4 Apr
2021
4 Apr
'21
9:57 a.m.
It’s possible I am conflating two conferences in my head and the NetBSD
thing was NYC not Atlanta.
On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 8:42 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello!
Adam? Seriously? That was the case when I visited them at one year's
LinuxWorld. (I think it was the one when we met.) And yes at the
System Z Council meetings I would catch up with them.
Larry? It is funny, but earlier on I did mention all of that in a
completely different thread.
But why would the <DELETED!> characters at what was SCO start this
stupidity all over again? I seem to be missing something.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 10:48 PM Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
IBM was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of
a sudden there was an IBM port to S/390. Clearly (well, *I* thought it was
clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced
their hand. (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of
my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground).
On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
So from IBM's POV, they could
support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370
and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe
iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of
the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right?
This is not how I remember it going down.
There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that
I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible
Linux-on-S/390
machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s
I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM
to advise them how we thought they should proceed. They seemed to take
much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very
crazy. (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine
Associates. They're still around.)
I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM
had bought
Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different.
Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot
of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver. Alas, IBM tightened the
screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer
from Oracle in its back pocket.
But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in
the late
90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually
went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a
development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your
so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in
hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not
offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing,
cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port
going."
So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is
all
I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had
its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a
jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned
out differently.
Adam