From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_ADSP_CUSTOM_MED, DKIM_INVALID,DKIM_SIGNED,FREEMAIL_FROM,MAILING_LIST_MULTI, T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 28711 invoked from network); 11 May 2022 16:45:17 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 11 May 2022 16:45:17 -0000 Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id E6D7C9C5D8; Thu, 12 May 2022 02:45:10 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6E8AA9BCC3; Thu, 12 May 2022 02:44:18 +1000 (AEST) Authentication-Results: minnie.tuhs.org; dkim=fail reason="signature verification failed" (2048-bit key; unprotected) header.d=gmail.com header.i=@gmail.com header.b="X3eRzgpQ"; dkim-atps=neutral Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 4E99A9BA56; Thu, 12 May 2022 02:44:16 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mail-vs1-f43.google.com (mail-vs1-f43.google.com [209.85.217.43]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id BF8C59BC21 for ; Thu, 12 May 2022 02:44:12 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mail-vs1-f43.google.com with SMTP id i186so2577063vsc.9 for ; Wed, 11 May 2022 09:44:12 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20210112; h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:from:date:message-id:subject:to :cc; bh=+5Td2d7kyfwm9mbyTnWuXMEOPOl+LGc+NbREkN5jmZI=; b=X3eRzgpQuuWyqAfsGsxSySWda/9jaSHzOEZkEvD2i0BX4+mLkvTv+dDRz3uzrux2wa +bo0DNLkAzImbyi1gJFcwiWsbawftSoKqknBzAOtj3VGup1dSg9UWYmBaGM1IUljbobB jW8gU1WCzrCnGJwBDsKN7gU8TB+E1sttmWeB7Ti+zoAYMmPnU1KdZwXd2btqVZfCoVdM lduOkyArJ9bInvMeWdqNbpEtftH3LVMWtisYnNcMp+MskoIgjnf/AsOy7oldGTRD4AuH ZT5TGYQdYiIpFZPMljlkDnuoMH3rUNCC2dvP000cqhHdX9zKP9/kyBhLEtOtoRMsobzq mTzg== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20210112; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:in-reply-to:references:from:date :message-id:subject:to:cc; bh=+5Td2d7kyfwm9mbyTnWuXMEOPOl+LGc+NbREkN5jmZI=; b=Hkzxa/imOSsHun5GT8yy4yyivpLONnjk1W4brdwYgk14P5B/M+c62RNllL9tXaW4wf AqllxP5ITZWPuTo79Mjlu8gVzL7e4rMCczbCPIefoOaa60cMC2s/UStJFfFmgoDpxCgD ecXSOQbVQBBkVTaAeHny0mEJKdu7jJktWAyDaTEgxamptoqn9hTedATvK8yfFir6lTQM gTZUtdOCGdlhw9DhqHheophdwy174ZbJYHHK8dFXWAUef1sKNkY6pLziV1crORUAYkhA 23xk6VxdVtBn53FWLBDqj51+aTrReaTgevRiCj6jkHopYoxzoXe7jCp67CTH8qsJ/8wn RmVQ== X-Gm-Message-State: AOAM532zL9mXaMtqxN+QjfRULmpa2wYp7UsLjb9lV9PHtdbPVsahEELf 64NNi8g+CupouHpxeokPsDHkeDksh1SlSHLkVwRLmIFD X-Google-Smtp-Source: ABdhPJzhKt5o2GfGTMQT/jWi20JaNusWaO1n2/wkLpK1LQvN0O4A5zj/yiobDqXLNoeozg/I7QnxQeiHHj70hT2vNO8= X-Received: by 2002:a67:d803:0:b0:32d:47ca:c83e with SMTP id e3-20020a67d803000000b0032d47cac83emr15032566vsj.81.1652287451506; Wed, 11 May 2022 09:44:11 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 2002:ab0:3250:0:0:0:0:0 with HTTP; Wed, 11 May 2022 09:44:10 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: References: <57977CE7-DDCC-4861-BBD2-843B9B9F51C2@ronnatalie.com> <1505232b-86bd-0d65-52c7-c8d19bd0663c@mhorton.net> From: Paul Winalski Date: Wed, 11 May 2022 12:44:10 -0400 Message-ID: To: TUHS main list Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Subject: Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code? X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" On 5/10/22, Clem Cole wrote: > a couple of small additions/corrections .... > > Ultrix was the formal > name of DEC's first UNIX a product. Before that, Bill and Armando's engineering group was part of DEC's Telephone Industry Group (TIG) marketing organization. Their charter was to see that Unix and other AT&T software ran well on DEC hardware. Mainly they did device drivers and some kernel mods. DEC was getting increasing demand from those outside Telco who were running Unix to get a DEC-supported Unix on the VAX. And so TIG engineering was split off and did a full port and the result was called Ultrix. This started in 1982 IIRC. > Famously, Bill Munson announced Ultrix at an early 1980s USENIX, > reminding everyone that it meant Fortran, Cobol and the like would be > coming too. Paul W and his mates in the Languages group had to do all > sorts of stuff to make that so. I believe Paul has previously extolled us > with moving the VMS linker over to the Unix to support at least Fortran. > FYI, Sun does not yet exist (Shannon is still working for Munson in NH). That was a very nasty bit of DEC internal politics. As soon as we in DEC's software development tools departments (Technical Languages, Commercial Languages, Methods & Tools) heard about the creation of Ultrix, we began planning ports of the VAX/VMS compilers and other pieces of the tool chain to Ultrix. We got immediate and fierce push-back from the Ultrix engineering group. TIG had had a deeply ingrained culture of resisting innovation. Their job was to make sure Unix ran on DEC hardware, not to enhance Unix. Many of the Ultrix engineers had a religious belief in keeping Unix pure and platform-independent. Things available on only one hardware platform were perceived as "vendor traps" and to be avoided. The biggest fight was over Fortran. VAX Fortran was seen as the gold standard in Fortran compilers by the Fortran R&D community and there was a lot of demand for DEC to make it available on Ultrix. f77, the Unix alternative, was, by comparison, considered a toy that lacked key features. By careful cherry-picking the compiler people in the Ultrix group managed to put together a suite of Fortran benchmarks that hit all the glass jaws in the VAX Fortran optimizer. They claimed that this showed that f77 produced code at least as good, if not better, than VAX Fortran did. The VMS development tools group had better things to do than argue with the Ultrix group, so the whole idea of porting VAX/VMS tools to Ultrix was dropped. Many of the non-standard innovations in VAX Fortran were adopted by IBM and other vendors under pressure from the Fortran community. By 1985 DEC was losing sales to other vendors in the HPTC world due to lack of VAX Fortran features in f77. The Fortran team in Technical Languages and Environments had to do a rush-rush port of VAX Fortran and its runtime library to Ultrix. We were rather teed off since we'd proposed the same thing three years before and now it was a "we need it yesterday" crash project. It was decided that it would take too much time to teach the VAX Fortran code generator to produce a.out object files and so instead we ported the VMS linker to Ultrix and taught it to read and write a.out as well as VMS object files. The result was called lk. As the developer in the software tools organization who best understood linkers and object files (I'd written a link editor in grad school when interning at IBM) I was put in charge of the linker port. I've told that story already here in TUHS. > It's about the time of the original Ultrix work is when I stopped paying > attention to the PDP-11s, so there are gaps in my knowledge. Ultrix > definitely was released as a binary product for the 11. My >>memory<< is > the first version for the Vax was 4.1 based with some new defined support > and languages, but that version may not have gone too far outside of DEC > and until the 4.2BSD version was the first one for revenue. The first > Ultrix-11 was V7+some set of BSDisms. I know Shannon's overlay code went > to UCB, but I'm not so sure when the BSD 11 changes came back to DEC. IIRC the 4.1 version of VAX Ultrix was their prototype. I think PDP-11 Ultrix was just one of the existing Unix variants for the PDP-11 with the "Ultrix" marketing label slapped on. We can't have vendor traps, you know.... By the late 1980s the PDP-11/VAX style of CISC architecture had fallen way behind RISC in terms of performance. Alpha wasn't ready yet. To keep a toehold in the Unix marketplace, Ultrix was ported to the MIPS architecture and a MIPS code generator was implemented for the GEM back end so that DEC Fortran would be available. Unix was easier to port to Alpha than VMS was. Score one for writing in a HLL and maintaining platform neutrality. Clem has told that story here. Most of the VMS OS code was in assembler. A VAX MACRO compiler front end had to be written that read VAX assembly code and produced GEM intermediate language. To this day most of OpenVMS is still in VAX MACRO. -Paul W.