[TUHS] lost ports

[crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross)]

Along those lines....

I once heard about a paper that was presented at some conference titled
something along the lines of, "My Goodness: It Still Runs?!". The topic was
some sort of early version of Unix running on some ancient piece of
hardware doing some sort of industrial control. When I heard about it, a
notable part of the paper was a mention that it was believed they had
removed all bugs from the implementation.

Not quite a lost version of Unix, but almost a lost+found version. Has
anyone else heard of this paper? Perhaps it is apocryphal? I've always
wanted to read it, but never found a copy "in the wild."

        - Dan C.


On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 4:24 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> So there are a few ports I know of that I wonder if they ever made it back
> into that great github repo.I don't think they did.
>
> harris
> gould
> That weird BBN 20-bit machine
>    (20 bits? true story: 5 4-bit modules fit in a 19" rack. So 20 bits)
> Alpha port (Tru64)
> Precision Architecture
> Unix port to Cray vector machines
>
> others? What's the list of "lost machines" look like? Would companies
> consider a donation, do you think?
>
> If that Cray port is of any interest I have a thread I can push on maybe.
>
> but another true story: I visited DEC in 2000 or so, as LANL was about to
> spend about $120M on an Alpha system. The question came up about the SRM
> firmware for Alpha. As it was described to me, it was written in BLISS and
> the only machine left that could build it was an 11/750, "somewhere in the
> basement, man, we haven't turned that thing on in years". I suspect there's
> a lot of these containing oxide oersteds of interest.
>
> ron
>
>
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