26 Aug
2014
26 Aug
'14
8:17 a.m.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 01:00:45PM -0700, Lyndon
Nerenberg wrote:
I had one too. (Also a trailblazer and then a worldblazer.) The 3B1 ran
SVR2; the BSD networking was available as an add-on with the ethernet
card.
I spent many happy hours working on that box, developing gawk and its
documentation; it was slow enough that you could see algorithmic
differences, e.g. standard diff vs. GNU diff.
It had one of those great AT&T keyboards (as did the blit). The UI
wasn't anything special to write home about though.
For a while there was a separate 3b1.* set of newsgroups and an
archive of stuff at Ohio State; there remains a comp.sys.3b1 group
that still has some activity as new people try to revive some of
these machines and others who had them help out. Someone was writing
an emulator, but I don't think it ever got finished.
Ah, the memories .... :-)
Arnold
It was quite astounding to see the wide range of
performance impacts
this had on various systems. 3B* systems would tip over and die, except
for the (built by Convergent Tech) 3B1.
Sheesh, you people keep bringing up stuff from my past. My buddy Rob
Netzer (used to be a prof at Brown, now works on BitKeeper with me)
had one of those 3B1s. Neat machine. Sort of like a desktop VAX.