[TUHS] AIX repeat [was Re: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Charles H Sauer]

I'm not sure that I have anything to add beyond repeating citation to 
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/. 
It credits ISC and LCC appropriately.

AIX involvement with SCO, if any, would have been after I left IBM. I 
find it hard to imagine what that involvement would have been.

Charlie

On 4/2/2021 11:03 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com 
> <mailto: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.
> 
> A for AIX/370 a quick history which Charlie can fill in more from the 
> IBM side, was that in the last 60s and early 70s, IBM had a strange hold 
> on the education/research market with the S/360; but lost it because of 
> the lack of timesharing to DEC and PDP-10 based systems as IBM was more 
> and more focused on the commercial sector where there was much more 
> money to be made.   But ... there was a drive in the IBM 
> educational/research team to be able to reenter that market and Locus 
> was hired to develop AIX/370 (and later PS2) as it was felt that UNIX 
> was considered an important offering for those customers.  After it was 
> released as a product, it turned out purchasing AIX/370 was exceedingly 
> difficult (for a number of reasons), although it was extremely well 
> received by those that ran it, but getting it was difficult.  In fact, I 
> have been told by folks that there at the time, that using TCF was an 
> important feature here at Intel for the success of the simulation for 
> the 486 and Pentium.
> 
> Again, Charlie can tell you the history but IBM also developed AIX for 
> the RS/6000 which was the same OS (only different) from IBM Austin(no 
> TCF, but supported DS which was cool in its own right).  Locus was 
> actually contracted to develop a UNIX subsystem for the AS/400 also, but 
> I'm not sure if that ever shipped.  I had left Locus and hadgoneto DEC 
> by then.

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer at technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer