[TUHS] VAX System V

[Brad Spencer via TUHS]

Kevin Bowling via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> writes:

> I got a manual set for Digital VAX System V 3.2.1.  It appears to be a
> descendent of AT&T's VAX port, but it was thoroughly extended with
> large system hardware support (including CI bus) and even sundries
> like X11R4.  Compared to i.e. 3B2 System V which IMHO is pretty bare
> bones and even a little half baked.  The manuals are actually pretty
> great.
>
> I'm not overly familiar with DEC but perusing history it seemed to be
> that Ultrix was always playing second fiddle to VMS.  VAX System V
> seems like a "more serious" UNIX, it targets the large machines:  VAX
> 11/780, 6000, 8000, 9000.  Only in the 3.2.1 release did a MVII pop
> in.
>
> I don't think I've ever seen anything on this in the wild, the main
> customer appeared to be AT&T itself and the RBOCs.  Information online
> is scare.
>
> Regards,
> Kevin

When I was at AT&T / Lucent the product I worked on started out on the
Vax running a port of System V from DEC.  The department, if I remember
correctly, had a number of the systems mentioned above.  If I remember
the story correctly, AT&T pushed for this with DEC because of the "Thou
Shalt Run System V" command that came down inside of AT&T.  I do know
that when DEC proposed that the Alpha replace the Vax and that the Alpha
would not officially run System V (it apparently ran System V
unofficially inside of DEC), only OSF/1 (or was it Ultrix...  don't
remember), the department moved to drop DEC as a vendor.  Of course,
later in the Lucent days, that directive was more or less ignored.

I also remember something someone said to me at the time about the Vax
and operating systems, VMS was first with support inside of DEC,
followed by Ultrix and then System V at a more distant third place.  The
department at AT&T I was in fixed a number of kernel and userland bugs
for DEC.  There was full access to the source code and there existed a
kernel and userland build system that could pretty much recreate the
system from source code.

The product that I was working on ate an entire Vax.  We actually
created our own set of system tapes that contained the OS as we wanted
it configured (the department forced, or at least tried to force, a
specific and exact hardware configuration on the customer base) along
with the product we were selling.  The customers, be them RBOCs or
someone outside of the US, would boot the tapes we sent (well, our
installer would do that) and this would load the OS and the product in
one pass.  Much faster then the method used by DEC.






-- 
Brad Spencer - brad at anduin.eldar.org