[COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days

[Adam Thornton]

I don't know enough about MVS but it too is public domain until 3.8j or so,
and I would expect that the way you serviced the system was about the same:
patch the assembly code from PTFs (or whatever those are called in
MVS-land), reassemble the modules, relink into a kernel/system
image/whatever the os-appropriate nomenclature is.

Adam

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 5:10 PM Adam Thornton <athornton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Pretty sure this VM/370 reference has, somewhere in its rather formidable
> bulk, what you're looking for.  Start around p. 225:
>
>
> http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/370/VM_370/Release_6/GC20-1801-10_VM370_Sysgen_Rel_6_Jan80.pdf
>
> Now granted VM was never the most popular of the IBM OSes.  But it was
> delivered (and patched) as assembler sources.  You may also enjoy Melinda
> Varian's "What Mother Never Told You about VM Service."
> http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/tutorial.pdf
>
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 5:06 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 18:45:15 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
>> > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the
>> >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for
>> >> a big computer was from source.  Now I've been asked for a reference,
>> >> and I can't find one!  Can anybody help?
>> >
>> > Mumble -- For IBM and DEC in the 60s and early 70s, the manufactures
>> > distributed the (assembler) sources to the OS and we could (and did)
>> > build from source but usually just built parts.
>>
>> Right, this is my recollection.
>>
>> > Remember, the target was the manufacturers HW so they were not
>> > giving away much.
>>
>> Again, my assessment.
>>
>> The real issue is: where can I find a reference?  Google brings up so
>> many false positives that it's not worth the trouble, and Wikipedia's
>> pages on "System generation" are too vague.
>>
>> Greg
>> --
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