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From: greg travis <greg.m.travis@gmail.com>
To: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
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 11:43:37 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJvuEa0zifbr_9YFw9Hs8OJZps+B047x6_R7OMbo8VBQ2hm=Og@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAEoi9W5Un6Q7bjK_m1j639XiWLScTYE82wPA3sj-n3Rs-=1vnQ@mail.gmail.com>

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You're quite right about the religious error messages. I used MetaWare High
C under DOS briefly, comparing it to Turbo C and Watcom. (Watcom won.) It
had extensions to C, such as a coroutine-ish 'yield' keyword.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 9:20 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer <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`. I don't recall
> a pcc-derived compiler, but apparently such a thing did exist and some
> documentation says that High C was installed as `hc`, so my memory may be
> off. This old post describes RT compilers:
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt/u7DUwY5U9kQ/uVqLP9FhqMEJ
>
> Hi-C was sort of an odd compiler. I gather IBM outsourced the development
> of it to some third party (MetaWare) which was founded by very religious
> people, and I have a vague memory of some of the documentation or perhaps
> even error messages making biblical references.
>
> The kernel had to be built with High C, if I recall correctly, though GCC
> worked OK for producing userspace binaries. I don't recall what the bug
> was, but it was eventually found and fixed. Perhaps it had to do with
> incomplete register saves on function entry interacting poorly with
> interrupts or something.
>
> 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. Anyway, I have some vague
> recollection that at some point the bug in the compiler was fixed so that
> GCC could produce a working kernel; nascent NetBSD and OpenBSD ports were
> planned, but I don't think they ever went anywhere.
> https://www.openbsd.org/romp.html exists, though I don't know that the
> NetBSD people ever got beyond the talking stage. The OpenBSD-romp mailing
> list had some interesting information, but I can't find archives anymore.
>
> Oh well. The RT was an interesting footnote in the history of computing,
> but it seems that, as a workstation, it was too little too late by the time
> it actually hit the market. Had they released it a few years earlier?
> Perhaps they could have cornered the market.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>
>

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2019-11-21 16:44 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
2019-11-21 16:43                     ` greg travis [this message]
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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