From: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
To: Chester Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 15:53:00 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAEoi9W7zNaju3OBGuxtJKMDEpfQbt3ZaQOT+k3MSqjQn3vQGdA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <397f861b-8684-0938-250c-b929e7710000@case.edu>
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On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 11:16 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> On 11/21/19 9:19 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org
> > <mailto:brad@anduin.eldar.org>> wrote:
> >
> > For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu,
> MACH
> > microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS. Ran well
> > enough, but was disk and memory constrained. We had source to much
> of
> > the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to
> recall
> > that compiling it was a big pain. Something like you had to use a
> > specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C?? hc command
> perhaps)
> > to compile some of the source. gcc had a backend for the ROMP
> > processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries. I think
> that
> > some variation of pcc was the usual compiler. I remember it being
> > pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS. We used them mostly
> as X
> > terminal workstations.
> >
> >
> > "High C" (or perhaps "Hi C"? It's been a while...) was the name of the
> > system compiler on AOS; I thought it was installed as `cc`.
>
> "High C", and it was installed as cc and hc.
>
Yeah, that matches my (vague) recollection as well.
> Some RT enthusiasts kept those machines running well beyond their prime.
> > Why? I'm not entirely sure; as you say, they were memory and disk
> > constrained. They were also very slow.
>
> I had one running in my basement into the late 90s, with my own self-
> maintained kernel. I did a considerable portion of the bash-2.0
> development on that box, and my wife wrote all of her doctoral thesis on
> it (using a troff macro package I wrote to do APA style formatting). It
> didn't make the cut when I moved from that house. Why did I have it?
> Because it was free, and it did what I needed.
>
We kept a couple of them running through the mid- to late-90s as well. By
that time, however, it seemed like Linux and the BSDs on PCs had greatly
eclipsed whatever was possible performance or software-wise on the aging
RTs, which were also starting to fail in odd ways. But until that point,
they were free and ran Unix, and for a long time that was kind of a special
thing. We ended up replacing a 6150 with a 486 running FreeBSD and life was
pretty good, though.
The spiritual descendent of that (those) machine(s) now runs OpenBSD on a
VPS somewhere. A while back, I found some old NIS data files (in ndbm
format, of course) that we'd preserved from some ancient backup; I was able
to get the ndbm library from an old BSD distribution and compile it and
extract the data, which was kind of fun.
- Dan C.
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-11-21 20:53 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 49+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-11-03 21:05 [TUHS] " Kevin Bowling
2019-11-03 23:29 ` Dennis Boone
2019-11-04 0:06 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-11-04 1:29 ` Dennis Boone
2019-11-04 1:58 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-11-04 3:39 ` Gregg Levine
2019-11-04 4:49 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-11-04 15:32 ` Adam Thornton
2019-11-05 16:21 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-11-05 18:04 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-11-05 19:22 ` ron
2019-11-05 17:30 ` Clem Cole
2019-11-05 18:07 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-11-05 18:15 ` Clem Cole
2019-11-05 19:03 ` Christopher Browne
2019-11-05 19:12 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-11-05 19:26 ` SPC
2019-11-05 19:28 ` SPC
2019-11-05 20:26 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-11-05 20:10 ` Clem Cole
2019-11-05 20:42 ` Kevin Bowling
2019-11-05 21:11 ` Clem Cole
2019-11-05 22:11 ` [TUHS] one element of one of M factions of N companies [Re: " Charles H Sauer
2019-11-06 0:06 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-11-06 3:36 ` Charles H. Sauer
2019-11-06 7:59 ` [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT " SPC
2019-11-06 15:51 ` Charles H Sauer
2019-11-07 22:40 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-11-08 4:39 ` Jason Stevens
2019-11-21 6:26 ` Al Kossow
2019-11-21 11:58 ` Dan Cross
2019-11-21 13:07 ` Brad Spencer
2019-11-21 14:19 ` Dan Cross
2019-11-21 16:16 ` Chet Ramey
2019-11-21 20:53 ` Dan Cross [this message]
2019-11-21 16:43 ` greg travis
2019-11-21 19:41 ` arnold
2019-11-21 20:21 ` Jon Steinhart
2019-11-21 17:33 ` Charles H Sauer
2019-11-21 17:36 ` Dan Cross
2019-11-21 18:11 ` Brad Spencer
2019-11-21 17:29 ` Charles H Sauer
2019-11-22 20:38 ` Al Kossow
2019-11-06 20:28 Pat Barron
2019-11-06 20:31 Pat Barron
2019-11-21 19:53 Noel Chiappa
2019-11-21 20:08 ` Clem Cole
2019-11-23 4:40 ` Gregg Levine
2019-11-23 12:51 ` Clem Cole
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