[TUHS] What sparked lint? [Was: Unix stories]

[mah@mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton)]

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I recall at the Delaware Usenix conference (in 1979?) a professor from 
Case Western gave a talk about his port of UNIX to some Interdata or 
Data General or something.  He said that when he booted it up, it said 
"NUXI".


On 01/05/2017 09:46 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
>
> I remember being at an early UUG meeting and the group who did the 
> UNIX port to the IBM series lamenting that it printed NUXI on boot 
> because of byte order issues.    Don’t know if it was true, but NUXI 
> became a synonym for UNIX byte order issues from then on.
>
> The 8/32 indeed has some 370-ish stuff starting from the fact that it 
> numbers the bits from the MSB end.   Amusingly, it has more 
> minicomputerish other features.
>
> One bizarre source of fun is that where as accessing a 16 bit quantity 
> on an odd address on the PDP-11 gives you a bus error trap, the 
> Interdata just ignores the low order bit and returns you the 16 bit 
> value that you are pointing into the middle of.   Same things happen 
> on 32-bit access (lower 2 bits ignored).
>
> For nostalgia, here’s a scan of an old 8/32 programmers manual: 
> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/interdata/32bit/8-32/29-428_8-32_User_May78.pdf
>
> Byte ordering got worked out when networking came in.     I worked on 
> IBM’s AIX which was a productization of the UCLA LOCUS kernel.   The 
> thing was a relatively tightly coupled multiprocessor system that 
> allowed seamless execution of different binary types.    The machines 
> we were working with were the 370 mainframe, the i386 (in the form of 
> IBM PS/2’s), and a four processor i860 add in card IBM built called 
> the W4.    The mainframe having the opposite byte ordering of the others.
>

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