[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Warren Toomey]

And now, we bring the RMS/Gnu thread to a close :-)

To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could  be the hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.

Cheers, Warren
-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[arnold]

Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system
> you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could  be the hardware
> e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.

AT&T 3B20 - *0 didn't segfault but brought in some weird value.

Pyramid Dual Universe - System V vs. BSD - why be forced to decide when
you can have your cake and eat it too?

Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).

Eunice - we had it one place I worked but I didn't use it much.

I never got to work on more exotic systems such as Interdata
or Series 1.

Arnold

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[David Arnold]

Helios: a Unix-like system running on Transputers (and TI C40, and a few others).

It had a similar notion of a universal protocol for servers to hook into the "file" namespace as Plan9 / 9P, and a shell that included operators for spawning tasks on other CPUs, parallel execution, and so on.

They'd ported some basic GNU userland: GCC, GMake, etc, as well as the basic sources (ls, and co -- not sure where they came from or if they were written from scratch).  There was even an X11R5 (maybe R4?) server that would work with a few of the framebuffers that some of the Transputer boards had.

All good fun.  Sadly didn't last too long: likely killed off by Inmos' late delivery of the second gen T9000 processor like most of the Transputer world, but they disappeared after trying to move onto other CPUs seemingly unsuccessfully.



d


> On 17 Sep 2017, at 17:28, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
>> To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system
>> you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could  be the hardware
>> e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
> 
> AT&T 3B20 - *0 didn't segfault but brought in some weird value.
> 
> Pyramid Dual Universe - System V vs. BSD - why be forced to decide when
> you can have your cake and eat it too?
> 
> Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
> OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
> 
> Eunice - we had it one place I worked but I didn't use it much.
> 
> I never got to work on more exotic systems such as Interdata
> or Series 1.
> 
> Arnold

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Adam Sampson]

David Arnold <davida at pobox.com> writes:

> [...] as well as the basic sources (ls, and co -- not sure where they
> came from or if they were written from scratch).

They wrote their own:
https://github.com/axelmuhr/Helios-NG/tree/master/cmds/com

(That repository has the Helios 1.31 sources in; there is some RCS
history in the code that Tim King released but it doesn't look like it's
been imported into Git.)

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Steve Simon]

Weird unix...

My first contact with something unix-like was cromix, a unix rewrite in z80 assembler (i think). the machine i had access to had two 8inch floppies, and the exciting addition of a hard disk.

other strangeness was primix, a port of system v user space  onto primos. that was slow, and was similar enough to unix to lull you into a seance of security, until it bit you with something odd.

then came edition 7 on an interdata/perkin elmer and normality was restored (thanks again Richard Miller).

-Steve

> On 17 Sep 2017, at 09:10, David Arnold <davida at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> Helios: a Unix-like system running on Transputers (and TI C40, and a few others).
> 
> It had a similar notion of a universal protocol for servers to hook into the "file" namespace as Plan9 / 9P, and a shell that included operators for spawning tasks on other CPUs, parallel execution, and so on.
> 
> They'd ported some basic GNU userland: GCC, GMake, etc, as well as the basic sources (ls, and co -- not sure where they came from or if they were written from scratch).  There was even an X11R5 (maybe R4?) server that would work with a few of the framebuffers that some of the Transputer boards had.
> 
> All good fun.  Sadly didn't last too long: likely killed off by Inmos' late delivery of the second gen T9000 processor like most of the Transputer world, but they disappeared after trying to move onto other CPUs seemingly unsuccessfully.
> 
> 
> 
> d
> 
> 
>> On 17 Sep 2017, at 17:28, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
>> 
>> Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system
>>> you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could  be the hardware
>>> e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
>> 
>> AT&T 3B20 - *0 didn't segfault but brought in some weird value.
>> 
>> Pyramid Dual Universe - System V vs. BSD - why be forced to decide when
>> you can have your cake and eat it too?
>> 
>> Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
>> OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
>> 
>> Eunice - we had it one place I worked but I didn't use it much.
>> 
>> I never got to work on more exotic systems such as Interdata
>> or Series 1.
>> 
>> Arnold

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/17/17 3:28 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
> OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).

I think they called it DG/UX -- just like they called their wretched
System V port.

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

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Derrik Walker v2.0]

On 09/17/2017 02:50 PM, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 9/17/17 3:28 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
>
>> Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
>> OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
> I think they called it DG/UX -- just like they called their wretched
> System V port.
>
I had to support a DGUX box for a short time.

Fortunately, porting the app to HPUX was the software guys top priority 
and I only had to deal with it for 6 months or So.

Let's just say, it was no HPUX, ( or even Solaris, or Irix )!

-- 
-- Derrik

Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE
dwalker at doomd.net

"Those UNIX guys, they think weird!" -- John C. Dvorak


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[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[arnold]

> On 9/17/17 3:28 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> > Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
> > OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).

Chet Ramey <chet.ramey at case.edu> wrote:
> I think they called it DG/UX -- just like they called their wretched
> System V port.

I thought it had a different name. But I definitely no longer remeber.

Arnold

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Dennis Boone]

 > To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix
 > system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be
 > the hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.

Guess I can more or less tick two of the above boxes.  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.

De

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Nigel Williams]

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.

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[arnold]

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.

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1934 bytes --]

(This is a copy of an email I sent from the wrong address. If the first
(identaical) version of the message eventually arrives, just ignore it)

On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 02:31:06AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 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:
[cut]

I've been wondering about this for some time, if a byte isn't 8 bits on
an architecture, how would you go about calculating memory sizes in a
way that makes it comparable between machines?

A 32 KB memory buffer is 262144=32*1024*8 bits on one machine, but
294912=32*1024*9 bits on another.  That's a difference of 32 Kbit.

Of course, it may not matter since both buffers contains as many
items/bytes, but for the machine as a whole you can't say "this machine
has X MB of memory" without mentioning the byte length.  A machine with
"n" bit words would be able to "store less information" in memory than a
machine with the same number of MB of RAM but with "n+x" bit words.

How would you do for even more exotic hardware?
What if sizeof(char) != 1 for example?

Maybe this isn't/wasn't an issue at all?

Cheers,
Kusalananda


-- 
Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri,
National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS),
Uppsala University, Sweden.

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Michael Kjörling]

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[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1440 bytes --]

On 18 Sep 2017 12:39 +0200, from andreas.kahari at icm.uu.se (Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri):
> I've been wondering about this for some time, if a byte isn't 8 bits on
> an architecture, how would you go about calculating memory sizes in a
> way that makes it comparable between machines?
> 
> A 32 KB memory buffer is 262144=32*1024*8 bits on one machine, but
> 294912=32*1024*9 bits on another.  That's a difference of 32 Kbit.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Maybe this isn't/wasn't an issue at all?

Memory _chips_ are often specified in terms of accessible bits. So you
might have a chip that can hold _(8 * 2^20) * 8 bits_, or eight binary
megabytes for the case where 1 byte == 8 bits. The same chip could be
specified as _(64 * 2^20) * 1 bits_ for 64 binary megabits. This would
normally be written 8Mx8 or 64Mx1 for a binary "M" prefix.

How you then use those bits is entirely up to the system integrator
and software developer. And we do know that on systems with limited
memory, bit-packing is a common practice, based on the mantra that "no
good bits should ever be allowed to go to waste".

This notation has the benefit that it relates directly to how much
data can be held, as opposed to _how_ that data is held.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
                 “People who think they know everything really annoy
                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2017, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> 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!!!)

What I hated about Pr1me was they implied that "1" is prime; it is not, as 
any mathematician will tell you.

In fact, I turned down a job opportunity there for precisely that reason, 
on the grounds that if they got a simple concept like that wrong, then 
where else did they screw up?

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2017-09-19 11:54, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> > 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!!!)
> 
> What I hated about Pr1me was they implied that "1" is prime; it is
> not, as any mathematician will tell you.

It's not a composite, either.  And there are already many cases where
you have to say "let p be an _odd_ prime" because the statement fails
for p=2, so many that maybe allowing 1 in (and having to explain it away
in many more theorems) is not much worse that having it in a special
weird category of its own.

It's just terminology.

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet.

[TUHS] PR1ME - was Re: And now ... Weirdnix?

[Toby Thain]

On 2017-09-18 9:54 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Sep 2017, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
>> 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!!!)
> 
> What I hated about Pr1me was they implied that "1" is prime; it is not,
> as any mathematician will tell you.
> 
> In fact, I turned down a job opportunity there for precisely that
> reason, on the grounds that if they got a simple concept like that
> wrong, then where else did they screw up?
> 

The name clearly doesn't reference the concept of prime numbers; that's
only coincidence (and the incompatibility might have been a clue).

Isn't it more obviously connected to Latin 'primus', meaning 'first'?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prime#Etymology_1

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Nemo]

On 17/09/2017, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system you
> used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could  be the hardware e.g
> NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.

Does ersatz-UNIX count?

At one start-up, our servers were SPARC-based but we could only afford
Intel boxes on the desktops.  We found that the MKS Toolkit on OS/2
Warp was the closest on the boxes, talking to the servers over X and
such.  (EMX stuff was acceptable but it still sat on top of DOS.  Warp
was odd in that it came with a full TCP/IP stack.)

N.

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 17 Sep 2017, Warren Toomey wrote:

> And now, we bring the RMS/Gnu thread to a close :-)

But it was fun while it lasted :-)  I learned a bit.

> To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system 
> you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware 
> e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.

Eunice for certain.  Never seen NULL != 0, but didn't the Interdata boxes 
have the NUXI problem?

And one of the UNSW departments had this 11/34 clone, where the two disk 
packs (one removable) had a common spindle...  I think that was also the 
box where the clock had to be enabled/disabled by a front-panel switch, so 
you disabled it, booted Unix, then hopefully remembered to enable it.

Oh, and if it extends to organic-ware, the UNSW Library's 11/40 had no
password on "root", but had one on "oper"...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

And now ... Weirdnix?

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo]

Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> writes:

> To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix
> system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the
> hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.

That would be the userland Unix from the Norwegian company Norsk Data.
For years, they made excellent mini machines with their own operating
system, SINTRAN.  People kept telling them that that time was passing,
and they needed to get with the times and adopt a standardized OS, like
Unix, but they insisted that there was no need.

When they finally started trying to do that, it was too late.

They made two attempts.  One was a System V port to their hardware, the
other a port to SINTRAN, having Unix run as an application under it.
Neither attempt got any real traction, and today, the company is only a
fond memory.

Oh, and when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he did it
on a Norsk Data computer running SINTRAN.  :)

-tih
-- 
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay

And now ... Weirdnix?

[George Michaelson]

I think the dual-boot state of the perq was pretty wierd. From memory,
you could peek into some UNIX state from the other OS, but not the
other way.

The weird bit was the 'hacky' nature of the OS/memory/screen boundary.
Compile? ok, you clearly don't need your screen memory because who
would think they could do useful mouse/keyboard work while compiling?
So.. I'll just rob that memory buffer to do this compilation... Very
interesting bitblt implications all over the screen. I suspect this
was considered a 'feature' because you got a free meter of your
compilation progress by crud on the screen..

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 10:58 PM, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo
<tih at hamartun.priv.no> wrote:
> Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> writes:
>
>> To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix
>> system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the
>> hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
>
> That would be the userland Unix from the Norwegian company Norsk Data.
> For years, they made excellent mini machines with their own operating
> system, SINTRAN.  People kept telling them that that time was passing,
> and they needed to get with the times and adopt a standardized OS, like
> Unix, but they insisted that there was no need.
>
> When they finally started trying to do that, it was too late.
>
> They made two attempts.  One was a System V port to their hardware, the
> other a port to SINTRAN, having Unix run as an application under it.
> Neither attempt got any real traction, and today, the company is only a
> fond memory.
>
> Oh, and when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he did it
> on a Norsk Data computer running SINTRAN.  :)
>
> -tih
> --
> Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
> of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[David]

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I had almost wiped any memory of DG/UX from my memory. Now I’m
quite sure I must resume therapy for it.

I wrote device drivers for that . . . thing to drive graphics cards for
Megatek and its custom version of X11 that buried about 1/2 of the
server in the hardware.

	David

> On Sep 17, 2017, at 12:01 PM, tuhs-request at minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
> 
> From: Chet Ramey <chet.ramey at case.edu>
> To: arnold at skeeve.com, wkt at tuhs.org, tuhs at tuhs.org
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?
> Message-ID: <58b4bb3e-1b94-0e3d-312d-9151e8a057a6 at case.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> 
> On 9/17/17 3:28 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
>> Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
>> OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
> 
> I think they called it DG/UX -- just like they called their wretched
> System V port.

[TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?

[Chet Ramey]

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On 9/18/17 7:41 AM, David wrote:
> I had almost wiped any memory of DG/UX from my memory. Now I’m
> quite sure I must resume therapy for it.
> 
> I wrote device drivers for that . . . thing to drive graphics cards for
> Megatek and its custom version of X11 that buried about 1/2 of the
> server in the hardware.

That's well later than the MV10000 we had here, running one of the earliest
versions of DG/UX. That must have been 1987 or 1988.

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