[TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org>]

arnold@skeeve.com writes:

> Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org> wrote:
>
>> The later MV/xxxxx Supernova boxes could run Unix, I
>> believe... (at least I remember the university running Unix on a MV
>> series after I left).
>
> I think these were called "Eclipse", and the story of their
> development is told in the famous book "The Soul of a New Machine".
> For you youngsters out there, it's a great read.

Ya, that is right...  I didn't remember that correctly.  The Eclipse was
the MV series, 32 bit, and ran AOS/VS, the Nova, 16 bit, ran AOS.

> We had one at Georgia Tech, it ran a Unix emulation on top
> of AOS (or whatever it was called). Later on DG ported Unix to
> run on it native.

I was there for the start of that emulation layer stuff for AOS/VS.
When I encountered it, it was just, mostly, something that helped port
software written for Unix to AOS/VS.  I remember two things that made
that very hard, the lack of any sort of fork() notion in AOS/VS and the
lack of any sort of setuid() notion.  You pretty much couldn't do either
of those in any manor.  There was an idea much like fork()+exec() that
could be used to start a new program, but that required source changes.
I very much remember a port of sendmail that couldn't be used to deliver
mail to a local user on the box because you didn't have setuid() and
couldn't fake it as a normal user.  It was nice to hear that DG did a
real Unix port, but that was after my time.

> Arnold



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