8 Jul
2024
8 Jul
'24
9:28 p.m.
arnold(a)skeeve.com writes:
Brad Spencer <brad(a)anduin.eldar.org> wrote:
Ya, that is right... I didn't remember that correctly. The Eclipse was
the MV series, 32 bit, and ran AOS/VS, the Nova, 16 bit, ran AOS.
The later MV/xxxxx Supernova boxes could run
Unix, I
believe... (at least I remember the university running Unix on a MV
series after I left).
I think these were called "Eclipse", and the story of their
development is told in the famous book "The Soul of a New Machine".
For you youngsters out there, it's a great read. We had one at Georgia Tech, it ran a Unix emulation on
top
of AOS (or whatever it was called). Later on DG ported Unix to
run on it native.
I was there for the start of that emulation layer stuff for AOS/VS.
When I encountered it, it was just, mostly, something that helped port
software written for Unix to AOS/VS. I remember two things that made
that very hard, the lack of any sort of fork() notion in AOS/VS and the
lack of any sort of setuid() notion. You pretty much couldn't do either
of those in any manor. There was an idea much like fork()+exec() that
could be used to start a new program, but that required source changes.
I very much remember a port of sendmail that couldn't be used to deliver
mail to a local user on the box because you didn't have setuid() and
couldn't fake it as a normal user. It was nice to hear that DG did a
real Unix port, but that was after my time.
Arnold
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org