[TUHS] UNIX on (not quite bare) System/370

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:39 AM Phil Budne <phil at ultimate.com> wrote:

> The October 1984 BSTJ article by Felton, Miller and Milner
> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/otherports/ibm.pdf
>
> Describes an AT&T port of UNIX to System/370 using TSS/370
> underpinnings as the "Resident System Supervisor" and used as the 5ESS
> switching system development environment.
>
> I also found mention at http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x09
> chapter 9 of http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ with footnote 96:
>
>       Ian Johnstone, who had been the tutor at University of New
>       South Wales working with Professor John Lions, was one of the
>       researchers invited to Bell Labs. He managed the completion at
>       AT&T Bell Labs of the port of Unix to the IBM 370 computer. See
>       "Unix on Big Iron" by Ian Johnstone and Steve Rosenthal, UNIX
>       Review, October, 1984, p. 26. Johnstone also led the group that did
>       the port to the AT&T 2B20A multiprocessor system.
>
> I found
>
> https://ia902801.us.archive.org/3/items/Unix_Review_1984_Oct.pdf/Unix_Review_1984_Oct.pdf
> "BIG UNIX: The Whys and Wherefores" (pdf p.24), which only offers
> rationale.
>
> Also:
>
>         "IBM's own involvement in Unix can be dated to 1979, when it
>         assisted Bell Labs in doing its own Unix port to the 370 (to
>         be used as a build host for the 5ESS switch's software). In
>         the process, IBM made modifications to the TSS/370 hypervisor
>         to better support Unix.[12]"
> at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX#cite_ref-att-s370-unix_12-0
>
> Is there any other surviving documentation about the system?
> Any recall of what branch of AT&T UNIX it was based on?
>

[ since this original question hasn't been answered ]

>
V6. There were 3 v6 ports: two interdata ports (Wollongong and Labs) and
one VM/370 port (at Harvard or Princeton). They are got to first boot the
sane year, within a few months of each other

Uts grew out of this early port. There's several blog posts about this and
the TUHS archive has the initial port that was recovered from DECtapes
recently.

https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/12/370unixpart3/ is the last in the series.

AT&T also did a V7 port, which I think is what is written up in the bell
labs journal. I'm not sure I have a proper source for this other than
comparing the two accounts. I don't know if research did this or another
group.

AT&T did the VAX port of V7 called V32,  but v32 was little more than a
swapping kernel that didn't do demand paging. This is where the Berkeley
folks started to do paging with 3BSD. It is also where AT&T did their Vax
port that other mailing list threads chronicled.

Warner

>
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