[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

Norman Wilson norman at oclsc.org
Sun Aug 26 23:09:42 AEST 2018


Seth Morabito:

  After the past several years of focusing on 3B2 preservation and
  emulation, I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much
  inside of Bell Labs. Has anyone ever heard whether Research UNIX was
  ever ported to the WE32100? I've certainly never seen anything that
  would suggest it was, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

=====

I never heard of anyone doing such a thing.  Had they ported
the kernel I would almost certainly have heard about it, because
they'd have asked me a question or two.  Much VAX-specific
structure inside there that I'd love to have had the time and
energy to clean up.

It's possible that someone did a semi-port, moving a lot of
the user-mode tools like the shell and the Jerq software.
Dave Kapilow did something like that for early SunOS, including
a mux-like X11 terminal program called sux, built atop a
library that did a simple mapping from Jerq graphics-library
calls to X11.

Certainly nobody inside 1127 ever did either of those things.
A few of us played with 3B1 or 3B2 systems (I remember Tom
Duff had a 3B1 at home at one point), but never very seriously.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON



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