From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=DATE_IN_PAST_12_24, DKIM_INVALID,DKIM_SIGNED,LOTS_OF_MONEY,MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 2437 invoked from network); 27 Jan 2023 17:47:25 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (50.116.15.146) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 27 Jan 2023 17:47:25 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2D58342582; Sat, 28 Jan 2023 03:47:18 +1000 (AEST) Received: from outgoing.mit.edu (outgoing-auth-1.mit.edu [18.9.28.11]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 868DE4257E for ; Sat, 28 Jan 2023 03:47:13 +1000 (AEST) Received: from cwcc.thunk.org (pool-173-48-120-46.bstnma.fios.verizon.net [173.48.120.46]) (authenticated bits=0) (User authenticated as tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU) by outgoing.mit.edu (8.14.7/8.12.4) with ESMTP id 30RHl0QI003048 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 bits=256 verify=NOT); Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:47:01 -0500 DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=mit.edu; s=outgoing; t=1674841622; bh=Pdb+TVmkk+UOxw8zoYch5udZ9+OUVSfDozmRXXn3b6Y=; h=Date:From:To:Cc:Subject:References:In-Reply-To; b=oQVZ0ujTT5aZMmlb03L2d2nQM9ZVCgBH0Kw1HPaNoKi6lgTO7sMdMEUIxevU/yiv5 sldj7KWzgBAYhEiXP4qOKxHC1ew0x7aKyvd5SEhI4gCMIMeErLN6VvyaPsbNEf4g9a mUj8pVBEKrxT4K5xPNmzvEz1vuWewTz2DFRpAn3rH88DvW47GB5f5RrtwDNPWSYfZS VSx8f0HlrDVfKoBGxoVMx2tjJv5p1SGRF9dxmbZFog4owS5FEQ6NOM09uEHJdbH8OY v8IEEjSv9yRFRJtnZmYxPcZJGPKO+h7EGxZqPtcoDa/bV33JMfp8vEH2IWhEd8URoP lJvC9uKK0L7hg== Received: by cwcc.thunk.org (Postfix, from userid 15806) id D1B1715C358B; Thu, 26 Jan 2023 23:49:53 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2023 23:49:53 -0500 From: "Theodore Ts'o" To: Dan Cross Message-ID: References: <3e272d72-b77a-d347-b5c3-7ed19482e5af@gmail.com> <3h5FEAegoTs6FrhHODiW-rBdB59dt_Rmr4G0PIw7flqaJLsmorgPsilm4f2aJkDud-qEljDjnCJcE1uY05Iw4HNQcyNG4W3wzVlLD0UZfLg=@protonmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Message-ID-Hash: 5QHMI2HW36QUQ7RNKY4U772F53DJFCUI X-Message-ID-Hash: 5QHMI2HW36QUQ7RNKY4U772F53DJFCUI X-MailFrom: tytso@mit.edu X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; header-match-tuhs.tuhs.org-0; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: segaloco , TUHS main list X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: 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 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