11 Jul
2019
11 Jul
'19
10:02 p.m.
Interactive Systems. Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in many a year. Heinz Lycklama
went there.
The did a couple of things, a straight UNIX port to various things (PDP-11, 386) and also
there “UNIX running under VMS” product.
They also had their own version of the Rand Editor called “INed” that was happiest on this
hacked version of a Perkin Elmer terminal.
Early versions were PWB UNIX based if I recall.
My first job out of college was working with IS Unix on an 11/70 playing configuration
management (essentially all the PWB stuff). I also hacked the line printer spooler and
the .mm macro package to do classification markings (this was a part of a government
contract).
A few years later I was given the job of porting Interactive Systems UNIX that was already
running on an i386 (an Intel 310 system which had a Multibus I) to an Intel Multibus II
box. Intel had already ported it once, but nobody seemed to be able to find the source
code. So with a fresh set of the source code for the old system from IS, I proceeded to
reverse engineer/port the code to the Message Passing Coprocessor. (Intel was not real
forthcoming for documentation for that either). Eventually, I got it to work (the
Multibus II really was a pleasant bus and worked well with UNIX). I went on to write
drivers for a 9-track tape drive (which sat in my living room for a long time), a Matrox
multibus II framebuffer (OK, that had problems), and a SCSI host adapter that was talking
to this kludge device that captured digital data from a FLIR on uMatic cassettes (but
that’s a different story).
11 Jul
11 Jul
10:31 p.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
On Thu, 11 Jul 2019, ron(a)ronnatalie.com wrote:
Interactive Systems. Now there’s a name I’ve not
heard in many a
year. Heinz Lycklama went there.
A blast from the past indeed.
The did a couple of things, a straight UNIX port to
various things
(PDP-11, 386) and also there “UNIX running under VMS” product.
Which model of the PDP-11? I did ports of V6.5 (as I called it) to the
11/34, 11/23, and 11/60, all of which had their oddities.
And that wouldn't be Eunice, would it? Or was that purely a DEC product?
-- Dave
12 Jul
12 Jul
2:52 a.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
On Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 4:31 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Thu, 11 Jul 2019, ron(a)ronnatalie.com wrote:
Eunice came from Stanford and was sold by the Wollongong group, both as a
standalone thing, or as the TCP/IP subset... I'm unsure if others licensed
it or not (TGV did the TCP part, iirc, but enhanced it way more than TWG
did).
Warner
Interactive Systems. Now there’s a name I’ve
not heard in many a
year. Heinz Lycklama went there.
A blast from the past indeed.
The did a couple of things, a straight UNIX port
to various things
(PDP-11, 386) and also there “UNIX running under VMS” product.
Which model of the PDP-11? I did ports of V6.5 (as I called it) to the
11/34, 11/23, and 11/60, all of which had their oddities.
And that wouldn't be Eunice, would it? Or was that purely a DEC product?
3:55 a.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
> On Thu, 11 Jul 2019, ron(a)ronnatalie.com wrote:
> > (PDP-11, 386) and also there “UNIX running under VMS” product.
Was there only three UNIX on VMS (or under...) options?
Eunice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_(software)
"phi"-nix: A Unix Emulator for VAX/VMS:
https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/101549/TR82-08.pdf?seque…
ISC's IS/1-WB Work Bench for VMS (UNIX Tools only?)
5 p.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
There were a number of them. As others have meantioned, the TGV folks did
one, there were a number of tools from DECUS, and even DEC actually
released more and more UNIX into VMS themselves. I used to carry a mag
tape with vi, the shell and few basic tools that allowed me to edit things
on VMS if I had to deal with it. The biggest issue was TCP/IP, since
DECnet was the only networking for a such a long time from DEC.
Stan Smith and I wrote the original VAX IP/TCP support for Tektronix in
1979, in BLISS and some small amount of VAX assembler. My friends (former
coworkers) @ CMU took this back in and enhanced it (the CMU folks did a
huge amount of work on the mail interface). IIRC I sent the tape to Danny
Klein, but it might have been someone else.
I have the code from the CMU's update of our work on 9-track tape, but I
think it eventually also may have gone out on a DECUS tape. But I do
know that this code base would make its way to DEC, where CJ and Wayne
would take it to become the code base that started OpenVMS's version [CJ
once told me he was impressed at how little they had to rewrite it, mostly
removing some Vaxism's - Stan and I were not worried about portability, we
just wanted something to talk correctly to the UNIX V7 TCP from 3COM (UNET)
and the TCP we had written from the Cyber NOS].
Clem
On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 11:56 PM Nigel Williams <
nw(a)retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 11
Jul 2019, ron(a)ronnatalie.com wrote:
> > (PDP-11, 386) and also there “UNIX running under VMS” product.
Was there only three UNIX on VMS (or under...) options?
Eunice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_(software)
"phi"-nix: A Unix Emulator for VAX/VMS:
https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/101549/TR82-08.pdf?seque…
ISC's IS/1-WB Work Bench for VMS (UNIX Tools only?)
8:12 p.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
There was also an extensive port of the Software Tools to VMS, done by
Joe Sventek at LBNL. Included at the key tools, the shell, pipes,
everything. Felt completely like Unix.
Deborah
On 7/12/19 10:00 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
There were a number of them. As others have
meantioned, the TGV folks
did one, there were a number of tools from DECUS, and even DEC
actually released more and more UNIX into VMS themselves. I used to
carry a mag tape with vi, the shell and few basic tools that allowed
me to edit things on VMS if I had to deal with it. The biggest issue
was TCP/IP, since DECnet was the only networking for a such a long
time from DEC.
Stan Smith and I wrote the original VAX IP/TCP support for Tektronix
in 1979, in BLISS and some small amount of VAX assembler. My friends
(former coworkers) @ CMU took this back in and enhanced it (the CMU
folks did a huge amount of work on the mail interface). IIRC I sent
the tape to Danny Klein, but it might have been someone else.
I have the code from the CMU's update of our work on 9-track tape, but
I think it eventually also may have gone out on a DECUS tape. But I
do know that this code base would make its way to DEC, where CJ and
Wayne would take it to become the code base that started OpenVMS's
version [CJ once told me he was impressed at how little they had to
rewrite it, mostly removing some Vaxism's - Stan and I were not
worried about portability, we just wanted something to talk correctly
to the UNIX V7 TCP from 3COM (UNET) and the TCP we had written from
the Cyber NOS].
Clem
On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 11:56 PM Nigel Williams
<nw(a)retrocomputingtasmania.com <mailto:nw@retrocomputingtasmania.com>>
wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Jul 2019, ron(a)ronnatalie.com
<mailto:ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> > (PDP-11, 386) and also there “UNIX
running under VMS” product.
Was there only three UNIX on VMS (or under...) options?
Eunice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_(software)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_%28software%29>
"phi"-nix: A Unix Emulator for VAX/VMS:
https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/101549/TR82-08.pdf?seque…
ISC's IS/1-WB Work Bench for VMS (UNIX Tools only?)
8:45 p.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
On 7/12/19, Deborah Scherrer <dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu> wrote:
There was also an extensive port of the Software Tools
to VMS, done by
Joe Sventek at LBNL. Included at the key tools, the shell, pipes,
everything. Felt completely like Unix.
How did the LBNL Software Tools for VMS implement pipes? I'm curious
because DEC itself did a product in the mid-1980s called DEC Shell
that was a VMS port of the Bourne shell and associated utilities. I
wrote a VMS device driver that implemented pipes as a true VMS
pseudo-device, similar to VMS mailboxes but with true Unix pipe
semantics.
-Paul W.
9:43 p.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
I didn't do this port, so don't know the details. But it was done in
the late 70s (I think) and had broad distribution. When I collected
various Software Tools versions, I was not able to find the VMS one. Sorry.
Deborah
On 7/12/19 1:45 PM, Paul Winalski wrote:
On 7/12/19, Deborah Scherrer
<dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu> wrote:
There was also an extensive port of the Software
Tools to VMS, done by
Joe Sventek at LBNL. Included at the key tools, the shell, pipes,
everything. Felt completely like Unix.
How did the LBNL Software Tools for VMS
implement pipes? I'm curious
because DEC itself did a product in the mid-1980s called DEC Shell
that was a VMS port of the Bourne shell and associated utilities. I
wrote a VMS device driver that implemented pipes as a true VMS
pseudo-device, similar to VMS mailboxes but with true Unix pipe
semantics.
-Paul W.
10:45 p.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
If I recall this was one of the implementations that wrote to a file and
then forked the next process after it got to eof.
On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 2:44 PM Deborah Scherrer <
dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu> wrote:
I didn't do this port, so don't know the
details. But it was done in
the late 70s (I think) and had broad distribution. When I collected
various Software Tools versions, I was not able to find the VMS one. Sorry.
Deborah
On 7/12/19 1:45 PM, Paul Winalski wrote:
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
On 7/12/19, Deborah Scherrer
<dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu> wrote:
-- There was also an extensive port of the Software
Tools to VMS, done by
Joe Sventek at LBNL. Included at the key tools, the shell, pipes,
everything. Felt completely like Unix.
How did the LBNL Software Tools for VMS
implement pipes? I'm curious
because DEC itself did a product in the mid-1980s called DEC Shell
that was a VMS port of the Bourne shell and associated utilities. I
wrote a VMS device driver that implemented pipes as a true VMS
pseudo-device, similar to VMS mailboxes but with true Unix pipe
semantics.
-Paul W.
11:18 p.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
I believe you are right. That was a typical implementation method.
Deborah
On 7/12/19 3:45 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
If I recall this was one of the implementations that
wrote to a file
and then forked the next process after it got to eof.
On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 2:44 PM Deborah Scherrer
<dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu <mailto:dscherrer@solar.stanford.edu>>
wrote:
I didn't do this port, so don't know the details. But it was done in
the late 70s (I think) and had broad distribution. When I collected
various Software Tools versions, I was not able to find the VMS
one. Sorry.
Deborah
On 7/12/19 1:45 PM, Paul Winalski wrote:
curious
On 7/12/19, Deborah Scherrer
<dscherrer(a)solar.stanford.edu
<mailto:dscherrer@solar.stanford.edu>> wrote:
> There was also an extensive port of the
Software Tools to VMS,
done by
Joe
Sventek at LBNL. Included at the key tools, the shell, pipes,
everything. Felt completely like Unix.
How did the LBNL Software Tools for VMS
implement pipes? I'm because DEC itself did a product in the mid-1980s
called DEC Shell
that was a VMS port of the Bourne shell and associated utilities. I
wrote a VMS device driver that implemented pipes as a true VMS
pseudo-device, similar to VMS mailboxes but with true Unix pipe
semantics.
-Paul W.
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
13 Jul
13 Jul
12:24 a.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
On Fri, 12 Jul 2019, Clem Cole wrote:
[ VMS "pipes" ]
If I recall this was one of the implementations that
wrote to a file and
then forked the next process after it got to eof.
That's my recollection too.
Trivia: I was speaking to Max at a DECUS conference, and he admitted that
they had a Unix licence and were studying the code very carefully; not
soon after, VMS became POSIX-compliant :-)
-- Dave
12:36 a.m.
New subject: Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)
On Thu, 11 Jul 2019, Warner Losh wrote:
Which model of the PDP-11? I did ports of V6.5
(as I called it)
to the 11/34, 11/23, and 11/60, all of which had their oddities.
And that wouldn't be Eunice, would it? Or was that purely a DEC
product?
Eunice came from Stanford and was sold by the Wollongong group, both as
a standalone thing, or as the TCP/IP subset... I'm unsure if others
licensed it or not (TGV did the TCP part, iirc, but enhanced it way more
than TWG did).
Aha! Thanks for that background info.
I still remember the conversation I had with my boss about running Eunice
on their Vaxen:
Me: "It makes VMS look civilised."
He: "No, it makes it look like Unix."
Me: "That's what I said!"
Dunno what happened afterwards, because I was attracted to a commercial
opportunity which paid much more and needed my Unix skills (otherwise I
would've been supporting ancient COBOL programs).
-- Dave
1748
days inactive
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11 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
Clem Cole -
Dave Horsfall -
Deborah Scherrer -
Nigel Williams -
Paul Winalski -
ron＠ronnatalie.com -
Warner Losh