TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

47 participants
6502 discussions

by Saif Resun

hello there I'm Resun, a teenaged programmer and I love C and UNIX. I want to use the 5th edition UNIX operating system. From here Index of /Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v5 (tuhs.org)<https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v5/> I've got a compressed file of the 5th edition UNIX. I want to use it using the SimH emulator but there's no guide about how to install it or use it. I'm using SimH in Windows 10. Can someone please help me to use this system? Thanks.

4 years

JF Reiser

by Larry Stewart

I never saw his 32V work, but I reimplemented his additive random number generator in my own work. Not too many people can write a 35 page PhD thesis. Fewer can do it for Knuth. -Larry

4 years

Evolution of Unix (demand) paging 1980-1985

by Paul Ruizendaal

As an offshoot of looking more closely at 32V, SysIII and 8th Edition I got interested in how each managed memory. I’ve not deep-dived into the code yet, but from cursory inspection and searching past posts on this list, I get to the following summary: - As has been documented widely, 32V essentially retained the V7 swapping architecture, merely increasing the maximum process size a bit versus the PDP-11 version. - SysIII appears to have retained this, just cleaning up the source code a bit. I assume that all the V7/SysIII derivatives of the early 80’s were swapping systems. - John Reiser further developed 32V memory management into a (reportedly elegant) demand paging system in 1980-1981, but this code appears lost. - 3BSD/4BSD/4.1BSD developed 32V memory management into a full demand paging setup as well. This code base was dominant in the 1980-1985 era. - 8th Edition pulled in the BSD VM code and is essentially identical to that in 4.1BSD. This choice was made because it was not a research interest and using a maintained code base freed up scarce time. - SysV R1 appears to have retained the SysIII memory system. - SysV R2 (floating about on the net, eg. here https://github.com/ryanwoodsmall/oldsysv) seems to have used a new implementation. Questions: Is that about correct, or am I missing major elements? Several places mention that there was also a setup that was still swapping in nature, but did not require allocations in core to be contiguous (“scatter paging”). Did this get used much in the era? At first glance, the SysV R2 code seems shorter and cleaner than the early BSD code (~2000 vs. ~3000 sloc). Is this implementation perhaps a derivative of John Reiser’s work?

4 years

pcc in 8th edition

by Paul Ruizendaal

For clarity and ease of reference: - The “Tour of paper” is for instance here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.3512 <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.3512> - A machine description for the VAX that matches with that paper is for instance in the SysIII source: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/cmd/cc/vax/pcc/ta… <https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/cmd/cc/vax/pcc/ta…> - The new style description in 8th edition is here: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/ccom/vax/stin <https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/ccom/vax/stin> - The program that translates the “stin” file to a “table.c” file is here: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/ccom/common/sty.y <https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/ccom/common/sty.y> ==== Sometimes one thing leads to another. Following the recent mention of some retro-brew 68K single board systems, I decided to build a CB030 board (in progress). I figure it is a rough proxy for a 1980 VAX and would allow for some experimentation with the 32V / SysIII / 8th edition code. My first thought was to use the M68K compiler that is included with the Blit sources (see THUS Archive for this), as I had used that before to explore some of the Blit source. That compiler is LP32, not ILP32 - which may be a source of trouble. Just changing the SZINT parameter yielded some issues, so I started looking at the PCC source. This source does not have a “table.c” in the well known format as described in the “A tour of the portable C compiler” paper. Instead it uses a file “stin” which appears to be in a more compact format and is translated into a “table.c” file by a new pre-processor ("sty.y”). Then looking at the VAX compilers for 8th and 10th edition, these too use this “stin” file. All the other m68K compilers (based on pcc) that I found appear to derive from the V7/32V/SysIII lineage, not from the 8th edition lineage. A quick google did not yield much background or documentation on the STY format. Anybody on this list that can shed some light on the history of the STY table and on how to use it? Any surviving reports or memos that would be useful? Many thanks in advance Paul

4 years

SunOS Patches

by Henry Bent

Does anyone here have an archive of SunOS patches? I'm looking for one specific one, 100332-08, for Fortran 1.4. Feel free to reply off-list. Thanks! -Henry

4 years

How to install 4.3BSD Quasijarus on VAXStation 4000 VLC?

by Adam Thornton

Thanks to Emanuel Steibler, I am now in possession of a VAXStation 4000 VLC. I've got OpenVMS installed, but, well, the SCSI2SD gives me two more 2GB disks (the fourth partition is the OpenVMS install CD). I'd like to put Quasijarus on it. Problem is, the VLC only supports, as far as I know, SCSI devices. I'm quite happy to install Quasijarus under simhfrom an emulated SCSI tape to an rz device and then just dd the resulting disk image over to the SD card...but I can't work out how to do it. This (as my simh ini file) works fine for getting to the emulated console: set rz0 rzu att rz0 quas.dsk set rz4 tz30 att rz4 quas.tap boot.cpu Problem is, quas.tap doesn't actually work; neither the prepackaged 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c.tap nor one I make with mkdisttap.pl and the input stand/miniroot/etc files. I get this: adam@m1-wired:~/Documents/src/quasi$ ./vaxstation4000vlc install.ini VAXstation 4000-VLC (KA48) simulator V4.0-0 Current git commit id: 9bf37d3d /Users/adam/Documents/src/quasi/install.ini-4> att rz4 quas.tap RZ4: Tape Image 'quas.tap' scanned as SIMH format /Users/adam/Documents/src/quasi/install.ini-5> boot cpu Loading boot code from internal ka48a.bin KA48-A V1.2-32B-V4.0 08-00-2B-B2-35-2C 16MB ?? 010 2 LCG 0086 ?? 001 3 DZ 0032 ?? 001 4 CACHE 0512 ?? 001 7 IT 8706 ?? 001 8 SYS 0128 ?? 001 9 NI 0024 >>> show dev VMS/VMB ADDR DEVTYPE NUMBYTES RM/FX WP DEVNAM REV ------- ---- ------- -------- ----- -- ------ --- ESA0 08-00-2B-B2-35-2C DKA0 A/0/0 DISK 2.14GB FX RZ23 0A18 DKA100 A/1/0 DISK ...... FX RZ23 0A18 DKA200 A/2/0 DISK ...... FX RZ23 0A18 DKA300 A/3/0 DISK ...... FX RZ23 0A18 MKA400 A/4/0 TAPE RM TZK50 1.1A DKA500 A/5/0 DISK ...... FX RZ23 0A18 ..HostID.. A/6 INITR DKA700 A/7/0 DISK ...... FX RZ23 0A18 >>> boot mka400: -MKA400 ?48 ENDOFFILE HALT instruction, PC: 00000B15 (MOVL (R11),SP) Sooooo.... How do I make a bootable SCSI tape image from Quasijarus? Or, alternatively, how can I create a bootable ISO image from the Quasijarus installation files (and then either install under simh, or just dd to an SD partition and boot from there, or even burn to an actual CD and install from a SCSI CD-ROM drive)? Adam

4 years

Re: [TUHS] pcc in 8th edition

by norman＠oclsc.org

Adam Thornton: I sat in on an undergrad course from [Dave Hanson] my first year of grad school (94-95) and he taught it with lcc. I asked `why not gcc' and he said, `gcc is 100,000 lines and I don't know what 90% of them are doing; lcc is 10,000'. === My copy is indeed about 10K lines, not counting the code-generator modules. Those are C files generated by a utility program lburg from a template file. The three architectures supplied in the distribution, for MIPS, SPARC, and X86, have template files of about 900, 1200, and 700 lines respectively. The template file for the VAX is about 2800 lines, but includes some metalanguage of my own, interpreted by an awk script, to generate extra rules for all the direct-store type-to-type instructions. The C output from lburg for the other architectures is 5000-6000 lines; for the VAX, after expansion by my awk program and then by lburg, is nearly 20K. Did someone say Complex Instruction Set? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years

Re: [TUHS] pcc in 8th edition

by norman＠oclsc.org

Dan Cross: I seem to recall that LCC was also used, at least on 10th Ed. Am I imagining things, or was that real? === Some of the earliest work on lcc was done in 1127; Chris Fraser worked for the Labs for some years, Dave Hanson collaborated from his appointment at Princeton. I believe there was a /usr/bin/lcc. Some programs used it, either because they needed some part of the ISO syntax (pcc2 was pre-ISO) or just because. I don't think that version of lcc used Reiser's c2 optimizer; it generated reasonably good code by itself, including emitting auto-increment/decrement instructions. Later versions of lcc (such as that I later adopted as cc in my personal V10 world) couldn't do that any more, so I had to keep c2, and in fact to modify it to turn addl3 a,b,(p) mova 4(p),p into addl3 a,b,(p)+ (or maybe it was addl2 $4,p, I forget) But that's another story which I'll tell only if asked, and nothing to do with the original question.

4 years

Re: [TUHS] pcc in 8th edition

by norman＠oclsc.org

I was waiting to see whether Steve Johnson would speak up, because I'm not much of an expert; but yes, the VAX C compiler in V8/V9/V10 is pcc2. I think there are a few Research-specific hacks to add additional stab info for pi(9.1) and on request insert basic-block profiling for lcomp(1), but nothing major. Maybe we did some hacking on c2 as well. I know I did a lot of c2 cleanup later in my personal hacking in Toronto, but I don't think I did much if any in New Jersey. But that's independent of the compiler (modulo, I think, some of my later fixes discovered by using c2 with a different compiler). Norman Wilson Toronto ON

4 years

pcc in 8th edition

by Paul Ruizendaal

Sometimes one thing leads to another. Following the recent mention of some retro-brew 68K single board systems, I decided to build a CB030 board (in progress). I figure it is a rough proxy for a 1980 VAX and would allow for some experimentation with the 32V / SysIII / 8th edition code. My first thought was to use the M68K compiler that is included with the bit sources (see THUS Archive for this), as I had used that before to explore some of the Blit source. That compiler is LP32, not ILP32 - which may be a source of trouble. Just changing the SZINT parameter yielded some issues, so I started looking at the PCC source. This source does not have a “table.c” in the well known format as described in the “A tour of the portable C compiler” paper. Instead it uses a file “stin” which appears to be in a more compact format and is translated into a “table.c” file by a new pre-processor ("sty.y”). Then looking at the VAX compilers for 8th and 10th edition, these to use this “stin” file. All the other m68K compilers (based on pcc) that I found appear to derive from the V7/32V/SysIII lineage, not from the 8th edition lineage. A quick google did not yield much background or documentation on the STY format. Anybody on this list that can shed some light on the history of the STY table and on how to use it? Any surviving reports or memos that would be useful? Many thanks in advance Paul

4 years

FTAG: AlphaServer DS15, Sun T5140, Sun Blade 10, HP Proliant DL380 G7, VT220 [London, UK]

by Andrew Luke Nesbit

Hello all again, With a heavy heart I need to find a new home for the following beautiful hardware: - AlphaServer DS15 server - Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 1U rack server - Sun Blade 10 mini tower - HP Proliant DL380 G7 2U rack server - DEC VT220 with screen, keyboard, and various adapter cables Please note that the Sun T5140 and HP DL380 are deep (700mm for purposes of installation in a rack). I'm starting a new job next week and intend to focus on that and my family. I've stopped working on various projects and I am vacating my studio workshop, so I have a lot of things to give away or sell. The above items are all FREE FOR COLLECTION ONLY (a car will be fine to transport the above items). I am located in London, UK. Post code is N15 4QL (Seven Sisters and Tottenham Hale) in Haringey, London. Kind regards, Andrew

4 years, 1 month

First C compiler outside Bell Labs?

by Lars Brinkhoff

Hello, Which was the first C compiler written outside Bell Labs? I have a candidate in mind. Alan Snyder interned at Bell Labs in 1973. Later at MIT, we wrote a C compiler for the PDP-10. This would have been 1974-1975.

4 years, 1 month

SUN (Stanford University Network) was PC Unix

by Paul Ruizendaal

> On 09/04/2021 11:12, emanuel stiebler wrote: > You're comparing a z80 SBC running CP/M? Or are you thinking of 68000 SBCs? Z80 CP/M machines were still competitive in 1981-1983 (Osborne, Kaypro) > I've never seen a 68k SBC. Have I missed out something along the way? Is there a community for 68k SBC's? Kind regards, Andrew Well, Rob Pike designed one: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/ I guess the original hacker scene for the 68K was around Hal Hardenberg’s newsletter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTACK_Grounded The ready-made 68K SBC’s only arrived 1984-1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL (I think Linus Torvalds owned one) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000 All these machines are rather similar at the hardware level - 68K processor, RAM shared between CPU and display. Only the Amiga had a (simple) hardware GPU. What set the SUN-1 apart was its MMU, which none of the above have. What influenced the timing was probably that Motorola made the 68K more affordable by the mid-80’s. Paul

4 years, 1 month

Can I use Apout simulator on Windows 10?

by Saif Resun

hello there! I want to use Unix Operating system but I use Windows and from TUHS I got to know that Apout can be installed on FreeBSD 2.x and 3.x, and on RedHat Linux 2.2. Can I use it on Windows 10? Thank you.

4 years, 1 month

Looking for a paper..

by Warner Losh

... or the proceedings that it's in. The paper is by Chris Torek entitled "A New Framework for Device Support in Berkeley Unix" from Proceedings of the UKUUG, London, Summer 1990. The Google hits I'm getting in the proceedings suggest I'd like a copy of the full thing. Closest I've found is from 2005 or 2006 on archive.org... Nothing in the TUHS archives I was able to find.... This paper is referenced in Chris Torek's "Device Configuration in 4.4BSD" which only ever seemed to circulate in draft form. That I have a pdf of which I converted from a ps that was on NetBSD.org... Any chance I can get a copy of it? Or will I need to figure out inter-library loan again for the first time in almost 2 decades... Warner

4 years, 1 month

Anyone know ancient versions of XLC?

by Ben Huntsman

I know this is a strange place to ask, but it was suggested to me that some people who may know may follow this list... Anyone on here used IBM's XLC in very old versions? Anyone know what the argument -qdebug=austlib does? I can't seem to find any documentation that says... It would have been an argument for the compiler shipping with AIX 3.2.5, I believe. Thanks in advance!

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] (no printed copy) (was (no subject))

by Norman Wilson

Nemo Nusquam: In this informal survey, I side with Dave, though I prefer to read in my comfy well-lit chair with tea/coffee/cocoa.B (A very similar thread was aired on MO last year.) ===== I should point out that, having at various times spilled hot chocolate on a tablet and on a paper book, it is much simpler to recover when it's a tablet. And a cat can flip pages for you with either technology. Norman Wilson Toronto ON (Curled up on the couch with my laptop, cat just left)

4 years, 1 month

ching in Unix

by Warren Toomey

https://ewe2.ninja/stuff/computers/ching/ Interesting story! Cheers, Warren

4 years, 1 month

PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference

by Paul Ruizendaal

> On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 11:34 PM Ed Bradford <egbegb2 at gmail.com <https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tuhs>> wrote: > > > Why did a Ph.D., an academic, and a computer scientist not know about UNIX > > in 1974 or so? 1976? In 1976, some (many?) universities had source code. > > > > Some knowns/givens at the time ... > 1.) He was a language/compiler type person -- he had created PL/M and that > was really what he was originally trying to show off. As I understand it > and has been reported in other interviews, originally CP/M was an attempt > to show off what you could do with PL/M. > 2.) The 8080/Z80 S-100 style machines we quite limited, they had very > little memory, no MMU, and extremely limited storage in the 8" floppies > 3.) He was familiar with RT/11 and DOS-11, many Universities had it on > smaller PDP-11s as they ran on an 11/20 without an MMU also with limited > memory, and often used simple (primarily tape) storage (DECtape and > Cassette's) as the default 'laboratory' system, replacing the earlier PDP-8 > for the same job which primarily ran DOS-8 in those settings. > 4.) Fifth and Sixth Edition of Unix was $150 for university but to run it, > it took a larger at least 11/40 or 45, with a minimum of 64Kbytes to boot > and really need the full 256Kbytes to run acceptably and the cost of a 2.5M > byte RK05 disk was much greater per byte than tape -- thus the base system > it took to run it was at least $60K (in 1975 dollars) and typically cost > about two to four times that in practice. Remember the cost of > acquisition of the HW dominated many (most) choices. > > *I**'ll take a guess, but it is only that.* I *suspect* he saw the S-100 > system as closer to a PDP-11/20 'lab' system than as a small > timesharing machine. He set out with CP/M to duplication the functionality > from RT/11. He even the naming of the commands was the same as what DEC > used (*e.g.* PIP) and used the basic DEC style command syntax and parsing > rules. That is about it. CP/M predates the Altair / S-100 bus, and was designed for a heavily hacked Intellec-8 system. CP/M was developed on a PDP-10 based 8080 simulator in 1974. It was developed for the dual purposes of creating a “native” PL/M compiler and to create the “astrology machine”. The first versions of CP/M were written (mostly) in PL/M. To some extent, in 1974 both Unix and CP/M were research systems, with a kernel coded in a portable language — but aimed at very different levels of hardware capability. In 1975 customers started to show up and paid serious money for CP/M (Omron, IMSAI) - from that point on the course for Kildall / DRI was set. The story is here: https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/?key=in-his-… <https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/?key=in-his-…>

4 years, 1 month

PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference

by M Douglas McIlroy

> I wonder. IBM introduced the IBM PC in August of 1981. > That was years after a non-memory managed version of > Unix was created by Heinze Lycklama, LSX. Is anyone > on this list familiar with Bell Labs management thoughts > on selling IBM on LSX rather than "dos"? IBM famously failed to buy the well-established CP/M in 1980. (CP/M had been introduced in 1974, before the advent of the LSI-11 on which LSX ran.) By then IBM had settled on Basic and Intel. I do not believe they ever considered Unix and DEC, nor that AT&T considered selling to IBM. (AT&T had--fortunately--long since been rebuffed in an attempt to sell to DEC.) Doug

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] SUN (Stanford University Network) was PC Unix

by Jason Stevens

I'd totally subscribe to your newsletter :P that's cool, there is a tape dump of the old stuff on bitsavers... the UniSoft port I think was the original stuff before Bill showed up? http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/Sun/UniSoft_1.3/ along with some ROM images http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/Sun/sun1/ but more pictures and whatnot are always interesting! -----Original Message----- From: Earl Baugh To: Clem Cole Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: 4/10/21 4:02 AM Subject: Re: [TUHS] SUN (Stanford University Network) was PC Unix I’ve done a fair amount of research on Sun 1’s since I have one ( and it has one of the original 68k motherboards with the original proms ). It’s on my list to create a Sun 1 registry along the lines of the Apple 1 registry. ( https://www.apple1registry.com/ <https://www.apple1registry.com/> ) Right now, I can positively identify 24 machines that still exist. Odd serial numbering makes it very hard to know exactly how many they made. Cisco was sued by Stanford over the Sun 1. From what I read, they made off with some Stanford property ( SW and HW ). Wikipedia mentions this ( and I have some supporting documents as well ). They ended up licensing from Stanford as part of the settlement. From what I’ve gathered VLSI licensed the design from Stanford not Andy directly. However the only produced a few machines and Andy wasn’t all that happy with that. That was one of the impetus is to getting sun formed and licensing the same design. I also believe another company ( or 2 )licensed the design but either didn’t produce any or very very few machines. You can tell a difference between VLSI boards and the Sun Microsystems boards because the SUN is all capitalized on the VLSI boards ( and is Sun on the others ). At least on the few I’ve seen pictures of. The design was also licensed to SGI — I’ve seen a prototype SGI board that’s the same thing with a larger PCB to allow some extensions. And the original CPU boards didn’t have an MMU. They could only run Sun OS up to 0.9, I believe was the version. When Bill Joy got there, again from what I’ve gathered, he wanted to bring more of the BSD code over and they had to change the system board. This is why you see the Sun 1/150 model number ( as an upgrade to the original Sun 1/100 designation ). The rack mounted Sun 1/120 was changed to the 1/170. The same upgraded CPU board was used in the Sun 2/120 at least initially. The original Sun OS wasn’t BSD based. It was a V32 variant I believe. And the original CPU boards were returned to Sun, I believe as part of the upgrade from the 1/100 to the 1/150. ( Given people had just paid $10,000 for a machine having to replace the entire machine would’ve been bad from a customer perspective). Sun did board upgrade trade ups after this ( I worked at a company and we purchased an upgrade to upgrade a Sun 3/140 to a Sun 3/110 — the upgrade consisted of a CPU board swap and a different badge for the box ) Sun then, from when I can tell, sold the original CPU boards to a German company that was producing a V32 system. They changed out the PROMs but you can see the Sun logo and part numbers on the boards I could go on and on about this topic ? A Sun 1 was a “bucket list” machine for me - and I am still happy that some friends were willing to take a 17 hour road trip from Atlanta to Minnesota to pick mine up. ? After unparking the drive heads it booted up, first try ( I was only willing to try that without a bunch of testing work because I have some spare power supplies and a couple plastic tubs of multi bus boards that came with it ?) Earl Sent from my iPhone On Apr 9, 2021, at 11:13 AM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: ? On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 10:10 AM Tom Lyon < pugs(a)ieee.org <mailto:pugs@ieee.org> > wrote: Prior to Sun, Andy had a company called VLSI Technology, Inc. which licensed SUN designs to 5-10 companies, including Forward Technology and CoData, IIRC. The SUN IPR effectively belonged to Andy, but I don't know what kind of legal arrangement he had with Stanford. But the design was not generally public, and relied on CAD tools only extant on the Stanford PDP-10. Cisco did start with the SUN-1 processor, though whether they got it from Andy or direct from Stanford is not known to me. When Cisco started (1984), the Sun-1 was long dead already at Sun. Bits passing in the night -- this very much is what I remember, expereinced. <https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aY2xlbWNAY2NjLmNvbQ%3D%3D&type= zerocontent&guid=57eccb88-2f68-40ed-9f5a-ce8913f2b4cc> ?

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] SUN (Stanford University Network) was PC Unix

by Jason Stevens

Is there any solid info on the Stanford SUN boards? I just know the SUN-1 was based around them, but they aren't the same thing? And apparently cisco used them as well but 'borrowed' someone's RTOS design as the basis for IOS? There was some lawsuit and Stanford got cisco network gear for years for free but they couldn't take stock for some reason? I see more and more of these CP/M SBC's on ebay/online and it seems odd that there is no 'DIY' SUN boards... Or were they not all that open, hence why they kind of disappeared? -----Original Message----- From: Jon Steinhart To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: 4/8/21 7:04 AM Subject: Re: [TUHS] PC Unix Larry McVoy writes: > On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 12:18:04AM +0200, Thomas Paulsen wrote: > > >From: John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> > > >Sun was making 68000-based systems in 1981, before the IBM PC was created. > > > > Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. The Sun-1 was launched in May 1982. > > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1 > > John may be sort of right, I bet avb was building 68k machines at > Stanford before SUN was founded. Sun stood for Stanford University > Network I believe. > > --lm Larry is correct. I remember visiting a friend of mind, Gary Newman, who was working at Lucasfilm in '81. He showed me a bunch of stuff that they were doing on Stanford University Network boards. Full disclosure, it was Gary and Paul Rubinfeld who ended up at DEC and I believe was the architect for the microVax who told me about the explorer scout post at BTL which is how I met Heinz. Jon

4 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] SUN (Stanford University Network) was PC Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jason Stevens > apparently cisco used them as well but 'borrowed' someone's RTOS design > as the basis for IOS? There was some lawsuit and Stanford got cisco > network gear for years for free but they couldn't take stock for some > reason? I don't know the whole story, but there was some kind of scandal; I vaguely recall stories about 'missing' tapes being 'found' under the machine room raised floor... The base software for the Cisco multi-protocol router was code done by William (Bill) Yeager at Stanford (it handled IP and PUP); I have a vgue memory that his initially ran on PDP-11's, like mine. (I think their use of that code was part of the scandal, but I've forgotten the details.) > From: Tom Lyon > the design ... relied on CAD tools only extant on the Stanford PDP-10. Sounds like SUDS? Noel

4 years, 1 month

PC Unix

by Paul Ruizendaal

> I developed LSX at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ in the 1974-1975 > timeframe. > An existing C compiler made it possible without too much effort. The > UNIX > source was available to Universities by then. I also developed Mini-UNIX > for the PDP11/10 (also no memory protection) in the 1976 timeframe. > This source code was also made available to Universities, but the source > code for LSX was not. > > Peter Weiner, the founder of INTERACTIVE Systems Corp.(ISC) in June > 1977, > the first commercial company to license UNIX source from Western > Electric for $20,000. Binary licenses were available at the same time. > I joined ISC in May of 1978 when ISC was the first company to offer > UNIX support services to third parties. There was never any talk about > licensing UNIX source code from Western Electric (WE) from the founding > of ISC to when the Intel 8086 micro became available in 1981. > DEC never really targeted the PC market with the LSI-11 micro, > and WE never made it easy to license binary copies of the UNIX > source code, So LSX never really caught on in the commercial market. > ISC was in the business of porting the UNIX source code to other > computers, micro to mainframe, as new computer architectures > were developed. > > Heinz The Wikipedia page for ISC has the following paragraphs: "Although observers in the early 1980s expected that IBM would choose Microsoft Xenix or a version from AT&T Corporation as the Unix for its microcomputer, PC/IX was the first Unix implementation for the IBM PC XT available directly from IBM. According to Bob Blake, the PC/IX product manager for IBM, their "primary objective was to make a credible Unix system - [...] not try to 'IBM-ize' the product. PC-IX is System III Unix." PC/IX was not, however, the first Unix port to the XT: Venix/86 preceded PC/IX by about a year, although it was based on the older Version 7 Unix. The main addition to PC/IX was the INed screen editor from ISC. INed offered multiple windows and context-sensitive help, paragraph justification and margin changes, although it was not a fully fledged word processor. PC/IX omitted the System III FORTRAN compiler and the tar file archiver, and did not add BSD tools like vi or the C shell. One reason for not porting these was that in PC/IX, individual applications were limited to a single segment of 64 kB of RAM. To achieve good filesystem performance, PC/IX addressed the XT hard drive directly, rather than doing this through the BIOS, which gave it a significant speed advantage compared to MS-DOS. Because of the lack of true memory protection in the 8088 chips, IBM only sold single-user licenses for PC/IX. The PC/IX distribution came on 19 floppy disks and was accompanied by a 1,800-page manual. Installed, PC/IX took approximately 4.5 MB of disk space. An editorial by Bill Machrone in PC Magazine at the time of PC/IX's launch flagged the $900 price as a show stopper given its lack of compatibility with MS-DOS applications. PC/IX was not a commercial success although BYTE in August 1984 described it as "a complete, usable single-user implementation that does what can be done with the 8088", noting that PC/IX on the PC outperformed Venix on the PDP-11/23.” It seems like Venix/86 came out in Spring 1983 and PC/IX in Spring 1984. I guess by then RAM had become cheap enough that running in 64KB of core was no longer a requirement and LSX and MX did not make sense anymore. Does that sound right?

4 years, 1 month

Story about Microsoft and *ix

by Dan Stromberg

I heard a while back, that the reason that Microsoft has avoided *ix so meticulously, was that back when they sold Xenix to SCO, as part of the deal Microsoft signed a noncompete agreement that prevented them from selling anything at all similar to *ix. True?

4 years, 1 month

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