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* [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
@ 2022-05-01  9:30 Andrew Warkentin
  2022-05-01 11:43 ` Ron Natalie
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Andrew Warkentin @ 2022-05-01  9:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
actually the first.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01  9:30 [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code? Andrew Warkentin
@ 2022-05-01 11:43 ` Ron Natalie
  2022-05-01 11:56   ` Rob Pike
  2022-05-01 14:09   ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-01 20:55 ` Michael Huff
  2022-05-02 15:43 ` Clem Cole
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Ron Natalie @ 2022-05-01 11:43 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Andrew Warkentin; +Cc: tuhs

Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago. 

> On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
> from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
> is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
> genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
> first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
> but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
> my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
> predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
> actually the first.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 11:43 ` Ron Natalie
@ 2022-05-01 11:56   ` Rob Pike
  2022-05-01 14:03     ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-01 14:09   ` Kenneth Goodwin
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Rob Pike @ 2022-05-01 11:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Ron Natalie; +Cc: TUHS main list

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The folks at Bell Labs were asked to figure out if Mark Williams had copied
Unix directly or via too much knowledge already obtained, or whether it was
truly a clean room recreation. I don't remember all the details, but it
became clear after a while that it was indeed a reasonably clean rewrite.

This was done by looking for corner cases that were an accident of the
original implementation and would be unlikely to appear in a version
created separately. One detail that did stick with me was the discovery
during this process that ppt, the paper tape simulator, mispunched a
letter, I think "R", but the Mark Williams version did not. Was that
compelling? Not on its own, but it was funny and memorable.

-rob


On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 9:46 PM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago.
>
> > On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
> > from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
> > is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
> > genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
> > first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
> > but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
> > my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
> > predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
> > actually the first.
>
>

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* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 11:56   ` Rob Pike
@ 2022-05-01 14:03     ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-03  4:37       ` Jim Carpenter
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Kenneth Goodwin @ 2022-05-01 14:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Rob Pike; +Cc: TUHS main list

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One of the reasons that Mark Williams attracted the attention of AT&T
lawyers was because they actually engaged former members of the Bell Labs
UNIX research group
who had prior access to ATT research source code to work on pieces of their
system.
THE BIG RED FLAG....

However, everyone at MW was painfully aware of the IP lawsuit potential in
what they were doing. So they took great pains to avoid that occuring.

I believe they could read the MAN page and any supporting documents, But
they had to write everything from scratch.

This is from a USENIX conference dialog with a mutual friend who passed
through MW on his way west to fame and fortune.

I believe a version of Coherent resides at Sourceforge in the operating
systems archives.

On Sun, May 1, 2022, 8:01 AM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

> The folks at Bell Labs were asked to figure out if Mark Williams had
> copied Unix directly or via too much knowledge already obtained, or whether
> it was truly a clean room recreation. I don't remember all the details, but
> it became clear after a while that it was indeed a reasonably clean rewrite.
>
> This was done by looking for corner cases that were an accident of the
> original implementation and would be unlikely to appear in a version
> created separately. One detail that did stick with me was the discovery
> during this process that ppt, the paper tape simulator, mispunched a
> letter, I think "R", but the Mark Williams version did not. Was that
> compelling? Not on its own, but it was funny and memorable.
>
> -rob
>
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 9:46 PM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
>> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago.
>>
>> > On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
>> > from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
>> > is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
>> > genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
>> > first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
>> > but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
>> > my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
>> > predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
>> > actually the first.
>>
>>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 11:43 ` Ron Natalie
  2022-05-01 11:56   ` Rob Pike
@ 2022-05-01 14:09   ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-01 18:08     ` ron minnich
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Kenneth Goodwin @ 2022-05-01 14:09 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Ron Natalie; +Cc: TUHS main list

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I actually purchased several copies of Coherent when it was first released
and used it as printer servers for a bunch of inexpensive Centronics based
printers. lpd based server to server transfers. Took the printing burden
off the main systems. Someone came out with a network based print spooler
box (Milan ??) later on which I switched over to after MW passed into
obscurity.


On Sun, May 1, 2022, 7:46 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago.
>
> > On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
> > from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
> > is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
> > genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
> > first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
> > but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
> > my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
> > predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
> > actually the first.
>
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 14:09   ` Kenneth Goodwin
@ 2022-05-01 18:08     ` ron minnich
  2022-05-01 18:22       ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
                         ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: ron minnich @ 2022-05-01 18:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Kenneth Goodwin; +Cc: TUHS main list

in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
code."

Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
the full path existed. oops.

But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
handle AIX being different from just about everything else.


On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 7:12 AM Kenneth Goodwin
<kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I actually purchased several copies of Coherent when it was first released and used it as printer servers for a bunch of inexpensive Centronics based printers. lpd based server to server transfers. Took the printing burden off the main systems. Someone came out with a network based print spooler box (Milan ??) later on which I switched over to after MW passed into obscurity.
>
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 7:46 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>
>> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago.
>>
>> > On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
>> > from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
>> > is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
>> > genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
>> > first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
>> > but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
>> > my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
>> > predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
>> > actually the first.
>>

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 18:08     ` ron minnich
@ 2022-05-01 18:22       ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
  2022-05-01 19:49         ` Dan Stromberg
  2022-05-02  2:08       ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-02  2:42       ` Phil Budne
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Charles H Sauer (he/him) @ 2022-05-01 18:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

I don't recall that particular case, but AIX was definitely derived from 
AT&T code. See 
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/

HOWEVER, when the 1983 transition happened and AIX became a primary site 
effort (as discussed in the cited reference), there were those new to 
the effort and new to Unix that thought they could redefine behaviors 
inappropriately.

For example, I recall one person trying to enforce only one root login 
at a time. Larry made it quite clear to that person that we were not 
going to violate Unix tradition in that manner.

Charlie

On 5/1/2022 1:08 PM, ron minnich wrote:
> in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
> understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
> code."
> 
> Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
> One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
> the full path existed. oops.
> 
> But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
> handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
> 
> 
> On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 7:12 AM Kenneth Goodwin
> <kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I actually purchased several copies of Coherent when it was first released and used it as printer servers for a bunch of inexpensive Centronics based printers. lpd based server to server transfers. Took the printing burden off the main systems. Someone came out with a network based print spooler box (Milan ??) later on which I switched over to after MW passed into obscurity.
>>
>>
>> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 7:46 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago.
>>>
>>>> On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
>>>> from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
>>>> is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
>>>> genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
>>>> first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
>>>> but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
>>>> my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
>>>> predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
>>>> actually the first.
>>>

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 18:22       ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
@ 2022-05-01 19:49         ` Dan Stromberg
  2022-05-01 20:37           ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Dan Stromberg @ 2022-05-01 19:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Charles H Sauer (he/him); +Cc: TUHS main list

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I don't know where the fellow got his information, but I was told that AIX
started out as AT&T code, but went through not one but two rewrites.

On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 11:55 AM Charles H Sauer (he/him) <
sauer@technologists.com> wrote:

> I don't recall that particular case, but AIX was definitely derived from
> AT&T code. See
>
> https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/
>
> HOWEVER, when the 1983 transition happened and AIX became a primary site
> effort (as discussed in the cited reference), there were those new to
> the effort and new to Unix that thought they could redefine behaviors
> inappropriately.
>
> For example, I recall one person trying to enforce only one root login
> at a time. Larry made it quite clear to that person that we were not
> going to violate Unix tradition in that manner.
>
> Charlie
>
> On 5/1/2022 1:08 PM, ron minnich wrote:
> > in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
> > understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
> > code."
> >
> > Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
> > One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
> > the full path existed. oops.
> >
> > But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
> > handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
> >
> >
> > On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 7:12 AM Kenneth Goodwin
> > <kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I actually purchased several copies of Coherent when it was first
> released and used it as printer servers for a bunch of inexpensive
> Centronics based printers. lpd based server to server transfers. Took the
> printing burden off the main systems. Someone came out with a network based
> print spooler box (Milan ??) later on which I switched over to after MW
> passed into obscurity.
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 7:46 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago.
> >>>
> >>>> On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
> >>>> from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
> >>>> is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
> >>>> genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
> >>>> first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
> >>>> but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
> >>>> my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
> >>>> predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
> >>>> actually the first.
> >>>
>
> --
> voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
> fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
> Facebook/Google/Twitter
> <https://technologists.com/sauer/Facebook/Google/Twitter>: CharlesHSauer
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 19:49         ` Dan Stromberg
@ 2022-05-01 20:37           ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Charles H Sauer (he/him) @ 2022-05-01 20:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Stromberg; +Cc: TUHS main list

Except to the extent discussed in my cited post, that seems overstated 
to me, untrue through AIX 3 on 6K and RT hardware, unlikely to be true 
post AIX 3.

On 5/1/2022 2:49 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> 
> I don't know where the fellow got his information, but I was told that 
> AIX started out as AT&T code, but went through not one but two rewrites.
> 
> On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 11:55 AM Charles H Sauer (he/him) 
> <sauer@technologists.com <mailto:sauer@technologists.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I don't recall that particular case, but AIX was definitely derived
>     from
>     AT&T code. See
>     https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/
>     <https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/>
> 
>     HOWEVER, when the 1983 transition happened and AIX became a primary
>     site
>     effort (as discussed in the cited reference), there were those new to
>     the effort and new to Unix that thought they could redefine behaviors
>     inappropriately.
> 
>     For example, I recall one person trying to enforce only one root login
>     at a time. Larry made it quite clear to that person that we were not
>     going to violate Unix tradition in that manner.
> 
>     Charlie
> 
>     On 5/1/2022 1:08 PM, ron minnich wrote:
>      > in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
>      > understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
>      > code."
>      >
>      > Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
>      > One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
>      > the full path existed. oops.
>      >
>      > But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
>      > handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>      >
>      >
>      > On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 7:12 AM Kenneth Goodwin
>      > <kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com <mailto:kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com>>
>     wrote:
>      >>
>      >> I actually purchased several copies of Coherent when it was
>     first released and used it as printer servers for a bunch of
>     inexpensive Centronics based printers. lpd based server to server
>     transfers. Took the printing burden off the main systems. Someone
>     came out with a network based print spooler box (Milan ??) later on
>     which I switched over to after MW passed into obscurity.
>      >>
>      >>
>      >> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 7:46 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com
>     <mailto:ron@ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
>      >>>
>      >>> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many
>     years ago.
>      >>>
>      >>>> On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin
>     <andreww591@gmail.com <mailto:andreww591@gmail.com>> wrote:
>      >>>>
>      >>>> What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not
>     derived
>      >>>> from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic
>     Unix)? Idris
>      >>>> is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK
>     it's not a
>      >>>> genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which
>     was the
>      >>>> first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix
>     influence
>      >>>> but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the
>     top of
>      >>>> my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
>      >>>> predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if
>     it was
>      >>>> actually the first.
>      >>>
> 
>     -- 
>     voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
>     <mailto:sauer@technologists.com>
>     fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
>     Facebook/Google/Twitter
>     <https://technologists.com/sauer/Facebook/Google/Twitter>: CharlesHSauer
> 

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01  9:30 [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code? Andrew Warkentin
  2022-05-01 11:43 ` Ron Natalie
@ 2022-05-01 20:55 ` Michael Huff
  2022-05-03  4:55   ` Jim Carpenter
  2022-05-02 15:43 ` Clem Cole
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Michael Huff @ 2022-05-01 20:55 UTC (permalink / raw)
  Cc: tuhs

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 I realize this doesn't help but there's an old story about dmr being asked
in the early or mid 80's to look at a clone which he checked for specific
bugs he was aware of (but apparently no one else was). It turned out to be
clean. I don't remember the details but that might be a good starting
point?

Apologies to Andrew who gets this mail twice (in his in his private
mailbox, and on the list). I assumed gmail would send it to the list as I
intended but it didn't, so I had to resend. Sorry!

On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 1:34 AM Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com>
wrote:

> What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
> from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
> is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
> genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
> first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
> but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
> my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
> predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
> actually the first.
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 18:08     ` ron minnich
  2022-05-01 18:22       ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
@ 2022-05-02  2:08       ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-02  9:21         ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
                           ` (2 more replies)
  2022-05-02  2:42       ` Phil Budne
  2 siblings, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Kenneth Goodwin @ 2022-05-02  2:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ron minnich; +Cc: TUHS main list

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My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source code and
then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days experience with it on a
POS cash register fixing a client issue. The shocker - they changed all the
error messages to error codes with a look at the manual requirement.

Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite but more
along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time.
License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.

On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

> in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
> understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
> code."
>
> Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
> One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
> the full path existed. oops.
>
> But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
> handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 7:12 AM Kenneth Goodwin
> <kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I actually purchased several copies of Coherent when it was first
> released and used it as printer servers for a bunch of inexpensive
> Centronics based printers. lpd based server to server transfers. Took the
> printing burden off the main systems. Someone came out with a network based
> print spooler box (Milan ??) later on which I switched over to after MW
> passed into obscurity.
> >
> >
> > On Sun, May 1, 2022, 7:46 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago.
> >>
> >> > On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
> >> > from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
> >> > is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
> >> > genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
> >> > first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
> >> > but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
> >> > my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
> >> > predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
> >> > actually the first.
> >>
>

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* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 18:08     ` ron minnich
  2022-05-01 18:22       ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
  2022-05-02  2:08       ` Kenneth Goodwin
@ 2022-05-02  2:42       ` Phil Budne
  2022-05-02  6:46         ` Ron Natalie
                           ` (3 more replies)
  2 siblings, 4 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Phil Budne @ 2022-05-02  2:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Ron Minnich wrote:
> in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
> understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
> code."

My memory, from having a "finger" program that tried to display the
foreground/active process for each tty/login/utmp entry, is that there
it was possible there were multiple code bases (tho it's possible
there was just one, and it mutated wildly across major versions), all
called "AIX" (and as my old boss, Barry Shein (BZS) at Boston
University said, they all "will remind you of Unix"), there were (at
least) versions for:

RT PC
RS/6000 (POWER, PowerPC)
PS/2

I never had access to AIX/370, but BZS got a chance to try it out in a
VM on the academic computing S/390, and ISTR he said it finished
compiles before you hit return.

There was also a (pretty clean, ISTR) port of 4.3 BSD to the RT called
"ACIS", but it might only have been available to academic sites.

My memory is also that IBM had a very broad license for SVR2 and when
the Open Software Foundation came together (with people who weren't
AT&T or Sun), IBM was able to offer that up as a code base.




















gether,

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  2:42       ` Phil Budne
@ 2022-05-02  6:46         ` Ron Natalie
  2022-05-02 13:50           ` Clem Cole
                             ` (2 more replies)
  2022-05-02 12:59         ` Kenneth Goodwin
                           ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  3 siblings, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Ron Natalie @ 2022-05-02  6:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1425 bytes --]

Back around 1989 our company was provided the AIX 370 and PS/2 source code.    This was a distinct code base from either of the RT UNIXes.    It was a pretty straight-forward UNIX kernel with what IBM termed the Transparent Computing Facility (derived from the UCLA locus stuff).    We were porting it to an IBM-produced four-processor i860 board called the W4.    It was fairly neat in that the file system could support hidden versions of the executables for each of the different platforms, and if you invoked one that didn't exist on your local hardware, it automatically ran it on one where it existed.

The W4 was a microchannel card that had its own frame buffer (I wrote an X Server for it) but lived inside a PS2, so during the port, it was easy just to use the 386 versions of the bulk of the executables.    When working at IBM's Palo Alto facility I could even execute on the 370-variant there as well.   The W4 kernel looked more like the 370 than the 386 interestingly.

I hacked on the -mm macro package to make it stylistically look like IBM's manuals so we could produce our documentation to look like there's.   We had to have our facility inspected to hold IBM's source code (I referred to the room as the toxic waste dump).    Our other joke is that IBM had a multiplexed console that they called the HFT (High Function Terminal).   When I wrote the simple console for the W4 kernel, I called it the LFT.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  2:08       ` Kenneth Goodwin
@ 2022-05-02  9:21         ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
  2022-05-02 20:19           ` Rich Morin
  2022-05-10 15:28         ` Mary Ann Horton
  2022-05-15  2:00         ` Stuart Remphrey
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Dr Iain Maoileoin @ 2022-05-02  9:21 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Kenneth Goodwin; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3017 bytes --]


> On 2 May 2022, at 03:08, Kenneth Goodwin <kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source code and then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days experience with it on a POS cash register fixing a client issue. The shocker - they changed all the error messages to error codes with a look at the manual requirement.
> 
> Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
> But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite but more along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time. 
> License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
In the UK in the 80s IBM had large bill-board adverts that ran along the lines of “…we took UNIX and added a million lines of code …..”.
I always thought (rather unfairly) YES, and every one of them was wrong.

However one of my car registration plates is "AIX OK”.  I changed my mind later on….
> 
> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com <mailto:rminnich@gmail.com>> wrote:
> in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
> understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
> code."
> 
> Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
> One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
> the full path existed. oops.
> 
> But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
> handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
> 
> 
> On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 7:12 AM Kenneth Goodwin
> <kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com <mailto:kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > I actually purchased several copies of Coherent when it was first released and used it as printer servers for a bunch of inexpensive Centronics based printers. lpd based server to server transfers. Took the printing burden off the main systems. Someone came out with a network based print spooler box (Milan ??) later on which I switched over to after MW passed into obscurity.
> >
> >
> > On Sun, May 1, 2022, 7:46 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com <mailto:ron@ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> Mark Williams Coherent was one I worked with on the PC many years ago.
> >>
> >> > On May 1, 2022, at 11:34, Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com <mailto:andreww591@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
> >> > from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
> >> > is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
> >> > genetic Unix), but was it actually the first? Similarly, which was the
> >> > first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
> >> > but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
> >> > my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
> >> > predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
> >> > actually the first.
> >>


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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  2:42       ` Phil Budne
  2022-05-02  6:46         ` Ron Natalie
@ 2022-05-02 12:59         ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-02 14:13           ` Richard Salz
  2022-05-02 13:14         ` tytso
  2022-05-02 13:16         ` Dan Cross
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Kenneth Goodwin @ 2022-05-02 12:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Phil Budne; +Cc: TUHS main list

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Compiles before the return key

That phrase as i recall it i have associated with the Amdahl mainframe, not
IBM. Anyone else recall this event at a  USENIX conference???

They released a C Compiler for it and I think also a unix version for it.

the phrase that they coined to indicate the shear speed of it  at the time
went something like this -

You can compile the entire UNIX kernel in the debounce time of the return
key.

It was part of the presentation on their C compiler implementation. Perhaps
it was IBM and I need to replace some faulty core and rebuild some database
indices......

The phrase has been stuck in my head ever since.


On Sun, May 1, 2022, 10:43 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:

> Ron Minnich wrote:
> > in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
> > understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
> > code."
>
> My memory, from having a "finger" program that tried to display the
> foreground/active process for each tty/login/utmp entry, is that there
> it was possible there were multiple code bases (tho it's possible
> there was just one, and it mutated wildly across major versions), all
> called "AIX" (and as my old boss, Barry Shein (BZS) at Boston
> University said, they all "will remind you of Unix"), there were (at
> least) versions for:
>
> RT PC
> RS/6000 (POWER, PowerPC)
> PS/2
>
> I never had access to AIX/370, but BZS got a chance to try it out in a
> VM on the academic computing S/390, and ISTR he said it finished
> compiles before you hit return.
>
> There was also a (pretty clean, ISTR) port of 4.3 BSD to the RT called
> "ACIS", but it might only have been available to academic sites.
>
> My memory is also that IBM had a very broad license for SVR2 and when
> the Open Software Foundation came together (with people who weren't
> AT&T or Sun), IBM was able to offer that up as a code base.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> gether,
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  2:42       ` Phil Budne
  2022-05-02  6:46         ` Ron Natalie
  2022-05-02 12:59         ` Kenneth Goodwin
@ 2022-05-02 13:14         ` tytso
  2022-05-02 13:32           ` Larry McVoy
  2022-05-02 13:16         ` Dan Cross
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: tytso @ 2022-05-02 13:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Phil Budne; +Cc: tuhs

On Sun, May 01, 2022 at 10:42:03PM -0400, Phil Budne wrote:
> There was also a (pretty clean, ISTR) port of 4.3 BSD to the RT called
> "ACIS", but it might only have been available to academic sites.

At least in the 80's, there was a BSD 4.3 port for the IBM PC/RT's
that was called "AOS", for "Academic Operating System".  For proof
that my memory isn't playing tricks on me, here's independent
confirmation :-)

	https://archiveos.org/aos/

At the time, it was pretty popular at MIT's Project Athena, mostly
because the RT's were contemporaneous with the MicroVax's, but had
three times faster integer operations, which made running TeX and
LaTeX a far more pleasant experience for those of us who were
typesetting papers and problem sets.  :-)

When AOS was sunset and Athena was frog-marched to use AIX, RT's
suddenly became far less popular.  :-/

						- Ted

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  2:42       ` Phil Budne
                           ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2022-05-02 13:14         ` tytso
@ 2022-05-02 13:16         ` Dan Cross
  2022-05-02 14:14           ` Miod Vallat
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2022-05-02 13:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Phil Budne; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2422 bytes --]

On Mon, May 2, 2022, 2:43 AM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:

> Ron Minnich wrote:
> > in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
> > understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
> > code."
>
> My memory, from having a "finger" program that tried to display the
> foreground/active process for each tty/login/utmp entry, is that there
> it was possible there were multiple code bases (tho it's possible
> there was just one, and it mutated wildly across major versions), all
> called "AIX" (and as my old boss, Barry Shein (BZS) at Boston
> University said, they all "will remind you of Unix"), there were (at
> least) versions for:
>
> RT PC
> RS/6000 (POWER, PowerPC)
> PS/2
>
> I never had access to AIX/370, but BZS got a chance to try it out in a
> VM on the academic computing S/390, and ISTR he said it finished
> compiles before you hit return.
>
> There was also a (pretty clean, ISTR) port of 4.3 BSD to the RT called
> "ACIS", but it might only have been available to academic sites.
>

The RT 4.3 port was called AOS (for the, "Academic Operating System"). It
was mostly Tahoe with NFS and came with most of the sources, but some bits
were distributed only as object code: I believe some of the MM bits?
Perhaps the MMU code? I vaguely recall this being one of the things people
had a hard time with when trying to port Reno and 4.4 to the RT.

ACIS was, I believe a marketing term for the RT running AOS as sold to
universities.

The port was fairly faithful; the C compiler was a bit strange "High C" or
"Hi C", bit GCC was available after a while, but had some bug and could not
compile the kernel.

Charlie Sauer kindly answered some AOS/RT questions on this list a few
years ago, but as I'm typing this on my phone, I can't look them up right
now. :-(

My memory is also that IBM had a very broad license for SVR2 and when
> the Open Software Foundation came together (with people who weren't
> AT&T or Sun), IBM was able to offer that up as a code base.


My understanding is that AIX on the mainframe was closer to OSF/1 than to
AIX on the RS/6000, which was rather different than AIX on the RT.

RS/6000 was the successor to the RT, and AIX on the latter stopped after
version 2, so I'm guessing RS/6k was more evolved than RT AIX, while (as I
heard it many years ago) mainframe AIX was its own thing; the name was
mostly marketing.

        - Dan C.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 13:14         ` tytso
@ 2022-05-02 13:32           ` Larry McVoy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2022-05-02 13:32 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tytso; +Cc: tuhs

On Mon, May 02, 2022 at 06:14:54AM -0700, tytso wrote:
> On Sun, May 01, 2022 at 10:42:03PM -0400, Phil Budne wrote:
> > There was also a (pretty clean, ISTR) port of 4.3 BSD to the RT called
> > "ACIS", but it might only have been available to academic sites.
> 
> At least in the 80's, there was a BSD 4.3 port for the IBM PC/RT's
> that was called "AOS", for "Academic Operating System".  

I'm pretty sure it was UW-Madison that did the NFS port to 4.3, I was a
grad student there at the time and remember hearing about it.  The RT's
were pretty nice machines for the time.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  6:46         ` Ron Natalie
@ 2022-05-02 13:50           ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-02 14:46             ` tytso
  2022-05-02 23:30           ` Gregg Levine
       [not found]           ` <CAK7dMtD08weh+97mx+ncrq0cxprKgke42C0vFYNPnBkd8Fx9Sg@mail.gmail.com>
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-02 13:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Ron Natalie; +Cc: tuhs

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in blue

On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 2:57 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> Back around 1989 our company was provided the AIX 370 and PS/2 source
> code.    This was a distinct code base from either of the RT UNIXes.
>
Correct -- AIX for the 370 ISA and 386 were compiled from the same code base



>   It was a pretty straight-forward UNIX kernel with what IBM termed the
> Transparent Computing Facility (derived from the UCLA locus stuff).
>
Not quite correct.

TCF was based on the ideas from the Locus Distributed OS.   But not the
same code.  The Locus Distributed OS was based on a research (V7) kernel
originally on 11/70s; although I believe UCLA added BSDism over time and
Vax support (I never saw that personally).  But more importantly, AIX and
TCF itself were also owned by IBM (*i.e.* it was a work for hire of LCC for
IBM).   Bruce Walker was the implementation lead for both (and one of
Jerry's grad students).

Locus TNC (which is what OpenSSI for Linux is based on[1]) - although the
website seems to be taken down sadly - it never was ported beyond Linux 2.6
kernel) is a completely new implementation yet.   I'm one of the architects
of the same.   We were 'firewalled' so Bruce and our peers could talk about
things, but I was never allowed to actually look at the IBM code base.  I
could >>use<< it to try things out.  After the IBM AIX contract ended,
Bruce and the old AIX team at LCC was then given full access to TNC source
trees which Locus owned the IP.

The big difference between the 3 was the Locus was its own OS, that
supported UNIX-like features.  Whereas TFC was built into a modified/custom
AIX kernel and special FS with ad hoc support for the different issues that
allow process migration.   One of the cool things as Ron pointed out was
the TCF allowed the mixing of binaries from Intel and IBM ISAs and the
kernel would use whatever processor it needed.   With the 3rd generation
TNC, the technology was split into 14 separate 'products' that used
structured interfaces in the kernel.  For instance, the process support was
encapsulated in what we called VPROC (similar to the multiple FS style
layers from Research and later Sun -* i.e.* the different VFS) and while it
worked better if you used the Locus supplied cluster file system (which
supported full Unix semantics), basic process migration within the
constraints that NFS placed, also worked (the HP implementation was based
on NFS, while DEC, Intel, and SRVR4 implementations used CFS).
My personal role was much of CFS and some of the utility functions like the
Cluster Management System (CMS).

In fact, a small demonstration of TNC was done with OS/2 to show that the
OS/2 process semantics and the UNIX process semantics could co-exist, but
it was never completed as IBM did not buy it.  However, some of the
technology landed in the Rochesters AS/400 OS in their Posix emulator which
Locus also had a hand in building.

One of my favorite demos was at a trade show that had a LAN; our folks
would bring a PS/2 with an empty hard disk and load a single floppy.  Boot
the kernel, and add it to the TCF cluster back at LCC.  The system
immediately was usable, although since the disk was not populated, all
binaries had to come across the LAN/WAN.  But the caching would start to
take over in the background and slowly populated a local copy of /bin,
/lib, and the like.  Very cool ...

Clem

[1] Sadly, when I checked this AM, the OpenSSI website seemed to be taken
down.  I d not believe OpenSSI was ever beyond Linux 2.6 kernel.  IMO: It
was a shame that the upstream Linux kernel team had been willing to take
the VPROC changes, it would have been a very interesting and
exciting system enhancement.   As Ron said, anyone that used TCF or TNC was
pretty much hooked. I'll have to do some more poking to find out what
happened.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 12:59         ` Kenneth Goodwin
@ 2022-05-02 14:13           ` Richard Salz
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Richard Salz @ 2022-05-02 14:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Kenneth Goodwin; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 380 bytes --]

I remember hearing that about Cray. The anecdote was they thought their
port of "make" was broken because it kept rebuilding everything. It turned
out that the timestamp granularity of one second wasn't good enough.

Also that if you wanted your program to stop, you needed three 'halt'
instructions to make sure the full pipeline got the message.  I'm less sure
if that is real.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 13:16         ` Dan Cross
@ 2022-05-02 14:14           ` Miod Vallat
  2022-05-02 14:50             ` ron minnich
                               ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Miod Vallat @ 2022-05-02 14:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> The RT 4.3 port was called AOS (for the, "Academic Operating System"). It
> was mostly Tahoe with NFS and came with most of the sources, but some bits
> were distributed only as object code: I believe some of the MM bits?
> Perhaps the MMU code? I vaguely recall this being one of the things people
> had a hard time with when trying to port Reno and 4.4 to the RT.

What was delivered as binary was the Advanced Floating-Point Accelerator
microcode.

At the end of the AOS work circa 1996, most of the kernel was 4.4,
except for the network stack which was 4.3-Reno, and the VM system which
was still 4.3 (hence no mmap).

> The port was fairly faithful; the C compiler was a bit strange "High C" or
> "Hi C", bit GCC was available after a while, but had some bug and could not
> compile the kernel.

The compiler was Metaware High C. GCC could not be used to compile the
kernel sources unchanged, because one of the locore->trap.c paths was
relying upon the stack layout used by the compiler. With that fixed, gcc
could be used to build a working kernel.

Miod

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 13:50           ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-02 14:46             ` tytso
  2022-05-02 15:38               ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: tytso @ 2022-05-02 14:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: tuhs

On Mon, May 02, 2022 at 09:50:28AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> [1] Sadly, when I checked this AM, the OpenSSI website seemed to be taken
> down.  I d not believe OpenSSI was ever beyond Linux 2.6 kernel.  IMO: It
> was a shame that the upstream Linux kernel team had been willing to take
> the VPROC changes, it would have been a very interesting and
> exciting system enhancement.   As Ron said, anyone that used TCF or TNC was
> pretty much hooked. I'll have to do some more poking to find out what
> happened.

It looks like some sources and mailung list archives for OpenSSI are
still available sourceforage:

	https://sourceforge.net/p/ssic-linux

From what I can tell, the OpenSSI folks were focsued on porting
OpenSSI to various distributions (Fedora, Debian, RHEL), etc., but
they were not focused on getting any of their changes upstream.  The
only evidence I can find of OpenSSI on the Linux Kernel mailing list
was a forwarded announcement of OpenSSI 1.0:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/410DDFA2.40107@hp.com/T/#r2b3cfcce5ccd8127a8493e7987349a1921597537

And apparently OpenSSI had patches to e2fsprogs (since they had a
clusterfied version of ext3), but no one ever sent the OpenSSI
e2fsprogs patches to me for review.  So it appears that it was not a
matter of "the upstream Linux kernel team.... [being] willing to take
the VPROC changes", it was more like no one asked, or prepared patches
that could be considered by usptream.

				- Ted

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 14:14           ` Miod Vallat
@ 2022-05-02 14:50             ` ron minnich
  2022-05-02 16:13             ` Al Kossow
  2022-05-02 21:17             ` Dan Cross
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: ron minnich @ 2022-05-02 14:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Miod Vallat; +Cc: TUHS main list

Someone mentioned the weird message format on AIX. IBM, in many
things, was out there ahead of everyone. One of those areas was in
"the message catalog", sample doc here:
https://www-40.ibm.com/servers/resourcelink/svc00100.nsf/pages/zOSV2R3SA380673/$file/ieam600_v2r3.pdf

For every message there was a short identifier that was the message
catalog id, the one that sticks in my mind from years as an operator
is IEA013I, which is not in that doc ... IEA013E is, however.

This was useful for internationalization. IOW, IBM got it i8n well
ahead of a lot of us, in the 19[67]0s or so? The message catalog did
not change; the allegedly human readable message was in the local
language, if that applied.

Which comes to a prank we pulled on a friend. One evening in 1977, we
replaced all shell messages with IBM message catalog style messages,
and then set that as their login shell.

As you might guess, they were *not* amused ;-)


On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 7:16 AM Miod Vallat <miod@online.fr> wrote:
>
> > The RT 4.3 port was called AOS (for the, "Academic Operating System"). It
> > was mostly Tahoe with NFS and came with most of the sources, but some bits
> > were distributed only as object code: I believe some of the MM bits?
> > Perhaps the MMU code? I vaguely recall this being one of the things people
> > had a hard time with when trying to port Reno and 4.4 to the RT.
>
> What was delivered as binary was the Advanced Floating-Point Accelerator
> microcode.
>
> At the end of the AOS work circa 1996, most of the kernel was 4.4,
> except for the network stack which was 4.3-Reno, and the VM system which
> was still 4.3 (hence no mmap).
>
> > The port was fairly faithful; the C compiler was a bit strange "High C" or
> > "Hi C", bit GCC was available after a while, but had some bug and could not
> > compile the kernel.
>
> The compiler was Metaware High C. GCC could not be used to compile the
> kernel sources unchanged, because one of the locore->trap.c paths was
> relying upon the stack layout used by the compiler. With that fixed, gcc
> could be used to build a working kernel.
>
> Miod

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 14:46             ` tytso
@ 2022-05-02 15:38               ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-02 20:31                 ` Warner Losh
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-02 15:38 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

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On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 10:46 AM tytso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> So it appears that it was not a
> matter of "the upstream Linux kernel team.... [being] willing to take
> the VPROC changes", it was more like no one asked, or prepared patches
> that could be considered by usptream.
>
FWIW:  I know that at least 3 people on the OpenSSI team were telling me
they were told to go away.   I do not know the details of the interchange,
but doing some Linux work at the time, I too found the reception to kernel
changes to often be a tad cold (it took 10 years to get the core RDMA
support up-streamed). It's possible the way the OpenSSI team asked, the
prayers offered were not acceptable to those in charge at the time.  I
don't know, but please be careful here. *They were tried and feel that they
were rejected.*   *That is history*.  I understand that you want to try
to say, well there is no evidence of the proper emails/git change, *etc.*
 But that team ran into blocks.  So you can be a lawyer about it, or you
can try to accept what actually happened to those of us on the other end
with some grace.

FWIW: Larry M and I have often disagreed about the 'open-ness' of the
traditional UNIX releases from AT&T.   I suspect we are both right in our
position given the history that we each experienced.  Larry's position
(which I understand and accept) is that from his standpoint, it just was
not *open to him *as the University kept things under lock and key. I
always find that strange because I had absolutely the opposite history.  I
know my friend at MIT had free access, I can only assume you enjoyed that
yourself/but I'll not try to speak for you.  I believe it was available if
you had wanted it, while it was not Larry at UWis.

I do not know for sure in the case of the OpenSSI team, I know what they
have told me, but my >>guess<< is that something similar is happening
here.   The issue, which I think was similar to the pushback my teams
received with
RDMA around the same timeframe --> the core Linux kernel team was still
trying to fight to be a desktop war and had not yet started to focus on where
it would become a major success (enterprise-class system).   RDMA (and I
suspect OpenSSI too) was not seen as something that was relevant to the
desktop war and the creators were discouraged to continue to pursue it.

Taking my own experience here, RDMA only got upstreamed because so many
people at Intel started working in the Linux kernel team and people like me
at Intel who did care about that support, had to be a tad forceful to get
it there.  As I said, it took about 10 years before it came out. all
clustered Linux systems use it.   In my own experience when we started that
work in the early/mid-1990s, I personally was quite directly told [IIRC to]
'bugger off' in an email from one of the core Linux kernel folks (not you
mind you - but I bet you can guess) - that they were not interested in the
feature.  The word was something on the order of adding RDMA would only
make it hard for the VM system and no one would use it.  What is
interesting is that it's pretty popular and now a lot of hardware is being
designed assuming it is there and the Linux implementation frankly is the
most complete.  I've also seen a number of distros advertise their support
for RDMA HW these days.

Back to my core point.  Adding support for VPROC was invasive to the kernel
itself.  There is code to support processes in lots of places (For instance
the code to send different signals even makes it into some device
drivers).    So it means moving all the process code into separate modules
(like the file systems) and then making the core kernel call indirectly
through that layer.  Once that layer and functions are added, it means that
different process models (like a distributed one needed for something like
TNC) become a loadable module. Kernel's that do need it, just load the
traditional process model.  The other thing that is cool, IMO, it means you
can start to play with other process models.  Adding processes that use a
different API (*e.g.* my comment about the OS/2 demo we did for IBM).  Yes,
the changes are invasive to add support, but the power is extraordinary.

So ....   I also, personally know a number of the folks that worked on the
OpenSSI project and I suspect they tried to get the VPROC changes
upstreamed too, but were ignored/discouraged, and they finally gave up
trying.   I know at one point Frank started to put VPROC support into
FreeBSD, but I don't think that went anywhere either (although I don't
think he finished it).  I also know that the *Linux port to 2.6 was
complete at one point* (I personally had it running on a cluster here at
Intel with RDMA too BTW), but I never tried the FreeBSD codebase.

And yes, I do think that is a real shame and that it does not speak well of
history.  History has probably lost something good because at this point
the people involved are just not interested in trying anymore.

Clem
ᐧ

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* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01  9:30 [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code? Andrew Warkentin
  2022-05-01 11:43 ` Ron Natalie
  2022-05-01 20:55 ` Michael Huff
@ 2022-05-02 15:43 ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-02 16:16   ` Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-02 15:43 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Andrew Warkentin; +Cc: tuhs

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On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 5:34 AM Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com>
wrote:

> What was the first "clone" functional Unix (i.e. an OS not derived
> from genetic Unix code but highly compatible with genetic Unix)? Idris
> is the earliest such OS of which I am aware (at least AFAIK it's not a
> genetic Unix), but was it actually the first?

I know of none before this that tried to truly 'clone' all the (v6) kernel
functionality and many tools.



> Similarly, which was the
> first "outer Unix-like" system (i.e. one with strong Unix influence
> but significantly incompatible with functional Unix)? Off the top of
> my head the earliest such system I can think of is Thoth (which
> predates Idris by almost 2 years), but again I'm not sure if it was
> actually the first.
>
Thoth Thucks....   [Kelly Booth gave me one of these tee's years go].

Mike Malcolm did not try to clone UNIX - for one thing, it was in B [which
Steve Johnson has spread the gospel of same on his sabbatical).  It was not
until the Thoth rewrite that became QNX that they tried to ensure all of
the Unix behaviors and APIs.  Mike was certainly had an influence by UNIX
and IIRC his thesis and the Thoth papers reference/compare it.

The first non-C style mostly cone was Holt's Tunis in the early 1980-s (in
Euclid IIRC - which is similar to, but different from, Hansen and Wirth's
Concurrent-Pascal).
ᐧ

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 14:14           ` Miod Vallat
  2022-05-02 14:50             ` ron minnich
@ 2022-05-02 16:13             ` Al Kossow
  2022-05-02 18:46               ` Miod Vallat
  2022-05-02 19:54               ` Chet Ramey
  2022-05-02 21:17             ` Dan Cross
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Al Kossow @ 2022-05-02 16:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

On 5/2/22 7:14 AM, Miod Vallat wrote:

> The compiler was Metaware High C. GCC could not be used to compile the
> kernel sources unchanged, because one of the locore->trap.c paths was
> relying upon the stack layout used by the compiler. With that fixed, gcc
> could be used to build a working kernel.

does that kernel source tree survive anywhere?



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 15:43 ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-02 16:16   ` Bakul Shah
  2022-05-02 16:19     ` Bakul Shah
                       ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2022-05-02 16:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: tuhs

On May 2, 2022, at 8:43 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> Thoth Thucks....   [Kelly Booth gave me one of these tee's years go].
> 
> Mike Malcolm did not try to clone UNIX - for one thing, it was in B [which Steve Johnson has spread the gospel of same on his sabbatical).  It was not until the Thoth rewrite that became QNX that they tried to ensure all of the Unix behaviors and APIs.  Mike was certainly had an influence by UNIX and IIRC his thesis and the Thoth papers reference/compare it.

IIRC Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge worked with Thoth as students but QNX is not derived from it. I ran across QNX at a contract job in 1986 or so[1]. Back then it fit in 8KB. IIRC the original few versions were mostly written in assembly language or had substantial portions in assembly while most of Thoth was written in C[2]. The original QNX was basically a message passing microkernel. Unix APIs came in much later.

[1] I had to debug some obscure problem where the QNX was running on a text to speech board plugged in a PC and was connected to an IBM 370 system. The TTS system was used to allow a salesperson to place an order or something. It failed randomly. In the end it turned out to be an "undocumented" h/w bug in 286 (Intel knew about it but they denied when we asked!). I caught it in the act using a logic analyzer! Anyway, I had to get pretty familiar with QNX then.

[2] In 1981 AMD tried to get into computer business via AMC (American Micro Computers). They  used Thoth! I interviewed there but in the end joined Fortune Systems.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 16:16   ` Bakul Shah
@ 2022-05-02 16:19     ` Bakul Shah
  2022-05-02 17:14       ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-02 16:29     ` Larry McVoy
  2022-05-02 17:42     ` Clem Cole
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2022-05-02 16:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: tuhs



> On May 2, 2022, at 9:16 AM, Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:
> 
> On May 2, 2022, at 8:43 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Thoth Thucks....   [Kelly Booth gave me one of these tee's years go].
>> 
>> Mike Malcolm did not try to clone UNIX - for one thing, it was in B [which Steve Johnson has spread the gospel of same on his sabbatical).  It was not until the Thoth rewrite that became QNX that they tried to ensure all of the Unix behaviors and APIs.  Mike was certainly had an influence by UNIX and IIRC his thesis and the Thoth papers reference/compare it.
> 
> IIRC Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge worked with Thoth as students but QNX is not derived from it. I ran across QNX at a contract job in 1986 or so[1]. Back then it fit in 8KB. IIRC the original few versions were mostly written in assembly language or had substantial portions in assembly while most of Thoth was written in C[2]. The original QNX was basically a message passing microkernel. Unix APIs came in much later.
> 
> [1] I had to debug some obscure problem where the QNX was running on a text to speech board plugged in a PC and was connected to an IBM 370 system. The TTS system was used to allow a salesperson to place an order or something. It failed randomly. In the end it turned out to be an "undocumented" h/w bug in 286 (Intel knew about it but they denied when we asked!). I caught it in the act using a logic analyzer! Anyway, I had to get pretty familiar with QNX then.
> 
> [2] In 1981 AMD tried to get into computer business via AMC (American Micro Computers). They  used Thoth! I interviewed there but in the end joined Fortune Systems.

Correction: Thoth was written in "Zed", similar to C. 


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 16:16   ` Bakul Shah
  2022-05-02 16:19     ` Bakul Shah
@ 2022-05-02 16:29     ` Larry McVoy
  2022-05-02 17:42     ` Clem Cole
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2022-05-02 16:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Bakul Shah; +Cc: tuhs

On Mon, May 02, 2022 at 09:16:40AM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On May 2, 2022, at 8:43 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Thoth Thucks....   [Kelly Booth gave me one of these tee's years go].
> > 
> > Mike Malcolm did not try to clone UNIX - for one thing, it was in B [which Steve Johnson has spread the gospel of same on his sabbatical).  It was not until the Thoth rewrite that became QNX that they tried to ensure all of the Unix behaviors and APIs.  Mike was certainly had an influence by UNIX and IIRC his thesis and the Thoth papers reference/compare it.
> 
> IIRC Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge worked with Thoth as students but QNX is not derived from it. I ran across QNX at a contract job in 1986 or so[1]. Back then it fit in 8KB. IIRC the original few versions were mostly written in assembly language or had substantial portions in assembly while most of Thoth was written in C[2]. The original QNX was basically a message passing microkernel. Unix APIs came in much later.

I was friends with Dan Hildebrandt, one of the 3 people allowed to commit
changes to the microkernel in the 1990's.  That history seems pretty
accurate though Dan told me the commonly used microkernel code fit in 4K
of instruction cache, I don't recall what it needed in the data cache.
Dan told me they were very careful to not let that bloat, I remember
him saying "the instruction cache needs to have space for user code".
A refreshing point of view, especially since I was living in "I measured
it, it's only 1% slower" AKA "death by a thousand paper cuts".

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 16:19     ` Bakul Shah
@ 2022-05-02 17:14       ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-02 17:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Bakul Shah; +Cc: tuhs

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On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 12:19 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:

>
>
>
> Correction: Thoth was written in "Zed", similar to C.
>
Indeed - but aw I understand it, Zed like C came from B.
ᐧ

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 16:16   ` Bakul Shah
  2022-05-02 16:19     ` Bakul Shah
  2022-05-02 16:29     ` Larry McVoy
@ 2022-05-02 17:42     ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-02 17:59       ` Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-02 17:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Bakul Shah; +Cc: tuhs

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On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 12:16 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:

>  Thoth as students but QNX is not derived from it.

Interesting. Possible I suppose.  Derived is probably the operative word
here.  Of course, it is also quite possible that I could be miss-remember
the conversations, but as IIRC both Mike Malcolm and Dan Hildebrandt have
said to me about the influence of one on the other when I have spoken with
them socially.  Also, Kelly (who got the shirt and was at Waterloo during
that time), and was the person that introduced me to Mike in the late
1970s; also said something similar to me.

FWIW: In the late 1980s, I too used QNX (in C) in a production setting on a
386.  Before that, I had played with Thoth in a grad OS course, but I never
ran it significantly.

That said, my point was that Thoth was not trying to be a UNIX look/work
alike from an API standpoint.   Thoth, like V,  RIG, Accent, *et al*, were
all distinct developments that learned from the UNIX work but were not
trying to emulate it.   When QNX was birthed, the mK was not trying to be
UNIX, but they, like Mach later on (after the failure of Accent), did try
to supply an application layer UNIX (and later full POSIX) API.

The point that started this thread was when UNIX emulated.

BTW: I had Ieft out another important Pascal-based UNIX clone.  In 1983,
Michael Gien published his work in USENIX on Sol.  In the early 1990s, he
and his team rewrote that in C++ to create Chorus.

When OSF announced its long-term strategy for OSF/1 was to be based on
Mach; UI announced that the future SVR6 was to be based on Chorus.  While
the former was eventually released (and I think the sources can still be
found in the wild), I did not believe the latter was ever completed.

Clem



ᐧ

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 17:42     ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-02 17:59       ` Bakul Shah
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2022-05-02 17:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2577 bytes --]



> On May 2, 2022, at 10:42 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 12:16 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org <mailto:bakul@iitbombay.org>> wrote:
>  Thoth as students but QNX is not derived from it. 
> Interesting. Possible I suppose.  Derived is probably the operative word here.  Of course, it is also quite possible that I could be miss-remember the conversations, but as IIRC both Mike Malcolm and Dan Hildebrandt have said to me about the influence of one on the other when I have spoken with them socially.  Also, Kelly (who got the shirt and was at Waterloo during that time), and was the person that introduced me to Mike in the late 1970s; also said something similar to me.

[I scramble old memories all the time but I seem to remember random facts that are of no use to me :-)]

> 
> FWIW: In the late 1980s, I too used QNX (in C) in a production setting on a 386.  Before that, I had played with Thoth in a grad OS course, but I never ran it significantly.
> 
> That said, my point was that Thoth was not trying to be a UNIX look/work alike from an API standpoint.   Thoth, like V,  RIG, Accent, et al, were all distinct developments that learned from the UNIX work but were not trying to emulate it.   When QNX was birthed, the mK was not trying to be UNIX, but they, like Mach later on (after the failure of Accent), did try to supply an application layer UNIX (and later full POSIX) API. 

Indeed. These were all research OSes. The thing that distinguished Unix was the collection of tools and composability via pipes and shell that made for a very nice development env. As a grad student I didn't quite appreciate this (not having used Unix) but the moment I used it, I was sold on it!

From what I remember, A Thoth "team" was about the same as a Unix "process" and Thoth "process" was a thread in a team. That to me was the most interesting part about it. Unix got threads much later.
 
> The point that started this thread was when UNIX emulated.
> 
> BTW: I had Ieft out another important Pascal-based UNIX clone.  In 1983, Michael Gien published his work in USENIX on Sol.  In the early 1990s, he and his team rewrote that in C++ to create Chorus.

I remember Sol but by then I had moved on from Pascal.

> When OSF announced its long-term strategy for OSF/1 was to be based on Mach; UI announced that the future SVR6 was to be based on Chorus.  While the former was eventually released (and I think the sources can still be found in the wild), I did not believe the latter was ever completed.


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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 16:13             ` Al Kossow
@ 2022-05-02 18:46               ` Miod Vallat
  2022-05-02 19:54               ` Chet Ramey
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Miod Vallat @ 2022-05-02 18:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Al Kossow; +Cc: tuhs

> > The compiler was Metaware High C. GCC could not be used to compile the
> > kernel sources unchanged, because one of the locore->trap.c paths was
> > relying upon the stack layout used by the compiler. With that fixed, gcc
> > could be used to build a working kernel.
> 
> does that kernel source tree survive anywhere?

As the person who did that work, it's only in my own AOS tree, which I
really ought to publish somewhere eventually. I also have fixes for gcc
2.95 to make it more reliable on the RT. But ENOTIME at the moment...

Miod

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 16:13             ` Al Kossow
  2022-05-02 18:46               ` Miod Vallat
@ 2022-05-02 19:54               ` Chet Ramey
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Chet Ramey @ 2022-05-02 19:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Al Kossow, tuhs

On 5/2/22 12:13 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
> On 5/2/22 7:14 AM, Miod Vallat wrote:
> 
>> The compiler was Metaware High C. GCC could not be used to compile the
>> kernel sources unchanged, because one of the locore->trap.c paths was
>> relying upon the stack layout used by the compiler. With that fixed, gcc
>> could be used to build a working kernel.
> 
> does that kernel source tree survive anywhere?

I have a copy of the entire source tree. We used it extensively, and I ran
it on a castoff RT in my home office for years.

-- 
``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/

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  9:21         ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
@ 2022-05-02 20:19           ` Rich Morin
  2022-05-02 21:30             ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-02 21:36             ` Dan Cross
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Rich Morin @ 2022-05-02 20:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> On May 2, 2022, at 02:21, Dr Iain Maoileoin <iain@csp-partnership.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> ... In the UK in the 80s IBM had large bill-board adverts that ran along the lines of “…we took UNIX and added a million lines of code …..”.
> I always thought (rather unfairly) YES, and every one of them was wrong.
> 
> However one of my car registration plates is "AIX OK”.  I changed my mind later on….

I love Barry Shein's snark on AIX (and occasionally paraphrase it for Linux):

"AIX - It will remind you of Unix."

-r


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 15:38               ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-02 20:31                 ` Warner Losh
  2022-05-03  5:01                   ` tytso
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2022-05-02 20:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 10:46 AM tytso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> So it appears that it was not a
>> matter of "the upstream Linux kernel team.... [being] willing to take
>> the VPROC changes", it was more like no one asked, or prepared patches
>> that could be considered by usptream.
>>
> FWIW:  I know that at least 3 people on the OpenSSI team were telling me
> they were told to go away.   I do not know the details of the interchange,
> but doing some Linux work at the time, I too found the reception to kernel
> changes to often be a tad cold (it took 10 years to get the core RDMA
> support up-streamed). It's possible the way the OpenSSI team asked, the
> prayers offered were not acceptable to those in charge at the time.  I
> don't know, but please be careful here. *They were tried and feel
> that they were rejected.*   *That is history*.  I understand that you
> want to try to say, well there is no evidence of the proper emails/git
> change, *etc.*   But that team ran into blocks.  So you can be a lawyer
> about it, or you can try to accept what actually happened to those of us on
> the other end with some grace.
>

I know from wearing my FreeBSD hat that random people on mailing lists
often say 'nope' and people go away not realizing they aren't the abitors
of what gets into FreeBSD. We lost a lot of good contributions because of
delays created by scenarios like this...

I also know that getting changes into Linux suffers from this and for a
long time (especially pre-git) was almost impossible unless you knew
someone and were on good terms with them.

Also, people will get frustrated after one or two things don't go up and
they don't do the rest. Or they do one big huge thing that's impossible to
review (maybe it went to the wrong place) and they give up too unless
there's an 'advocate' that works with them to make the changes bite-sized
and sorts out the wheat from the chaff that's almost always in huge change
sets. The process that was documented was hit or miss. Plus lkm wasn't the
nicest of places with the best of interactions, which put off a lot of
people from even trying... Much has been done to improve things in the last
20 years, but for a while things were truly awful for someone without a
huge reputation to get anything non-trivial into Linux. Even today,
projects following the Linux model can be difficult to land changes in,
even when you are nominally the maintainer of a part of the tree...

VPROC was done for 2.6, which is long enough ago to be in the 'bad old
days' of getting things upstreamed.

It wouldn't surprise me at all that enough things were done wrong, and/or
they listened to the wrong people and/or submitted things in the wrong
place they the OpenSSI folks just gave up in frustration early on w/o
getting the right people's attention...

Warner

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* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 14:14           ` Miod Vallat
  2022-05-02 14:50             ` ron minnich
  2022-05-02 16:13             ` Al Kossow
@ 2022-05-02 21:17             ` Dan Cross
  2022-05-02 23:49               ` George Michaelson
                                 ` (2 more replies)
  2 siblings, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2022-05-02 21:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Miod Vallat; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Mon, May 2, 2022, 2:16 PM Miod Vallat <miod@online.fr> wrote:

> > The RT 4.3 port was called AOS (for the, "Academic Operating System"). It
> > was mostly Tahoe with NFS and came with most of the sources, but some
> bits
> > were distributed only as object code: I believe some of the MM bits?
> > Perhaps the MMU code? I vaguely recall this being one of the things
> people
> > had a hard time with when trying to port Reno and 4.4 to the RT.
>
> What was delivered as binary was the Advanced Floating-Point Accelerator
> microcode.


Thanks. My memory of all of this is decaying over time. I'd forgotten about
the AFPA; I believe our RTs either had a 68881 or 68882, but it's been so
long the details are fuzzy: I definitely remember a Motorola FPU, but no
longer remember the model.

At the end of the AOS work circa 1996, most of the kernel was 4.4,
> except for the network stack which was 4.3-Reno, and the VM system which
> was still 4.3 (hence no mmap).


This happened outside of IBM, didn't it? What prevented the rest of the VM
code being ported?

> The port was fairly faithful; the C compiler was a bit strange "High C" or
> > "Hi C", bit GCC was available after a while, but had some bug and could
> not
> > compile the kernel.
>
> The compiler was Metaware High C. GCC could not be used to compile the
> kernel sources unchanged, because one of the locore->trap.c paths was
> relying upon the stack layout used by the compiler. With that fixed, gcc
> could be used to build a working kernel.
>

I vaguely remember that happening, but by then we had retired the RTs.

I vaguely remember Metaware being somewhat religiously extreme, but again
the details are fuzzy now. Was there some kind of ecclesiastical reference
in the man page?

        - Dan C.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 20:19           ` Rich Morin
@ 2022-05-02 21:30             ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-02 21:36             ` Dan Cross
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-02 21:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Rich Morin; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 4:22 PM Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> wrote:

> I love Barry Shein's snark on AIX (and occasionally paraphrase it for
> Linux):
>
> "AIX - It will remind you of Unix."
>
Henry Spencer's line a few years earlier was:  "4.2 is just like Unix, only
different."
ᐧ

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 20:19           ` Rich Morin
  2022-05-02 21:30             ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-02 21:36             ` Dan Cross
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2022-05-02 21:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Rich Morin; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Mon, May 2, 2022, 8:22 PM Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> wrote:

> > On May 2, 2022, at 02:21, Dr Iain Maoileoin <iain@csp-partnership.co.uk>
> wrote:
> >
> > ... In the UK in the 80s IBM had large bill-board adverts that ran along
> the lines of “…we took UNIX and added a million lines of code …..”.
> > I always thought (rather unfairly) YES, and every one of them was wrong.
> >
> > However one of my car registration plates is "AIX OK”.  I changed my
> mind later on….
>
> I love Barry Shein's snark on AIX (and occasionally paraphrase it for
> Linux):
>
> "AIX - It will remind you of Unix."
>

One of my favorites: "SMIT happens."

        - Dan C.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  6:46         ` Ron Natalie
  2022-05-02 13:50           ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-02 23:30           ` Gregg Levine
       [not found]           ` <CAK7dMtD08weh+97mx+ncrq0cxprKgke42C0vFYNPnBkd8Fx9Sg@mail.gmail.com>
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Gregg Levine @ 2022-05-02 23:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Tuhs

Hello!
Egads! I remember trying out AIX (On an original RT/PC rig) at a
UNIXEXPO years ago. I found that the units were all networked
together, and used the telnet command to log into them from the first
one. Surprised the heck out of the sales 'droid that was present at
their booth. As for AIX/370 I found about it at a different event that
same year, And yes I did want a copy to try out under a certain
emulator named for a plane and mythological figure. And of course as a
guest under VM/370.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 2:57 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
> Back around 1989 our company was provided the AIX 370 and PS/2 source code.    This was a distinct code base from either of the RT UNIXes.    It was a pretty straight-forward UNIX kernel with what IBM termed the Transparent Computing Facility (derived from the UCLA locus stuff).    We were porting it to an IBM-produced four-processor i860 board called the W4.    It was fairly neat in that the file system could support hidden versions of the executables for each of the different platforms, and if you invoked one that didn't exist on your local hardware, it automatically ran it on one where it existed.
>
> The W4 was a microchannel card that had its own frame buffer (I wrote an X Server for it) but lived inside a PS2, so during the port, it was easy just to use the 386 versions of the bulk of the executables.    When working at IBM's Palo Alto facility I could even execute on the 370-variant there as well.   The W4 kernel looked more like the 370 than the 386 interestingly.
>
> I hacked on the -mm macro package to make it stylistically look like IBM's manuals so we could produce our documentation to look like there's.   We had to have our facility inspected to hold IBM's source code (I referred to the room as the toxic waste dump).    Our other joke is that IBM had a multiplexed console that they called the HFT (High Function Terminal).   When I wrote the simple console for the W4 kernel, I called it the LFT.
>

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 21:17             ` Dan Cross
@ 2022-05-02 23:49               ` George Michaelson
  2022-05-03  7:22                 ` Ronald Natalie
  2022-05-03  7:40               ` Miod Vallat
       [not found]               ` <CAEoi9W4eD8AF=FwjMT-KPRfyYgD+qgVvE1u3sBwiovm4=1WWLg@mail.g mail.com>
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: George Michaelson @ 2022-05-02 23:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

The PC/RT was interesting in hardware design sense, as a "user" I
found it well, arguably "over" engineered. Big bold IBM solid feel.
Connectors which were 2x chunkier than they needed to be, but then you
looked at other systems with bent pins and broken latches and the IBM
stuff was grossly over-size, but just didn't break.

The screen was good, but somehow small. We had one at the same time as
Decstation 2100s and they were greyscale, but deliciously big
monitors.

The manual set was complete, and covered everything. You had to
understand how to walk the IBM structured dewey-decimal model of
thing-sub-thing-sub-sub-thing-sub-lettter but if you got to a
fictitious  FRU-BCP-FRZ-J page, it described everything you needed to
know and had paste-overs or insert sheets about the -J variant.

It was the heaviest PC chassis I ever had to move. Other people
laughed at it, but I enjoyed using it for a year. I felt much the same
about the ICL Perq: very very heavy, but Olivetti-good cool design.
Just the right shade of Orange and Coffee for its day.

getting MBONE working on it was a joy.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 14:03     ` Kenneth Goodwin
@ 2022-05-03  4:37       ` Jim Carpenter
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Jim Carpenter @ 2022-05-03  4:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Kenneth Goodwin; +Cc: TUHS main list

On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 10:06 AM Kenneth Goodwin
<kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe a version of Coherent resides at Sourceforge in the operating systems archives.

Coherent, which was open sourced many years ago by MWC founder Bob
Swartz (Aaron's dad), is available at
http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php . You can get Coherent
sources, source for the excellent manual, and XYBASIC.

Udo Munk (does the CP/M emulators with the fancy front panels) worked
at MWC and has been going crazy (re)creating Coherent build systems,
older versions (down to 3.2.1?), VMs you can play with and lots more.
I also see he recently made available disk images for Coherent 2.3.43
for the 8086. His stuff is at  https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/ .

Jim

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-01 20:55 ` Michael Huff
@ 2022-05-03  4:55   ` Jim Carpenter
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Jim Carpenter @ 2022-05-03  4:55 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Michael Huff; +Cc: tuhs

On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 4:59 PM Michael Huff <mphuff@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I realize this doesn't help but there's an old story about dmr being asked in the early or mid 80's to look at a clone which he checked for specific bugs he was aware of (but apparently no one else was). It turned out to be clean. I don't remember the details but that might be a good starting point?

This is the Mark Williams Coherent story that Rob Pike just posted
about. At least I've always read that it was DMR checking out
Coherent.

Jim

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 20:31                 ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-05-03  5:01                   ` tytso
  2022-05-03 11:35                     ` Richard Salz
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: tytso @ 2022-05-03  5:01 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Warner Losh; +Cc: TUHS main list

On Mon, May 02, 2022 at 02:31:00PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> > FWIW:  I know that at least 3 people on the OpenSSI team were telling me
> > they were told to go away.

I don't know where they were told to go away; I can just state that
the patches were never sent to LKML, and from a search using
lore.kernel.org, I don't see any evidence that they were told to "go
away" on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

Could they have been told to "go away" by someone, either with someone
"official" or "non-official", on some random mailing list, or at some
random bar at some random conference?  Sure.  It's impossible to say.

> I know from wearing my FreeBSD hat that random people on mailing lists
> often say 'nope' and people go away not realizing they aren't the abitors
> of what gets into FreeBSD. We lost a lot of good contributions because of
> delays created by scenarios like this...

Yep.  And sometimes, even if they are someone official, if they don't
necessarily explain the patches well, and/or never send the patches
for review on the mailing list, it could be that there was a
miscommunication regarding how the patches were described, such that a
"no" that happened at a conversation at some random bar at some random
Usenix conference might have been a "yes" if there were patches sent
to be reviewed on the mailing list.

> I also know that getting changes into Linux suffers from this and for a
> long time (especially pre-git) was almost impossible unless you knew
> someone and were on good terms with them.

Something which definitely happens is the fear of "drive by
contributions".  So for example, Clem tells the story of people being
hesitant of accepting RDMA / IB patches.  I very much doubt it was
because people were chasing the Desktop.  There were certainly people
in the Linux kernel who were chasing the Desktop, but those tended not
to be the "gate keepers" for the kernel.  Linux kernel developers
might use the desktop, but there really was very few "desktop" kernel
features.

If I had to guess, the main concern was that some random developer
would try to get the code upstream --- perhaps because a system
integrator like IBM or HP would have something in the procurement
contract requiring that the device driver be "upstream" --- but then
once the code made it upstream, the developer would disappear, never
to be heard from again, and the Linux Kernel developers would be stuck
having to support it forever.  (Worse, in the early days of IB, IB was
$$$, and most kernel developers didn't even have access to IB in their
home systems.)

So it's helpful to have a company to have multiple engineers, all
contributing changes, hopefully to adjacent parts of the kernel other
than the specific subsystem which they are trying to shove into the
kernel, to demonstrate that they are going to be there for the long
haul, and not just try to "drive by" shoehorn code into the kernel,
only to be never heard from again.

For example, just recently someone from a particular tried to get an
NTFS implementation "upstream" into the Linux kernel.  They sold a
"feature-full" version of that file system for $$$, and there was some
suspicion in some quarters that they were only trying to get a
stripped-down version of their file system into the Linux kernel for
marketing reasons.  There were some, including yours truly, who
pointed out that they hadn't open sourced userspace utilities, and
that the file system regression test when run on their file system was
failing tests right and left, and hence wasn't ready for prime-time.
They pushed hard, and ultimately, Linus decided to accept their code
contribution, because the alternative in-tree file system was pretty
crappy, and the belief was that new one was better.

Immediately after the merge window closed, the developer went silent,
and stopped responding to e-mails.  Which left folks debating whether
we should remove the code contribution from the tree before users
started depending on it, because something worse than one
unmaintained, crappy file system in the tree that some users might be
trying to use wouldbe *two* unmaintained, crappy file systems in the
tree....

> Much has been done to improve things in the last
> 20 years, but for a while things were truly awful for someone without a
> huge reputation to get anything non-trivial into Linux.

That's true, but again, part of that is because of the "drive by
contribution" problem.  One of the ways which we've tried to solve
this problem for device drivers is to have a "staging" part of the
tree where new code which is "on probation" can live, and if it turns
out that the developers disappear, code in the "staging tree" is
documented to be more easily removed uncerimonously if it looks like
the code has become abandonware.

This doesn't work as well if there needs to be massive code
complexification into the core parts of the kernel, where large parts
of the kernel needs to be changed, perhaps to add (for example) VPROC
support.  It's even worse if such "powerful" changes ends up slightly
slowing down code which is in the hotpath.


We have in the past tried to put file systems into the staging tree.
But for example, there was pain when we ultimately decided that Lustre
needed to be removed from the Linux tree, because the people who tried
to get Lustre into the upstream kernel wasn't actually *improving*
that was in the upstream kernel, but instead was working on shipping
product in distro kernels:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/lustre-filesystem-dropped-linux-418-kernel

So the "companies / communites" just trying to throw code of varying
quality over the wall and not providing a commitment to continuous
maintenance and improvement of said code is a real one.  And if you
wonder why sometimes the Linux kernel community can be a bit "cold"
about accepting new code, that very often can be why.  Open source is
not just about the code, it's about the development community.  And if
the community hasn't been integrated into the Linux kernel community
first, it may be that an important prerequisite step is missing.

Cheers,

						- Ted

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 23:49               ` George Michaelson
@ 2022-05-03  7:22                 ` Ronald Natalie
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Ronald Natalie @ 2022-05-03  7:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS

The screen was a IBM 6091, the IBM rebrand of a Sony tube.   We had 
serial number 2 in our office.     Amusingly, the RT we had came all 
locked up,. but I found that turning the key to the wrehch position and 
booting it got me a maintenance shell that on one option invoked more 
that I could shell escape out of to get.a root shell.    There haven’t 
been too many UNIX systems I’ve not been able to get into.   The 
funniest was showing some guy in the Pentagon out to bust out of the 
SunTools screen lock.

IBM made a big thing about telling how the thing had a 24bit 
framebuffer, but the *&@$&* X Server on it only had eight bit visuals.   
  I did a port of our code base to it because that was what I did back 
then (we had the premier intelligence image processing system that ran 
on just about any UNIX system out there:   Sun (Spark and 68K), MIPS 
(both the MIPS workstation and the DEC SPIM), SGI, Ardent, Stellar, 
MassPar, Various 386 things (of which I was fond of the MultibusII 
systems), HP, DEC Alpha, etc….  We even ran on Apollo Domain and some of 
the early NT for both the PC and the iTanic.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
       [not found]           ` <CAK7dMtD08weh+97mx+ncrq0cxprKgke42C0vFYNPnBkd8Fx9Sg@mail.gmail.com>
@ 2022-05-03  7:28             ` Ronald Natalie
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Ronald Natalie @ 2022-05-03  7:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS

We got in on the W4 from the IBM Federal Systems guy (later dealt out to 
Loral, Martin Marietta, and then Lockheed-Martin).    I started with 
those guy doing a contract job to craft the second nework interface into 
Secure Xenix (Jacob Recter I think was responsible for the first) to 
provide a secure downgrading system for some government entity.

Then Intel developed the i860- and IBM came up with the Wizard card.    
This was only designed to be.a coprocessor card and was done down in 
Boca Raton.   The fun and games with that one is that we were on early 
steppings of the processor chips and spent a lot of time coding around 
chip bugs (mostly with regard to interrupts).  IBM/Intel had developed 
this thing called hostlink that was supposed to be useful, but we 
decided to port AIX to it.  When IBM Owego came up with the W4, we were 
asked to port AIX again to it.

We had one non-functional W4 kicking around for demo purposes that had 4 
“delidded” i860 chips in it.    I swapped one for an early stepping 
(useless) chip and kept one of the delidded ones which I still have in a 
box somewhere.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02 21:17             ` Dan Cross
  2022-05-02 23:49               ` George Michaelson
@ 2022-05-03  7:40               ` Miod Vallat
  2022-05-03  8:03                 ` Ron Natalie
       [not found]               ` <CAEoi9W4eD8AF=FwjMT-KPRfyYgD+qgVvE1u3sBwiovm4=1WWLg@mail.g mail.com>
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Miod Vallat @ 2022-05-03  7:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> > At the end of the AOS work circa 1996, most of the kernel was 4.4,
> > except for the network stack which was 4.3-Reno, and the VM system which
> > was still 4.3 (hence no mmap).
> 
> 
> This happened outside of IBM, didn't it? What prevented the rest of the VM
> code being ported?

Most - if not all - the AOS work was done by Roger Florkowski and Mark
Dapoz, and Roger was definitely working for IBM at that time.

I think time was limiting factor, but also Roger was not really wanting
to port the Mach VM to AOS due to the RT MMU limitations - in
particular, there is no way for multiple virtual addresses to point to
the same page, so you need to keep evicting/switching mappings when you
want a page to be available to the kernel and the currently running
userland process. That was fixed in the POWER MMU.

> I vaguely remember Metaware being somewhat religiously extreme, but again
> the details are fuzzy now. Was there some kind of ecclesiastical reference
> in the man page?

I'm afraid that doesn't ring any bell.

Miod

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-03  7:40               ` Miod Vallat
@ 2022-05-03  8:03                 ` Ron Natalie
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Ron Natalie @ 2022-05-03  8:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Miod Vallat; +Cc: TUHS main list

All I remember was that the Metaware compilers came with prayer book.  

> On May 3, 2022, at 09:43, Miod Vallat <miod@online.fr> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>>> At the end of the AOS work circa 1996, most of the kernel was 4.4,
>>> except for the network stack which was 4.3-Reno, and the VM system which
>>> was still 4.3 (hence no mmap).
>> 
>> 
>> This happened outside of IBM, didn't it? What prevented the rest of the VM
>> code being ported?
> 
> Most - if not all - the AOS work was done by Roger Florkowski and Mark
> Dapoz, and Roger was definitely working for IBM at that time.
> 
> I think time was limiting factor, but also Roger was not really wanting
> to port the Mach VM to AOS due to the RT MMU limitations - in
> particular, there is no way for multiple virtual addresses to point to
> the same page, so you need to keep evicting/switching mappings when you
> want a page to be available to the kernel and the currently running
> userland process. That was fixed in the POWER MMU.
> 
>> I vaguely remember Metaware being somewhat religiously extreme, but again
>> the details are fuzzy now. Was there some kind of ecclesiastical reference
>> in the man page?
> 
> I'm afraid that doesn't ring any bell.
> 
> Miod


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-03  5:01                   ` tytso
@ 2022-05-03 11:35                     ` Richard Salz
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Richard Salz @ 2022-05-03 11:35 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tytso; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 297 bytes --]

You should have just let it die with Clem's gracious explanation of
people's other view of history.  There is no need to prove, by mail logs or
anec data, with the Linux kernel development model is just perfect. He made
a point of not criticizing anyone in particular. As the song says, let it go

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
       [not found]               ` <CAEoi9W4eD8AF=FwjMT-KPRfyYgD+qgVvE1u3sBwiovm4=1WWLg@mail.g mail.com>
@ 2022-05-03 12:14                 ` John Foust via TUHS
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: John Foust via TUHS @ 2022-05-03 12:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

At 04:17 PM 5/2/2022, Dan Cross wrote:
>I vaguely remember Metaware being somewhat religiously extreme, but again the details are fuzzy now. Was there some kind of ecclesiastical reference in the man page?

I have the manuals around somewhere, and that rings a bell.

I used Metaware High C and the Pharlap extender in the early 1990s
in the odd 32-bit DOS enviroment to make 3D import/export plugins for 
Autodesk's 3D Studio.

- John


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  2:08       ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-02  9:21         ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
@ 2022-05-10 15:28         ` Mary Ann Horton
  2022-05-10 16:08           ` Warner Losh
  2022-05-10 16:59           ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-15  2:00         ` Stuart Remphrey
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Mary Ann Horton @ 2022-05-10 15:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1708 bytes --]

I recall having an IBM PC port of UNIX in the 1980s on floppy with a 
black 6x9 box and Charlie Chaplin with the red rose. I thought it was 
called AIX. I installed it, and recall it being very different from UNIX 
for sysadmin (different logs, different admin commands) but similar for 
users. I thought it was based on System III or thereabouts.

I can't find any evidence of this. It appears AIX 1.0 wasn't for the 
original PC.

Does anyone else recall this distribution and what it was called or 
based on?

Thanks,

     Mary Ann

On 5/1/22 19:08, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
> My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source code 
> and then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days experience 
> with it on a POS cash register fixing a client issue. The shocker - 
> they changed all the error messages to error codes with a look at the 
> manual requirement.
>
> Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
> But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite but 
> more along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time.
> License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
>     understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
>     code."
>
>     Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
>     One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
>     the full path existed. oops.
>
>     But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
>     handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 15:28         ` Mary Ann Horton
@ 2022-05-10 16:08           ` Warner Losh
  2022-05-10 16:40             ` Heinz Lycklama
                               ` (2 more replies)
  2022-05-10 16:59           ` Clem Cole
  1 sibling, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2022-05-10 16:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Mary Ann Horton; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Tue, May 10, 2022, 9:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

> I recall having an IBM PC port of UNIX in the 1980s on floppy with a black
> 6x9 box and Charlie Chaplin with the red rose. I thought it was called AIX.
> I installed it, and recall it being very different from UNIX for sysadmin
> (different logs, different admin commands) but similar for users. I thought
> it was based on System III or thereabouts.
>
> I can't find any evidence of this. It appears AIX 1.0 wasn't for the
> original PC.
>
> Does anyone else recall this distribution and what it was called or based
> on?
>

The first 8086 port was inside of Bell Labs, but was for a system with a
custom MMU. The first commercial one was Venix released in 1983 based on
Version 7 with some Berkeley improvements using the MIT compilers of the
time, but it had a blue label with a boring stylized V on it. IBM released
PC/IX a year later (1984) and marketed heavily. It was a companion to its
other unix offerings, and wasn't AIX. That port was based on System III. If
anything had the clever Charlie Chaplin marketing materials, it was sure to
be PC/IX. Microsoft's Xenix was also in this time frame, but wasn't
marketed by IBM (and its earliest version in 1982 predate Venix, but were
only for Intel's System 86 machines, and may have required an Intel MMU
board (the quick research I did was unclear on this point, other than it
was supported). SCO/Microsoft released in late 1983 and early 1984 versions
for the commercially available PC and other variants at the time before the
IBM-PC became the standardized x86 platform.

So my money is on PC/IX.

Warner

Thanks,
>
>     Mary Ann
> On 5/1/22 19:08, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
>
> My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source code and
> then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days experience with it on a
> POS cash register fixing a client issue. The shocker - they changed all the
> error messages to error codes with a look at the manual requirement.
>
> Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
> But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite but more
> along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time.
> License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
>> understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
>> code."
>>
>> Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
>> One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
>> the full path existed. oops.
>>
>> But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
>> handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>>
>>
>>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 16:08           ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-05-10 16:40             ` Heinz Lycklama
  2022-05-10 16:42             ` James Frew
  2022-05-14  2:56             ` Mary Ann Horton
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Heinz Lycklama @ 2022-05-10 16:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3289 bytes --]

PC/IX was developed for IBM by INTERACTIVE Systems.
It was based on UNIX System III. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation

Heinz

On 5/10/2022 9:08 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2022, 9:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:
>
>     I recall having an IBM PC port of UNIX in the 1980s on floppy with
>     a black 6x9 box and Charlie Chaplin with the red rose. I thought
>     it was called AIX. I installed it, and recall it being very
>     different from UNIX for sysadmin (different logs, different admin
>     commands) but similar for users. I thought it was based on System
>     III or thereabouts.
>
>     I can't find any evidence of this. It appears AIX 1.0 wasn't for
>     the original PC.
>
>     Does anyone else recall this distribution and what it was called
>     or based on?
>
>
> The first 8086 port was inside of Bell Labs, but was for a system with 
> a custom MMU. The first commercial one was Venix released in 1983 
> based on Version 7 with some Berkeley improvements using the MIT 
> compilers of the time, but it had a blue label with a boring stylized 
> V on it. IBM released PC/IX a year later (1984) and marketed heavily. 
> It was a companion to its other unix offerings, and wasn't AIX. That 
> port was based on System III. If anything had the clever Charlie 
> Chaplin marketing materials, it was sure to be PC/IX. Microsoft's 
> Xenix was also in this time frame, but wasn't marketed by IBM (and its 
> earliest version in 1982 predate Venix, but were only for Intel's 
> System 86 machines, and may have required an Intel MMU board (the 
> quick research I did was unclear on this point, other than it was 
> supported). SCO/Microsoft released in late 1983 and early 1984 
> versions for the commercially available PC and other variants at the 
> time before the IBM-PC became the standardized x86 platform.
>
> So my money is on PC/IX.
>
> Warner
>
>     Thanks,
>
>         Mary Ann
>
>     On 5/1/22 19:08, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
>>     My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source
>>     code and then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days
>>     experience with it on a POS cash register fixing a client issue.
>>     The shocker - they changed all the error messages to error codes
>>     with a look at the manual requirement.
>>
>>     Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
>>     But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite
>>     but more along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time.
>>     License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
>>
>>     On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>         in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the
>>         first, as I
>>         understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
>>         code."
>>
>>         Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done
>>         quite right.
>>         One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an
>>         error if
>>         the full path existed. oops.
>>
>>         But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
>>         handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>>
>>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 16:08           ` Warner Losh
  2022-05-10 16:40             ` Heinz Lycklama
@ 2022-05-10 16:42             ` James Frew
  2022-05-14  2:56             ` Mary Ann Horton
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: James Frew @ 2022-05-10 16:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

In the early '80s UC Santa Barbara had a general assignment teaching lab 
full of IBM PC/ATs (i.e. 286s). We convinced the the powers-that-be to 
let us run Xenix on them for a remote sensing class, which meant we 
could port an image processing system I'd written under v6 (PDP-11/45) 
to an actual classroom. Xenix must have been v7 or pretty close, since 
the port was painless. (The display driver was a bit harder---it was 
(gasp!) 8-bits deep, first display I didn't have to dither on, but it 
wasn't memory-mapped, so you had to shovel pixels into it a byte a time. 
Made for nice dramatic slow reveals...)

Thanks for the memories!
/James Frew

P.S.: Hardware brevis, software longa: https://github.com/USDA-ARS-NWRC/ipw

On 2022-05-10 09:08, Warner Losh wrote:
>
> Microsoft's Xenix was also in this time frame, but wasn't marketed by 
> IBM (and its earliest version in 1982 predate Venix, but were only for 
> Intel's System 86 machines, and may have required an Intel MMU board 
> (the quick research I did was unclear on this point, other than it was 
> supported).

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 15:28         ` Mary Ann Horton
  2022-05-10 16:08           ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-05-10 16:59           ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-10 17:18             ` Clem Cole
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-10 16:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Mary Ann Horton; +Cc: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1837 bytes --]

PC/IX
ᐧ

On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 11:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

> I recall having an IBM PC port of UNIX in the 1980s on floppy with a black
> 6x9 box and Charlie Chaplin with the red rose. I thought it was called AIX.
> I installed it, and recall it being very different from UNIX for sysadmin
> (different logs, different admin commands) but similar for users. I thought
> it was based on System III or thereabouts.
>
> I can't find any evidence of this. It appears AIX 1.0 wasn't for the
> original PC.
>
> Does anyone else recall this distribution and what it was called or based
> on?
>
> Thanks,
>
>     Mary Ann
> On 5/1/22 19:08, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
>
> My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source code and
> then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days experience with it on a
> POS cash register fixing a client issue. The shocker - they changed all the
> error messages to error codes with a look at the manual requirement.
>
> Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
> But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite but more
> along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time.
> License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
>> understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
>> code."
>>
>> Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
>> One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
>> the full path existed. oops.
>>
>> But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
>> handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>>
>>
>>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 16:59           ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-10 17:18             ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-10 18:05               ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
  2022-05-10 19:08               ` Henry Bent
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-10 17:18 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Mary Ann Horton; +Cc: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3653 bytes --]

Sorry, I  hit return too soon.

Mary Ann -  I think  PC/IX is what you were thinking.  FWIW: it was one of
the reasons why Andy developed Minix.  He said at the time it was
insufficient and if he was going to have a pure V7 port for the base
8088-based PC/XT (not 286s-based PC/AT) then he wanted something he could
teach with.   IIRC the early PC/IX (and I know for certain Minux did not)
did not even recognize the MMU for the 286 of the AT (much less the later
386), but it did have a driver for the AT disk controller (which was/is a
different controller than the XT).

As Warner says, PC/XT was based on the new System III license we had just
all negotiated earlier that winter.   Microsoft had already started
shipping Xenix on the x86/68000 and I think a z8000 using the V7
license, but I don't think IBM relicensed it.   HP was shipping HP-UX for
the original 9000 on the same, and Tek was also shipping it firsts emulator
system on the V7 license.    DEC had the original v7m which begat Ultrix,
although I don't remember if DEC ever shipped binaries on the original V7
license.  Charlie can correct me, but I don't think IBM ever shipped
binaries on the V7 license either.

[The original V7 redistribution license had terms that makers of $100K+
systems did not mind too much, but was difficult for what would eventually
be called PCs and workstations at the <$10K (much less < $1K) price to
swallow.

FWIW: Years later, Linus famously got his 386 box from his parents for
Christmas, got a copy of Andy's Minux (for a PC/XT), started writing his
terminal program, and was annoyed that it did not use the VM/larger address
space of hardware.
ᐧ
ᐧ

On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 12:59 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> PC/IX
> ᐧ
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 11:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:
>
>> I recall having an IBM PC port of UNIX in the 1980s on floppy with a
>> black 6x9 box and Charlie Chaplin with the red rose. I thought it was
>> called AIX. I installed it, and recall it being very different from UNIX
>> for sysadmin (different logs, different admin commands) but similar for
>> users. I thought it was based on System III or thereabouts.
>>
>> I can't find any evidence of this. It appears AIX 1.0 wasn't for the
>> original PC.
>>
>> Does anyone else recall this distribution and what it was called or based
>> on?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>     Mary Ann
>> On 5/1/22 19:08, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
>>
>> My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source code
>> and then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days experience with it
>> on a POS cash register fixing a client issue. The shocker - they changed
>> all the error messages to error codes with a look at the manual
>> requirement.
>>
>> Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
>> But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite but more
>> along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time.
>> License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
>>
>> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
>>> understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
>>> code."
>>>
>>> Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
>>> One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
>>> the full path existed. oops.
>>>
>>> But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
>>> handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>>>
>>>
>>>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 17:18             ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-10 18:05               ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
  2022-05-10 19:27                 ` Lars Brinkhoff
  2022-05-10 19:08               ` Henry Bent
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Charles H Sauer (he/him) @ 2022-05-10 18:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

I mostly defer to Heinz and Clem regarding PC/IX. It is hard to imagine 
the IBM people in Boca Raton allowing the Chaplin imagery to be used 
with a secondary product like PC/IX, but I don't remember the packaging.

PC/IX was my first hands on experience with Unix. PC/IX was used 
extensively in the AIX development group while ROMP hardware was scarce.

Before I got my own RT/PC, I used PC/IX primarily, until I got a PC/AT 
and started using some instance of Xenix that supported the 286 MMU.

Charlie

On 5/10/2022 12:18 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Sorry, I  hit return too soon.
> 
> Mary Ann -  I think  PC/IX is what you were thinking.  FWIW: it was one 
> of the reasons why Andy developed Minix.  He said at the time it was 
> insufficient and if he was going to have a pure V7 port for the base 
> 8088-based PC/XT (not 286s-based PC/AT) then he wanted something he 
> could teach with.   IIRC the early PC/IX (and I know for certain Minux 
> did not) did not even recognize the MMU for the 286 of the AT (much less 
> the later 386), but it did have a driver for the AT disk controller 
> (which was/is a different controller than the XT).
> 
> As Warner says, PC/XT was based on the new System III license we had 
> just all negotiated earlier that winter.   Microsoft had already started 
> shipping Xenix on the x86/68000 and I think a z8000 using the V7 
> license, but I don't think IBM relicensed it.   HP was shipping HP-UX 
> for the original 9000 on the same, and Tek was also shipping it firsts 
> emulator system on the V7 license.    DEC had the original v7m which 
> begat Ultrix, although I don't remember if DEC ever shipped binaries on 
> the original V7 license.  Charlie can correct me, but I don't think IBM 
> ever shipped binaries on the V7 license either.
> 
> [The original V7 redistribution license had terms that makers of $100K+ 
> systems did not mind too much, but was difficult for what would 
> eventually be called PCs and workstations at the <$10K (much less < $1K) 
> price to swallow.
> 
> FWIW: Years later, Linus famously got his 386 box from his parents for 
> Christmas, got a copy of Andy's Minux (for a PC/XT), started writing his 
> terminal program, and was annoyed that it did not use the VM/larger 
> address space of hardware.
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
> 
> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 12:59 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com 
> <mailto:clemc@ccc.com>> wrote:
> 
>     PC/IX
>     ᐧ
> 
>     On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 11:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net
>     <mailto:mah@mhorton.net>> wrote:
> 
>         I recall having an IBM PC port of UNIX in the 1980s on floppy
>         with a black 6x9 box and Charlie Chaplin with the red rose. I
>         thought it was called AIX. I installed it, and recall it being
>         very different from UNIX for sysadmin (different logs, different
>         admin commands) but similar for users. I thought it was based on
>         System III or thereabouts.
> 
>         I can't find any evidence of this. It appears AIX 1.0 wasn't for
>         the original PC.
> 
>         Does anyone else recall this distribution and what it was called
>         or based on?
> 
>         Thanks,
> 
>              Mary Ann
> 
>         On 5/1/22 19:08, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
>>         My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V
>>         source code and then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a
>>         days experience with it on a POS cash register fixing a client
>>         issue. The shocker - they changed all the error messages to
>>         error codes with a look at the manual requirement.
>>
>>         Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
>>         But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch
>>         rewrite but more along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones
>>         of the time.
>>         License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
>>
>>         On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com
>>         <mailto:rminnich@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>             in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the
>>             first, as I
>>             understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual,
>>             write the
>>             code."
>>
>>             Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done
>>             quite right.
>>             One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return
>>             an error if
>>             the full path existed. oops.
>>
>>             But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of
>>             code to
>>             handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>>
>>

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 17:18             ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-10 18:05               ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
@ 2022-05-10 19:08               ` Henry Bent
  2022-05-10 19:33                 ` Richard Salz
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Henry Bent @ 2022-05-10 19:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 419 bytes --]

On Tue, 10 May 2022 at 13:21, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> DEC had the original v7m which begat Ultrix, although I don't remember if
> DEC ever shipped binaries on the original V7 license.
>

What was the timeframe on that?  As far as I can tell from looking through
the Ultrix 2.0 source code, the earliest modifications were in very late
'83 and reference imports from 4.2BSD dated at latest fall '83.

-Henry

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 18:05               ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
@ 2022-05-10 19:27                 ` Lars Brinkhoff
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Lars Brinkhoff @ 2022-05-10 19:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Charles H Sauer (he/him); +Cc: tuhs

Charles H Sauer wrote:
> I mostly defer to Heinz and Clem regarding PC/IX. It is hard to
> imagine the IBM people in Boca Raton allowing the Chaplin imagery to
> be used with a secondary product like PC/IX, but I don't remember the
> packaging.

Here's something interesting from
http://vtda.org/bits/OS/IBM/pcix/documentation/pcix.txt

   Anyway, the PC/IX binders were pinstriped, very dark charcoal gray,
   with white type, and a bud vase with a single red rose, harking back
   to the original IBM PC ad campaign featuring “The Little Tramp”
   (Charlie Chaplin lookalike with a red rose); the VM/IX binders were
   identical, except for a vase with a bouquet of red roses.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 19:08               ` Henry Bent
@ 2022-05-10 19:33                 ` Richard Salz
  2022-05-10 20:18                   ` Ronald Natalie
                                     ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Richard Salz @ 2022-05-10 19:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Henry Bent; +Cc: TUHS main list

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Per wikipedia (FWIW), V7M was for PDP-11; Ultrix was the first VAX unix
project and based on 4.2BSD.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix

Armando Stettner is probably most famous for the NH license plate "Ultrix"
The NH state motto, which appeared on all their license plates, was "Live
Free or Die"

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* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 19:33                 ` Richard Salz
@ 2022-05-10 20:18                   ` Ronald Natalie
  2022-05-11 16:20                     ` James Frew
  2022-05-10 20:28                   ` Henry Bent
                                     ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Ronald Natalie @ 2022-05-10 20:18 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Richard Salz, Henry Bent; +Cc: TUHS main list

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Armando’s plates didn’t say ULTRIX.   The ULTRIX plates cae later (some 
complete marketing disaster at DEC).

Armondo’s plate said UNIX.    At one USENIX meeting, Armando got up and 
made an announcement that for many years UNIX and DEC had been 
synonymous, but DEC had never realized it.   He was therefore happy to 
announce the first UNIX license from DEC and held out up one of the 
plates.     I still have mine.

Armondo had a NH vanity plate that said UNIX (like the replicas given 
away).   He also had one of the DEC replicas on his car complete with 
the state renewal stickers.   At one point it went missing.   He 
announced that on the net, which led to a lot of people mentioning that 
they hadn’t seen it wherever they were.   I believe he ultimately did 
recover it.



------ Original Message ------
From "Richard Salz" <rich.salz@gmail.com>
To "Henry Bent" <henry.r.bent@gmail.com>
Cc "TUHS main list" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Date 5/10/2022 9:33:59 PM
Subject Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

>Per wikipedia (FWIW), V7M was for PDP-11; Ultrix was the first VAX unix 
>project and based on 4.2BSD.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix
>
>Armando Stettner is probably most famous for the NH license plate 
>"Ultrix"  The NH state motto, which appeared on all their license 
>plates, was "Live Free or Die"
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 19:33                 ` Richard Salz
  2022-05-10 20:18                   ` Ronald Natalie
@ 2022-05-10 20:28                   ` Henry Bent
  2022-05-10 20:43                   ` Warner Losh
  2022-05-10 20:46                   ` Clem Cole
  3 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Henry Bent @ 2022-05-10 20:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Richard Salz; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Tue, 10 May 2022 at 15:34, Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Armando Stettner is probably most famous for the NH license plate
> "Ultrix"  The NH state motto, which appeared on all their license plates,
> was "Live Free or Die"
>
>
 I was very fortunate to accidentally stumble on an '80s Ohio license plate
that had "VAX" on it, and it sits proudly on display next to my MicroVAX
3100 memory boards and a sadly now deceased PMAG-F.  I picked up the
graphics accelerator back when you could have old hardware for little more
than a song, and I'm glad that I did as it seems that few people bought it
at the time.

-Henry

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* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 19:33                 ` Richard Salz
  2022-05-10 20:18                   ` Ronald Natalie
  2022-05-10 20:28                   ` Henry Bent
@ 2022-05-10 20:43                   ` Warner Losh
  2022-05-10 20:46                   ` Clem Cole
  3 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2022-05-10 20:43 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Richard Salz; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 1:35 PM Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

> Per wikipedia (FWIW), V7M was for PDP-11; Ultrix was the first VAX unix
> project and based on 4.2BSD.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix
>

At some point, Unix V7M was rebranded as Ultrix-11 and pulled in a lot from
the BSD releases (2.9 or 2.10) to get TCP/IP
networking onto the PDP-11. I don't think DEC ever shipped pure AT&T
binaries. The V7M was a modified version of V7,
with most of the modifications in the kernel to fix a few bugs with buffer
handling, and also make it run on all the different
PDP-11 models.

All the sources to V7, V7M and the last Ultrix-11 version are in TUHS for
people to peruse...

Warner

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 19:33                 ` Richard Salz
                                     ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2022-05-10 20:43                   ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-05-10 20:46                   ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-11 16:44                     ` Paul Winalski
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-10 20:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Richard Salz; +Cc: TUHS main list

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a couple of small additions/corrections ....

On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 3:34 PM Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

> Per wikipedia (FWIW), V7M was for PDP-11; Ultrix was the first VAX unix
> project and based on 4.2BSD.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix
>
Not quite...  Indeed, V7M was a >>source<< distribution for the 11 - Fred
Cantor and Bill Shannon were the primary hackers on same - actually].
I want to say that 1980 maybe 1981. This was available to any AT&T source
licensee - using the traditional rules [Warren has it -- it actually is
easier to get running on a PiDP-11 than the basic V7 distribution -- its
supports more devices out of the box]..   The key is that V7m booted on
more systems out of the box than V7 and also it has Shannon's overlay code
in it [which would eventually make its way in 2.X BSD].

Ultrix was the first VAX release of Ultrix that Armando and Bill shepherded
using 4.1BSD, but Fred did the first Ultrix-11 also which was somewhere
between 2.X BSD and V7m *and was a binary release*. Ultrix was the formal
name of DEC's first UNIX a product. BTW: A number of the drivers from
Ultrix went back to Merrimack via Shannon to CSRG.  At the time ~82, I had
the only pure DEC 780 at UCB [which DEC had donated to the CAD group] so
Sam and I debugged the TU78 driver from Ultrix on the now burgeoning 4.1A
on the UCBCAD machine 'coke' - with remote help from Bill. I don't
remember all the differences but my system had a fully loaded I/O system
and Shannon's system back in MKO did not.   I think Sam must have rewritten
the configuration support code a few times during that process.  That said,
that driver and device support may not have been released in the BSD stream
until the 4.2BSD stuff was folded in.

Famously, Bill Munson announced Ultrix at an early 1980s USENIX,
reminding everyone that it meant Fortran, Cobol and the like would be
coming too.  Paul W and his mates in the Languages group had to do all
sorts of stuff to make that so.  I believe Paul has previously extolled us
with moving the VMS linker over to the Unix to support at least Fortran.
FYI, Sun does not yet exist (Shannon is still working for Munson in NH).

At some point, Ultrix went to the PMAX (after Armando moved to Palo Alto
and Shannon had left for Sun).   Interesting tidbit, Ultrix was used to
debug the Alpha and was the first OS that ran on it.   History has shown
the stupidity of not releasing that as a product [cost at least 4 years of
revenue but I digress].

It's about the time of the original Ultrix work is when I stopped paying
attention to the PDP-11s, so there are gaps in my knowledge.  Ultrix
definitely was released as a binary product for the 11.  My >>memory<< is
the first version for the Vax was 4.1 based with some new defined support
and languages, but that version may not have gone too far outside of DEC
and until the 4.2BSD version was the first one for revenue.   The first
Ultrix-11 was V7+some set of BSDisms.   I know Shannon's overlay code went
to UCB, but I'm not so sure when the BSD 11 changes came back to DEC.





> Armando Stettner is probably most famous for the NH license plate "Ultrix"
>
No, he had the NH UNIX plate [on his Z-Car] not Ultrix, and he later sold
it to Maddog when he moved to DEC Palo Alto.  His Plate was the model for
the famous DEC license plate [note I've had the Mass plate since '83 and I
believe I am the only person that ever had it -- it's been a number of cars
since - currently on my Model S.



> The NH state motto, which appeared on all their license plates, was "Live
> Free or Die"
>
Still does.  As does the Old Man on the Mountain
<https://streaklinks.com/BCshxfLaWkefKIBCHgqyssb9/https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FOld_Man_of_the_Mountain>
even though it's long gone.
ᐧ

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* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 20:18                   ` Ronald Natalie
@ 2022-05-11 16:20                     ` James Frew
  2022-05-11 16:51                       ` Paul Winalski
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: James Frew @ 2022-05-11 16:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

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At which point someone in the audience called out "Hey Armando, where'd 
you learn how to make those?"

On 2022-05-10 13:18, Ronald Natalie wrote:
>
> At one USENIX meeting, Armando got up and made an announcement that 
> for many years UNIX and DEC had been synonymous, but DEC had never 
> realized it.   He was therefore happy to announce the first UNIX 
> license from DEC and held out up one of the plates.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 20:46                   ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-11 16:44                     ` Paul Winalski
  2022-05-11 17:09                       ` Clem Cole
                                         ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Paul Winalski @ 2022-05-11 16:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

On 5/10/22, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> a couple of small additions/corrections ....
>
> Ultrix was the formal
> name of DEC's first UNIX a product.

Before that, Bill and Armando's engineering group was part of DEC's
Telephone Industry Group (TIG) marketing organization.  Their charter
was to see that Unix and other AT&T software ran well on DEC hardware.
Mainly they did device drivers and some kernel mods.  DEC was getting
increasing demand from those outside Telco who were running Unix to
get a DEC-supported Unix on the VAX.  And so TIG engineering was split
off and did a full port and the result was called Ultrix.  This
started in 1982 IIRC.

> Famously, Bill Munson announced Ultrix at an early 1980s USENIX,
> reminding everyone that it meant Fortran, Cobol and the like would be
> coming too.  Paul W and his mates in the Languages group had to do all
> sorts of stuff to make that so.  I believe Paul has previously extolled us
> with moving the VMS linker over to the Unix to support at least Fortran.
> FYI, Sun does not yet exist (Shannon is still working for Munson in NH).

That was a very nasty bit of DEC internal politics.  As soon as we in
DEC's software development tools departments (Technical Languages,
Commercial Languages, Methods & Tools) heard about the creation of
Ultrix, we began planning ports of the VAX/VMS compilers and other
pieces of the tool chain to Ultrix.  We got immediate and fierce
push-back from the Ultrix engineering group.  TIG had had a deeply
ingrained culture of resisting innovation.  Their job was to make sure
Unix ran on DEC hardware, not to enhance Unix.  Many of the Ultrix
engineers had a religious belief in keeping Unix pure and
platform-independent.  Things available on only one hardware platform
were perceived as "vendor traps" and to be avoided.

The biggest fight was over Fortran.  VAX Fortran was seen as the gold
standard in Fortran compilers by the Fortran R&D community and there
was a lot of demand for DEC to make it available on Ultrix.  f77, the
Unix alternative, was, by comparison, considered a toy that lacked key
features.  By careful cherry-picking the compiler people in the Ultrix
group managed to put together a suite of Fortran benchmarks that hit
all the glass jaws in the VAX Fortran optimizer.  They claimed that
this showed that f77 produced code at least as good, if not better,
than VAX Fortran did.  The VMS development tools group had better
things to do than argue with the Ultrix group, so the whole idea of
porting VAX/VMS tools to Ultrix was dropped.

Many of the non-standard innovations in VAX Fortran were adopted by
IBM and other vendors under pressure from the Fortran community.  By
1985 DEC was losing sales to other vendors in the HPTC world due to
lack of VAX Fortran features in f77.  The Fortran team in Technical
Languages and Environments had to do a rush-rush port of VAX Fortran
and its runtime library to Ultrix.  We were rather teed off since we'd
proposed the same thing three years before and now it was a "we need
it yesterday" crash project.  It was decided that it would take too
much time to teach the VAX Fortran code generator to produce a.out
object files and so instead we ported the VMS linker to Ultrix and
taught it to read and write a.out as well as VMS object files.  The
result was called lk.  As the developer in the software tools
organization who best understood linkers and object files (I'd written
a link editor in grad school when interning at IBM) I was put in
charge of the linker port.  I've told that story already here in TUHS.

> It's about the time of the original Ultrix work is when I stopped paying
> attention to the PDP-11s, so there are gaps in my knowledge.  Ultrix
> definitely was released as a binary product for the 11.  My >>memory<< is
> the first version for the Vax was 4.1 based with some new defined support
> and languages, but that version may not have gone too far outside of DEC
> and until the 4.2BSD version was the first one for revenue.   The first
> Ultrix-11 was V7+some set of BSDisms.   I know Shannon's overlay code went
> to UCB, but I'm not so sure when the BSD 11 changes came back to DEC.

IIRC the 4.1 version of VAX Ultrix was their prototype.  I think
PDP-11 Ultrix was just one of the existing Unix variants for the
PDP-11 with the "Ultrix" marketing label slapped on.  We can't have
vendor traps, you know....

By the late 1980s the PDP-11/VAX style of CISC architecture had fallen
way behind RISC in terms of performance.  Alpha wasn't ready yet.  To
keep a toehold in the Unix marketplace, Ultrix was ported to the MIPS
architecture and a MIPS code generator was implemented for the GEM
back end so that DEC Fortran would be available.

Unix was easier to port to Alpha than VMS was.  Score one for writing
in a HLL and maintaining platform neutrality.  Clem has told that
story here.  Most of the VMS OS code was in assembler.  A VAX MACRO
compiler front end had to be written that read VAX assembly code and
produced GEM intermediate language.  To this day most of OpenVMS is
still in VAX MACRO.

-Paul W.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-11 16:20                     ` James Frew
@ 2022-05-11 16:51                       ` Paul Winalski
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Paul Winalski @ 2022-05-11 16:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: James Frew; +Cc: TUHS main list

On 5/11/22, James Frew <frew@ucsb.edu> wrote:
>
> At which point someone in the audience called out "Hey Armando, where'd
> you learn how to make those?"

Many have pointed out the irony of the prisoners in New Hampshire
state penitentiaries having to spend their days stamping "Live Free or
Die" on license plates.

Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado would have been proud.  :-)

-Paul W.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-11 16:44                     ` Paul Winalski
@ 2022-05-11 17:09                       ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-11 17:35                       ` Larry McVoy
  2022-05-12  5:22                       ` Warner Losh
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-05-11 17:09 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Winalski; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 12:44 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Many of the non-standard innovations in VAX Fortran were adopted by
> IBM and other vendors under pressure from the Fortran community.  By
> 1985 DEC was losing sales to other vendors in the HPTC world due to
> lack of VAX Fortran features in f77.
>
I would put it a little differently.   As far as I'm concerned the best
piece of marketing that DEC ever did was convincing the world that VMS FTN
was standard Fortran-77.   So when you went into a VMS shop trying to sell
a UNIX box (from any manufacturer), many (most) had written their code in
VMS FTN, and thus your Fortran compiler needed to accept the DEC VMS
extensions.   The fact was most customers swore up and down they had
written their code in F77, but the UNIX compiler would die trying to
compile it and as Paul point out, even if you did get the local compiler to
accept your sources from a syntactical standpoint, the code generator and
optimizer used in the PCC-based F77 compilers was not int he same league at
the DEC or IBM compilers of the day.

As I have mentioned on this list previously, a year after MASSCOMP was
founded and about 5 years before Sun figured this issue out, we had hired a
number of ex-DEC languages folks and they wrote our compiler C and Fortran
compilers using the same optimization techniques that DEC had honed.  In
fact, one of the reasons why we added the RSX/VMS AST scheme to RTU, was to
make porting customer code from VMS that much easier [tjt and I drew the
line on QIO since we already had a different async I/O scheme, but UNIX
signals were so far from AST it was never going to work -- again as I have
said, I can build UNIX/POSIX signals from ASTs, but not the other way
round].
ᐧ

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-11 16:44                     ` Paul Winalski
  2022-05-11 17:09                       ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-05-11 17:35                       ` Larry McVoy
  2022-05-12  0:16                         ` George Michaelson
  2022-05-13  2:46                         ` Adam Thornton
  2022-05-12  5:22                       ` Warner Losh
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2022-05-11 17:35 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Winalski; +Cc: TUHS main list

On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 12:44:10PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
> Many of the Ultrix
> engineers had a religious belief in keeping Unix pure and
> platform-independent.  Things available on only one hardware platform
> were perceived as "vendor traps" and to be avoided.

Not unique to DEC, I very much had that attitude at Sun and wasn't alone.
As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant, I wrote lint libraries
for BSD, Sys III, Sys V, POSIX, and I don't remember what else.  The idea
was that you could use Sun as a dev platform but lint your code against
whatever platform you wanted to target.

It was misguided, I bet I can count on one hand the number of people that
used any of those, but I hated vendor traps as much as DEC, maybe more.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-11 17:35                       ` Larry McVoy
@ 2022-05-12  0:16                         ` George Michaelson
  2022-05-13  2:46                         ` Adam Thornton
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: George Michaelson @ 2022-05-12  0:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: TUHS main list

I don't think you were misguided. I do think Ultrix was a contained
problem for code portability, probably because enough pre-existing
code came into Sun, it was a compiler toolchain pre-motivated to work
in Vax architecture machinecode.

HP-UX on the other hand, and Apollos unix under Domain/OS, I recall as
a nightmare. I regularly had to try and get current spec sendmail
working on these, because both platforms were in use in Chemical
Engineering and NMR related contexts as device controller and display
platforms in the uni I worked in. Portable code onto these worlds, was
frankly horrid: HP believed a single -lcompat type library provided
everything you needed when in fact, #include path hell was inches
away.

Unisys was freaky bad. Their native IPv4 format for an address used
comma, not dot as the dotted-quad separator.

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 3:35 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 12:44:10PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
> > Many of the Ultrix
> > engineers had a religious belief in keeping Unix pure and
> > platform-independent.  Things available on only one hardware platform
> > were perceived as "vendor traps" and to be avoided.
>
> Not unique to DEC, I very much had that attitude at Sun and wasn't alone.
> As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant, I wrote lint libraries
> for BSD, Sys III, Sys V, POSIX, and I don't remember what else.  The idea
> was that you could use Sun as a dev platform but lint your code against
> whatever platform you wanted to target.
>
> It was misguided, I bet I can count on one hand the number of people that
> used any of those, but I hated vendor traps as much as DEC, maybe more.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-11 16:44                     ` Paul Winalski
  2022-05-11 17:09                       ` Clem Cole
  2022-05-11 17:35                       ` Larry McVoy
@ 2022-05-12  5:22                       ` Warner Losh
  2022-05-12 12:06                         ` Ron Natalie
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2022-05-12  5:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Winalski; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 6005 bytes --]

On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 10:45 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 5/10/22, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> > a couple of small additions/corrections ....
> >
> > Ultrix was the formal
> > name of DEC's first UNIX a product.
>
> Before that, Bill and Armando's engineering group was part of DEC's
> Telephone Industry Group (TIG) marketing organization.  Their charter
> was to see that Unix and other AT&T software ran well on DEC hardware.
> Mainly they did device drivers and some kernel mods.  DEC was getting
> increasing demand from those outside Telco who were running Unix to
> get a DEC-supported Unix on the VAX.  And so TIG engineering was split
> off and did a full port and the result was called Ultrix.  This
> started in 1982 IIRC.
>
> > Famously, Bill Munson announced Ultrix at an early 1980s USENIX,
> > reminding everyone that it meant Fortran, Cobol and the like would be
> > coming too.  Paul W and his mates in the Languages group had to do all
> > sorts of stuff to make that so.  I believe Paul has previously extolled
> us
> > with moving the VMS linker over to the Unix to support at least Fortran.
> > FYI, Sun does not yet exist (Shannon is still working for Munson in NH).
>
> That was a very nasty bit of DEC internal politics.  As soon as we in
> DEC's software development tools departments (Technical Languages,
> Commercial Languages, Methods & Tools) heard about the creation of
> Ultrix, we began planning ports of the VAX/VMS compilers and other
> pieces of the tool chain to Ultrix.  We got immediate and fierce
> push-back from the Ultrix engineering group.  TIG had had a deeply
> ingrained culture of resisting innovation.  Their job was to make sure
> Unix ran on DEC hardware, not to enhance Unix.  Many of the Ultrix
> engineers had a religious belief in keeping Unix pure and
> platform-independent.  Things available on only one hardware platform
> were perceived as "vendor traps" and to be avoided.
>

That's kinda ironic. One of the biggest ticket items in the AUUG newsletters
from the early days was how you can get FORTRAN, BASIC or MACRO-11
running under V6 or V7. There were several compatibility shims for RT-11
to accomplish this in a number of different ways. It was a big deal for many
folks that needed to run their FORTRAN programs from a DEC OS, but
wanted / needed to run Unix....


> The biggest fight was over Fortran.  VAX Fortran was seen as the gold
> standard in Fortran compilers by the Fortran R&D community and there
> was a lot of demand for DEC to make it available on Ultrix.  f77, the
> Unix alternative, was, by comparison, considered a toy that lacked key
> features.  By careful cherry-picking the compiler people in the Ultrix
> group managed to put together a suite of Fortran benchmarks that hit
> all the glass jaws in the VAX Fortran optimizer.  They claimed that
> this showed that f77 produced code at least as good, if not better,
> than VAX Fortran did.  The VMS development tools group had better
> things to do than argue with the Ultrix group, so the whole idea of
> porting VAX/VMS tools to Ultrix was dropped.
>

It's clea*r* they'd forgotten the PDP-11 experience...


> Many of the non-standard innovations in VAX Fortran were adopted by
> IBM and other vendors under pressure from the Fortran community.  By
> 1985 DEC was losing sales to other vendors in the HPTC world due to
> lack of VAX Fortran features in f77.  The Fortran team in Technical
> Languages and Environments had to do a rush-rush port of VAX Fortran
> and its runtime library to Ultrix.  We were rather teed off since we'd
> proposed the same thing three years before and now it was a "we need
> it yesterday" crash project.  It was decided that it would take too
> much time to teach the VAX Fortran code generator to produce a.out
> object files and so instead we ported the VMS linker to Ultrix and
> taught it to read and write a.out as well as VMS object files.  The
> result was called lk.  As the developer in the software tools
> organization who best understood linkers and object files (I'd written
> a link editor in grad school when interning at IBM) I was put in
> charge of the linker port.  I've told that story already here in TUHS.
>

The macro-11 that was in 2BSD had its own companion linker that
was basically the same. It could link  in .OBJ files from other DEC tools
as well...  History repeated itself, eh?

Warner


> > It's about the time of the original Ultrix work is when I stopped paying
> > attention to the PDP-11s, so there are gaps in my knowledge.  Ultrix
> > definitely was released as a binary product for the 11.  My >>memory<< is
> > the first version for the Vax was 4.1 based with some new defined support
> > and languages, but that version may not have gone too far outside of DEC
> > and until the 4.2BSD version was the first one for revenue.   The first
> > Ultrix-11 was V7+some set of BSDisms.   I know Shannon's overlay code
> went
> > to UCB, but I'm not so sure when the BSD 11 changes came back to DEC.
>
> IIRC the 4.1 version of VAX Ultrix was their prototype.  I think
> PDP-11 Ultrix was just one of the existing Unix variants for the
> PDP-11 with the "Ultrix" marketing label slapped on.  We can't have
> vendor traps, you know....
>
> By the late 1980s the PDP-11/VAX style of CISC architecture had fallen
> way behind RISC in terms of performance.  Alpha wasn't ready yet.  To
> keep a toehold in the Unix marketplace, Ultrix was ported to the MIPS
> architecture and a MIPS code generator was implemented for the GEM
> back end so that DEC Fortran would be available.
>
> Unix was easier to port to Alpha than VMS was.  Score one for writing
> in a HLL and maintaining platform neutrality.  Clem has told that
> story here.  Most of the VMS OS code was in assembler.  A VAX MACRO
> compiler front end had to be written that read VAX assembly code and
> produced GEM intermediate language.  To this day most of OpenVMS is
> still in VAX MACRO.
>
> -Paul W.
>

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* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-12  5:22                       ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-05-12 12:06                         ` Ron Natalie
  2022-05-12 12:43                           ` John Cowan
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Ron Natalie @ 2022-05-12 12:06 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Warner Losh, Paul Winalski; +Cc: TUHS main list

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The Undergraduate Computer Society (UCS) made a deal with the EE 
department that they could run UNIX on the departments 11/45 if they 
could get the BASIC PLUS that was running on the existing RSTS system 
running.    Turns out that wasn't too difficult.    UNIX uses trap as a 
system call, RSTS (like most DEC OS's for some odd reason) uses EMT.    
It only took a couple of calls that needed emulation in UNIX as well as 
an option to disable UNIX's automatic statck management (the "nostatck" 
system call).

BASIC PLUS was at the core of the largest freshman EE class:   Models 
and Simulation.   MNS students had a disk quota of a whopping 8 blocks 
(4KB).   It was encouraged that you buy a DECtape (something around 
500Kb) for long term storage though the system had a papertape 
reader/punch (how else to load the MAINDEC software).   I thought I was 
in fat city when me and my roommate chipped in and bought an RK05 pack 
(4872 blocks).   At the time the system ran on three "always mounted" 
RK05's:  The root, /sys1, and /sys2 (the latter being the user home 
directories).    The system swapped to an RF-11 fixed head disk (1 MB).  
   There were two extra RK05's shared between various users and were also 
dual ported to an 11/40 that ran MiniUNIX from time to time (until the 
guys upstairs bought an 11/23 that I moved UNIX to as well).

By the time I left, the system had picked up an 80MB removable drive, a 
bulk core box (emulated another RF-11), and a tape drive.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-12 12:06                         ` Ron Natalie
@ 2022-05-12 12:43                           ` John Cowan
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: John Cowan @ 2022-05-12 12:43 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Ron Natalie; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 8:07 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:


> UNIX uses trap as a system call, RSTS (like most DEC OS's for some odd
> reason) uses EMT.
>

That's pretty much what the processor documentation says (in various
wordings depending on what manual you look at).  EMT is for the "system",
TRAP is for the "user".  The intention, I think, was that a user-mode
program could use TRAP for its own purposes, and the supervisor would keep
track of the TRAP vector in low memory associated with a process.  Since
Unix was a "user program", even though it ran in supervisor mode, the
decision was made to use TRAP.

Each DEC OS used EMT in a different way.  Consequently, when the RSTS/E
pseudo-hypervisor (it didn't provide full emulation) was written,
hypervisor calls were performed with EMT 377 immediately followed by
another EMT.  This was unlikely to occur in any user program (at minimum
you'd have to set up the registers for the second call).  An EMT was acted
on by the hypervisor only if it met these conditions (the second EMT was
simply examined, not executed), otherwise it was vectored to the guest OS.
Similarly, RSX/11-M used only EMT 376 and EMT 377, neither of which were
used by RT-11 user programs, making it possible to run a thin RT-11
emulator as a user program that EMTed into RSX to do its work.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-11 17:35                       ` Larry McVoy
  2022-05-12  0:16                         ` George Michaelson
@ 2022-05-13  2:46                         ` Adam Thornton
  2022-05-15  0:48                           ` Larry McVoy
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Adam Thornton @ 2022-05-13  2:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: TUHS main list



> On May 11, 2022, at 10:35 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant,

As good a time as any to thank you for this.  Pity you couldn't convince them to put the POSIX sh in /bin/sh and the old sh in /usr/compat or some such, rather than having POSIX only in /usr/xpg4.

Adam

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-10 16:08           ` Warner Losh
  2022-05-10 16:40             ` Heinz Lycklama
  2022-05-10 16:42             ` James Frew
@ 2022-05-14  2:56             ` Mary Ann Horton
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Mary Ann Horton @ 2022-05-14  2:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Warner Losh; +Cc: TUHS main list

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It must have been PC/IX, that rings a bell. I also had Xenix in the same 
time frame, it was different (and I preferred Xenix).

     Thanks!

         Mary Ann

On 5/10/22 09:08, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2022, 9:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:
>
>     I recall having an IBM PC port of UNIX in the 1980s on floppy with
>     a black 6x9 box and Charlie Chaplin with the red rose. I thought
>     it was called AIX. I installed it, and recall it being very
>     different from UNIX for sysadmin (different logs, different admin
>     commands) but similar for users. I thought it was based on System
>     III or thereabouts.
>
>     I can't find any evidence of this. It appears AIX 1.0 wasn't for
>     the original PC.
>
>     Does anyone else recall this distribution and what it was called
>     or based on?
>
>
> The first 8086 port was inside of Bell Labs, but was for a system with 
> a custom MMU. The first commercial one was Venix released in 1983 
> based on Version 7 with some Berkeley improvements using the MIT 
> compilers of the time, but it had a blue label with a boring stylized 
> V on it. IBM released PC/IX a year later (1984) and marketed heavily. 
> It was a companion to its other unix offerings, and wasn't AIX. That 
> port was based on System III. If anything had the clever Charlie 
> Chaplin marketing materials, it was sure to be PC/IX. Microsoft's 
> Xenix was also in this time frame, but wasn't marketed by IBM (and its 
> earliest version in 1982 predate Venix, but were only for Intel's 
> System 86 machines, and may have required an Intel MMU board (the 
> quick research I did was unclear on this point, other than it was 
> supported). SCO/Microsoft released in late 1983 and early 1984 
> versions for the commercially available PC and other variants at the 
> time before the IBM-PC became the standardized x86 platform.
>
> So my money is on PC/IX.
>
> Warner
>
>     Thanks,
>
>         Mary Ann
>
>     On 5/1/22 19:08, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
>>     My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source
>>     code and then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days
>>     experience with it on a POS cash register fixing a client issue.
>>     The shocker - they changed all the error messages to error codes
>>     with a look at the manual requirement.
>>
>>     Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
>>     But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite
>>     but more along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time.
>>     License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
>>
>>     On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>         in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the
>>         first, as I
>>         understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
>>         code."
>>
>>         Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done
>>         quite right.
>>         One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an
>>         error if
>>         the full path existed. oops.
>>
>>         But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
>>         handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>>
>>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-13  2:46                         ` Adam Thornton
@ 2022-05-15  0:48                           ` Larry McVoy
  2022-05-15  5:36                             ` Adam Thornton
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2022-05-15  0:48 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Adam Thornton; +Cc: TUHS main list

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 07:46:33PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> 
> 
> > On May 11, 2022, at 10:35 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant,
> 
> As good a time as any to thank you for this.  Pity you couldn't convince them to put the POSIX sh in /bin/sh and the old sh in /usr/compat or some such, rather than having POSIX only in /usr/xpg4.

I was pretty green, it was my 3rd job after grad school.  I didn't have
pull at the time, I was a nobody who had to prove himself.

Sun was pretty BSD centric at the time, it was more or less a bug fixed
BSD with a well designed and well implemented replacement VM system.

The POSIX stuff had a definite System V feel to it, and in some places,
for the better.  It felt like POSIX cleaned up signal semantics (I know,
ASTs are better) and sorted out a bunch of differences between the
various vendors.  But Sun was not all in on POSIX, they were doing it
because they had to.  I was there as a contractor because none of the
rank and file wanted anything to do with it.

Whatever, doing that work was an education about all the code paths in
the kernel, in retrospect I would have paid my entire college tuition
to be forced to do that work.  I learned a _lot_.

This is sort of neither here nore there, but credit where credit is due.
I enjoyed working with Don Cragun, Sun's rep to the POSIX meetings.
Very soft spoken guy, but very detail oriented.  When Don said "do this"
I did what he said.

--lm

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-02  2:08       ` Kenneth Goodwin
  2022-05-02  9:21         ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
  2022-05-10 15:28         ` Mary Ann Horton
@ 2022-05-15  2:00         ` Stuart Remphrey
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Stuart Remphrey @ 2022-05-15  2:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Kenneth Goodwin; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1786 bytes --]

> My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source code
and then proceeded to "make it their own"...
> The shocker - they changed all the error messages to error codes with a
look at the manual requirement...
> License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.

Not just error codes, also configuration file stanzas and SMIT(e)!  :-(


AIX wasn't the first (QNX, maybe?), and it was initially derived from AT&T
code, but it was intended not to be:
Someone at IBM publicly stated their intention, quoted in an interview in
one of the industry/VAR magazines, to avoid the license by replacing all
the AT&T source code with their own. Though AFAIK this effort eventually
sputtered and died in favour of Linux.

I recall thinking at the time that's a "once bitten, twice shy" reaction to
licensing DOS/Windows from Microsoft, "Oh, no, we're not going *there*
again".


I was (briefly) at Wang Australia (late 80's?) where we (re)sold RISC/6000
Unix/y systems, along with MIPS and HP. The MIPS agreement was local to Oz,
but IBM and IIRC HP were global. Maybe the year before the U.S. head office
filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors... when that happened, I got
an apologetic phone call from my friend & colleague Ross Leighton who had
recruited me from Pyramid the year before to support the Unix effort he was
putting together at Wang Oz -- though it was too little, too late...

Stuart.


p.s. Dave Horsfall: Would you know Ross from Lionel Singer Group/Corp and
Pyramid Technology Australia?
I had been at LSG/LSC and then the memorably-named PTC BURP at Bond Uni
Research Park.
Recall PTAs books of customer SFA forms, in triplicate: Software Fault
Advice about which we could do Sweet F*ck All.
(until some pointy-haired boss changed the name)

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-15  0:48                           ` Larry McVoy
@ 2022-05-15  5:36                             ` Adam Thornton
  2022-05-15 13:37                               ` Larry McVoy
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 79+ messages in thread
From: Adam Thornton @ 2022-05-15  5:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: TUHS main list



> On May 14, 2022, at 5:48 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 07:46:33PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On May 11, 2022, at 10:35 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant,
>> 
>> As good a time as any to thank you for this.  Pity you couldn't convince them to put the POSIX sh in /bin/sh and the old sh in /usr/compat or some such, rather than having POSIX only in /usr/xpg4.
> 
> I was pretty green, it was my 3rd job after grad school.  I didn't have
> pull at the time, I was a nobody who had to prove himself.

What are you talking about?  That wasn't a long time ago.  It was only...

...

...aw crap.

Adam

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?
  2022-05-15  5:36                             ` Adam Thornton
@ 2022-05-15 13:37                               ` Larry McVoy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 79+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2022-05-15 13:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Adam Thornton; +Cc: TUHS main list

On Sat, May 14, 2022 at 10:36:41PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> 
> 
> > On May 14, 2022, at 5:48 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 07:46:33PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> >> 
> >> 
> >>> On May 11, 2022, at 10:35 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >>> As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant,
> >> 
> >> As good a time as any to thank you for this.  Pity you couldn't convince them to put the POSIX sh in /bin/sh and the old sh in /usr/compat or some such, rather than having POSIX only in /usr/xpg4.
> > 
> > I was pretty green, it was my 3rd job after grad school.  I didn't have
> > pull at the time, I was a nobody who had to prove himself.
> 
> What are you talking about?  That wasn't a long time ago.  It was only...
> 
> ...
> 
> ...aw crap.

Amen to that.  I turned 60 this year and man, oh, man, that sucked.  I've
mostly been fine with getting older but 60?  Are you kidding me?  I'm 60?
That's the first time a birthday made me feel closer to death.  Yuck.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 79+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-05-15 13:38 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 79+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-05-01  9:30 [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code? Andrew Warkentin
2022-05-01 11:43 ` Ron Natalie
2022-05-01 11:56   ` Rob Pike
2022-05-01 14:03     ` Kenneth Goodwin
2022-05-03  4:37       ` Jim Carpenter
2022-05-01 14:09   ` Kenneth Goodwin
2022-05-01 18:08     ` ron minnich
2022-05-01 18:22       ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2022-05-01 19:49         ` Dan Stromberg
2022-05-01 20:37           ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2022-05-02  2:08       ` Kenneth Goodwin
2022-05-02  9:21         ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
2022-05-02 20:19           ` Rich Morin
2022-05-02 21:30             ` Clem Cole
2022-05-02 21:36             ` Dan Cross
2022-05-10 15:28         ` Mary Ann Horton
2022-05-10 16:08           ` Warner Losh
2022-05-10 16:40             ` Heinz Lycklama
2022-05-10 16:42             ` James Frew
2022-05-14  2:56             ` Mary Ann Horton
2022-05-10 16:59           ` Clem Cole
2022-05-10 17:18             ` Clem Cole
2022-05-10 18:05               ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2022-05-10 19:27                 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2022-05-10 19:08               ` Henry Bent
2022-05-10 19:33                 ` Richard Salz
2022-05-10 20:18                   ` Ronald Natalie
2022-05-11 16:20                     ` James Frew
2022-05-11 16:51                       ` Paul Winalski
2022-05-10 20:28                   ` Henry Bent
2022-05-10 20:43                   ` Warner Losh
2022-05-10 20:46                   ` Clem Cole
2022-05-11 16:44                     ` Paul Winalski
2022-05-11 17:09                       ` Clem Cole
2022-05-11 17:35                       ` Larry McVoy
2022-05-12  0:16                         ` George Michaelson
2022-05-13  2:46                         ` Adam Thornton
2022-05-15  0:48                           ` Larry McVoy
2022-05-15  5:36                             ` Adam Thornton
2022-05-15 13:37                               ` Larry McVoy
2022-05-12  5:22                       ` Warner Losh
2022-05-12 12:06                         ` Ron Natalie
2022-05-12 12:43                           ` John Cowan
2022-05-15  2:00         ` Stuart Remphrey
2022-05-02  2:42       ` Phil Budne
2022-05-02  6:46         ` Ron Natalie
2022-05-02 13:50           ` Clem Cole
2022-05-02 14:46             ` tytso
2022-05-02 15:38               ` Clem Cole
2022-05-02 20:31                 ` Warner Losh
2022-05-03  5:01                   ` tytso
2022-05-03 11:35                     ` Richard Salz
2022-05-02 23:30           ` Gregg Levine
     [not found]           ` <CAK7dMtD08weh+97mx+ncrq0cxprKgke42C0vFYNPnBkd8Fx9Sg@mail.gmail.com>
2022-05-03  7:28             ` Ronald Natalie
2022-05-02 12:59         ` Kenneth Goodwin
2022-05-02 14:13           ` Richard Salz
2022-05-02 13:14         ` tytso
2022-05-02 13:32           ` Larry McVoy
2022-05-02 13:16         ` Dan Cross
2022-05-02 14:14           ` Miod Vallat
2022-05-02 14:50             ` ron minnich
2022-05-02 16:13             ` Al Kossow
2022-05-02 18:46               ` Miod Vallat
2022-05-02 19:54               ` Chet Ramey
2022-05-02 21:17             ` Dan Cross
2022-05-02 23:49               ` George Michaelson
2022-05-03  7:22                 ` Ronald Natalie
2022-05-03  7:40               ` Miod Vallat
2022-05-03  8:03                 ` Ron Natalie
     [not found]               ` <CAEoi9W4eD8AF=FwjMT-KPRfyYgD+qgVvE1u3sBwiovm4=1WWLg@mail.g mail.com>
2022-05-03 12:14                 ` John Foust via TUHS
2022-05-01 20:55 ` Michael Huff
2022-05-03  4:55   ` Jim Carpenter
2022-05-02 15:43 ` Clem Cole
2022-05-02 16:16   ` Bakul Shah
2022-05-02 16:19     ` Bakul Shah
2022-05-02 17:14       ` Clem Cole
2022-05-02 16:29     ` Larry McVoy
2022-05-02 17:42     ` Clem Cole
2022-05-02 17:59       ` Bakul Shah

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