16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
7:48 a.m.
Becareful. The Idris name was also used later by someone else for a 68000 system a few
years after the Whitesmiths demise and they had stopped trying to sell there clone. I do
not believe the two products were in any way related.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On Sep 15, 2019, at 9:31 PM, William Pechter
<pechter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/15/19 5:46 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
Funny the things you think about at 3 in the AM.
Idris is interesting in that when Plauger built it, he did get in trouble at the UDel
USENIX when he tried to 'hawk it' and basically was booed (how he did was as
much of a problem as that fact that he did it). But by that point, there was another
commercial UNIX available. What's interesting is that there was not an official V6
redistribution license like there was for V7; so I'm not 100% sure I know how it was
done and I would love to enlightened.
Interesting... I was at Concurrent messing around with a couple of truckloads of
7350 boxes they were trashing. They were still being built (or supported) by Concurrent
in 87 or so (I think that's when the Masscomp merger happened)... They were an 8mhz
68000 running either Uniplus+ (Sys III) or Idris (IIRC) or MicroXelos System V (which I
think is a rebadged Uniplus SysV renamed to match the Concurrent 3200 Xelos systems).
They used them internal around '83 when they went to a Rand Editor and some *Roff
based formatting for their office automation. The motto for the IT move to desktop Unix
was "Paper Free in '83."
Soon PC's and laser printers killed any hope of "paper free" as the staff
spent way too much time chosing fonts for BS memos.
Here's some info on the very slow 68k I ran a newsfeed on:
http://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/perkin/PerkinElmer7350.pdf
I know this much of the story.
As I mentioned before the first commercial user of UNIX was Rand Corporation in LA. Al
Arms of AT&T legal wrote the original $15K/CPU license for them. I don't know
how many of those licenses were made available, but I've always been under the
impression it was under 10. Like a lot of people at the time, this was when the
'glass tty' was just showing up in force and Rand updated/wrote a version of
ed(1) called the rand(1) editor [IIRC, its still available as the 'grand editor'
from Dave Yost].
Perkin-Elmer had a port of the Rand Editor "E" which worked on both the
block mode and text terminals and they were using this for their office automation stuff
internal on the desktops until they went Windows and Microsoft around 86 or so.
I rescued a bunch of the trash bound 7350's and set up a small Cnews relay around
Monmouth and Ocean counties in NJ. For a while I upgraded to an AT&T6300 with
Xenix-86 on it which outran the 6 or 8 mhz 68k in the Perkin-Elmer box.
Cheap RLL disks and higher speed serial ports were to obsolete everything below a 386 for
the news feed so I upgraded it.
One of the great things about the editor on the box was the Rand Editor version allowed
block copy of column data -- which I could only do on my CP/M box under Wordstar.
I kept the boxes around until a Trenton Computer Festival. When I couldn't unload
them in the 90-91 time frame I used the free dumpsters there to finish the destruction
that Concurrent had planned.
I wiped and reused the ton of Uniplus disks I had at the time as scratch floppies. I
wish I had a copy left for historical reasons. I kept the full manual set until I had a
full *BSD 4.2,4.3 set and a full SysV set so I dumped the Idris and SysIII stuff.
My original degree was history and I never found an old computer or doc I didn't try
to save.
Bill
--
Digital had it then. Don't you wish you could buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com http://xkcd.com/705/