[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > It would be nice to have section in TUHS of any early clones that could
    > be collected.

The Unix Tree does have a section for "Unix Clones", and it has Coherent,
Xinu, Minix and some early Linuxes.

Another one that's missing (although in a different category) is Ultrix-32.>

      Noel

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Warner Losh]

On Dec 12, 2017 7:17 AM, "Noel Chiappa" <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

    > From: Clem Cole

    > It would be nice to have section in TUHS of any early clones that
could
    > be collected.

The Unix Tree does have a section for "Unix Clones", and it has Coherent,
Xinu, Minix and some early Linuxes.

Another one that's missing (although in a different category) is Ultrix-32.>


Ultrix-11 is there though. It's interesting to see how it evolved from v7m
which evolved from v7.

Warner
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[Nigel Williams]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 2:16 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> The Unix Tree does have a section for "Unix Clones", and it has Coherent,
> Xinu, Minix and some early Linuxes.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Unix_history-simple.png



Another Unix clone to find: http://i.imgur.com/dlGTh.png

Yourdon UNIX known as OMNIX for the Zilog Z-80
- compatible with CP/M
- ran on Industrial Microsystems and Cromemco CS-3
- had its own shell?
- multi-user and multi-process


I remain surprised/impressed that so many people from that era simply
decided to write their own Unix clone, no small undertaking at the
time.

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 9:15 PM, Nigel Williams <
nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:

>
> I remain surprised/impressed that so many people from that era simply
> decided to write their own Unix clone, no small undertaking at the
> ​ ​
> time.
>

​+1

I remember Leor bringing BDS C <http://www.bdsoft.com/resources/bdsc.html>and
his Unix emulation for CP/M to a Boston USENIX and showing it to a number
of us in his hotel room.  At the time we were all always worried about what
IP was 'open' and what was not (remember this is before Judge Green, much
less the AT&T/BSDi case).   Dennis' comment at the time was it reminded him
of early UNIX in look and feel from the 11/20 days.   Which considering the
Z80 was a 64K address space is not surprising.   IIRC: Leor's system had a
bank switched memory scheme so he could get more physical memory in it was
a trick that was in vogue for the S-100 bus systems.  But it was an 8"
floppy based machine.

I looked at it longingly because I could not afford to own an S-100 based
system of my own!

A year or two later, Onyx brought their Z8000 based system to the UDel
USENIX and wowed us again.

Clem
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[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 08:46:41AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> I remember Leor bringing BDS C <http://www.bdsoft.com/resources/bdsc.html>and
> his Unix emulation for CP/M to a Boston USENIX 

I wrote a lot of code in BDS C, remember it fondly (even though it's stdio
was non-stdio :)

I never heard about any Unix emulation from him, do you mean the libraries
or something else.

I ask because I wrote a bunch of tiny CP/M programms, in assembler because
I was using every trick I could to make them small.  I believe the ones I
had on every floppy were:

	ls
	cp
	mv
	rm

and each one of those I made fit in either one or two 512 byte sectors
because they weren't memory resident, it had to spin up the floppy and
read them in each time I ran them.  So I wanted them small for two
reasons: speed of reading them in and not taking up precious space on
the floppy.

I had a utils floppy that had larger programs on it, like grep, my quicknet
terminal emulator/file transfer tool (I wish I had saved the source to that).

my CP/M machine was an Okidata with a color(!)  monitor and a built in
printer with two floppies so I could do work on one floppy and get the
utils on the other.  Hmm, wonder if there is picture of that machine
on the net?  Of course there is:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=94

So Clem, did Leor do any utilities that I didn't know about or are you
talking about his not so standard C library?

--lm

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Clem Cole]

He had some utilities (that came with the compiler I thought, but I've
forgotten that detail to be honest).  IIRC, he had a simple shell and the
traditional simple file manipulation, although again, IIRC he did not write
the associated tools, someone else had.

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 11:58 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 08:46:41AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > I remember Leor bringing BDS C <http://www.bdsoft.com/
> resources/bdsc.html>and
> > his Unix emulation for CP/M to a Boston USENIX
>
> I wrote a lot of code in BDS C, remember it fondly (even though it's stdio
> was non-stdio :)
>
> I never heard about any Unix emulation from him, do you mean the libraries
> or something else.
>
> I ask because I wrote a bunch of tiny CP/M programms, in assembler because
> I was using every trick I could to make them small.  I believe the ones I
> had on every floppy were:
>
>         ls
>         cp
>         mv
>         rm
>
> and each one of those I made fit in either one or two 512 byte sectors
> because they weren't memory resident, it had to spin up the floppy and
> read them in each time I ran them.  So I wanted them small for two
> reasons: speed of reading them in and not taking up precious space on
> the floppy.
>
> I had a utils floppy that had larger programs on it, like grep, my quicknet
> terminal emulator/file transfer tool (I wish I had saved the source to
> that).
>
> my CP/M machine was an Okidata with a color(!)  monitor and a built in
> printer with two floppies so I could do work on one floppy and get the
> utils on the other.  Hmm, wonder if there is picture of that machine
> on the net?  Of course there is:
>
> http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=94
>
> So Clem, did Leor do any utilities that I didn't know about or are you
> talking about his not so standard C library?
>
> --lm
>
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[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 13 Dec 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:

> I wrote a lot of code in BDS C, remember it fondly (even though it's 
> stdio was non-stdio :)

I had BDS C for my Z-80 box (the Australian 128Kb Microbee with 
bank-switched memory), and hated it, as it barely understood C.  $BOSS 
then bought me Hi-Tech C, and it was full ANSI, to my surprise (that's 
when I found the TMPFS M: drive stuff from somewhere).

I ported a few programs over that way (GREP etc, but damned slow, and I'll 
probably get told that it couldn't possibly have worked[*]), but now all 
sadly lost, alas.

[*]
I have a long history of doing the impossible, mostly because I was the 
only one dumb enough to actually try it.

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

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Clem Cole]

My question about SOL got me thinking a bit.  It would be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.   The two that
I can think of that probably should be there are (other feel free to point
ones that we should try to find):

1.) Idris, which was fairly true to V6 (enough that the one time I test it,
things from pretty much just worked).  It was notable from being first.
Although the C compiler and the 'anat' (the assembler) were a tad
different.  It the system that got Bill Plauger in trouble @ USENIX @ UDEL
when he was booed for a 'marketing' talk.


2.) CRDS (pronounced Cruds by those of use that use it at the time) -
Charles River Data Systems.   It was a UNIX-like system, although I do not
think really attempted to hold to a V7 API much more than intent.  Although
if my memory serves me, one of the unique features was the use of Reed &
Kanodia synchronization in its kernel [REED79], which I was a always a
fan.   The system was slow as sin bit it ran on a 68000.  [CRUDS system, a
Fortune box and our Vax/750 running BSD4.1 were the systems Masscomp used
to bootstrap].

Clem




[REED79] D.P. Reed and R.K. Kanodia, "Synchronization with Eventcounts and
Sequencers"
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[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Random832]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017, at 09:40, Clem Cole wrote:
> My question about SOL got me thinking a bit.  It would be nice to have
> section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.   The two
> that I can think of that probably should be there are (other feel free
> to point ones that we should try to find):

A while ago I ran across a manual for "Cromix" - which looks like it
wasn't really unix-compatible as such, but clearly a 'clone' of it in a
looser sense, and ran on a Z80 machine. "Micronix" seems to have also
run on Z80 machines, and to have been a much closer imitation of V6
unix.

http://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/ftp/cromemco/Cromemco%20Cromix%20Instruction%20Manual%20023-4022%20198212.pdf
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/morrow/decision/Micronix_Operating_System_1.61_Jun83.pdf

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Random832]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017, at 11:29, Random832 wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 12, 2017, at 09:40, Clem Cole wrote:
> > My question about SOL got me thinking a bit.  It would be nice to have
> > section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.   The two
> > that I can think of that probably should be there are (other feel free
> > to point ones that we should try to find):
> 
> A while ago I ran across a manual for "Cromix"

I should have realized this was from it being posted here in April.

http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-April/009685.html

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Jason Stevens]

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And then in the early 90’s (91 or 92) we had ixemul on the Amiga, and EMX on MS-DOS and OS/2.  Although I guess that is too new?

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Clem Cole
Sent: Tuesday, 12 December 2017 10:41 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: [TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

My question about SOL got me thinking a bit.  It would be nice to have section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.   The two that I can think of that probably should be there are (other feel free to point ones that we should try to find):

1.) Idris, which was fairly true to V6 (enough that the one time I test it, things from pretty much just worked).  It was notable from being first.  Although the C compiler and the 'anat' (the assembler) were a tad different.  It the system that got Bill Plauger in trouble @ USENIX @ UDEL when he was booed for a 'marketing' talk.


2.) CRDS (pronounced Cruds by those of use that use it at the time) - Charles River Data Systems.   It was a UNIX-like system, although I do not think really attempted to hold to a V7 API much more than intent.  Although if my memory serves me, one of the unique features was the use of Reed & Kanodia synchronization in its kernel [REED79], which I was a always a fan.   The system was slow as sin bit it ran on a 68000.  [CRUDS system, a Fortune box and our Vax/750 running BSD4.1 were the systems Masscomp used to bootstrap].

Clem




[REED79] D.P. Reed and R.K. Kanodia, "Synchronization with Eventcounts and Sequencers"

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[Nemo]

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On 12 December 2017 at 23:16, Jason Stevens
<jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
> And then in the early 90’s (91 or 92) we had ixemul on the Amiga, and EMX on
> MS-DOS and OS/2.  Although I guess that is too new?

I would note that Mattes's EMX was a memory extender (and a fantastic
one at that).  But, on a case-sensitive OS/2, it allowed people to
compile a *lot* of Unix code.

N.

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Robert Swierczek]

A nifty little Unix clone/rewrite is OMU (One Man Unix):

http://discordia.org.uk/~steve/omu.html

Also Xv6, Fuzix, and UZI:

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html

http://www.fuzix.org/

http://www.dougbraun.com/uzi.html

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>My question about SOL got me thinking a bit.  It would be nice to have
>section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware.  ISTR one
of my colleague's whinges was the 256-byte command-line limit.

My earliest exposure would have been Xenix on a 286 - my main recollections
are:
1) The Pascal compiler that didn't ignore comments (changing a comment
could make the code fail to compile with an obscure error.
2) The fork() system call could sometimes return -1 to the parent, even when
it succeeded - that caused a lot of head-scratching.
3) Hacking one of the Emacs clones (I no longer recall which) to use "far"
pointers for the buffers, so I could edit files >64K without paying the
performance penalty of writing "large model" code.  (286 protected-mode
performance was abyssmal if it needed to do segment descriptor loads)
Unfortunately, I no longer have that code.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> >My question about SOL got me thinking a bit.  It would be nice to have
> >section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
> 
> One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
> colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware.  

I've used it in that timeframe.  It was pretty amazing on a 286, you could
have multiple people logged in via terminals and get work done.

I became friends with one of the people who did the OS:

Dan Hildebrandt (QNX)           613-591-0931 x204 (RIP 1998)

I can't remember how we crossed paths, but we both cared about design
a lot and liked bouncing ideas off of each other.

QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
instruction cache.  I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
to keep it small and fast.

This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.

I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Steve Nickolas]

On Mon, 18 Dec 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:

> QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
> instruction cache.  I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
> only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
> to keep it small and fast.
>
> This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
> harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
>
> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
> for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?

Isn't it the OS of the Blackberry?

-uso.

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 10:57:01AM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Dec 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> >QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
> >instruction cache.  I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
> >only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
> >to keep it small and fast.
> >
> >This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
> >harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
> >
> >I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
> >for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?
> 
> Isn't it the OS of the Blackberry?

Yep, that too.

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Steve Simon]

Qnx is used in cars quite a bit , also in the telecoms sector i wad told.

we used it for control of image processing systems, however it it wad a rather foolish management decision IMHO as qnx is heavyweight for the simple user interfaces we needed

-Steve



> On 18 Dec 2017, at 15:46, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>>> On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>> My question about SOL got me thinking a bit.  It would be nice to have
>>> section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
>> 
>> One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
>> colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware.  
> 
> I've used it in that timeframe.  It was pretty amazing on a 286, you could
> have multiple people logged in via terminals and get work done.
> 
> I became friends with one of the people who did the OS:
> 
> Dan Hildebrandt (QNX)           613-591-0931 x204 (RIP 1998)
> 
> I can't remember how we crossed paths, but we both cared about design
> a lot and liked bouncing ideas off of each other.
> 
> QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
> instruction cache.  I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
> only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
> to keep it small and fast.
> 
> This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
> harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
> 
> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
> for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Arthur Krewat]

My Ford Taurus SHO's Sync 3 is running QNX. What a difference (in 
stability) between it and the Sync 2 that used Windows CE.

On 12/18/2017 11:13 AM, Steve Simon wrote:
> Qnx is used in cars quite a bit , also in the telecoms sector i wad told.
>
> we used it for control of image processing systems, however it it wad a rather foolish management decision IMHO as qnx is heavyweight for the simple user interfaces we needed
>
>

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Henry Bent]

On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

>
> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
> for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?
>

Quite a few car systems, it seems:
http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html

-Henry
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[Andy Kosela]

On Monday, December 18, 2017, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
>> for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?
>>
>
> Quite a few car systems, it seems: http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/
> 2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
>
>
I remember in the late 90s there was a demo of QNX running the whole OS
with GUI including web browser etc. from 1.44MB floppy.  It was very fast
too!  Too bad they never open sourced it.

--Andy
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[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
You are correct. That's how I got my start. Eventually I was able to
swing a hobbyist license.... There was talk of parts of it becoming
open source, sadly that never really happened.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 11:34 AM, Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Monday, December 18, 2017, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
>>> for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?
>>
>>
>> Quite a few car systems, it seems:
>> http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
>>
>
> I remember in the late 90s there was a demo of QNX running the whole OS with
> GUI including web browser etc. from 1.44MB floppy.  It was very fast too!
> Too bad they never open sourced it.
>
> --Andy

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Steve Simon]

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maybe i am wrong but i thought QNX was open source for a while, but then it changed hands and the new owners “removed it from the internet”.

interestingly if this is true its only the 2nd time i have heard of this happening ever happening. the other one was years ago with the Khronos dataflow signal processing system.

-Steve


> On 18 Dec 2017, at 16:34, Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Monday, December 18, 2017, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
>>> for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?
>> 
>> 
>> Quite a few car systems, it seems: http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
>> 
> 
> I remember in the late 90s there was a demo of QNX running the whole OS with GUI including web browser etc. from 1.44MB floppy.  It was very fast too!  Too bad they never open sourced it.
> 
> --Andy
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[Toby Thain]

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On 2017-12-18 12:35 PM, Steve Simon wrote:
> 
> maybe i am wrong but i thought QNX was open source for a while, but then
> it changed hands and the new owners “removed it from the internet”.
> 
> interestingly if this is true its only the 2nd time i have heard of this
> happening ever happening. the other one was years ago with the Khronos
> dataflow signal processing system.

What about Solaris.

--T

> 
> -Steve
> 
> 
> On 18 Dec 2017, at 16:34, Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com
> <mailto:akosela at andykosela.com>> wrote:
> 
>>
>>
>> On Monday, December 18, 2017, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com
>> <mailto:henry.r.bent at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com
>>     <mailto:lm at mcvoy.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>         I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is
>>         the basis
>>         for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?
>>
>>
>>     Quite a few car systems, it seems:
>>     http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
>>     <http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html>
>>
>>
>> I remember in the late 90s there was a demo of QNX running the whole
>> OS with GUI including web browser etc. from 1.44MB floppy.  It was
>> very fast too!  Too bad they never open sourced it.
>>
>> --Andy

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Brad Spencer]

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Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> writes:

> On 2017-12-18 12:35 PM, Steve Simon wrote:
>> 
>> maybe i am wrong but i thought QNX was open source for a while, but then
>> it changed hands and the new owners “removed it from the internet”.
>> 
>> interestingly if this is true its only the 2nd time i have heard of this
>> happening ever happening. the other one was years ago with the Khronos
>> dataflow signal processing system.
>
> What about Solaris.
>
> --T
>

Depends on your point of view a bit.... One can probably say that Oracle
Solaris has been "pulled back".  But, Solaris has sufficiently escaped
in a form that is still open source, if you ignore Oracle.  The company
which is my $DAYJOB uses Joyent Triton SmartOS, which is very Solaris in
every way and completely open source.  We run a couple of farily large
private clouds with it.





-- 
Brad Spencer - brad at anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS
http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
I've tried it out a couple of times. Besides being a rare microkernel
OS, it has a good support system, from its company. As far as its site
would explain it is a favorite among some car companies. Ford for one.
BlackBerry uses it for their devices, certainly.

And I believe some industrial controllers use it.

The big problem is still the licensing.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
>> for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?
>
>
> Quite a few car systems, it seems:
> http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
>
> -Henry

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Bakul Shah]

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> On Dec 18, 2017, at 7:46 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>>> On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>> My question about SOL got me thinking a bit.  It would be nice to have
>>> section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
>> 
>> One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
>> colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware.  
> 
> I've used it in that timeframe.  It was pretty amazing on a 286, you could
> have multiple people logged in via terminals and get work done.
> 
> I became friends with one of the people who did the OS:
> 
> Dan Hildebrandt (QNX)           613-591-0931 x204 (RIP 1998)
> 
> I can't remember how we crossed paths, but we both cared about design
> a lot and liked bouncing ideas off of each other.
> 
> QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
> instruction cache.  I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
> only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
> to keep it small and fast.
> 
> This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
> harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
> 
> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
> for a lot of the car stuff.  Anyone know?

OKL4 (a variant of L4 micro kernel) is supposedly in billions of mobile
devices. Apple’s “Secure Enclave” runs a modified version of L4. Likely
OKL4. Their claim to fame is that it is “provably correct”. L4 is derived
from Liedke’s L3 and is much more portable than L3. OKL4 and seL4
we’re both owned by Open Kernel Labs, which is now owned by General
Dynamics. Now seL4 has been open sourced. There have been a few
variations of L4 over time with names like fiasco & Pistachio etc. L4 is
simpler than Mach or QNX. What I like about seL4 is that it is capability
based. 

A contract I did ages ago was for a company that used QNX on their
text to speech 286 based board. It had a peculiar crash only when
used in a complex setup. After about a month of close study
and experiments I guessed it was an Intel bug. Intel refused to
help so then I had to catch it in action in a live setup, at which point
Intel fessed up! Any way, I learned a bunch about QNX back then. 

[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 5:10 AM, Peter Jeremy <peter at rulingia.com> wrote:

>
> One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
> colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware.  ISTR one
> of my colleague's whinges was the 256-byte command-line limit.


QNX, indeed a cool system.  It's predecessor was Thoth and successor, the
Stanford V-Kernel; QNX was the same timeframe as Mach.

RIG/Accent and Thoth were all contemporaries and at the time, "UNIX"
interface was not yet standard, nor C as the system language of choice,
Thoth was in B IIRC, RIG assembler & Pascal, Accent / Pascal.  Tunis was
similar, although, like SOL was a rewrite, in that case Concurrent-Pascal;
like UNIX, targeting the PDP-11.

Both QNX and Mach were in C and tried to be more friendly to import UNIX
code.  QNX was definitely, Intel architecture target.  Mach was trying to
be all things on any HW target like UNIX.,  I got the impression some/much
of QNX's kernel was assembler, but the 'servers' for the things like the
FS, the IP stack, et al where 100% C.

QNX, was  clean, an extremely small, and was fairly good at real-time (
like Thoth had been before it, V gave up real-time to be more portable
distribute better).

I used a QNX on a PC/AT (286) that was, V7-ish and code from the PDP-11
pretty much just worked.  The compiler was very slow, but it was 5.25"
floppy based system so it may have been a lot to do with the disks I have.
  I remember they then add a POSIX subsystem when that was in vogue, but I
never used it or their ANSI-C compiler.

When 'embedded' types needed a RTOS, the QNX folks definitely had a
following; particularly because the kernel was so small and efficient.  I
know a number of industrial robots from the 'Rust Belt' that had Mech-E
types that swore by it (i.e. Millacron, Intelligrated to think of two).   I
understand that a number of folks/alumni are a lot of the current
autonomous car people, and I had heard the brought that code base with
them.  Again, if I understand it correctly (and its been years since I
played with it), the RTOS features are not POSIX conformant and mixing the
different APIs could cause interesting effects.
ᐧ
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[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Kurt H Maier]

       
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
> colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware.  ISTR one
> of my colleague's whinges was the 256-byte command-line limit.
       
Blackberry's phones are no longer QNX-based (they fell to the advancing
Android hordes) but they still own it and are targeting the IVI market  
with it, apparently.  They have a no-commercial-use no-cost license
available.
       
The first QNX device I saw in the wild was the 3com Audrey, which was a
little all-in-one computer with an infrared keyboard and a resistive    
touchscreen.  3com seemed to want to sell them for kitchen use, but then
the dot-com bust happened and the Audrey went with it.  The QNX
deployment on it was sufficiently unixlike that step one in doing
anything interesting was exploiting a privilege escalation and editing  
the passwd file.
       
khm