[TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Sat Apr 3 02:11:47 AEST 2021


On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 12:03:41PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >  I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of
> > the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right?
> >
> No.   BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s.
> 
> Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much
> less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2
> for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them.  The user-space was
> mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great
> deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM
> called TCF - the transparent computing facility.  It was very cool you
> could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either
> ISA.   It has been well discussed in this forum, previously.

It's really a shame that TCF didn't get more widespread usage/traction.
That's exactly what BitMover wanted to do, I wanted to scale small cheap
SMPs in a cluster with a TCF layer on it.  I gave some talks about it,
it obviously went nowhere but might have if we had TCF as a starting
point.  TCF was cool.


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