[TUHS] Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 2:54 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>[snip]
> The VAX 750's were huge time-sharing systems that you could connect to
> via VT-100's and VS-100 that were hard-wired to the VAX 750's, and
> telnet from IBM PC/AT's.  The smaller clusters used PC/AT's because
> they were more flexible as to which 750 you were connecting to;
> otherwise, undergraduates had to go to the right terminal room in the
> right part of campus to connect to the Vax 750 that you were assgined
> to based on the starting character of your last name.  (And graduate
> students initially didn't have access to Project Athena at all;
> although if you were in EECS, LCS or the AI Lab you had access to
> dedicated systems, of course.)

Was this before the introduction of DECserver terminal concentrators?

>[snip]
> There was a brief, shining moment that we were standardized on
> BSD-derived Unix systems, but then IBM turned down AOS (the "academic"
> operating system), and we were forced to use AIX on the IBM RT's, with
> all that this implied: SMIT, and other horrors.

Huh, I thought that AOS ran on all versions of the RT? I know they
dropped support for it when the power-based RS/6000s came out and
replaced the RT, though.

> "AIX: it *reminds* you of Unix...." was the saying at the time ---
> although we tried not to say that when the IBM engineers assigned
> Athena were in hearing range :-).  The one saving grace of the IBM
> RT's was that they were three MIPS machines, while the Microvax's were
> but a single MIPS, and that made a huge different if you were running
> TeX or LaTeX.

The RT was a weird duck, for sure. Compared to a SPARCstation it was
absurdly slow, but I guess compared to a uVAX perhaps not so much.

        - Dan C.