[TUHS] Government-Issue UNIX?

[Niklas Karlsson via TUHS]

AGH! Whatever you're using to send mail seems to have eaten all newlines in
your message, including what you're quoting. Do you think you could try and
fix that? Because as it is, your message is basically unreadable.

/Niklas

Den lör 11 okt. 2025 kl 05:27 skrev GARY LUCKENBAUGH via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org
>:

> Wow, I thought I went through a lot of mergers and acquisitions, that's
> wild. On Oct 10, 2025, at 1:27 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com>
> wrote: We worked with these guys for years. First IBM Federal Sector, then
> Federal Systems, then Loral, then Lockmart, then Leidos, My contact there
> said he’s worked for different companies without ever changing his office.
> I still have an IBM badge/door card from my days there. Of course, we joked
> about it, but my company was not much better. We were part of BDS, then
> spun out as KTS, then back into BDS, and then merged with BTG, then spun
> out again as Sensor Systems, then merged with Austin Information Systems to
> form Overwatch Systems (also picking up Visual Learning Systems, Paragon
> Imaging, and IT Spatial), and then got bought out by Textron. All along the
> way I did several UNIX ports, several X Server Ports, some Novell Drivers,
> all while developing our image processing products (intelligence and
> medical research). ------ Original Message ------ From "Andy Wallis" <
> rawallis at panix.com> To "Natalie Ron" <ron at ronnatalie.com> Cc "GARY
> LUCKENBAUGH" <luckenbg at icloud.com>; "segaloco" <segaloco at protonmail.com>;
> tuhs at tuhs.org Date 10/9/2025 11:27:15 PM Subject Re: [TUHS] Re:
> Government-Issue UNIX? IBM Federal Systems got sold off to Loral then
> Lockheed and is now owned by Leidos. The Gaithersburg plant was partially
> torn down to make way for a FedEx or UPS depot. There are still a number of
> ex IBM FS people still working at Leidos. I think Gary worked with me in
> the FAA ATC programs if it the same person I remember. It is still very
> much a UNIX shop. AIX has been replaced by RHEL. That place gave me my love
> of AIX from our FAA programs going back to AAS to ERAM. -Andy Wallis On Oct
> 9, 2025, at 10:28 PM, Ron Natalie via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote: I was
> consulting for IBM FSC (Gaithersburg MD). Tom Wellington was who I was
> dealing with there. On Oct 9, 2025, at 21:30, GARY LUCKENBAUGH via TUHS <
> tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote: BTW, Ron Natalie, where did you work on IBM Secure
> Xenix? I'm surprised we didn't cross paths. Maybe we did, and I just don't
> remember. My 68 y/o brain isn't what it used to be. Gary Luckenbaugh Sent
> from my iPhone On Oct 9, 2025, at 9:11 PM, GARY LUCKENBAUGH via TUHS <
> tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote: I was the lead developer on IBM Secure Xenix. I
> designed all the APIs and did much of the kernel work from Jan 1984 until
> 1989 when we handed off the project to Steve Walker's Trusted Information
> Systems. My dream job was to work on the Unix kernel, and by some miracle I
> got to do that at IBM. I was the first IBMer on the project and the last
> off. This was my first job out of graduate school. My thesis advisor,
> Virgil Gligor, was an IBM consultant, and he knew they were looking for
> kernel developers, dare I say kernel hacker. Besides my advisor, and my IBM
> manager, I was the only one working the project until the summer of 1984
> when we brought in two PhDs to work the project, one was from IBM's
> Yorktown Research Division, and one was a hire from AT&T Naperville. I was
> the only one with knowledge of the Unix kernel. I was two steps down the
> ladder from the guys with PhDs, but my manager quickly figured out I was
> the only one that really knew what I was doing. I got really annoyed with
> the analysis paralysis. I decided I had enough of that, and implemented the
> Mandatory Access Controls over a weekend. 😆 That project was a heck of a
> lot of fun, and the highlight of my career. I was one of IBM's first Unix
> people, and I got to run all around the corporation giving talks. My home
> base was IBM Federal Systems Division in Gaithersburg, MD, but I spent a
> lot of time at IBM's Advanced Workstation Division in Austin, TX the home
> of IBM's AIX. Gary Luckenbaugh Sent from my iPhone On Oct 9, 2025, at 5:44
> PM, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote: On Fri, 10 Oct 2025, at
> 01:35, Jon Forrest via TUHS wrote: KSOS was made from scratch at Ford
> Aerospace in the late 1970s. I was in the group that did it, although I
> didn't work on it because I didn't have a security clearance. There seems
> to be an IEEE paper on this, though I’ve not read it yet. Hate it when
> things need a login :-( Do you know where it belonged on the spectrum from
> “zero AT&T code” to “new kernel but overwhelmingly AT&T userland”?
> Intrigued, John Fwiw the manual I have on hand is just for the kernel API,
> so I couldn't say. On a quick flip-through, the sections appear to have
> been rearranged (.e.g Section I describes datatypes used by syscalls) and
> in none of the sections did I spot anything particularly resembling
> userland applications, although I think the API documentation includes
> non-syscall entrypoints implying parts of a userland C library. - Matt G.