Microsoft and Xenix.

Ah, yes, the RT/PC. That brings back some fond memories. My first exposure to Unix was with AIX on the RT. I still have some of those weird-sized RT AIX manuals around somewhere...

Wayne

John Adams <[email protected]> on 06/23/2001 07:49:42 PM

To: [email protected]
cc: (bcc: Wayne Brown/Corporate/Altec)

Subject: Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

You are partially correct. AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) was built by the Boston office of Interactive Systems under contract to IBM. We had a maximum of 17 people in the effort which shipped on the RT in January 1986.

Prior to that time, Interactive Systems had produced a port of System III running on the PC/XT called PC/IX which was sold via IBM. I used PC/IX to produce the software only floating point code in the first version of AIX.

johna
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We always ran AOS on RT's. Actually, the server was the only RT, the rest were some other model that was basically a PS/2 (286) that booted DOS, then booted the other same chip that the RT used that was on a daughter card.

AOS was basically IBM's version of BSD. Academic Operating System.

mrc

     Mike Castle      [email protected]      www.netcom.com/~dalgoda/
    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen
fatal ("You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different"); -- gcc

Now if somebody here could just point me to a decent reference on A/UX - Apple's mid-80's version of Unix (for the early macintosh, I believe...)

A big thing I'm trying to show in my book is that Unix has been, for almost thirty years, the standard against which everything else was compared. Even when it wasn't what people were directly using it's what the techies were thinking about when they designed their other stuff. (That and the Xerox Parc work...)

Let's see, the real earthquakes in the computing world (off the top of my head) are:

MIT: project whirlwind (which got computing off of vacuum tubes, spawned DEC, and Minsky's hacker lab. Gurus too numerous to mention.)

Bell Labs: (the transistor, and 20 years later Unix. Gurus ken thompson, dennis ritchie, the three transistor guys, ).

DARPA: (Arpanet (BBN), funded project MAC at MIT, and Multics which brought the MIT stuff to bell labs.)

Xerox Parc (WIMP interface, WYSIWYG word processing/printing/desktop publishing, object oriented programming,

The integrated circuit/microchip (Texas Instruments' manufacturing innovation, which led to the Intel 4004, which eventually led to the Altair, which led to the personal computer. Moore's Law would probably be the theme here...)

The whole free software thing (Berkeley in the 70's to early 80's, Stallman and the FSF taking over from there. And Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix, which spawned Linux...)

Huh, I'd have to mention IBM (forget the PC, how about the winchester drive?), and of course the AT&T breakup (a negative earthquake, but big anyway, sort of leading to the commercialization of the software side of things, although Gates was trying that already. AT&T just removed a lot of the roadblocks by shattering the opposition for a while.)

Alright, I need to sit down and make an outline and a timeline. I admit
this... (Collecting the data is the easy part. ORGANIZING this fermenting heap of disconnected facts and observations is the hard part...)

Rob

1937 claude shannon A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,"

1948 claude shannon A mathematical theory of information.

without those you're kind in trouble on the computing front...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joel Jaeggli				       [email protected]
Academic User Services			     [email protected]
     PGP Key Fingerprint: 1DE9 8FCA 51FB 4195 B42A 9C32 A30D 121E
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of
arms.  Karl Marx -- Introduction to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
the right, 1843.

Yeah, I know I've bumped into that name (and probably taken notes) somewhere.
Hmmm... Might be from "Where wizards stay up late", or might have been an
article linked from slashdot... (I don't THINK it was mentioned in "Hackers"... Rodents, where was the reference... Crystal fire? That's mostly hardware. Accidental Empries? Doesn't sound right... Can't have been "Fire in the valley" because I haven't read that yet, it's still sitting on the bookshelf. Not soul of a new machine, that's post-digital Equipment Corporation...)

I THINK that's in the set of notes that's on the box that's not hooked up right now... (Shortage of monitors at home.)

This was the dude who decided to apply a binary and boolean approach to electronic computation, right? I KNOW I've read some stuff about him... late last year?

Now I remember. Slashdot linked to his obituary:

http://www.bell-labs.com/news/2001/february/26/1.html

Rob

The list for this discussion is:
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/penguicon-comphist

[snip]

Yes, but the latter paper was the real milestone. This was the guy who actually defined what information *is*, and found out the upper limits of communication rates on a given channel. This was the guy who laid the fundaments of the information theory. Without information theory no compression, reliable transmission, reliable storage, crypthography, etc.

Erik
[who works in an information theory group]

J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Department
of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems,
Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031,  2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Phone: +31-15-2783635  Fax: +31-15-2781843  Email: [email protected]
WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/

Shannon was one of the clearest thinkers of the 20th century, and yet his name is hardly known outside his own field. Within his field he is respected at the level of, say, Newton. It was a real loss to mankind when he died a few months back.

Regards,
Steve

[email protected] (Rob Landley) wrote on 24.06.01 in <[email protected]>:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2ba/ux%22

Usually a good idea.

Also, you probably want to look at RFC 2235.

MfG Kai

Hi again,

some old brain-cells got excited with the "good-ol-days" and other names have surfaced like "Superbrain","Sirius" and "Apricot".Sirius was Victor in the USA. If you go done the so-called IBM compatible route then the nearly compatible nightmares will arise and haunt you, your lucky if the scars have faded!!

I learnt my computing on a PDP8/E with papertape punch/reader, RALF, Fortran II, then later 2.4Mb removable cartridges (RK05 I think). toggling in the bootstrap improved your concentration. Much later you could
get a single chip(?) version of this in a wee knee sized box.

One summer job was working on a PDP15 analog computer alongside an 11/20 with DECTAPE, trying to compute missile firing angles. [A simple version of Pres Bush's starwars shield].

--

Andrew Smith in Edinburgh,Scotland

With the spelling cleaned up slightly, I just might want to quote that last sentence in my book. Would you object?

I take it that superbrain, sirius/victor, and apricot were PC clones like the Tandy and Wang that were sort of but not really compatable?

"A quarter century of unix" mentions RK05 cartridges several times, but never says much ABOUT them.

Okay, so they're 2.4 megabyte removable cartridges? How big? Are they tapes or disk packs? (I.E. can you run off of them or are they just storage?) I know lots of early copies of unix were sent out from Bell Labs on RK05 cartidges signed "love, ken"...

What was that big reel to reel tape they always show in movies, anyway?

I need a weekend just to collate stuff...

Considering that the Mark I was designed to compute tables of artillery firing angles during World War II... It's a distinct trend, innit? And the source of the game "artillery duel", of course...

<[email protected]>:

http://www.pdp8.net/rk05/rk05.shtml

The big-refrigerator-sized guys were generally attached to mainframes, IBM or otherwise. Here's a little info: http://www.digital-interact.co.uk/site/html/reference/media_9trk.html (but take it with a grain of salt; IBM surely didn't go to nine tracks because of ASCII!).

/Jonathan Lundell.

There seems to be a bug in the mail routing again. It may be related to the recent problem with ditto copier history outbreaks on Linux S/390 and the infamous 'pdp-11 memory subsystem' article routing bug that plagued comp.os.minix once.

In the meantime can people check that their mailer hasnt spontaneously added linux-kernel to their history articles before posting them ?

Alan

Rob Landley <[email protected]>:

...

Ah, the memories... (apologies for the interruptions, but just had too ...)

RK05 cartriges looked very similar to a floppy case the size of an old 78 RPM record (about 12 inches across, 2 - 3 inches high). I never used them, but I did see them. They were among the first disk drives DEC ever made. Not the first (I think that was a DF-32 for PDP 8 systems with 32 K bytes of disk space). The raw storage was reported as 2.5 MB, formatted was ~2.4MB, with two recording surfaces. The drive looked very similar to a modern CD drive that would fit in about a 3U (ummm 4U?) 19 inch rack. It had 2 recording surfaces. It did have a write enable/disable switch. If I remember right these were originally made for the PDP 11/10-20 systems used for laboratory device control - chromatographs were mentioned by the chemistry department back in school.

I may have an old DEC peripheral specification book at home (11/45 version). I really liked those books that DEC used to put out. If you ever needed to program a DEC interface, that book had everything. It was almost like the engineers were bragging about how easy the interfaces were to program.

I think they were CDC transports.

Or the 11/34 version of the Lunar Lander (load from paper tape, graphics display on VT11 - 512x512 8 bit color). It used to be distributed as a diagnostic tool (hardware level interrupts, dual A/D conversion via joystick, I/O via VT11). Any memory, DMA, or bus configuration errors would hang the system with a known diagnostic one-liner message explaining the problem.

I also saw a report of a "terminal warfare" event where the graphics display was being used for text editing when two little stick figure men would walk onto the display, pick up a line, and then walk off the screen. There was nothing the user could do until it finished. The text buffer wasn't touched, only the display buffer.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: [email protected]

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.

32768 13-bit words (12-bit plus parity)

IIRC, rk05 was a removable disk drive, 1 platter to the assembly, about the size of a large pizza box. They were the standard disk drives for small DEC machines of the era. My memories from 30+ years ago, say they were maybe 10 pounds each. I would imagine you are confusing tapes with disks (ie, tk<num> instead of rk<num>) in terms of the release media Bell Labs sent out (at least I never saw a disk with the media, and I did have a job of trying to port the V7 compiler to a V6 system). It could be the very early customers got disks, and the later ones got tapes.

Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.  (GCC group)
PMB 198, 174 Littleton Road #3, Westford, Massachusetts 01886, USA
Work:	  [email protected]		phone: +1 978-486-9304
Non-work: [email protected]	fax:   +1 978-692-4482

Ooh! Old manuals!

Would you be willing to part with them?

I am collecting old manuals, and old computing magazines. I even pay for postage, with a bit of warning that they're coming...

Rob