Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

[Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu>]

On 11/21/19 9:19 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org 
> <mailto:brad@anduin.eldar.org>> wrote:
> 
>     For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu, MACH
>     microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS.  Ran well
>     enough, but was disk and memory constrained.  We had source to much of
>     the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to recall
>     that compiling it was a big pain.  Something like you had to use a
>     specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C??  hc command perhaps)
>     to compile some of the source.  gcc had a backend for the ROMP
>     processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries.  I think that
>     some variation of pcc was the usual compiler.  I remember it being
>     pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.  We used them mostly as X
>     terminal workstations.
> 
> 
> "High C" (or perhaps "Hi C"? It's been a while...) was the name of the 
> system compiler on AOS; I thought it was installed as `cc`.

"High C", and it was installed as cc and hc.


> Some RT enthusiasts kept those machines running well beyond their prime. 
> Why? I'm not entirely sure; as you say, they were memory and disk 
> constrained. They were also very slow.

I had one running in my basement into the late 90s, with my own self-
maintained kernel. I did a considerable portion of the bash-2.0
development on that box, and my wife wrote all of her doctoral thesis on
it (using a troff macro package I wrote to do APA style formatting). It 
didn't make the cut when I moved from that house. Why did I have it?
Because it was free, and it did what I needed.


-- 
``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/