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. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: