18 Sep
2017
18 Sep
'17
10:31 a.m.
That Pr1me had a Unix emulation layer is news to me (I think). I worked
on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Pr1me Computers for
several years. (Oh, how I wish I had saved that last release tape!!!)
Primos was a terribly weird OS, but the SWT subsystem made it almost
Unix-like and very pleasant and usable. The mark parity business
was only one of the weirdnesses of that machine. Georgia Tech even
had a C compiler for it. sizeof(char) was 1, of course, but it was 16
bits, because the instruction mode used didn't have 8 bit byte pointers.
I can't claim credit for GT-SWT; I came along after it was mature
and stable, but I did do a few nice things.
Arnold
Nigel Williams <nw(a)retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:49 AM, Dennis Boone
<drb(a)msu.edu> wrote:
The Prime minis
had a layered product called Primix that provided a unix userland of
sorts. Dog slow, at least in its earlier releases. Null pointers were
not zero on the Prime machines.
I second Dennis's vote for Primix as "weirdnix".
The other weirdness was the high-bit of ASCII being set due to the
convention on Primos (they feared to ever change it to avoid upsetting
customers).
People went mad trying to port applications to it due to these
differences. Primos defaulted to all UPPERCASE, and I vaguely recall
having to poke about for a fair while when starting Primix to convince
the Prime terminal handler to switch to lowercase.
There was an attempt to produce a native port of Unix for Prime
computers but I believe it was squashed by Prime management.