[TUHS] Greetings!

Phillip Harbison alvitar at xavax.com
Wed Aug 13 15:59:33 AEST 2025


Thank you to whoever added me to this list!

I have been a UNIX & C disciple since 1982. I spent much of the 1980s 
writing UNIX, BSD, and OSF/1 device drivers. I ran "madhat", the first 
public access USENET site in Huntsville. Madhat was a homebuilt 68000 
running Unisoft's port of System V Release 0. I also set up "uahcs1", 
the first UNIX and USENET host at The University of Alabama in 
Huntsville (UAH). Uahcs1 was a Unisys U7000, originally known as the 
Power 6/32 minicomputer developed by Computer Consoles Inc., running 
their port of 4.3 BSD.

During my career I have worked with UNIX v7, UNIX System V, AIX, BSD, 
HPUX, IRIX, Linux, MkLinux, OSF/1, Solaris, SunOS, Ultrix, and Xenix, as 
well as variants such as Mach, Minix, and Xinu. All of my currently 
active systems run various versions of macOS. In the past my home office 
was a Microsoft-Free Zone (tm) but alas too many clients insisted on the 
use of "Word" so I was forced to compromise and partially surrender to 
the Dark Side (but only in a Windoze VM).

One of my current hobby projects is building a RISC processor using 1980 
technology, specifically the Am2900 family of bit-slice components. I 
call it Project Madhat.  My goal is to perform as well as a VAX-11/780 
at least for integer code. I hope it will eventually run 4.4 BSD. If 
interested you can read about it here.

http://www.xavax.com/madhat/

My professional work is fragmented. For years I've been developing a 
Massively-Parallel Processor based on the NXP (formerly Freescale or 
Motorola) T4240 which has 12 PowerPC e6500 cores and built-in Serial 
RapidIO. The execution units will run a lean microkernel but the overall 
system will be managed by some flavor of UNIX. I don't currently have 
any information about the MPP online without an NDA, but I would be 
happy to answer general questions about it.

I was recently motivated by the Russo-Ukraine war to start a company 
called Trident Droneworks. It is developing systems for the Ukrainian 
military. If interested you can read about that here.

http://tridentdroneworks.com/

Thanks again for adding me. I look forward to discussing UNIX lore.

-- 
Phillip L Harbison




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