25 Jan
2023
25 Jan
'23
2:46 a.m.
All,
If you think unix ends without x, just move along, nothing to see here.
Otherwise, I thought I would share the subject of my latest post and a
link with those of you interested in such things.
Recently, I've been tooling around trying to wrap my head around x
windows and wanted to give programming it a shot at the xlib level... on
my mac, if possible. So, I bought a copy of Adrian Nye's Xlib
Programming Manual for Version 11 R4/R5, aka Volume One of The
Definitive Guides to the X Window System, published, get this... 30+
years ago, in 1992 :) and started reading like a madman. As usual, this
was an example of great technical writing from the prior millenium,
something rarely found today.
Anyway, I hunted up the source code examples as published, unpacked
them, did a few environmental things to my mac, and built my first xlib
application from that source. A few tweaks to my XQuartz configuration
and I was running the application in twm on my mac, with a root window.
To read about it and see it in all of its glory, check it out here:
https://decuser.github.io/operating-systems/mojave/x-windows/2023/01/24/x-w…
The same sort of setup works with Linux, FreeBSD, or my latest
environment DragonFly BSD. It's not the environment that I find
interesting, but rather the X Window System itself, but this is my way
of entering into that world. If you are interested in running X Windows,
not as an integrated system on your mac (where x apps run in aqua
windows), but with a 'regular' window manager, and you haven't figured
out how, this is one way.
On the provocateur front - is X part of unix? I mean this in oh so many
nuanced ways, so read into it as you will. I would contend, torpedoes be
damned, that it is :).
Will
25 Jan
25 Jan
8:45 a.m.
I suspect even what with Wayland making the rounds, there'll probably be X around for
a looooong time. My guess anyway. I just recently built an X setup from scratch on Linux,
it wasn't too much of a pain save that the protocol headers have merged into the
xorgproto package. I didn't realize this until I had already installed older versions
of all the individual packages.
I was surprised to learn in the process that xterm is not distributed by XOrg, but by
someone else. It even features in the default xdm session along with xconsole and xsm, so
certainly considered a standard component of X, but distributed and maintained
independently it seems.
Aa for the questions of the UNIX-ness of X, it started in Athena, which as I understand it
was supposed to be relatively OS-agnostic distributed computing? In any case, the
predecessor ran on a different OS, not sure how significant that is to the genesis of what
would be called X or what OS it "started" on.
Aside from the ubiquitous X books (which I mean to add to my library...) USL also shipped
a handful of books with SVR4 concerning both X and NeWS. I've only got the Xlib one
but it seems to cover the basics pretty well. I'd be curious to compare it to the
other set. One of these days I mean to round out that SVR4 documentation set.
There were probably materials in the SVR4.2 era as well but I haven't focused as much
on those books. Dunno what if any documentation Novell then Caldera/SCO kept up with.
I'd love a fresh round of print books, I much prefer paper for reference, but
nowadays new tech material is most certainly second/third-hand rather than thoughtfully
crafted by the team and those adjacent to whatever is being described. I love me a good
primary source....
I've played with XQuartz a bit, mainly remote X from one of my Linux boxes. Kinda
slow...but I did zero tuning so not sure what the expected performance of X-over-ssh is.
In any case, given the ubiquity, I doubt we'll see X going anywhere soon, and even
when it does eventually start to sunset, there'll probably be shims and wrappers for
compatibility for a while longer. Plus, I don't know what the prospects are regarding
Wayland and SVR4 derivs, but they're all happily running X still, and aren't
necessarily getting any new large-scale development love, so likely will ride out with X.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Tuesday, January 24th, 2023 at 5:46 PM, Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
All,
If you think unix ends without x, just move along, nothing to see here. Otherwise, I
thought I would share the subject of my latest post and a link with those of you
interested in such things.
Recently, I've been tooling around trying to wrap my head around x windows and
wanted to give programming it a shot at the xlib level... on my mac, if possible. So, I
bought a copy of Adrian Nye's Xlib Programming Manual for Version 11 R4/R5, aka
Volume One of The Definitive Guides to the X Window System, published, get this... 30+
years ago, in 1992 :) and started reading like a madman. As usual, this was an example of
great technical writing from the prior millenium, something rarely found today.
Anyway, I hunted up the source code examples as published, unpacked them, did a few
environmental things to my mac, and built my first xlib application from that source. A
few tweaks to my XQuartz configuration and I was running the application in twm on my mac,
with a root window.
To read about it and see it in all of its glory, check it out here:
https://decuser.github.io/operating-systems/mojave/x-windows/2023/01/24/x-w…
The same sort of setup works with Linux, FreeBSD, or my latest environment DragonFly BSD.
It's not the environment that I find interesting, but rather the X Window System
itself, but this is my way of entering into that world. If you are interested in running X
Windows, not as an integrated system on your mac (where x apps run in aqua windows), but
with a 'regular' window manager, and you haven't figured out how, this is
one way.
On the provocateur front - is X part of unix? I mean this in oh so many nuanced ways, so
read into it as you will. I would contend, torpedoes be damned, that it is :).
Will
5:41 p.m.
Aa for the questions of the UNIX-ness of X, it started
in Athena, which as
I understand it was supposed to be relatively OS-agnostic distributed
computing? In any case, the predecessor ran on a different OS, not sure how
significant that is to the genesis of what would be called X or what OS it
"started" on.
Athena was about scaling up Unix workstations. It was started with grants
from IBM and Digital. It was never OS-agnostic.
You can find a brief history of X at
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/x-power-tools/9780596101954/ch01.html,
and the Wikipedia article on the X Window System is pretty good; reed the
"History" section.
8:53 p.m.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 11:41:12AM -0500, Rich Salz wrote:
Well..... technically Athena was about computing in higher ed. If you
go far back enough, at the very beginning, we used VAX 750's and IBM
PC/AT's running DOS. As soon as the Microvax 2's and IBM PC/RT's came
in, about 2 or so years in, Project Athena switched to Unix
workstations, but in the earliest days (which would have been pre-X
Windows), Project Athena had not yet standardized on Unix or
workstations for that matter.
The VAX 750's were huge time-sharing systems that you could connect to
via VT-100's and VS-100 that were hard-wired to the VAX 750's, and
telnet from IBM PC/AT's. The smaller clusters used PC/AT's because
they were more flexible as to which 750 you were connecting to;
otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room in the
right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were assgined
to based on the starting character of your last name. (And graduate
students initially didn't have access to Project Athena at all;
although if you were in EECS, LCS or the AI Lab you had access to
dedicated systems, of course.)
One of the perks for being hired as a student systems programmer back
then was that you got accounts on all of the Vax 750's, so you could
use any terminal room across campus. :-) We then would either rlogin
to our "home" Vax 750, or we had scripts that would replicate our home
directories across the various 750's.
There was a brief, shining moment that we were standardized on
BSD-derived Unix systems, but then IBM turned down AOS (the "academic"
operating system), and we were forced to use AIX on the IBM RT's, with
all that this implied: SMIT, and other horrors.
"AIX: it *reminds* you of Unix...." was the saying at the time ---
although we tried not to say that when the IBM engineers assigned
Athena were in hearing range :-). The one saving grace of the IBM
RT's was that they were three MIPS machines, while the Microvax's were
but a single MIPS, and that made a huge different if you were running
TeX or LaTeX.
Cheers,
- Ted
Aa for the
questions of the UNIX-ness of X, it started in Athena, which as
I understand it was supposed to be relatively OS-agnostic distributed
computing? In any case, the predecessor ran on a different OS, not sure how
significant that is to the genesis of what would be called X or what OS it
"started" on.
Athena was about scaling up Unix workstations. It was started with grants
from IBM and Digital. It was never OS-agnostic. 
9:04 p.m.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
[snip]
The VAX 750's were huge time-sharing systems that you could connect to
via VT-100's and VS-100 that were hard-wired to the VAX 750's, and
telnet from IBM PC/AT's. The smaller clusters used PC/AT's because
they were more flexible as to which 750 you were connecting to;
otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room in the
right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were assgined
to based on the starting character of your last name. (And graduate
students initially didn't have access to Project Athena at all;
although if you were in EECS, LCS or the AI Lab you had access to
dedicated systems, of course.)
Was this before the introduction of DECserver terminal concentrators?
[snip]
There was a brief, shining moment that we were standardized on
BSD-derived Unix systems, but then IBM turned down AOS (the "academic"
operating system), and we were forced to use AIX on the IBM RT's, with
all that this implied: SMIT, and other horrors.
Huh, I thought that AOS ran on all versions of the RT? I know they
dropped support for it when the power-based RS/6000s came out and
replaced the RT, though.
"AIX: it *reminds* you of Unix...." was the
saying at the time ---
although we tried not to say that when the IBM engineers assigned
Athena were in hearing range :-). The one saving grace of the IBM
RT's was that they were three MIPS machines, while the Microvax's were
but a single MIPS, and that made a huge different if you were running
TeX or LaTeX.
The RT was a weird duck, for sure. Compared to a SPARCstation it was
absurdly slow, but I guess compared to a uVAX perhaps not so much.
- Dan C.
9:23 p.m.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 03:04:27PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
The RT was a weird duck, for sure. Compared to a
SPARCstation it was
absurdly slow, but I guess compared to a uVAX perhaps not so much.
I think the RT predated the SPARC machines. There were RT's running BSD
at UW-Madison when I was a grad student there (UW did something, maybe
the BSD port to RT?) and they were pretty nice. Sun machines were still
68K, there were no SPARCs at UW-Madison at that time. Yeah, looked it
up, they were released in 1987, we had RT machines early, perhaps before
the release in 1986 to do the port.
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
9:27 p.m.
On 1/25/23 3:23 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 03:04:27PM -0500, Dan Cross
wrote:
Didn't AOS use the UW BSD NFS port? I know it had NFS; we used them for a
long time and I had one in my home for years.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
The RT was a weird duck, for sure. Compared to a
SPARCstation it was
absurdly slow, but I guess compared to a uVAX perhaps not so much.
I think the RT predated the SPARC machines. There were RT's running BSD
at UW-Madison when I was a grad student there (UW did something, maybe
the BSD port to RT?) and they were pretty nice.
27 Jan
27 Jan
5:49 a.m.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 03:04:27PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
Well, it perhaps would have been more accurate that IBM had decided to
that AIX was the future, and had defunded the AOS group. While AOS
may have continued to work on the IBM RT's, the Powers That Be at IBM
had decided that AIX was the future, and when the company which is
sending you $5 million dollars a year (half in hardware and engineers'
salaries, and half in cold hard cash) wants you to switch to AIX, you
salute and reinstall AIX on all of the IBM RT's....
Later on we did get the RS/6000's, but at that point, most of us who
wanted something... that wasn't AIX, would try to get the VAXstation
3100 and later, the M38 variant. My first staff workstation at MIT
was a VS-3100 named rt-11.mit.edu, and the VS-3100 M38 was
tsx-11.mit.edu, which became the first FTP site for Linux in North
America in 1991. (I'm not sure how many people realized that the
primary ftp server for Linux was named after an obscure time-sharing
OS built on top of RT-11 for the PDP-11. :-)
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore Ts'o
<tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
I'm not sure; this would have been in the 1985--1987 time frame.
[snip]
The VAX 750's were huge time-sharing systems that you could connect to
via VT-100's and VS-100 that were hard-wired to the VAX 750's, and
telnet from IBM PC/AT's. The smaller clusters used PC/AT's because
they were more flexible as to which 750 you were connecting to;
otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room in the
right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were assgined
to based on the starting character of your last name. (And graduate
students initially didn't have access to Project Athena at all;
although if you were in EECS, LCS or the AI Lab you had access to
dedicated systems, of course.)
Was this before the introduction of DECserver terminal concentrators? [snip]
There was a brief, shining moment that we were standardized on
BSD-derived Unix systems, but then IBM turned down AOS (the "academic"
operating system), and we were forced to use AIX on the IBM RT's, with
all that this implied: SMIT, and other horrors.
Huh, I thought that AOS ran on all versions of the RT? I know they
dropped support for it when the power-based RS/6000s came out and
replaced the RT, though. The RT was a weird duck, for sure.
Well, there were the jokes that the RT was an overgrown typewriter
controller with pretensions. :-) And it's floating-point performance
was crap, but if you were only doing integer operations (e.g., running
TeX, running compiles), it wasn't half-bad if it wasn't running AIX.
Compared to a SPARCstation it was
absurdly slow, but I guess compared to a uVAX perhaps not so much.
Alas, Sun wasn't one of Project Athena's sponsors; just IBM and DEC.
It also didn't help that our contemporaneous uVax's were mostly the VS
II/RC's, with the the epoxyed backplane which limited the amount of
amount of memory that could be put in them....
- Ted
7:05 p.m.
This was certainly true before 1986; I joined Project Athena in April of
1986 and this was quite well established by then.
And it was no real surprise when IBM killed off AOS. AIX was already
"product" and there was no commercially installed base for RT/PC systems
worth mentioning ... (part of my job at the time was to identify and
document the differences)
-----Original Message-----
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu>
Sent: 26 January 2023 23:50
To: Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com>
Cc: segaloco <segaloco(a)protonmail.com>; TUHS main list <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 03:04:27PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore Ts'o
<tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
>[snip]
> otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room
>in the right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were
>assgined to based on the starting character of your last name.
I'm not sure; this would have been in the 1985--1987 time frame.
-snip-
Well, it perhaps would have been more accurate that IBM had decided to that
AIX was the future, and had defunded the AOS group.
7:24 p.m.
The decision to end AOS was made sometime in 1H88 and the group of us
that defined the "convergence" was formed. Our work must have been
largely complete when I presented our plans at Berkeley 11/88 at a
workshop that coincided with the Morris worm. I assume we submitted the
Uniforum 89 paper
(https://technologists.com/sauer/Convergence_of_AIX_and_4.3BSD.pdf)
about then, as well.
On 1/27/2023 12:05 PM, Henry Mensch wrote:
This was certainly true before 1986; I joined Project
Athena in April of
1986 and this was quite well established by then.
And it was no real surprise when IBM killed off AOS. AIX was already
"product" and there was no commercially installed base for RT/PC systems
worth mentioning ... (part of my job at the time was to identify and
document the differences)
-----Original Message-----
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu>
Sent: 26 January 2023 23:50
To: Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com>
Cc: segaloco <segaloco(a)protonmail.com>; TUHS main list <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 03:04:27PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
--
voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore
Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
> [snip]
> otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room
> in the right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were
> assgined to based on the starting character of your last name.
I'm not sure; this would have been in the 1985--1987 time frame.
-snip-
Well, it perhaps would have been more accurate that IBM had decided to that
AIX was the future, and had defunded the AOS group.
26 Jan
26 Jan
2:17 p.m.
A couple of years after Athena got going the Andrew project at CMU got
started. That project focused primarily on early Sun workstations. There
was some fooling around with some sort of Unix on the PC/AT, but the lack
of virtual memory support and the weakness of the networking cards for the
machine meant that we never saw them.
My memory of how X evolved is a bit confused, but there was a collaboration
between Athena and Andrew. Each had built window systems independently.
My recollection is that Gosling, Rosenthal, and Sidebotham built the core
of the CMU one. It introduced the separation between the display engine
(the ‘server’) and the application (the ‘client’) using an ancestor of the
X Protocol.
After a while a consolidated window system was agreed, using front end
ideas from the MIT W system and the CMU wm system and preserving the X
Protocol. This produced a flexible architecture that allowed an
application to run anywhere and display in a window anywhere else. It also
made networking support a must.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 11:41:12AM -0500, Rich Salz
wrote:
Well..... technically Athena was about computing in higher ed. If you
go far back enough, at the very beginning, we used VAX 750's and IBM
PC/AT's running DOS. As soon as the Microvax 2's and IBM PC/RT's came
in, about 2 or so years in, Project Athena switched to Unix
workstations, but in the earliest days (which would have been pre-X
Windows), Project Athena had not yet standardized on Unix or
workstations for that matter.
The VAX 750's were huge time-sharing systems that you could connect to
via VT-100's and VS-100 that were hard-wired to the VAX 750's, and
telnet from IBM PC/AT's. The smaller clusters used PC/AT's because
they were more flexible as to which 750 you were connecting to;
otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room in the
right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were assgined
to based on the starting character of your last name. (And graduate
students initially didn't have access to Project Athena at all;
although if you were in EECS, LCS or the AI Lab you had access to
dedicated systems, of course.)
One of the perks for being hired as a student systems programmer back
then was that you got accounts on all of the Vax 750's, so you could
use any terminal room across campus. :-) We then would either rlogin
to our "home" Vax 750, or we had scripts that would replicate our home
directories across the various 750's.
There was a brief, shining moment that we were standardized on
BSD-derived Unix systems, but then IBM turned down AOS (the "academic"
operating system), and we were forced to use AIX on the IBM RT's, with
all that this implied: SMIT, and other horrors.
"AIX: it *reminds* you of Unix...." was the saying at the time ---
although we tried not to say that when the IBM engineers assigned
Athena were in hearing range :-). The one saving grace of the IBM
RT's was that they were three MIPS machines, while the Microvax's were
but a single MIPS, and that made a huge different if you were running
TeX or LaTeX.
Cheers,
- Ted
--
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
> Aa for the questions of the UNIX-ness of X,
it started in Athena,
which as
> I understand it was supposed to be
relatively OS-agnostic distributed
> computing? In any case, the predecessor ran on a different OS, not
sure how
> significant that is to the genesis of what
would be called X or what
OS it
"started" on.
Athena was about scaling up Unix workstations. It was started with grants
from IBM and Digital. It was never OS-agnostic. 
8 Feb
8 Feb
11:12 p.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 02:53:30PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 11:41:12AM -0500, Rich Salz
wrote:
Well..... technically Athena was about computing in higher ed. If you
go far back enough, at the very beginning, we used VAX 750's and IBM
PC/AT's running DOS. As soon as the Microvax 2's and IBM PC/RT's came
in, about 2 or so years in, Project Athena switched to Unix
workstations, but in the earliest days (which would have been pre-X
Windows), Project Athena had not yet standardized on Unix or
workstations for that matter.
Before the PC/RT machines and AOS, there was also an attempt at PC/XT
machines with Genix running on a add-in card.
"IBM, which has recently established an IBU called Academic Information
Systems (ACIS) to address colleges, universities, and schools, will
use the Genix32 operating system from National Semiconductor.
Genix32, still under development, is based on 4.2BSD (Berkeley's
demand-paged Unix system) and runs on the NS32032 32-bit MPU. A
previous Genix version was based on 4.1BSD and ran on the NS16032.
IBM is likely to use the system on the IAWS (Interim Advanced
Workstation, a PC equipped with an NS32032 board, probably also
from Sritek."
Unix World Vol01.05
https://archive.org/details/Unix_World_Vol01_05.pdf/page/n30/mode/1up
"IBM SHIPS XT'S WITH 16032 COPROCESSORS
IBM will soon ship 150 XTs containing plug-in National Semiconductor
16032 16-bit microprocessor-based CPU cards to Massachusetts Institute
of Technology for use on its large networking development project
(described previously in this column). The boards are made by Sritek
and include the National Semiconductor floating point math co-processor
ICs. IBM will also provide its new video controller board with high
density graphics capability and the Berkeley version of the UNIX
operating system.
The 16032 is a 32-bit microprocessor with 16-bit I/O clocked at
10MHz. It supports a demand-paged virtual-memory environment similar
to the DEC VAX.
The networking research project, funded by Digital Equipment Corp.
($40 million), IBM ($10 million), and MIT ($12 million), is expected,
within five years, to tie together 6,000 personal computers, 63 DEC
VAX minicomputers, and 150 DEC VAX microcomputers. All the systems
will run various versions of UNIX. It is expected that most of the
personal computer workstations will be Sun Microsystems and new DEC
units similar to the Sun systems. MIT is expected to develop an
enhanced version of UNIX (which was designed only to be a multi-user
time sharing system) to operate in a shared resource network
environment with enhanced graphics user interfaces utilizing windows
and mice. It will probably be called the MIT version of Unix."
PC Tech Journal, June 1984, Vol 1, No 9
https://archive.org/details/PC_Tech_Journal_vol01_n09/page/n29/mode/2up
"The IBM PC/XT was to be a shell within which the IBM Athena workstation
was to be built. High-speed co-processor cards and high-resolution
graphics boards were to be piggybacked onto the IBM PCs.
These plans fell through because of problems with the co-processor card.
...
The project awaits the delivery of 80 IBM PC/ATs. These machines will
run XENIX"
Simson L. Garfinkel - Athena at MIT
The Tech, Vol 105, No 3, Feb 12, 1985
https://thetech.com/issues/105/3/pdf
Http://tech.mit.edu:8080/V105/N3/athena.03n.html (cached)
Aa for
the questions of the UNIX-ness of X, it started in Athena, which as
I understand it was supposed to be relatively OS-agnostic distributed
computing? In any case, the predecessor ran on a different OS, not sure how
significant that is to the genesis of what would be called X or what OS it
"started" on.
Athena was about scaling up Unix workstations. It was started with grants
from IBM and Digital. It was never OS-agnostic.
9 Feb
9 Feb
3:51 a.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
On Thu, Feb 09, 2023 at 09:12:28AM +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
Before the PC/RT machines and AOS, there was also an attempt at PC/XT
machines with Genix running on a add-in card.
It's possible that there were some IBM'ers at MIT Building E40 (where
Project Athena was headquartered) that were playing with a PC/XT with
a co-processor board, but as far as I know that was never deployed in
the field --- at least, I never saw them. The only I saw were PC/AT's
(that is, the ones with the '286 CPU) that ran DOS and which were
essentially used only to telnet to the Vax 750's (or supdup to the MIT
AI / LCS lab machines, but most undergraduates didn't have access to
those computers; connecting to MIT Multics was also possible, via a
3270 emulator, but again, most undergrduates didn't have access,
although MIT's Student Information Processing Board could give out
limited accounts for undergraduates to experiment with Multics.)
- Ted
11 Feb
11 Feb
1:13 a.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
that would have happened before I arrived in April of 1986. my first job at Athena was to.
get folks off those XTs and (mostly) ATs.
This was wildly unsuccessful and unpopular because the replacement hardware wouldn't
be similarly capable... and also because, even then, there were more things that could be
plugged into XTs and ATs. The old platform was perceived as more versatile.
- Henry
On February 9, 2023 20:30:47 "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 09, 2023 at 09:12:28AM +1100, Jonathan
Gray wrote:
Before the PC/RT machines and AOS, there was also an attempt at PC/XT
machines with Genix running on a add-in card.
It's possible that there were some IBM'ers at MIT Building E40 (where
Project Athena was headquartered) that were playing with a PC/XT with
a co-processor board, but as far as I know that was never deployed in
the field --- at least, I never saw them. The only I saw were PC/AT's
(that is, the ones with the '286 CPU) that ran DOS and which were
essentially used only to telnet to the Vax 750's (or supdup to the MIT
AI / LCS lab machines, but most undergraduates didn't have access to
those computers; connecting to MIT Multics was also possible, via a
3270 emulator, but again, most undergrduates didn't have access,
although MIT's Student Information Processing Board could give out
limited accounts for undergraduates to experiment with Multics.)
- Ted
1:53 a.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 07:13:41PM -0500, Henry Mensch wrote:
that would have happened before I arrived in April of
1986. my first job at Athena was to. get folks off those XTs and (mostly) ATs.
This was wildly unsuccessful and unpopular because the replacement hardware wouldn't
be similarly capable... and also because, even then, there were more things that could be
plugged into XTs and ATs. The old platform was perceived as more versatile.
- Henry
So the "old platform" was the National 32016 addon cards that somehow
ran a Unix?
I'd love to learn more about that, I really liked the 320xx architecture,
seemed like a winner but my memory is they were buggy. Still would like
to get some idea of what it was like to run on an XT/AT with that card
plugged in. Did you boot DOS and that somehow booted Unix or what?
--lm
4:51 a.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 04:53:22PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 07:13:41PM -0500, Henry Mensch
wrote:
It seems that configuration wasn't used.
"Phase I: The off-the-shelf system
...
The closest approximation to the intended workstation environment
economically feasible on available Digital hardware at the time the
project began was minicomputer time-sharing systems. Approximately 50
VAX 11/750 minicomputers have been installed, each with six to eight
graphics-capable terminals.
...
The closest approximation to the eventual workstation configuration
available in the IBM catalog for Phase I was the PC/AT personal
computer, with a Professional Graphics Display and 3COM Ethernet
interface. Approximately 160 PC/AT's have been installed. The software
environment consists of PC/DOS, plus a set of higher level languages and
application packages chosen to simplify moving to an eventual UNIX
environment. In addition, 105 PC/XT personal computers, mostly with
Color Graphics Display, have been installed, primarily for use as
laboratory experiment controllers and also as cluster print servers for
the PC/AT's."
Evolution to the Athena Workstation Model: An Overview of the
Development Plan
http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/athenaplan/d.pdf
that would have happened before I arrived in
April of 1986. my first job at Athena was to. get folks off those XTs and (mostly) ATs.
This was wildly unsuccessful and unpopular because the replacement hardware wouldn't
be similarly capable... and also because, even then, there were more things that could be
plugged into XTs and ATs. The old platform was perceived as more versatile.
- Henry
So the "old platform" was the National 32016 addon cards that somehow
ran a Unix?
I'd love to learn more about that, I really liked the 320xx architecture,
seemed like a winner but my memory is they were buggy. Still would like
to get some idea of what it was like to run on an XT/AT with that card
plugged in. Did you boot DOS and that somehow booted Unix or what?
--lm
Multiple companies made these kinds of cards.
Some are mentioned in an ad:
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_MiniMicroS_110087111/page/20/mode/2up
http://www.cpu-ns32k.net/Defhard.html
http://www.cpu-ns32k.net/Opus.html
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/opusSystems/32k/800-00237-000_Opus_100pm_User_Manu…
The DSI-32 Coprocessor Board, Part 1: The Hardware
https://archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_10-08_1985-08_The_Amiga/page/n127/mode…
The DSI-32 Coprocessor Board, Part 2: The Software
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-09/page/n103/mode/2up
3:48 p.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
On Sat, Feb 11, 2023 at 02:51:55PM +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
That gave me the best "feel" for what it was like. Still would like to
hear from someone that ran on this on a day to day basis. It looks
pretty cool but either it happened a little too late for me (by 1987
I was working for Lachman porting Unix to the ETA-10 and I was running
on Sun3/50 as my desktop and Sun3/260 as the file server) or I missed
it.
I owned an AT&T Unix PC in college (I think, or I used Rob Netzer's
but I think we had 2 of them) and it would be interesting to know
how the 320xx on an AT stacked up against that.
12 Feb
12 Feb
3:26 a.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
On Sat, Feb 11, 2023 at 06:48:32AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Sat, Feb 11, 2023 at 02:51:55PM +1100, Jonathan
Gray wrote:
That gave me the best "feel" for what it was like. Still would like to
hear from someone that ran on this on a day to day basis. It looks
pretty cool but either it happened a little too late for me (by 1987
I was working for Lachman porting Unix to the ETA-10 and I was running
on Sun3/50 as my desktop and Sun3/260 as the file server) or I missed
it.
Not sure when the Sritek 16032 card was announced. It was discussed in
the June 1983 issue of Byte
Sudha Kavuru
Modular Architecture, Designing a modular computer around the IBM PC
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-06-rescan/page/n195/mode/2up
and shown at the January 1984 UniForum:
"Sritek manufactures high-performance coprocessors and advanced
operating systems for the IBM PC and XT. The Xenix System 3.0 for
the Sritek 68000 coprocessor offers paged-memory management which
can support up to 16 users. For the 16032 coprocessor we offer the
Berkeley 4.1 BSD which supports 32-bit demand-paged virtual memory
management and floating-point hardware. We will soon offer the 4.2
BSD version with networking facilities. UNIX System V will be
available on the 68000, 16032 and 80286 coprocessors during the
second quarter of 1984."
https://archive.org/details/1984-proceedings-uni-forum-dc/page/n30/mode/2up
For the 68000 card, an interesting writeup is in the
April 1983 issue of InfoWorld. Sritek cards were offered to both MIT
and CMU while they were waiting for the RT PCs.
"CMU will use Sritek coprocessor boards
Sritek, of Cleveland, Ohio, and Carnegie-Mellon University, located
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have agreed that Sritek will supply the
university with several hundred of its 68000 coprocessor boards with
XENIX software for the IBM PC XT.
According to a Carnegie-Mellon spokesman, the school will use the
enhanced computer as a transition work station until its new system,
under development in cooperation with IBM, is ready.
The university and IBM are working on a 32-bit microcomputer with one
megabyte of RAM and high-resolution bit-mapped graphics that will be
used in a campus network of 7500 work stations. The machine is not
expected to be ready until 1991, however.
CMU also plans to offer the enhanced IBM XT to faculty, students and
CMU employees for purchase at a discount. Sritek hardware will be
included in this plan."
10:35 p.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
I don't think you will find that. These systems were, pretty much, out in
the world and not particularly managed by anyone except the people who were
using them (largely educators and researchers). While the PC/ATs were
deployed by Project Athena, they were not managed. By the time I landed
there the RT devices were the focus of future activity since they more
closely fit into the plan and folks like Ted were in a better position to do
what was needed to build a platform that was uniform.
-----Original Message-----
From: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
Sent: 11 February 2023 09:49
To: Jonathan Gray <jsg(a)jsg.id.au>
Cc: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>; Henry Mensch <henry(a)henare.com>; Theodore
Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu>; tuhs(a)tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Re: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development
Environment for Mac OS)
On Sat, Feb 11, 2023 at 02:51:55PM +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
That gave me the best "feel" for what it was like. Still would like to hear
from someone that ran on this on a day to day basis. It looks pretty cool
but either it happened a little too late for me (by 1987 I was working for
Lachman porting Unix to the ETA-10 and I was running on Sun3/50 as my
desktop and Sun3/260 as the file server) or I missed it.
I owned an AT&T Unix PC in college (I think, or I used Rob Netzer's but I
think we had 2 of them) and it would be interesting to know how the 320xx on
an AT stacked up against that.
11 Feb
11 Feb
1:23 a.m.
New subject: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)
On February 8, 2023 17:12:50 Jonathan Gray <jsg(a)jsg.id.au> wrote:
"IBM SHIPS XT'S WITH 16032 COPROCESSORS
The project awaits the delivery of 80 IBM PC/ATs. These machines will
run XENIX"
AFAIK, this (XENIX) never happened, except perhaps in a very rudimentsry way by someone
evaluating things. The PC/ATs shipped with PGA graphics cards and PGA wasn't
compatible with anything that wasn't IBM produced. it died just a few years later
when VGA started to become a thing.
644
days inactive
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days old
20 comments
12 participants
participants (12)
-
Charles H Sauer (he/him) -
Chet Ramey -
Dan Cross -
Henry Mensch -
Jonathan Gray -
Larry McVoy -
Lars Brinkhoff -
Marc Donner -
Rich Salz -
segaloco -
Theodore Ts'o -
Will Senn