[TUHS] What sparked lint? [Was: Unix stories]
Mary Ann Horton
mah at mhorton.net
Fri Jan 6 06:55:00 AEST 2017
I recall at the Delaware Usenix conference (in 1979?) a professor from
Case Western gave a talk about his port of UNIX to some Interdata or
Data General or something. He said that when he booted it up, it said
"NUXI".
On 01/05/2017 09:46 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
>
> I remember being at an early UUG meeting and the group who did the
> UNIX port to the IBM series lamenting that it printed NUXI on boot
> because of byte order issues. Don’t know if it was true, but NUXI
> became a synonym for UNIX byte order issues from then on.
>
> The 8/32 indeed has some 370-ish stuff starting from the fact that it
> numbers the bits from the MSB end. Amusingly, it has more
> minicomputerish other features.
>
> One bizarre source of fun is that where as accessing a 16 bit quantity
> on an odd address on the PDP-11 gives you a bus error trap, the
> Interdata just ignores the low order bit and returns you the 16 bit
> value that you are pointing into the middle of. Same things happen
> on 32-bit access (lower 2 bits ignored).
>
> For nostalgia, here’s a scan of an old 8/32 programmers manual:
> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/interdata/32bit/8-32/29-428_8-32_User_May78.pdf
>
> Byte ordering got worked out when networking came in. I worked on
> IBM’s AIX which was a productization of the UCLA LOCUS kernel. The
> thing was a relatively tightly coupled multiprocessor system that
> allowed seamless execution of different binary types. The machines
> we were working with were the 370 mainframe, the i386 (in the form of
> IBM PS/2’s), and a four processor i860 add in card IBM built called
> the W4. The mainframe having the opposite byte ordering of the others.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170105/dda1ea79/attachment.html>
More information about the TUHS
mailing list