From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: nw@retrocomputingtasmania.com (Nigel Williams) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2017 17:27:27 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix? In-Reply-To: <20170917144909.DB27FA585CB@yagi.h-net.msu.edu> References: <8AA943A2-D6C0-4812-9C16-C09D1298754F@tuhs.org> <20170917144909.DB27FA585CB@yagi.h-net.msu.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:49 AM, Dennis Boone wrote: > The Prime minis > had a layered product called Primix that provided a unix userland of > sorts. Dog slow, at least in its earlier releases. Null pointers were > not zero on the Prime machines. I second Dennis's vote for Primix as "weirdnix". The other weirdness was the high-bit of ASCII being set due to the convention on Primos (they feared to ever change it to avoid upsetting customers). People went mad trying to port applications to it due to these differences. Primos defaulted to all UPPERCASE, and I vaguely recall having to poke about for a fair while when starting Primix to convince the Prime terminal handler to switch to lowercase. There was an attempt to produce a native port of Unix for Prime computers but I believe it was squashed by Prime management.