26 Jan
2023
26 Jan
'23
2:04 a.m.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
[snip]
The VAX 750's were huge time-sharing systems that you could connect to
via VT-100's and VS-100 that were hard-wired to the VAX 750's, and
telnet from IBM PC/AT's. The smaller clusters used PC/AT's because
they were more flexible as to which 750 you were connecting to;
otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room in the
right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were assgined
to based on the starting character of your last name. (And graduate
students initially didn't have access to Project Athena at all;
although if you were in EECS, LCS or the AI Lab you had access to
dedicated systems, of course.)
Was this before the introduction of DECserver terminal concentrators?
[snip]
There was a brief, shining moment that we were standardized on
BSD-derived Unix systems, but then IBM turned down AOS (the "academic"
operating system), and we were forced to use AIX on the IBM RT's, with
all that this implied: SMIT, and other horrors.
Huh, I thought that AOS ran on all versions of the RT? I know they
dropped support for it when the power-based RS/6000s came out and
replaced the RT, though.
"AIX: it *reminds* you of Unix...." was the
saying at the time ---
although we tried not to say that when the IBM engineers assigned
Athena were in hearing range :-). The one saving grace of the IBM
RT's was that they were three MIPS machines, while the Microvax's were
but a single MIPS, and that made a huge different if you were running
TeX or LaTeX.
The RT was a weird duck, for sure. Compared to a SPARCstation it was
absurdly slow, but I guess compared to a uVAX perhaps not so much.
- Dan C.