17 Sep
2017
17 Sep
'17
7:03 a.m.
And now, we bring the RMS/Gnu thread to a close :-)
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system you used
& why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware e.g NULL was not
zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
Cheers, Warren
--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
17 Sep
17 Sep
7:28 a.m.
Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the
"weirdest" Unix system
you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware
e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
AT&T 3B20 - *0 didn't segfault but brought in some weird value.
Pyramid Dual Universe - System V vs. BSD - why be forced to decide when
you can have your cake and eat it too?
Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
Eunice - we had it one place I worked but I didn't use it much.
I never got to work on more exotic systems such as Interdata
or Series 1.
Arnold
8:10 a.m.
Helios: a Unix-like system running on Transputers (and TI C40, and a few others).
It had a similar notion of a universal protocol for servers to hook into the
"file" namespace as Plan9 / 9P, and a shell that included operators for spawning
tasks on other CPUs, parallel execution, and so on.
They'd ported some basic GNU userland: GCC, GMake, etc, as well as the basic sources
(ls, and co -- not sure where they came from or if they were written from scratch). There
was even an X11R5 (maybe R4?) server that would work with a few of the framebuffers that
some of the Transputer boards had.
All good fun. Sadly didn't last too long: likely killed off by Inmos' late
delivery of the second gen T9000 processor like most of the Transputer world, but they
disappeared after trying to move onto other CPUs seemingly unsuccessfully.
d
On 17 Sep 2017, at 17:28, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the
"weirdest" Unix system
you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware
e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
AT&T 3B20 - *0 didn't segfault but brought in some weird value.
Pyramid Dual Universe - System V vs. BSD - why be forced to decide when
you can have your cake and eat it too?
Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
Eunice - we had it one place I worked but I didn't use it much.
I never got to work on more exotic systems such as Interdata
or Series 1.
Arnold 
12:52 p.m.
David Arnold <davida(a)pobox.com> writes:
[...] as well as the basic sources (ls, and co -- not
sure where they
came from or if they were written from scratch).
They wrote their own:
https://github.com/axelmuhr/Helios-NG/tree/master/cmds/com
(That repository has the Helios 1.31 sources in; there is some RCS
history in the code that Tim King released but it doesn't look like it's
been imported into Git.)
--
Adam Sampson <ats(a)offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
2:23 p.m.
Weird unix...
My first contact with something unix-like was cromix, a unix rewrite in z80 assembler (i
think). the machine i had access to had two 8inch floppies, and the exciting addition of a
hard disk.
other strangeness was primix, a port of system v user space onto primos. that was slow,
and was similar enough to unix to lull you into a seance of security, until it bit you
with something odd.
then came edition 7 on an interdata/perkin elmer and normality was restored (thanks again
Richard Miller).
-Steve
On 17 Sep 2017, at 09:10, David Arnold
<davida(a)pobox.com> wrote:
Helios: a Unix-like system running on Transputers (and TI C40, and a few others).
It had a similar notion of a universal protocol for servers to hook into the
"file" namespace as Plan9 / 9P, and a shell that included operators for spawning
tasks on other CPUs, parallel execution, and so on.
They'd ported some basic GNU userland: GCC, GMake, etc, as well as the basic sources
(ls, and co -- not sure where they came from or if they were written from scratch). There
was even an X11R5 (maybe R4?) server that would work with a few of the framebuffers that
some of the Transputer boards had.
All good fun. Sadly didn't last too long: likely killed off by Inmos' late
delivery of the second gen T9000 processor like most of the Transputer world, but they
disappeared after trying to move onto other CPUs seemingly unsuccessfully.
d
> On 17 Sep 2017, at 17:28, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
>
> Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix
system
>> you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware
>> e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
>
> AT&T 3B20 - *0 didn't segfault but brought in some weird value.
>
> Pyramid Dual Universe - System V vs. BSD - why be forced to decide when
> you can have your cake and eat it too?
>
> Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
> OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
>
> Eunice - we had it one place I worked but I didn't use it much.
>
> I never got to work on more exotic systems such as Interdata
> or Series 1.
>
> Arnold
2:49 p.m.
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the
"weirdest" Unix
system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be
the hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
Guess I can more or less tick two of the above boxes. The Prime minis
had a layered product called Primix that provided a unix userland of
sorts. Dog slow, at least in its earlier releases. Null pointers were
not zero on the Prime machines.
De
3:08 p.m.
On 17/09/2017, Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the
"weirdest" Unix system you
used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware e.g
NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
Does ersatz-UNIX count?
At one start-up, our servers were SPARC-based but we could only afford
Intel boxes on the desktops. We found that the MKS Toolkit on OS/2
Warp was the closest on the boxes, talking to the servers over X and
such. (EMX stuff was acceptable but it still sat on top of DOS. Warp
was odd in that it came with a full TCP/IP stack.)
N.
6:50 p.m.
On 9/17/17 3:28 AM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top
of their native
OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
I think they called it DG/UX -- just like they called their wretched
System V port.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
7:01 p.m.
On 09/17/2017 02:50 PM, Chet Ramey wrote:
On 9/17/17 3:28 AM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
I had to support a DGUX box for a short time.
Fortunately, porting the app to HPUX was the software guys top priority
and I only had to deal with it for 6 months or So.
Let's just say, it was no HPUX, ( or even Solaris, or Irix )!
--
-- Derrik
Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE
dwalker(a)doomd.net
"Those UNIX guys, they think weird!" -- John C. Dvorak
Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on
top of their native
OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
I think they called it
DG/UX -- just like they called their wretched
System V port.
18 Sep
18 Sep
7:27 a.m.
On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:49 AM, Dennis Boone <drb(a)msu.edu> wrote:
The Prime minis
had a layered product called Primix that provided a unix userland of
sorts. Dog slow, at least in its earlier releases. Null pointers were
not zero on the Prime machines.
I second Dennis's vote for Primix as "weirdnix".
The other weirdness was the high-bit of ASCII being set due to the
convention on Primos (they feared to ever change it to avoid upsetting
customers).
People went mad trying to port applications to it due to these
differences. Primos defaulted to all UPPERCASE, and I vaguely recall
having to poke about for a fair while when starting Primix to convince
the Prime terminal handler to switch to lowercase.
There was an attempt to produce a native port of Unix for Prime
computers but I believe it was squashed by Prime management.
8:31 a.m.
That Pr1me had a Unix emulation layer is news to me (I think). I worked
on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Pr1me Computers for
several years. (Oh, how I wish I had saved that last release tape!!!)
Primos was a terribly weird OS, but the SWT subsystem made it almost
Unix-like and very pleasant and usable. The mark parity business
was only one of the weirdnesses of that machine. Georgia Tech even
had a C compiler for it. sizeof(char) was 1, of course, but it was 16
bits, because the instruction mode used didn't have 8 bit byte pointers.
I can't claim credit for GT-SWT; I came along after it was mature
and stable, but I did do a few nice things.
Arnold
Nigel Williams <nw(a)retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:49 AM, Dennis Boone
<drb(a)msu.edu> wrote:
The Prime minis
had a layered product called Primix that provided a unix userland of
sorts. Dog slow, at least in its earlier releases. Null pointers were
not zero on the Prime machines.
I second Dennis's vote for Primix as "weirdnix".
The other weirdness was the high-bit of ASCII being set due to the
convention on Primos (they feared to ever change it to avoid upsetting
customers).
People went mad trying to port applications to it due to these
differences. Primos defaulted to all UPPERCASE, and I vaguely recall
having to poke about for a fair while when starting Primix to convince
the Prime terminal handler to switch to lowercase.
There was an attempt to produce a native port of Unix for Prime
computers but I believe it was squashed by Prime management. 
10:39 a.m.
(This is a copy of an email I sent from the wrong address. If the first
(identaical) version of the message eventually arrives, just ignore it)
On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 02:31:06AM -0600, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
That Pr1me had a Unix emulation layer is news to me (I
think). I worked
on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Pr1me Computers for
several years. (Oh, how I wish I had saved that last release tape!!!)
Primos was a terribly weird OS, but the SWT subsystem made it almost
Unix-like and very pleasant and usable. The mark parity business
was only one of the weirdnesses of that machine. Georgia Tech even
had a C compiler for it. sizeof(char) was 1, of course, but it was 16
bits, because the instruction mode used didn't have 8 bit byte pointers.
I can't claim credit for GT-SWT; I came along after it was mature
and stable, but I did do a few nice things.
Arnold
Nigel Williams <nw(a)retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
[cut]
I've been wondering about this for some time, if a byte isn't 8 bits on
an architecture, how would you go about calculating memory sizes in a
way that makes it comparable between machines?
A 32 KB memory buffer is 262144=32*1024*8 bits on one machine, but
294912=32*1024*9 bits on another. That's a difference of 32 Kbit.
Of course, it may not matter since both buffers contains as many
items/bytes, but for the machine as a whole you can't say "this machine
has X MB of memory" without mentioning the byte length. A machine with
"n" bit words would be able to "store less information" in memory than
a
machine with the same number of MB of RAM but with "n+x" bit words.
How would you do for even more exotic hardware?
What if sizeof(char) != 1 for example?
Maybe this isn't/wasn't an issue at all?
Cheers,
Kusalananda
--
Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri,
National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS),
Uppsala University, Sweden.
11:59 a.m.
On 18 Sep 2017 12:39 +0200, from andreas.kahari(a)icm.uu.se (Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri):
I've been wondering about this for some time, if
a byte isn't 8 bits on
an architecture, how would you go about calculating memory sizes in a
way that makes it comparable between machines?
A 32 KB memory buffer is 262144=32*1024*8 bits on one machine, but
294912=32*1024*9 bits on another. That's a difference of 32 Kbit.
[snip]
Maybe this isn't/wasn't an issue at all?
Memory _chips_ are often specified in terms of accessible bits. So you
might have a chip that can hold _(8 * 2^20) * 8 bits_, or eight binary
megabytes for the case where 1 byte == 8 bits. The same chip could be
specified as _(64 * 2^20) * 1 bits_ for 64 binary megabits. This would
normally be written 8Mx8 or 64Mx1 for a binary "M" prefix.
How you then use those bits is entirely up to the system integrator
and software developer. And we do know that on systems with limited
memory, bit-packing is a common practice, based on the mantra that "no
good bits should ever be allowed to go to waste".
This notation has the benefit that it relates directly to how much
data can be held, as opposed to _how_ that data is held.
--
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se
“People who think they know everything really annoy
those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)
12:02 p.m.
On 9/17/17 3:28 AM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
> Whatever Data General called their Unix layer on top of their native
> OS for the Eclipse or whatever it was (32 bit system).
Chet Ramey <chet.ramey(a)case.edu> wrote:
I think they called it DG/UX -- just like they called
their wretched
System V port.
I thought it had a different name. But I definitely no longer remeber.
Arnold
11:57 p.m.
On Sun, 17 Sep 2017, Warren Toomey wrote:
And now, we bring the RMS/Gnu thread to a close :-)
But it was fun while it lasted :-) I learned a bit.
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the
"weirdest" Unix system
you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware
e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
Eunice for certain. Never seen NULL != 0, but didn't the Interdata boxes
have the NUXI problem?
And one of the UNSW departments had this 11/34 clone, where the two disk
packs (one removable) had a common spindle... I think that was also the
box where the clock had to be enabled/disabled by a front-panel switch, so
you disabled it, booted Unix, then hopefully remembered to enable it.
Oh, and if it extends to organic-ware, the UNSW Library's 11/40 had no
password on "root", but had one on "oper"...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
19 Sep
19 Sep
1:54 a.m.
On Mon, 18 Sep 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
That Pr1me had a Unix emulation layer is news to me (I
think). I worked
on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Pr1me Computers for
several years. (Oh, how I wish I had saved that last release tape!!!)
What I hated about Pr1me was they implied that "1" is prime; it is not, as
any mathematician will tell you.
In fact, I turned down a job opportunity there for precisely that reason,
on the grounds that if they got a simple concept like that wrong, then
where else did they screw up?
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
7:07 a.m.
On 2017-09-19 11:54, Dave Horsfall wrote:
It's not a composite, either. And there are already many cases where
you have to say "let p be an _odd_ prime" because the statement fails
for p=2, so many that maybe allowing 1 in (and having to explain it away
in many more theorems) is not much worse that having it in a special
weird category of its own.
It's just terminology.
--
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet.
That Pr1me had
a Unix emulation layer is news to me (I think). I
worked on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Pr1me
Computers for several years. (Oh, how I wish I had saved that last
release tape!!!)
What I hated about Pr1me was they implied that "1" is prime; it is
not, as any mathematician will tell you. 
2:09 p.m.
New subject: PR1ME - was Re: And now ... Weirdnix?
On 2017-09-18 9:54 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Mon, 18 Sep 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
The name clearly doesn't reference the concept of prime numbers; that's
only coincidence (and the incompatibility might have been a clue).
Isn't it more obviously connected to Latin 'primus', meaning
'first'?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prime#Etymology_1
That Pr1me had a Unix emulation layer is news to
me (I think). I
worked on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Pr1me
Computers for several years. (Oh, how I wish I had saved that last
release tape!!!)
What I hated about Pr1me was they implied that "1" is prime; it is not,
as any mathematician will tell you.
In fact, I turned down a job opportunity there for precisely that
reason, on the grounds that if they got a simple concept like that
wrong, then where else did they screw up?
4 Oct
4 Oct
5:58 a.m.
Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> writes:
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the
"weirdest" Unix
system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the
hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
That would be the userland Unix from the Norwegian company Norsk Data.
For years, they made excellent mini machines with their own operating
system, SINTRAN. People kept telling them that that time was passing,
and they needed to get with the times and adopt a standardized OS, like
Unix, but they insisted that there was no need.
When they finally started trying to do that, it was too late.
They made two attempts. One was a System V port to their hardware, the
other a port to SINTRAN, having Unix run as an application under it.
Neither attempt got any real traction, and today, the company is only a
fond memory.
Oh, and when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he did it
on a Norsk Data computer running SINTRAN. :)
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay
4:15 p.m.
I think the dual-boot state of the perq was pretty wierd. From memory,
you could peek into some UNIX state from the other OS, but not the
other way.
The weird bit was the 'hacky' nature of the OS/memory/screen boundary.
Compile? ok, you clearly don't need your screen memory because who
would think they could do useful mouse/keyboard work while compiling?
So.. I'll just rob that memory buffer to do this compilation... Very
interesting bitblt implications all over the screen. I suspect this
was considered a 'feature' because you got a free meter of your
compilation progress by crud on the screen..
On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 10:58 PM, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo
<tih(a)hamartun.priv.no> wrote:
Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> writes:
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the
"weirdest" Unix
system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the
hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
That would be the userland Unix from the Norwegian company Norsk Data.
For years, they made excellent mini machines with their own operating
system, SINTRAN. People kept telling them that that time was passing,
and they needed to get with the times and adopt a standardized OS, like
Unix, but they insisted that there was no need.
When they finally started trying to do that, it was too late.
They made two attempts. One was a System V port to their hardware, the
other a port to SINTRAN, having Unix run as an application under it.
Neither attempt got any real traction, and today, the company is only a
fond memory.
Oh, and when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he did it
on a Norsk Data computer running SINTRAN. :)
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay
2389
days inactive
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19 comments
17 participants
participants (17)
-
Adam Sampson -
Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri -
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Chet Ramey -
Dave Horsfall -
David Arnold -
Dennis Boone -
Derrik Walker v2.0 -
George Michaelson -
Ian Zimmerman -
Michael Kjörling -
Nemo -
Nigel Williams -
Steve Simon -
Toby Thain -
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo -
Warren Toomey