[TUHS] Comments in early Unix systems

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Thu Mar 22 11:00:56 AEST 2018


On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 08:55:44PM -0400, Mike Markowski wrote:
> On 03/21/2018 07:50 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 07:17:11PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> >>I used to regularly compress sources of various distributions (not UNIX, but
> >>inn, pine, elm, etc) that I compiled, just to save space.
> >>
> >>And that was in the early 90's when I could buy a 1GB SCSI drive for $1000.
> >>I can't imagine working off of the early hard drives...
> >
> >I was sys admin for a Masscomp with a 40MB disk and 20 users.  That
> >was, um, "fun".
> 
> I remember Masscomp...  We used one (I forget model) in the field in the
> late 80s in the back of a tractor trailer.  We'd capture radar signals with
> it because it allowed data acquisition to not be swapped out.  It was a very
> expensive failure if, just as you started getting the short radar return,
> something like system logging swapped you out for a little!

I remember the Masscomps we had fondly.  The ones we had were 68000 based
and they had two of those CPUs running in lock step (or something, Clem
will correct this, he was one of the main devs at Masscomp) because the
68K didn't do VM right.  I can't remember the details, it was something
like they didn't handle faults right so they ran two CPUs and when the 
fault happened the 2nd CPU somehow got involved.

Clem, what model was that?  And can you provide the real version of what
I was trying say?

--lm



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