Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Rudi Blom]

>Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).

>I am rather saddened by the fact that there is so much about all the Unix (and not only >Unix) history of computing in the USA and so very little in Europe. I wouldn’t even know >where to start, to be honest, all I have as a history is the Italian side from my father and his other mad friends and colleagues in Milan. So little of it is recorded, never mind written down.

In the 80-tisch I worked at Philips Data Systems in Apeldoorn, the
Netherlands. Not in Development, but in System Support. Philips was
working on a System V.3 based UNIX running on Motorola 68000 CPUs in a
P9X00 server. Called MPX as in Multi-Processor UNIX. The Multi part
refers to having an Ethernet, X25 and SDLC board running a tailored
version of the OS to offload the main CPU.
See for example
https://www.cbronline.com/news/better_late_philips_enters_the_uk_unix_market/
https://www.cbronline.com/news/philips_ready_with_68030_models_for_its_p9000_unix_workstation_family

Later Philips moved to i386 with a 'unknown version' based UNIX.
Division was bought by DEC (some say sold off by Philips) in 1991 and
we moved to DEC's choice of SCO UNIX. The 'intelligent comm boards
were ported and still running the separate OS though.

Unfortunately I never had any of that OS type of source and my paper
archive was left behind. Only have some small higher level test stuff
and my mail archive. For a while I was "rudi blom"
<blom@kiwi.idca.tds.philips.nl>, later rudi blom"@apd.mts

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

Kevin Bowling writes:

> Can you share any details or photos about that 3B?

Nope.  The only pictures I had of the '4000 were from the night we
"decommissioned" it.  They were lost many moves ago.  But even if I
still had them I would not let them out in public, to protect the
guilty.

Which is a shame, because some of them were quite entertaining :-)

--lyndon

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Kevin Bowling]

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Can you share any details or photos about that 3B?

Academia and cash strapped aren’t terms I’d tie together in my generation
in the US with all the loldebt and gilding.

On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 6:12 PM Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:

> >> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> >> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> >> time Solaris 2.x came along.
>
> >Yep, can confirm.  I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the
> >time just didn't want competition for SPARC.
>
> I have vague memories of the Road Runner.  But I also recall, circa
> 1993, Sun was trying very hard not to sell a '386 port of Solaris that
> I wanted to get my hands on.
>
> At the time I was spinning up a brand new university campus.  We
> were, as all academia were, $$$ constrained.  Windows was starting
> to roll out, but the incoming academics wanted UNIX to run their
> code on.  Sun had just leaked out a 386-based release, but was
> hiding it from everyone.  At the front-end of the campus build, my
> thoughts were to get this Intel version of SunOS running on the
> Intel boxes that we knew we had to buy, anyway, because MSDOS and
> Windows.
>
> At the '93 Interop I quickly tracked down the Sun booth and started
> nailing down all the booth critters to set up a conversation about
> doing a campus-wide binary license of the 386 port.  Both booth
> shitheads could not be bothered.  They only wanted to SPARC the
> booth babes across the aisle.
>
> Does anyone remember the name of that Sun release?  I've forgotten now.
> Meanwhile, we signed up for a BSDi academic source license, and deployed
> UNIX on every PC that hit the campus.
>
> Sun did eventually show up, many months after the campus opening.  With a
> "million dollar" donation.  It was a heap of mostly broken workstations
> that they piled on the floor in the agora for a photo-op.  Same gig that
> AT&T tried when they dumped the 3B4000 on us in Athabasca in 1990 ;-)
>
> --lyndon
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Arthur Krewat]

On 7/23/2019 9:04 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> At the '93 Interop I quickly tracked down the Sun booth and started
> nailing down all the booth critters to set up a conversation about
> doing a campus-wide binary license of the 386 port.  Both booth
> shitheads could not be bothered.  They only wanted to SPARC the
> booth babes across the aisle.
I can't help, aside from saying I'd love to get my hands on a '386 based 
SunOS...

But that statement has to be the most epic description of a conference 
I've ever read.

That, and using SPARC as a verb.

Well done ;)

art k.

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

>> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
>> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
>> time Solaris 2.x came along.

>Yep, can confirm.  I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the
>time just didn't want competition for SPARC.

I have vague memories of the Road Runner.  But I also recall, circa
1993, Sun was trying very hard not to sell a '386 port of Solaris that
I wanted to get my hands on.

At the time I was spinning up a brand new university campus.  We
were, as all academia were, $$$ constrained.  Windows was starting
to roll out, but the incoming academics wanted UNIX to run their
code on.  Sun had just leaked out a 386-based release, but was
hiding it from everyone.  At the front-end of the campus build, my
thoughts were to get this Intel version of SunOS running on the
Intel boxes that we knew we had to buy, anyway, because MSDOS and
Windows.

At the '93 Interop I quickly tracked down the Sun booth and started
nailing down all the booth critters to set up a conversation about
doing a campus-wide binary license of the 386 port.  Both booth
shitheads could not be bothered.  They only wanted to SPARC the
booth babes across the aisle.

Does anyone remember the name of that Sun release?  I've forgotten now.
Meanwhile, we signed up for a BSDi academic source license, and deployed
UNIX on every PC that hit the campus.

Sun did eventually show up, many months after the campus opening.  With a
"million dollar" donation.  It was a heap of mostly broken workstations
that they piled on the floor in the agora for a photo-op.  Same gig that
AT&T tried when they dumped the 3B4000 on us in Athabasca in 1990 ;-)

--lyndon

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On 17 Jul 2019, at 23:09, Dagobert Michelsen <dam@opencsw.org> wrote:
> Am 17.07.2019 um 17:08 schrieb Ben Greenfield via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>:
>> To be more clear the innovations developed by Heinz Nixdorf in the early days of the company did not contribute to Unix but was it also concept and worthy of study.
>> 
>> After Heinz died the company lost direction and was purchased by Siemens.
> 
> Indeed. There is btw a very nice collection of european mainframes presented
> in a collection at the „Computermuseum“ at the University of Applied Sciences
> in Kiel (sorry, webpages in German only):
>  https://www.fh-kiel.de/index.php?id=computermuseum
>  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computermuseum_der_Fachhochschule_Kiel

Fantastic! Now not only should I visit Berlin but also Kiel and, in the meantime, I can get some sailing in! 

Arrigo

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Wesley Parish]

And Robert Switzer's Tunix as laid out in his Operating Systems: A
Practical Approach. Used the SysVR3 API iirc, as opposed to the 7th
Edition Minix of 1987.

Wesley Parish

On 7/18/19, Chris Hanson <cmhanson@eschatologist.net> wrote:
> On Jul 17, 2019, at 2:28 AM, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the
>> Unix-like operating systems?
>
> Among others, there is of course Minix.
>
>   -- Chris
>
>

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Clem cole]

It is an uK.  I have a complete set of doc but I don’t think I have the code at this point. Fyi AT&T was supposed to use Chorus for SVR5 but it never shipped. The chorus folks opened an office in Portland Or.  iirc Michel Gien moved out there for a bit.  [We were working for both OSF and ATT at Locus.  Fun times.  ]

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Jul 17, 2019, at 7:22 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Jul 17, 2019, at 7:34 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 5:28 AM Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote: 
>>> For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).
>> Close, not quite.  Contemporaries but not the same.
>> 
>> Chorus was a C++ rewrite of Gien's Pascal based 'SOL' systems [Gien M. (1983). “The SOL Operating System”, USENIX Association, 1983, Proceedings of the Summer ‘83 USENIX Conference, Toronto, Canada, July, 1983, Pages 75-78.]
> 
> A good paper on Chorus:
> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eab3/b28bebdc202d9c5e2354731bebadf0872aac.pdf
> 
> Apparently Chorus was not "unix" until the SOL team joined them in 1984!
> Its nucleus seem very much like a microkernel.
> 

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Bakul Shah]

On Jul 17, 2019, at 7:34 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 5:28 AM Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote: 
> > For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).
> Close, not quite.  Contemporaries but not the same.
> 
> Chorus was a C++ rewrite of Gien's Pascal based 'SOL' systems [Gien M. (1983). “The SOL Operating System”, USENIX Association, 1983, Proceedings of the Summer ‘83 USENIX Conference, Toronto, Canada, July, 1983, Pages 75-78.]

A good paper on Chorus:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eab3/b28bebdc202d9c5e2354731bebadf0872aac.pdf

Apparently Chorus was not "unix" until the SOL team joined them in 1984!
Its nucleus seem very much like a microkernel.

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Chris Hanson]

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On Jul 17, 2019, at 2:28 AM, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote:
> 
> Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems?

Among others, there is of course Minix.

  -- Chris


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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi,

Am 17.07.2019 um 17:08 schrieb Ben Greenfield via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>:
> To be more clear the innovations developed by Heinz Nixdorf in the early days of the company did not contribute to Unix but was it also concept and worthy of study.
> 
> After Heinz died the company lost direction and was purchased by Siemens.

Indeed. There is btw a very nice collection of european mainframes presented
in a collection at the „Computermuseum“ at the University of Applied Sciences
in Kiel (sorry, webpages in German only):
  https://www.fh-kiel.de/index.php?id=computermuseum
  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computermuseum_der_Fachhochschule_Kiel
The collection of mainframes is quite large and they have a good collection of Zuse
machines (although they lack a working Z1 which is presented in Berlin and if you are
lucky is explained by Horst Zuse, the son of Konrad Zuse).

If you ever happen to be in northern Germany and want to give it a try let me know
and I’ll make sure you get a tour in english :-)


Best regards

  — Dago

-- 
"You don't become great by trying to be great, you become great by wanting to do something,
and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process." - xkcd #896

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 11:40 AM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

> ….see also the current http://retrocmp.com/projects/unibone
>
Yeah - these boards are pretty cool.   I think the LCM+L was using either
these or something like them.   The don't use real rotating storage anymore
if they can help it.

[Actually, the coolest thing I saw last week was the core memory
replacement they made for the CDC-6x00 systems.   The cores got too
unreliable.  So they made a board and lucite box that that form and fit
compatible.   They told me a neat story.  It seems after they announced to
the world that they had made it, somebody in the US DoD asked about
availability -- seems some old CDC gear is still in use [which seems like
an application for simh to me].

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Larry McVoy]

Wow, those came out when I was there, I've done a ton of work on those
machines.  The first Sun cluster was built from them.  But I've never
seen that ad before, it's classic Sun.

On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 11:36:43PM +0800, Jason Stevens wrote:
> Funny you mention that, I recently pulled this ad from SUN:
> 
> https://books.google.com.hk/books/content?id=GTwEAAAAMBAJ&hl=en-US&rview=1&pg=PT8&img=1&zoom=3&sig=ACfU3U0g2GS1KStkA6HXup3UG31UQdNcwg&w=1280
> 
> These days, there???s absolutely no limit to the things you can add to your PCs. Coprocessors. VGA cards. Large scale monitors. Network cards.
> But no matter how many thousands of dollars you pour into your PCs, they still can???t give you what you get with every Sun workstation. The screaming-hot performance. The multi-tasking. The high-resolution graphics. And the built-in networking.
> And now, we???re introducing a new workstation that makes all the shortcomings of your PCs even more obvious.
> SPARCstation??? IPC.
> At $8,995*, it???s the lowest cost, full-color RISC workstation in the world. By far. In fact, it???s about the same price as a high-performance 386 PC. But just look at the difference???.
> 
> 
> Sent from Mail for Windows 10
> 
> From: Larry McVoy
> Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2019 11:11 PM
> To: arnold@skeeve.com
> Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386
> 
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 02:10:14AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > > > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
> > >
> > > "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> > > Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
> > >
> > > Cheers
> > >
> > 
> > Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> > I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> > time Solaris 2.x came along.
> 
> Yep, can confirm.  I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the
> time just didn't want competition for SPARC.  Which was sort of silly,
> a 386 was nowhere near as fast as the SPARC chips of the day, that was
> when RISC actually made sense.  But perhaps they had a crystal ball
> and could see that x86 was going to be as fast or faster down the
> road?  I tend to doubt it, they really looked down on the 386.
> 

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[William Pechter]

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Don't forget Siemens-Nixdorf was a major reseller of Pyramid OS/x and DC/OSx (SysV R4) and eventually they purchased the remnants of Pyramid after AT&T (a major Pyramid shop and OEM) bought NCR and stopped using/selling Pyramid when DC./OSx was just appearing on the Pyramid MIServer MIPS R3000 boxes. 

Bill

Sent from pechter@gmail.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
To: Ben Greenfield <ben@cogs.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Sent: Wed, 17 Jul 2019 10:42
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 8:39 AM Ben Greenfield via TUHS <
tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:

>
> I know that it didn’t run Unix but I believe Nixdorf Computer was the
> large computer company at that time.
>
Both Nixdorf and Siemens were heavy into UNIX.  Both were founders of OSF.
  Nixdorf OEM'ed a couple of machines from US firms, as well as making
their own.   Siemens and Philips both trended to make their own systems.
IIRC Philips was mostly in the AT&T Camp at the time.  Olivetti was
definitely since one of the original 386 systems AT&T tried to sell was
their PC (in fact was one of systems ISC used for the original 386 UNIX
port - supplied by AT&T).

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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Adam Thornton]

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> On Jul 17, 2019, at 3:42 AM, emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2019-07-17 11:28, Arrigo Triulzi wrote:
> 
>> Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).
> 
> In Germany, there was MUNIX (sometimes called "Münchener UNIX ;-) )
> The company was PCS, they had the funny idea of replacing the PDP11 or
> VAX board on the Q-Bus with Motorolas m68k hardware. So you still could
> use your old peripherals (tape, drives, printers, etc.) with a new CPU,
> running UNIX ...
> 

….see also the current http://retrocmp.com/projects/unibone <http://retrocmp.com/projects/unibone>

Adam

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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Jason Stevens]

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Funny you mention that, I recently pulled this ad from SUN:

https://books.google.com.hk/books/content?id=GTwEAAAAMBAJ&hl=en-US&rview=1&pg=PT8&img=1&zoom=3&sig=ACfU3U0g2GS1KStkA6HXup3UG31UQdNcwg&w=1280

These days, there’s absolutely no limit to the things you can add to your PCs. Coprocessors. VGA cards. Large scale monitors. Network cards.
But no matter how many thousands of dollars you pour into your PCs, they still can’t give you what you get with every Sun workstation. The screaming-hot performance. The multi-tasking. The high-resolution graphics. And the built-in networking.
And now, we’re introducing a new workstation that makes all the shortcomings of your PCs even more obvious.
SPARCstation™ IPC.
At $8,995*, it’s the lowest cost, full-color RISC workstation in the world. By far. In fact, it’s about the same price as a high-performance 386 PC. But just look at the difference….


Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Larry McVoy
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2019 11:11 PM
To: arnold@skeeve.com
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 02:10:14AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
> >
> > "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> > Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> 
> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> time Solaris 2.x came along.

Yep, can confirm.  I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the
time just didn't want competition for SPARC.  Which was sort of silly,
a 386 was nowhere near as fast as the SPARC chips of the day, that was
when RISC actually made sense.  But perhaps they had a crystal ball
and could see that x86 was going to be as fast or faster down the
road?  I tend to doubt it, they really looked down on the 386.


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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 9:11 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 02:10:14AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > > > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
> > >
> > > "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> > > Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
> > >
> > > Cheers
> > >
> >
> > Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> > I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> > time Solaris 2.x came along.
>
> Yep, can confirm.  I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the
> time just didn't want competition for SPARC.  Which was sort of silly,
> a 386 was nowhere near as fast as the SPARC chips of the day, that was
> when RISC actually made sense.  But perhaps they had a crystal ball
> and could see that x86 was going to be as fast or faster down the
> road?  I tend to doubt it, they really looked down on the 386.
>

And wasn't it a weird version of SunOS? Support for the Roadrunners was
only in a couple of releases too (4.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 only). Most of the
sunos sources that have fallen off a truck on the internet are 4.0.3 and
newer, so there's no i386 support in them. I used a Sun386/250 at
Wollongong to do testing. Mostly it ran X and was one of the available X
workstations in the testing lab since it was weird enough people didn't
want to use it (though the Sony News box next to it might also have come in
a close second for weird).

The wikipedia page says there was a Sun486 (code named apache) that was
designed and a few built, but that was then cancelled before release.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 02:10:14AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
> >
> > "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> > Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> 
> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> time Solaris 2.x came along.

Yep, can confirm.  I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the
time just didn't want competition for SPARC.  Which was sort of silly,
a 386 was nowhere near as fast as the SPARC chips of the day, that was
when RISC actually made sense.  But perhaps they had a crystal ball
and could see that x86 was going to be as fast or faster down the
road?  I tend to doubt it, they really looked down on the 386.

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Ben Greenfield via TUHS]

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Yes, I should have been more careful with my phrasing.

To be more clear the innovations developed by Heinz Nixdorf in the early days of the company did not contribute to Unix but was it also concept and worthy of study.

After Heinz died the company lost direction and was purchased by Siemens.





> On Jul 17, 2019, at 10:41 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 8:39 AM Ben Greenfield via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org <mailto:tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>> wrote:
> 
> I know that it didn’t run Unix but I believe Nixdorf Computer was the large computer company at that time.
> Both Nixdorf and Siemens were heavy into UNIX.  Both were founders of OSF.   Nixdorf OEM'ed a couple of machines from US firms, as well as making their own.   Siemens and Philips both trended to make their own systems.   IIRC Philips was mostly in the AT&T Camp at the time.  Olivetti was definitely since one of the original 386 systems AT&T tried to sell was their PC (in fact was one of systems ISC used for the original 386 UNIX port - supplied by AT&T).


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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 8:39 AM Ben Greenfield via TUHS <
tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:

>
> I know that it didn’t run Unix but I believe Nixdorf Computer was the
> large computer company at that time.
>
Both Nixdorf and Siemens were heavy into UNIX.  Both were founders of OSF.
  Nixdorf OEM'ed a couple of machines from US firms, as well as making
their own.   Siemens and Philips both trended to make their own systems.
IIRC Philips was mostly in the AT&T Camp at the time.  Olivetti was
definitely since one of the original 386 systems AT&T tried to sell was
their PC (in fact was one of systems ISC used for the original 386 UNIX
port - supplied by AT&T).

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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 5:28 AM Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org>
wrote:

> Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the
> Unix-like operating systems?

Yes, I talk about it in my paper in the digital release of volume *CNAM
Historical Booklets* including your respective texts.

http://technique-societe.cnam.fr/la-recherche-sur-les-systemes-des-pivots-dans-l-histoire-de-l-informatique-ii-ii-988170.kjsp?RH=cdhte



Note the web site is in French, and all the papers are A4 format, some are
French some are in English (like mine own).   [Send me email off line if
you want a copy of the paper and don't want try to get the whole thing].



> For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on
> Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it
> for no mare than about two hours..).
>
Close, not quite.  Contemporaries but not the same.

Chorus was a C++ rewrite of Gien's Pascal based 'SOL' systems [Gien M.
(1983). “The SOL Operating System”, USENIX Association, 1983, Proceedings
of the Summer ‘83 USENIX Conference, Toronto, Canada, July, 1983, Pages
75-78.]



>
> I am rather saddened by the fact that there is so much about all the Unix
> (and not only Unix) history of computing in the USA and so very little in
> Europe.

Fair, although not completely true.  USENIX and it's European sisters did a
number of conferences back in the day.  If we missed, other than Australia,
we probably did less in Asia that we could have.   The truth was that the
European's wanted to be published in the ACM or USENIX pubs (just like most
American's and Brits wanted to publish in the Swiss and German journals for
Physics and Chemistry in the 30s and 40s).

But I think a lot of us in the community, certainly were aware of the lot
of cool things happening 'across the pond.'    Please don't sell yourself
and your non-North American sisters and brothers so short.



> I wouldn’t even know where to start, to be honest, all I have as a history
> is the Italian side from my father and his other mad friends and colleagues
> in Milan. So little of it is recorded, never mind written down.
>
That's a shame to hear.  I hope we can find more of it.

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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Clem Cole]

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RR and the ISC products were different.  RR was done in Billerica, MA and
ran a variant of SunOS [FWIW: some of the RR guys came to Stellar work on
the HW team].

ISC did the 386 port for Intel/ATT/IBM much earlier than that.   Later, as
was pointed out, Sun ended up with the IP when they bought it from Kodak.

On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 4:10 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
>
> > On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
> >
> > "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> > Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
> >
> > Cheers
> >
>
> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> time Solaris 2.x came along.
>
> And, I *do* remember ESIX. We used it for our product at a startup
> company I worked for. Initially System V R3 based, IIRC, and then
> eventually SVR4; I think we saw an improvement moving to the
> BSD fast file system.
>
> Arnold
>

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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On 17 Jul 2019, at 14:50, Dagobert Michelsen <dam@opencsw.org> wrote:
> Am 17.07.2019 um 14:32 schrieb Ben Greenfield via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>:
>> On Jul 17, 2019, at 5:28 AM, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote:
>>> Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).
>> 
>> I know that it didn’t run Unix but I believe Nixdorf Computer was the large computer company at that time.
> 
> There was also Sinix from Siemens that was derived from Reliant Unix:
>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINIX
>  https://web.archive.org/web/20120324121229/http://maben.homeip.net/static/S100/siemens/rmunix
> 
> Unfortunately I didn’t have had much exposure to it and don’t own any install media or such :-/

Yes, indeed there were many, in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, etc. but, unlike the USA, there is nobody apparently trying to keep it all together.

Is the Deutsche Museum in Munich doing something about German IT history like the Computer History Museum in California?

In the UK there’s the Historical Computing group within the BCS who publish a frequent newsletter with their work, they have exhibits at Bletchley Park and they took it upon them to write the histories of the Lyons, ICL, AMT, Inmos, etc.

I was recently trying to find something about Olivetti’s Unix: Olivetti re-branded the AT&T 3B2 and AT&T re-branded their beautiful M24 on which I briefly used Xenix for the 8086 (I *think* it was branded Xenix) but it was just a US UNIX version which spoke English.

Arrigo

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi,

Am 17.07.2019 um 14:32 schrieb Ben Greenfield via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>:
> On Jul 17, 2019, at 5:28 AM, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote:
>> Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).
> 
> I know that it didn’t run Unix but I believe Nixdorf Computer was the large computer company at that time.

There was also Sinix from Siemens that was derived from Reliant Unix:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINIX
  https://web.archive.org/web/20120324121229/http://maben.homeip.net/static/S100/siemens/rmunix

Unfortunately I didn’t have had much exposure to it and don’t own any install media or such :-/


Best regards

  — Dago

-- 
"You don't become great by trying to be great, you become great by wanting to do something,
and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process." - xkcd #896

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Ben Greenfield via TUHS]

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> On Jul 17, 2019, at 5:28 AM, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote:
> 
> On 17 Jul 2019, at 10:10, arnold@skeeve.com <mailto:arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>> 
>> emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
>>>> called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
>>> 
>>> "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
>>> Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
>>> 
>>> Cheers
>>> 
>> 
>> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
>> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
>> time Solaris 2.x came along.
>> 
>> And, I *do* remember ESIX. We used it for our product at a startup
>> company I worked for. Initially System V R3 based, IIRC, and then
>> eventually SVR4; I think we saw an improvement moving to the
>> BSD fast file system.
> 
> Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).

I know that it didn’t run Unix but I believe Nixdorf Computer was the large computer company at that time.

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/264/1115

https://www.hnf.de/en/permanent-exhibition/exhibition-areas/nixdorf-pioneer-of-decentralized-data-processing/the-products-of-nixdorf-computer-ag.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixdorf_Computer

> 
> I am rather saddened by the fact that there is so much about all the Unix (and not only Unix) history of computing in the USA and so very little in Europe. I wouldn’t even know where to start, to be honest, all I have as a history is the Italian side from my father and his other mad friends and colleagues in Milan. So little of it is recorded, never mind written down.

Maybe here.

http://www.technikum29.de/en/

Let me know what you find out regarding the Nixdorf 820. I happen to have my friends dad’s old one…

Keep Digging,

Ben


> 
> Arrigo


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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[emanuel stiebler]

On 2019-07-17 11:28, Arrigo Triulzi wrote:

> Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).

In Germany, there was MUNIX (sometimes called "Münchener UNIX ;-) )
The company was PCS, they had the funny idea of replacing the PDP11 or
VAX board on the Q-Bus with Motorolas m68k hardware. So you still could
use your old peripherals (tape, drives, printers, etc.) with a new CPU,
running UNIX ...

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Jason Stevens]

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The only non American one I was aware of came from Brazil, TROPIX.
http://allegro.nce.ufrj.br/tropix/index.html

I’d written a small thing about it here
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2009/06/18/tropix/

I’ve seen mention of something out of Sweden, although nothing concrete on the name.

There is also Демос/DEMOS the BSD code that had been stolen during the cold war, and ported to various Soviet machines & localized.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Arrigo Triulzi
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2019 6:01 PM
To: arnold@skeeve.com
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

On 17 Jul 2019, at 10:10, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
>>> called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
>> 
>> "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
>> Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
>> 
>> Cheers
>> 
> 
> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> time Solaris 2.x came along.
> 
> And, I *do* remember ESIX. We used it for our product at a startup
> company I worked for. Initially System V R3 based, IIRC, and then
> eventually SVR4; I think we saw an improvement moving to the
> BSD fast file system.

Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).

I am rather saddened by the fact that there is so much about all the Unix (and not only Unix) history of computing in the USA and so very little in Europe. I wouldn’t even know where to start, to be honest, all I have as a history is the Italian side from my father and his other mad friends and colleagues in Milan. So little of it is recorded, never mind written down.

Arrigo


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Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On 17 Jul 2019, at 10:10, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
>>> called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
>> 
>> "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
>> Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
>> 
>> Cheers
>> 
> 
> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> time Solaris 2.x came along.
> 
> And, I *do* remember ESIX. We used it for our product at a startup
> company I worked for. Initially System V R3 based, IIRC, and then
> eventually SVR4; I think we saw an improvement moving to the
> BSD fast file system.

Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).

I am rather saddened by the fact that there is so much about all the Unix (and not only Unix) history of computing in the USA and so very little in Europe. I wouldn’t even know where to start, to be honest, all I have as a history is the Italian side from my father and his other mad friends and colleagues in Milan. So little of it is recorded, never mind written down.

Arrigo

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[arnold]

emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:

> On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
>
> "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
>
> Cheers
>

Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
time Solaris 2.x came along.

And, I *do* remember ESIX. We used it for our product at a startup
company I worked for. Initially System V R3 based, IIRC, and then
eventually SVR4; I think we saw an improvement moving to the
BSD fast file system.

Arnold

[TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[emanuel stiebler]

On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...

"Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...

Cheers