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

[Wesley Parish]

Thanks. I knew IBM had had some involvement with 4.*BSD, but lacked the details.

Wesley Parish

On 4/3/21, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> 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.
>
> 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 had gone to DEC by then.
>