[TUHS] Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
Well before it was withdrawn from marketing, it played in a big pool
Namely the mainframes at one of the universities in Norway. And I got
this from a VMer I who is best known for writing the pipelines stuff,
And sadly that was its only customer.

By contrast AIX for RS/6000 gang and its ancestors were well taken
care of and its still available.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:45 AM, Ronald Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>
>> AIX/370 was a real product.
>
> Indeed it was.
>
>
>
>>
>>   All of these AIX versions came from the same source code and used the
>> IBM TCF to allow you to transparently run executables across nodes in the
>> cluster.
>
> Exactly right.   TCF - Transparent Computing Facility -- No mean trick...
> you can mix PS/2 and 370 in the cluster, so root on desk allowed me root on
> the mainframe too.   What was cool was that the TCF will look at the
> executable and find the proper CPU.   The big mistake was that that node id
> was stored in a single 32 bit word and assigned per bit, which was a scaling
> issues.
>
> I was at Locus Computing Corp (aka LCC or just "Locus"), who developed AIX
> for IBM under contract and TCF was part of it.  The direct result of the The
> LOCUS Distributed System Architecture from UCLA.  The book actually
> describes much of the AIX/370 work, but starts with the original UCLA work.
> I did not work on the IBM project, although a number of my peers did.  I was
> higher to help developed TNC - Transparent Network Computing, which is was
> used in Intel's Paragon and DEC's TruClusters and a never shipped HP Cluster
> Product. Many of the same ideas but we wanted a separate team that never saw
> the IBM code so there could never be any concern about ownership.  The
> architects like me and Roman, were allowed to talk to the AIX architects,
> such as Bruce; but we keep separate development environments at separate
> sites.    After the IBM work ended, all of the Locus  distributed system
> folks the struct around went to work on TNC and the technology go sold off
> and licensed.   What was interesting is that TNC was open'ed sourced after
> the Compaq/HP mergers and put into Linux but I've forgotten the URL (I'll
> search and follow up).
>
> It's a real shame it never went anywhere.   It was a very, very cool.
>
>
>
>>
>>      The only AIX that didn’t play was the completely independent (and in
>> my opinion somewhat brain damaged) IBM/RT UNIX.    If there was a TCF-based
>> RT kernel, I never saw it, even inside the IBM labs.
>
> That was IBM politics.   LCC has the contract for the original AIX port to
> the 370.   When the RT was developed, the Austin team was ramped up.   One
> of our members of the TUHS list who is remaining silent I see is not saying
> why but I know was there ;-) and might  known the actual politics, I never
> did.   But when the AIX/RT port was forked, they started with AIX/370 code
> base and removed the TCF code.   But LCC still had the AIX/370 contract from
> Enterprise system group to maintain AIX/370.   And also, Locus had the
> contract from Entry Systems, who all they wanted TCF.   So AIX/386 and
> AIX/370 as Ron points out were one code base, one dev team (at LCC in
> California).
>
> Dan Cross said:  "I had understood was that AIX/370 was actually OSF/1
> based"
>
> It maybe that by the end, the user space was based on the OSF/1 user space
> code.  That was true for HP and DEC also.   But I can definitely state
> AIX/370 and AIX/386 were one set of source trees and all of was done by
> Locus Computing Corporation certainly through the mid 1990s.
>
> Clem
>
>