12 Dec
2017
12 Dec
'17
2:40 p.m.
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It would be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected. The two that
I can think of that probably should be there are (other feel free to point
ones that we should try to find):
1.) Idris, which was fairly true to V6 (enough that the one time I test it,
things from pretty much just worked). It was notable from being first.
Although the C compiler and the 'anat' (the assembler) were a tad
different. It the system that got Bill Plauger in trouble @ USENIX @ UDEL
when he was booed for a 'marketing' talk.
2.) CRDS (pronounced Cruds by those of use that use it at the time) -
Charles River Data Systems. It was a UNIX-like system, although I do not
think really attempted to hold to a V7 API much more than intent. Although
if my memory serves me, one of the unique features was the use of Reed &
Kanodia synchronization in its kernel [REED79], which I was a always a
fan. The system was slow as sin bit it ran on a 68000. [CRUDS system, a
Fortune box and our Vax/750 running BSD4.1 were the systems Masscomp used
to bootstrap].
Clem
[REED79] D.P. Reed and R.K. Kanodia, "Synchronization with Eventcounts and
Sequencers"
12 Dec
12 Dec
4:29 p.m.
On Tue, Dec 12, 2017, at 09:40, Clem Cole wrote:
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It would
be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected. The two
that I can think of that probably should be there are (other feel free
to point ones that we should try to find):
A while ago I ran across a manual for "Cromix" - which looks like it
wasn't really unix-compatible as such, but clearly a 'clone' of it in a
looser sense, and ran on a Z80 machine. "Micronix" seems to have also
run on Z80 machines, and to have been a much closer imitation of V6
unix.
http://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/ftp/cromemco/Cromemco%20Cromix%20I…
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/morrow/decision/Micronix_Operating_S…
4:41 p.m.
On Tue, Dec 12, 2017, at 11:29, Random832 wrote:
On Tue, Dec 12, 2017, at 09:40, Clem Cole wrote:
I should have realized this was from it being posted here in April.
http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-April/009685.html
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It
would be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected. The two
that I can think of that probably should be there are (other feel free
to point ones that we should try to find):
A while ago I ran across a manual for "Cromix" 
13 Dec
13 Dec
4:16 a.m.
And then in the early 90’s (91 or 92) we had ixemul on the Amiga, and EMX on MS-DOS and
OS/2. Although I guess that is too new?
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
From: Clem Cole
Sent: Tuesday, 12 December 2017 10:41 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: [TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It would be nice to have section in TUHS of
any early clones that could be collected. The two that I can think of that probably
should be there are (other feel free to point ones that we should try to find):
1.) Idris, which was fairly true to V6 (enough that the one time I test it, things from
pretty much just worked). It was notable from being first. Although the C compiler and
the 'anat' (the assembler) were a tad different. It the system that got Bill
Plauger in trouble @ USENIX @ UDEL when he was booed for a 'marketing' talk.
2.) CRDS (pronounced Cruds by those of use that use it at the time) - Charles River Data
Systems. It was a UNIX-like system, although I do not think really attempted to hold to
a V7 API much more than intent. Although if my memory serves me, one of the unique
features was the use of Reed & Kanodia synchronization in its kernel [REED79], which I
was a always a fan. The system was slow as sin bit it ran on a 68000. [CRUDS system, a
Fortune box and our Vax/750 running BSD4.1 were the systems Masscomp used to bootstrap].
Clem
[REED79] D.P. Reed and R.K. Kanodia, "Synchronization with Eventcounts and
Sequencers"
9:22 p.m.
On 12 December 2017 at 23:16, Jason Stevens
<jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
And then in the early 90’s (91 or 92) we had ixemul on
the Amiga, and EMX on
MS-DOS and OS/2. Although I guess that is too new?
I would note that Mattes's EMX was a memory extender (and a fantastic
one at that). But, on a case-sensitive OS/2, it allowed people to
compile a *lot* of Unix code.
N.
14 Dec
14 Dec
12:26 a.m.
A nifty little Unix clone/rewrite is OMU (One Man Unix):
http://discordia.org.uk/~steve/omu.html
Also Xv6, Fuzix, and UZI:
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html
http://www.fuzix.org/
http://www.dougbraun.com/uzi.html
18 Dec
18 Dec
10:10 a.m.
On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It would
be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware. ISTR one
of my colleague's whinges was the 256-byte command-line limit.
My earliest exposure would have been Xenix on a 286 - my main recollections
are:
1) The Pascal compiler that didn't ignore comments (changing a comment
could make the code fail to compile with an obscure error.
2) The fork() system call could sometimes return -1 to the parent, even when
it succeeded - that caused a lot of head-scratching.
3) Hacking one of the Emacs clones (I no longer recall which) to use "far"
pointers for the buffers, so I could edit files >64K without paying the
performance penalty of writing "large model" code. (286 protected-mode
performance was abyssmal if it needed to do segment descriptor loads)
Unfortunately, I no longer have that code.
--
Peter Jeremy
3:46 p.m.
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
I've used it in that timeframe. It was pretty amazing on a 286, you could
have multiple people logged in via terminals and get work done.
I became friends with one of the people who did the OS:
Dan Hildebrandt (QNX) 613-591-0931 x204 (RIP 1998)
I can't remember how we crossed paths, but we both cared about design
a lot and liked bouncing ideas off of each other.
QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
instruction cache. I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
to keep it small and fast.
This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It
would be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware. 
3:57 p.m.
On Mon, 18 Dec 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly
fit in a 4K
instruction cache. I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
to keep it small and fast.
This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
Isn't it the OS of the Blackberry?
-uso.
3:59 p.m.
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 10:57:01AM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
On Mon, 18 Dec 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
Yep, that too.
QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part
neatly fit in a 4K
instruction cache. I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
to keep it small and fast.
This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
Isn't it the OS of the Blackberry? 
4:13 p.m.
Qnx is used in cars quite a bit , also in the telecoms sector i wad told.
we used it for control of image processing systems, however it it wad a rather foolish
management decision IMHO as qnx is heavyweight for the simple user interfaces we needed
-Steve
On 18 Dec 2017, at 15:46, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter
Jeremy wrote:
I've used it in that timeframe. It was pretty amazing on a 286, you could
have multiple people logged in via terminals and get work done.
I became friends with one of the people who did the OS:
Dan Hildebrandt (QNX) 613-591-0931 x204 (RIP 1998)
I can't remember how we crossed paths, but we both cared about design
a lot and liked bouncing ideas off of each other.
QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
instruction cache. I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
to keep it small and fast.
This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know? On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It would be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware. 
4:18 p.m.
My Ford Taurus SHO's Sync 3 is running QNX. What a difference (in
stability) between it and the Sync 2 that used Windows CE.
On 12/18/2017 11:13 AM, Steve Simon wrote:
Qnx is used in cars quite a bit , also in the telecoms
sector i wad told.
we used it for control of image processing systems, however it it wad a rather foolish
management decision IMHO as qnx is heavyweight for the simple user interfaces we needed
4:15 p.m.
On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
Quite a few car systems, it seems:
http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
-Henry
4:34 p.m.
On Monday, December 18, 2017, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I remember in the late 90s there was a demo of QNX running the whole OS
with GUI including web browser etc. from 1.44MB floppy. It was very fast
too! Too bad they never open sourced it.
--Andy
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
Quite a few car systems, it seems: http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/
2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
4:39 p.m.
Hello!
You are correct. That's how I got my start. Eventually I was able to
swing a hobbyist license.... There was talk of parts of it becoming
open source, sadly that never really happened.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 11:34 AM, Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
On Monday, December 18, 2017, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I remember in the late 90s there was a demo of QNX running the whole OS with
GUI including web browser etc. from 1.44MB floppy. It was very fast too!
Too bad they never open sourced it.
--Andy
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
Quite a few car systems, it seems:
http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
5:35 p.m.
maybe i am wrong but i thought QNX was open source for a while, but then it changed hands
and the new owners “removed it from the internet”.
interestingly if this is true its only the 2nd time i have heard of this happening ever
happening. the other one was years ago with the Khronos dataflow signal processing
system.
-Steve
On 18 Dec 2017, at 16:34, Andy Kosela
<akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
On Monday, December 18, 2017, Henry Bent
<henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I remember in the late 90s there was a demo of QNX running the whole OS with GUI
including web browser etc. from 1.44MB floppy. It was very fast too! Too bad they never
open sourced it.
--Andy On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
Quite a few car systems, it seems:
http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
5:41 p.m.
On 2017-12-18 12:35 PM, Steve Simon wrote:
maybe i am wrong but i thought QNX was open source for a while, but then
it changed hands and the new owners “removed it from the internet”.
interestingly if this is true its only the 2nd time i have heard of this
happening ever happening. the other one was years ago with the Khronos
dataflow signal processing system.
What about Solaris.
--T
-Steve
On 18 Dec 2017, at 16:34, Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com
<mailto:akosela@andykosela.com>> wrote:
>
>
> On Monday, December 18, 2017, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com
> <mailto:henry.r.bent@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com
> <mailto:lm@mcvoy.com>> wrote:
>
>
> I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is
> the basis
> for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
>
>
> Quite a few car systems, it seems:
> http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
> <http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html>
>
>
> I remember in the late 90s there was a demo of QNX running the whole
> OS with GUI including web browser etc. from 1.44MB floppy. It was
> very fast too! Too bad they never open sourced it.
>
> --Andy
6:41 p.m.
Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au> writes:
On 2017-12-18 12:35 PM, Steve Simon wrote:
Depends on your point of view a bit.... One can probably say that Oracle
Solaris has been "pulled back". But, Solaris has sufficiently escaped
in a form that is still open source, if you ignore Oracle. The company
which is my $DAYJOB uses Joyent Triton SmartOS, which is very Solaris in
every way and completely open source. We run a couple of farily large
private clouds with it.
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS
http://anduin.eldar.org - & - http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]
maybe i am wrong but i thought QNX was open source for a while, but then
it changed hands and the new owners “removed it from the internet”.
interestingly if this is true its only the 2nd time i have heard of this
happening ever happening. the other one was years ago with the Khronos
dataflow signal processing system.
What about Solaris.
--T
4:37 p.m.
Hello!
I've tried it out a couple of times. Besides being a rare microkernel
OS, it has a good support system, from its company. As far as its site
would explain it is a favorite among some car companies. Ford for one.
BlackBerry uses it for their devices, certainly.
And I believe some industrial controllers use it.
The big problem is still the licensing.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 18 December 2017 at 10:46, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
Quite a few car systems, it seems:
http://qnxauto.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-to-z-of-qnx-in-cars.html
-Henry 
6:32 p.m.
On Dec 18, 2017, at 7:46 AM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
OKL4 (a variant of L4 micro kernel) is supposedly in billions of mobile
devices. Apple’s “Secure Enclave” runs a modified version of L4. Likely
OKL4. Their claim to fame is that it is “provably correct”. L4 is derived
from Liedke’s L3 and is much more portable than L3. OKL4 and seL4
we’re both owned by Open Kernel Labs, which is now owned by General
Dynamics. Now seL4 has been open sourced. There have been a few
variations of L4 over time with names like fiasco & Pistachio etc. L4 is
simpler than Mach or QNX. What I like about seL4 is that it is capability
based.
A contract I did ages ago was for a company that used QNX on their
text to speech 286 based board. It had a peculiar crash only when
used in a complex setup. After about a month of close study
and experiments I guessed it was an Intel bug. Intel refused to
help so then I had to catch it in action in a live setup, at which point
Intel fessed up! Any way, I learned a bunch about QNX back then.
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter
Jeremy wrote:
I've used it in that timeframe. It was pretty amazing on a 286, you could
have multiple people logged in via terminals and get work done.
I became friends with one of the people who did the OS:
Dan Hildebrandt (QNX) 613-591-0931 x204 (RIP 1998)
I can't remember how we crossed paths, but we both cared about design
a lot and liked bouncing ideas off of each other.
QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
instruction cache. I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
to keep it small and fast.
This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know? On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It would be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware.
4:53 p.m.
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 5:10 AM, Peter Jeremy <peter(a)rulingia.com> wrote:
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware. ISTR one
of my colleague's whinges was the 256-byte command-line limit.
QNX, indeed a cool system. It's predecessor was Thoth and successor, the
Stanford V-Kernel; QNX was the same timeframe as Mach.
RIG/Accent and Thoth were all contemporaries and at the time, "UNIX"
interface was not yet standard, nor C as the system language of choice,
Thoth was in B IIRC, RIG assembler & Pascal, Accent / Pascal. Tunis was
similar, although, like SOL was a rewrite, in that case Concurrent-Pascal;
like UNIX, targeting the PDP-11.
Both QNX and Mach were in C and tried to be more friendly to import UNIX
code. QNX was definitely, Intel architecture target. Mach was trying to
be all things on any HW target like UNIX., I got the impression some/much
of QNX's kernel was assembler, but the 'servers' for the things like the
FS, the IP stack, et al where 100% C.
QNX, was clean, an extremely small, and was fairly good at real-time (
like Thoth had been before it, V gave up real-time to be more portable
distribute better).
I used a QNX on a PC/AT (286) that was, V7-ish and code from the PDP-11
pretty much just worked. The compiler was very slow, but it was 5.25"
floppy based system so it may have been a lot to do with the disks I have.
I remember they then add a POSIX subsystem when that was in vogue, but I
never used it or their ANSI-C compiler.
When 'embedded' types needed a RTOS, the QNX folks definitely had a
following; particularly because the kernel was so small and efficient. I
know a number of industrial robots from the 'Rust Belt' that had Mech-E
types that swore by it (i.e. Millacron, Intelligrated to think of two). I
understand that a number of folks/alumni are a lot of the current
autonomous car people, and I had heard the brought that code base with
them. Again, if I understand it correctly (and its been years since I
played with it), the RTOS features are not POSIX conformant and mixing the
different APIs could cause interesting effects.
ᐧ
5:08 p.m.
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I
didn't directly use it but a
colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware. ISTR one
of my colleague's whinges was the 256-byte command-line limit.
Blackberry's phones are no longer QNX-based (they fell to the advancing
Android hordes) but they still own it and are targeting the IVI market
with it, apparently. They have a no-commercial-use no-cost license
available.
The first QNX device I saw in the wild was the 3com Audrey, which was a
little all-in-one computer with an infrared keyboard and a resistive
touchscreen. 3com seemed to want to sell them for kitchen use, but then
the dot-com bust happened and the Audrey went with it. The QNX
deployment on it was sufficiently unixlike that step one in doing
anything interesting was exploiting a privilege escalation and editing
the passwd file.
khm
2331
days inactive
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21 comments
17 participants
participants (17)
-
Andy Kosela -
Arthur Krewat -
Bakul Shah -
Brad Spencer -
Clem Cole -
Gregg Levine -
Henry Bent -
Jason Stevens -
Kurt H Maier -
Larry McVoy -
Nemo -
Peter Jeremy -
Random832 -
Robert Swierczek -
Steve Nickolas -
Steve Simon -
Toby Thain