[TUHS] Fwd: Amdahl UTS Source Code

[Adam Thornton via TUHS]

I had no trouble installing it under VM/370.  And, yeah, the video I saw
from ... maybe Moshix? ... claimed it was v6 but playing with it, it's very
much closer to v7.

Dumping the source ought to be a pretty simple matter of mounting an
emulated tape to hercules, dumping the files with tar, and then using the
herc utils to extract them out again (or indeed, create a .tar file, dump
THAT to awstape, extract the tar, and then use Unix tar to deal with the
contents, which is actually probably easier than roundtripping the files
through EBCDIC again).

On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 2:36 PM Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> This has been "known" for a while.
>
> It's definitely the V7 port to Amdahl, known internally as "Au".
> There's no swapping or paging because the underlying VM system provided
> virtual memory.
> Being V7, there's no problem with the UNIX license,  but Fujitsu owns the
> Amdahl IP now.  I have a hard time believing anyone would care.
>
> I've toyed with it, but the folks who have done a lot more hang out on
> Discord:
> "Mainframe Enthusiasts" # uts-and-all-nixes:
> https://discord.com/channels/423767742546575361/871957791923920967
>
> Sadly, I don't remember how to do the kernel build and disk formatting.
> I'm curious - how did you extract the source code?
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 1:21 PM Warren Toomey via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> wrote:
>
> > All, I received this e-mail from Andrew Gadsby:
> >
> >    Hello Warren
> >
> >    In the mid 1980s I was a Amdahl UTS sysadmin so I was amazed when I
> >    found the UTS system at
> >    https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/
> >
> >    I booted it up and got it running, which was great fun. Anyway, as I
> >    explored this release I realised that it is complete and includes all
> >    of the utility and kernel source code -is also builds within the
> booted
> >    system. This was a complete surprise to me and bought back many
> >    memories of those early days.
> >
> >    I have extracted the source code and am working on some notes on using
> >    this beast. Would you be interested in adding this material to the
> >    site? If so I’ll pull my notes and the code together over the next few
> >    days and send you a link so you can take a look.
> >
> > Andrew has some concerns about the copyright on the modifications. He
> adds:
> >
> >   The more I look at this the more it looks like a V7 research Unix, as
> >   per your existing PDP11 source code but with modifications to make it
> >   run on the 370 - not complete as for example the sys/sched() code is
> >   empty so there’s no paging or swapping. Some of the documentation is
> >   by the original Unix team - e.g doc/out/iosys by Dennis Ritchie in
> 1981.
> >
> >   I also think “Pugs” may have been doing something on it as well,
> >   as there’s an old mail entry for him from c. 1980. If he’s on your
> >   mailing list maybe he can give some input?  I’ve still not found
> >   any copyright notices.
> >
> >   Does any of this help with copyright concerns?
> >
> >   I will get you a fuller set of files to you  when I’ve figured out
> >   more about the kernel rebuild and disk formatting process. That’ll
> >   help me get a starter guide written - the included 3270 driver is
> >   a pain but I’m beating it into submission- who needs a backslash
> >   character anyway!
> >
> > I thnk Tom Lyons ("Pugs") is on the list, so if Tom and/or others could
> > provide any insights that would be wonderful :-)
> >
> > Thanks, Warren
> >
>