[TUHS] Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Paul McJones]

> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 15:16:08 -0400, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com <mailto:henry.r.bent at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:59, Lawrence Stewart <stewart at serissa.com <mailto:stewart at serissa.com>> wrote:
> 
>> My rare items are only Unix-adjacent.  ...  I have some boards for a Digital
>> Firefly, a research vax multiprocessor that ran a Modula-2 based OS that
>> would run Ultrix binaries.
> 
> That's incredibly cool.  Do you know if any of the Firefly machines
> survived?  I saw a VAXstation 3540 for sale at some point recently but it
> was well out of my price range; I hope it found a good home.
> 
> -Henry

I have a set of Firefly boards (I worked on the Taos operating system for the Firefly). But as far as I can tell, no software survives.

Charles P. Thacker and Lawrence C. Stewart. 1987. Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation. In Proceedings of the second international conference on Architectual support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS II). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1145/36206.36199
Paul McJones and Garret Swart. Evolving the UNIX system interface to support multithreaded programs. Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference, December 1989. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/evolving.pdf Also available as Part I of SRC Research Report 21 (https://mcjones.org/paul/SRC-RR-21.pdf), Part II of which is the Taos Programmer's Manual.
Paul McJones and Andy Hisgen. The Topaz system: Distributed multiprocessor personal computing. Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems. IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Operating Systems, November 1987. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/wwospos.pdf

(Topaz was the name for the Modula-2+ programming environment, which also ran on VAX Ultrix.)


Paul
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