[TUHS] anedotes: RT/PC VRM, (early) AIX compilers, IBM (Research) software release/pricing [was Re: Bitsavers' RT/PC, AIX, AOS, etc. recent additions

[Kevin Bowling]

Thanks for sharing, very interesting history to me.  You guys were pros..
particularly amazing to me how far ahead the machine abstractions were on
the various IBM machines (CP, S/38, VRM) compared to most of the industry.

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 11:44 PM Charles H. Sauer <sauer at technologists.com>
wrote:

>
> > On Feb 18, 2020, at 7:41 AM, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > ...
> >
> > IBM abandoned the idea of any ukernel with AIX3 for RISC/6000.. Charlie
> may be able to add commentary on that but it was almost certainly for
> performance which was paramount in the workstation wars and RS6K had an
> front runner opening.
> >
>
> I initially missed Kevin's ping after my spam filter put several TUHS
> messages in /var/mail/devnull. (I eventually skim subject lines of messages
> that go there.)
>
> I could write more than I want to/should about how the VRM came to be and
> not to be, but will try to add a little to what I've said before (
> https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/).
> I'm trusting 30+ year-old memories here and not looking at the various
> papers and manuals that might inform.
>
> I joined Glenn's AFWS project July 5, 1982. There was no well defined
> software plan yet. Glenn wanted to do something useful and significant, and
> proposed that we do the VRM. We had several distinct user environments in
> mind. I took the lead in writing a specification of the VMI (virtual
> machine interface) while others started prototyping. We were way overly
> ambitious with abstractions along the lines of the single level store of
> (Glenn's) System 38, trying to take advantage of the 40 bit addressing of
> the Rosetta virtual memory chip, yet still heavily influenced by CP/CMS.
> After a few months, Al Chang, primary person behind CP.R, came to Austin
> for a design review of what we'd done. He told Glenn he'd grade our work
> "C+". That might have been generous.
>
> We scaled back our ambitions dramatically, started working with ISC. About
> the time (1983) of the transition from "ad tech" to "product" organization,
> it became clear that our virtual memory manager needed to be scrapped and
> we lifted what Al had done for CP.R and put it in the VRM.
>
> In hindsight, the VRM turned out better than it might have. Besides AIX
> there was a version of Pick for VRM that sold about 4000 copies according
> to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC. Though the VMI cost us some
> in performance, we were surprisingly successful in minimizing the
> penalties. But with AIX 3 and RS/6000 we wanted to take dramatic steps
> forward, and it made no sense to preserve the VMI.
>
> Anecdotal comments on other TUHS/COFF discussions:
>
> If I recall correctly, pcc, eventually including the HCR optimizing phase,
> was bundled with base AIX. Initially, the C compiler based on the PL.8
> compiler would only run on CMS, so it was not generally available outside
> of IBM, but app vendors, especially CAD vendors, were enabled and
> encouraged to come to Austin to use it to get the best performance. The
> native C compiler based on PL.8 compiler concepts ended up being a complete
> rewrite, outside of Yorktown, and sold as a separate product.
>
> Producing software products, getting them released, priced, etc. was very
> confusing to me most of the time I was at IBM. Part of it was the history
> that Clem has cited. Part of it was confusion about the antitrust suits
> against IBM. Part of it was confusion about whether and what software was
> patentable. Academics and others wanted access to the modeling & simulation
> software, RESQ, my team developed at Yorktown. Eventually, the concept of
> "Research Distributed Program" was agreed upon and RESQ was the first
> instance: https://technologists.com/sauer/RA144.pdf. However, we were
> forced to price RESQ much higher than I thought reasonable. I had already
> transferred to Austin by the time the release was official -- I don't know
> how many copies were sold. But source code was necessary to take full
> advantage of RESQ so the PL/I source was included on the tapes.
>
> When OSF was announced, with the intention of making AIX source available
> to the other OSF companies, I was stunned because it was so
> uncharacteristic of the IBM I thought I knew. It would be interesting to
> know how that would have worked out if OSF had stuck with AIX and IBM had
> delivered the source on the schedule everyone hoped for, but that's on a
> different timeline than this one.
>
>
> --
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> CharlesHSauer
>
>
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