[TUHS] RT/PC-centric AIX history

[sauer@technologists.com (Charles H Sauer)]

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Dan,

I’m not sure how well I can answer, but I’ll try.

I think the responsible organization was known as ACIS (ACademic Information Systems??), with BSD work primarily staffed in the Palo Alto Scientific Center. Back then IBM had “scientific centers” separate from the Research Division – my main contact was with Cambridge, MA and Palo Alto centers, but I think there were 13 centers world wide.

I think you’re correct that it was called AOS and likely correct that it was only available to academic institutions. I was primarily aware of usage at Brown, CMU and MIT.

The sole RT I had with AOS was at my house, and I didn’t have Internet access at the office, much less at home, so though I was in the thick of the distributed filesystem work, didn’t do any of it hands on on AOS.

I was technically responsible for getting the NFS license for AIX and I think you’re right that ACIS put NFS on AOS once we had the license, but would have forgotten that if you hadn’t reminded me. I think the license agreement was put in place in the second half of 1988, but that could easily be off by months or longer.

Certainly much of the Andrew work in general and AFS specifically was done with AOS. I assume that all AFS versions were made available on AOS as soon as Kazar et al thought they were ready.

Charlie

From: Dan Cross 
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2017 9:27 PM
To: Charles H Sauer 
Cc: TUHS 
Subject: Re: [TUHS] RT/PC-centric AIX history

Wow, this is really cool, Charlie. It puts a lot of stuff in perspective. 

I wonder if you might add a bit more detail about the BSD ports? That's what we ran on our RTs; I seem to recall that product was only available to educational institutions and was referred to as AOS: "Academic Operating System." I do recall that it came with NFS, and possibly AFS version 2? It seemed to be approximately 4.3-Tahoe based. The AFS bit is hazy....

On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 2:41 PM, Charles H Sauer <sauer at technologists.com> wrote:

  I've refrained from jumping into AIX & RT/PC discussions on TUHS. It seems more appropriate to summarize AIX history than try to correct or clarify specifics out of context.

  I wrote about 5 pages, got feedback, revised accordingly, and posted at
  https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/.

  Charlie 

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