From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2017 09:54:11 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years? In-Reply-To: References: <20170225141738.f3uauxhasru7gsb3@ancienthardware.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:45 AM, Ronald Natalie wrote: > > > On Feb 28, 2017, at 10:15 PM, Gregg Levine > wrote: > > > > Hello! > > We (well most of us) all of us know about AIX. Well what about AIX/370? > > —— > > AIX/370 was a real product. One of the ones that I don’t ever think > saw the light of day was the i860 AIX port. IBM made two i860 add-in > cards for the PS/2. The single processor version was called the Wizard > and there was a 4 processor version with an integral frame buffer called > the W4. We ported AIX to both. The i860 version actually had more in > common with the 370 version than it did with the 386. 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. The only > AIX that didn’t play was the completely independent (and in my opinion > somewhat brain damaged) IBM/RT UNIX. We had RTs where I was. By the time I came on the scene, they were being decommissioned in favor of RS/6k hardware (arguably, the RT was pretty low-powered even for its day), so the students were running around grabbing them and playing with them. We ran AOS on ours, which was a more-or-less straight port of 4.3BSD+NFS (maybe they started with Tahoe? I don't know), but IBM seemed to want to push AIX with them. The RT was my first exposure to "real" Unix source code. What was interesting to me was all of the #ifdef's in the source that made it clear that someone at IBM had obviously tried to port 4.3 to the 370. I don't think that ever saw the light of day, but there were definitely vestiges of it in the kernel. I had understood was that AIX/370 was actually OSF/1 based and totally separate from AIX 2.x (on the RT) and AIX 3.x (on the RS/6k)? From what you wrote, it sounds like that wasn't quite right. If there was a TCF-based RT kernel, I never saw it, even inside the IBM > labs. > > Speaking of odd job control mechanisms. The 386 side had a device that > multiplexed the PS/2 console into multiple streams called the “High > Function Terminal.” When we wrote the virtual console for the Wizard/W4 > add in card, we called it the “Low Function Terminal." Did the HFT survive into the RS/6k? I seem to recall hearing about that. Perhaps it was an option on the RT, or somehow could be used with the "crossbow" card on the 6152? - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: