From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com)
Subject: [TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2017 02:31:06 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201709180831.v8I8V6LB021088@freefriends.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CACCFpdwD4jAx69MqQ1QdT7GRuKMbVVOBjvMLbMHgu2GSRcy7rQ@mail.gmail.com>
That Pr1me had a Unix emulation layer is news to me (I think). I worked
on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Pr1me Computers for
several years. (Oh, how I wish I had saved that last release tape!!!)
Primos was a terribly weird OS, but the SWT subsystem made it almost
Unix-like and very pleasant and usable. The mark parity business
was only one of the weirdnesses of that machine. Georgia Tech even
had a C compiler for it. sizeof(char) was 1, of course, but it was 16
bits, because the instruction mode used didn't have 8 bit byte pointers.
I can't claim credit for GT-SWT; I came along after it was mature
and stable, but I did do a few nice things.
Arnold
Nigel Williams <nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:49 AM, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> wrote:
> > The Prime minis
> > had a layered product called Primix that provided a unix userland of
> > sorts. Dog slow, at least in its earlier releases. Null pointers were
> > not zero on the Prime machines.
>
> I second Dennis's vote for Primix as "weirdnix".
>
> The other weirdness was the high-bit of ASCII being set due to the
> convention on Primos (they feared to ever change it to avoid upsetting
> customers).
>
> People went mad trying to port applications to it due to these
> differences. Primos defaulted to all UPPERCASE, and I vaguely recall
> having to poke about for a fair while when starting Primix to convince
> the Prime terminal handler to switch to lowercase.
>
> There was an attempt to produce a native port of Unix for Prime
> computers but I believe it was squashed by Prime management.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-09-18 8:31 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-09-17 7:03 Warren Toomey
2017-09-17 7:28 ` arnold
2017-09-17 8:10 ` David Arnold
2017-09-17 12:52 ` Adam Sampson
2017-09-17 14:23 ` Steve Simon
2017-09-17 18:50 ` Chet Ramey
2017-09-17 19:01 ` Derrik Walker v2.0
2017-09-18 12:02 ` arnold
2017-09-17 14:49 ` Dennis Boone
2017-09-18 7:27 ` Nigel Williams
2017-09-18 8:31 ` arnold [this message]
2017-09-18 10:39 ` Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri
2017-09-18 11:59 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-09-19 1:54 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-09-19 7:07 ` Ian Zimmerman
2017-09-19 14:09 ` [TUHS] PR1ME - was " Toby Thain
2017-09-17 15:08 ` [TUHS] " Nemo
2017-09-18 23:57 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-10-04 5:58 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo
2017-10-04 16:15 ` George Michaelson
[not found] <mailman.1035.1505674910.3779.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-09-18 11:41 ` [TUHS] " David
2017-09-18 13:15 ` Chet Ramey
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