[TUHS] The John Snow's of the UNIX family

alan at alanlee.org alan at alanlee.org
Wed Jan 16 13:49:19 AEST 2019


I've been on a Data General Aviion restoration binge lately and
re-familiarizing myself with DG/UX.  In my case 5.4R3.1 running on a
MC88100 based AV/300 and MC88110 dual core AV/5500.  The more I
experience, the more I am impressed.  There are a few things about the
system that seem impressive. 

- Despite coming from a System V core, there is a lot of BSD influx -
especially on the networking side.  This is a personal taste issue as
other ports have tried to mix the best of both worlds.  But after a
prior month-long Sun/Solaris restoration binge of similar era hardware
(Super/Hyper/Ultra SPARC) and software (SunOS 4 through Solaris 9),
DG/UX is a welcome and refreshing change!  Especially out of the box. 

- It has a system of file security that seems unique for that era - at
least in my experience - of explicit and implicit directory tags with
inheritance.  There is even a high security extended version of the OS. 

- It has a built-in logical volume manager supporting multiple virtual
to physical disk mappings, striping, mirroring, and even archiving -
something several entire sub-industries were created for in other ports.
 I am guessing this contributed to EMC's purchase of Data General for
the Clariion disk storage product lines. 

- It leveraged open-source tools early.  The default m88k compiler
installed with the system is GNU C 2.xx. 

- It was among the earliest of operating systems to support NUMA aware
affinity on MP versions of the MC88110. (IRIX, Solaris, BSD, Linux, and
Windows support all came much later). 

- Many others. 

It does have it's quirks.  However I get the overall impression the
folks working at DG were on their game and were a leader in the industry
in many areas.  It is unfortunate a) the fate of the Motorola 88K was
tied to Data General's place in the UNIX world, and b) by the time they
migrated to IA86, enterprise business was more interested in Microsoft
NT & SQL server or Linux than an expensive vendor's UNIX port. 

That being said, I don't see DG/UX mentioned much in UNIX history.  In
fact, I am researching an exhibit I'm putting together for the Vintage
Computer Festival Southeast 7.0, and DG/UX isn't mentioned on any of the
'UNIX Family Tree' diagrams I can find so far.   It doesn't even make
Wikipedia's 'UNIX Variants' page.  It's own Wikipedia page is also
rather sparse.  Like John Snow in season 1, there is a junk of missing
and plot impacting history here - centered around the people involved. 

To a lesser degree, IRIX is also a red-headed step-child.  It's omitted
from half the lists I can find.  It just seems the importance, even if
it's an importance by being the 'first' rather than # of users, of these
ports are pretty significant. 

Just curious of others' thoughts.  And I wondering if anyone has
first-hand knowledge of Data General's efforts or knows of others that
can illuminate the shadows of what I'm discovering is a pretty exciting
corner of the UNIX world. 

Thanks, 

-Alan H.
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