8 Jul
2024
8 Jul
'24
11:04 p.m.
Al is right. Tom West led the Eagle project in Westboro, MA, which is
documented in the Soul of the New Machine. The Eagle project became the
32-bit MV/8000 Eclipse [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General for
more details]. I knew a few of the HW guys, as I went to CMU with one of
them, and a couple of them came to do the Stellar CPU a few years later.
But I did not know the SW folks there like I know the DEC folks,
particularly since I never worked there.
That said, WRT to their later UNIX box, I did have access to the same at
Locus. As we did a lot of work for DG, adding features and helping them
with POSIX/FIPS and SPEC1170 conformance — IIRC, we added the FS Switch for
NFS support. It was probably the easiest UNIX kernel I have ever worked
with, with the shortest learning curve. I may remember that the User API
was based on SVR3/SVID, which means >>IIRC<<; it was based on Streams/TLI,
but ISTR is a user mode sockets layer for porting (but I'm not sure of that
-- it has been almost 30 years now). The kernel itself was a scratch
rewrite with SMP in mind. The locking scheme was clean and simple and
worked well to order 32/64 processors in our tests. Moreover, the kernel
was well-documented. I do not know for sure, but I remember being told by
some of the DG folks in NC that it was originally planned for the failed
Fountainhead system, which was canceled after West and the MA-based folks
delivered Eagle before the new system came from DG NC.
Also, I believe that DG had in response to BLISS a low-level system
language they called PL/N, but I don't know much about it/I never saw it -
I'm told that it was a >>very<< subset PL/1 syntax, but like PL/360 -
exposed a lot of hardware. ISTR that they developed some MV series
compilers with it, but since Eagle was a 32-bit super set of Nova, AOS was
ported. FWIW:. Since Multics had used PL/1 and supposedly Fountainhead was
heavily influenced by Multics (as was Pr1me, by the way), it would not
surprise me that PL/n has a PL/1 'flavor.'
I'd love to know for sure >>but my WAG<< is that that core work for
Fountainhead was reimplemented in C for their SMP 88000 box, and they added
a UNIX API layer to it.
ᐧ
On Mon, Jul 8, 2024 at 9:22 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 08, 2024 at 12:59:14AM -0600,
arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Brad Spencer <brad(a)anduin.eldar.org>
wrote:
I've heard, but never verified, that they did a really nice SMP Unix.
If anyone has seen the code I'd like to hear what you thought. The
way it was described to me, it sounded like an SMP SunOS.
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
The later MV/xxxxx Supernova boxes could run
Unix, I
believe... (at least I remember the university running Unix on a MV
series after I left).
I think these were called "Eclipse", and the story of their
development is told in the famous book "The Soul of a New Machine".
For you youngsters out there, it's a great read.
We had one at Georgia Tech, it ran a Unix emulation on top
of AOS (or whatever it was called). Later on DG ported Unix to
run on it native.