On 2019-Mar-05, at 8:36 PM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote: That was my first question too. Having worked at the University of British Columbia through that era, a "UNIX tools distribution" kind of surprised me, and was wondering if it was some other meaning of "UBC". The Computing Centre (at that time) had nothing to do with UNIX, revolving entirely around MTS. They used /11s as front-end terminal muxes for the MTS mainframe, but those were running their own internal system software written in their own language (PLUS, IIRC). The Computer Science Dept. (my home base) ignored ATT Unix and had no /11s running UNIX, instead running BSD on vax(en). There was a small facility in biosci or genetics running UNIX on /11s or (later) a vax (IIRC), serving the bio community. I had some minor association with them, saw the machine room once and recall the fellow who managed it, but was unaware of them doing general system tools development, or being known for such outside the university/bio dept. TRIUMF was using /11s for cyclotron control I believe, that's not where you anticipate UNIX showing up. But . . . buried in ubc/fcdoc/fclet is: )m Biology Data Center )l 2204 Main Mall )l The University of British Columbia )l Vancouver, B.C., Canada ~~V6T 1W5 )ml2e go )t2 August 24, 1979. )l2 Dear Fortran 77 user: !p there is now available a new version of the UBC Fortran 77 compiler. . . . . . . )l6t2 Sincerly )l4t2 W. E. Webb Learn somethin' new every day.

On 2019-Mar-05, at 10:07 PM, Richard Loken wrote: Well, I don't know for certain, I was just trying to recall where I was aware of there being /11's around campus. I had the impression from somewhere at the time that /11s were running the cyclotron, or were present in some significant capacity at TRIUMF. It would make sense in terms of TRIUMF chronological dev, predating VAX. And for real-time control, don't expect UNIX. So I wasn't aware of, or it seemed unlikely to me, the tools came out of TRIUMF. The quoted text from the tape seems to confirm it came out the UBC biosci service. Granted that a facility like TRIUMF can be expected to have more than one computing cluster/service. Come to recall, I did have some minor contact with TRIUMF in a professional capacity - we supplied our X400 email program to them (as well as to the biosci facility), and that would have been for a VAX, most likely VMS, machine. The HEP community was quite fond of VAXen & VMS in that era.

On 3/6/19 10:14 AM, Lyndon Nerenberg via cctalk wrote: sigh.. before this goes farther into the weeds, the tape came from the University of British Columbia's Biosciences Data Center there is a short bio of Bill Webb at http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/people I guess there aren't enough Unix greybeards around here any more. The UBC tape, like Usenix tapes, Yale E editor, and the RAND editor tapes were just things you knew about.

On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 3:50 PM Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I got into UNIX in 1984/85 on VAXen and I know all about the Usenix tapes, but I have to say the UBC tape is not something I recall from those days. -ethan

On 3/7/19 7:28 AM, Warner Losh wrote: I'm sure there are. Usenix threw out the copies of their tapes that were given back to them to preserve.

I have a tape with the label "UNIX USERS GRUOP NEW RELEASE TAPE" "091377" (That last part is almost certainly the date). The tape is in tp format. I don't see anything that looks to match in the bitsavers archive. Al, shall I upload the image for you to snag? JRJ On 3/7/2019 12:08 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: