On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 08:29:42PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> >- In the begining (well once Olsen got over his anti-UNIX thing),
> >there
> >was ULTRIX on the 11, the VAX and MIPS.
>
> On the /11? Ultrix seemed very VM-centric. (I.e. wanting post-11
> TLBs and such.)
Yes, there was Ultrix on the 11. I believe you can download it....
Ultrix was a succession of different systems, starting on the PDP-11
but moving to the VAX and eventually MIPS.
> >- When DEC decided to swich from ULTRIX to OSF/1, it started its
> >development on MIPS.
> >- To what extent OSF/1 on MIPS was seen in the wild is not clear.
> >Claims range from, it was never officially released to, support for MIPS
> >existed in the source tree for several versions.
I know that CMU did a port of OSF/1 to MIPS, but I don't think it was
generally available. And I certainly believe that a lot of the development
work was hosted on MIPS and possibly even targeted MIPS before the Alpha
was ready, but I don't ever recall it being a commercial offering from
DEC. Even after the Alpha was released, if you bought a MIPS or VAX-based
machine from DEC, the only Unix offered was Ultrix.
Maybe if you were one of those special customers you could get them to
give you OSF for MIPS, but I never ranked that high. :-)
> My hazy recollections of the first MIPS workstations involved Ultrix.
> (1.1?) No OSF until ...
That's right.
> I think Tru64 pre-dated Compaq. Nothing much changed between OSF/DUX/
> Tru (from the standpoint of someone who had to keep reasonably large
> apps running throughout).
Nothing much changed, but I'm pretty sure the Tru64 name came after the
Compaq buy-out. The name Digial Unix didn't fly anymore since they didn't
keep the Digital name (though, if I recall, in the original buy-out
agreement they said they would). For a while, when you bought a Compaq
Alpha, it came with the D|I|G|I|T|A|L logo still on the front-panel; I
guess branding wasn't so important as using back-inventory of parts.
> Of all the commercial Unixen of the era, the Ultrix follow-on
> variants were the least painful to deal with. And the DEC MIPS-
> derived C compiler kicked ass when it came to spitting out
> grandmother-guilt-fed diagnostics :-) (Was it DEC or MIPS who were
> responsible for the Spanish Inquisition error messages? While noisy,
> the verbiage shortened a lot of other conversations :-)
Oh, Ultrix was a pain to administer, especially after DEC dropped support
for it. I didn't especially like the compiler for it, either, though I
have a vague recollection that it had good diagnostics. I don't think it
was fully ANSI C89 compliant, though, and other things in the OS left a
lot to be desired. The monicker Uglix wasn't all together inappropriate.
That said, I still have a MIPS-based Ultrix machine somewhere in storage.
I should dig it out and see if it still boots.... (and if I still have
any data on it!).
- Dan C.
