[TUHS] What sparked lint? [Was: Unix stories]

[Clem Cole]

He is right, it was the IBM Series/1 Port and it was a different school
(Miami of Ohio, I think).

Case was Bill Shannon and Sam Leffler's port to an Interdata.

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 3:55 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
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