Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 2:47 PM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:

> I remember it slightly differently than Clem, but close.

Ouch -- I was 1/2 of the Magnolia development team -- I remember a lot
about it!!!
For the curious when bitsavers comes back:   <goog_573452328>
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/tektronix/magnolia/

Roger Bates had just finished the Dorado at PARC.  I had just left CMU.
 We were cubical mates in TekLabs.   Motorola had an experimental chip that
was not yet numbered.   We were given them in the Computer Research group
in Tek Labs. So, we started building a personal computer at night for
ourselves.

Our boss saw the notes and asked what we would do differently if Tek paid
for it.  I was originally using 8" floppies and immediately said 'a real
disk.'   We got a Tek '$10K project' and a few months to build a prototype.
I already had written (well sort of hacked) a simple C compiler based on
Dennis's PDP-11 compiler (when it screwed up it would sometimes include
PDP-11 code - and I never supported FP).   Paul Blattner wrote an assembler
and linker.     Using that, Steve Glaser and I ported UNIX/V7 to it.



> The Magnolia wasn't a UNIX workstation, it was an experimental Smalltalk
> machine.

That was 2+ years later actually.   Once they had the system, a couple of
other folks moved Smalltalk to it.  And in fact, it eventually did release
it as a product called the 4404.




> I don't recall
> much about it, but I don't think that it had to address many of the
> problems
> that UNIX had at the time with the 68000 such as the lack of a MMU.

Be careful... It most definitely did have an MMU, I designed it!!!  The
Xerox Altos and Dorado's never had MMU's.  So Roger was not familiar with
them.  I had to teach him.   Magnolia had a base/limit register MMU similar
to the PDP-11/70.  The original OS was V7 and swapped.  It ran just fine.



> I think
> that the Magnolia predated the 68010 and certainly predated the 68020 and
> awful but usable PMMU.

The wire-wrapped prototype was originally an X-series chip and yes the
first 'production' units were real 10Mhz 68000s.   After I went back to
grad school, Roger spliced a 68010 into and ripped out my MMU.  The late
Terry Laskodi put 4.1BSD on it.



> Part of the issue was that the Magnolia was developed in Tek Labs, which
> was
> the research end of things.  It wasn't a product organization, the Magnolia
> at the time hadn't gone through any of the rigorous environmental testing
> required by Tek which was a company that actually provided warranty
> service.
> And there was no marketing, not that Tek was a marketing powerhouse.  Given
> the way that things panned out I don't think that the Magnolia would have
> been
> a player once things like Suns appeared, if for no other reason that Tek
> had no
> clue as to how to do anything in volume and our stuff was way too
> expensive.
>
Very possible, but they did have first mover position.  In fact, folks at
Harvard Business as much as said so later.  There is a great HBS case study
written about it called "Why Skunk Projects Don't Work" (which I have
somewhere) -- I should get that scanned at added to the Magnolia archive on
BitSavers.




>
> In any case, while the 32032 was a problem, the real reason that Tek failed
> in the workstation biz was management.

No doubt... but it was 3 years later.   Which I think was a huge issue.




>  "well, we have 2 RS-232 ports and a parallel port and so we'll work with
> that."

Which of course was what Magnolia had been 3.5 years earlier and was what
became the 4404 Smalltalk machine.

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