[TUHS] IBM Unix source licenses [was Re: PWB vs Unix/TS

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 3:01 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Kevin/Charlie:
>
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 3:31 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Charlie, there is some interesting history of the pre-RS/6000 AIX
>> stuff here (you give a quote :)).  Particularly page 41 gives a
>> chronology of UNIX at IBM:
>>
>> https://amaus.net/static/S100/IBM/RTPC/AIX%20Family%20Definition%201989.pdf
>
> Awesome - thank you,
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> Prior to AIX the Series/1 had a UNIX port in the early '80s.  I think
>> that work happened in Boca Raton.
>>
> FYI: the original S/1 port was done at Cleveland State with the Seventh
> Edition - the name of the Prof that led it I can not say I remember nor his
> HW configuration, but I do remember his presentation.  It is where the term
> 'NUXI' was coined.  I want to say in 1979 or 1980, they gave a wonderful
> talk about it.   They had some help from folks at Case as they did not have
> a PDP-11 of their own and never seen UNIX before (*i.e.* they arranged to
> borrowed time on a PDP-11 at the EE Dept at Case.  They wrote a new back
> end for the Ritchie C compiler, and recompiled everything, wrote new
> drivers for the S/1 HW and rewrote m40.s as needed.  Then they wrote the
> disks, then drove the packs back to Cleveland State.  IIRC it took a summer
> of work to complete).
>
> FWIW: The PDP-11 has an interesting way it does byte-swapping and when
> they first booted the system, the first message was NUXI which was how the
> S/1 saw the strings.  The term was used from then on in the community to
> describe byte-swapping issues.
>
> I remember all of us in the audience howling with laughter when they
> described their work.    Unfortunately, this was before USENIX kept
> conference proceedings so I'm not sure if the talk and paper were archived.
>
> And the truth is, I wish we had that port in the TUHS archives.
>

Me too. This is a port I had no clue about.... I'll have to put it in my
slides as "S/1 NUXI" :)

Warner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20190912/bf1222c5/attachment.html>