A. Harry Williams wrote:
[snip....]
I missed this note last week. I don't claim anything for Marist other than
being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people
involved. When I talk history, I reference bigfoot, but I also reference
others that I believe helped spawn the current system. The oldest mention
I have found for the concept of running Linux on VM on what is now the
System z Architecure happened on August 25, 1994. It was wishful thinking
then, but pushed the idea as something we should do. In fact, here's part of
the text
... above all, keep a good attitude about it. Don't forget those things
which you loved about VM way back when it was the renegade instead of a
"legacy" or a "dinosaur". Those traits still make for the best operating
systems, an UNIX afficionados see some of them in UNIX (but, unfortunately
for them, they are blind or ignorant to the balance which lies in VM/CMS).
You've got to woo them, not alienate them. If only someone could port Linux
to s/390 we could show them UNIX on top of VM. (AIX and/or UTS work fine,
but they're ex$pen$ive)
It was an email with no subject. Any ideas who wrote those prophetic words?
This, as well as the first note below, certainly sounds like something
Rick Troth would write, but I don't know that for a fact. He's written
in the past on how to help bridge the gulf between the U*ix weenies and
the z/VM world with same sort of terms and emphasis.....
On Feb 28, 1998 an email calling for Linux-VM developers appeared with a
subject of "Another way to save VM."
I'm proposing putting a real unix environment on VM (not to knock OpenVM -
its a near miraculous achievement, but without fork and its reliance on
EBCDIC and 3270 terminals in an ASCII and world, its still a kludge - yes,
many *ix apps can [with considerable effort] be ported to it; how many *ix
apps have been developed on it -- and gone out in the world <ok it a new
thing>)). And VM would bring to the unix world the ability to manage
terabyte DASD farms, multiple instantiation of of the os [you can test
entire network configurations in one box! ; you can test a new kernel in one
VM while your production environment slaves away in *safe* ignorant bliss; a
safe learning environment(each sysadmin wannabe in your CS390 class gets a
linux he can trash 'til his heart's content, and still has no excuse not to
get his history paper in), and assuming the appropriate drivers are written
all the needed access (by internal communication, not execution) to the old
(still running) VM and old and new OS/390 apps.
And this final one pains me, but the first public email I can find that has
the words Linux on VM in the subject was on December 12, 1998 and reads
Since my mob, just provides programming support for pre-existing
situations, I can only offer advice here. Such as examine what current
versions of the Linux Kernel are available on-line, or from CD-ROM for the
PC, the source code for the Kernels are typically available there as well.
The next step will be a C compiler, one of you has gotten the gcc370
compiler from GNU to work, fine, some of it is written in assembler, I
think there is a cross assemblers out there, try one of those. And of
course feel free to write back, such as what happens when an adventurous
soul tries "IPL LINUX" from the console, or however it gets launched, or
just in general, such with comments, or questions, or just again in
general.
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--
Dave Jones
V/Soft
www.vsoft-software.com
Houston, TX
281.578.7544
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