From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Don't know much about history From: Geoff Collyer Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 00:58:54 -0700 In-Reply-To: <85f02f6cb97f9c7eaa11ea22b81d91d2@9netics.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: b131603c-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.