TUHS March 2017

tuhs@tuhs.org

87 participants
136 discussions

by Rudi Blom

The 'oldest' I have is a set of SCO UNIX 3.2V4.0 and V4.2 Mail me if you're interested Cheers, rudi > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2017 16:55:25 -0800 > From: Cory Smelosky <b4(a)gewt.net> > To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org > Subject: [TUHS] SCO OpenDesktop 386 2.0.0 > Message-ID: > <1488070525.154368.892915216.18B7F7A4(a)webmail.messagingengine.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Hey, > > Does anyone have any of the floppies for OpenDesktop 2.0.0? Mine got > damaged in a dehumidifier failure before they got to California. The > only survivor was of all things...the QIC-24 tape (which I have read > fine) > > sco-tape> tar tf file0 | more > ./tmp/_lbl/prd=odtps/typ=u386/rel=2.0.0a/vol=1 > > Anyone know a good starting point for attempting to install it in to a > VM? ;) > -- > Cory Smelosky > b4(a)gewt.net

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance?

by Nick Downing

Yes. And I just want to point out the systems vendor's worst nightmare: Competition from an earlier version of their own product. History is littered with examples where something was deliberately left to wither and die for this reason. Apple II and IIgs: We all know that the IIgs was deliberately crippled, and then discontinued in favour of the IIc+, as it presented a viable alternative to the 68000-based Macs. 680x0 Macs: Apparently some licensees had 68060 Macs and accelerators in the works, but Apple refused access to the ROMs to add the 68060 support code, because it would have been a viable alternative to the PowerPC 603. IBM OS/2: Was heavily DOS based (I believe it used the INT 21h API with modifications for protected mode), but in fact was eclipsed by later versions of DOS/Windows that were retrofitted with things like DPMI support, hacky but effective in providing a viable alternative to OS/2. BSD and SysIII: For a while it looked like the 32V-derived BSDs were going provide a viable alternative to AT&T's official developments of the same, and it took some heavy handed legal and political manouevring and backroom deals to make sure that did not happen in the end. AMD64 and Itanium: Enough said, a very expensive egg on face episode for Intel. 8086/8088 and iAPX432: Same thing except it was actually Intel's own product that provided a viable alternative to the "official" new version rather than a competitor's development of it. Of course a similar story can be told about 8080/Z80/8085/8086, Intel faced stiff competition from an enhanced version of their own product before wresting back control with the much improved 8086. A nightmare for them. That's the real reason vendors won't open source. Nick On Mar 4, 2017 12:02 PM, "Henry Bent" <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: On 3 March 2017 at 18:56, Wesley Parish <wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz> wrote: > > And since the central Unix source trees have been static - I don't think > Novell was much more than a > caretaker, correct me if I'm wrong - and the last SysVR4 release of any > consequence was Solaris - has > Oracle done anything with it? - I think the best thing for all would be > the release of the Unix SysV > source trees under a suitable open source license. There was an SVR5, even if it was not nearly the popular product that its predecessors were. While development certainly slowed, it contained some amount of technological progression. Obviously at this point development has stopped completely and it probably does make sense to open source that code base. > (I've made a similar argument for the IBM/MS OS/2, > DEC VAX VMS, and MS Windows and WinNT 3.x and 4.x source trees on various > other Internet forums: > the horse has bolted, it's a bit pointless welding shut the barn door now. > Better to get the credit for > being friendly and open, and clear up some residual bugs while you're at > it ... ) Equating VMS, old versions of Windows, etc. isn't quite the same. Even old versions of those products may well include source that contains, or is believed by its owners to contain, novel ideas or novel implementations of existing ideas that may have survived relatively unchanged in newer versions. And because there is at least a reasonably sized user base for all of the products you mentioned, corporate customers have an interest in protecting their investment, and the software creators have an interest in responding to the desires (or perceived desires) of their customers. Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see a legal release of the VMS 5 source, or Windows 3 source, or classic Macintosh source. I'm just not holding my breath. I think the community's time would be better spend advocating for source releases of products that are truly dead or all but dead. -Henry

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] AIX/370 Questions

by Clem Cole

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 9:13 PM, Jason Stevens < jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote: > Slightly off or on topic, but since you seem to know, and I've never seen > aix 370 in the eild, did it require VM? > It could boot on raw HW. > Did it take advantage of SNA, and allow front ends, along with SNA > gateways and 3270's? > Not sure how to answer this. It was an IBM product and could be used with a lot of other IBM's products. Generally speaking it was aimed at the Educational market, although there were some commercial customers, for instance Intel was reputed to do a lot of the 486 simulation on a TCF cluster (I don't know that for sure, that was before I worked for Intel). > > Or was it more of a hosted TCP/IP accessable system? > Clearly, if you had a PS/2 in the cluster, that was your access point. I think it was all mixed up in the politics of the day at IBM between Enterprise, Workstations, and Entry systems. TCP/IP and Ethernets were not something IBM wanted to use naturally. But the Educational market did use it and certainly some folks at IBM saw the value. UNIX was needed for the Education market as was TCP/IP so that going to be the pointed head of the stick.

7 years, 1 month

Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years?

by Arno Griffioen

Hi! Some of the stories on here reminded me of the fact that there's also likely a whole boat-load of UNIX ports/variants in the past that were never released to customers or outside certain companies. Not talking about UNIX versions that have become obsolete or which have vanished by now like IRIX or the original Apple A/UX (now *that* was an interesting oddball though..) and such, but the ones that either died or failed or got cancelled during the product development process or were never intended to be released to the outside ar all. Personally I came across one during some UNIX consultancy work at Commodore during the time that they were working on bringing out an SVR4 release for the Amiga (which they actually sold for some time) Side-note.. Interestingly enough according to my contacts at that time inside CBM it was based on the much cheaper to license 3B2 SVR4 codebase and not the M68k codebase which explained some of the oddities and lack of M68k ABI compliance of the Amiga SVR4 release.. However.. It turned out that they had been running an SVRIII port on much older Amiga 2000's with 68020 cards for some of their internal corporate networking and email, UUCP, etc. and was called 'AMIX' internally. But as far as I know it was never released to the public or external customers. It was a fairly 'plain jane' SVRIII port with little specific 'Amiga' hardware bits supported but otherwise quite complete and pretty stable. Worked quite well in the 4MB DRAM available on these cards. The later SVR4 didn't fare so well.. Paged itself to death unless you had 8 or even (gasp!) 16MB. It was known 'outside' that something like this existed as the boot ROM's on the 68020 card had an 'AMIX' option but outside CBM few people really knew much about it. It may have been used at the University of Lowell as they developed a TI34010 based card that may already have had some support in this release. Still.. This does make me wonder.. Does anyone else know of these kinds of special 'snowflake' UNIX versions that never got out at various companies/insitutes? (and can talk about it without violating a whole stack of NDA's ;) ) No special reason.. Just idle curiosity :) Likely all these are gone forever anyway as prototypes and small run production devices and related software tends to get destroyed when companies go bust or get aquired. Bye, Arno.

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall > Another acronym is Esc Meta Alt Ctl Shift... Good one! And there was a pretty funny fake Exxx error code - I think it was "EMACS - Editor too big"? I was never happy with the size of EMACS, and it had nothing to do with the amount of memory resources used. That big a binary implies a very large amount of source, and the more lines of code, the more places for bugs... And it makes it harder to understand, for someone working on it (to make a change/improvement). Noel

7 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Was 5ESS built on UNIX?

by Rudi Blom

>Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2017 14:11:24 -0500 >From: Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> >To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> >Subject: [TUHS] Was 5ESS built on UNIX? >Message-ID: ><CAJfiPzyDkUP7aAfxQTv51MF61a4CjKSSMxduQaW+Yp0cW00y5w(a)mail.gmail.com> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > >>I have looked at the papers published in the AT&T Technical J. in 1985 >and found no mention of UNIX. > >N. My Prentice Hall "UNIX(R) System V Release 4, Programmer's Guide: Streams" lists AT&T copyrights from 1984 - 1990 and UNIX Systems Laboratories, Inc. 1991-1992. Rudi

7 years, 1 month

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TUHS March 2017