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* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
@ 2019-11-06 20:31 Pat Barron
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Pat Barron @ 2019-11-06 20:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Also, I'm still in touch with shadow, I can ask if there's a mirror of 
that IBM RT page still around.

--Pat.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-23  4:40   ` Gregg Levine
@ 2019-11-23 12:51     ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2019-11-23 12:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Gregg Levine; +Cc: TUHS main list

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No I don't remember Many details on this one as I did not do it.  As I said
I think it was a Burness message in the graphics subsystem, but I cannot
swear to it.     I just remember the time frame and what happened.  Roger
Gourd's reaction was priceless when Mr Potatohead called us on it.  It was
one of the times I really learned to respect Roger.

That said, Ill see what I can find by asking around.

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 11:41 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello!
> Clem by chance do you remember what the error message response was? It
> would be interesting to see what phrases were used. For example, on
> the IBM side of things, a fellow Adam and I both know, coded an entire
> application so that everything it said and did would be in Klingonese.
> No I do not remember which one it was, and what have you, I only
> remember it surfacing during his talk at the IBM offices here in town,
> during the early years of running Tux on the IBM S/390 systems.
>
> I also find it strange that sometimes even Google is thinking in that
> language.
> -----
> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 3:09 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 2:53 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>     > From: Arnold Robbins
> >>
> >>     > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too.
> >>
> >> And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin,
> >> courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site
> once,
> >> whereupon hilarity ensued.
> >
> > One of my favorite stories of the same vein was a masscomp story.   We
> were chasing a rare event (as I recall it was when we first were debugging
> Multiprocessor stuff and it a lock order problem).  But we could not get
> the customers to tell us about what was happening, since the system
> recovered quickly, but we might kill a process. We had done a few releases
> and make a few changes but we could never reproduce it.
> >
> > I never knew who it was but someone ??Jack Burness if I had to guess??
> put out a patch with a couple of error messages in Klingon and dumped a
> bunch of information.  Sure enough this was noticed, customer stopped, we
> got the needed data, as they reported the error.  But it was a high
> visibility customer, so the president (Mr. Potatohead) got a phone call.
>  Fossil (our boss) made us swear it would never happen again, but he
> defended us to the President.   We found the bug ;-)
>
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

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* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 20:08 ` Clem Cole
@ 2019-11-23  4:40   ` Gregg Levine
  2019-11-23 12:51     ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: Gregg Levine @ 2019-11-23  4:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

Hello!
Clem by chance do you remember what the error message response was? It
would be interesting to see what phrases were used. For example, on
the IBM side of things, a fellow Adam and I both know, coded an entire
application so that everything it said and did would be in Klingonese.
No I do not remember which one it was, and what have you, I only
remember it surfacing during his talk at the IBM offices here in town,
during the early years of running Tux on the IBM S/390 systems.

I also find it strange that sometimes even Google is thinking in that language.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 3:09 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 2:53 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>>     > From: Arnold Robbins
>>
>>     > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too.
>>
>> And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin,
>> courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site once,
>> whereupon hilarity ensued.
>
> One of my favorite stories of the same vein was a masscomp story.   We were chasing a rare event (as I recall it was when we first were debugging Multiprocessor stuff and it a lock order problem).  But we could not get the customers to tell us about what was happening, since the system recovered quickly, but we might kill a process. We had done a few releases and make a few changes but we could never reproduce it.
>
> I never knew who it was but someone ??Jack Burness if I had to guess?? put out a patch with a couple of error messages in Klingon and dumped a bunch of information.  Sure enough this was noticed, customer stopped, we got the needed data, as they reported the error.  But it was a high visibility customer, so the president (Mr. Potatohead) got a phone call.   Fossil (our boss) made us swear it would never happen again, but he defended us to the President.   We found the bug ;-)

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 11:58               ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 13:07                 ` Brad Spencer
  2019-11-21 17:29                 ` Charles H Sauer
@ 2019-11-22 20:38                 ` Al Kossow
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Al Kossow @ 2019-11-22 20:38 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross; +Cc: TUHS main list



On 11/21/19 3:58 AM, Dan Cross wrote:

> But anyway, there was no hypervisor involved.

Sorry, got it mixed up in my mind with aix
I had remembered bits of the kernel were missing, but I forgot why.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 16:16                     ` Chet Ramey
@ 2019-11-21 20:53                       ` Dan Cross
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2019-11-21 20:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Chester Ramey; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 11:16 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:

> On 11/21/19 9:19 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org
> > <mailto:brad@anduin.eldar.org>> wrote:
> >
> >     For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu,
> MACH
> >     microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS.  Ran well
> >     enough, but was disk and memory constrained.  We had source to much
> of
> >     the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to
> recall
> >     that compiling it was a big pain.  Something like you had to use a
> >     specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C??  hc command
> perhaps)
> >     to compile some of the source.  gcc had a backend for the ROMP
> >     processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries.  I think
> that
> >     some variation of pcc was the usual compiler.  I remember it being
> >     pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.  We used them mostly
> as X
> >     terminal workstations.
> >
> >
> > "High C" (or perhaps "Hi C"? It's been a while...) was the name of the
> > system compiler on AOS; I thought it was installed as `cc`.
>
> "High C", and it was installed as cc and hc.
>

Yeah, that matches my (vague) recollection as well.

> Some RT enthusiasts kept those machines running well beyond their prime.
> > Why? I'm not entirely sure; as you say, they were memory and disk
> > constrained. They were also very slow.
>
> I had one running in my basement into the late 90s, with my own self-
> maintained kernel. I did a considerable portion of the bash-2.0
> development on that box, and my wife wrote all of her doctoral thesis on
> it (using a troff macro package I wrote to do APA style formatting). It
> didn't make the cut when I moved from that house. Why did I have it?
> Because it was free, and it did what I needed.
>

We kept a couple of them running through the mid- to late-90s as well. By
that time, however, it seemed like Linux and the BSDs on PCs had greatly
eclipsed whatever was possible performance or software-wise on the aging
RTs, which were also starting to fail in odd ways. But until that point,
they were free and ran Unix, and for a long time that was kind of a special
thing. We ended up replacing a 6150 with a 486 running FreeBSD and life was
pretty good, though.

The spiritual descendent of that (those) machine(s) now runs OpenBSD on a
VPS somewhere. A while back, I found some old NIS data files (in ndbm
format, of course) that we'd preserved from some ancient backup; I was able
to get the ndbm library from an old BSD distribution and compile it and
extract the data, which was kind of fun.

        - Dan C.

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* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 19:41                       ` arnold
@ 2019-11-21 20:21                         ` Jon Steinhart
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Jon Steinhart @ 2019-11-21 20:21 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

arnold@skeeve.com writes:
> greg travis <greg.m.travis@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You're quite right about the religious error messages.
>
> The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too. I remember flipping through some
> of the early manuals and there are a number of references to needing
> divine help if things go badly wrong, praying for divine guidance,
> and so on. :-)  (Yes, I know that was mainly cultural. Still, it
> was striking, at least to me.)
>
> Arnold

I believe that you're talking about the "gerts" command and if you ever had
to use it, you'd know that the divine guidance part was accurate.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 19:53 Noel Chiappa
@ 2019-11-21 20:08 ` Clem Cole
  2019-11-23  4:40   ` Gregg Levine
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2019-11-21 20:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Noel Chiappa; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 2:53 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Arnold Robbins
>
>     > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too.
>
> And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin,
> courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site
> once,
> whereupon hilarity ensued.
>
One of my favorite stories of the same vein was a masscomp story.   We were
chasing a rare event (as I recall it was when we first were debugging
Multiprocessor stuff and it a lock order problem).  But we could not get
the customers to tell us about what was happening, since the system
recovered quickly, but we might kill a process. We had done a few releases
and make a few changes but we could never reproduce it.

I never knew who it was but someone ??Jack Burness if I had to guess?? put
out a patch with a couple of error messages in Klingon and dumped a bunch
of information.  Sure enough this was noticed, customer stopped, we got the
needed data, as they reported the error.  But it was a high visibility
customer, so the president (Mr. Potatohead) got a phone call.   Fossil (our
boss) made us swear it would never happen again, but he defended us to the
President.   We found the bug ;-)

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
@ 2019-11-21 19:53 Noel Chiappa
  2019-11-21 20:08 ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2019-11-21 19:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs; +Cc: jnc

    > From: Arnold Robbins

    > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too.

And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin,
courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site once,
whereupon hilarity ensued.

	  Noel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 16:43                     ` greg travis
@ 2019-11-21 19:41                       ` arnold
  2019-11-21 20:21                         ` Jon Steinhart
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: arnold @ 2019-11-21 19:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: greg.m.travis, crossd; +Cc: tuhs

greg travis <greg.m.travis@gmail.com> wrote:

> You're quite right about the religious error messages.

The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too. I remember flipping through some
of the early manuals and there are a number of references to needing
divine help if things go badly wrong, praying for divine guidance,
and so on. :-)  (Yes, I know that was mainly cultural. Still, it
was striking, at least to me.)

Arnold

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 17:33                   ` Charles H Sauer
  2019-11-21 17:36                     ` Dan Cross
@ 2019-11-21 18:11                     ` Brad Spencer
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Brad Spencer @ 2019-11-21 18:11 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Charles H Sauer; +Cc: tuhs

Charles H Sauer <sauer@technologists.com> writes:

> On 11/21/2019 7:07 AM, Brad Spencer wrote:
>
>> ... I remember it being
>> pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.  
>
> I'm puzzled about the "minus YP/NIS". I negotiated the IBM NFS license 
> on behalf of AIX, but was inclusive of the rest of the company, so I 
> think ACIS put NFS into AOS under the auspices of that license. I 
> remember discussing with the Palo Alto ACIS folks at the time.
>
> I only had AOS at home, without Ethernet, so wouldn't have tried to use 
> NFS or YP. But I would have thought that ACIS would have included YP.
>
> Charlie


I was referring to the Mt. Xinu Mach based 4.3BSD OS that replaced AIX
on the RTs I was using.  Aside from the 4.3BSD part, it didn't have AIX
involved... and it didn't have YP/NIS.



-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 17:33                   ` Charles H Sauer
@ 2019-11-21 17:36                     ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 18:11                     ` Brad Spencer
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2019-11-21 17:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Charles H Sauer; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 12:34 PM Charles H Sauer <sauer@technologists.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On 11/21/2019 7:07 AM, Brad Spencer wrote:
>
> > ... I remember it being
> > pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.
>
> I'm puzzled about the "minus YP/NIS". I negotiated the IBM NFS license
> on behalf of AIX, but was inclusive of the rest of the company, so I
> think ACIS put NFS into AOS under the auspices of that license. I
> remember discussing with the Palo Alto ACIS folks at the time.
>
> I only had AOS at home, without Ethernet, so wouldn't have tried to use
> NFS or YP. But I would have thought that ACIS would have included YP.
>

AOS definitely had NIS/YP. I remember it quite distinctly.

        - Dan C.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 13:07                 ` Brad Spencer
  2019-11-21 14:19                   ` Dan Cross
@ 2019-11-21 17:33                   ` Charles H Sauer
  2019-11-21 17:36                     ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 18:11                     ` Brad Spencer
  1 sibling, 2 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Charles H Sauer @ 2019-11-21 17:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs



On 11/21/2019 7:07 AM, Brad Spencer wrote:

> ... I remember it being
> pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.  

I'm puzzled about the "minus YP/NIS". I negotiated the IBM NFS license 
on behalf of AIX, but was inclusive of the rest of the company, so I 
think ACIS put NFS into AOS under the auspices of that license. I 
remember discussing with the Palo Alto ACIS folks at the time.

I only had AOS at home, without Ethernet, so wouldn't have tried to use 
NFS or YP. But I would have thought that ACIS would have included YP.

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 11:58               ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 13:07                 ` Brad Spencer
@ 2019-11-21 17:29                 ` Charles H Sauer
  2019-11-22 20:38                 ` Al Kossow
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Charles H Sauer @ 2019-11-21 17:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs



On 11/21/2019 5:58 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:33 AM Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org 
> <mailto:aek@bitsavers.org>> wrote:

>     It was, and may still be in the afs heirarchy
>     I'm not going to say where, or how complete what was there is
>     I also seem to remember it still sat on top of an AIX microkernel
>     and didn't go down to bare metal.
> 
> 
> No, that's not true. AOS was basically 4.3BSD Tahoe plus NFS and it ran 
> on bare RT hardware. There was source code available to universities, 
> though as I recall some bits related to memory management were missing 
> and distributed as object files. I gathered, at the time, this was due 
> to some obscure intellectual property reasons. People later tried to 
> Port e.g. 4.4BSD to aging RT hardware and found it challenging because 
> the memory subsystem was so different.
> 
> But anyway, there was no hypervisor involved.

There may well have been AFS for AIX and thus the confusion about 
hypervisor (AIX VRM).


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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 14:19                   ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 16:16                     ` Chet Ramey
@ 2019-11-21 16:43                     ` greg travis
  2019-11-21 19:41                       ` arnold
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: greg travis @ 2019-11-21 16:43 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross; +Cc: TUHS main list

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You're quite right about the religious error messages. I used MetaWare High
C under DOS briefly, comparing it to Turbo C and Watcom. (Watcom won.) It
had extensions to C, such as a coroutine-ish 'yield' keyword.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 9:20 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org>
> wrote:
>
>> For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu, MACH
>> microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS.  Ran well
>> enough, but was disk and memory constrained.  We had source to much of
>> the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to recall
>> that compiling it was a big pain.  Something like you had to use a
>> specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C??  hc command perhaps)
>> to compile some of the source.  gcc had a backend for the ROMP
>> processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries.  I think that
>> some variation of pcc was the usual compiler.  I remember it being
>> pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.  We used them mostly as X
>> terminal workstations.
>>
>
> "High C" (or perhaps "Hi C"? It's been a while...) was the name of the
> system compiler on AOS; I thought it was installed as `cc`. I don't recall
> a pcc-derived compiler, but apparently such a thing did exist and some
> documentation says that High C was installed as `hc`, so my memory may be
> off. This old post describes RT compilers:
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt/u7DUwY5U9kQ/uVqLP9FhqMEJ
>
> Hi-C was sort of an odd compiler. I gather IBM outsourced the development
> of it to some third party (MetaWare) which was founded by very religious
> people, and I have a vague memory of some of the documentation or perhaps
> even error messages making biblical references.
>
> The kernel had to be built with High C, if I recall correctly, though GCC
> worked OK for producing userspace binaries. I don't recall what the bug
> was, but it was eventually found and fixed. Perhaps it had to do with
> incomplete register saves on function entry interacting poorly with
> interrupts or something.
>
> Some RT enthusiasts kept those machines running well beyond their prime.
> Why? I'm not entirely sure; as you say, they were memory and disk
> constrained. They were also very slow. Anyway, I have some vague
> recollection that at some point the bug in the compiler was fixed so that
> GCC could produce a working kernel; nascent NetBSD and OpenBSD ports were
> planned, but I don't think they ever went anywhere.
> https://www.openbsd.org/romp.html exists, though I don't know that the
> NetBSD people ever got beyond the talking stage. The OpenBSD-romp mailing
> list had some interesting information, but I can't find archives anymore.
>
> Oh well. The RT was an interesting footnote in the history of computing,
> but it seems that, as a workstation, it was too little too late by the time
> it actually hit the market. Had they released it a few years earlier?
> Perhaps they could have cornered the market.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 14:19                   ` Dan Cross
@ 2019-11-21 16:16                     ` Chet Ramey
  2019-11-21 20:53                       ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 16:43                     ` greg travis
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: Chet Ramey @ 2019-11-21 16:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross, Brad Spencer; +Cc: TUHS main list

On 11/21/19 9:19 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org 
> <mailto:brad@anduin.eldar.org>> wrote:
> 
>     For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu, MACH
>     microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS.  Ran well
>     enough, but was disk and memory constrained.  We had source to much of
>     the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to recall
>     that compiling it was a big pain.  Something like you had to use a
>     specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C??  hc command perhaps)
>     to compile some of the source.  gcc had a backend for the ROMP
>     processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries.  I think that
>     some variation of pcc was the usual compiler.  I remember it being
>     pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.  We used them mostly as X
>     terminal workstations.
> 
> 
> "High C" (or perhaps "Hi C"? It's been a while...) was the name of the 
> system compiler on AOS; I thought it was installed as `cc`.

"High C", and it was installed as cc and hc.


> Some RT enthusiasts kept those machines running well beyond their prime. 
> Why? I'm not entirely sure; as you say, they were memory and disk 
> constrained. They were also very slow.

I had one running in my basement into the late 90s, with my own self-
maintained kernel. I did a considerable portion of the bash-2.0
development on that box, and my wife wrote all of her doctoral thesis on
it (using a troff macro package I wrote to do APA style formatting). It 
didn't make the cut when I moved from that house. Why did I have it?
Because it was free, and it did what I needed.


-- 
``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] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 13:07                 ` Brad Spencer
@ 2019-11-21 14:19                   ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 16:16                     ` Chet Ramey
  2019-11-21 16:43                     ` greg travis
  2019-11-21 17:33                   ` Charles H Sauer
  1 sibling, 2 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2019-11-21 14:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Brad Spencer; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org> wrote:

> For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu, MACH
> microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS.  Ran well
> enough, but was disk and memory constrained.  We had source to much of
> the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to recall
> that compiling it was a big pain.  Something like you had to use a
> specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C??  hc command perhaps)
> to compile some of the source.  gcc had a backend for the ROMP
> processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries.  I think that
> some variation of pcc was the usual compiler.  I remember it being
> pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.  We used them mostly as X
> terminal workstations.
>

"High C" (or perhaps "Hi C"? It's been a while...) was the name of the
system compiler on AOS; I thought it was installed as `cc`. I don't recall
a pcc-derived compiler, but apparently such a thing did exist and some
documentation says that High C was installed as `hc`, so my memory may be
off. This old post describes RT compilers:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt/u7DUwY5U9kQ/uVqLP9FhqMEJ

Hi-C was sort of an odd compiler. I gather IBM outsourced the development
of it to some third party (MetaWare) which was founded by very religious
people, and I have a vague memory of some of the documentation or perhaps
even error messages making biblical references.

The kernel had to be built with High C, if I recall correctly, though GCC
worked OK for producing userspace binaries. I don't recall what the bug
was, but it was eventually found and fixed. Perhaps it had to do with
incomplete register saves on function entry interacting poorly with
interrupts or something.

Some RT enthusiasts kept those machines running well beyond their prime.
Why? I'm not entirely sure; as you say, they were memory and disk
constrained. They were also very slow. Anyway, I have some vague
recollection that at some point the bug in the compiler was fixed so that
GCC could produce a working kernel; nascent NetBSD and OpenBSD ports were
planned, but I don't think they ever went anywhere.
https://www.openbsd.org/romp.html exists, though I don't know that the
NetBSD people ever got beyond the talking stage. The OpenBSD-romp mailing
list had some interesting information, but I can't find archives anymore.

Oh well. The RT was an interesting footnote in the history of computing,
but it seems that, as a workstation, it was too little too late by the time
it actually hit the market. Had they released it a few years earlier?
Perhaps they could have cornered the market.

        - Dan C.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21 11:58               ` Dan Cross
@ 2019-11-21 13:07                 ` Brad Spencer
  2019-11-21 14:19                   ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 17:33                   ` Charles H Sauer
  2019-11-21 17:29                 ` Charles H Sauer
  2019-11-22 20:38                 ` Al Kossow
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Brad Spencer @ 2019-11-21 13:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross; +Cc: tuhs

Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:33 AM Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 11/5/19 11:59 PM, SPC wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Is it AOS stuff saved and available (including source code)
>> > un some place on the Internet?
>>
>> It was, and may still be in the afs heirarchy
>> I'm not going to say where, or how complete what was there is
>> I also seem to remember it still sat on top of an AIX microkernel
>> and didn't go down to bare metal.
>>
>
> No, that's not true. AOS was basically 4.3BSD Tahoe plus NFS and it ran on
> bare RT hardware. There was source code available to universities, though
> as I recall some bits related to memory management were missing and
> distributed as object files. I gathered, at the time, this was due to some
> obscure intellectual property reasons. People later tried to Port e.g.
> 4.4BSD to aging RT hardware and found it challenging because the memory
> subsystem was so different.
>
> But anyway, there was no hypervisor involved.
>
>         - Dan C.

For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu, MACH
microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS.  Ran well
enough, but was disk and memory constrained.  We had source to much of
the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to recall
that compiling it was a big pain.  Something like you had to use a
specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C??  hc command perhaps)
to compile some of the source.  gcc had a backend for the ROMP
processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries.  I think that
some variation of pcc was the usual compiler.  I remember it being
pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS.  We used them mostly as X
terminal workstations.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-21  6:26             ` Al Kossow
@ 2019-11-21 11:58               ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-21 13:07                 ` Brad Spencer
                                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2019-11-21 11:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Al Kossow; +Cc: TUHS main list

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On Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:33 AM Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 11/5/19 11:59 PM, SPC wrote:
> >
> >
> > Is it AOS stuff saved and available (including source code)
> > un some place on the Internet?
>
> It was, and may still be in the afs heirarchy
> I'm not going to say where, or how complete what was there is
> I also seem to remember it still sat on top of an AIX microkernel
> and didn't go down to bare metal.
>

No, that's not true. AOS was basically 4.3BSD Tahoe plus NFS and it ran on
bare RT hardware. There was source code available to universities, though
as I recall some bits related to memory management were missing and
distributed as object files. I gathered, at the time, this was due to some
obscure intellectual property reasons. People later tried to Port e.g.
4.4BSD to aging RT hardware and found it challenging because the memory
subsystem was so different.

But anyway, there was no hypervisor involved.

        - Dan C.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-06  7:59           ` [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT " SPC
  2019-11-06 15:51             ` Charles H Sauer
@ 2019-11-21  6:26             ` Al Kossow
  2019-11-21 11:58               ` Dan Cross
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: Al Kossow @ 2019-11-21  6:26 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs



On 11/5/19 11:59 PM, SPC wrote:
> 
> 
> Is it AOS stuff saved and available (including source code)
> un some place on the Internet?

It was, and may still be in the afs heirarchy
I'm not going to say where, or how complete what was there is
I also seem to remember it still sat on top of an AIX microkernel
and didn't go down to bare metal.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-07 22:40               ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
@ 2019-11-08  4:39                 ` Jason Stevens
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Jason Stevens @ 2019-11-08  4:39 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs, Grant Taylor

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Aix is kind of running on Qemu...  I've run 4.12 although the networking wasn't running, but enough to uuencode stuff through the console. 




Get Outlook for Android







On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 7:41 AM +0900, "Grant Taylor via TUHS" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:










On 11/6/19 8:51 AM, Charles H Sauer wrote:
> I think there is more recent AIX on SIMH 

I know someone who has booted and run AIX 7. under SimH.  I 
don't know how different the emulation SimH is doing to allow that to 
run vs an RS/6000.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die







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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-06 15:51             ` Charles H Sauer
@ 2019-11-07 22:40               ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
  2019-11-08  4:39                 ` Jason Stevens
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: Grant Taylor via TUHS @ 2019-11-07 22:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

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On 11/6/19 8:51 AM, Charles H Sauer wrote:
> I think there is more recent AIX on SIMH 

I know someone who has booted and run AIX 7.<something> under SimH.  I 
don't know how different the emulation SimH is doing to allow that to 
run vs an RS/6000.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
@ 2019-11-06 20:28 Pat Barron
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Pat Barron @ 2019-11-06 20:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

I may still have AOS 4.3 tape images still around somewhere.  I will have 
to search around and see if I still have them.  Though even if I do, I'm 
not sure if the license would permit me to make them available - if I 
recall correctly, this wasn't an actual LPP, but there may be some IBM 
license on this over and above the Berkeley license.  Yes, it did come on 
tape cartridges.

--Pat.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-06  7:59           ` [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT " SPC
@ 2019-11-06 15:51             ` Charles H Sauer
  2019-11-07 22:40               ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
  2019-11-21  6:26             ` Al Kossow
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: Charles H Sauer @ 2019-11-06 15:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: SPC; +Cc: TUHS main list

I'm not aware of AOS source anywhere, but plausibly someone from Athena 
or CMU might still have it. If I recall correctly, it came on large tape 
cartridges.

There was some AOS stuff at www.dementia.org/~shadow/ibmrt.html, some 
still present at 
http://web.archive.org/web/20110725231604/http://www.dementia.org/~shadow/ibmrt.html, 
but the ftp stuff seems to be gone.

Also some AOS stuff at https://amaus.net/static/S100/IBM/RTPC/AOS/.

I'm not aware of RT or 6K emulators available. I think there is more 
recent AIX on SIMH 
(https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/running-aix-7-2-tl3sp1-on-x86_64-via-qemu-system-ppc64/), 
but I've not looked at it.

CHS

On 11/6/2019 1:59 AM, SPC wrote:
> 
> 
> El mié., 6 nov. 2019 4:37, Charles H. Sauer <sauer@technologists.com 
> <mailto:sauer@technologists.com>> escribió:
> 
> 
>     When I left IBM at the beginning of May 1989, I was running AOS on
>     my home RT and AIX 2.2 on my office machine
> 
> 
> With permisión, I have one question fron years about this... Is it AOS 
> stuff saved and available (including source code) un some place on the 
> Internet?
> 
> I would ask too about some kind of emulator of the IBM/RT, but I never 
> find one.
> 
> Regards
> Sergio
> 

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
  2019-11-06  3:36         ` Charles H. Sauer
@ 2019-11-06  7:59           ` SPC
  2019-11-06 15:51             ` Charles H Sauer
  2019-11-21  6:26             ` Al Kossow
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: SPC @ 2019-11-06  7:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Charles H. Sauer; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 471 bytes --]

El mié., 6 nov. 2019 4:37, Charles H. Sauer <sauer@technologists.com>
escribió:

>
> When I left IBM at the beginning of May 1989, I was running AOS on my home
> RT and AIX 2.2 on my office machine
>

With permisión, I have one question fron years about this... Is it AOS
stuff saved and available (including source code) un some place on the
Internet?

I would ask too about some kind of emulator of the IBM/RT, but I never find
one.

Regards
Sergio

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2019-11-23 12:52 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 24+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2019-11-06 20:31 [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA Pat Barron
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-11-21 19:53 Noel Chiappa
2019-11-21 20:08 ` Clem Cole
2019-11-23  4:40   ` Gregg Levine
2019-11-23 12:51     ` Clem Cole
2019-11-06 20:28 Pat Barron
2019-11-03 21:05 [TUHS] " Kevin Bowling
2019-11-04  3:39 ` Gregg Levine
2019-11-05 17:30   ` Clem Cole
2019-11-05 22:11     ` [TUHS] one element of one of M factions of N companies [Re: " Charles H Sauer
2019-11-06  0:06       ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-11-06  3:36         ` Charles H. Sauer
2019-11-06  7:59           ` [TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT " SPC
2019-11-06 15:51             ` Charles H Sauer
2019-11-07 22:40               ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-11-08  4:39                 ` Jason Stevens
2019-11-21  6:26             ` Al Kossow
2019-11-21 11:58               ` Dan Cross
2019-11-21 13:07                 ` Brad Spencer
2019-11-21 14:19                   ` Dan Cross
2019-11-21 16:16                     ` Chet Ramey
2019-11-21 20:53                       ` Dan Cross
2019-11-21 16:43                     ` greg travis
2019-11-21 19:41                       ` arnold
2019-11-21 20:21                         ` Jon Steinhart
2019-11-21 17:33                   ` Charles H Sauer
2019-11-21 17:36                     ` Dan Cross
2019-11-21 18:11                     ` Brad Spencer
2019-11-21 17:29                 ` Charles H Sauer
2019-11-22 20:38                 ` Al Kossow

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