13 Sep
2019
13 Sep
'19
2:59 a.m.
Kevin/Charlie:
On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 3:31 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com>
wrote:
Charlie, there is some interesting history of the
pre-RS/6000 AIX
stuff here (you give a quote :)). Particularly page 41 gives a
chronology of UNIX at IBM:
https://amaus.net/static/S100/IBM/RTPC/AIX%20Family%20Definition%201989.pdf
Awesome - thank you,
Prior to AIX the Series/1 had a UNIX port in the early '80s. I think
that work happened in Boca Raton.
FYI: the original S/1 port was done at Cleveland State with the Seventh
Edition - the name of the Prof that led it I can not say I remember nor his
HW configuration, but I do remember his presentation. It is where the term
'NUXI' was coined. I want to say in 1979 or 1980, they gave a wonderful
talk about it. They had some help from folks at Case as they did not have
a PDP-11 of their own and never seen UNIX before (*i.e.* they arranged to
borrowed time on a PDP-11 at the EE Dept at Case. They wrote a new back
end for the Ritchie C compiler, and recompiled everything, wrote new
drivers for the S/1 HW and rewrote m40.s as needed. Then they wrote the
disks, then drove the packs back to Cleveland State. IIRC it took a summer
of work to complete).
FWIW: The PDP-11 has an interesting way it does byte-swapping and when they
first booted the system, the first message was NUXI which was how the S/1
saw the strings. The term was used from then on in the community to
describe byte-swapping issues.
I remember all of us in the audience howling with laughter when they
described their work. Unfortunately, this was before USENIX kept
conference proceedings so I'm not sure if the talk and paper were archived.
And the truth is, I wish we had that port in the TUHS archives.