[TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Thu Oct 31 14:16:53 AEST 2019


Hijacking this a bit but much props to Tom, he has done so much.  I 
learned he exposed the IOMMU to user space in Linux, you have to be
a geek to get how cool that is, it's life changing for VMs and Tom
just sort of said yeah, I did that, like it was not a big deal.

So I hosted Tom and a bunch of other systems guys at my place, we did
a rib fest and talked about systems.  It's the most fun I've had in
years, Kirk and Eric came and spent the night in my guest house and
Kirk dryly said "could we do this more often than every 20 years" 
because I used to go to their house for wine tastings.  But it had
been at least 20 years.

Kevin Bowling was the energy that got that meeting going and he has
asked me if there was some way to get an East Coast version of that
going.  He really wants the DEC people, he has a theory that if we
could get the PDP-11 people and the VAX people there would be so many
good stories.

Would there be any interest in getting the DEC people together and 
getting them to tell stories?  I hate to travel but I'd travel for
that, especially if we got bwk and other Bell Labs people like 
Doug to show up.

Pugs, happy to see you here, this list is fun.

On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 08:56:04PM -0700, Tom Lyon wrote:
> Hi, folks. Tom Lyon here - this UNIX 370 stuff was recovered by Stephen at
> LCM+L from DECtapes that I've had sitting around for 40+ years.
> You can read all about the Princeton/Amdahl project here:
> https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart1/
> 
> If anyone wants to get serious with the code, you'll need Hercules with a
> VM/370 image as well as a PDP-11 emulator running V6. There's not a lot
> beyond the kernel, I got the shell working enough to prove that fork
> worked, and then ran out of steam because of the awful communication
> problems between the PDP and the IBM.  [ But that was my start as a
> networking guy ]. I personally haven't had time to do anything with the
> recovered bits.
> 
> I've been lurking on TUHS for a while - a special Hi to Ken Thompson and
> Steve Johnson. I owe a lot to each of them. Read about my summer at Bell
> with the Interdata 8/32 here: https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/16/belllabspart1/
> 
> On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 9:04 PM Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> > All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has
> > arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7.
> >
> > So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/
> >
> > Cheers, Warren
> >
> > P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well.
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> - Tom

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 


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