[TUHS] Any Interdata war stories?

[TUHS] Any Interdata war stories?

[arnold]

> From: Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com>
>
> I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
> Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.

I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
into the dustbin of history.  And Unix on it apparently never
got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the
TUHS archives.

Was the Interdata system in use at Bell Labs for actual work once
the port was complete?

ISTR there was a meeting with Interdata about changes in the architecture
that Bell Labs wanted, that Interdata didn't want to make. What
was the full story?

Any other info would be welcome.

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Jonathan Gray]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 12:55:05AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > From: Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com>
> >
> > I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
> > Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
> 
> I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
> happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
> into the dustbin of history.  And Unix on it apparently never
> got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the
> TUHS archives.

Tom described some of the C portability problems in
Inter-UNIX Portability

https://archive.org/details/CLanguagePortability_Sept77/page/n15/mode/2up
https://akapugsblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/inter-unix_portability.pdf

> 
> Was the Interdata system in use at Bell Labs for actual work once
> the port was complete?
> 
> ISTR there was a meeting with Interdata about changes in the architecture
> that Bell Labs wanted, that Interdata didn't want to make. What
> was the full story?

Steve Johnson on the hardware problems
https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/2023-August/001672.html

> 
> Any other info would be welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Arnold
> 

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 12:55 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com>
> >
> > I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
> > Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
>
> I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
> happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
> into the dustbin of history.  And Unix on it apparently never
> got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the
> TUHS archives.
>
> Was the Interdata system in use at Bell Labs for actual work once
> the port was complete?
>
> ISTR there was a meeting with Interdata about changes in the architecture
> that Bell Labs wanted, that Interdata didn't want to make. What
> was the full story?
>
> Any other info would be welcome.

So on the marketing side, the Interdata port wound up being sold in the US
by The Wollogong Group (TWG). They marketed it to Harris computer users
more generally. Tom and Steve were frustrated that they couldn't market this
in .au so effectively sold their rights to TWG who did market it.

And then they branched out, using their V6 license to do a number of other
things:
* Eunice for VMS (4BSD environment for VMS)
* TCP/IP for VMS (the TCP. from 4.2BSD (and later 4.3BSD) ported to VMS,
as extracted from Eunice, not to be confused with TVG's Multinet).
* TCP/IP for a bunch of other System V systems (mostly 3B2*'s) as well as
HP (both HPUX and non unix systems) and a few other early odd-balls
that my memory isn't responding well to.
* Unix internals training with the Lions Book, including AT&T and Wollgong
intellectual property markings (I wish I'd tried hard to snag a copy when
I worked there: I had to settle for an Nth generation copy from a coworker).
* Some other early porting work that may have just been marketing material
to compete with Unisoft / raise funding. I just saw this stuff once at the TWG
offices and was given some hand-wavey explanation that amounted to
"don't worry about testing this"...
* IP/TCP for DOS (though this was an independent thing, done at MIT,
the licensing material for this product, IIRC, included some kind of
unix permission that confused me at the time, but it may have just
been lawyering to CYA rather than including anything).

Warner

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Jon Forrest]

On 4/29/25 10:00 AM, Warner Losh wrote:

> And then they branched out, using their V6 license to do a number of other
> things:
> * Eunice for VMS (4BSD environment for VMS)

Minor quible - Eunice was developed by David Kashtan at SRI, but
then maintained and marketed the The Wollongong Group.
(I used it on VMS at UCSB in the early 1980s).

Jon

P.S. A non-Unix Interdata memory. At UCSB we used 3 Interdata
machines as terminal switchers. You could connect from a terminal
in certain terminal rooms to any of a number of computers on campus that
had support for the switching protocol. The names of the Interdata
machines were "huey", "duey", and "louie". There was allegedly a
fourth machine called "kablooey" that was used as a backup.

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 11:18 AM Jon Forrest <nobozo@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 4/29/25 10:00 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
>
> > And then they branched out, using their V6 license to do a number of other
> > things:
> > * Eunice for VMS (4BSD environment for VMS)
>
> Minor quible - Eunice was developed by David Kashtan at SRI, but
> then maintained and marketed the The Wollongong Group.
> (I used it on VMS at UCSB in the early 1980s).

True, I mentioned it only because they used their V6 license which
had unusually favorable terms to do so... Which is an unanticipated
"long hand" of the interdata port into the late 80s and early 90s.

Warner

> Jon
>
> P.S. A non-Unix Interdata memory. At UCSB we used 3 Interdata
> machines as terminal switchers. You could connect from a terminal
> in certain terminal rooms to any of a number of computers on campus that
> had support for the switching protocol. The names of the Interdata
> machines were "huey", "duey", and "louie". There was allegedly a
> fourth machine called "kablooey" that was used as a backup.

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Al Kossow]

On 4/29/25 10:00 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 12:55 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>>
>>> From: Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com>
>>>
>>> I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
>>> Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
>>
>> I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
>> happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
>> into the dustbin of history.  And Unix on it apparently never
>> got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the
>> TUHS archives.
>>

Two different ports.
TWG's port was written at the University of Wollongong, extensive
documentation and SIMH emulation survives.

No trace of the BTL port exists that I know of

Interdata was bought by Perkin-Elmer, Perkin-Elmer sold it to
Concurrent Computer Corp.

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Rich Salz]

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On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 1:00 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> * IP/TCP for DOS (though this was an independent thing, done at MIT,
> the licensing material for this product, IIRC, included some kind of
> unix permission that confused me at the time, but it may have just
> been lawyering to CYA rather than including anything).
>

The PC/IP software from MIT included a port of the "Portable C Compiler" to
generate 8086-era code. It ran on a Unix machine and built binaries that
you downloaded to the PC. So you need an ATT source license to get the full
PCIP dev kit.

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[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Clem Cole]

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Yes, that was one of the RTS compilers for the NU machine.  John Romkey may
have done it, as he was the primary person behind PCIP, but I can not claim
I remember who did the 8086 backend.  IIRC Jack Test did the 68K backend.
The RTS crew had the NU machine and NU bus that went with it.   Very tean
project Neat project.  Similar idea, in fact to what CMU was doing with the
Intel Mutlibus called the distributed front end (we had started with LSI-11
and cost reduced it to 8086 on a Intel Multibus).  Andy Bechtolsheim would
take with him to Stanford and rework with a 68K which became the
Stanford Network Terminal - which used the RTS's C compilers.   It's all
very mixed up. [ Don't tell me there was not an open source culture back in
the old days by the way].

Anyway the MIT RTS foilks made hardware and PCC back ends for the 68K,
Z8000 and 8086.  I believe that each had separate assemblers, tjt who
sometimes reads this list might know more, as he wrote the 68K assembler.
IIRC they had a common linker which is was rewrite/extension to the
original V7 linker or maybe the 4.1 linker.

Anyone with a V7 license could get it.   If you had a PC license you get
get the source to Romkey's PCIP.   If you did not a license, you could only
get a binary kit.
ᐧ

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 1:59 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 1:00 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
>> * IP/TCP for DOS (though this was an independent thing, done at MIT,
>> the licensing material for this product, IIRC, included some kind of
>> unix permission that confused me at the time, but it may have just
>> been lawyering to CYA rather than including anything).
>>
>
> The PC/IP software from MIT included a port of the "Portable C Compiler"
> to generate 8086-era code. It ran on a Unix machine and built binaries that
> you downloaded to the PC. So you need an ATT source license to get the full
> PCIP dev kit.
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Chet Ramey via TUHS]

On 4/29/25 1:00 PM, Warner Losh wrote:

> And then they branched out, using their V6 license to do a number of other
> things:
> * Eunice for VMS (4BSD environment for VMS)

"Congratulations.  You aren't running Eunice."

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Warner Losh]

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On Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 12:26 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Yes, that was one of the RTS compilers for the NU machine.  John Romkey
> may have done it, as he was the primary person behind PCIP, but I can not
> claim I remember who did the 8086 backend.  IIRC Jack Test did the 68K
> backend.  The RTS crew had the NU machine and NU bus that went with it.
>  Very tean project Neat project.  Similar idea, in fact to what CMU was
> doing with the Intel Mutlibus called the distributed front end (we had
> started with LSI-11 and cost reduced it to 8086 on a Intel Multibus).  Andy
> Bechtolsheim would take with him to Stanford and rework with a 68K which
> became the Stanford Network Terminal - which used the RTS's C compilers.
>  It's all very mixed up. [ Don't tell me there was not an open source
> culture back in the old days by the way].
>
> Anyway the MIT RTS foilks made hardware and PCC back ends for the 68K,
> Z8000 and 8086.  I believe that each had separate assemblers, tjt who
> sometimes reads this list might know more, as he wrote the 68K assembler.
> IIRC they had a common linker which is was rewrite/extension to the
> original V7 linker or maybe the 4.1 linker.
>
> Anyone with a V7 license could get it.   If you had a PC license you get
> get the source to Romkey's PCIP.   If you did not a license, you could only
> get a binary kit.
> ᐧ
>
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 1:59 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 1:00 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>>
>>> * IP/TCP for DOS (though this was an independent thing, done at MIT,
>>> the licensing material for this product, IIRC, included some kind of
>>> unix permission that confused me at the time, but it may have just
>>> been lawyering to CYA rather than including anything).
>>>
>>
>> The PC/IP software from MIT included a port of the "Portable C Compiler"
>> to generate 8086-era code. It ran on a Unix machine and built binaries that
>> you downloaded to the PC. So you need an ATT source license to get the full
>> PCIP dev kit.
>>
>
Yea. The MIT compiler was also shipped with Venix/86

Warner

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[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Al Kossow]

On 4/29/25 11:25 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Yes, that was one of the RTS compilers for the NU machine.  John Romkey may have done it, as he was the primary person behind PCIP, but I 
> can not claim I remember who did the 8086 backend.  IIRC Jack Test did the 68K backend.  The RTS crew had the NU machine and NU bus that 
> went with it.   Very tean project Neat project.  Similar idea, in fact to what CMU was doing with the Intel Mutlibus called the distributed 
> front end (we had started with LSI-11 and cost reduced it to 8086 on a Intel Multibus).  Andy Bechtolsheim would take with him to Stanford 
> and rework with a 68K which became the Stanford Network Terminal - which used the RTS's C compilers.   It's all very mixed up. [ Don't tell 
> me there was not an open source culture back in the old days by the way].
> 
> Anyway the MIT RTS foilks made hardware and PCC back ends for the 68K, Z8000 and 8086.  I believe that each had separate assemblers, tjt who 
> sometimes reads this list might know more, as he wrote the 68K assembler.  IIRC they had a common linker which is was rewrite/extension to 
> the original V7 linker or maybe the 4.1 linker.
> 
> Anyone with a V7 license could get it.   If you had a PC license you get get the source to Romkey's PCIP.   If you did not a license, you 
> could only get a binary kit.

I have an image of the "MIT Compiler Tape" with a bunch of different PCC ports from a couple of different institutions.

On the Stanford side, SUMACC was a hack of the compiler to work with the Macintosh
I had the source for it at one point, but haven't been able to find it on any of my backups.

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Al Kossow]

On 4/29/25 11:46 AM, Al Kossow wrote:

> I have an image of the "MIT Compiler Tape" with a bunch of different PCC ports from a couple of different institutions.

I forgot I put this up a while ago
http://bitsavers.org/bits/MIT/trix/MIT_Compiler_Tape

I wish I had more information about what went on wrt Steve Ward's lab

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 1:07 PM Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:
>
> On 4/29/25 11:46 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
>
> > I have an image of the "MIT Compiler Tape" with a bunch of different PCC ports from a couple of different institutions.
>
> I forgot I put this up a while ago
> http://bitsavers.org/bits/MIT/trix/MIT_Compiler_Tape
>
> I wish I had more information about what went on wrt Steve Ward's lab

I've tried building that for modern systems and the code is definitely
very K&R...
In one spot, IIRC, there's even a vax queue instruction.

Warner

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Clem Cole]

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Thanks for the refresh -- National chip (16032), not the Z8000 but right
idea.
ᐧ

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 3:07 PM Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:

> On 4/29/25 11:46 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
>
> > I have an image of the "MIT Compiler Tape" with a bunch of different PCC
> ports from a couple of different institutions.
>
> I forgot I put this up a while ago
> http://bitsavers.org/bits/MIT/trix/MIT_Compiler_Tape
>
> I wish I had more information about what went on wrt Steve Ward's lab
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, April 29th, 2025 at 12:45 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the refresh -- National chip (16032), not the Z8000 but right idea.
> ᐧ
> 
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 3:07 PM Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:
> 
> > On 4/29/25 11:46 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
> > 
> > > I have an image of the "MIT Compiler Tape" with a bunch of different PCC ports from a couple of different institutions.
> > 
> > I forgot I put this up a while ago
> > http://bitsavers.org/bits/MIT/trix/MIT_Compiler_Tape
> > 
> > I wish I had more information about what went on wrt Steve Ward's lab

Just fyi, thread from a couple years back in which Steve Johnson offered some recollections of his time involved in the Interdata 8/32 work at BTL: https://tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/thread/WH4IEMFZEZEDPG5VQHDWKTS6UTRMTRLL/

His recollections above touch on the microcode bug that prevented the Interdata port from being viable beyond porting exercises.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Henry Bent]

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On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 at 14:36, Chet Ramey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> On 4/29/25 1:00 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
>
> > And then they branched out, using their V6 license to do a number of
> other
> > things:
> > * Eunice for VMS (4BSD environment for VMS)
>
> "Congratulations.  You aren't running Eunice."


Perl has some good quips hidden in Configure but that was always one of my
favorites, even well before I had any real idea what Eunice was.

Personally I want a t-shirt that says "configure: error: cannot guess host
type; you must specify one" which nicely sums up my experiences with both
historic computing and my general life.

-Henry

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[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Jonathan Gray]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 11:46:19AM -0700, Al Kossow wrote:
> On 4/29/25 11:25 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> > Yes, that was one of the RTS compilers for the NU machine.  John Romkey
> > may have done it, as he was the primary person behind PCIP, but I can
> > not claim I remember who did the 8086 backend.  IIRC Jack Test did the
> > 68K backend.  The RTS crew had the NU machine and NU bus that went with
> > it.   Very tean project Neat project.  Similar idea, in fact to what CMU
> > was doing with the Intel Mutlibus called the distributed front end (we
> > had started with LSI-11 and cost reduced it to 8086 on a Intel
> > Multibus).  Andy Bechtolsheim would take with him to Stanford and rework
> > with a 68K which became the Stanford Network Terminal - which used the
> > RTS's C compilers.   It's all very mixed up. [ Don't tell me there was
> > not an open source culture back in the old days by the way].
> > 
> > Anyway the MIT RTS foilks made hardware and PCC back ends for the 68K,
> > Z8000 and 8086.  I believe that each had separate assemblers, tjt who
> > sometimes reads this list might know more, as he wrote the 68K
> > assembler.  IIRC they had a common linker which is was rewrite/extension
> > to the original V7 linker or maybe the 4.1 linker.
> > 
> > Anyone with a V7 license could get it.   If you had a PC license you get
> > get the source to Romkey's PCIP.   If you did not a license, you could
> > only get a binary kit.
> 
> I have an image of the "MIT Compiler Tape" with a bunch of different PCC ports from a couple of different institutions.
> 
> On the Stanford side, SUMACC was a hack of the compiler to work with the Macintosh
> I had the source for it at one point, but haven't been able to find it on any of my backups.

in the TUHS archive
Distributions/UCB/4.3BSD/new.tar.gz

contains sumacc.tar.Z which has source

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[arnold]

Thanks for this, and to everyone else who replied. I'm guessing
the hardware problems prevented the system from being used further.

Thanks,

Arnold

Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 12:55:05AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > > From: Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com>
> > >
> > > I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
> > > Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
> > 
> > I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
> > happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
> > into the dustbin of history.  And Unix on it apparently never
> > got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the
> > TUHS archives.
>
> Tom described some of the C portability problems in
> Inter-UNIX Portability
>
> https://archive.org/details/CLanguagePortability_Sept77/page/n15/mode/2up
> https://akapugsblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/inter-unix_portability.pdf
>
> > 
> > Was the Interdata system in use at Bell Labs for actual work once
> > the port was complete?
> > 
> > ISTR there was a meeting with Interdata about changes in the architecture
> > that Bell Labs wanted, that Interdata didn't want to make. What
> > was the full story?
>
> Steve Johnson on the hardware problems
> https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/2023-August/001672.html
>
> > 
> > Any other info would be welcome.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Arnold
> > 

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[arnold]

Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:

> Two different ports.
> TWG's port was written at the University of Wollongong, extensive
> documentation and SIMH emulation survives.

Ah! I was shown a V6 port on SIMH, but Bell Labs didn't do
a port of V6. This explains it.

> No trace of the BTL port exists that I know of
>
> Interdata was bought by Perkin-Elmer, Perkin-Elmer sold it to
> Concurrent Computer Corp.

CCI made the Tahoe that 4.4 ran on, but I'm guessing it's
a different architecture than the Interdata?

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

On Apr 30, 2025, at 12:21 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:
> 
>> Two different ports.
>> TWG's port was written at the University of Wollongong, extensive
>> documentation and SIMH emulation survives.
> 
> Ah! I was shown a V6 port on SIMH, but Bell Labs didn't do
> a port of V6. This explains it.

The story of this first port (by Richard Miller) here:

https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Other/Interdata/uow103747.pdf

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

On Apr 30, 2025, at 12:35 AM, Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:
> 
> On Apr 30, 2025, at 12:21 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> 
>> Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> Two different ports.
>>> TWG's port was written at the University of Wollongong, extensive
>>> documentation and SIMH emulation survives.
>> 
>> Ah! I was shown a V6 port on SIMH, but Bell Labs didn't do
>> a port of V6. This explains it.
> 
> The story of this first port (by Richard Miller) here:
> 
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Other/Interdata/uow103747.pdf

More details in Richard's invited talk @ Usenix:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix98/invited_talks/miller.ps

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Greg A. Woods]

At Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:55:05 -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Any Interdata war stories?
> 
> > From: Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com>
> >
> > I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
> > Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
> 
> I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
> happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
> into the dustbin of history.  And Unix on it apparently never
> got out of Bell Labs;

In about 1981 or 1982 the chemistry (IIRC) department at University of
Calgary had an Interdata 8/32 that was, at least for some time around
then, running Unix.  I remember poking around on it briefly, but I don't
remember much more than that about it.

-- 
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Tom Lyon]

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I found this USENIX paper from Steve Johnson that has a lot of detail about
the
Interdata port (postscript format):

"C and the AT&T Unix Port--A Personal History"
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix98/invited_talks/johnson.ps


On Mon, Apr 28, 2025 at 11:55 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> > From: Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com>
> >
> > I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
> > Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
>
> I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
> happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
> into the dustbin of history.  And Unix on it apparently never
> got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the
> TUHS archives.
>
> Was the Interdata system in use at Bell Labs for actual work once
> the port was complete?
>
> ISTR there was a meeting with Interdata about changes in the architecture
> that Bell Labs wanted, that Interdata didn't want to make. What
> was the full story?
>
> Any other info would be welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold
>

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[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Arnold Robbins

    > CCI made the Tahoe that 4.4 ran on, but I'm guessing it's a different
    > architecture than the Interdata?

I think so. Almost all documentation on the Tahoe has been lost in the mists
of time (if ANYONE retains ANY hardcopies of ANY hardware documentation for
the Tahoe, PLEASE let me know), but I recently managed to work out a bit
about it from the instruction decoding/printing routines in the debuggers
from 4.3 BSD Tahoe:

  https://gunkies.org/wiki/Power_6/32

and it seems to be fairly different from the Interdata:

  http://bitsavers.org/pdf/interdata/32bit/29-365R01_32BitRefMan_Jun74.pdf

Also, 'CCI' is 'Computer Consoles Incorporated', not "Concurrent Computer
Corp".

	Noel

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Steve Nickolas]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> That leaves several mysteries. 1) Why would a commercial compiler not come
> with a linker? 2) Why did people who wanted to work with the PC/IP source
> need a Bell license?

A possible answer for 1, since we're probably talking about a compiler for 
MS-DOS: most releases of MS-DOS and PC DOS, at least through version 3.3, 
came with a linker, so maybe they didn't deem it necessary.

-uso.

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Lawrence Stewart]

It isn’t Unix related, but it is a fun Interdata war story.

I hung out at the MIT Architecture Machine in the early 70’s (the Media Lab before it was the Media Lab.)
The lab used Interdata minis, with homegrown software.  My part was designing and building
various I/O devices, including parts of a network interconnecting the various minis.

There were Interdata model 3, model 5, model 75, and one blazing fast model 85 with semiconductor memory.  The rest were core.

I think the first 7/32 we got had two 32K core modules.  There was a microcode bug, such that in some case the microcode did not disable a non-maskable interrupt, so if the ISR was so foolish as to cause one, the machine got stuck in an interrupt loop.  You couldn’t clear it by reset or by power cycling the machine, because core!  The bad state was in the memory and was non-volatile.  It was possible to clear (sometimes) by swapping the two core modules with the power off, if the other one didn’t have the poison bits, but if they did, the only thing that worked was to unplug the memory module with the power on.  Luckily the OS guys figured out how to fix the ISR before we trashed anything permanently.

-L

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Lawrence Stewart]

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> On Apr 30, 2025, at 9:11 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> 
> Who'd have ever thought, back in the day, that it would turn into what it
> did? Well, probably John Brunner, whom I (sadly) never met, who was there
> before any of us.)
> 

The reference here is to Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner in 1975.

I did meet him once. He came by PARC to talk to John Shoch and John Hupp, who 
had written a network “worm” after Brunner’s naming. A very prescient author!

“The “worm” programs — early experience with a distributed computation”.  Shoch and Hupp https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/102616.102636


-Larry


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[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > Yes, that was one of the RTS compilers for the NU machine. John Romkey
    > may have done it, as he was the primary person behind PCIP

I decided to poke around in the 'MIT-CSR' dump, since that was the machine
the PC/IP project started on, to see what I could find. Hoo boy! What an
adventure!

In the PC/IP area, I found a 'c86' directory - but it was almost empty. It
did have a shell file, 'grab', which contained:

  tftp -g $1 xx "PS:<Wayne>$1"

and a 'graball' file which called 'grab' for the list of compiler source
files. ('xx' was MIT-XX, the TOPS-20 main time-sharing machint of LCS.)

So I did a Web search for Wayne Gramlich (with whom I hadn't communicated in
many decades), and he popped right up. (Amazing thing, this Internet thingy.
Who'd have ever thought, back in the day, that it would turn into what it
did? Well, probably John Brunner, whom I (sadly) never met, who was there
before any of us.)

I took a chance, and called his number, and he was there, and we had a long
chat. He absolutely didn't do it, although he wrote the loader the project
used ('l68', the source for which I did find.) He's virtually certain Romkey
didn't (which would have been my guess too; Romkey was like a sophmore when
the project started). His best (_very_ faded) memory was that they started off
with a commercial compiler. (But see below.)

That leaves several mysteries. 1) Why would a commercial compiler not come
with a linker? 2) Why did people who wanted to work with the PC/IP source
need a Bell license?


I did some more poking, and the list of files for the 86 compiler, from
'graball':

  trees.c optim.c pftn.c code.c local.c scan.c xdefs.c
  table.c reader.c local2.c order.c match.c allo.c comm1.c
  manifest mfile1 common macdefs mfile2 mac2defs

matched the file names from 'pcc', as given in "A Tour Through the Portable C
Compiler":

  https://maibriz.de/unix/ultrix/_root/porttour.pdf

(in section "The Source Files"). So whether the 86 compiler was done at MIT
(by someone in RTS), or at a company, it was definitely a 'pcc' descendant.

(Possibly adding to the confusion, we had some other C compilers for various
ISA's in that project [building networking software for various
micro-computers], including an 8080 C compiler from Whitesmiths, Ltd, which I
have also found. It's possible that Wayne's vague memory of a commercial
compiler is of that one?)

I really should reach out to Romkey and Bridgham, to see what they remember.
Later today.

Whether the main motivation for keeping the compiler source on XX was i)
because disk space was short on CSR (we had only a hand-me-down pair of
CalComp Model 215 drives - capacity 58 Mbytes per drive!); ii) to prevent
version skew; or iii) because it was a commercial compiler, and we had to
protect the source (e.g. we didn't have the source to the 8080 compiler, only
the object modules), I have no idea.


    > Anyway the MIT RTS folks made hardware and PCC back ends for the 68K,
    > Z8000 and 8086. I believe that each had separate assemblers, tjt who
    > sometimes reads this list might know more, as he wrote the 68K assembler.

There is an 'a86' directory on CSR, but it too is empty, except for a 'grab'
command file. That contains only:

  tftp -g $1 xx "PS:<novick>$1"

I have no memory of who 'novick' might have been. A Web search for 'novick
mit lcs' didn' turn anything up. (I wonder if it might have been Carol
Novitsky; she was in our group at LCS, and I have a vague memory of her being
associated with the networking software for micro-computers project.)

Anyway, it probably doesn't matter; the c86 'grab' referred to Wayne, but he
didn't write c86; 'novick' might not have written a86.

Something else to ask Romkey and Bridgham about.

	  Noel

[TUHS] Re: Any Interdata war stories?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Rich Salz

    > The PC/IP software from MIT included a port of the "Portable C
    > Compiler" to generate 8086-era code. It ran on a Unix machine and built
    > binaries that you downloaded to the PC. ... So you need an ATT source
    > license to get the full PCIP dev kit.

That makes sense. The 'MIT license' (about which Jerry Saltzer did a note for
the October-December 2020 issue of the 'IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing', available here:

  https://www.mit.edu/~Saltzer/publications/MITLicense.pdf

and which mentions that it was initially done for the MIT PC/IP code) only
applied to the MIT-written applications, not a 'derived work' (to use the
intellectual property law 'term of art') based on Bell code.

	Noel