On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 10:51 PM, <jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

I’ve actually loaded AIX 1.3 for the PS/2 on a model 80 decked out with 16MB of RAM, and an Ethernet board, and honestly It was ‘yet another SYSV’

Interesting characterization.... It had all of the primary BSDism in there. As I said it was intended for the Education market., and it would have been lost without it. I never saw anything from a BSD that did not pretty much just recompile on AIX/386 - but I admit I never pushed it very hard, since it was not a primary system for me.

and it didn’t feel like it had much in common with AIX 3.1 on the RS/6000. As always by the time I had gotten all the needed bits, Linux was a thing, running Unix on a 386 with ESDI disks felt horribly slow, and Linux had much better support for stuff. Although if I had the machine when it was the thing to do it’d have been awesome. Not that I’d probably ever get access to a 370, let alone AIX for the 370 + those i860 boards.

It's too bad you missed one of the coolest tricks that TCF would allow you to do. If you had a running TCF node (370 or 386) with a full install on it, all you needed to install another node was the boot floppy. The OS would load into memory from the boot floppy, send out a couple of packets on the network (never touching its disk) and the node would join the cluster and immediately be a part of the system. If the was disk was empty, it would start to be populated in the background using replication, if it had data, then the rebuild protocol started -- al behind the scene. It meant a node boot was really the time to perform the cluster management join protocol, which on TCF was fairly fast because it was bounded to 32 nodes. Later TNC clusters the CMS was a lot more complicated.

All very, very cool. I do miss some of those ideas.

Clem