21 Nov
2019
21 Nov
'19
9:53 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 11:16 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ramey(a)case.edu> wrote:
On 11/21/19 9:19 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
Yeah, that matches my (vague) recollection as well.
On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer
<brad(a)anduin.eldar.org
<mailto:brad@anduin.eldar.org>> wrote:
For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu,
MACH
microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an
alternative to AOS. Ran well
enough, but was disk and memory constrained. We had source to much
of
the system (or perhaps all of it, don't
remember), but I seem to
recall
that compiling it was a big pain. Something
like you had to use a
specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C?? hc command
perhaps)
to compile some of the source. gcc had a
backend for the ROMP
processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries. I think
that
some variation of pcc was the usual compiler.
I remember it being
pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS. We used them mostly
as X
terminal workstations.
"High C" (or perhaps "Hi C"? It's been a while...) was the name
of the
system compiler on AOS; I thought it was installed as `cc`.
"High C", and it was installed as cc and hc.
Some RT enthusiasts kept those machines running well
beyond their prime.
We kept a couple of them running through the mid- to late-90s as well. By
that time, however, it seemed like Linux and the BSDs on PCs had greatly
eclipsed whatever was possible performance or software-wise on the aging
RTs, which were also starting to fail in odd ways. But until that point,
they were free and ran Unix, and for a long time that was kind of a special
thing. We ended up replacing a 6150 with a 486 running FreeBSD and life was
pretty good, though.
The spiritual descendent of that (those) machine(s) now runs OpenBSD on a
VPS somewhere. A while back, I found some old NIS data files (in ndbm
format, of course) that we'd preserved from some ancient backup; I was able
to get the ndbm library from an old BSD distribution and compile it and
extract the data, which was kind of fun.
- Dan C.
Why? I'm not entirely sure; as you say, they
were memory and disk
constrained. They were also very slow.
I had one running in my basement into the late 90s, with my own self-
maintained kernel. I did a considerable portion of the bash-2.0
development on that box, and my wife wrote all of her doctoral thesis on
it (using a troff macro package I wrote to do APA style formatting). It
didn't make the cut when I moved from that house. Why did I have it?
Because it was free, and it did what I needed.