[TUHS] DG UNIX History

[arnold at skeeve.com]

I'm pretty sure that DG never ported DG-UX to the Nova. There was
a native port to the Eclipse (32 bit).  There was also a Eunice-style
Unix environment that sat on top of their native OS, whatever it was
called.

When I was working there, DG gave the Georgia Tech School of Information
and Computer Science an Eclipse running their native OS in the early
mid-80s. I didn't do much with it, and I suspect that nobody else there
did either.

I'm bcc-ing Scott Lee, who was the admin for that machine at the time;
maybe he remembers more.

There was a guy who worked at DG and contributed a lot of the Motorola
88000 code to GCC whose name I don't remember, although I met him
at a USENIX.  If someone else remembers who this is, maybe he can
be tracked down for more info.

DG-UX was a pretty generic SVR3 (and later SVR4) system, IIRC.

In any case, DG-UX on the Eclipse preceded it on the 88000.

I hope this helps,

Arnold

P.S. For the youngsters here who've never heard of it, I highly
recommend Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" about the
development of the Eclipse. (https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316491977/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+soul+of+a+new+machine+by+tracy+kidder&qid=1668271720&sprefix=the+soul+of+a+new%2Caps%2C233&sr=8-1).

It was originally written in 1982 - 40 years ago!

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> This recent activity on the simh mailing list WRT to DG Nova and
> Ecpilse got me wondering.  At Locus in the 80s and 90s, we did a lot of
> work with DG and DG-UX with their later MP-based ports using commercially
> available microprocessors (which I have reported was a very nicely done
> system, easy to work on, the locks tended to scale well, e*tc*.).
>
> But I am trying to remember if C or UNIX was on a Nova or an Eclipse.  This
> could be my failed memory, given that so many people ported V7 in the late
> 1970s (the infamous 'NUIX' bug from the Series/1 port probably being my
> favorite tale).  So to the hive mind, did anyone (DG themselves or a
> University) ever build 16 or 32-bit tools for the DG architectures and do a
> UNIX port, and if so, does anyone know what became of those efforts?  Is
> this something that needs to be in the TUHS archives also?
>
> Clem
> ???