On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 4:39 PM Dennis Boone <drb(a)msu.edu> wrote: There’s a chance some media needs a small amount of heat over time applied “tape baking” but a facility to do that is readily available almost anywhere. I haven’t had any issues with properly stored 9 track from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/tapes/ has links to the authoritative sources but gives a good enough overview for water cooler talk.

We live in an imperfect world. All we can do is try; it will certainly cease with inaction. It's painfully ironic we have effectively limitless perfect preservation systems [1] now, but are losing worthwhile information at an astonishing rate. I suspect most estate sales, and even professional archivists[2] trash manuals, tape and things like microfiche without really thinking much about it because they don't really understand how to bring it to permanent storage systems or that nobody else has done so either. [1] Stack your favorite local filesystem, a public cloud, and/or archive.org [2] I accidentally came across this pulling up the tape baking link showing almost this https://ricehistorycorner.com/2015/05/13/obsolete-technology-reel-to-reel/ Regards, Kevin On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 6:30 PM Dennis Boone <drb(a)msu.edu> wrote:

I have anecdotal evidence UTS and at least one of the AIX VM ports were used within the Bell telephone companies. I can pour through my telecom stuff and try to find it. On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 8:40 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> wrote:

One of my first jobs I did for the company that I ended up working for decades was a job for IBM FSD to put a second ethernet interface in to “secure XENIX” (a MLS system) to allow the system to be used for downgrading classified material. This gave us an in with IBM FSD and this led to us doing work with an IBM on a pair of microchannel i860 coprocessor cards called the Wizard and the W4. We ported AIX to both of them. The cards ran inside of another AIX PS/2 system so the TCF was really handy in allowing apps that only had 386 versions to run, the ability to maintain a common file system, and to share peripherals. Indeed, I think the major reason IBM used the TCF concept is it gave the 370 version of the thing an easy way to interoperate with user’s on the PS/2’s. 3270’s and other terminals designed for the mainframe really weren’t suited for UNIX. The initial Wizard card had no I/O other than the host PS/2. It was really more or less an academic experiment (the cards were also buggy). Two amusing things however came out of that port. The AIX for the PS/2 had this thing to multiplex the normal VGA display (outside of X) called the “High Function Terminal.” Our i860 version was less capable so it was denoted the “Low Function Terminal.” The other was that I hacked the -mm macro package to mimic the style of the IBM manuals so we could write “IBM-ish” documentation. The W4 card was interesting. It had 4 i860 processors along with it’s own framebuffer. One of my employees spent a lot of time of in Owego fixing the memory system (the whole thing was set up with these Xilinx PGAs that were easy to update in the field). Amusingly, the machine-specific parts of the W4 version of the AIX kernel had more in common with the 370 version than the i386 version. I spent weeks out at the IBM Palo Alto Science Center doing work on this project. I had managed to inadvertantly shutdown the main AIX/370 in the cluster (such is a problem when things get too transparent). Of course, while I had experience using VM/CMS before (both at the University of Maryalnd and at Rutgers), I’d never really much dealt with the operations side of the 370. But I found my way to a 3270 and typed “ipl aix” with at the command line with extreme optimism, but that was indeed all it took.

Yep, we started with it and HOSTLINK (Intel's software) but we switched it to a two-node AIX cluster (one with the i386 and one with the Wizard). It ran X and was used in our application to run our proprietary image processing software.

Clem, The AIX/386 stuff is readily available http://ps-2.kev009.com/aixps2/ and can run in virtualbox https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/running-aix-1-3-inside-virtual-b… Regards, Kevin On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 10:30 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:

On Tue, 5 Nov 2019 at 13:08, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote: Wow, so the "x86" version of AIX truly existed! I had long heard rumour of this, and had heard of it from sources I was inclined to trust not to be making it up. The dates seem to decently explain the invisibility; introduction in 1992 and withdrawal in March 1995 left but a brief period of time when anyone would have been willing to acknowledge it as a product. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

El mar., 5 nov. 2019 20:12, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> escribió: It's available as diskette images on Internet from veras algo. But it can be installed and run mostly for cause of the advance in the virtualization applications, together with some specific efforts of investigation and testing. And yes, we used SCO for our PS/2 servers running Unix or Unix-like. No discussion, at least until some years after when I installed one RS/6000 server with AIX 3.2 Regards Sergio

Yup I was involved in the salvage and was the first purveyor of these floppies to the modern internet. Saying this as it is germane to my original post in the thread, I have a lot of experience doing this kind of thing and I need willing connections to the source materials in question. Regards, Kevin On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 12:28 PM SPC <spedraja(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Clem, I am very curious about this UNIX for OS/400 work it sounds either different or much earlier than what I am familiar with. I am familiar with the PASE environment that shipped around OS/400 V4R4 (1999?). After AS/400s started running PowerPCish CPUs (there is a bit of history there I won't dive into) PASE was like WINE for Linux.. same CPU arch, do some library and linker/loader tricks to hoist a different (AIX 4.3 first) environment within OS/400s understanding of the universe. A year or so later, some very bright group figured to use the OS/400's Single Level Store as the device model/device virtualization for the CPU virtualization (LPAR) in later POWER CPUs. You could run Linux or OS/400 or AIX this way. That work was then somewhat inverted, and pHyp was born from the OS/400's SILC idea of machine dependent code as a light weight firmware hypervisor in the converging iSeries and pSeries POWER systems.. they switched the device model/device virtualization to AIX called APV or PowerVM. It was nicknamed "Fortress Rochester" for a reason. They did some very nice work. But yeah IBM was running 4 large and extremely different computing businesses in the 1990s and probably some smaller ones too. They were very different but the systems did interoperate pretty well given the stakes. Regards, Kevin On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 1:10 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:

Clem says today "It was then I realized IBM was N different companies, each competing with each other." He's said that to me before and I then responded "Actually, it was more like M competing factions within N competing companies." It has been illuminating, surprising, but not shocking, the last week of so, to learn from from posts here, that AIX/370 was hard to get and mostly a university offering. What we (AIX people associated with RT/PC and then RS/6000) were told was that "everybody", especially Federal customers, wanted what became known as TCF (the original Locus work) for 370 and PS/2. I remember one Federal Systems Division person who seemed especially effective as a Locus advocate. I'd always assumed AIX/370 and AIX PS/2 became more available than reported here, but I left IBM before they were released. Enumerating factions/companies, just regarding AIX & Unix, there were the Federal Systems faction/company, the academic factions/company (primarily two factions, BSD & TCF, in Palo Alto), the PS/2 faction/company, the Rochester System/38->AS/400 faction/company, the Austin development lab, several Research locations (primarily Yorktown), ... And in LCC there were the firewalled TCF/TNC entities. It would be interesting to know more from the TCF folks at LCC. With Jerry's passing, if there is to be further clarity on what happened with AIX/370, it would probably have to come from Bruce Walker or Greg Thiel. I don't think I've had contact with either since I left IBM in 1989. CHS On 11/5/2019 11:30 AM, Clem Cole wrote: -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

Yes, but maybe the forced march at Athena was a year or so later, ’88 or ’89?? There was a preceding IBM internal “forced march” involving Bruce Walker from LCC, people from Palo Alto responsible for AOS (two co-authors of https://technologists.com/sauer/Convergence_of_AIX_and_4.3BSD.pdf <https://technologists.com/sauer/Convergence_of_AIX_and_4.3BSD.pdf> plus a couple of others) and AIX people. The work in that 1989 Uniforum paper was done in 1988, targeting AIX 3, as discussed a little more in https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beg… <https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/>. 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. -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com <mailto:sauer@technologists.com> fax: +1.512.346.5240 web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ <http://technologists.com/sauer/> Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

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/i…, 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…), but I've not looked at it. CHS On 11/6/2019 1:59 AM, SPC wrote: -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

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" &lt;tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org&gt; wrote: On 11/6/19 8:51 AM, Charles H Sauer wrote: 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

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:33 AM Al Kossow &lt;aek(a)bitsavers.org&gt; wrote: 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.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer &lt;brad(a)anduin.eldar.org&gt; wrote: "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.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 11:16 AM Chet Ramey &lt;chet.ramey(a)case.edu&gt; wrote: Yeah, that matches my (vague) recollection as well. 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.

greg travis &lt;greg.m.travis(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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

On 11/21/2019 7:07 AM, Brad Spencer wrote: 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(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

Charles H Sauer &lt;sauer(a)technologists.com&gt; writes: 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(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

On 11/21/19 3:58 AM, Dan Cross wrote: Sorry, got it mixed up in my mind with aix I had remembered bits of the kernel were missing, but I forgot why.