[TUHS] Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 03:04:27PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> >[snip]
> > The VAX 750's were huge time-sharing systems that you could connect to
> > via VT-100's and VS-100 that were hard-wired to the VAX 750's, and
> > telnet from IBM PC/AT's.  The smaller clusters used PC/AT's because
> > they were more flexible as to which 750 you were connecting to;
> > otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room in the
> > right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were assgined
> > to based on the starting character of your last name.  (And graduate
> > students initially didn't have access to Project Athena at all;
> > although if you were in EECS, LCS or the AI Lab you had access to
> > dedicated systems, of course.)
> 
> Was this before the introduction of DECserver terminal concentrators?

I'm not sure; this would have been in the 1985--1987 time frame.

> >[snip]
> > There was a brief, shining moment that we were standardized on
> > BSD-derived Unix systems, but then IBM turned down AOS (the "academic"
> > operating system), and we were forced to use AIX on the IBM RT's, with
> > all that this implied: SMIT, and other horrors.
> 
> Huh, I thought that AOS ran on all versions of the RT? I know they
> dropped support for it when the power-based RS/6000s came out and
> replaced the RT, though.

Well, it perhaps would have been more accurate that IBM had decided to
that AIX was the future, and had defunded the AOS group.  While AOS
may have continued to work on the IBM RT's, the Powers That Be at IBM
had decided that AIX was the future, and when the company which is
sending you $5 million dollars a year (half in hardware and engineers'
salaries, and half in cold hard cash) wants you to switch to AIX, you
salute and reinstall AIX on all of the IBM RT's....

Later on we did get the RS/6000's, but at that point, most of us who
wanted something... that wasn't AIX, would try to get the VAXstation
3100 and later, the M38 variant.  My first staff workstation at MIT
was a VS-3100 named rt-11.mit.edu, and the VS-3100 M38 was
tsx-11.mit.edu, which became the first FTP site for Linux in North
America in 1991.  (I'm not sure how many people realized that the
primary ftp server for Linux was named after an obscure time-sharing
OS built on top of RT-11 for the PDP-11.  :-)

> The RT was a weird duck, for sure.

Well, there were the jokes that the RT was an overgrown typewriter
controller with pretensions.  :-)  And it's floating-point performance
was crap, but if you were only doing integer operations (e.g., running
TeX, running compiles), it wasn't half-bad if it wasn't running AIX.

> Compared to a SPARCstation it was
> absurdly slow, but I guess compared to a uVAX perhaps not so much.

Alas, Sun wasn't one of Project Athena's sponsors; just IBM and DEC.

It also didn't help that our contemporaneous uVax's were mostly the VS
II/RC's, with the the epoxyed backplane which limited the amount of
amount of memory that could be put in them....

       	  	      	       	      - Ted