Does anyone know where the 386 port from PCC came from?
While trying to build a Tahoe userland for the i386, it seems that everything was built with GCC…
Was there a PCC for the i386 around ’88-90? It seems after the rapid demise of the Tahoe/Harris
HCX-9 that the non Vax/HCX-9 platforms had moved to GCC?
Also anyone know any good test software for LIBC? I’ve been tracing through some
strange issues rebuilding LIBC from Tahoe, where I had to include some bits from
Reno to get diropen to actually work. I would imagine there ought to have been some
platform exercise code to make sure things were actually working instead of say
building as much as you can, and playing rogue for a few hours to make sure
its stable enough.
> BSD[Ii] got in trouble with AT&T for their sales number, which was
> 1-800-ITS-UNIX. I don't know if they ever got officially sued or not.
There was a joke that MIT should have sued them too, for violating their
trademark on ITS.
-- Richard
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).
>I am rather saddened by the fact that there is so much about all the Unix (and not only >Unix) history of computing in the USA and so very little in Europe. I wouldn’t even know >where to start, to be honest, all I have as a history is the Italian side from my father and his other mad friends and colleagues in Milan. So little of it is recorded, never mind written down.
In the 80-tisch I worked at Philips Data Systems in Apeldoorn, the
Netherlands. Not in Development, but in System Support. Philips was
working on a System V.3 based UNIX running on Motorola 68000 CPUs in a
P9X00 server. Called MPX as in Multi-Processor UNIX. The Multi part
refers to having an Ethernet, X25 and SDLC board running a tailored
version of the OS to offload the main CPU.
See for example
https://www.cbronline.com/news/better_late_philips_enters_the_uk_unix_marke…https://www.cbronline.com/news/philips_ready_with_68030_models_for_its_p900…
Later Philips moved to i386 with a 'unknown version' based UNIX.
Division was bought by DEC (some say sold off by Philips) in 1991 and
we moved to DEC's choice of SCO UNIX. The 'intelligent comm boards
were ported and still running the separate OS though.
Unfortunately I never had any of that OS type of source and my paper
archive was left behind. Only have some small higher level test stuff
and my mail archive. For a while I was "rudi blom"
<blom(a)kiwi.idca.tds.philips.nl>, later rudi blom"@apd.mts
Nearly all the unixes i used where from the US, but one stands out.
I spent a week or two trying to get my head around Helios which was aimed at parallel systems (transputer). I believe it was French in origin, and wad unix-like at the command line but the shell supported mesh pipelines and other unique ideas.
interesting but hard to manage..
-Steve
For anyone that is interested, there is 2 files on Kirk’s DVD that don’t appear on the CD’s
mach.86-accent
mach.86
The smaller mach.86-accent is a few months newer than the other, and is strictly the kernel. mach.86 contains
stuff like the libraries for mach, bindings for pascal, along with an updated libc, and various binaries to run under
4.3BSD. It appears that the Mach project at that time was pretty much in step with the CSRG release.
Speaking of pascal, the early version of MIG is actually written in pascal. There is quite a #ifdef ACCENT stuff in the code
As well. So the bindings are more than something superficial.
I had a major issue trying to use RA81 disks on SIMH, although switching to RP06’s seemed to have made things a
little more stable, the larger issue seems to have been the async I/O code, and disabling that increased stability
and reduced disk corruption greatly.
Setting up the build involved copying files from the ‘cs’ directory to their respective homes, along with the ‘mach/bin/m*’
commands to the /bin directory. Configuring the kernel is very much like a standard BSD kernel config, however the directory
needs to exist beforehand, and instead of the in path config command run the config command in the local directory.
I have been able to self host a kernel, and build a good portion of world before I realized that the I/O was probably what I was
Fighting and went back and restored the 4.3 tape back onto the HP’s and just re-built the kernel to verify it works. For those
Wanting the command for SIMH it’s simply ‘set noasync’. The XU adapter worked out of the box with a simple:
set xu ena
att xu nat:tcp=42323:10.0.2.15:23
Which allowed me to telnet into the VAX, making things much easier than dealing with the console.
While this kernel does have mentions of multi processor support I haven’t quite figured out what models (if any) are supported
On the VAX, and if SIMH emulates them. While http://www.oboguev.net/vax_mp/ has a very interesting looking multiprocessor VAX
Emulation it’s a fictional model based on the microvax, which I’m pretty sure 4.3BSD/Mach’86 is far too old for.
And for those who like the gratuitious dmesg, this is a self hosted Mach build
loading hp(0,0)boot
Boot
: hp(0,0)vmunix
393480+61408+138472 start 0x1fa5
Vax boot: memory from 0x92000 to 0x800000
Kernel virtual space from 0x80000000 to 0x82000000.
Mach/4.3/2/1 #1: compiled in /usr/mk/MACH on wb2.cs.cmu.edu at Mon Oct 20 12:54:42 1986
physical memory = 8.00 megabytes.
available memory = 5.86 megabytes.
using 408 buffers containing 0.79 megabytes of memory
VAX 11/780, serial#1234(0), hardware ECO level=7(0)
mcr0 at tr1
mcr1 at tr2
uba0 at tr3
zs0 at uba0 csr 172520 vec 224, ipl 15
ts0 at zs0 slave 0
dz0 at uba0 csr 160100 vec 300, ipl 15
de0 at uba0 csr 174510 vec 120, ipl 15
de0: hardware address 08:00:2b:0d:d1:48
mba0 at tr8
hp0 at mba0 drive 0
hp1 at mba0 drive 1
hp2 at mba0 drive 2
hp3 at mba0 drive 7
Changing root device to hp0a
I uploaded my SIMH config, along with the RP06 disk images here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20Windows/v0.4/Ma…
386BSD was released on this day in 1992, when William and Lynne Jolitz
started the Open Source movement; well, that's what my notes say, and
corrections are welcome (I know that Gilmore likes to take credit for just
about everything).
-- Dave
Many, many thanks to Clem Cole for arranging the 50th Unix Anniversary
celebration in Seattle last Wednesday. It was wonderful to see old
friends again. Most of these folks are still out in the world sharing
their brilliance in various computing facilities. Lots of very special
people still doing wonderful work! Thanks, Clem, for the chance to meet
up with them again!
Deborah
As the last week had a discussion on this list about various VMS+Unix projects from that era, maybe it is a good time to ask the below question again:
For a while I have been searching for a 1982 tech report from CSRG:
"TR/4 (Proposals for the Enhancement of Unix on the Vax)"
This report later evolved into TR/5, the 4.2BSD manual, but I’m specifically looking for TR/4.
The only reference that I have for TR/4 is contained in a 1982 discussion about VMS vs. Unix:
https://tech-insider.org/vms/research/1982/0111.html (seek for message 5854 from Bill Mitchell).
Clutching at straws here, but maybe a copy survived in a box with VMS+Unix materials.
Wbr,
Paul
