older than even late 1980s #Unix.

I don't know what old versions of #Xenix one could get up and running nowadays.

@cstross
#cat #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory

@JdeBP @oddhack @oclsc @cstross

I attended a mid-80s Unix conference (Toronto) where Rob Pike complained that “cat went off to Berkeley and came back waving flags”. I think his talk was an early exploration of what would become known as “the Unix philosophy”

@lain_7

It's interesting that not even Pike's paper gives an indication of who actually originated the -v option to cat.

The contemporary literature that I have kept explicitly says that it was new in S5R3, but alas covers AT&T better than BSD.

It doesn't say whether AT&T #Unix got it from BSD or vice versa.

@oddhack @oclsc @cstross
#cat #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory

@JdeBP @lain_7 @oddhack @cstross cat -v came from Berkeley. Rob didn't give a Usenix talk until 1983 but -v existed (and was a target of various naughty emotions amonst us purists) in 4.0 BSD. I just checked my paper copy of the 3BSD and 4.0 BSD manuals; the latter is dated November 1980.

One example of the wrongheadedness (at least as people like me see it): the same cat had options -n and -s to number lines (something pr could already do) and to remove empty lines (sed '/^$/d' works fine).

I think it was Rob who also wrote vis, a little tool that did nothing but convert control characters to visible form. Because that was its primary purpose, it was not intrusive for it to have flags to leave tabs alone and to elide rather than convert unprintables.