Misremembered the year.  That conference was October 2000.  I just found
the bookbag I got as swag from it.

On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 7:46 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So from IBM's POV, they could
>> support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370
>> and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe
>> iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of
>> the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right?
>>
>
>  This is not how I remember it going down.
>
> There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that IBM
> was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of a
> sudden there was an IBM port to S/390.  Clearly (well, *I* thought it was
> clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced
> their hand.  (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of
> my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground).
>
> I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible
> Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s
> I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM
> to advise them how we thought they should proceed.  They seemed to take
> much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very
> crazy.  (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine
> Associates.  They're still around.)
>
> I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM had
> bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different.
> Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot
> of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver.  Alas, IBM tightened the
> screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer
> from Oracle in its back pocket.
>
> But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in the
> late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually went
> by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a
> development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your
> so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in
> hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not
> offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing,
> cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port
> going."
>
> So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is
> all I'm saying.  By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had
> its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a
> jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned
> out differently.
>
> Adam
>