From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: gregg.drwho8@gmail.com (Gregg Levine) Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2017 23:15:34 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years? In-Reply-To: <20170225141738.f3uauxhasru7gsb3@ancienthardware.org> References: <20170225141738.f3uauxhasru7gsb3@ancienthardware.org> Message-ID: Hello! We (well most of us) all of us know about AIX. Well what about AIX/370? ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 9:17 AM, Arno Griffioen wrote: > Hi! > > Some of the stories on here reminded me of the fact that there's also likely > a whole boat-load of UNIX ports/variants in the past that were never released > to customers or outside certain companies. > > Not talking about UNIX versions that have become obsolete or which have > vanished by now like IRIX or the original Apple A/UX (now *that* was an > interesting oddball though..) and such, but the ones that either died or > failed or got cancelled during the product development process or were never > intended to be released to the outside ar all. > > Personally I came across one during some UNIX consultancy work at Commodore > during the time that they were working on bringing out an SVR4 release for the > Amiga (which they actually sold for some time) > > Side-note.. Interestingly enough according to my contacts at that time inside > CBM it was based on the much cheaper to license 3B2 SVR4 codebase and not the > M68k codebase which explained some of the oddities and lack of M68k ABI > compliance of the Amiga SVR4 release.. > > However.. > > It turned out that they had been running an SVRIII port on much older Amiga > 2000's with 68020 cards for some of their internal corporate networking and > email, UUCP, etc. and was called 'AMIX' internally. But as far as I know it > was never released to the public or external customers. > > It was a fairly 'plain jane' SVRIII port with little specific 'Amiga' hardware > bits supported but otherwise quite complete and pretty stable. > > Worked quite well in the 4MB DRAM available on these cards. The later SVR4 > didn't fare so well.. Paged itself to death unless you had 8 or even (gasp!) > 16MB. > > It was known 'outside' that something like this existed as the boot ROM's on > the 68020 card had an 'AMIX' option but outside CBM few people really knew > much about it. > > It may have been used at the University of Lowell as they developed a TI34010 > based card that may already have had some support in this release. > > Still.. > > This does make me wonder.. Does anyone else know of these kinds of special > 'snowflake' UNIX versions that never got out at various companies/insitutes? > (and can talk about it without violating a whole stack of NDA's ;) ) > > No special reason.. Just idle curiosity :) > > Likely all these are gone forever anyway as prototypes and small run production > devices and related software tends to get destroyed when companies go bust or > get aquired. > > Bye, Arno.