At Sun, 6 Jun 2021 14:23:49 -0400, Clem Cole wrote: Subject: Re: [TUHS] 32V memory management: not quite V7 style swapping -- source code update > > You got me thinking and I'm curious if anyone really knows historically how > many sites ran a 32V system? In those days (late 70s/early 80s) the > universities that knew and and even many sites inside the Bell System, the > Vaxen I ran 4.1BSD (say the Marx's brothers at Whippany along with the Vax > in the underseas research lab were we put the AP I did for my thesis). If my memory serves me correctly, University of Calgary ran 32V on their first teaching VAX 11/780 for a short while when I was starting my second year of undergrad (Sept. through to the xmas break, IIRC). This would be the fall of 1980. After that first term I think it was running 3BSD for the rest of the semester, and finally was running and early 4BSD not long after. As I recall they had tried to run 3.x right away but had some problems (possibly with a serial driver? the initial setup had some 20 or 30 terminals) and in order to not have all us students trying to crowd onto the old PDP 11/60 with just 12 terminals (which was also still in use by a bunch of classes), while the VAX sat idle, they just gave up and (re)installed 32V. I think my class probably lost a week or two of time to use the system. At that time the only other teaching system was the Multics mainframe, and it was also overloaded with too many users. I remember being a little dismayed that the BSD C compiler seemed entirely different from 32V (where it was very V7-like and thus what I was familiar with from first year). It wasn't until 4BSD offered me job control and command history in CSH that I finally became more accepting of BSD. I think it was after the 4.x upgrade that they instituted CPU time limits for students, and I remember discovering that if one caught SIGXCPU then the limit just kept increasing -- i.e. the hard limit never worked in the initial release of whatever version it was -- so I wrote a little program that would catch the signal, then burn CPU in a loop until the limit was above some requested value, and then it would fork a shell. I put that in my ~/.login and had lots of fun until I was caught. Then I fessed up and didn't get expelled! They fixed the bug of course and as a result of it all I then got to know the sysadmins better and learned an awful lot more from them than I did in class on some/many days. -- Greg A. Woods Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack Planix, Inc. Avoncote Farms