From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2017 02:31:06 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix? In-Reply-To: References: <8AA943A2-D6C0-4812-9C16-C09D1298754F@tuhs.org> <20170917144909.DB27FA585CB@yagi.h-net.msu.edu> Message-ID: <201709180831.v8I8V6LB021088@freefriends.org> 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 wrote: > On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:49 AM, Dennis Boone 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.