3 Apr
2021
3 Apr
'21
7:24 a.m.
Thanks. I knew IBM had had some involvement with 4.*BSD, but lacked the details.
Wesley Parish
On 4/3/21, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish
<wobblygong(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think anybody was even thinking of
porting any of
the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right?
No. BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much
less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2
for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The user-space was
mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great
deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM
called TCF - the transparent computing facility. It was very cool you
could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either
ISA. It has been well discussed in this forum, previously.
A for AIX/370 a quick history which Charlie can fill in more from the IBM
side, was that in the last 60s and early 70s, IBM had a strange hold on the
education/research market with the S/360; but lost it because of the lack
of timesharing to DEC and PDP-10 based systems as IBM was more and more
focused on the commercial sector where there was much more money to be
made. But ... there was a drive in the IBM educational/research team to
be able to reenter that market and Locus was hired to develop AIX/370 (and
later PS2) as it was felt that UNIX was considered an important offering
for those customers. After it was released as a product, it turned out
purchasing AIX/370 was exceedingly difficult (for a number of reasons),
although it was extremely well received by those that ran it, but getting
it was difficult. In fact, I have been told by folks that there at the
time, that using TCF was an important feature here at Intel for the success
of the simulation for the 486 and Pentium.
Again, Charlie can tell you the history but IBM also developed AIX for the
RS/6000 which was the same OS (only different) from IBM Austin (no TCF, but
supported DS which was cool in its own right). Locus was actually
contracted
to develop a UNIX subsystem for the AS/400 also, but I'm not sure if that
ever shipped. I had left Locus and had gone to DEC by then.