[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Norman Wilson]

Seth Morabito:

  After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and
  emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
  inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was
  ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that
  would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

=====

I never heard of anyone doing such a thing.  Had they ported
the kernel I would almost certainly have heard about it, because
they'd have asked me a question or two.  Much VAX-specific
structure inside there that I'd love to have had the time and
energy to clean up.

It's possible that someone did a semi-port, moving a lot of
the user-mode tools like the shell and the Jerq software.
Dave Kapilow did something like that for early SunOS, including
a mux-like X11 terminal program called sux, built atop a
library that did a simple mapping from Jerq graphics-library
calls to X11.

Certainly nobody inside 1127 ever did either of those things.
A few of us played with 3B1 or 3B2 systems (I remember Tom
Duff had a 3B1 at home at one point), but never very seriously.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Seth Morabito]

After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

-Seth
-- 
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[William Cheswick]

I never saw it. I believe the answer is no. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 24, 2018, at 11:13 AM, Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:
> 
> After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
> 
> -Seth
> -- 
>  Seth Morabito
>  Poulsbo, WA
>  web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:

> ...
> I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of
> Bell Labs.
>
I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced you to
buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had bought the one we
had a Stellar otherwise).
The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the behavior
of some code/validation testing of RFS *etc*...

The HW as pretty slow/inflexible compared to 68020/68030 which came out
around the same time, so it was just not interesting - *i.e.* 'JAWS' - Just
another work station' and it did not have a display.  IIRC, it was a server
and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for that use.
Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed out,
kicked butt
and were cheaper
.   The MIPS chip would emerge
with lots of designs,
and for that matter the 040 and the 386 would appear soon their after
, too.

I've always felt that the 3Bx series was an example of fighting the
previous war; other than 3B4000 (which had high reliability but other
issues in practice to use it), there was never anything that made them
special - compared to everyone else.

The only 'successful' product
that I
can
remember that used the WE32100
was the
second version (*a.k.a.* product version) of the Blit (Bart's first version
was 68000 IIRC).  Does anyone know of another product?  I think I was told
the 5ESS
changed
 the SLICs
design
from the original 68000 design to WE32100 but I was no
longer associated with anyone working on it by then, so I don't know.

Dennis once remarked to a couple of us that the WE32100 was an example of
AT&T wanting to make sure it had its own recipe to make processors, but it
was not clear it was worth it.   BTW: around the same time both AT&T and HP
were making their own DRAM too.  It was common thinking in management at
tech companies - telling folks that they needed to be 'vertically
integrated.'  But in the case of both HP and AT&T there internally produced
DRAM chips cost 2-3 times what the merchant market cost; so besides the
investment in the fab (which was huge) it was a pretty expensive insurance
policy.

That said, this was also the end times for the idea of the 'second
source.'   Chip manufacturers would be required to license their designs to
some one else (for instance AMD was originally Intel's second source).   I
think HP was using a second source license for their memory, but IIRC AT&T
had developed its own because they had higher reliability standards.

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 12:06:22PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> IIRC, it was a server
> and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for that use.
> Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed out,
> kicked butt and were cheaper

I dunno that they kicked butt, my memory is we were all playing leapfrog.
People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking 
about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the 
CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home 
about.  SPARC was sort of like that too, it was better but it was 
really really rare to have a chip that was 2x faster than its peers,
if that happened it was usually the introduction of one CPU generation
compared to the tail of another CPUs generation.

> The only 'successful' product that I can remember that used the WE32100
> was the second version (*a.k.a.* product version) of the Blit (Bart's first version
> was 68000 IIRC).  

Ah, the BLIT.  Pretty sure Wisconsin's CS department had the first generation
(aren't those the ones that caught on fire?).  I *loved* those terminals,
so much nicer than a single screen.

BTW, I had Greg Chesson here for a pig roast once, and he brought Bart.
I've got pics somewhere if anyone cares.

--lm

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Jon Forrest]

On 8/24/2018 9:46 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:

> People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking
> about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the
> CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
> about.  

When the alpha first came out there were 3 implementations, soon
followed by more. I wonder which one you measured.

(You probably don't remember this but you once came to my office
at UCB to talk to my officemate Carl Staelin back when I had
one of the first alphas to be released by DEC.)

Jon

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 10:54:41AM -0700, Jon Forrest wrote:
> On 8/24/2018 9:46 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >People remember the alpha with a lot of revisionist history, talking
> >about fast it was.  I was actually measuring performance of all the
> >CPUs at that time and the Alpha I had wasn't anything to write home
> >about.
> 
> When the alpha first came out there were 3 implementations, soon
> followed by more. I wonder which one you measured.

2106A 275Mhz

> (You probably don't remember this but you once came to my office
> at UCB to talk to my officemate Carl Staelin back when I had
> one of the first alphas to be released by DEC.)

I don't remember a lot of stuff, I'm old.  Old enough to get the joke that
when you are 25 and you open the fridge and ask "what am I doing here?"
it is existential question.  When you are my age and you open the fridge
and ask the same question it's because you forgot what you wanted.

That said, I do have some memory of going somewhere, but UCB?  I thought
Carl was at HP Labs?  But I do remember going somewhere.

And all these years later Carl and I are still close friends.  It is
a small world.  

--lm

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Mary Ann Horton]

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Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to 
use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the 
externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 
1980s.  We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told 
"eat your own dog food." The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had 
potential.  Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide 
turned in favor of Suns.


On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com 
> <mailto:web@loomcom.com>> wrote:
>
>     ...
>     I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
>     inside of Bell Labs.
>
> I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced 
> you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had 
> bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).
> The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the 
> behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS /etc/...
>
> The HW as pretty slow/inflexible compared to 68020/68030 which came 
> out around the same time, so it was just not interesting - /i.e./ 
> 'JAWS' - Just another work station' and it did not have a display.  
> IIRC, it was a server and pretty inflexible in the I/O subsystem for 
> that use.
> Sun would quickly produce the first Sparcs, which as Larry has pointed 
> out, kicked butt
> and were cheaper
> .   The MIPS chip would emerge
> with lots of designs,
> and for that matter the 040 and the 386 would appear soon their after
> , too.
>
> I've always felt that the 3Bx series was an example of fighting the 
> previous war; other than 3B4000 (which had high reliability but other 
> issues in practice to use it), there was never anything that made them 
> special - compared to everyone else.
>
> The only 'successful' product
> that I
> can
> rememberthat used the WE32100
> was the
> second version (/a.k.a./product version) of the Blit (Bart's first 
> version was 68000 IIRC).  Does anyone know of another product?  I 
> think I was told the 5ESS
> changed
>  the SLICs
> design
> from the original 68000 design to WE32100 but I was no
> longer associated with anyone working on it by then, so I don't know.
>
> Dennis once remarked to a couple of us that the WE32100 was an example 
> of AT&T wanting to make sure it had its own recipe to make processors, 
> but it was not clear it was worth it.   BTW: around the same time both 
> AT&T and HP were making their own DRAM too.  It was common thinking in 
> management at tech companies - telling folks that they needed to be 
> 'vertically integrated.'  But in the case of both HP and AT&T there 
> internally produced DRAM chips cost 2-3 times what the merchant market 
> cost; so besides the investment in the fab (which was huge) it was a 
> pretty expensive insurance policy.
>
> That said, this was also the end times for the idea of the 'second 
> source.'   Chip manufacturers would be required to license their 
> designs to some one else (for instance AMD was originally Intel's 
> second source).   I think HP was using a second source license for 
> their memory, but IIRC AT&T had developed its own because they had 
> higher reliability standards.


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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Seth Morabito]

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On Mon, Aug 27, 2018, at 8:54 AM, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to
> use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the
> externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-
> late 1980s.  We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were
> told "eat your own dog food."  The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the
> 3B2 had potential.  Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs
> the tide turned in favor of Suns.> 
> On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Seth Morabito
>> <web@loomcom.com> wrote:>>> 
>>> ...
>>> I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside
>>> of Bell Labs.>> I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it.  AT&T forced
>> you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had
>> bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).>> The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the
>> behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS *etc*...[...]

Thank you all for your many replies!

I have a soft spot for the 3B2 because I've put so much work into
reverse engineering it and understanding it, but I can absolutely
understand why everyone wanted Suns. The 3B2 was a funny architecture,
and unless it had been a breakout hit right from the start, I can't
imagine a path that would have led to 3B2s taking over the world.
-Seth
--
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com




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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Clem Cole]

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below...

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:04 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to use
> AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally
> developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s.  We
> all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog
> food."
>
That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and Kolstad
made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody (ber
probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were not
amsussed.

The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential.
>
It was not so much they we awful IMO, is that they were nothing special -
too little too late.   The 3B20 (the only computer I even knew with a 'pull
starter'), was basically a 1MIP 780 and took the same resources (machine
room, multiple 19" cabinets, etc); when a 68020 based Masscomp, Apollo or
Sun was at 4-5 MIPS and fit under your desk.   As I said, fighting the last
war.

The 3B2 got the size and performance more inline, but the SW was still
behind and by them it was arguable if a BLIT over a serial line could
compete with the builtin graphics.   For the former, did the 3B2 only run
SRV3 and SRV4?   The others ran SVR0-2 which was not even close to BSD.  By
SVR3 the OS finally got better.    BILT had some great stuff, but I think
the shear volume of programmers using X-Windows, particularly once it ran
on super cheap HW (*i.e.* Wintel based) it was tough.



> Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in favor
> of Suns
>
Although by the time of its release, the default system for

SRV4 was Wintel.

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[John P. Linderman]

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We (at the Labs outside of 11127) were definitely forced to use the 3B
series, despite its unbelievable lack of documentation (and floating point,
for the 3B20s). Having to eat your own dog food doesn't make it palatable,
it just prevents you from doing something worthwhile, and dislike those who
prepare the menu. I'd be happy to apologize, if the 3Bs had proved their
worth.

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 1:33 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> below...
>
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:04 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:
>
>> Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to use
>> AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally
>> developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s.  We
>> all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog
>> food."
>>
> That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and
> Kolstad made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody
> (ber probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were not
> amsussed.
>
> The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential.
>>
> It was not so much they we awful IMO, is that they were nothing special -
> too little too late.   The 3B20 (the only computer I even knew with a 'pull
> starter'), was basically a 1MIP 780 and took the same resources (machine
> room, multiple 19" cabinets, etc); when a 68020 based Masscomp, Apollo or
> Sun was at 4-5 MIPS and fit under your desk.   As I said, fighting the last
> war.
>
> The 3B2 got the size and performance more inline, but the SW was still
> behind and by them it was arguable if a BLIT over a serial line could
> compete with the builtin graphics.   For the former, did the 3B2 only run
> SRV3 and SRV4?   The others ran SVR0-2 which was not even close to BSD.  By
> SVR3 the OS finally got better.    BILT had some great stuff, but I think
> the shear volume of programmers using X-Windows, particularly once it ran
> on super cheap HW (*i.e.* Wintel based) it was tough.
>
>
>
>> Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in
>> favor of Suns
>>
> Although by the time of its release, the default system for
>
> SRV4 was Wintel.
>
> Clem
>

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Brad Spencer]

"John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> writes:

> We (at the Labs outside of 11127) were definitely forced to use the 3B
> series, despite its unbelievable lack of documentation (and floating point,
> for the 3B20s). Having to eat your own dog food doesn't make it palatable,
> it just prevents you from doing something worthwhile, and dislike those who
> prepare the menu. I'd be happy to apologize, if the 3Bs had proved their
> worth.

[snip]


I was at 6200 Broad Street in Reynoldsburg in the late 1990s to early
2000s and while the group I was a part of was not forced to use the 3B
series for our product, we did get forced into using GIS [a.k.a. NCR]
systems after NCR was purchased.  The OS running on it was some sort of
SVR4, pretty vanilla, if I recall correctly.  I just remember it being
buggy.  That version of the product was sold to a single domestic US
customer.  All of the rest of the domestic customers waited for the
HP-UX port which happened after it was obvious no one wanted the NCR
product.  The product that I was a part of was old even at the time,
having been ported to the VAX [SVR3], test ported to SunOS 4.x, Tandem
and the AT&T rebranded variation [SVR3, and SVR4], GIS [SVR4] and HP
[HP-UX, lots of versions].  I have heard since that the product is still
around and runs on Linux at this point.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Mon, 27 Aug 2018, Clem Cole wrote:

> That was always my impression.     IIRC Mt. Xinu made a poster (and 
> Kolstad made a series of buttons) stating "4.2 > V"  I remember somebody 
> (ber probably) had it hanging in Whippany and certain supervisors were 
> not amsussed.

I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a 
PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my 
SparcStation.

Unfortunately the latter part of my career was having to support SysVile 
and pretending that I liked it...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Unfortunately the latter part of my career was having to support SysVile and
> pretending that I liked it...

I don't think anyone really liked it.  Maybe Roger Faulkner.  And there
are the Joyent crew.  Even they, when I told them I had tried it and
wasn't impressed, asked if I had /opt/GNU/bin in my path first?  Huh?
Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning to the
compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?  SunOS was the system that everyone
used because they wanted to, Solaris was what people used because they
had to.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning [sic] to the
> compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?

As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there are still plenty
of places where that compatibility is what sells systems.

> SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris
> was what people used because they had to.

Nicely put!

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[George Michaelson]

we pretty much bounced a UNISYS library information system on using
',' (comma) as the separator on IPv4 dotted-quads. If there isn't a
dot, how can it be one?

I think the OS I used with a cd command which could walk down, but
walking "up" was a cd to root and a walk down -1 also fell out of
favour.

The only thing I remember doing on the apollo domain workstations was
tuning their sendmail config. nobody ran commands on it, nobody could
reliably compile.

HP and its HP compatibility library. and the really badly written BSD
compatibility layer.

oddly, OSF/1 and RS/6000 AIX both survived. maybe you can have enough
lipstick on a pig. reboot to re-apply bindings. well i *guess* that
works, but gee, was it really so hard to move shared library through
some staging process? and having to boot into a mini OS to do
filesystem repairs. please.

none of these things were fatal but somehow all of these things were.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 4:02 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > Decades have gone by, Sun is gone, and they are still cleaning [sic] to the
> > compatibilty argument for /usr/bin?
>
> As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there are still plenty
> of places where that compatibility is what sells systems.
>
> > SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris
> > was what people used because they had to.
>
> Nicely put!
>
> Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:

> none of these things were fatal but somehow all of these things were.

This goes back to Clem's argument about economics. The increasing power
and declining cost of Intel HW combined with the _almost_ neglible cost
of Linux combined to kill off almost all the legacy Unixes.

That Linux modelled many things after SunOS also helped.

But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and
Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 8/28/2018 2:42 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and
> Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
> big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

If you haven't tried Solaris 11, at least 11.2 or later, check it out. A 
lot of GNU stuff is available, and you can "pkg install" apache, tomcat, 
PHP, MYSQL, and a slew of other things that are actually being kept up 
to date. The recent PHP 7.1.17 exploit fix was put out in the regular 
Solaris 11 SRU a few weeks after it was publicly released. And that was 
supposedly after the "mass layoff" of Solaris engineers. I've also 
noticed quite a few bug fixes for Solaris internals and device drivers 
since then so Oracle is still maintaining Solaris. I think their most 
recent support time line puts Solaris support out to 2030 or so.

I've installed and maintain a few Solaris 11.1 (since upgraded to 11.3) 
clusters for Oracle databases on Intel (Dell) blades with fiber channel, 
and with ZFS they've been rock-solid.

Side note, and I probably already said this a long time ago here, but 
back in the early days of Linux kernel 2.6, I complained on one of the 
mailing lists about the removal of a way to control the size of the disk 
cache, along with the tendency for the kernel to page out applications 
in favor of more disk cache. The snobby answer I got back from a 
developer was that (paraphrased) "We know better than you about memory 
allocation" or some such garbage. I've always turned my nose up at Linux 
since then. I figure if that level of arrogance had infested it to that 
degree, and an open-source project at that, I wanted no part of it. 
Since then, of course, they have made some changes that make it less 
likely to do that, but I have a recent Oracle Linux (Redhat) system here 
running Oracle eBusiness that is currently 2GB into swap, and has 10G of 
disk cache. Swappiness is set to 0, and other tunables were altered that 
should have stopped that. That's just plain dumb.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and 
> Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting 
> big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

Yep, that was my last job too, until I was made redundant at age 58 (ever 
tried to find a job at that age, having specialist skills?).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and 
> > Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting 
> > big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.
>
> Yep, that was my last job too, until I was made redundant at age 58 (ever 
> tried to find a job at that age, having specialist skills?).
>
> -- Dave

That's exactly what happened to me, at the same age.  Fortunately the
market where I live (Israel) is super hot for C++ / Linux developers,
and I landed a job at what so far is a reasonable start-up company.
("Praise the Lord", as they say.)

I hope you've found something.

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

[...]

>> SunOS was the system that everyone used because they wanted to, Solaris 
>> was what people used because they had to.
>
> Nicely put!

Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
penguins have broken this time).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Harald Arnesen]

Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:

> Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
> sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
> at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
> BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
> penguins have broken this time).

So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?
-- 
Hilsen Harald

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 02:36:47AM +0200, Harald Arnesen wrote:
> Dave Horsfall [2018-08-29 00:33]:
> 
> > Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a shit 
> > sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like systems 
> > at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least vaguely 
> > BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see what the 
> > penguins have broken this time).
> 
> So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?

MacOS is based on Mach and Mach was a big steaming mess of promises that
were not so much.  Easy for me to say, I haven't written a VM system from
scratch and they did, so credit them for that.  But I've been in a VM
system that was oh so much easier to read and understand, the SunOS 4.x
VM system done by Joe Moran (mojo@sun.com).  That guy had crazy skills,
well beyond mine or anyone else I can think of.  When he quit the story
is that Bill Joy stopped him in the parking lot and offered him crazy
amounts of money to stay.

So I'd go with MacOS is not a fun kernel.  It's pretty close to BSD
and I recently wandered through that VM system and I was not impressed.
I wish like hell that Sun had fed their VM back to BSD.  Yeah, it wasn't
multi processor friendly but someone would have fixed that.

The penguin stuff, it's OK.  Not as clean as SunOS by a long shot.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Harald Arnesen wrote:

>> Signature material, in fact!  I loved SunOS 4.1.4, and had to eat a 
>> shit sandwich when they went to Solaris (but continue to run BSD-like 
>> systems at home; first BSDi, then FreeBSD; the MacBook is at least 
>> vaguely BSD-ish, and the only reason that I also have Debian is to see 
>> what the penguins have broken this time).
>
> So you don't think MacOS has broken more than the penguins have?

Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac (the latter has mo 
serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an equally-dodgy 
driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).

And vice-versa; I had to learn how to control DTR etc on a genuine
serial port on the FreeBSD box (I am writing a user-level driver for
a serial device).

As for Penguin/OS (and trying to figure out just which header file uses 
which flags, when I'm using low-level Perl I/O), then forget it.

What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on 
Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.

I had a look at how they (Linux) wrote stty.c, and nearly threw up.

So, yes, that's pretty much my answer...

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> 
> What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
> Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.

I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly
late innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's
user interface.

In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:

	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0

Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
type?  :-)

					- Ted

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Tuesday, 28 August 2018 at 23:23:10 -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>
>> What really blew my gasket is that "stty -f" on *BSD is "stty -F" on
>> Penguin/OS, despite them copying every other flag.
>
> I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly
> late innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's
> user interface.
>
> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>
> 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0

Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
(along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

But options are an issue, notably with GNU software, which has a
completely different lineage.  Just look at FreeBSD ls(1) and GNU
ls(1).

> Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when
> redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to
> type?  :-)

Creeping featurism!

Greg
--
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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> > Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
> >
> > 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
> 
> Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
> (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
> sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
> I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)

Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
1992 at the latest.

Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were unwillingly frog-marched
from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.

    	      	      	       	     	- Ted

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dan Cross]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1439 bytes --]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > > In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
> > > Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
> > >
> > >     stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
> >
> > Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
> > (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
> > sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
> > I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
>
> BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
>
> Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
> 1992 at the latest.
>

I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented in Net/2
(1991, though of course the entanglements there have been discussed), but
the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to be absent from the man
page).

Most of the Linux kernel developers from those early days cut their
> teeth on BSD 4.3 and BSD 4.3 Reno, and were unwillingly frog-marched
> from Sun OS 4.x to Slowlaris 2.x, and from IBM AOS (which was also BSD
> 4.3 based) to IBM AIX (thanks, AT&T) in their day jobs.
>

I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
"Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to
Solaris.

        - Dan C.

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:

> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.

I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:50:48AM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
> 
> I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
> on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
> AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
> macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.

I believe Wisconsin did the NFS stuff for that OS, as I was coming up
to speed I noticed a bunch of IBM work stations and I think they were
running AOS.  Wisconsin was quite the hacker school back then, mojo came
from there, so did Rusty and a bunch of the kernel hackers that were a
few years ahead of me.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/29/18 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:50:48AM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
>> On 8/29/18 10:41 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>
>>> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>>
>> I was. We used it for a number of things at CWRU, and I used it personally
>> on old IBM workstations. I wrote a considerable portion of bash-2.0 on an
>> AOS machine in my old house, and my wife used it (plus an APA-style troff
>> macro package I wrote) to write her doctoral thesis.
> 
> I believe Wisconsin did the NFS stuff for that OS, as I was coming up
> to speed I noticed a bunch of IBM work stations and I think they were
> running AOS.  Wisconsin was quite the hacker school back then, mojo came
> from there, so did Rusty and a bunch of the kernel hackers that were a
> few years ahead of me.

Yep, they did. I maintained a custom kernel version for quite a long time,
but that computer is not one of the things that came along when we moved.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arno Griffioen]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.

Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's. 

The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with 
using an assembler :)

Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!

							Bye, Arno.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Eric Wayte]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen@ieee.org>
wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>
> Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
>
> The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
> using an assembler :)
>
> Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
>
>                                                         Bye, Arno.
>

I remember IBM brought a semi-trailer to my university (UCF) showcasing the
RT back in the 80s.
-- 
Eric Wayte

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
I remember meeting the RT family of machines during the UNIXEXPO cycle
of events. Also what DEC was up to. It was both the IBM 6151 RT
machines and finally the odd looking design that they turned into. I
still have the mouse pad they gave me of a certain Viking working to
promote them.

I recall that the sales droid at the collection of RT machines was
rather vexed that I simply used the telnet command to walk my way
across the whole series.

I also recall that I was more impressed by the DEC crowd, and was
amused by the SUN efforts. You're right as usual Larry, they were
working too <DELETED> hard to promote themselves.

Kevin I've seen your site before, it is as informative as usual.

As for running AIX in a virtual machine, perhaps I will contact you
off list to discuss that idea, Kevin.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Eric Wayte <ewayte@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen@ieee.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
>> > I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
>>
>> Used it for several years, but on IBM 6151 RT machines and not RS/6000's.
>>
>> The ROMP CPU in the RT's was a bit of an oddball, but fun to play with
>> using an assembler :)
>>
>> Like many IBM's from the era they had fantastic keyboards though!
>>
>>                                                         Bye, Arno.
>
>
> I remember IBM brought a semi-trailer to my university (UCF) showcasing the
> RT back in the 80s.
> --
> Eric Wayte

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:41:02AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> I'm curious who was using AOS, which was essentially Tahoe+NFS.
> "Frog-marched" is an apt description of the forced migration from SunOS to
> Solaris.

AOS was used by MIT's Project Athena.  DEC and IBM both contributed $5
million/year in staff or equipment, while MIT contributed $2
million/year.  So Athena was funded at $12 million for five years,
which was later extended by another 3 years.

Initially the DEC and IBM equipment was running on BSD 4.3/4.3 Tahoe.
DEC later moved us to Ultrix, and IBM to AIX (sigh).

Sun equipment was later added to the mix (purchased and funded by MIT).

   	       	       	     	       - Ted

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Wednesday, 29 August 2018 at 10:41:02 -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:26 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 03:06:40PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>>>> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining
>>>> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>>>>
>>>>     stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
>>>
>>> Checking mckusick's source distribution, it seems that the -f option
>>> (along with sanity) came in with 4.4BSD.  It was in the original
>>> sources imported into FreeBSD.  4.3BSD had such a bizarre syntax that
>>> I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.
>>
>> BSD 4.4 Lite was released in 1994.  (Lite2 was released in 1995.)
>>
>> Linux was started in 1991, and we had a stty from very early on --- by
>> 1992 at the latest.

Right, which is why I wrote

  I suspect whatever you emulated must have come from a later date.

In case that wasn't clear, I meant a later date than 4.3BSD.

> I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented
> in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
> discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
> be absent from the man page).

No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:

  static char sccsid[] = "@(#)stty.c	5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";

And it has the -f flag.  This was (just) before the very first version
of Linux.  My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
from Net/2.  Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.

Greg
--
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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:58 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> > I think that Greg is slightly mistaken; `stty` had `-f` documented
> > in Net/2 (1991, though of course the entanglements there have been
> > discussed), but the option existed in Reno (1990, though it seems to
> > be absent from the man page).
>
> No, this is exactly what I suspected, but was too lazy to check up on.
> I don't have sources for Tahoe, Reno or Net/2 on my machine, but
> FreeBSD 1.0 stty.c has:
>
>   static char sccsid[] = "@(#)stty.c    5.28 (Berkeley) 6/5/91";
>
> And it has the -f flag.  This was (just) before the very first version
> of Linux.  My understanding is that FreeBSD 1.0 was primarily derived
> from Net/2.  Of course, there's no reason to have chosen that version.
>

Net/2 was the basis of 386BSD, which begat the patchkits, which begat
FreeBSD and NetBSD.

One of the problems with early Linux was that they were just a bunch of
guys (and sometimes gals) that had access to these cool unix systems. At
the time, there was quite the lag between release by research / university
and running in a commercial Unix. So in the early 1990s, there were  a
bunch of systems based on 4.2BSD, as well as many based on System V, which
lacked the -f flag. At the time, it was at the end of the isolated phase of
Unix, where people just made stuff up in relative isolation and when the
cross pollination effects of USENET and the first Unix converts having had
a decade or so under their belts. The Linux guys weren't old-time Bell Labs
guys that would know the differences in detail between the different
strains, especially the people that were writing one-off utilities, often
to an old, out of date man page, that Linux encouraged to contribute.
Nothing wrong with all that, it was a crazy time trying to recreate things
at a mile a minute. But some details were not faithfully emulated. It's not
surprising: there was always so much to do. So while it existed when they
started, it's unlikely the knowledge had diffused enough for them to know
about it when it came time to code...

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2018, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> I'm pretty sure the addition of "stty -f" and "stty -F" is a fairly late 
> innovation.  i.e., it wasn't there when Linux "copied" stty's user 
> interface.

Yeah, I suppose that's it, but in true GNU style they also have 
"--file=/dev/XXX", so why not "-f"?

> In BSD 4.3 and early Linux (which is when I still was maintaining 
> Linux's serial driver) you always had to do:
>
> 	stty dec < /dev/ttyS0
>
> Really, why did those young whippersnappers had to add an option, when 
> redirection worked perfectly well and required one less character to 
> type?  :-)

Ah, but then the shell does the opening, which might not be the mode that 
you wanted; I was doing some funky I/O redirection at the time as well.

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On 29 Aug 2018, at 03:06, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> Stuff I write on FreeBSD pretty much works on my Mac (the latter has mo serial ports, and thus uses a dodgy USB/serial cable with an equally-dodgy driver that hangs the system to the point of requiring a *power cycle*).

I’m glad I’m not the only one who has infinite problems with these dongles. I have a sacred old laptop running OpenBSD precisely to get serial consoles working as a) it has an RS-232 port and b) the drivers are sane. I have a USB-serial dongle which on Mac, once the driver is installed, creates a device called /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Serial-SiLo. Took me an eternity to figure out it was that because the docs had nothing about which device file it actually created and, well, considering it is a physical cable I had eliminated Bluetooth to begin with… I confess to looking at the creation date on the device file and then saying “naah, it cannot be… oh… it is…”

I do miss SunOS too - because of a single user with great powers we had to upgrade a SparcStation 10 to Solaris back in 1994 and the performance took an instant nosedive. Not to mention the hours spent getting tools to make it actually work (i.e. 99% of the GNU project).

Arrigo

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Warren Toomey]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:12AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a
> PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
> SparcStation.

I made a "Satan Inside" PS file once, along with a "Downgrade to Solaris"
PS file. Must dig them out ....

Cheers, Warren

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Paul Winalski]

On 8/27/18, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> I remember seeing a photo of that button.  Somewhere (I think) I have a
> PS/PDF (or was it a sticker?) of "Intel outside" which I stuck to my
> SparcStation.

We stuck an International House of Pancakes "Powered by Pancakes"
sticker on the power supply box of our IBM mainframe.

-Paul W.

Re: [TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[arnold]

I am pretty sure that V8 was the first research system to run on
Vaxen, and I believe that Research used 750 and later 8550s for
their systems. Norman could probably give a defnitive answer.

V7 on the Interdata aside, Plan 9 is when you saw a big push to
a multiplatform system: MIPS, SPARC, 68040 and 386.

Arnold

Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:

> After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and
> emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
> inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was
> ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that
> would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
>
> -Seth
> -- 
>   Seth Morabito
>   Poulsbo, WA
>   web@loomcom.com