From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: gregg.drwho8@gmail.com (Gregg Levine) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2017 21:27:35 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years? In-Reply-To: References: <20170225141738.f3uauxhasru7gsb3@ancienthardware.org> Message-ID: Hello! Well before it was withdrawn from marketing, it played in a big pool Namely the mainframes at one of the universities in Norway. And I got this from a VMer I who is best known for writing the pipelines stuff, And sadly that was its only customer. By contrast AIX for RS/6000 gang and its ancestors were well taken care of and its still available. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Clem Cole wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:45 AM, Ronald Natalie wrote: >> >> AIX/370 was a real product. > > Indeed it was. > > > >> >> All of these AIX versions came from the same source code and used the >> IBM TCF to allow you to transparently run executables across nodes in the >> cluster. > > Exactly right. TCF - Transparent Computing Facility -- No mean trick... > you can mix PS/2 and 370 in the cluster, so root on desk allowed me root on > the mainframe too. What was cool was that the TCF will look at the > executable and find the proper CPU. The big mistake was that that node id > was stored in a single 32 bit word and assigned per bit, which was a scaling > issues. > > I was at Locus Computing Corp (aka LCC or just "Locus"), who developed AIX > for IBM under contract and TCF was part of it. The direct result of the The > LOCUS Distributed System Architecture from UCLA. The book actually > describes much of the AIX/370 work, but starts with the original UCLA work. > I did not work on the IBM project, although a number of my peers did. I was > higher to help developed TNC - Transparent Network Computing, which is was > used in Intel's Paragon and DEC's TruClusters and a never shipped HP Cluster > Product. Many of the same ideas but we wanted a separate team that never saw > the IBM code so there could never be any concern about ownership. The > architects like me and Roman, were allowed to talk to the AIX architects, > such as Bruce; but we keep separate development environments at separate > sites. After the IBM work ended, all of the Locus distributed system > folks the struct around went to work on TNC and the technology go sold off > and licensed. What was interesting is that TNC was open'ed sourced after > the Compaq/HP mergers and put into Linux but I've forgotten the URL (I'll > search and follow up). > > It's a real shame it never went anywhere. It was a very, very cool. > > > >> >> The only AIX that didn’t play was the completely independent (and in >> my opinion somewhat brain damaged) IBM/RT UNIX. If there was a TCF-based >> RT kernel, I never saw it, even inside the IBM labs. > > That was IBM politics. LCC has the contract for the original AIX port to > the 370. When the RT was developed, the Austin team was ramped up. One > of our members of the TUHS list who is remaining silent I see is not saying > why but I know was there ;-) and might known the actual politics, I never > did. But when the AIX/RT port was forked, they started with AIX/370 code > base and removed the TCF code. But LCC still had the AIX/370 contract from > Enterprise system group to maintain AIX/370. And also, Locus had the > contract from Entry Systems, who all they wanted TCF. So AIX/386 and > AIX/370 as Ron points out were one code base, one dev team (at LCC in > California). > > Dan Cross said: "I had understood was that AIX/370 was actually OSF/1 > based" > > It maybe that by the end, the user space was based on the OSF/1 user space > code. That was true for HP and DEC also. But I can definitely state > AIX/370 and AIX/386 were one set of source trees and all of was done by > Locus Computing Corporation certainly through the mid 1990s. > > Clem > >