Re: [TUHS] Porting 2.11 BSD

Oliver Lehmann wrote: Nice site... I worked for DEC back in the 80's and I ended up installing Exxon Office Systems' Vaxes which they used for software development for the Zeus systems. Some employees were from the Berkeley area and New Jersey, even Princeton, seemed to be culture shock. The computer room was directly under the flight path to the little Princeton Airport and the rented building wasn't really designed for those machines. The place was small offices for insurance sales, accounting, lawyers and such. They later moved over to a new building on the RT 1 corridor which had a real computer room after they had all the electricity put in for the 11/780. They moved from California to Princeton, New Jersey back around '81 or so and were gone shortly when Exxon closed them down in '84. I think they were the first Ultrix32 box I saw in my lifetime... which was much more AT&T focused working for DEC in New Jersey. By 92 or so I was doing SunOS 4.1.3 at work and FreeBSD/NetBSD at home. I never could figure out how AT&T kept the miserable self-destructive Unix Filesystem alive with it's 13 character filename limit and no symbolic links. SysVR4 finally showed some promise, and I even thought they had a winner with their object-oriented management tools to manage getty's and printers and such. FACE, the SVR4 character terminal graphic utilities were not too bad. You could finally run the whole system without vi-ing configurations -- kind of like a pre-SUSE Yast that used the button labels on function keys. Perkin-Elmer/Concurrent had a similar thing in Xelos (SVR2) on their block-mode capable 1251 and 6312 terminals... That was the thing in the 80's -- menu or function button Unix sysadmin screens. AT&T killed their future OEM's by allowing the OSF/USL split to happen over their Sun investment and promise that Sun would get the new Unix before everyone else. The Unix wars made sure there wouldn't be one binary/source compatible version of Unix across all hardware platforms. When I started to work with Solaris2 I was amazed as to how different it seemed than straight SVR4 and I helped write Pyramid's training for their OS/x SVR4 MIPS R3000 product. Had AT&T been more willing to supply the code equally and get out of the way you wouldn't have had the waste of the NCR purchase later after the less than stellar 3b and 3b2 sales of the late 80's. To bring this back to the Z8000 ZEUS and Zilog: Pyramid was an OEM for AT&T and AT&T was to sell Pyramid boxes to the US Government to replace the Z8000 Zilog Zeus machines which were used by the IRS. I think this all fell apart after the NCR purchase. My job kind of went with it as Pyramid went through a downward sales spiral as AT&T stopped buying MIServers and the MIPS MIServer-S line (R3000 SVR4) multicpu boxes. Bill -- Digital had it then. Don't you wish you could buy it now! pechter-at-gmail.com http://xkcd.com/705/