Re: [9fans] Don't know much about history

[Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>]

Amdahl's machines were called 470s and their front-end communications
processors were called 4705s, if memory serves.  Their initial Unix
was called something like UTS/370 (I'm sure about the `UTS' part).  We
ran several virtual machines of UTS on an IBM 3033 that IBM donated,
for undergraduate use at U of Toronto in the early 1980s.  UTS was a
port of V7, with a few gratuitous C library interface changes, a port
of dmr's V6 PDP-11 C compiler, and no fsck.  Their fsck replacement
had the charming property that it only worked on file systems with a
handful of errors needing repair, so just when you really needed it,
it gave up.  I ported V7's fsck quickly and we used that instead.  The
system used ASCII internally and translated to and from EBCDIC where
necessary at the edges (some terminal I/O, printing, etc.).  It had
support for VM/370's virtual card readers, card punches and line
printers, so inter-virtual-machine communication was done via virtual
card images.  At the time, it seemed really fast.  It could fsck an
entire 3330 disk drive in 30 seconds.  `make' and `make -n' ran at
about the same speed.  Its Achille's heel was that IBM machines tended
to have operators, who thought they could just `force down' (crash)
virtual machines running UTS, though we told them over and over that
they needed to shut them down gracefully, including syncing them, and
provided them with a simple way to do so.

I'm pretty sure that UTS (d)evolved and become System V.something.

Google is unreachable now (as is much of the Internet), but I think
the Wollongong Group were best known for Eunice, a Unix emulator that
ran (slowly) on VAX/VMS.